Dec. 6, 1963 - A rifle shot that narrowly missed former Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, an angry critic of President Kennedy, in his Dallas home last April 10 was fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, Dallas police sources say. Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy, told at least one person that he fired the shot at Mr. Walker (pictured the morning after the incident). That person was believed to have been Oswald’s Russian-born wife, Marina. An unconfirmed report said the name of Mr. Walker, who is identified with right-wing causes, had been found in a notebook in Oswald’s room. The bullet fired at Mr. Walker was so fragmented as to make conclusive identification impossible. Evidence that Oswald wanted to kill both Mr. Walker and President Kennedy, whose political philosophies were poles apart, is regarded as supporting the theory that Oswald was a paranoid personality, not the agent of some revolutionary group. The shooting at the Walker home occurred four days after Oswald lost his job in a downtown photocopying plant. An Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, a 1938 model of 6.5-mm. caliber, was received by Oswald at his Dallas post office box on March 20. It had been ordered from the Chicago mail-order house of Klein’s Sporting Goods in the name of “A. Hidell.” On April 10, Mr. Walker was working on his income tax return about 9 p.m. at his home at 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard. A bullet crashed through a casement window, past his head, and burrowed through a wall. Mr. Walker was not struck, but slivers of glass and metal showered his right forearm. Mr. Walker went to the second floor of his home, got a pistol, searched for the sniper, and then telephoned the police. The Dallas Times Herald quoted a detective, D.E. McElroy, as saying, “Whoever shot at the general was playing for keeps. The sniper wasn’t trying to scare him. He was shooting to kill.” The detective said the sniper had apparently stood in an alley behind the Walker house and had leaned on a fence to steady his aim.
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