A former Secret Service agent who was present at President John F. Kennedy’s assassination has come forward with a new claim that would debunk the ‘magic bullet’ theory and raises questions about whether there was a second shooter.
According to the Daily Mail, Paul Landis, 88, broke his silence on Saturday, nearly 60 years after Kennedy was shot dead in a motorcade passing through Dallas, to share his bombshell recollection with the New York Times.
Landis, who in 1963 was a young Secret Service agent assigned to protect First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy, said that in the chaos following the shooting, he picked up a nearly pristine bullet sitting on the top of the back seat of the open limousine.
It was just behind where Kennedy was sitting when he was killed, he says. Landis says he took the projectile and placed it on the president’s hospital stretcher to preserve it for the autopsy investigators.
That bullet, the first piece of evidence logged in the murder investigation, has for six decades been said to have been found on the stretcher of Texas Governor John Connally, and was hypothesized to have fallen free from a wound to his thigh.
Landis thinks the bullet may have rolled onto Connally’s stretcher from Kennedy’s while they were next to each other. It has long been known as the ‘magic bullet’ — the bullet that supposedly passed through Kennedy’s neck from the rear, then entered Connally’s right shoulder, struck his rib, exited under his right nipple, passed through his right wrist and hit his left thigh.
But Landis’ assertion that it had actually exited Kennedy in his Cadillac could lay waste to the magic bullet theory – and bolster the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald did not operate alone on the day of the murder.
According to the official finding of the Warren Commission, Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who fired three shots at the motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building with a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
According to the report, one of the shots missed the motorcade, another was the ‘magic bullet’ that struck both Kennedy and Connally, and the final round fatally struck Kennedy in the head.
Now, Landis says that he believes the bullet he retrieved from the limo may have been undercharged, and dislodged from a shallow wound in the president’s back, falling back onto the limousine seat when the fatal shot struck his head.
He theorizes that, after he placed the bullet on Kennedy’s stretcher, it may have fallen onto Connally’s stretcher when they were jostled together.
It’s also possible that the hospital staffer who found the bullet and handed it over to the Secret Service misidentified which stretcher it was from, or that his account was mangled by investigators.
The bullet, which had been fired but was nearly fully intact, was positively matched to Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano through ballistics analysis. But if Landis’ claim is true, that suggests the bullet tagged as evidence item ‘Q1’ was not responsible for the injuries to Connolly, and there was no so-called ‘magic bullet’.
