Trial Room at McNair

[John E.]

(01-20-2013 02:28 PM)BettyO Wrote:  John - ya'll's picture also shows that the gallows stands almost directly in the middle of the tennis courts!!

Again, thanks for the clarification! Just goes to show that we're all still learning, ya'll! And that's the beauty of the whole thing!!

Betty, I think you are mistaking the fence that surrounded the construction site at building 20 for the Tennis court fence. The scaffold was situated closer to the northwest section of court 1 and not the center. The different angles sometimes cause optical illusions as well and can be confusing. Take Roger's photo of building 20 for example. In that photo, it looks like the tennis court fence lines up with the end of the eastern-most wall of the building. In the photo you posted, you can see that its actually much closer to the west wall.

This discussion brings back some fond memories. I started conversing with Barry back in 2009 over some of these same questions. Where was the scaffold ? What direction were the conspirators facing ? Could they see the scaffold being built from their cells ?

After realizing that we shared some of the same fascination over the minutia, we started collaborating more often. Eventually, he asked me to co-author a book with him. He's regretted it ever since !! Just kidding. The more research we started doing, the more our project kept expanding. "Well, we gotta include that!" became a common phrase between the two of us. Low and behold, the book still isn't finished. I can honestly say that the end product will be better because we didn't rush to finish this thing.

Three years later, we're still researching, still coming up with new finds and offering counter-arguments to long-accepted truths of the assassination and related facts.

Because of Dave Taylor's excellent research on Booth's knife, we had to change a line or two in the opening narrative. We also had to exclude photographer Timothy O'Sullivan from accompanying Gardner at the Navy Yard and the executions.

Unfortunately, our conclusions and findings came too late for the Killing Lincoln docu-drama. That production is going to be fantastic. Erik Jendrensen went to great lengths and consulted with many of us to make sure he was getting things right. Unlike some other producers, he genuinely listened and made appropriate corrections and changes.

John