Introduction: 'best evidence'

The backyard photographs rank among the most puzzling aspects of Lee Harvey Oswald's enigmatic biography - that is, if they properly belong to his biography at all. Although the photos do not and never could prove that Oswald killed President Kennedy or Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit, they are central to the case against him for two reasons. First of all, they were used to establish him as the owner of the Italian World War Two vintage 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano carbine that was allegedly used to kill Kennedy and the Smith & Weston .38 revolver that was allegedly used to kill Tippit. Most important of course was the Mannlicher-Carcano. Although the image is not sharp enough to allow the rifle in the photo to be conclusively identified as that said to have been used in the assassination - the FBI's photographic expert, Special Agent Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt, admitted as much - most defenders of the theory that Oswald killed JFK believe it to be the same weapon. Edward Jay Epstein, for example, refers to the pictures as the 'best evidence' that Oswald owned the weapon used in the Kennedy assassination. (NOTE 1)
Second, the photos established Oswald's image as a man attracted to violence by a militant revolutionary ideology. Since Oswald apparently had no motive to kill Kennedy, the photos at least helped convince millions of Americans that Oswald was the type of person who would assassinate a president. If a hundred million Americans smelled a conspiracy the minute they saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald live on NBC-TV on November 24, 1963, the subsequent publication of one of the photos on the cover of Life magazine on February 21, 1964, temporarily soothed suspicions. Many readers of Life, which was, with 7 million readers, the nation's most widely read magazine, and the numerous other newspapers and magazines that carried the picture blithely assumed that only a truly determined assassin would have had pictures taken of himself flaunting a rifle and revolver.
For a time, therefore, the backyard photos helped to create a receptive audience for the Warren Report when it was published in September 1964. Yet, by 1966 a more sceptical mood had developed, one that has never dissipated. Among those who laboured to dispel Warren Commission mythology in the mid-1960s was New York lawyer Mark Lane. Lane was one of the first people to publicly draw attention to the possibility that the Life photo was a fake. The problem he focused on initially was whether the picture had been retouched to make the rifle look more like a Mannlicher-Carcano. In the long term, however, the problem turned out to be more far-reaching: whether, as Oswald himself maintained, the pictures were complete fabrications.
Today, forty years after the crime that stopped the world in its tracks, the authenticity of the backyard photos is rejected by most people who believe that Oswald was the unwitting victim of a conspiracy to pin the crime on a leftwing suspect. Among those who reject the backyard photos, the key difference is between those like Mark Lane who, following Oswald himself, claim that they were forged simply by pasting Oswald's face onto someone else's body and those like Malcolm Thompson of Scotland Yard who believe that each photo is a montage of at least three different images. While both schools of thought accept that Oswald's face has been pasted over someone else's, in the first scenario, an unknown man would have posed in the backyard of the 214 West Neely St. house where Oswald lived from March 2 to April 24, 1963 while in the second scenario the body in the picture would have been photographed in a studio against a white background and subsequently inserted into a picture of the Neely St backyard.
Regardless of the positions they take, most assassination researchers now look on the backyard photos as a classic instance of the use of forged evidence to persuade the technologically-unsophisticated, forensically-challenged general public to believe that the person accused of a crime is most probably guilty. Along with items like the typewriter that was used to put Alger Hiss behind bars and the Arabic-language Boeing 757 flight manual all too conveniently discarded at Boston airport by those said to have executed the September 11 terrorist attacks, the photographs prop up the official version of a major crime in lieu of hard evidence. Largely by means of the backyard photos, Oswald was convicted (in the public mind, for he was murdered before he could stand trial) by a provocative psychological profile rather than his actions on November 22, 1963.
Crucial elements of the profile that was constructed to incriminate Oswald began being built up - and perhaps some of them were already in place - from the very moment of his arrest inside the Texas Theater at around 1.50pm on November 22. But in the short life that remained him - only 45 hours - he was able to reject one of the core elements of the mythology that would be used to incriminate him afterwards, the backyard photos. Although we do not have a verbatim record of his words, all extant accounts of his interviews with Dallas police officials agree that he rejected them totally. In this website, I review the puzzling circumstances in which various backyard photos have come to light over the years and show that the testimony of Oswald's wife, Marina, who allegedly took the photos, is worthless. I then rehearse the major arguments for the view that the photos are fakes, paying attention chiefly to arguments that can easily be understood by photographic non-experts. By way of conclusion, I engage in speculations to explain where the photos came from and why they were created..

Oswald is shown a photo

During an interrogation on Saturday, November 23, Lee Oswald was first confronted by the sight of one of the two backyard photographs that featured in the Warren Report. Although both had supposedly been discovered together, he was shown only two versions of the SAME photo. According to Captain Fritz, his chief interrogator, Oswald saw first an enlargement of the photo and then the smaller original. He records that Oswald not only denied that the pictures were authentic, but that he would be able to prove the fact. 'In time I will be able to show you that this is not my picture,' he said, 'but I don't want to answer any more questions ... I will not discuss this photograph without advice of an attorney.' Oswald, who told Fritz that he knew photography 'real well,' told him how the photo had been made. 'The small picture was reduced from the larger one,' he said - an extremely important statement in itself, for it reversed the police claim that the larger picture was simply an enlargement. After identifying the DPD itself as the most probably source of the fake photos, Oswald suggested that someone who had photographed him since he had been arrested the previous afternoon had cut out his face and pasted it on the rifleman's body. The very existence of this series of photos strikes many critical students of the case against Oswald as deeply suspicious. Like the paper trail left by Oswald's (apparent) decision to purchase his rifle and revolver by mail order, these photos made no sense unless Oswald wanted to make sure that he would look guilty afterwards. The motive Marina attributed to her husband was that he had wanted the pictures taken to send to socialist newspaper The Militant 'to show that he was ready for anything.' (23H408. Cf. 1H15; 2H27) By this she meant that he wanted to show 'that he was bore[d] and that he was ready to do anything even if it involves possible use of arms.' (23H408)
But this explanation is scarcely credible. At the height of the Cold War, no leftwing newspaper in America would have published photographs of an armed militant 'ready for anything.' Any that did so would have brought down upon itself the full repressive force of the FBI. That no socialist paper would have published pictures of this type does not mean, of course, that Oswald was not stupid enough to think that one might. (Although, in these pictures, Oswald looks like he belongs to Robert DePugh's Minutemen rather than a revolutionary socialist group.) Unfortunately, no one who worked on The Militant is on record as confirming that they had received one of these pictures from Oswald in the mail. Two people who had worked for The Militant at the time told researcher Hal Verb that they did recall receiving a picture of this type, but he failed to identify them by name and to my knowledge neither has said anything about the subject publicly. (NOTE 2) Furthermore, no version of the picture originating from The Militant's offices has ever turned up. The FBI presumably investigated The Militant and would have confiscated an Oswald photo, if the paper had a copy in its possession. However, it is hard to believe that if a copy had been found there, it would not have been produced to settle the controversy. After all, if it could be proven that a copy of one of the photos had reached The Militant as early as April 1963, it would be impossible to maintain that the photos were forgeries concocted by police or government agencies to incriminate Oswald after the assassination.
In the absence of proof that Oswald ever posted copies of the photographs to The Militant (or the other paper shown in the photos, The Daily Worker), one is left groping for a plausible motive as to why he should have posed for them. Unless one thinks that Oswald had reasons for wishing to implicate himself for a crime he did not commit, it is clear that those the strongest motive for wishing to forge the photos belonged to the Dallas Police Department. By November 23, 1963, the DPD found itself faced with an alleged assassin who had not been seen shooting at anybody, who had no known motive for slaying either of his alleged victims, and who certainly did not intend to confess to either crime. At this stage, there was as much of a need for these pictures to incriminate Oswald publicly as there is today for weapons of mass destruction to turn up in Iraq. Necessity being the mother of invention, at least one picture was available to be shown to Oswald himself by November 23.

NOTES
(1) http://edwardjayepstein.com/archived/state2.htm
(2) http://www.assassinationweb.com/shack1.htm

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For a complete presentation of the evidence for Oswald's innocence
www.ratical.com/ratville/jfk/pg/pg.html

For Mark Lane's pioneering critique of the flawed case against Oswald
www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Lane/Natl-Guardian/Natl_Guardian.html