The Missing JFK Assassination Film: The Mystery Surrounding the Orville Nix Home Movie of November 22, 1963 by Gayle Nix Jackson

Author:Gayle Nix Jackson [Jackson, Gayle Nix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510706637
Google: zEJ1EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01I8S3ZU2
Barnesnoble: B01I8S3ZU2
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-02-15T06:00:00+00:00

After that meeting, Orville went home very upset. The agent was so matter of fact; as if Orville were just another bum picked up on Industrial Avenue. The agent, a man whose name he never wrote down, asked him several times how many shots he heard.237

“I believe there were at least four shots, maybe five,” Orville replied.

“Which shots hit the president?” the agent asked.

“Well, I couldn’t rightly say for certain, but I know the third shot hit him because that’s when I saw…” Orville struggled for words, “when I saw…the president’s head explode and saw the First Lady trying to get out of the car or maybe reaching for something, though I don’t know what.” Orville looked down into his lap. The agent just stared at him, like a man with no feelings.

Orville later learned this agent’s name was Joe Abernathy. Abernathy would be the agent assigned, along with Lyndal Shaneyfelt, to study the camera and determine timing and run speed tests on the Keystone K-810. He also asked Orville how tightly he had wound the spring in an effort to determine timing. Abernathy sent reports through J. Gordon Shanklin from the Dallas office regarding the Nix film to the Warren Commission.

“So I can expect the camera back soon?” Orville asked Abernathy.

“Yessir, you can expect it back when the Warren Commission says they are finished with it,” Abernathy assured him.

By March of 1964, he still didn’t have it back.

He called his daughter-in-law Elaine knowing that she had a typewriter and could write well and asked her to send the FBI a letter asking when he could expect his camera to be returned. He didn’t want to do it himself because he didn’t want to misspell words or use incorrect grammar. Elaine had already dutifully typed several letters for him and he trusted his daughter-in-law to be his secretary.

* * * * *

Around the first of March 1964, he got a letter from J. Gordon Shanklin of the Dallas FBI asking to keep his camera for further study until the Warren Commission had finished with it.238 What Orville did not know at the time was that the FBI was trying to determine timing for the camera, and in doing so, had taken the camera apart - broken it into little pieces.

Why had they not done the same thing with the Zapruder camera? Was there something special about the Keystone camera as opposed to Zapruder’s Bell & Howell? Or was there something in the Nix film that couldn’t be seen in the Zapruder film?

J. Gordon Shanklin had given Orville no idea as to how long the Warren Commission would need it, but by late March, Orville was beginning to worry about his upcoming vacation. He needed his camera to film his grandchildren.

In April, he asked Elaine again to send a letter. Again, it took weeks to receive an answer.

“Funny thing isn’t it, Elaine? These federal boys and the Dallas Police Department can catch Lee Harvey Oswald in a little over an hour, but it takes them months to study my camera.

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