DALLAS (AP) A homemade tape showing President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade speeding down a Dallas highway to a hospital after being shot was auctioned Saturday for $137,500.
The homemade 8mm color tape was auctioned by RR Auction in Boston. The auction house said the buyer wishes to remain anonymous.
The family of Dale Carpenter Sr., the man who captured the images on November 22, 1963, had preserved them to this day. The film begins when Carpenter cannot see the limousine in which the president and the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, were traveling, but captures other vehicles of the motorcade that were traveling along Lemmon Avenue towards the center of the city. The footage continues after Kennedy was shot, and Carpenter captured the moment the motorcade travels down Interstate 35.
The shooting occurred as the motorcade passed Dealey Plaza, in front of a school book warehouse, where it was later discovered that the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself from a sniper position on the sixth floor. The murder was filmed by Abraham Zapruder.
The tape recorded by Carpenter of Interstate 35, which lasts about 10 seconds, shows Secret Service agent Clint Hill who jumped into the back of the limousine when the shots were heard standing and leaning over the president’s body and over Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit can be seen. The president was pronounced dead upon arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of the auction house, said in a news release that the tape conveys a compelling sense of urgency and anguish.
Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said that although his family knew his grandfather had a recording of that day, it wasn’t talked about much. Therefore, Gates said, when he received the recording, which had been stored in a milk crate along with other family films, he was not sure what exactly his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had recorded.
Projecting the images on his bedroom wall in 2010, Gates was initially disappointed when he saw the shots of Lemmon Avenue. But suddenly the images of Interstate 35 appeared. It was shocking, he said.
RR Auction has published screenshots of the part of the recording that shows how the caravan was speeding down the highway, but has not published the video.
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