This photograph of Lee Oswald posing with a rifle similar to the one that killed John Kennedy (and discovered on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository) was found on the day after the assassination in a house where Marina Oswald was living at the time and which Lee Oswald visited on weekends.  Most of their belongings were stored at the house.

Marina said she had taken the photo along with several others, including a second one that was also recovered at the house as a negative. This negative of the second photograph was definitely taken with a camera the Oswalds owned, also found at the house in question.  Since the negative of the photograph at the head of this post was not found, an ironclad link to the camera in question could not be established, though it clearly belonged to the same series of photographs.

Oswald claimed, along with many others since, that the photos were faked. An FBI documents examiner at the time stated that they were not faked, and that if they were the job would have involved state-of-the-art technology and expertise as it existed at the time.

Later tests have come to conflicting conclusions, though the most convincing of them have found the photos were not doctored.

The photo at the head of the post, if authentic, is highly incriminating.  In order to believe that it is not authentic, one has to assume that someone, prior to the assassination, took a series of photos in the location pictured, the backyard of the house where Marina was living, using the camera the Oswalds owned, that they were then doctored by a highly sophisticated expert and planted in the home, and that Marina was persuaded to lie about having taken them.

Marina was at first reluctant to believe that her husband had assassinated JFK, later decided that he probably had, and still later came to the conclusion that he hadn’t, or hadn’t acted alone.

Throughout all this she has never denied that she took the pictures in question, though denying this would be the best evidence possible that her husband was what he claimed to be, a patsy.

Click on the image to enlarge.