Abraham Zapruder did not act alone in filming the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. There was a second cameraman.

Across the street from where Zapruder recorded his now-famous footage of Kennedy being fatally shot, Orville Nix also was filming that day. The Nix footage, captured from the corner of Main and Houston streets, is a mirror image of the Zapruder film from the other side of Dealey Plaza.

Nix, a federal employee, gave a copy of his film to the FBI, but sold the original to then-wire service UPI for $5,000. UPI promised to keep it for 25 years. Nix died in 1972. When Nix’s granddaughter, Gayle Nix Jackson, tried to recover the film from UPI, the wire service said it no longer had it.

Jackson has been trying for years to get the government to return the film to her family and has now filed a lawsuit seeking its return. She says the federal government has had the film since 1978, when the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations obtained it, before supposedly transferring it to the National Archives, according to Courthouse News Service.

“According to the Warren Commission, the Nix film is nearly as important as the Zapruder film, yet the public is mainly unaware of its significance,” Jackson’s lawsuit reads. “Despite its significance and duty by the Government and its agencies who last possessed it to preserve the original Nix film and to turn it over the Plaintiff, it remains missing, stolen or destroyed.”

Jackson said her grandfather said he believed alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. “He told us there was another gunman over there [on the grassy knoll],” Jackson said in 1991. “He said, ‘I was right there. I know it.’ Everybody around him is divebombing into the ground, and he just kept [the camera] running.”

Jackson is seeking $10 million from the government for the film, basing her demand on what the Zapruder heirs got for theirs: $16 million.

-Noel Brinkerhoff, Steve Straehley

To Learn More:

Lawsuit Seeks Return of Missing JFK Assassination Footage (by Justin Wm. Moyer, Washington Post)

Feds Sued for Lost JFK Assassination Film (by Zack Huffman, Courthouse News Service)

Why is Obama Administration Still Hiding Secret Service Documents about Assassination of President Kennedy? (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)