Newly surfaced video of JFK assassination shows motorcade taking president to hospital after he was shot

Newly emerged images of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade speeding down a Dallas highway toward a hospital after… He was fatally wounded It will go up for auction later this month.

Experts say the find is not necessarily surprising, even more than 60 years after the murder.

“These images, films and photographs, are often still there. They continue to be discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages,” said Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination.

RR Auction will offer the 8mm home movie in Boston on Sept. 28. It begins with Dale Carpenter Sr. narrowly missing the limousine carrying the president and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, but capturing other vehicles in the motorcade as it travels down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown. The film continues after Kennedy is shot, with Carpenter filming as the motorcade roars down Interstate 35.

“This is extraordinary, in color, and you can feel the 80 mph,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of the auction house.

The I-35 footage, which lasts about 10 seconds, shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hillwho jumped into the back of the limousine as the shots rang out, hovering above the president and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit can be seen.

“I didn’t know they weren’t going to shoot anymore,” Hill said. “I had a vision that, yeah, there was probably going to be more shooting when I got there like I did.”

The shots were fired as the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where the shooter was later found to have been killed. Lee Harvey Oswald He had positioned himself as a sniper on the sixth floor. The assassination itself was filmed by Abraham Zapruder.

After the shooting, the caravan turned onto I-35 and sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospitalwhere Kennedy would be declared dead. It was the same route the motorcade would have taken to take Kennedy to its next stop, a speech at the Trade Mart.

Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said that while his family knew his grandfather had films from that era, it wasn’t talked about much. So Gates said when he was finally given the film, stored with other family films in a milk crate, he wasn’t sure exactly what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had captured.

In 2010, when he projected it on his bedroom wall, he was initially unimpressed by what he saw on Lemmon Avenue, but then he saw what he saw on I-35. “It was shocking,” he said.

He was particularly struck by Hill’s precarious position in the back of the limo.

Shortly after arriving at the hospital, Hill was on the phone with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, CBS Bay Area reported.

“He said, ‘Well, how serious is this?’ and I didn’t want to tell him that his brother was dead,” Hill told the station. “So I said, ‘This is the worst thing that can happen,’ and with that, he just hung up the phone.”

Around the same time Hill’s book, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” was published in 2012, Gates contacted Hill and her co-author, Lisa McCubbin, who became Lisa McCubbin Hill when she and Hill married in 2021.

McCubbin Hill said it was admirable that Gates was sensitive enough to want Hill to see the footage before doing anything else with it. He said that while he knew Hill’s description of sitting in the limousine as it sped down the highway, “seeing the footage of what actually happened … just makes your heart stop.”

The auction house has released photos from the film footage, but has not released the portion that shows the caravan speeding down the interstate.

Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentary filmmaker and former FBI analyst who has seen the film, said it shows the race to Parkland in a more complete way than other, more fragmented footage he has seen. He said the footage offers “a new look at the race to Parkland” and hopes that after the auction, it will end up somewhere it can be used by filmmakers.

Fagin said the murder was such a shocking event that it was instinctive for people to preserve material relating to it, so there is always the possibility of new material emerging.

He said historians had wondered for years about a man who can be seen taking pictures in one of the photographs from that day.

“For years we had no idea who this photographer was, where his camera was, where those images were,” Fagin said.

In 2002, Jay Skaggs walked into the museum with a shoebox under his arm. He was the photographer in the photo, and in that box were 20 images of Dealey Plaza before and after the killing, including the only known color photographs of the rifle when it was removed from the Texas School Book Depository building, Fagin said.

“He just handed us that box,” Fagin said.

In December 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration released a set of 13,173 documents related to the JFK assassination, shortly after President Biden issued an executive order authorizing their release while keeping thousands of other sensitive records secret.

At that time, the The files said Ninety-seven percent of the roughly 5 million pages in its collection related to the assassination have been made public, but some experts say the government continues to censor or withhold important information that could reflect poorly on the CIA or other agencies.