Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Mysterious Package



One of the more obscure pieces of evidence in the Kennedy assassination is the package mailed to Lee Oswald shortly before the assassination from Irving, Texas. There are two things wrong with it. One, the street address was wrong and two, there was insufficient postage. There was no return address either. Discovered in the dead letter department of the Irving, Texas post office two weeks after the assassination, it was a package Oswald never saw.  It will never be known if he knew this second bag was being mailed to him. The framing of a guilty man?

The Package Contents
The package was discovered by C. G. Twilley on December 4, 1963. It was addressed to Lee Oswald, but the address was for 601 West Nassau Street. A street that did not exist in Dallas, Texas. The package was short $.12 on the postage. Odd, as it was metered postage and not stamps.

The package was opened by Dallas Postmaster Harry Holmes, a controversial figure in the course of the investigation. (He was the only non-police officer to question Oswald.) The package contained a long, empty paper bag similar to the one found in the sixth floor of the Texas school book depository building (CE142). This original bag was 38 x 8.5 inches in length. It is assumed Oswald made the bag to sneak the rifle into the building but Troy West who worked in the shipping department states that he never saw Oswald there. Apparently, only one witness, Wesley Frasier saw Oswald with the package. (He later flunked his polygraph examination.) Also, Oswald’s fingerprints were never found on the paper bag discovered by Dallas police detectives, just as his fingerprints were never found on the money order he is supposed to have used to order the rifle with.

So here we have a second paper bag, basically identical to the one found on the sixth floor. This means that either Oswald was truly a nut that went around mailing empty paper bags to himself using phony addresses, which also would incriminate him for the crime; or two, he was part of a conspiracy and his fellow conspirators knew of his role in the plot and were out to frame him for the assassination to make sure he would be arrested.  A package mailed without sufficient postage, with no return address to a non-existent mailing address is a package designed to arrive at a location and mostly, meant to be discovered.  Which it would be as the FBI was keeping a watch on  all mail arriving to Lee Oswald after the assassination and after his death as well.

The Postage Due Card
As if all of this were not strange enough, on November 23, a post due card arrived at Ruth Paine’s address at 2515 W. 5th Street in Irving. It’s $.12 due, just as the package with the phony Nassau street address was. But there is no package for Oswald waiting for him with Ruth Paine’s address on it. Only the one with the Nassau address which is unknown till two weeks later. So the postage due card should never have been sent in the first place unless somebody at the post office knew Lee Oswald was using the 2515 W. 5th Street address as a drop-off. If that is the case, we’ll never know who or why.

So if you don’t want to believe in a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy then don’t. But you’ll always have the second paper bag, similar to the one Oswald supposedly used.

Who mailed him the other bag?


Sources

A deep discussion on the original paper bag uncovered on the 6th floor is at the JFK Board with loads of pictures and commentary from users. Highly recommended.

https://jfk.boards.net/thread/51/lee-harvey-oswald-construct-paper

Armstrong, John, Harvey and Lee; Marrs, Jim, Crossfire; www.history-matters.com; www.ctka.net (Probe Magazine article archive)