JOE ELLIOTT SAID:
From what I can tell, he [Dale Myers] just said that he moved Connally and the jumpseat six inches. He never admitted or claimed he has the jumpseat six inches from the door.
But, in truth, there is no need to give Mr. Myers the benefit of the doubt. There is no serious doubt. His video shows two heavy lines, which the jumpseat crosses over in the "Before" position. Those heavy lines have to represent the door. The inboard heavy line is the edge of the door at floor level, the outboard heavy is the edge of the door up high. The lines continue the length of the passenger compartment and are roughly flushed with Kennedy's seat and the front seat which Kellerman and Greer sat on. Kennedy's seat overlaps the inboard line, as it may very well have done, since the back seat may have extended slightly beyond the interior boundary at floor level.
What else can these heavy lines represent? Not the door itself but some sort of force field generated by the door? Of course not. They represent the door, the boundary of the interior of the limousine.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
I've just been watching the videos featuring Dale Myers again (and again)....plus I've been looking at some pictures of the interior of the limousine for comparison purposes....and I noticed something in one of the photos [seen below] of the limo taken after the assassination at the White House garage that I hadn't paid much attention to previously (although I have definitely seen this gory picture before). Like most cars, the Presidential limousine has a hump running down the middle of the floor (directly between the two jump seats):
Now, given the fact that each jump seat was exactly 20 inches wide, and keeping in mind the place in the middle of the car where the "hump" begins to curve upward, I'm just wondering if it would be physically possible to even place John Connally's jump seat a full six inches inboard of the right-hand door?
Seems to me that might not even be physically conceivable to do, given the "hump" being where it is (and given the location in the car where the hump begins its curve upward toward the center of the vehicle).
If the jump seat is 20 inches wide (which the Hess & Eisenhardt chart says it is), and IF the seat was placed a full six inches from the inner surface of the door, it looks like that might be an awfully tight squeeze without actually having the seat itself (or the base part of it) running up onto the transmission hump.
That, of course, is just a guess on my part, based on nothing more than merely eyeballing the above "hump" picture, without having any way to accurately measure the distances with any precision. And since we are only talking about a discrepancy of 3.5 inches in the first place, I suppose I could very well be mistaken. But it seems to me, it's something to take into account anyway.
I must admit (even though I've seen the above "hump" photo before), I had never thought about the way that the hump in the middle of the car could have physically affected the location of the jump seats.
Also:
Although this isn't exactly ironclad proof that the position of John Connally's jump seat was only 2.5 inches inside the limo's right-hand door, the following illustration appears in the photo section of Vincent Bugliosi's 2007 book "Reclaiming History"; and in my opinion this "three-dimensional overhead rendering" (as Vince calls it in his book) looks pretty darn accurate in its pertinent details. And just look how close the jump seats are to the doors:
Governor Connally's seat doesn't look like it is six inches inboard of the door to me in the above animated illustration. It looks closer to the 2.50 inches as purported in the limo's body draft, which is probably the best evidence for the true measurement of the seat, even though Mr. Bugliosi, in multiple places within the same book that contains the illustration above, claims that the seat is six inches inside the door.
And the above artist rendering also seems to make full allowances for the transmission hump that runs along the floor of the limousine directly between the two jump seats, with the seats coming very close to physically touching the outer edges of the rendered "hump" in the illustration in Bugliosi's book.
And, Joe, once again, I want to emphasize that you might very well be correct regarding the "heavy lines" representing the thick car door in the Discovery Channel video clip. It's just that it's kind of difficult to know for certain what all of those schematic lines mean that are criss-crossing the car.
But, like John Fiorentino recently said, when speaking of Dale Myers (and I must concur):
"He's the one who wins the awards you know." -- John F.; May 3, 2008
David Von Pein
May 13, 2008
