Missing audio tapes, an alleged clean up of the limo...

From The Dallas Morning News

Missing radio tapes, an alleged cleanup: J.F.K. limousine part of assassination conspiracy lore

In Sunday’s paper, I wrote about the strange and surprising history of the limousine John F. Kennedy rode in the day of his assassination. The Secret Service named the vehicle X-100. The Associated Press dubbed it the Death Car. But Kennedy’s elegant Lincoln Continental limo was as emblematic as he was.

In my research, I learned two intriguing tales about the car from Gary Mack, curator of Dallas’ Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

Mack says that while the car was parked outside Parkland Hospital, something strange happened. There were odd reports by some hospital staff of a man in a suit inside the emergency area who asked for a bucket of water and some towels. (Here is another one.) “And the implication was that they were going to clean out the car — clean out the crime scene,” he says. The mysterious man was never identified, but Mack says “a bucket was photographed at the left rear door of the limo before being carried toward the emergency entrance.” And yet, photographs of the car’s backseat taken by the FBI after the car was flown back to Washington, D.C. reveal it does not appear to have been cleaned. Perhaps only the driver’s area was wiped down?

Mack points out one more remaining mystery connected with the car: the radio transmissions. Each vehicle in the motorcade that day was patched into a radio network, and he says the Secret Service was monitoring the chatter from a room at the Adolphus Hotel. The transmissions were being fed to Air Force One and, presumably, the White House Communications Agency. “Where are the tapes? No one knows,” Mack says. “The tapes could be important if, as one of the agents in the limo testified, he was on his radiotelephone during some of the assassination and his microphone could have picked up the sounds of the shots.” Mack shared this information with the Assassination Records Review Board during its 1994 research stop in Dallas when they took testimony from several people. He says the board looked into it, but never could get a straight answer. “Now, you could assume that the Secret Service doesn’t want secrets out. Well, procedural things, sure. But it opens up the door to reasonable doubt. And that’s why people are still so fascinated with this subject because parts of it, to this day, just don’t make sense.”