Print Expert Now Says Oswald Held Rifle

A police expert, reversing his 1978 congressional testimony, said Monday that newly discovered photos of fingerprints on the rifle that killed President John F. Kennedy conclusively prove that Lee Harvey Oswald’s fingers were on the weapon.

Vincent Scalice, a consultant who formerly headed a New York City police fingerprint unit, told a news conference that he examined the four photos and concluded that “there is no doubt in my mind” that Oswald’s prints were on the trigger guard of the rifle that killed Kennedy 30 years ago.

He was given the photos to examine by “Frontline,” a public television program that discovered them and used them as part of a three-hour documentary to be aired tonight.

But the show also presents a second expert who disputes Scalice’s findings.

Former FBI official George Bonebrake, who also examined copies of the fingerprint pictures, said he could not determine positively if they were Oswald’s.

Scalice said Monday that in 1978 he had examined perhaps only one or two photographs, not the four recently uncovered photos.

The four new prints were held all these years by R. W. (Rusty) Livingston, a former Dallas police investigator who made duplicates of print photos held by police.