Counting Pixels in the Zapruder film.

[Paul Rigby]

The next bystander to come into view is Jean Hill, but she isn't standing in a place where she might cast that shadow. Is this a film error, a "cut and paste" mistake, or has a bystander deliberately been eliminated from the background?

As matters stand, it's impossible to be sure who was eliminated from the real scene by the compilers of the fake film, but three candidates suggest themselves, all female book depository employees who said they stood together on the south curb of Elm at roughly the mid-point between the TSBD and the overpass (Holt, Simmons and Jacob in 22WCH652-3; presence on Elm St in shooting's immediate aftermath confirmed by policeman Lewis in 19WCH526).

An attempt to preserve two of the three vanishing TSBD employees from the south curb would have necessitated the removal of Hill and Moorman. Interestingly, the ground appears to have been prepared for just such a switch.

All three TSBD women's statements were seemingly taken on the same day, 18 March 1964.The statements of Holt and Jacob were structured by the same pair, A. Raymond Switzer and Eugene F. Petrakis. The job of fashioning Simmons', by contrast, was undertaken by E.J. Robertson and Thomas T. Trettis. The latter duo had very interesting recent "form."

Five days earlier Robertson and Trettis had interviewed Jean Hill, another, albeit rather better, publicised south curb witness. This was to produce startling results. Let Harold Weisberg take up the story: "Reporting their interview with Mrs. Hill, the agents write things they must have known to be wrong. The two women [Mary Moorman, being the other PR] were not opposite the main entrance of the Texas School Book Depository Building' but considerably west of there, opposite the location of the President's car at the time of the fatal shot" (Photographic Whitewash, 1976, p.36). Hill and Moorman, ridiculous as it may now seem, were to be shifted and "lost" in the crowd.

How to make sense of this? On the surface of it, simple enough: Five days before Robertson and Trettis separated Simmons from Holt and Jacob, the same pair removed Hill and Moorman from the south curb, too. Why? Did the latter pair make one pair too many for the Z-film? The entire problem arose, I hasten to point out, because the film was refashioned only after the appearance of the stills in Life magazine in its first post-assassination edition.