Mortal Error [antikvár]

A CHANCE TELEPHONE CALL fate sometimes holds a man in check Until his moment amvcs. Hidden skills and talents lie dormant for years, only to surface after a chance encounter or extraordinary event. It is a common phenomenon but no less dramatic each time it occurs. So it was for Howard Donahue. Donahue was a salesman most of his career. For years, he supplied pharmaceutical products to drugstores around Baltimore; later he sold missile components to defense firms across the South. After that, Donahue realized a lifelong dream and opened a gun shop. But Donahue's real calling was detective work. His abilities in this area did not emerge until he was middle-aged, and had it not been for a chance encounter in the spring of 1967, they probably wouldn't have surfaced at all. What Howard Donahue did—part-time, on weekends, over the course of twenty-five years—was investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In this he was no different from thousands of other amateur sleuths. Except that, unlike others, Donahue possessed considerable knowledge of firearms and ballistics and a remarkable ability to imagine and understand. In time, these traits allowed him to spot inconsistencies in the evidence that virtually everyone else had missed. So Donahue pulled the string. And kept pulling until, in the end, the vast tapestry of fact, fiction, and paranoid fantasy surrounding Kennedy's death unraveled in his hands. Donahue's startling opinion about what happened on November 22, 1963, remains unconventional in the extreme. It is controversial. It is also profoundly compelling, because more than any theory ever put forth about Kennedy's death, Donahue's understanding is grounded in facts and evidence alone. What Donahue discovered was this: The bullet that slammed into Kennedy's skull could not have been fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.