Panning from left to right, Zapruder followed the motorcade as it moved through Dealey Plaza. A highway sign momentarily blocked Zapruder’s view of the President’s limo. Staying focused, however, the amateur continued filming.

Some experts believe the first shot was recorded between Frames 145-155. A young girl, running near the President’s car, stopped and appears to stare at the Book Depository.

On the sixth floor of the Book Depository, at that moment located behind the motorcade, Oswald allegedly fired twice more from the southeast corner. Governor and Mrs. Connally, sitting in the front seat of the limo, later said they heard three shots coming from behind them. (The link depicts Warren Commission exhibit 1312 - a person of Oswald's height seated on a carton alongside the open "assassination window.") Three spent casings were, in fact, found on the depository’s sixth floor, near the window. Connally "immediately thought it was an assassination attempt."

Zapruder continued filming, although at times one can sense that his hands were unsteady. Between frames 220 and 230, both Kennedy and Connally have been hit. At about frame 230, we can clearly see evidence that the President has been wounded. He grabs his throat and slumps left, toward his wife. By Frame 235, Connally’s body reacts to his collapsed lung.

Seconds later the fatal shot struck the right side of the President’s head. The Zapruder film, shockingly explicit, recorded the horror. One cannot imagine what Jackie Kennedy was thinking at the moment she witnessed her husband’s death blow. We do know what she said. Governor Connally recalled her words:

Mercifully, portions of the President’s skull remained attached by skin, allowing those sections to fall back into place after the energy of the explosion had dissipated.

Mrs. Kennedy, likely in an effort to retrieve other portions of her husband’s brain, moved to the trunk of the limo. Clinton Hill, her Secret Service agent, pushed the First Lady back into the car and covered her and the President with his body. That heroic act came too late for the 35th President of the United States. He was dying as his limo sped to Parkland Hospital. Shocked media personnel announced the unthinkable to the American people.

Ninety seconds after the shooting, police stormed the Book Depository building. An officer, hearing shots from that direction, had seen a flock of pigeons fly away from the roof of a building. He was "pretty sure" it was on the "northwest corner" of the street or, in other words, the Book Depository.

Oswald was in the second-floor lunch room when Officer Baker arrived. He was completely composed and not out-of-breath. Serious students of the assassination have often been bothered by that fact because it raises a difficult question. How could Oswald (within the span of ninety seconds) have fired the last shot, hidden his rifle opposite the open sixth-floor window, raced down four flights of stairs to the lunch room, and be calmly in that room when the first officer arrived on the scene? No police officer detained Oswald at the depository.

When the investigators reached the sixth floor, however, they found evidence of a sniper’s perch.