Newly emerged video of JFK's assassination shows a motorcade taking the president to the hospital after the shooting

Recently surfaced footage of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing down a Dallas highway toward a hospital after he was fatally wounded will be auctioned later this month.

According to experts, the discovery is not necessarily surprising, even more than 60 years after the assassination.

“These images, these films and photos are often still out there. They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages,” said Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination.

RR Auction will auction the 8mm home movie in Boston on September 28. It begins with Dale Carpenter Sr. narrowly missing the President and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's limousine, but picking up other vehicles in the motorcade as it heads down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown. The film then picks up after Kennedy is shot, with Carpenter rolling as the motorcade speeds down Interstate 35.

“It's remarkable, in color, and you can feel the 80 miles per hour,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of the auction house.

The approximately 10-second footage from I-35 shows Secret Agent Clint Hillwho famously jumped into the back seat of the limousine when the shots were fired and hovered in a standing position over the President and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit can be seen.

“I didn't know there wouldn't be more shots,” Hill said. “I had a vision that there would probably be more shots when I got up there.”

The shots were fired as the motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where it later emerged that the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself from a sniper post on the sixth floor. The assassination itself was captured on film by Abraham Zapruder.

After the shots were fired, the motorcade turned onto I-35 and sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospitalwhere Kennedy would be declared dead. 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 that while it was known in his family that his grandfather owned film from that day, it wasn't often discussed. Gates said when he finally passed the film, which was stored in a milk crate with other family films, to him, he wasn't sure what exactly his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had recorded.

When he projected the video onto his bedroom wall around 2010, he was initially not impressed by the footage from Lemmon Avenue. But then the footage from I-35 played before his eyes. “It was shocking,” he said.

What was particularly striking to him was Hill’s precarious position in the back seat of the limousine.

Soon after his arrival at the hospital, Hill spoke on the phone with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, CBS Bay Area reported.

“He said, 'Well, how bad is it?' and I didn't want to tell him his brother was dead,” Hill told the station. “So I said, 'It can't get any worse,' and he just hung up.”

Around the time Hill's book, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, was published in 2012, Gates contacted Hill and his co-author Lisa McCubbin, who became Lisa McCubbin Hill after she married Hill in 2021.

McCubbin Hill said it was admirable that Gates had the sensitivity to let Hill see the footage before doing anything else with it. She said while she knew Hill's description of sitting on top of the limousine as it sped down the highway, “to see the footage of it actually happening … just makes your heart stop.”

The auction house has released stills from the footage, but the portion showing the motorcade on the highway will not be made public.

Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentary filmmaker and former FBI analyst who has seen the film, said it shows the Parkland rush more comprehensively than other, more fragmentary footage he has seen. He said the footage provides “a fresh look at the race for Parkland” and he hopes it ends up somewhere after the auction where filmmakers can use it.

Fagin said the assassination was such a shocking event that people instinctively preserved material about it, so there was always the possibility that new material would emerge.

He said historians have puzzled for years about a man who was seen taking pictures in one of the photos from that day.

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

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

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

In December 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration released a trove of 13,173 documents related to JFK's assassination, shortly after President Biden issued an executive order authorizing their disclosure while thousands of other sensitive records remained classified.

At this time Archive said Ninety-seven percent of the collection's roughly 5 million pages relating to the assassination have been released to the public, but some experts said the government continues to redact or withhold key information that could cast the CIA or other agencies in a bad light.