I
DALLAS
The Open-and-Shut Case
Chapter 2
The Evidence Before You
“Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.”
—Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of the Four
In any fatal shooting inquiry, the primary factors are ballistics and wounds. Human testimony, though often crucial, must be weighed against the picture presented by hard evidence. In the Kennedy assassination, they are the raw material for the answers to key questions. How many gunmen fired how many bullets, and from what position? If gunfire came from more than one vantage point, there obviously must have been more than one assassin. Similarly, if more shots came from one position than could be fired by one gunman in the available time, it follows that accomplices were at work.
Evidence there was in profusion, and much of it was poorly handled in the first investigation. This is what we are left with—leaving aside for the moment the question of assigning guilt for the shooting.
Dealey Plaza provided a field day for the ballistics experts. Soon after the assassination, a policeman found three spent cartridge cases lying near an open window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, the large warehouse to the right rear of President Kennedy’s car at the time of the attack. Within an hour, another policeman spotted a bolt-action rifle,1 the now infamous 6.5-mm Mannlicher-Carcano, stashed behind a pile of boxes and also on the sixth floor.
A number of bullet fragments were recovered—from the wounds suffered by the President and Governor Connally, and in the presidential limousine. One bullet,2 which looked almost undamaged to the inexpert eye, turned up on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, where the victims had been treated. Suffice it to say, at this point, that firearms experts have firmly linked the cartridge cases to the rifle; they are sure the whole bullet and the bullet fragments came from the same gun.
Bullet damage was also noticed on the inside of the windshield of the presidential car and on a section of the curb in Dealey Plaza. No other gun or missiles were recovered immediately after the assassination.3 The catalog of ballistics evidence is at least clear-cut, but the accounting of the wounds is a different matter.
The autopsy on President Kennedy, one of the most important autopsies in twentieth-century history, was seriously flawed. Had it not been, much wearisome doubt could have been avoided.
An hour and a half after the shooting of the President, there was a struggle over his corpse. At the hospital, as the Secret Service team prepared to take the body to Washington, DC, Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, backed by a Justice of the Peace, barred their way. The doctor said that, under Texas law, the body of a murder victim may not be removed until an autopsy has been performed. Justice of the Peace Theran Ward, declared the President’s death, “just another homicide as far as I’m concerned.”
Kenneth O’Donnell, special assistant to the dead President, replied, “Go screw yourself.” The Secret Service agents put the doctor and the judge up against the wall at gunpoint and swept out of the hospital with the President’s body. They were wrong in law, and with hindsight denied their President an efficient autopsy. That evening, at eight o’clock, three doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital began the examination to determine precisely how the President had died.
Incredibly, according to the expert study commissioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s, the doctors “had insufficient training and experience to evaluate a death from gunshot wounds.” Not one of them was a full-time forensic pathologist, an expert in determining the cause of death in criminal cases.
The late Medical Examiner for New York City, Dr. Milton Helpern, said of the President’s autopsy, “It’s like sending a seven-year-old boy who has taken three lessons on the violin over to the New York Philharmonic and expecting him to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony. He knows how to hold the violin and bow, but he has a long way to go before he can make music.”
Cruel words, yet some of the autopsy’s shortcomings are glaring even to the layman. Although the President’s fatal injuries were to his head, and although the location of such wounds is crucial information, routine procedures were not followed. The doctors failed to shave Kennedy’s head to lay bare the skull damage, apparently because the Kennedy family wanted him to look good should the casket be left open. And, although the damaged brain was removed and fixed in formaldehyde, the doctors omitted to section it to track the path of the bullet or bullets. As discussed later, the brain itself later disappeared.
The chairman of the medical panel for the House Assassinations Committee, Dr. Michael Baden, was to declare in 1978 that the autopsy had been deficient in “the qualification of the pathologists … the failure to inspect the clothing … the inadequate documentation of injuries, lack of proper preservation of evidence, and incompleteness of the autopsy.”
The autopsy doctors had been handicapped by instructions relayed by phone from the President’s brother Robert, huddled with the widow in a VIP suite upstairs. A 1992 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed that the family, concerned in particular that the world would learn that Kennedy suffered from a progressive disease of the adrenal glands, wanted to prevent several routine procedures. The organs of the neck were not examined.
To this day, the precise nature of the President’s injuries remains unclear. The autopsy doctors described four wounds: a small wound at the back of the skull; a massive defect in the right side of the skull; a small hole near the base of the neck, slightly to the right of the spine; and a hole in the throat.
The throat wound had been obscured by the Dallas doctors when they performed a tracheotomy to insert an airway, during the hopeless bid to save the President’s life. Unnecessary confusion reigns over the injury supposedly located near the back of the neck. The Autopsy Descriptive Sheet placed it five and a half inches below the tip of the right mastoid process, a bump at the base of the skull. The autopsists’ working sketch, the death certificate, a report by FBI agents present at the autopsy, the statements of several Secret Service agents, and the holes in Kennedy’s jacket and shirt are consistent with a wound some six inches lower than reported.
The doctors failed to dissect this wound, an elementary procedure that might have established the path of the bullet. The hole was merely probed, not opened up and tracked to its destination. Documents suggest that photographs and X-rays were taken during the probing attempt. If so, however, the current location of those images remains unknown.
There is also confusion about the fatal injuries to Kennedy’s head. With the body long buried, forensic scientists in later years have had to base their findings on the extensive surviving X-rays and photographs—access to them is restricted to experts and doctors approved by the Kennedy family. They were examined in 1966 by the original autopsy doctors—astonishingly for the first time. They had never until then seen the pictures of the postmortem they had themselves supervised. The same material, and the President’s clothing, has since been much scrutinized—by an Attorney General’s medical panel in 1968, the Rockefeller Commission panel, pathologists for the Assassinations Committee in the 1970s, and by some of the Dallas doctors and other interested physicians.
The autopsy doctors located the small wound at the back of the skull as being two and a half centimeters to the right and slightly above the protuberance at the back of the skull. Other medical panels, working with the X-rays and photographs, decided that this had been a serious mistake, that the small wound was in fact four inches higher than described. Dr. Michael Baden, head of the Assassinations Committee panel, said that it could be seen in the photographs, above the hairline. It is unclear how such a conflict arose, unless—perhaps—from misinterpretation of the photographs (see Photo 7).
There has been lasting disagreement as to the true location of even
the fatal wound, the massive defect described by the autopsy doctors as a hole thirteen centimeters wide, extending both forward and back, on the right side of the head. Some of the autopsy photographs became available to the public in spite of the restrictions,4 and one of them (see Photo 8) shows a large flap of scalp and bone laid open, like a hatch cover, beside a terrible hole directly above the dead man’s right ear. This conflicts with the majority of the human testimony on the location of the wound.
Seventeen of the medical staff who observed the President in Dallas were to describe the massive defect as having been more at the back of the head than at the side. A large bone fragment, found in Dealey Plaza after the assassination, was identified at the time as belonging to the back of the skull.
The Secret Service agent who climbed into the President’s limousine as the shooting ended, Clint Hill, said, “I noticed a portion of the President’s head on the right rear side was missing… . Part of his brain was gone. I saw a part of his skull with hair on it lying in the seat… . The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car.” Two other Secret Service agents gave similar descriptions.
Jacqueline Kennedy came to one of the doctors in the emergency room, her hands cupped one over the other. She was holding her husband’s brain matter in her hands. “From the front, there was nothing,” she later said of the wounds. “But from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair and his skull on.”
Dr. Robert McClelland, a general surgeon on the team that attended the dying President, was one of those best qualified to describe the head wound from memory. “I took the position at the head of the table,” McClelland told the Warren Commission, “I was in such a position that I could closely examine the head wound, and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been blasted. It had been shattered, apparently, by the force of the shot so that the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seen to be fractured almost along its posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half, and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned, in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.” The wound McClelland described would look like the drawing below, a drawing that he approved for publication during the 1960s.
The only neurosurgeon present at the President’s deathbed, Dr. Kemp Clark, described the wound as a “large, gaping loss of tissue” located at the “back of the head … toward the right side.” No less than eleven other Parkland doctors, and four nurses—including the supervising nurse—have described this gaping wound at the back of the head. The same interpretation has been put on the description of the wound by twenty people who saw it at Bethesda Hospital in Washington, DC. Two of the technicians who X-rayed the President’s body during the autopsy recalled a posterior wound. One of them, Jerrol Custer, said it was enormous. “I could put both my hands in the wound.” The head of the Secret Service team, Roy Kellerman, who was assigned to the President that day and who attended the autopsy; two FBI agents assigned to the autopsy; and a mortician who prepared the body for burial, also recalled a wound at the back of the head.
Drawings of the large head wound were made from memory for the Assassinations Committee by the FBI’s observers, James Sibert and Francis O’Neill, and by the mortician, Thomas Robinson. While they vary in locating the height of the wound, they place it at the rear or right rear of the head, not at the side.
Wound position according to FBI Agent James Sibert
Wound position according to FBI Agent Francis O’Neill
Wound position according to mortician Thomas Robinson
Not one of the Parkland or Bethesda witnesses have described a wound like the one in the autopsy picture, which shows a great hole above the right ear, and the rear of the head virtually unmarked (see Photo 8).
What, then, to make of that photograph? After studying it, several of the Dallas medical staff expressed consternation. One, Dr. Fouad Bashour, insisted the photograph was wrong. “Why do they cover it up?” he said. “This is not the way it was!”
In an interview with the author, the Dallas surgeon Robert McClelland offered an explanation. When he saw the President in the emergency room, he said, a great flap of scalp and hair had been “split and thrown backwards, so we had looked down into the hole.” In Photo 8, however, McClelland believes the scalp is being pulled forward, back to its normal position, to show what looks like a small entrance wound near the top of the skull. This is not visible in Photo 8. “I don’t think they were trying to cover up the fact that there was a large hole,” said McClelland, “but that’s what they were doing… . They were covering up that great defect in the back and lateral part of the head by pulling that loose scalp flap up. You can see the hand pulling the scalp forward.”5
Dr. McClelland said the “great defect in the back” is visible on some photographs among the set of some fifty pictures he saw at the National Archives—pictures in which the torn scalp has been allowed to fall back on the President’s neck, pictures the public has never seen. His explanation may go a long way to resolve the apparent discrepancy. It certainly demonstrates that no outside researcher should form judgments on the basis of a set of photographs that may or may not be complete.
According to the pathologist who directed the autopsy, Dr. Humes, his colleague Dr. Pierre Finck, and the former director of photography at the Naval Medical School, who was the principal cameraman at the autopsy, not even the “official” set of autopsy photographs at the National Archives is complete. Pictures they remembered being taken, or thought should have been taken, are not in the collection. Photographs of the interior chest are not there. Nor, according to Dr. Finck, are certain photographs of the skull injuries.
With some pictures missing or possibly missing, and some showing injuries as witnesses do not recall having seen them, some have suspected forgery—notwithstanding a finding by a majority of the Assassinations Committee photographic panel that the pictures are authentic.6
Such doubts were encouraged by the comments of Floyd Reibe, a former Bethesda technician who himself took some of the autopsy photographs. He claimed that some of the photographs in the National Archives are “phony and not the photographs we took.”
In 1994, the Assassination Records Review Board stated that a second set of autopsy photographs may have survived, photographs apparently made from the original negatives and thus presumably authentic. If so, they would be key evidence, but the matter was left unresolved.
There are other problems with the autopsy record, not least the bizarre fact that the President’s brain is missing. Sometime after the assassination, it was sent to President Kennedy’s former secretary, along with the photographs and X-rays, for safekeeping. Safe it was not—at least not from the point of view of future investigators. In 1966, after the materials passed into the care of the National Archives, it was discovered that the brain was no longer with the photographs and X-rays. Also absent were tissue sections, blood smears, and a number of slides.
The Assassinations Committee, which could find no trace of the missing material, favored the theory that Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother, disposed of it to avoid tasteless display in the future. A vial containing a part of the brain was destroyed by the Secret Service some six years after the assassination. Whatever the full facts, the result was to hamper the work of later forensic pathologists.
The autopsy X-rays also feature in the catalog of mismanagement. Dr. McClelland, the surgeon who worked on the dying President in Dallas, reviewed the set of X-rays at the National Archives in 1989. He was quoted afterward as saying that they showed head injuries different from those he saw in the emergency room in 1963. Jerrol Custer, a former Bethesda technician who made some of the autopsy X-rays in
1963, claimed—as did his colleague of the autopsy photos—that some of the X-rays were “fake.”
A physicist and radiation therapist at the Eisenhower Medical Center, Dr. David Mantik, submitted the X-rays to a technique called optical densitometry. “This data,” he told the author, “provides powerful and quantitative evidence of alteration to some of the skull X-rays. They appear to me to be composites.”
It is not for this author to judge whether such suspicions are justified. What is clear, however, is that the best evidence, the President’s wounded body, was squandered. The deficiencies of the autopsy, and the mismanagement of the record, added fuel to the lasting controversy.7
Aside from the evidence of body and bullets, there is one further invaluable aid to any analysis of the assassination. This is the short but infinitely shocking film made by an amateur cameraman in the crowd, Abraham Zapruder. Having initially left his camera at home, Zapruder had hurried home to fetch it at the last moment. So it was that he came to make the eighteen seconds of truly apocalyptic film that has remained the subject of diverse interpretation. The most famous amateur movie in the world was shot from a vantage point on a low concrete wall to the right front of the approaching President. For all its fame, and although no description can replace actual viewing of the Zapruder film, its contents must be summarized here.
As the motorcade turns to come straight toward his lens, Zapruder catches the last uneventful seconds, with the President and his wife smiling and waving in the sun. Then the limousine vanishes for a moment behind a street sign. When it emerges, the President is clearly reacting to a shot—his hands clenched and coming up to his throat. Governor Connally turns around to his right, peering into the backseat. He begins to turn back, goes rigid, and shows signs that he, too, has been hit. Jacqueline Kennedy looks toward her husband, who is leaning forward and to his left. There is an almost imperceptible forward movement of the President’s head, and then, abruptly, his skull visibly explodes in a spray of blood and brain matter. He is propelled violently back into the rear seat of the car, then bounces forward and slides to the left into Mrs. Kennedy’s arms. The savage backward lurch by the President occurs, to the eye, at the instant of the fatal wound to the head. Then, as Mrs. Kennedy apparently reaches for a fragment of her husband’s skull on the back of the car, a Secret Service agent jumps aboard from behind, and the limousine finally accelerates away.