Was the Zapruder Film Altered?

The famous Zapruder film which captured the horror of an American president being murdered by a cabal of Wall Street plutocrats has been the subject of much controversy regarding its integrity. Regardless of the final resolution of that debate, it doesn’t really matter.

Abraham Zapruder (1905 – 1970) was allegedly the innocent bystander who just happened to have an 8mm Bell & Howell portable movie camera with him on the day that President John Kennedy was murdered in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. His ultimate film noir recorded for history the very moments when the assassins’ bullets ended the life of the president.

We do not believe that Zapruder was an innocent bystander. In fact we believe that he was hired – either directly or indirectly – to film the murder for the sick benefit of his pay masters. Zapruder owned a women’s clothing manufacturing firm which operated in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza. He was an extreme right wing ideologue who ran in the same circles as George DeMohrenschildt, another Russian émigré who shepherded Oswald to his job in the Texas School Book Depository.

This community of White Russians were strongly hostile to Kennedy because they viewed him as soft on communism.

Henry Luce’s Life magazine purchased the film in order to sequester it and to extract photos from it supporting the Lone Nut theory of the assassination.  When the film surfaced a few years later, its content shocked the world.

Prior to the film’s sequestration, a few people who saw the film were advised to keep their mouths shut when they protested that the film did not support the official Warren Commission Report. Luce, who was a hostile critic of the President and warned him of dire consequences due to his handling of the steel crisis, was undoubtedly happy to serve as custodian for the film.

The problem with the film is that it clearly shows fire from the front of the president’s limousine and therefore demolishes the Lone Nut and Single Bullet Theories.

The film’s long residency in the vault of Life magazine provides the background for the conspiracy theories – and we do not use the term pejoratively – that the film was altered. However, it is the film’s jerky quality which provides the real motivation for the theory. So when you marry the two facts together, it is easy to see how someone would consider a conspiracy to alter the film.

For our part, we believe that the video was slightly altered to show that the limousine did not come to a full stop. Many eye witnesses have testified that the driver completely stopped the car or brought it to a virtual stop. The reason for this, as we explained elsewhere, is so that the assassins could have the ideal frame for guaranteeing Kennedy's murder.

The alterations provided the Secret Service a plausible defense against charges that it participated in the murder of the president - something which it most certainly did.

But why did the murderers want a film of their wicked deeds? Beyond the macabre satisfaction of seeing the man they hated murdered, they needed a record of the event in order to know how to lie about the facts, to identify potentially troublesome witnesses, and to have a lessons learned record to plan future murders. Indeed, the FBI and Army Delta Force which murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. also filmed his assassination.

For these reasons, we believe that the Zapruder film is largely intact. Even with the minor modification we allow, it is largely irrelevant whether the film has been altered because it clearly shows that the president was murdered from the grassy knoll or another spot from the front of the president’s limousine.

Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.