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Oswald Denied Shooting the President and Modern Voice Technologies Determined He Was Telling the Truth
If you haven’t heard the clip where Oswald proclaims his innocence, you should really listen closely to it. It’s right on the Internet; just search “Lee Harvey Oswald declares ‘I’m just a patsy’” or go straight to: youtube.com/watch?v=T9F-szqv_RIv.
What you see and hear on that clip is a man who seems genuinely confused about the circumstances of his arrest, yet stringently maintains his innocence. He asks for legal representation which, as he says, has been denied. He acknowledges he was in that Book Depository building but points out that he works there, so of course he was there. He denies shooting anyone and says that he was “a patsy”; that he was set up. It’s pretty powerful stuff.
Well, it occurred to some very savvy researchers, that technologies even by the mid-1970s had improved a great deal since 1963 and they had yet to be applied to the case of the Kennedy assassination. So they took the clearly recorded voice of Oswald saying those things and subjected it to the latest voice technologies.
Psychological Stress Evaluation (PSE) is a scientific method of measuring voice stress. It measures and registers the stress level of the person as they say each word. PSE testing was actually developed by experts in the intelligence community.242
The PSE was invented in 1970 by a group of intelligence experts who sought to improve upon the traditional polygraph. Two of the PSE’s inventors, Allan D. Bell Jr. and Charles H. McGuiston, both retired lieutenant colonels from army intelligence, discovered that the frequencies composing the human voice shift from eight to fourteen times every second. But when the speaker is under stress, this frequency modulation disappears. What remains are the pure component frequencies of the voice—and a strong indication that the speaker is lying . . .243
George O’Toole, the former head of the CIA’s Problem Analysis Branch,244 wrote the book on PSE—literally—and explains the function:
Stress is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of lying; it must be interpreted, and therein lies the margin of error. But the absence of stress is a sufficient condition of truthfulness. If someone is talking about a matter of real importance to himself and shows absolutely no stress, then he must be telling the truth.245
It’s acknowledged legally, and in fact—unlike the lie detector test, the poly-graph—Voice Stress Analysis evidence is admissible evidence in a court of law. As historian Michael Griffith notes:
The PSE has been shown to be reliable in several tests. It is used by hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies, and it is accepted as evidence in more than a dozen states.246
That scientific voice analysis and evaluation of Oswald’s recorded voice overwhelmingly indicated that Oswald was being truthful about his innocence. Here are the results of those tests on Oswald’s recorded statements, direct from and in the words of Lloyd H. Hitchcock, the man who conducted the testing. Hitchcock was not only a member of the American Polygraph Association; he actually wrote the manuals on polygraph training and was also a former Army intelligence officer:247
• Oswald denied shooting anybody—the president, the policeman, anybody. The psychological stress evaluator said he was telling the truth.248
• There is no other plausible interpretation of the Oswald PSE charts than the explanation that Oswald was simply telling the truth.249
• My PSE analysis of these recordings indicates very clearly that Oswald believed he was telling the truth when he denied killing the president.250
The plain fact of the matter is that Oswald didn’t act anything like an assassin. And now we know that he didn’t sound like one either!
242 Penthouse News Release, “Lee Harvey Oswald apparently was telling the truth when he said he did not kill President John F. Kennedy, a new-type lie detector that examines the human voice for stress reveals,”10 March1975:jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20 Subject%20Index%20Files/O%20Disk/O’Toole%20George%203-10-75/Item%2001.pdf
243 Ibid.
244 Ibid.
245 George O’Toole, The Assassination Tapes: An electronic probe into the Murder of John F. Kennedy and the Dallas Cover-up (Penthouse Press, 1975).
246 Michael T. Griffith, “Hasty Judgment: A Reply to Gerald Posner-Why the JFK Case is Not Closed,” 8 April 1998: karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/the_critics/griffith/Hasty_Judgment.html
247 Penthouse News Release, “Lee Harvey Oswald apparently was telling the truth.”
248 O’Toole, The Assassination Tapes.
249 O’Toole, The Assassination Tapes.
250 Ibid.