A magic bullet, a grassy knoll and a “not great but efficient rifle” recently returned to relevance with the release of a trove of new documents related to the 1963 JFK assassination. In the 1986 film, “On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald,” attorney Vincent Bugliosi, the Manson Family prosecutor, with the aforementioned description, questioned Monty C. Lutz, about the Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle used by Oswald. Lutz was a firearms expert who advised the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-1978). The mock trial movie featured surviving witnesses to the assassination in order to determine Oswald’s guilt or innocence.
Lutz owned a similar Carcano used for the film. Lutz said he tested the rifle at 57, 72 and 87 yards, firing within 8.2 seconds – the length of time between Oswald’s shots in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. In three attempts, he was able to hit all three targets once and the closest and furthest (similar to Oswald) twice, firing as fast as 3.6 seconds. He told legendary attorney Gary Spence, the film’s defense attorney, the targets weren’t moving, unlike Kennedy who was traveling in a limousine.
The House Select Committee went against the 1964 Warren Commission’s report that Oswald acted alone, instead noting the likelihood of a conspiracy, but didn’t identify any conspirators. Lutz, who personally held that Oswald worked alone, also served as ballistics expert in the committee’s investigations of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and was part of an inquiry into the Mai Lai massacre. He reportedly worked with Mitchell L. WerBell on the silencer for the MAC-10.
As the JFK assassination and the debate around it return to the public consciousness, the Carcano rifle, Lutz and the film serve as adjacent history to the recently released documents from the National Archives. What do you think, conspiracy or lone wolf?
