Never-before-seen footage of motorcade taking JFK to hospital after assassination goes up for auction

Never-before-seen footage of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade rushing to the hospital after he was fatally shot in Dallas is going up for auction later this month.

Homemade 8mm footage shot by Dale Carpenter Sr. shows the most complete view of the chaotic moments immediately after Kennedy was assassinated as he sat next to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, according to a former FBI analyst.

The online auction for the film has already opened. On Wednesday evening, the highest bid was $12,100.

“This is extraordinary, in color, and you can feel the 80 mph,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction in Boston, where the film will go up for sale during a live auction on Sept. 28.

Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentary filmmaker and former FBI analyst who reviewed the film, said it shows the rush to Parkland Hospital more fully than other, more fragmented film footage he has seen.

The video, he said, gives “a fresh look” at the moments immediately after the president’s assassination and he hopes that after the auction, it will end up somewhere where it can be used by filmmakers.

Carpenter’s footage from I-35, which lasts only about 10 seconds, begins with video of support vehicles in the president’s motorcade traveling down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown Dallas.

It then picks up the story moments after Kennedy is fatally shot, with Carpenter filming as the motorcade speeds down Interstate 35.

The clip also shows Secret Service agent Clint Hill standing next to Jackie Kennedy in his iconic pink suit.

Hill jumped into the back of the Kennedys’ limousine when gunfire erupted as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, as captured in Abraham Zapruder’s famous film of the shooting.

“I didn’t know they weren’t going to shoot anymore,” said Hill, 92. “When I got there, as I did, I had a vision that, yes, there would probably be more shooting.”

Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had climbed to the sixth floor of the Depot with a sniper rifle and fired a single fatal shot at the president.

After Kennedy was hit in the head, the motorcade turned onto I-35 and sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he would be pronounced dead about a half hour later.

It was the same route the motorcade would have taken to take Kennedy to his next stop, a speech at the Trade Mart.

Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said the family had known for years that his grandfather, who died in 1991, had footage of the JFK assassination, but it was not often discussed.

Gates found the video stored alongside family movies in a milk carton and projected it on his bedroom wall for the first time in 2010.

At first, he was not overly impressed by the images from Lemmon Avenue, but found the images from 1-35 “shocking,” particularly Hill’s precarious position in the back of the limo.

Before making the images public, Gates contacted Hill around the same time her book, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” was published in 2012.

Hill’s co-author and later wife, Lisa McCubbin Hill, said that while she was familiar with Hill’s description of sitting in the limo as it sped down the interstate, “seeing the footage of how it actually happened … just makes your heart stop.”

The auction house has only released a few photos from the film’s footage and has not released any images showing the caravan moving along the highway.

Although Kennedy was assassinated more than 60 years ago, experts say the emergence of new images is not particularly surprising.

“These images, these films and photographs, are often still there,” said Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the JFK assassination.

“They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages.”

He said people recognised the murder as a historical event, leading many to preserve material relating to it, meaning new artefacts are always emerging.

Fagin said historians had wondered for years about a man who can be seen taking pictures in one of the photographs from that day.

“For years we had no idea who this photographer was, where his camera was, where those images were,” Fagin said.

With post wires