The Officer Who Found A Different Rifle — And Changed His Story The Next Day
On the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, chaos consumed downtown Dallas. President John F. Kennedy had just been shot as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza.
Screaming witnesses pointed toward the Texas School Book Depository, the towering brick warehouse overlooking the assassination site.
Within minutes, police officers and sheriff’s deputies flooded the building searching floor by floor for evidence.
What they found on the sixth floor would become one of the most controversial objects in American history.
And according to several officers present that day, it was not the rifle the government later claimed it was.
The sixth floor of the Depository looked like a maze. Cardboard book cartons were stacked in uneven rows, forming narrow corridors through the dimly lit warehouse space.
Near the southeast corner window — the alleged sniper’s nest — deputies discovered three spent shell casings lying on the floor.
That discovery intensified the search. Then, around 1:22 p.m., Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone and Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman moved toward the northwest corner near a staircase.
Hidden behind rows of boxes, partially concealed beneath cartons, they spotted a bolt-action rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.
According to Weitzman, the discovery happened almost simultaneously. “There it is,” he reportedly shouted. The officers secured the area and waited for crime lab personnel to photograph the weapon before touching it.
At that moment, according to multiple law enforcement reports, the rifle was identified as a German 7.65 Mauser.
Not an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano. Not the rifle later tied to Lee Harvey Oswald. A Mauser.
The distinction is enormous because the entire case against Oswald depended upon connecting him to a specific rifle purchased through a mail-order catalog under the alias “A.
Hidell.” That weapon was allegedly a 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano bearing serial number C2766. If the rifle found on the sixth floor was actually a Mauser, the official story collapses immediately.
And the evidence suggesting exactly that is difficult to dismiss. The day after the assassination, Seymour Weitzman signed a sworn affidavit describing the weapon in extraordinary detail.
He stated clearly that the rifle was a “7.65 Mauser bolt-action” equipped with a scope and leather sling.
This was not an offhand remark made in confusion. It was a formal legal document prepared after the event.
Deputy Eugene Boone filed a similar report identifying the rifle as a Mauser as well.
Then came another witness whose testimony would become even more explosive. Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig claimed he physically read the words “7.65 Mauser” stamped directly on the barrel itself.
If true, that detail destroys any argument about visual confusion or mistaken resemblance. Craig insisted he did not merely assume the rifle was a Mauser.
He read it. And he would never change that story. The identification spread rapidly throughout Dallas and beyond.
Television broadcasts described the murder weapon as a German Mauser. Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade publicly called it a Mauser during press interviews.
Even legendary CBS anchor Walter Cronkite informed the nation that a German-made Mauser rifle had been discovered inside the Depository.
For several crucial hours after Kennedy’s assassination, the “Mauser” identification was treated as established fact.
Then, suddenly, everything changed. The rifle was transported to police headquarters where Lieutenant J.C. Day examined it and officially logged it as an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano.
The FBI quickly connected the Carcano to mail-order records linked to Lee Harvey Oswald. Within less than twenty-four hours, the Mauser had effectively vanished from the official narrative.
The officers who originally identified it were now expected to explain themselves. Under questioning from the Warren Commission, Seymour Weitzman retreated from his earlier affidavit.
He admitted that at “a glance” the rifle looked like a Mauser, but insisted he had simply made an honest mistake.
The phrase “at a glance” became his repeated defense. He later appeared on CBS television expressing regret over the identification.
“To my sorrow,” he said, “I called it a Mauser.” Eugene Boone eventually followed the same path, acknowledging that he too had been mistaken.
But Roger Craig refused. Craig insisted until the day he died that the rifle found on the sixth floor was unquestionably a 7.65 Mauser.
And that refusal changed his life forever. Craig was no fringe figure. He had been named Dallas Sheriff’s Department Officer of the Year only a few years earlier.
But after challenging the official narrative, his career rapidly collapsed. He was allegedly forbidden from speaking publicly about his testimony.
When he later discussed the case with journalists, he was fired. The consequences became darker from there.
Craig claimed he was followed, threatened, and repeatedly targeted. He survived shootings. His car was reportedly forced off a road causing permanent injuries.
He became increasingly isolated and paranoid. In 1975, at just thirty-nine years old, Roger Craig was found dead from a gunshot wound in what authorities ruled a suicide.
To conspiracy researchers, Craig became symbolic of a witness destroyed for refusing to conform. To critics, he became an unstable man whose story evolved over time.
And therein lies the core problem with the “Mauser mystery.” Both sides possess arguments difficult to fully dismiss.
Supporters of the official narrative insist the confusion was understandable. Mauser rifles and Mannlicher-Carcanos share certain similarities in shape and bolt-action design.
In the chaotic atmosphere immediately following the assassination, experienced officers could have made a fast visual mistake.
That explanation is plausible. But skeptics point to details that remain deeply troubling. Weitzman’s affidavit did not merely say “looked like a Mauser.”
It specified caliber, scope details, and sling description. Craig claimed to have read the actual stamping on the weapon.
And perhaps most significantly, multiple officers independently converged on the exact same identification before the official narrative shifted.
That consistency is difficult to ignore. Critics also question how officers close enough to identify scope magnification and sling color somehow failed to notice markings reading “Made Italy” and “Cal 6.5” allegedly stamped plainly on the Carcano rifle.
The issue becomes even more complicated because no photograph has ever surfaced showing a Mauser on the sixth floor.
Every officially documented image depicts the Mannlicher-Carcano. To defenders of the Warren Commission, this proves no switch ever occurred.
To skeptics, it proves only that if a switch happened, it happened efficiently. Roger Craig’s additional testimony intensified suspicion further.
He claimed he saw Lee Harvey Oswald flee the Depository and enter a waiting Nash Rambler station wagon immediately after the assassination.
If true, Oswald could not have acted alone. That testimony directly threatened the Warren Commission’s lone gunman conclusion.
Craig later alleged portions of his testimony were altered or misrepresented when officially published. Whether true or not, his reputation deteriorated rapidly afterward.
The “Mauser versus Carcano” debate ultimately became much larger than the rifle itself. It evolved into a battle over truSt.
Do you trust the officers standing inside the Depository during the chaotic first hour after the assassination?
Or do you trust the institutional machinery that later standardized the official narrative? That question has haunted the Kennedy assassination for more than six decades.
Because what cannot be denied is this: Several Dallas law enforcement officers initially identified the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository as a 7.65 German Mauser.
Those statements exist in sworn affidavits and official reports. Later, those same officers changed their stories — except for one man who refused.
And from that moment forward, the rifle itself became yet another symbol of a deeper American suspicion: that somewhere between the raw confusion of history and the polished certainty of official conclusions, something important may have disappeared forever.
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