Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

The Unsigned Russian-Language Note

Cadigan’s examination confirmed Marina Oswald’s testimony that the handwriting in Commission Exhibit No. 1, the unsigned note written almost entirely in Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet, was that of Lee Harvey Oswald. Because the note was in Russian, Cadigan employed not only Oswald’s English language handwriting standards but also letters written by Oswald in the Russian language to make the comparison.

The Homemade Wrapping Paper Bag

Examination of the homemade paper bag found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository following the assassination was conducted using multiple methods because the heavy brown paper and glue-bearing brown paper tape contained no watermarks or distinctive characteristics. Cadigan compared the questioned paper and tape with known samples from the shipping department of the Texas School Book Depository obtained on November 22, 1963, examining them under natural and electric light, ultraviolet light, and microscopically; measuring their felting patterns, thickness to one one-thousandth of an inch, and fiber composition; and performing spectrographic analysis of metallic ions. The questioned and known items were identical in all measured properties (a 25-thousandths-of-an-inch width difference in the tape was not significant), while a paper sample obtained from the shipping room on December 1, 1963, was readily distinguishable. Tape examination revealed that all but two of the strip ends were irregularly torn, indicating a long strip had been drawn from a dispensing machine and torn by hand; small half-inch markings in a railroad-tie pattern down the center of the tape, made by a ridged wheel in a tape dispenser, matched the markings on tape from a dispenser located in the Texas School Book Depository shipping room. The number of lines per inch and line length on the bag tape was identical to that on the shipping room dispenser tape.