Footage of JFK’s motorcycle motorcade ride to hospital after being shot to go up for auction

Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said that while it was known in his family that his grandfather had film from that day, it wasn’t talked about much. So Gates said that when the film, stored with other family films in a milk crate, was finally passed down to him, he wasn’t sure exactly what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had captured.

Projecting it onto his bedroom wall around 2010, he was initially disappointed by the Lemmon Avenue footage. But then the I-35 footage played before his eyes. “It was shocking,” he said.

He was particularly struck by Hill’s precarious position in the backseat of the limo, so around the time Hill’s 2012 book “Mrs. Kennedy and Me” was released, Gates reached out to Hill and his co-author, Lisa McCubbin, who became Lisa McCubbin Hill when she married Hill in 2021.

McCubbin Hill said she admires that Gates was sensitive enough to want Hill to see the footage before he did anything else with it. She said that although she was familiar with Hill’s description of him sitting on top of the limo as it sped down the interstate, “seeing the footage of that happening just makes your heart skip a beat.”

The auction house released photos from a portion of the video showing the race on I-35, but has not released the footage of the portion.

Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentarian and former FBI analyst who has seen the film, said it shows the rush to Parkland in a more complete way than other, more fragmented footage he’s seen. He said the footage provides “a fresh perspective on the rush to Parkland” and hopes that after the auction it will go somewhere where filmmakers can use it.

Fagin said the attack was such a shocking event that people instinctively tried to gather material about it, so there was always the possibility that new material would emerge.

He added that historians have wondered for years about the fate of the man seen taking pictures in one of the photos taken that day.

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

Then, in 2002, Jay Skaggs walked into the museum with a shoebox under his arm. He was the photographer in the photo, and in that shoebox were 20 photos of Dealey Plaza before and after the attack, including the only known color photos of a rifle being carried out of the Texas School Book Depository building, Fagin said.

“He just handed us the box,” Fagin said.