JFK The Smoking Gun

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• published: 05 Dec 2013
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Australian investigator Colin McLaren created a 90-minute documentary and book[25] based on and supporting Donahue's theory, both titled JFK: The Smoking Gun. The documentary aired on Australian and American television on November 3, 2013.[26][27][28] The documentary features re-enactments, archival footage, and new interviews with Menninger, with Donahue's daughter, and with witnesses to the shooting. A one-hour abridged version of this documentary aired in the UK on November 13, 2013, entitled JFK's Secret Killer: The Evidence.[29] McLaren reconstructs Donahue's ballistics tests as described in Mortal Error, placing the second gunman exactly where Agent Hickey was positioned. To back up the accidental shot theory, the documentary showed a photograph of Agent Hickey holding up an AR-15 while standing inside a Secret Service follow-up car as it speeds behind the Presidential limousine with Secret Service Agent Clint Hill on its rear.[30] Finding this photograph was crucial to Donahue's decision to publish his work and was used on the front cover of Menninger's book. The documentary demonstrated the possibility of there being two different bullet calibres involved, and therefore two weapons, by stating bullet fragments found inside Kennedy's skull, from the catastrophic head shot, proved it disintegrated on impact, which lay contrary to the ballistics evidence of Oswald's second shot, a bullet which travelled straight through the President and into Governor Connally. Using Donahue's original research, McLaren demonstrated, with a drill and artificial skull, how the entry wound of the third and final shot was too small to allow a 6.5mm bullet from a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, but was a perfect fit for a 5.56mm bullet from an AR-15. Circumstantial evidence put forward by the documentary stated how an agitated Secret Service chief James Rowley admitted, at the Warren Commission, that AR-15s were no longer used by his organisation inside protection vehicles since the assassination; and also that classified Secret Service documents on the assassination were destroyed just one week prior to being handed over to the Assassination Records Review Board in 1995. Though it highlighted eyewitness testimony concerning the origin of the gunshots (some saying the Texas School Book Depository, some saying the Grassy Knoll, some saying both), the documentary did not make mention of any eyewitnesses who saw a gunshot coming from the Presidential motorcade. Reference was, however, made to several bystanders in Dealey Plaza who did recall the smell of gunpowder immediately after the shooting, with the documentary noting the direction of a breeze that day made it possible the gunpowder had originated from the vicinity of the motorcade. Donahue died in 1999.[31][32] In the documentary, his daughter Colleen says he was always surprised that his work received so little attention. At the time of his death he was working on another book on the same topic.