A group of Dallas Police Department detectives, including
Will Fritz,
Seymour Weitzman,
Roger Craig, Eugene Boone and Luke Mooney searched the Texas School Book Depository soon after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy. On the sixth floor they discovered a rifle hidden beneath some boxes. The detectives identified it as a 7.65 Mauser. District Attorney Henry M. Wade, in a television interview, told the nation that the rifle was a Mauser. It was the
FBI who announced that the officers had been mistaken. According to them it was a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, an Italian bolt-action rifle used in the
Second World War. All the detectives agreed to change their mind about the rifle except Roger Craig.
The
FBI discovered that the rifle had been purchased from Klein's sporting goods in
Chicago on 12th March, 1963, by a man using the name, A. J. Hiddell. When
Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested he was carrying a forged identity card bearing the name Alek J. Hiddell. A palm print taken from the barrel of the rifle was identified as belonging to Oswald.
It was during the month of March 1963 that Oswald obtained a rifle and a handgun, if we can rely on Marina's testimony. Not that it is greatly to be relied upon, as we saw earlier in discussion relating to an incriminating photograph in which both weapons were flaunted. Curiously, the weapons were bought, separately, under the name of A. J. Hidell, an alias which counted for little with Oswald other than in connection with the orders for the firearms. There was no reason whatever why Oswald should not have simply walked into a shop and bought what he wanted, obtaining the advantage and satisfaction of seeing what he was buying. Texas law imposed no control over the purchase of such weapons. There would have been very little - in fact virtually no - chance of Oswald being identified as the purchaser of the firearms had he bought them over the counter. So why did he buy them by mail order under this assumed name? There is strong evidence that the name was meaningful to those involved in intelligence. Army Intelligence, for instance, was known to have had a file on A. J. Hidell, the contents of which, significantly, were destroyed before it could be acquired by investigators.
It was not until the FBI said it had discovered that Oswald had purchased an Italian-made 6.5mm rifle from a Chicago mail-order house that the confusion was dispelled. Then all accounts and all sources agreed: The former .30 caliber-Enfield-7.65 Mauser was now a 6.5mm Italian-made rifle with telescopic sight. It was also at this time that all sources began agreeing that the gun had been found on the sixth floor - though some still held out for the open-window location, while others argued for the buried-behind-the-boxes theory.
During a thorough search of the sixth floor of the School Book Depository a rifle was found. Unhappily for the Warren Commissioners, the four police officers present at the time it was discovered, unanimously identified it as a German 7.65 Mauser. Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone found the rifle following the movement of book boxes by Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney and called Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman to witness his discovery. Another Deputy Sheriff, Roger Craig, was thereabouts and he saw the gun and heard the conversations of the others. The officers had no doubts about their identification and affidavits were drawn up by Boone and Weitzman, who described the weapon in detail, noting the colour of the sling and the scope. Police Captain Will Fritz was also present at the scene and he, also, is claimed to have agreed that the rifle was a 7.65 Mauser. Following the finding of the gun, however, it was collected by Lieutenant. C. Day and taken to Police Headquarters, where it was logged as a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, an Italian carbine, bearing the serial number C2766. Mannlicher-Carcano Italian carbine No. C2766, it was claimed, belonged to Lee Harvey Oswald.
Those concerned with the finding of the rifle at the Book Depository and who had written affidavits, Boone and Weitzman, were pressed, under questioning by the Commission, to review their identification of it. The Mannlicher-Carcano, at first glance, looked very much like 7.65 Mauser, it is true. How would they account, though, for a situation in which they had been close enough to describe the colour of the sling and yet had made an error in identifying the rifle itself? After all, the Mannlicher-Carcano bears the legend 'Made in Italy' on the butt, whereas the German gun has the name 'Mauser' stamped on the barrel! Were these officers unable to read? In spite of any argument which might be brought to bear, they both, nonetheless, changed their testimony and conceded they had made a mistake.
Young Roger Craig, who saw and heard all that had gone on in the Book Depository, refused to concede that he had been mistaken, or even that he might have been.
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKSmannlicher.htm