Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  In a 1965 memorandum to Brigadier General J. M. Blumberg, Dr. Finck wrote that Kennedy “suffered from adrenal insufficiency,” though this apparent confirmation was not a public record.34 In August 1992, JAMA confirmed with hospital officials that Dr. Nichols’s earlier deduction was correct, the patient was Kennedy.35 But at the time of the assassination, these facts were not known to the public.

  It seems clear that the Kennedy family didn’t want the president’s adrenal condition publicly known. Dr. Boswell told the HSCA in 1977 that Dr. Burkley told Dr. Humes that he didn’t want a report on the adrenal glands, preferring instead for the information to be reported to him informally (i.e., orally).36 Dr. Robert F. Karnei Jr., a twenty-nine-year-old, second-year resident who was “on duty” on the evening of the assassination, which meant that any autopsy that had to conducted after hours would normally have been his to perform, was merely assigned to “miscellaneous duties,” such as obtaining food for the military security guards and FBI and Secret Service agents and, most importantly, trying to control who was and who was not admitted into the morgue during the autopsy. Although Karnei even left the morgue occasionally to perform other duties, he nonetheless did observe, firsthand, several aspects of the autopsy. He told JAMA in 1992 that “no adrenal tissue could be found grossly on routine dissection,” a fact confirmed by Dr. Boswell, who said that “serial sections of the perirenal fat pads demonstrated no gross evidence of adrenal cortex or medulla.” Dr. Boswell’s findings are confirmation that the president did, indeed, suffer from severe Addison’s disease.37

  As indicated, according to the HSCA forensic panel, the Kennedy autopsy pathologists failed miserably.38 However, despite these deficiencies, and the claims by conspiracy theorists that the autopsy pathologists were in essence amateurs, the HSCA forensic panel proceeded on the very next page to contradict itself to the extent of saying that the autopsy report did contain “sufficient documentation” for the panel to arrive at “correct and valid conclusions” regarding the precise nature of the wounds that caused the president’s death.39

  Much more importantly, the HSCA’s forensic pathology panel came to the same, identical conclusion that the autopsy surgeons came to: that “President Kennedy was struck by two, and only two, bullets, each of which entered from the rear.”40

  One important footnote, I believe, to the above discussion: If one were to set forth the top-five allegations of the Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists in the Kennedy assassination, one of the five would most likely be that Kennedy’s body was unlawfully spirited away from the Dallas authorities at Parkland Hospital (mainly, from Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas medical examiner who physically resisted the appropriation of Kennedy’s body by the Secret Service) to be taken to Bethesda for the autopsy. And if the autopsy had been conducted in Dallas, no cover-up would have taken place by the incompetent and/or complicit (in the conspiracy to cover up) autopsy surgeons, and therefore the autopsy findings would have been different.

  The only serious problem with this is that ironically, and very unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, they don’t even have support for their argument from the very person whom they wanted to conduct the autopsy—Dr. Earl Rose. In 1968, Rose left his job as Dallas medical examiner to become a professor of pathology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. And in 1978, he was appointed by the HSCA to be one of the nine forensic pathologists to review the autopsy findings. Now retired in Iowa City, Dr. Rose told me no one ever calls him regarding his one year on the HSCA forensic panel and he was “enjoying” his “anonymity.” My key question to Dr. Rose was this: “Were you satisfied from your review of the autopsy photos and X-rays that the autopsy surgeons reached the same conclusion you would have reached if you had conducted the autopsy back in 1963 in Dallas?”

  Rose immediately and unequivocally answered, “Yes, there’s no question their conclusions were correct. Two shots entered the president from behind, the entrance wound to the back exiting in the throat at the site of the tracheotomy and the entrance wound to the back of the head exiting in the right frontal temporal area.” The only place he said he disagreed with the autopsy surgeons is that they reported the entrance wound to the back of the head “too low. It was in the cowlick area.”

  Rose said that although “more experienced” forensic pathologists should have been chosen to conduct the autopsy, the three autopsy surgeons were not, as so often said, inept and did a “competent job considering they were operating under the most trying, tremendously difficult circumstances,” with the Kennedy family “limiting” the extent of the autopsy. He said, “You can’t blame the autopsy surgeons for the fact that the autopsy should have been more complete.”41 And Rose is not the only member of the HSCA’s forensic pathology panel who feels this way. Dr. Charles Petty, the chief medical examiner for Dallas County, and my medical expert at the London trial, told me in preparation for the trial that he felt the autopsy surgeons had done “an adequate job.” In 2003, he said the autopsy, overall and considering all the circumstances, was “well done and well reported.”42

  With respect to the autopsy surgeons’ lack of experience (with the exception of Finck) in conducting gunshot wound autopsies, Rose said that “Humes was an extremely competent pathologist. Here’s someone who became president of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists.”* With respect to the issue of whether the autopsy surgeons took enough time to conduct the autopsy, when I asked Dr. Rose how long a typical autopsy would take, where, like the president, there were two bullet wounds and the decedent’s clothing was not examined, Rose, who at the time of his service on the HSCA panel had conducted around four thousand autopsies, said, “Oh, I think you should be able to do a very competent autopsy in around two hours,” which by all accounts is less time than the autopsy surgeons in the Kennedy case took.

  Concerning his confrontation with the Secret Service at Parkland, although he said he was in the right, “I think they were doing what they thought was right under the circumstances and I believe that their motivations were completely aboveboard.”43

  For over forty years, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the autopsy findings offer clear evidence of a conspiracy. But where? In the following pages we’ll take a detailed look at the facts and allegations surrounding the bullet wounds of both President Kennedy and Governor Connally and reveal how conspiracy theorists have bamboozled the general public into believing that even if a shot or two was fired from the sniper’s nest to the president’s right rear, where Oswald was believed to be, the fatal bullet to the president’s head was fired from the grassy knoll to the president’s right front. Also, the wound to the front of the president’s throat was an entrance, not an exit wound, and it too was fired from the grassy knoll to the president’s front.

  Early in its investigation, the HSCA realized the importance of establishing the authenticity of the autopsy photographs and X-rays housed at the National Archives—that is, to determine whether they were taken of President Kennedy at the time of his autopsy and whether anyone had altered them, both of which questions have been raised by the conspiracy community. (The 1964 Warren Commission never had to deal with this issue because the autopsy photographs and X-rays were never part of its published record.) This important step of the committee’s investigation was essential since the conclusions of its forensic medical panel of experts would rely chiefly on this photographic and radiological (X-ray) record.44

  To facilitate the scientific analysis of the photographs and X-rays, the HSCA brought in experts in anthropology, forensic dentistry, photographic interpretation, forensic pathology, and radiology. Anthropologists studied the autopsy photographs to verify that they all depicted one individual, John F. Kennedy, and in particular that the photographs of the rear of the head were consistent with other views in which President Kennedy’s facial features are recognizable. They also did a comparison study of the autopsy X-rays and premortem (i.e., prior to death) X-rays known to have been taken of Preside
nt Kennedy over several years. The anthropologists focused on a number of anatomic characteristics (including cranial sutures, vascular grooves, and air cells of the mastoid bone) that would enable them to tell if the premortem and autopsy X-rays depicted one or two separate individuals. They concluded that there could be no reasonable doubt that the person depicted in both the autopsy photographs and X-rays was in fact John F. Kennedy and no other person.45 In addition, the committee’s forensic odontologist, Dr. Lowell J. Levine, who was experienced in identifying the victims of unnatural death through dental records, examined premortem X-rays of President Kennedy’s teeth and compared them with those visible in the autopsy X-rays. Dr. Levine concluded, based on the unique positions of the teeth (relative to each other), the shapes and sizes of fillings of the teeth, and a myriad of other anatomic characteristics, that the three autopsy skull X-rays were “unquestionably of the skull of President John F. Kennedy.”46 Dr. Levine’s final report also concluded that the “unique and individual dental and hard tissue characteristics which may be interpreted from [the skull X-rays] could not be simulated [i.e., faked].”47

  In addition to the above-mentioned experts, the HSCA turned to members of its own photographic panel to determine if any of the photographs or X-rays had been altered, and concluded there was no evidence of tampering.48

  One comment before we continue our examination. As with the HSCA, the actual photographs of the president’s wounds are not being published as a part of this book, not just because their release was never authorized (only bootlegged copies have since become available and have appeared in various publications), but also because the exit wound to the president’s head is almost indescribably gruesome. I am, however, including a number of sketches produced for the HSCA by Ida Dox, a professional medical illustrator who was recommended to the HSCA by the Georgetown University School of Medicine. It was her task to illustrate the dimensions and location of the two entrance and two exit wounds in the president. She testified that she went to the National Archives and selected original autopsy photographs “that best showed the injuries.” Four photographs were used, per Dox. One, she said, showed “the back of the [president’s] head, another one…the upper back, then the side of the head and the front of the neck.” She said the subject photographs were copied by her “by placing a piece of tracing paper directly on the photograph, then all the details were carefully traced. Later on, while working on the final drawing, I had to have a photograph in front of me at all times. In this way I could be constantly comparing and looking back and forth at the drawing and the photograph so that no detail could be overlooked or omitted or altered in any way.” She said she had access to the original autopsy photographs “a great number of times” and also reviewed the autopsy X-rays.49

  President Kennedy’s Wounds

  Early in the autopsy, the three pathologists—Humes, Boswell, and Finck—turned their attention to the most obvious cause of death, the hole in the upper right back of the president’s head (which exited, they found, in the right frontal portion of his skull [see later discussion]). It was located, they wrote in their autopsy report, “approximately 2.5 cm. [approximately 1 inch] laterally to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance,” and the bullet causing the hole was fired, they concluded, “from a point behind and somewhat above the level of the [president].”50 This is entirely consistent, of course, with the known location of Oswald on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, to the president’s right rear.

  The wound to the head bore all the characteristics of an entrance wound. For one, it was small, being 6 × 15 millimeters (approximately ¼ × 3/5 inch), slightly less, on the smaller dimension, than the diameter of the bullet, which was 6.5 millimeters. This is so, Humes testified before the Warren Commission, because of the “elastic recoil of the tissues of the skin. It is not infrequent…that the measured wound is slightly smaller than the caliber of the bullet that traversed it.”51 The HSCA estimated that the bullet was descending “at an angle of 16 degrees below horizontal as it approached” the president and “from a point 29 degrees to the right of true north from the president,” which, of course, would be consistent with its having been fired from the vicinity of the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor of the Depository Building where Oswald was.52

  As to the long length of the wound, the bullet “struck at a tangent or an angle causing a fifteen-millimeter cut. The cut reflected a larger dimension of entry than the bullet’s diameter of 6.5 millimeters (about a quarter of an inch), since the missile, in effect, sliced along the skull for a fractional distance until it entered.”53 This is also consistent with the location of Oswald not being directly behind the president, but to his right rear. Humes testified that when he “reflected the scalp [i.e., peeled the scalp skin away to see the skull bone beneath], there was a through and through defect [in the skull] corresponding with the wound in the scalp.”54

  Additional evidence that it was an entrance wound was the “beveling of the margins of the bone when viewed from the inner aspect of the skull.”55 This is the “inward beveling” that one always finds in an entrance wound. When a bullet passes through a skull bone, it creates a beveling (or, as it is sometimes called, a coning or cratering) on the side of the skull opposite the side which was struck first by the bullet—in the same way a BB shot creates a crater on the opposite side when striking a plate of glass. In other words, in an entrance wound, the diameter of the wound is larger on the inside of the skull than on the outside where the bullet first hits. This physical reality has been known for centuries and has been the main basis for determining whether a wound is an entrance or exit wound. For instance, Assistant U.S. Surgeon General Dr. J. J. Woodward, who conducted the autopsy on President Lincoln on April 15, 1865, wrote in his autopsy report that “the ball [bullet] entered through the occipital bone about one inch to the left of the median line and just above the left lateral sinus…The wound in the occipital bone was…circular in shape, with beveled edges, the opening through the internal table being larger than that through the external table.”56 A bevel, then, on the inner surface of the skull is characteristic of an entrance wound, while a bevel on the outer surface of the skull indicates an exit wound. Dr. Finck, one of the autopsy surgeons, told the HSCA that “the hole in the skull in the back of the head showed no crater when examined from the outside of the skull, but when I examined the inside of the skull at the level of that hole in the bone I saw a crater, and to me that was a positive, unquestionable finding identifying a wound of entry in the back of the head.”57 Nine years earlier, Finck told a New Orleans jury in the Clay Shaw trial the same thing, adding, “The bullet definitely struck in the back of the [president’s] head…The wound was definitely inflicted by a shot from the rear.”58

  In a 1967 CBS interview, Dan Rather asked Dr. Humes, “Can you be absolutely certain that the wound you described as the entry wound was, in fact, that?”

  Humes: “Yes, indeed, we can, very precisely and incontrovertibly.” Humes said that as the bullet “passed through the skull, it produced a characteristic coning, or beveling effect on the inner aspect of the skull, which is scientific evidence that the wound was made from behind and passed forward through the president’s skull.”

  Rather: “Is [this] conclusive, scientific evidence?”

  Humes: “Yes, sir, it is.”

  Rather: “Is there any doubt that the wound at the back of the president’s head was the entry wound?”

  Humes: “There is absolutely no doubt, sir.”59

  And there was yet another strong indication that the wound to the back of the president’s head was an entrance wound. The HSCA said that the “margin of this wound [to the president’s head], from 3 to 10 o’clock, is surrounded by a crescent-shaped reddish-black area of denudation…presenting the appearance of an abrasion collar resulting from the rubbing of the skin by the bullet at the time of penetration.”60 Dr. Baden testified that “an abrasion collar is characteri
stic of an entrance wound.”61 Entrance wounds usually have abrasion collars or rings only because the bullet usually enters the skin at least at some angle, resulting, as Dr. Charles Petty, my pathologist at the London trial testified, in “little tiny tears” of skin62—thus, the word abrasion for abraded skin. Per Dr. Cyril Wecht, a member of the HSCA medical panel who is a conspiracy theorist, the reason why the term abrasion collar or ring is so popular in law enforcement circles is because “it can be seen by the naked eye.” But he added that “if a bullet enters a body straight on without any angularity at all, there might not be an abrasion collar. In the Kennedy head wound there was a collar because the bullet came in at an angle.”63

  Obviously, no other scientific or medical evidence is necessary to convince any rational person that the wound to the back of the president’s head was an entrance wound and the bullet that caused the wound was fired from the president’s rear.