Further, a microscopic examination of the tissues surrounding the back wound (as noted in the supplementary autopsy report) found “coagulation necrosis of the tissue at the wound margins,”103 conclusively establishing, as with the wound to the back of the president’s head, that the wound was an entrance wound. It should be noted that no beveling or cratering was found on the inner surface of the back wound, since this is a phenomenon that only exists in gunshot wounds to the skull. “In all my years,” Dr. Cyril Wecht says, “I’ve never seen a beveling effect on soft-tissue gunshot wounds.”104
Finally, an FBI examination of the president’s clothing at its laboratory in Washington, D.C., also confirmed that the bullet wound in the back was an entrance wound. Robert Frazier, the FBI agent who conducted the examination, told the Warren Commission that it revealed a small hole in the back of the president’s suit coat approximately 53/8 inches below the top of the collar and 1¾ inches to the right of the middle seam.105 The hole was circular in shape and “the cloth fibers around the margins of the hole were pushed inward.”106 A spectrographic examination of the fabric surrounding the hole in the back of the coat revealed minute traces of copper107 consistent with the copper-clad ammunition fired from Oswald’s rifle.
Frazier testified that his examination of the back of the president’s shirt revealed a hole with similar characteristics located 5¾ inches below the top of the shirt collar and 11/8 inches to the right of the midline of the shirt. In other words, the hole in the shirt matches up fairly well with the hole in the president’s suit coat, and both the Warren Commission and HSCA so found. The torn threads surrounding this hole in the shirt, which was slightly oval in shape (½ inch vertical by 1/3 inch horizontal), also, he said, “had been pressed inward.” Both holes were considered typical of bullet entrance holes.108
In addition to the Warren Commission and the HSCA, the four-member Clark Panel likewise concluded that the wound to the backside of the president was an entrance wound.109
So we see that there is unanimity of opinion as to the back wound (as we saw earlier with the head wound) being an entrance wound. This unanimity extends to Dr. Cyril Wecht, “the darling of the conspiracy buffs,” as I referred to him at the London trial over Gerry Spence’s objection. I asked Wecht at the trial, “Doctor, even though from a professional perspective you don’t think too much of the autopsy surgeons’ report, you do agree 100 percent with their findings; to wit, that the bullet wound to the president’s upper back and the bullet wound to the back of the president’s head were both entry wounds and not exit wounds, and hence, the bullets were fired from the president’s rear. Is that correct?”
Wecht: “Yes.”110
After taking photographs of the wound to the president’s back, Drs. Humes and Finck made attempts to probe the wound and determine its track through the body. Humes, using his little finger, was only able to penetrate the wound a short distance (less than an inch),111 whereas Finck, using a flexible metal probe, was able to penetrate a distance described by observers as 2 to 4 inches.112 In both cases, observers testified that the probing conducted by Drs. Humes and Finck indicated a downward trajectory. Humes testified that “attempts to probe in the vicinity of this wound were unsuccessful without fear of making a false passage…We were unable…to take probes and have them satisfactorily fall through any definite path.”113 Dr. Boswell told investigators in 1996, “We probed this hole which was in his neck with all sorts of probes and everything, and it was such a small hole, basically, and the muscles were so big and strong [they] had closed the hole and you couldn’t get a finger or a probe through it.”114
Next, Dr. Finck took a look at the tracheotomy incision performed by Dallas physician Malcolm Perry in the front of the throat, and examined the trachea in an attempt to locate an exit for the back entrance wound, but could not find “any evidence of a bullet wound.”115 (Of course, we know that the tracheotomy incision had almost completely obscured the exit wound in the throat.) In an effort to resolve where the bullet went, Dr. Finck asked to examine the president’s clothing to correlate it with the wounds and found it “most unfortunate” that the clothing was not available.116 It had been taken into custody at Parkland Hospital by the Secret Service.117 Asked in 1996 if it would be standard practice to have the clothing available for inspection, Dr. Boswell stated, “Well, under normal circumstances, but these were not normal circumstances.”118
Not seen by the three pathologists until they testified to the Warren Commission in 1964, the president’s clothing* would have confirmed that the bullet had exited at the throat. In a 1965 memorandum describing his examination of the clothing, Finck wrote that “immediately below the upper button of the front [of the president’s shirt] is a bullet hole perforating both flaps of the shirt, right and left. There is dry blood on the margins of both holes. The innermost hole reveals fibers directed outward, which indicates an exit perforation. The outermost hole also shows this outward orientation of the bloody shirt fibers, but to a lesser extent.”119 In the FBI’s laboratory examination of the hole in the shirt shortly after the assassination, investigators too found that the “fibers of the cloth” were “protruding outward,” characteristic of an exit hole for a projectile, but did not find any bullet metal in the fabric surrounding the hole.120*
Unfortunately, the autopsy pathologists wouldn’t learn of all the facts about the clothing until after the autopsy had been completed. For the time being, they were perplexed. What happened to the bullet that entered the president’s upper right back? Knowing that bullets can unexplainably end up in strange places, and thus far only X-ray films of the head having been taken, Dr. Finck requested a radiographic survey (X-rays) of the entire body before going further with the autopsy. After they waited more than an hour for the results, they proved to be negative.121 There was no bullet in the president’s body except for the metallic fragments seen earlier in the skull X-rays.122
The autopsy pathologists then subsequently learned that a bullet had been recovered from a stretcher at Parkland Hospital,123 which caused Dr. Humes to theorize that the bullet that struck the president in the back, “in some rather inexplicable fashion, had been stopped in its path” and had fallen back out of his body onto the stretcher, perhaps during cardiac massage at Parkland Hospital.124 FBI agent Francis O’Neill reported that Dr. Humes appeared “greatly relieved” and grew more and more confident that this is what happened. By the end of the autopsy, O’Neill reported, the three pathologists were convinced that the bullet that entered the president’s back had worked its way out through the back wound and dropped on the Dallas stretcher.125
As previously indicated, the following morning Dr. Humes placed a telephone call to Parkland Hospital surgeon Malcolm O. Perry in which he expressed his inability to determine what happened to the bullet that caused the back wound. He and his fellow autopsy surgeons couldn’t figure out where it went, Humes told Perry, surmising that perhaps it had fallen out during cardiac massage. “It seemed like a very unlikely event to me, to say the least,” Perry recalled in 1978. “But at any rate, when I told him that there was a wound in the anterior [front] neck, lower third, he [Humes] said, ‘That explains it.’”126† With the knowledge that the tracheotomy had obscured the bullet wound in the throat, Dr. Humes realized that the bullet had entered the back, slipped between the muscles of the upper back and neck (without striking any major blood vessels), continued over the top of the right lung, and exited at the throat just below the Adam’s apple.127
After talking to Dr. Perry, something else that Humes had observed the night of the autopsy suddenly made sense too. Late in the autopsy, Humes had made a standard Y incision in the chest and pulled back the skin and tissues in order to examine the interior of the chest and neck. Humes recalled that while examining the area of the tracheotomy incision, he noted that there was “some bruising of the muscles of the neck in the depths of this wound as well as [a] laceration or defect in the trachea,” perhaps caused, he thoug
ht at the time of the autopsy, by Dr. Perry’s knife.128 (He had also found bruising on the apex [top] of the right pleural cavity containing the right lung.) Yet, the incisions in the president’s chest, left arm, and ankle at Parkland (for the purpose of administering bodily fluids) showed “no evidence of bruising or contusion,” leading the autopsy doctors to conclude that these incisions were made during the death throes of the late president, when blood circulation had virtually ceased.129 Thirty minutes after his first conversation, Humes telephoned Dr. Perry again and asked him about the chest tube incisions.130 Perry doesn’t recall the conversation but he would have informed Humes that the tracheotomy and chest incisions were performed at about the same time.131
The bruises in the neck region, then, couldn’t have been caused by the tracheotomy because the circulation of blood in the body was nearly nonexistent at that point. Without blood, there could be no bruise—that is, there could only be damage to tissue, not discoloration of the tissue. The bruising of the neck muscles and right lung had to have been caused while the president’s heart and lungs were still operating sufficiently to permit a bruise to occur.132 In short, these bruises, which lay along a path between the president’s back and his throat wound, could only have occurred prior to the incisions that were made at Parkland Hospital (i.e., they had to have been made at the time of the shooting), and hence, the damage found there had to have been the result of a bullet entering the president’s back and exiting the throat.
Based on the testimony of Dr. Humes, which was agreed upon by fellow pathologists Boswell and Finck in the autopsy report, the Warren Commission concluded that the bullet that entered the president’s back “proceeded in a straight line” on a “downward angle” through the “soft tissue of the neck,” moving in a “slight right to left lateral direction,” hitting “no bony structure” before emerging in the front area of the president’s neck “that had been cut away by the tracheotomy.”133 This conclusion of the Warren Commission on the track of the bullet was “unanimously” confirmed by all nine of the HSCA’s panel of forensic pathologists, who noted that the straight path of the bullet was “adjacent to the spine,” though not touching it.134 Although the Warren Commission merely said the bullet passed on a “downward angle” through the president’s body, the HSCA’s sketch of the angle of decline shows 23 degrees from the horizontal.135
The 1968 Clark Panel also agreed with the autopsy surgeons on the path of the bullet, adding that “the possibility that this bullet might have followed a pathway other than one passing through the site of the tracheotomy wound was considered. No evidence for this was found. In addition, any path other than one between the two cutaneous [skin] wounds [upper back wound and wound in front of throat] would almost surely have been intercepted by bone, and the X-ray films show no bony damage in the thorax or neck.”136
At the London trial, before getting into the details supporting the conclusion, I asked Dr. Charles S. Petty, a member of the nine-man forensic pathology panel of the HSCA, what conclusion his panel had come to with respect to the number of bullets that struck the president, and their points of entrance and exit on his body.
Petty: “The conclusion of the panel was that the president was struck by two bullets, one entering the right upper back and exiting in the front of the neck, the other entering the right back of his head and exiting in what we call the right frontal area, that is, the front and side of the head.”
Question: “You found no evidence of any other entrance or exit wounds anywhere else on President Kennedy’s body?”
Petty: “That is absolutely correct.”137
Thomas Noguchi, the famed Los Angeles “Coroner to the Stars” (including Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Janis Joplin, Natalie Wood, Sharon Tate, and John Belushi), is fond of saying that an autopsy is a homicide victim’s opportunity to testify. “The victim is talking to you,” he says. President Kennedy’s autopsy, whose findings were confirmed by the HSCA, leaves no doubt that two bullets struck the president from the rear, one exiting the front of his body, the other the right front.
How do conspiracy theorists challenge this incontrovertible evidence? By trotting out the observations of the Parkland Hospital doctors, a group of mostly young interns and residents who were not pathologists and who had only twenty-two frenzied minutes in Kennedy’s presence, and then only to try to resuscitate him. Their observations, as unfocused and unconcentrated as they must have been regarding anything not directly related to saving the president’s life, supersede, in the conspiracy theorists’ minds, autopsy photographs and X-rays, and the positive conclusions of seventeen forensic pathologists, along with other experts (radiologists and anthropologists), who, with almost unlimited time, could coolly and dispassionately evaluate all the medical and scientific evidence. Don’t misunderstand me, here. I’m not saying that we should disregard out of hand everything that was not the primary focus of these physicians who were trying to save the president’s life, particularly in the absence of an explanation for their supposedly erroneous observations. This brings us to the central question in this matter. Starting with the head wound, what did the Parkland doctors “see”?
Most saw the large defect as being not to the right front but the right rear of the president’s head, lending support to the conspiracy theorists’ position that the fatal shot to the head was fired from the front.* For instance, Dr. Malcolm Perry, along with Dr. Charles Carrico, one of the two primary doctors administering emergency care to the president, said the large defect was to “the right posterior parietal area.”138 Dr. Carrico thought it to be in the “right occipital parietal area.”139 Dr. William Kemp Clark and Gene Akin also said the large wound was in the “right occipital parietal region.”140 Dr. William Zedelitz, a second-year general-surgery resident at Parkland whose presence in the president’s recovery room was mentioned in the Warren Commission volumes,141 but who never testified before the Commission, was tracked down by assassination researcher Vincent Palamara, and in a November 4, 1998, letter to Palamara also said that the president “had a massive head injury to the right occipital parietal area of the cranium.” Dr. Ronald C. Jones testified he saw a “large defect in the back side of the head.”142 But Mark Redhead, the London Weekend Television producer of the 1988 Oswald docu-trial, wrote that in a June 13, 1986, telephone conversation with Jones, “He cooled off a little on his testimony about the head wound. He said that, though his initial impression was that the bullet had hit JFK in the throat and exited from the back of the head, he had not gone around to the head and examined the wound.”143
Dr. Robert McClelland, who would later become the main Parkland doctor the conspiracy theorists would cite for the proposition that the large exit wound was not just to the occipital parietal area but completely to the rear of the president’s head, originally told the Warren Commission that the “right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted…The parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its right posterior half,” with “some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half.”144 Two months before McClelland’s Warren Commission testimony on March 21, 1964, the Texas State Journal of Medicine contacted the Parkland doctors who had actually treated the president (which the journal concluded numbered only seven) and asked them to record their separate impressions for the journal’s readers. McClelland wrote that “the cause of death was the massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the right side of the head.”145 McClelland’s view would soon change radically.
McClelland eventually drew a sketch for conspiracy theorists, which appears in their books,146 showing the massive gaping wound to the president as being solely in the occipital (rear bone) area of the president’s head. To fortify his position about seeing a large hole in back of Kennedy’s head, he has also said he saw a piece of cerebellum (a portion of the brain located to the rear of the cerebrum, the front part of the brain) fall out of the back of the president’s hea
d onto his stretcher.147 But although the autopsy report notes that “the major portion” of the right cerebrum was “exuding” from the large defect on the right side of the president’s head, there isn’t one word in the report indicating that any part of the cerebellum was missing or even lacerated.148 And Dr. Michael Baden of the HSCA told me that “X-rays and autopsy photos show that although there was damage to the cerebrum, the cerebellum was intact. Any doctors at Parkland, none of whom were pathologists, who said they saw damage to the cerebellum were wrong. They saw some brain tissue on Kennedy’s hair and they incorrectly assumed it was cerebellum tissue.”149 Indeed, with the entry wound to the president’s head being as high up as it was, it would have been virtually impossible for the cerebellum, in the lower part of the brain, to have been damaged, at least by the bullet.150
The relevance of this issue, of course, is that since the cerebellum is located near the back of the head, finding pieces of cerebellum on the stretcher would be consistent with there being a large exit wound to the rear or right rear of the president’s head, where conspiracy theorists claim the head exit wound was. Cerebellum certainly wouldn’t likely have been expelled from any defect in the right front of the president’s head, where the Warren Commission and the autopsy surgeons concluded the exit wound was. Yet several Parkland doctors claim they saw damaged and exposed cerebellum tissue (e.g., Dr. Charles Carrico,151 Dr. William Kemp Clark,152 Dr. Charles Baxter,153 Dr. Malcolm Perry,154 and Dr. Marion Jenkins).155 In his hospital report dated November 22, 1963, Dr. Jenkins wrote that “the cerebellum had protruded from the [head] wound,”156 and later testified to the Warren Commission in 1964 that the “cerebellum…was herniated from the wound.”157 However, Jenkins changed his mind after seeing autopsy photographs in 1988, telling author Gerald Posner that “the photos showed the President’s brain was crenelated from the trauma, and it resembled cerebellum, but it was not cerebellar tissue. I think it has thrown off a lot of people that saw it.”158 And after interviewing Jenkins in 1992, Dennis Breo reported in JAMA that when Jenkins wrote in his 1963 report that the “cerebellum had been blown out, he meant cerebrum.”159
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