Part 1396 of my "JFK Assassination Arguments" series includes a variety of my posts and comments covering the period of January 1—31, 2026. To read the entire forum discussion from which my own comments have been extracted, click on the "Full Discussion" logo at the bottom of each individual segment.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
66 years ago today....
David Von Pein
January 2, 2026
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DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Here's a 1962 newspaper which refers to a controversial question asked by a reporter at one of President Kennedy's news conferences (click to enlarge):
Below is the President's press conference referred to in the above newspaper clipping. The controversial question occurs at 15:10:
David Von Pein
January 4, 2026
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PAUL BLEAU SAID THIS.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Oh brother! Paul Bleau's 10-item "You Will Learn" list in the forum post linked above (which is filled with wholly incorrect and inaccurate information relating to President Kennedy's assassination) certainly won't (or shouldn't) help sway the opinion of Eileen Murphy or anyone else connected with ABC News. All ten items on that list are totally preposterous and 100% unproven.
David Von Pein
January 4, 2026
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DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Added to my video collection in late January 2026:
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David Von Pein
January 22-23, 2026
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DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Here's some material regarding WFAA reporter Travis Linn that I first posted at another JFK forum in April of 2010....
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MIKE WILLIAMS SAID:
Seems some time ago I read about a reporter who had a recorder in the plaza. This was not a recording via dictabelt, it was something different. .... From what I understood he started a recorder and had it set down somewhere. I thought by the reflecting pool. But I just vaguely recall reading something about this. Does anyone else recall or know of this?
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Mike,
You're not losing your mind. There was a reporter who claimed to have had a tape recording of the gunshots in Dealey Plaza. But his story doesn't ring true at all. In fact, it's been pretty much proven to be totally bogus and false (as we'll see in a minute via the book quotes shown below).
The reporter's name is Travis Linn, and he worked for WFAA-Radio at the time of the assassination in 1963. Linn said he heard the sound of three gunshots on the tape, but the recording was accidentally erased right after Linn (and Linn only) supposedly heard the three shots. (How convenient.)
Vincent Bugliosi discusses Linn in his book "Reclaiming History". Here are the pertinent excerpts (which appear as a lengthy footnote on Page 155 of the book's endnotes):
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"Author Gerald Posner tells of yet another alleged audiotape of the assassination, and cites it as confirmation for his conclusion that only three shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. Posner said that he had heard a rumor in Dallas that a former reporter for Dallas radio WFAA, Travis Linn, had an audio recording of the shooting in Dealey Plaza.
Posner contacted Linn in 1992 and Linn told him the following story. He said that since he was covering the Trade Mart that day, he asked an associate of his to take a small portable tape recorder to Dealey Plaza and set it down on top of a column near the reflective pool close to the corner of Houston and Elm to pick up the sound of the motorcade going by.
Since the associate was going to be there anyway, why Linn wouldn’t just have him hold it in his hand, and closer to the street, is not known. Also, why wouldn’t Linn want his associate to try to pick up the sound of the motorcade on Main, where the crowds were much larger? In any event, after the shooting, Linn went to Dealey Plaza and found that his associate had left, but the recorder was still there.
He played the tape back at the station and heard three shots on it, but while he was starting to duplicate it, his news director sent him out to Oswald’s apartment. He yelled out to his colleagues, “Don’t erase that tape,” but said when he got back “the tape had been erased.” (Posner, Case Closed, pp.243–245)
Apart from telling his story for the first time almost thirty years later, and the absence of any corroborative evidence that what Linn said took place, the story, on its face, seemed somewhat unlikely to me. I later found out that Sixth Floor Museum curator Gary Mack, who has no visceral opposition to far-out stories as long as they’re not fraudulent, had proved the story was false.
When Linn told Mack the story around 1989, Mack told me he interviewed Walter Evans, Linn’s news director at the time of the assassination, and Evans just laughed, saying it never happened and he hadn’t even heard about it before. Mack also spoke to Pierce Allman, the station’s program director at the time, who told Mack he had never heard it either. “Nor,” Mack wrote, “did any other reporter working in Dallas at the time at WFAA or elsewhere that I have been able to learn about. Something like that would have been known by others in the newsroom who would long remember the great story that got away.”
Mack then interviewed the son of A.J. L’Hoste, the WFAA-TV photographer Linn supposedly asked to record the motorcade. He told Mack his late father filmed the motorcade on Main Street, not Dealey Plaza, and had never heard of Linn’s story. Indeed, L’Hoste’s film, shot about nine blocks east of Dealey Plaza, appears without sound in the WFAA-TV videotapes recorded on November 22, 1963.
Finally, Mack looked at the Elsie Dorman film, which picks up the area where the tape recorder was supposedly left, and saw no such recorder. (Posting to the Internet by Gary Mack, August 8, 1998; Telephone interview of Gary Mack by author [Vincent Bugliosi] on August 18, 2005)." -- Page 155 of Endnotes in "Reclaiming History: The Assassination Of President John F. Kennedy"
DVP SAID:
I'll also add this --- Travis Linn can be heard providing a variety of live news reports on WFAA-Radio in Dallas throughout the weekend of JFK's assassination, including the afternoon of November 22nd. And nowhere in any of his radio reports does he mention a thing about any tape recording of the gunshots.
Now, you'd think if Linn had heard these shots on an audio tape, that would be a pretty nice scoop and a big EXCLUSIVE story to tell America via his position as an on-air reporter for radio station WFAA. Instead, we heard nothing that weekend from Linn about any tape that supposedly recorded the sound of the gunshots in Dealey Plaza.
If you'd like to hear the voice of Travis Linn, click THIS LINK, which is a portion of WFAA's live 11/22/63 radio coverage of the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination. At the 21:30 mark, Linn can be heard reporting from Love Field just after LBJ took off in Air Force One.
AN UNIDENTIFIED PERSON SAID:
Even though Linn's fabrication was to help prove only 3 shots, it is a perfect example of some "witness" gunning for his 15 minutes of fame, regarding the assassination. The problem is, many others have done this kind of thing and the fabrication is usually used to help corroborate some conspiracy story. The bigger problem is, many conspiracy theorists rely on these lying "witnesses" and their fabrications.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Indeed. In fact, in this Travis Linn fabrication, we've got author Gerald Posner falling for it--hook, line, and sinker. And that doesn't help Gerald's credibility any.
Here are some passages from Posner's book "Case Closed", regarding the Travis Linn story:
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"The final piece of the acoustical puzzle over the number of shots fired at Dealey Plaza is available now in the confirmation of a story that has long been rumored in Dallas. Since the assassination, local media gossip had it that a journalist had recorded the sounds of Dealey on November 22 and that later the recording was accidentally erased.
The author [Gerald Posner, that is] finally located the reporter, Travis Linn, now a professor of journalism. He had always declined previous interviews because "I didn't want to be the subject of twenty thousand telephone calls." But despite his reluctance, he finally agreed to tell, for the first time publicly, the story of the only sound recording known to have been made of the assassination.
[Quoting Travis Linn:] "I was a reporter for WFAA radio...which was an ABC and NBC affiliate. As we were making our plans for the day, I was scheduled to go to the Trade Mart, where I supposed to do radio pool on the speech. I asked one of the TV guys, A.J. L'Hoste, if he would take one of our portable tape recorders up to Dealey Plaza, as he was going up there, and I asked him to set it down on top of a column near the reflective pool at the corner of Houston and Elm [across the street from the Depository]. It would get the natural sound of the motorcade going by. I was at the Trade Mart when the shooting occurred. .... Finally, we shut down after Kennedy's death had been announced, and I caught a ride up to Dealey. .... I looked around and found the tape [recorder] on top of one of those pedestals. You couldn't really even see it, as the pedestals are tall, the tape recorder is pretty small, and you would have to look for it. And no one was looking for anything there after the pandemonium of the shooting." [End Linn Quotes.]
Linn said the German-manufactured recorder was a battery-driven professional unit. It was an early version of a cassette recorder, which had to be rewound manually with a crank. In order to play it on the air, it had to be transferred to a reel-to-reel tape machine.
[Quoting Linn again:] "So, I took it back to the station and dubbed it onto reel-to-reel in our beeper room, which is where we took in phone reports and production. And while I was in the process of dubbing it, I was called by my news director to go out, with a TV guy, to Lee Harvey Oswald's apartment. So I yelled, 'Don't erase that tape.' When I got back, the tape had been erased. The way it worked is you got the cassettes, and after you dubbed out of those little cartridges, you then bulk-erased the cartridges and went on to another assignment. And the reel-to-reel was not bulk-erased, but had been recorded over with so many incoming feeds that you could not find anything but little snatches of crowd noises." [End Linn Quotes.]
When asked if he heard the sounds of shots on the tape when he first played it back, Linn had no hesitation. [Quoting Linn:] "When I was dubbing it, I did hear three shots. I can tell you without any doubt that there were three shots and they were rifle shots. I know rifles and pistols. There is no question about those sounds. They were huge over the crowd noise. You've heard a rifle. A rifle fired in that square makes quite a noise. The first two, my recollection is, were closer together, and there was a slightly longer pause until the third one, as if the guy hurried his shots, and then said, 'No, I am going to aim this time.' " [End Linn Quotes.]
Asked why he had never come forward, Linn said, "Others knew about it at the station. But I was the only one that heard the shots. That's why I figured, 'Let's just forget about it.' In those days after the assassination, the stories were coming in so quick, just bang, bang, bang, that there was no time to think about it. You just don't have time to do thumbsuckers and think of what might have been. I knew within a week that if I had it, that it was very important. But I didn't have it, so what could I do?" " -- Pages 242-243 of "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald And The Assassination Of JFK" (1994 Paperback Edition)
The source notes for the above book excerpts indicate: "Interview with Travis Linn, April 15, 1992".
David Von Pein
April 15, 2010
