During the period from March 2, 1963, to April 24, 1963, the Oswalds lived on Neely Street in Dallas in a rented house which had a small back yard.[C4-82] One Sunday, while his wife was hanging diapers, Oswald asked her to take a picture of him holding a rifle, a pistol and issues of two newspapers later identified as the Worker and the Militant.[C4-83] Two pictures were taken. The Commission has concluded that the rifle shown in these pictures is the same rifle which was found on the sixth floor of the Depository Building on November 22, 1963. (See Commission Exhibits Nos. 133-A and 133-B, [p. 126].)
One of these pictures, Exhibit No. 133-A, shows most of the rifle’s configuration.[C4-84] Special Agent Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt, a photography expert with the FBI, photographed the rifle used in the assassination, attempting to duplicate the position of the rifle and the lighting in Exhibit No. 133-A.[C4-85] After comparing the rifle in the simulated photograph with the rifle in Exhibit No. 133-A, Shaneyfelt testified, “I found it to be the same general configuration. All appearances were the same.” He found “one notch in the stock at this point that appears very faintly in the photograph.” He stated, however, that while he “found no differences” between the rifles in the two photographs, he could not make a “positive identification to the exclusion of all other rifles of the same general configuration.”[C4-86]
PHOTOGRAPHS OF OSWALD HOLDING RIFLE
Commission Exhibit No. 133-A
Commission Exhibit No. 133-B
Commission Exhibit No. 134
(Enlargement of Commission Exhibit No. 133-A)
The authenticity of these pictures has been established by expert testimony which links the second picture, Commission Exhibit No. 133-B, to Oswald’s Imperial Reflex camera, with which Marina Oswald testified she took the pictures.[C4-87] The negative of that picture, Commission Exhibit No. 133-B, was found among Oswald’s possessions.[C4-88] Using a recognized technique of determining whether a picture was taken with a particular camera, Shaneyfelt compared this negative with a negative which he made by taking a new picture with Oswald’s camera.[C4-89] He concluded that the negative of Exhibit No. 133-B was exposed in Oswald’s Imperial Reflex camera to the exclusion of all other cameras.[C4-90] He could not test Exhibit No. 133-A in the same way because the negative was never recovered.[C4-91] Both pictures, however, have identical backgrounds and lighting and, judging from the shadows, were taken at the same angle. They are photographs of the same scene.[C4-92] Since Exhibit No. 133-B was taken with Oswald’s camera, it is reasonably certain that Exhibit No. 133-A was taken by the same camera at the same time, as Marina Oswald testified. Moreover, Shaneyfelt testified that in his opinion the photographs were not composites of two different photographs and that Oswald’s face had not been superimposed on another body.[C4-93]
One of the photographs taken by Marina Oswald was widely published in newspapers and magazines, and in many instances the details of these pictures differed from the original, and even from each other, particularly as to the configuration of the rifle. The Commission sought to determine whether these photographs were retouched prior to publication. Shaneyfelt testified that the published photographs appeared to be based on a copy of the original which the publications had each retouched differently.[C4-94] Several of the publications furnished the Commission with the prints they had used, or described by correspondence the retouching they had done. This information enabled the Commission to conclude that the published pictures were the same as the original except for retouching done by these publications, apparently for the purpose of clarifying the lines of the rifle and other details in the picture.[C4-95]