Landis' behaviour strikes me as being very peculiar. Shouldn't he have attempted to preserve evidence on the bullet rather than simply putting it into his pocket?
From the NYT article. It also mentions that crime scene integrity wasn't as much of a thing at the time, which seems questionable at best. But still, if you believe the choice is between keeping or losing the bullet, you definitely take it.
I’m kind of inclined to expect peculiar behavior from him.
It's a bullet. It just was next to an explosion that cleared it most most evidence. Then the barrel rifling altered the metal. That would not be harmed by picking it up. Then it went through jfk. Okay, we already know his DNA is on it.
The real question is why are you picking up random things from a crime scene and then putting them down in a hospital stretcher.
Probably seemed like a good idea at the time. My wife was in car accident once where the airbag deployed. For some reason her immediate reaction was to roll down the window. People in stressful and perilous situations sometimes do things that make no sense.
Why wouldn't she open a window?
It’s funny how advertising depicts air bags as these soft pillows when they are anything but inviting during the moment of deployment.
The bullet they are talking about is the "magic bullet" that hit Kennedy and Connally. The bullet that hit Kennedy's head distinegrated and they found fragments.
> The bullet they are talking about is the "magic bullet" that hit Kennedy and Connally. The bullet that hit Kennedy's head distinegrated and they found fragments.
The explosion they are referring to is the one inside the firearm when the firing pin strikes the cartridge.
No need to be unkind.
I don't really know, but it hardly seems like good practise to pick up a bullet. Don't crime scene investigators usually take calibrated pictures of important items such as bullets and often try to determine the trajectory?
There's also the chain of custody to think about - the bullet could easily have been swapped with a different bullet after he left it on the stretcher.
Of course it's not but that was no ordinary crime scene. There were thousands of people about, what would happen to the vehicle etc., etc? There's no way the crime scene could be secured in such a short time. And JFK had to be rushed to hospital. Nothing was certain.
He saw the bullet as evidence and on the spur of the moment secured it. After that he was likely in shock and thus his actions were more that of an automaton.
And his “only law enforcement experience was being in the Secret Service? That isn’t a low bar.