I arrived at my parents' house for the holidays to find my dad unusually excited. "I've got something I want to share with you," he told me, a sparkle in his eye. "It's a TV show. I thought we could watch it together."
"Oh yeah?" I answered, curious. "What's it about?"
He raised his eyebrows. "The Kennedy assassination."
My mom, who was standing next to my dad, rolled her eyes. "Your father's become a conspiracy nut."
"No, it's not nutty. It's science," he explained to my mother slowly, as if he'd made this point to her before. "They did scientific experiments."
My dad is a smart guy. A former engineer, he's not the type who would be easily fooled by bogus science. But I was a prosecutor working closely with the folks at the Alaska State Crime Lab when "CSI" and its progeny first brought forensic science into pop culture. I could drive the state lab scientists into fits just by mentioning anything I'd seen on TV purporting to be real science. Their skepticism had worn off on me.
"I don't know, Dad. Unless it's on PBS, it's usually junk science. The real stuff isn't exciting enough."
"Well, this isn't junk," he assured me. "The Wall Street Journal called it 'compelling.'"
'The smoking gun'
It occurred to me that I could potentially spend more time arguing about whether to watch the show than just watching it. Plus, I hadn't seen my dad this enthusiastic about anything since he and my mom got tickets to see "Dancing with the Stars," so we made a family event out of it. My dad, mom, sister and brother-in-law all gathered on my parents' wraparound sofa with a large bowl of popcorn to watch "JFK: The Smoking Gun."
The voiceover in the introduction told us that the Kennedy assassination had been re-examined by one of Australia's top detectives. When we were introduced to this detective, my first impression was not one of investigative gravitas but that he was wearing a 1970s-era gold chain. The Aussie detective's theory was that Oswald did not fire the final shot that hit Kennedy in the head. Instead, that bullet was accidentally fired from an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle by a Secret Service agent in the car following the presidential limousine.
The detective's first experiment was designed to show that Oswald wasn't firing the right type of bullet. Oswald's gun fired full metal jacket rounds, which are less likely to fragment on impact than hollow-point bullets are. The bullet that hit Kennedy in the head fragmented inside his brain. To prove this round must have been a hollow point, the Australian shot a cantaloupe with both kinds of bullets. Only the hollow point fragmented inside the cantaloupe.
My dad, sitting next to me on the couch, elbowed me at the conclusion of this demonstration. "See? I told you. What do you think about that?" he asked.
"All that proves it that Kennedy's head was harder than a cantaloupe," I countered.
"What? No -- that proves he wasn't shot by one of Oswald's bullets."
I shook my head. "In order to rule out a full metal jacket, they'd need to replicate the conditions of the shot precisely -- the same distance and the same target -- something as hard and thick as a skull. Not a cantaloupe."
My dad wasn't ready to concede the point. "But that makes it more likely the bullet was a hollow point."
"Not really," I replied. The rest of my family passed around the popcorn and watched us, their eyes bouncing back and forth like they were watching a tennis match. My dad and I were falling back into well-worn relationship dynamic: competition.
As we continued watching, the dick from down under drilled a 6 mm hole in an artificial skull, representing the reported size of the entry wound in Kennedy's head. The type of bullet Oswald used was 6.5 mm in diameter, he told us, and therefore too large to have created the smaller entry wound. The detective demonstrated his point by trying to jam a bullet through the hole in the skull. Indeed, it didn't fit.
My dad turned to me with the 'see, I'm right' smirk that I remembered well from my childhood. "See!" he exclaimed. "That's proof."
"Maybe," I countered. "But only if the autopsy measurements were accurate up to a half a millimeter. And only if this guy actually has his numbers right, which I doubt. I don't trust a man wearing a gold chain. They couldn't find anyone from this decade?"
I wasn't going to agree with him that easily. Growing up, my dad always won. He was the kind of guy who was good at whatever he tried to do, and he could usually best me in whatever competition was at hand. But now things were different. Now I would show him that he was dealing with a professional, a gal who knew her stuff.
Evidence? Or confirmation bias?
Walking past the infamous grassy knoll and book depository, his chain sparkling in the Dallas sun, the Aussie detective revealed that 13 witnesses near the street had reported smelling gunpowder after the shots were fired. They couldn't have smelled gunpowder from the street if the only shots fired were those from Oswald standing on the sixth floor of the book depository. The eyewitness testimony is conclusive evidence, he said, that someone else fired a gun at street level.
I didn't need any prompting to attack this argument. "First of all," I told my dad, "eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. There have been scientific studies proving this. It's one of the worst types of evidence. You know all those people who've had their convictions reversed by DNA evidence? They were usually put in jail in the first place by the testimony of eyewitnesses. In fact, I bet if you put together the hundreds of people who witnessed the assassination, you'd get hundreds of variations on what happened. Remember all of the people who swore they saw a shot fired from the grassy knoll?"
"Second, have you ever heard of confirmation bias?" I paused for dramatic effect, but not long enough for anyone to actually answer me. "I see it all the time in my job. I've had clients wrongfully accused of murder because of confirmation bias. It's when a detective starts an investigation by deciding what happened and then collects only those facts that agree with his theory and ignores any evidence that contradicts that theory. So he ends up just proving his theory, not discovering the truth. This guy," I said, pointing to the screen, "is totally guilty of that. For example, he made a big deal about 13 witnesses smelling gunpowder, but failed to mention that none of these witnesses -- or anyone else who was there -- actually saw the Secret Service agent shoot Kennedy. Get it?
"Yeah," my dad said, without pause "I think I get it. I'm no lawyer, but wouldn't that be like discounting everything a detective says just because he's wearing a gold chain?"
I heard my sister snicker. "Point for Dad!" she exclaimed. I threw a handful of popcorn at her.
As the program ended, my family declared a draw. The show, and my dad, had failed to prove that a Secret Service agent shot Kennedy, but I hadn't successfully shown that it couldn't have happened either.
Later that night, I lay in the same small twin bed I'd occupied for most of my youth and tried to convince myself to be happy with a draw. It was, after all, better that I used to do. Then I thought about the two matching cruiser bicycles we'd given my parents as retirement gifts. I'd had a pretty active summer. But my dad, since he'd retired, had been enjoying many a cocktail hour at his yacht club. Maybe tomorrow I'd ask him if he wanted to go for a bike ride.
Marcelle McDannel has been working in criminal law for almost two decades, both as a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney. She currently practices criminal defense statewide.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, e-mail commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.