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He pocketed the bullet
The ride to Parkland
Paul Landis rode on the running board of the car behind Kennedy's, no more than 20 feet back. When the third shot struck, he ducked to avoid the spray of blood, and the motorcade raced under the underpass toward Parkland Memorial Hospital.
At the hospital he ran to the President's limousine. Mrs. Kennedy had just stood up from the left center of the rear seat, beside a pool of blood, and right behind where she had been sitting lay a bullet that was not deformed. It carried only the markings of having been fired.
The bullet in the trauma room
Everyone around him was focused on the President. Landis was afraid this important piece of evidence would get lost, so he slipped the bullet into his pocket and hurried in beside the gurney. In Trauma Room 1, people were shoving and shouting, and he was pushed up next to the President's feet. He took the bullet out and placed it there.
The official bullet
The official story is that a maintenance man moved a stretcher blocking the emergency room corridor and found a bullet beneath it. That bullet, Warren Commission Exhibit 399, is in near-perfect condition, even though it is supposed to have passed through both Kennedy and Governor Connally and broken Connally's bones. A bullet that lay in the back seat of the limousine could not have come out of a wound in the front seat.
Landis made his account public in September 2023. Nobody had asked him before: the Warren Commission never interviewed any of the other agents in the follow-up car.
Why did agents ride on a car's running boards?
Presidential follow-up cars in that era had running boards and handholds so agents could stand outside and reach the President's car within seconds. Kennedy's follow-up car was a 1955 Cadillac convertible that the Secret Service code-named Halfback. Agents on the boards could jump off and run alongside the limousine, or climb onto it, if trouble started. After the assassination, the Warren Commission recommended broad changes to how the Secret Service protected the President.
How can a bullet carry markings from being fired?
Most rifle barrels are cut with spiral grooves called rifling, which spin the bullet for stability. The raised metal between the grooves engraves matching stripes into the bullet's surface as it travels down the barrel. Tiny imperfections inside each barrel add scratches that differ from one weapon to the next. Examiners have compared those marks under a comparison microscope since the 1920s to link a bullet to the gun that fired it.
Why does chain of custody matter for evidence?
Chain of custody is the written record of who held a piece of evidence, when, and where it was kept. Courts rely on it to show that an object is the same one found at the scene and that nobody swapped or altered it. A gap in the record gives the other side grounds to challenge whether the item can be trusted. Modern evidence bags are sealed and signed at every handoff for this reason.
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