Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination by Anthony Summers Page A

He told police immediately after the assassination that there had been four shots and that he had seen “a puff of smoke come from the trees.”
    Holland persisted in maintaining that at least some of the firing “sounded like it came from behind the wooden fence… . I looked over to where the shots came from, and I saw a puff of smoke still lingering underneath the trees in front of the wooden fence.” Pressed as to where the shots had come from, Holland replied, “Behind that picket fence—close to the little plaza—there’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind” (see Photo 6).
    The Warren Commission heard Holland’s testimony but ignored it.Skeptical suggestions that he saw smoke or steam from a locomotive make no sense. The railway line itself is far from the fence on the knoll. Rifles, on the other hand, sometimes do emit smoke.
    Holland’s account was supported—with variations as to the precise location of the smoke—by eight witnesses, most of them fellow railroad workers, who stood on the same bridge. Others saw the same phenomenon from other vantage points—one of them a man in a better position than anyone to observe suspicious activity by the fence on the knoll. Railroad worker Lee Bowers, perched in a signal box that commanded a unique view of the area behind the fence, said he noticed two men standing near the fence shortly before the shots were fired. One was “middle-aged” and “fairly heavyset,” wearing a white shirt and dark trousers. The other was “mid-twenties in either a plaid shirt or plaid coat … these men were the only two strangers in the area. The others were workers that I knew.”
    Bowers said, too, that when the shots were fired at the President “in the vicinity of where the two men I have described were, there was a flash of light, something I could not identify, but there was something which occurred which caught my eye in this immediate area on the embankment … a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel that something out of the ordinary had occurred there.”
    Lee Bowers was questioned by the Warren Commission but cut off in mid-sentence when he began describing the “something out of the ordinary” he had seen. The interrogating lawyer changed the subject.
    Six witnesses, all of them either distinguished public figures or qualified to know what they were talking about, claimed to have smelled gunpowder in the air. Three witnesses who had traveled in themotorcade—the Mayor’s wife, Mrs. Cabell; Senator Ralph Yarborough; and Congressman Ray Roberts—later mentioned such a smell. Unlikely, surely, that the odor could have reached them from a sixth-floor window high above. Surprising, too, that they could have smelled it from the grassy knoll, yet it seems they were in that general area when they did notice it. Police Officer Earle Brown, on duty at the railway bridge, and Mrs. Donald Baker, at the other end of the knoll, reported the same acrid smell.
    Another policeman, Patrolman Joe Smith, was holding up traffic across the road from the Book Depository when the motorcade passed by. On hearing the gunfire—and a woman cry out, “They’re shooting the President from the bushes!”—Smith ran to the grassy knoll, the only bushy place in the area. In 1978, he still remembered what he reported shortly after the assassination, that in the parking lot, “around the hedges, there was the smell, the lingering smell of gunpowder.”
    The Assassinations Committee photographic panel would examine a Polaroid photograph taken by bystander Mary Moorman at the moment of the fatal shot. A shape—some believe it is a man’s head—can be seen in the fenced area on the knoll (see Photo 5). The shape is no longer there in subsequent photographs.
    In 1978, amid the excitement over the Assassination Committee’s conclusion that two guns were fired at President Kennedy, rather less attention was given to the Committee’s decisions on a secondary but equally