The “mystery of the bullets” is the focus of William H. Hanson's 1969 book on the Kennedy assassination. 

The approaching 50th anniversary of the assassination inspired Hanson's family to revisit the book and reconsider how passionate the retired U.S. Air Force colonel was in establishing his own investigation into what many consider the crime of the century. 

In a closing section called “The Solution,” Hanson wrote that “using sound investigative procedures and rigid control of material evidence and testimony, we have determined, beyond any question of a doubt,” that there was “one assassin, three shots, three hits, no misses.” 

It's at odds with the official version of events established by the Warren Commision, which states Kennedy was struck by two bullets.  But it's the major theme of “The Shooting of John F. Kennedy,” a long-out-of-print book issued by the Naylor Co., a San Antonio-based regional publishing house. 

They've also retained a June 5, 1969, review of the book from the Fort Worth Star Telegram, which opined that while questions will always whirl around the assassination, “a retired Air Force colonel in San Antonio has developed a theory that goes a long way to resolving many of the most-debated points.” 

Hanson's 95-year-old widow, Phoebe, has the last box of the books under a bed in her suburban San Antonio home. 

“We feel my husband did get the correct solution to the mystery of the three bullets,” she said during a recent interview in her living room over a glass of iced tea, surrounded by two of her four children: Susan Lynch, 73, a retired nurse, and Brian Hanson, 71, a retired chemical engineer. 

As close family members will, they tended to both step on and finish each other's sentences:

Brian: “Dad was an old military commander.  Very methodical.” 

Susan: “He didn't become a general because he was too independent.  Daddy said exactly what he thought.” 

Phoebe: “And that wasn't always the smart thing to do.  He was very definitely a man who always thought he was right.” 

What emerged from his family was a portrait of an officer to whom duty, honor and discipline meant everything. 

Born in Hawaii in 1912, the son of a West Point cavalry officer went on to command a bomber wing in the Korean War and train pilots at Kelly and Randolph AFBs.  Along the way, he became a ballistics expert with extensive experience in military investigations of airplane accidents and incidents with firearms. 

After reading the Warren Commission's report, according to family members, Hanson was determined to set the record straight and began working on his book. 

While Hanson agreed with major foundations of the Warren Commisssion's report — a lone gunman firing three shots — he fervently believed the commission's approach was flawed. 

“It was plain enough to see that the Commission, as directed, had evaluated, rather than investigated, the circumstances surrounding the assassination of the President,” he wrote. 

Commission investigators' “serious error,” Hansen wrote, “was their failure to solve the mystery of the bullets.” 

The 889-page commission report, presented to President Lyndon Johnson in September 1964, merely “recorded a narrative of what might have happened (Hanson's italics) during the shooting episode of the assassination.” 

Hanson, according to his family, not only combed through the testimony, finding discrepancies and missed opportunities by Warren investigators, but also “did a lot of shooting with a rifle,” Brian said, to prove that a marksman could get off as many shots as Oswald did in just seconds.  He also visited the sixth floor of the School Book Depository in Dallas to get the assassin's perspective. 

“Have you ever heard, with the myriad of books on the assassination, that the first bullet hit the president and ricocheted?”  Lynch asked. “ It's amazing to me that the Warren Commission disregarded the Connallys' and Jackie's testimony.” 

And that's the heart of the matter, according to Col.  Hanson, who died in 2003.  He believed the people in the car with the president, through their testimony, proved that the first shot grazed Kennedy's head.  And, he argued, visual evidence such as the Zapruder film backed him up. 

“The impact of this glancing bullet knocked the President forward and slightly to the left and generated a visible lace wound of his scalp on the line of its glancing impact,” Hanson wrote. 

Then came the neck shot that went on to seriously injure Gov. Connally. 

A fraction more than four seconds later, the fatal shot was fired. 

“This third bullet struck the President in the back of his head and, in combination with the wounding effect of the first bullet, generated a 'blowout' type exit wound of massive proportions at the site of the first wound, which obliterated all evidence of the first wound.” 

“It's such a simple solution,” said Lynch. 

“But conspiracies are so much more fun,” Phoebe added. 

Did all three of Oswald's bullets hit Kennedy? 

Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter who has spent the last five years researching and writing the just-published “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination,” is skeptical. 

“What I know is that the nation's best pathologists who have looked at the case over the past 50 years are pretty convinced that only two shots hit Kennedy,” he said by phone. “ But after you spend enough time with this stuff you think almost anything is possible.”