“He described his dirty clothes as being a reddish colored, long sleeved shirt with a button-down collar and grey colored trousers. He indicated that he placed these articles of clothing in a lower drawer of his dresser.” ( CD 5, pg. 100 )

After his arrest, Oswald told the Dallas Police that after he left work, he went to his room and changed his clothes. Capt. Fritz’s notes of Oswald’s interrogation prove this fact.

The significance of this is that if true, then the witness Mrs. Bledsoe, who claimed to have seen him on the bus wearing the arrested shirt ( CE 150 ) BEFORE he got to his roominghouse, was either lying or simply mistaken.

Secondly and more importantly, if Oswald changed his shirt between the time of the assassination and his arrest, then the clothing fibers from the shirt he was wearing at the time of his arrest could not legitimately have been on the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository.

In other words, they were planted by authorities.

The interrogation

According to Wesley Frazier, who gave Oswald a ride to Irving after work on the evening of November 21st, Oswald was wearing a “reddish shirt”. ( CE 2009, 24 H 408 )

As stated above, Oswald told police that he was wearing that same shirt on the morning of the assassination and changed it after he left the Texas School Book Depository because it was dirty. He also told them he had been wearing grey trousers and where he had placed those dirty clothes. ( CD 5, pg. 91, pg. 100 ).

On the afternoon of the assassination, the Dallas Police with the assistance of the Assistant District Attorney ( William Alexander ) and the judge who issued the search warrant ( David Johnston ) , searched Oswald’s room at 1026 North Beckley.

District Attorneys and judges are not usually present when police conduct searches. So I can only assume that they were there to control the evidence and the description thereof.

The Beckley search

On the afternoon of the assassination, a search warrant was issued for 1026 North Beckley Ave., the house where Oswald rented a room. The search warrant was for “guns, ammunition, bombs, etc. and any plans made of the route of the Presidential Party in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963”.

The search was conducted by Dallas Homicide detectives Walter E. Potts, Fay M. Turner, Henry M. Moore and William L. Stenkel.

They didn’t find any guns, ammunition or bombs but they DID find the grey trousers and a dirty shirt that they described as a “brown shirt with button down collar” that ended up becoming Commission Exhibit 151.

The “brown” shirt

The Commission printed all of its photographic evidence in black-and-white, allowing it to deceive the reader with the color of the evidence. As it was with the tan jacket they called grey, so it was with this “reddish” shirt they called brown.

Years later ( 2016 ) and thanks to the work of researcher Pat Speer, the color version of this shirt was available to researchers. It revealed that the shirt had a reddish tint and was, in fact, dirty.

Commission Exhibit 3042 is the FBI list of items received from the Dallas Police. On page 588 of Volume 26 is a list of items taken from Oswald’s room at 1026 North Beckley. By its description of the tag inside the collar, it lists this shirt and two pair of grey cotton slacks, one ripped.

These items are the same ones that appear on the inventory of things taken from North Beckley.

This is strong evidence that Oswald was telling the truth when he said that he was wearing a reddish shirt and grey trousers and went home to change them because they were dirty.

Witnesses can’t identify arrested shirt as shirt he wore that morning

Many witnesses were shown Commission Exhibit 150, the arrested shirt, and could not identify that shirt as the shirt Oswald wore to work. Neither could they identify it as the shirt the Tippit killer wore.

Linnie Mae Randle, the sister of the man who gave Oswald a ride to work that morning, testified that Oswald was wearing “a white T-shirt and some sort of brown or tan shirt.” ( 2 H 250 )

When she was shown the CE 150 shirt, she said that she didn’t remember, “it being that shade of brown. I don’t remember it being exactly that. I thought it was a solid color.” ( ibid. )

She was implying that the shade of brown was lighter than the shirt she was being shown. Oswald owned only two brown shirts, CE 150 and the “reddish shirt”, CE 151.

And CE 151 was a solid color.
Amazingly, she was never shown it.
Neither were the employees at the TSBD.

“He just didn’t have the same clothes on”

Perhaps a thorn in the side of the “Oswald-did-it” crowd comes from none other than the Commission’s star witness, Howard Brennan. Brennan claimed to have seen the man in the window with the rifle before the shooting. He viewed the first lineup with Helen Markham but would not identify Oswald. After Oswald was dead, he had a great revelation that Oswald was the man he saw in the window.

During his testimony, he said that at the lineup, Oswald, “was not dressed in the same clothes as I saw the man in the window”. ( 3 H 161 )

When asked if he meant the shirt or trousers, he said:

“Well not particularly either. He just didn’t have the same clothes on.” ( ibid. )

The implication here is that Oswald could not have been the man in the window who Brennan saw unless he had changed his clothes. And even if he did, there was another problem the Commission had to deal with.

The shirt fibers

If Oswald had pulled the trigger of that rifle and if any shirt fibers were embedded on it, then it should have been fibers from the shirt he was wearing at the time of the shooting.

The Commission ignored the evidence that Oswald had changed his shirt and instead claimed that the shirt he was arrested in ( CE 150 ) was the shirt he was wearing when he left the Paine residence that morning and the same shirt he was wearing when he pulled the trigger.

They based this claim on the testimony of Marina Oswald, who admitted she repeatedly lied to the FBI, Mrs. Mary Bledsoe, who suffered a stroke that affected her memory and perception, and the police who claimed to have found a bus transfer in the pocket of the shirt.

The Commission never considered the possibility that some men transfer the contents of their pockets when they change their shirt or pants.

Ignoring the witnesses

They ignored the testimony of Buell Wesley Frazier and his sister Linnie Mae Randle, who could not identify CE 150 as the shirt he wore that morning.

In its Report, the Commission said that the fibers were found in a crevice between the butt plate and the wooden stock. ( pg. 124 )

The FBI fiber expert, Paul M. Stombaugh, testified that the fibers matched the fibers from the CE 150 shirt, although he couldn’t say that they matched THAT shirt to the exclusions of all others. ( ibid. )

Researcher Pat Speer has noted that during his testimony, Stombaugh testified that there was fingerprint powder in the crevice but the shirt fibers were clean, indicating that the fibers didn’t get onto the rifle until AFTER the rifle was dusted for fingerprints.

Stombaugh testified that the fibers, “were clean” and “looked as if they had just been picked up” by the rifle, in spite of the fact that there was a “presence of fingerprint powder being down in and through the crevice.”

Since we know that the rifle was dusted for fingerprints at the TSBD, this is evidence that the fibers could not have gotten onto the rifle prior to or during the assassination. 

I believe that when the shirt was in the possession of the FBI, someone at the Bureau planted the shirt fibers by rubbing the shirt on the rifle. The sharp edges on the butt of the rifle would have been enough to pull fibers off of the shirt.

The hole in the elbow

Commission Exhibit 150 has a hole in the right elbow. As one can see, it is a sizable hole. ( Arrow )

But photographs taken of Oswald while in custody and wearing the shirt show no such hole in the right elbow. It obviously wasn’t done during the struggle at the Texas Theater, as some have suggested.

Shaneyfelt Exhibit 24 ( 21 H 470 ) is a photo of an FBI agent duplicating the picture above on the right. He’s wearing that exact same CE 150 shirt and there’s no hole in the elbow.

Since there were no entities with access to the shirt while it was in FBI custody, it comes apparent that the hole HAD to have been done by someone at the Bureau.

Conclusion

Oswald told police that after he left the Texas School Book Depository he went back to his room and changed his shirt and pants. He described the clothing he changed out of in detail and told them where to find them.

The list of items taken into evidence indicate that a shirt and pants matching the descriptions of those he gave police were, in fact, in his room.

While the Commission had no problem showing the arrested shirt ( CE 150 ) to witnesses, it carefully avoided showing the “reddish shirt”, CE 151, to anyone who saw Oswald on November 22nd.

In fact, not one of the 552 witnesses who either appeared before the Commission or gave a deposition was ever shown CE 151. And of the thousands of questions asked, not one question was asked regarding CE 151.

The FBI was well aware of what Oswald said. They had two agents ( Hosty & Bookhout ) present when he said it. They wrote reports about it. (CD 5, pgs. 91 & 100 )

The FBI had the evidence list and the evidence in their possession. ( CE 3042 )

They simply suppressed it.

Avoiding the truth

The Commission avoided the reddish shirt like the plague because this shirt was the evidence that proved: a.) Oswald did NOT fire that rifle and b.) any shirt fibers from the arrested shirt ( CE 150 ) found on the rifle were planted.

Given that at least one witness ( Mrs. Randle ) described Oswald wearing a “some sort of brown” shirt OTHER than CE 150 on that morning and since Oswald only owned two brown shirts, one would think that the next obvious step in the investigation would be to show her his other brown shirt. ( CE 151 )

If she had identified it, then you’d go to the TSBD to see if anyone there had seen the shirt that morning and could confirm her identification.

But that wasn’t done.

Another reason why this evidence was suppressed was that the Commission was created with an agenda: “that Oswald was the sole assassin, that he did not have confederates who were still at large and the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”

Any evidence that the FBI collected that did not support that conclusion was either ignored, suppressed or vanished into thin air never to be seen again.

Those are the facts. Now I will state my opinion.

A final word

I believe Oswald told the police the truth.

He was wearing CE 151 on the morning of the assassination and a pair of grey slacks. He went home and changed his clothes because they were dirty. Color photographs show CE 151 to be dirty.

The fibers on the rifle from the CE 150 shirt were planted by the FBI by rubbing the shirt against the sharp edges of the rifle in order to lodge the fibers into the crevices. I believe the shirt got caught on one of these sharp edges and it resulted in the accidental tearing of the right sleeve at the elbow.

The photographic evidence is strong that this shirt was torn while in the possession of the FBI. It had to have occurred between the time of the picture in Shaneyfelt 24 and the showing of the shirt to Mrs. Bledsoe.

The evidence also proves that Bledsoe had NOT seen this shirt prior to its being shown to her by the FBI. Since there is no evidence that the hole in the elbow was there prior to her seeing the shirt for the first time, her “identification” was of the shirt that was shown to her by the FBI, not a shirt she allegedly saw on November 22nd.

This is my opinion based on the evidence I’ve seen.