The Commission concluded that its Exhibit number 573 was the bullet that was recovered from the home of General Walker on April 10, 1963. But a closer look at the evidence and the assurances by Walker himself that this was NOT the bullet raises serious doubts to that conclusion.

Discovery

Like the paper gunsack “found” in the Texas School Book Depository and the white jacket found under a car a block from the Tippit murder scene, exactly who found this bullet is unclear.

The FBI knew that there was a discrepancy on who actually found the bullet and documented those discrepancies. ( 26 H 440 )

On May 28, 1964 the FBI interviewed Officer B.G. Brown of the Crime Scene Search Section (CSSS) of the Dallas Police Dept. He said that upon his arrival at the Walker home, he was handed a bullet by B.G. Norvell who stated that he had found it among some papers and literature. ( 23 H 757 )

On the same date, the FBI interviewed Burglary and Theft Squad detective Don McElroy, who was dispatched to the Walker Residence. McElroy told the FBI that HE “picked up the bullet and gave it to Officer B.G. Brown…” ( ibid. )

On June 2, 1964 The FBI interviewed Officer D.P. Tucker, Norvell’s partner, who said that Norvell found the bullet and gave it to McElroy. ( 26 H 440 )

The following day the FBI interviewed Norvell who verified that he had found the bullet and given it to McElroy. ( ibid. ) Norvell also said that he scratched his initials “B.N.” or “N” in the base of it. ( 23 H 758 )

Brown also stated that he marked the bullet.

Bullet, bullet, who found the bullet ?

Could Brown have mistaken McElroy for Norvell? And if so, why would McElroy say he found the bullet when the evidence shows it was Norvell who found it?

Questions like these could have been answered and the whole thing cleared up very easily.

But the Commission never called any of the four officers who were present that night as witnesses. Any confusion surrounding the discovery of the bullet was not dealt with and the officers present were never asked to identify CE 573 as the bullet they handled on the night of the shooting.

Why didn’t they at least call the two officers who claimed to have marked the bullet, Norvell and Brown, to identify CE 573 as the bullet they marked ?

To the lab

Two weeks after the bullet was recovered from the Walker home, it was taken by Lt. J.C. Day to the County Criminal Investigation lab located at Parkland Hospital. It was turned over for identification to Floyd T. Alexander and Louie Anderson. ( 23 H 758 )

The lab was unable to determine what rifle it came from because it didn’t have a rifle to fire test bullets from.

In fact, the names of six witnesses who either saw, handled or in whose care the bullet was ( McElroy, Norvell, Tucker, B.G. Brown, Alexander and Anderson ) do not appear on the list of 552 witnesses who were called to give testimony. ( Report, Appendix V, pgs. 483-500 )

General Walker saw the bullet the night it was recovered and was called to testify, but was never shown CE 573 and asked to identify it.

An eighth witness, McElroy’s partner Ira Van Cleve, also saw the bullet and described it in his report on the crime. He also was never called to give testimony and identify CE 573.

It’s unconscionable that the same Commission that called Jack Ruby’s brother and heard testimony from the emcee at Jack Ruby’s strip club, omitted eight witnesses who either saw, handled or in whose possession the Walker bullet was.
There may have been a reason for that.

The “steel jacketed” bullet

As I said before, Det. Ira Van Cleve wrote a report on the incident, describing the bullet as having come from a “high powered rifle” and being a “steel jacket bullet”. His report is found in Volume 24 on page 39:

If one looks at the report closely, one can see that the crime was originally considered to be a “burglary by firearm”, not an attempted murder. That would make sense why two detectives from the Burglary and Theft Squad ( McElroy and Van Cleve ) were dispatched to the scene.

In fact, the crime was never considered an attempted murder until the name of Lee Harvey Oswald was “connected” to it.

That connection required a bullet fired from Oswald’s rifle to be the bullet removed from the Walker home.

Van Cleve’s identification of the bullet as a steel jacketed bullet was not the only threat to this connection, there were others as well.

Evidence of substitution: the General pipes in

On June 3, 1966, General Walker wrote to the Justice Department “..that the bullet fired at me be returned to me properly…”

This may have been because Walker had been conducting his own investigation into the shooting. He believed that Oswald did the shooting but that someone besides Oswald was involved.

Walker’s request was ignored.

What General Walker didn’t know was that they couldn’t return the bullet to him because it was a substitution for the bullet that WAS taken out of his house. He found that out while watching the HSCA hearings in the late 70s and seeing CE 573 displayed during the proceedings.

Notifying the HSCA

He sent out a mailgram to Committee Counsel Robert Blakey dated 9-12-78 alerting them to the substitution:

Keep in mind that Walker was one of the witnesses who saw and handled the bullet on the night of the attack. If there was anyone in that house who could have been considered an expert on weapons and ammunition, it was the General.

Writing the Department of Justice

After 5 months of having received no answer from Blakey, Walker wrote the Justice Department in February, 1979, calling CE 573 “a ridiculous substitute” and assuring the DOJ that, “I inspected it carefully. There is no mistake. There has been a substitution of the bullet fired by Oswald and taken out of my house”.

If the General was correct, he did not seem to realize that any other bullet would have exonerated Oswald as the shooter. Either this WAS the bullet and Oswald was the shooter or this WASN’T the bullet and the shooter was someone else. You can’t have Oswald as the shooter shooting another kind of bullet.

Writing the Police Chief

Walker was completely frustrated that the DOJ and the HSCA were ignoring his letters, so he wrote to Dallas Police Chief D.A. Byrd asking for his “cooperation and assistance” in resolving the matter, saying, “the withdrawal of the substitute bullet can only be in the best interest of the public”.

Notifying the Attorney General

On April 24, 1979, Walker wrote Attorney General Griffin Bell sending him copies of the mailgram to Robert Blakey and the letter to Police Chief Byrd.

Still, Walker received no reply from officialdom. Finally, he contacted his lawyer, Joseph Dinsmore Murphy, who wrote Special Counsel to the Attorney General Robert Keuch on June 7, 1979.

In that letter, Murphy said of Walker that “the Committee staff refused to reply to him” and that on the night of the shooting the bullet was “shown to Mr. Walker who held it in his hands and examined it.”
The letter went on to say that a person of General Walker’s experience “would know and recognize the bullet that was fired at him when he and the Dallas Police retrieved and examined the spent bullet….”

Finally the letter said that there was enough weight to Walker’s allegations “that the House Select Committee and the Department of Justice consider his opinions with respect to the possibility of substituted evidence…”

Finally, on June 21, 1979, Robert Keuch wrote to the FBI director looking for information that he could use to respond to Walker’s allegations that the “bullet fragments examined by the Select Committee which were reportedly fragments of the bullet fired at Walker, could not in fact be such fragments.”

In closing

This whole episode served to expose the possibility that evidence in this case had been substituted. This should have caused a great concern within the Committee and an investigation should have commenced to determine if all of the Warren Commission’s evidence was reliable or not.

But this was not done.

Perhaps the final word on the issue came from Robert Groden, an author and photographic and video expert who served as a photo analysis and enhancement consultant to the HSCA. He wrote a short dissent on the Walker bullet, which can be found in Volume 6 on page 296:

No identification

The FBI examined CE 573 to determine if it was indeed Western Cartridge ammunition and if it had been fired from the CE 139 Depository rifle.

In a December 9, 1963 report to Police Chief Jesse Curry, the FBI reported that the bullet Q188 ( CE 573 ) was mutilated so badly that it “prevents stating that it is of Western manufacture to the exclusion of all other sources.” ( CE 2001 / 24 H 46 )

In that same December, 1963 report, the FBI said that while CE 573 had the same visual and rifling characteristics as the fragments found in the limousine, the “individual microscopic marks left on bullets by the barrel of the K1 rifle ( CE 139 ) could have changed subsequent to the time Q188 was fired it was not possible to determine if Q188 was fired from K1″. ( CE 2001 / 24 H 47 )

But this is not true, as you’ll see in the next section.

The House Select Committee took up the issue of whether or not this was Western Cartridge ammunition by subjecting CE 573 to Neutron Activation Analysis. They found that the composition of the lead in CE 573 was “considerably different than any of the Dallas specimens”. ( HSCA Volume 1, pg. 529 )

Firearms identification

Firearms do not normally change much over time. This allows for firearms recovered months or even years after a shooting to be identified as having fired a specific bullet or cartridge case. Tests have been conducted that found that even after firing several hundred rounds through a firearm the last bullet fired could still be identified to the first.

https://www.firearmsid.com/A_FirearmsID.htm

While the class characteristics ( lands, grooves and direction of twist ) may have been the same, it’s the individual marks that determine if a bullet is fired from a weapon to the exclusion of all others.

The FBI’s reporting that the individual marks “could have changed” between the Walker shooting and the day of the assassination implied that whatever marks they saw on CE 573 were different from the test bullets.
They simply hid this fact by ignoring it and saying instead that the bullet was too mangled to make a positive identification.

In spite of all of this evidence to the contrary, the Commission concluded that there was a “fair probability” that CE 573 was fired from the Depository rifle. ( Report, pg. 562 )

But was it fired on April 10, 1963 ?

The evidence indicates that it wasn’t.