Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups
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•Dr. Paul Peters was a treating physician on the emergency medical team that treated President Kennedy in Dallas. He described a large exit wound at the right rear area of the President’s head. The circumstances were vividly memorable and the recollection is with certainty.198
•Dr. Kenneth E. Salyer was a treating physician on the emergency medical team that treated President Kennedy in Dallas. He described a large exit wound at the right rear area of the President’s head. The circumstances were vividly memorable and the recollection is with certainty.199
•ER Nurse Audrey Bell was a member of the emergency medical team that treated President Kennedy in Dallas. She described a large exit wound at the right rear area of the President’s head. The circumstances were vividly memorable and the recollection is with certainty.200
•FBI agent Frank O’Neal was present at Bethesda and observed the President’s body. He confirmed the existence of a massive wound at the right and rear of the President’s head.201
•Radiographer Jerrol Custer X-rayed the President’s body at Bethesda. With absolute certainty, he vividly recalls a gaping hole at the back and right portion of the President’s head: “It was gone.”202
•Floyd Riebe, an autopsy technician at Bethesda, stated in a filmed interview that he personally observed a huge exit wound at the right and rear of the President’s head.203
•Paul O’Connor, an autopsy technician at Bethesda, stated in a filmed interview that he personally observed a huge exit wound at the right and rear of the President’s head.204
Six of the Dallas physicians reported that they even observed a large portion of the cerebellum oozing out of the back of the President’s head and onto the ER table he was laying upon. When these physicians were asked if they remembered that with certainty, they basically responded that you quite simply just don’t forget a thing like that, especially when it’s the President of the United States.
Eighty percent of the eyewitnesses to the murder of President Kennedy reported that a shot came from the west (the site of the “official sniper’s nest” was east in the Texas School Book Depository building). The closest eyewitnesses reported that the upper knoll was the direction from which the fatal headshot occurred (west). Their reports were with certainty and were not instinctual—they heard the shot and it was different from the other shots. They reported statements such as the fact that the last shot was so close to them that it seemed as if it went right over their heads and they even dove to the ground seeking cover from the imminent danger registered in them by the last gunshot.205
SECRET SERVICE TESTIMONY:
Forrest Sorrels, SAIC (Special Agent in Charge), Dallas District, U.S. Secret Service (in Lead car; the car ahead of President Kennedy):
At the moment of the assassination, Special Agent Sorrels was a passenger in the lead car of the presidential motorcade. He was seated in the right rear of the lead car and was peering out the right rear window at the time of the shots. He testified that:
“I looked towards the top of the terrace to my right as the sound of the shots seemed to come from that direction.”206
Special Agent Paul E. Landis, White House Detail, U.S. Secret Service (in Follow-Up car, the car immediately behind President Kennedy):
“My reaction at this time was that the shot came from somewhere towards the front.”207
Thomas L. “Lem” Johns, Assistant to the Special Agent-in-Charge, Vice- Presidential Detail, U.S. Secret Service (riding with the Vice-President, two cars behind President Kennedy):
“The first two (shots) sounded like they were on the side of me towards the grassy knoll.”208
The collective testimony of U.S. Secret Service special agents has been well- documented in Vince Palamara’s book, Survivor’s Guilt. The immediate focus of many special agents was on the area that had been in front of the limousine because that was from where it had seemed that shots had been fired.209 It has been established that in the moments immediately following the gunshots, virtually all attention of law enforcement personnel was focused on the area that had been in front of the motorcade at the shooting (the overpass area, the railroad yard near it, and the grassy knoll area where scores of witnesses were rushing up the hill which they had determined as the location source of the gunfire).
Witness the very first police radio reports:
Jesse Curry, Chief of Police, Dallas, Texas (in Lead car; the car ahead of President Kennedy):
DALLAS POLICE RADIO TRANSMISSION: November 22, 1963, 12:30PM
Chief Curry: “Get a man on top of that Triple Underpass and see what happened up there.”210
Chief Curry later acknowledged that:
“We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody’s yet been able to put him in the building with a gun in his hand.”211
Bill Decker, Sheriff of Dallas County (in Lead car; the car ahead of President Kennedy):
DALLAS POLICE RADIO TRANSMISSION: November 22, 1963, 12:30PM
Sheriff Decker: “Have my office move all available men out of my office into the railroad yard to try to determine what happened in there and hold everything secure until Homicide and other investigators should get there.”212
Officer Clyde Haygood, Dallas Police motorcycle officer (riding flank right- side behind President Kennedy):
TESTIMONY OF OFFICER CLYDE A. HAYGOOD
QUESTION: “What did you do after you heard the sounds?”
OFFICER HAYGOOD: “I made the shift down to lower gear and went on to the scene of the shooting.”
QUESTION: “What do you mean by ‘the scene of the shooting?’”
OFFICER HAYGOOD: “... I could see all these people laying on the ground there on Elm. Some of them were pointing back up to the railroad yard, and a couple of people were headed back up that way, and I immediately tried to jump the north curb there in the 400 block, which was too high for me to get over.”
QUESTION: “You mean with your motorcycle?”
OFFICER HAYGOOD: “ ... And I left my motor on the street and ran to the railroad yard.”
QUESTION: “ ... Did you see any people running away from there?”
OFFICER HAYGOOD: “No. They was all going to it.”213
Officer Haygood, along with over one hundred other eyewitnesses and law enforcement officials, ran up the knoll embankment to the railroad yard in the minutes immediately following the shots.
JAMES TAGUE was an eyewitness in Dealey Plaza who noted for the historical record that the Texas School Book Depository was not at all the focus of early attention:
“If you go back to Dealey Plaza at 12:30 and get the photographs and police tapes, there was really no action taken on the School Book Depository for seven minutes. True, there were a couple of policemen who said they rushed in, which looks good on a sergeant’s report, but it didn’t happen that way. In those seven minutes, I think Oswald may have assisted in letting people into the building by saying they worked there or whatever. During that time, they could have moved an army in and out of the Texas School Book Depository.
In viewing the Zapruder film, there’s overwhelming evidence that there was a frontal shot. They keep saying that there was possibly a neurological reaction, but if you view the film in slow motion, the Groden enhancement, the power of that shot even throws the body backward. The car was barely moving, so it wasn’t from the acceleration, and I’ve never found anybody yet that has seen a kill of an animal where they fall toward the shot. As a result, there very definitely had to have been a shot from the grassy knoll.”214
Therefore, six primary evidence chains indicate a frontal shot:
1. The dramatic backward movement of head and body;
2. A large fragment of skull or brain material visibly driven backward at moment of impact;
3. Immediate blood and brain spatter on the windshields of the left- rear flanking motorcycles;
4. At least twenty-five credible eyewitness reports of smelling street- level gunpowder and/or
seeing gun smoke down at street level (Oswald was supposedly on 6th floor);215
5. Over 100 witnesses reported seeing and/or hearing at least one shot from the grassy area at street-level in front of the motorcade. That area is precisely where law enforcement personnel rushed in the moments after the assassination amid live on-scene reports of 216
6. The medical evidence, especially at Parkland Hospital where the President was taken immediately after the shooting, overwhelmingly indicates that at least two shots in the President’s body were frontal entry wounds: an entry wound in the front of the throat and another intact entry wound high in the right forehead at the hairline.217
OSWALD COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE ACCOMPLISHED THE SHOOTING THAT IS OFFICIALLY ATTRIBUTED TO HIM
“Now if I can’t do it, how in the world could a guy who was a non-qual on the rifle range and later only qualified ‘marksman’ do it?”218
—Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, Senior Instructor, Quan- tico, U.S. Marine Corps Sniper Instructor School
The most accomplished combat sniper in the entire history of the U.S. military is Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock. Hathcock’s skills are legendary; as a sniper, he was officially credited with ninety-three confirmed kills. He was also senior instructor for the U.S. Marine Corps Sniper Instructor School at its headquarters at Quantico, Virginia. Hathcock and his crew meticulously reconstructed the entire shooting scenario in the JFK assassination and concluded that the shooting was not possible from one gunman on the 6th floor of the building.
“‘Let me tell you what we did at Quantico,’ Hathcock recalls. ‘We reconstructed the whole thing: the angle, the range, the moving target, the time limit, the obstacles, everything. I don’t know how many times we tried it, but we couldn’t duplicate what the Warren Commission said Oswald did.’”219
SNIPER SNAPSHOT
of Dealey Plaza
LOGISTIC PROFESSIONAL ASSESSMENT DEGREE OF
DIFFICULTY:
Weapon: A C2766 bolt-action 6.5 mm Mann- licher-Carcano is an extremely unprofessional choice. After the first shot, potential for succeeding fire is severely limited. Implausible
Location: The 6th floor window of Book Deposit Building is a terrible choice for a professional shooter to set up. The angles are very poor. Sniper’s choice would be the Dal-Tex Building (which was also precisely the location of professional assassin Chuck Nicoletti, per testimony of Chicago Mafioso James Files). Highly Implausible
Angle of
Engagement: Kill zone is obscured by tree branches. Wall and vertical pipes prevent shooter from positioning properly for shot. Only a professional sniper could correctly gauge/scope the exact high-to-low angle formula necessary for a kill shot. Virtually Impossible
Shot Choice: Especially if 6.5 Carcano is weapon, shot choice is when target is approaching or beneath window, not when target has trailed off and moving away. Extremely Implausible
Sequence Of
Shots: In any realistic shooting scenario, the first shot is the most accurate. In the assassination, it was the least accurate, missing the entire limousine, as well as the target—leading to very logical speculation that first fire was actually a warning shot in an attempt to thwart the assassination. Extremely Implausible
Timing Of
Shots: “Re-enactment” could not duplicate shots/hits assigned to Oswald because it never happened that way in reality. If the best combat sniper in U.S history could not accomplish the shooting, it literally could not have been done by Oswald. Literally Impossible
Based primarily on the work of Lt. Colonel Craig Roberts and Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, both of whom were professional snipers.
Lt. Colonel Craig Roberts was a Marine sniper in Vietnam and a police sharpshooter with an urban SWAT team. Roberts examined the technical details of the shooting, and of Dealey Plaza itself, and wrote the book Kill Zone: A Sniper Looks at Dealey Plaza. Roberts puts it very simply:
“The reason I knew that Oswald could not have done it, was because I could not have done it.”220 (emphasis in original)
As a professional sniper, Lt. Colonel Roberts knew the moment that he looked at the target angles from the 6th floor window that the shooting wasn’t all done from there.
“I walked away from the window in disgust. I had seen all I needed to know that Oswald could not have been the lone shooter.”221
“Roberts places at least one shooter on the infamous grassy knoll overlooking Elm, ahead of Kennedy and to his right. He places another in the building across Houston Street from the Book Depository: the Dal-Tex Building, as it was in 1963.”222
Roberts has also studied the entrance/exit transit of the head shot and has concluded with absolute certainty that the final shot came from the front.
“Some of the supporters of the Warren Commission ... stated that the bullet came from the rear because the eruption of brain matter and blood came out of the front of the president’s skull. I saw something else. In a head shot, the exit wound, due to the buildup of hydrostatic pressure, explodes in a conical formation in the down-range direction of the bullet. Yet in the Zapruder film, I could plainly see that the eruption was not a conical shape to the front of the limo, but instead was an explosion that cast fragments both up and down in a vertical plane, and side to side in a horizontal plane. There was only one explanation for this: an exploding or ‘frangible’ bullet. Such a round explodes on impact—in exactly the manner depicted in the film.”223
“With his extensive combat experience, Roberts is scathing about the mysterious ‘jet force’ that supposedly blows Kennedy’s head backwards, towards Oswald, in the famous Zapruder home movie of the assassination. ‘In that film,’ says Roberts, ‘we see Kennedy take a shot from the front.’”224
The alleged rifle was such a piece of junk that it was also very difficult to fire succeeding shots. As former Governor Jesse Ventura, an Expert Marksman and Navy UDT (Underwater Demolition Teams, now known as Navy SEALs), established beyond doubt in a 2010 shooting re-enactment, it is impossible to get off three shots with that rifle in six seconds, as is officially alleged.225
An exhaustive scientific study that was recently published confirmed Ventura’s opinion; it concluded categorically that the rifle cannot be re-fired in 1.6 seconds, as the government officially claimed. The same study also confirmed that the head snap of the President was evidence of a frontal shot, with autopsy evidence of that as well. It also concluded that the government clearly acted in a pattern that established their need to arrive at a non-conspiracy conclusion, and that Oswald cannot be placed as one of the shooters.226
So, bear in mind, that’s if Oswald was even there—as the Chief of Police said:
“We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle and never have”227
—Jesse Curry, Dallas Chief of Police
The task of the shooting, therefore, for one lone shooter would have been impossible, even for an expert marksman. And Oswald was nothing close to an expert marksman. His fellow soldiers, in fact, recalled that he was “a relatively poor shot.”228
Furthermore, Oswald’s rifle wasn’t even sighted in (lined up correctly), which means that a person shooting it wouldn’t even hit what was lined up in the sight! As historian Walt Brown puts it:
“It would also have made a difference if the expert rifleman was using an expert rifleman’s weapon of choice, not a piece of war surplus Italian junk whose inadequacies were massively compounded by the conclusion that the weapon was assembled and fired without ever having been sighted in. Ask your friend, the hunter. He’ll tell you it can’t be done.”229
TOO MANY BULLETS NECESSITATE MULTIPLE SHOOTERS
“There had to be more than three shots, gentlemen.”230
—Official testimony of Roy Kellerman, U.S. Secret Service Special Agent-in-Charge White House Secret Service Detail, Dallas trip
TOO MANY BULLETS
(Official FBI & Warren Commission findings were three shots only)
&nbs
p; shot #1 The first rifle shot missed, hitting the street behind President Kennedy’s limousine and creating sparks. Even the Warren Commission categorizes this as a miss. It is an astonishing feat that the first shot misses and later shots hit the target. Any professional assassin would expect their first shot to be their best. This fact has caused rampant speculation that if Oswald actually fired at all, it was this, as a warning or diversionary shot, in an attempt to throw off the timing of the assassination plot he had penetrated and to save the life of President Kennedy, not take it.
shot #2 Hit President Kennedy in his throat from the front, just as the emergency room doctors in Dallas described it. The doctors observed the wound and described it as a “wound of entry” which they then utilized in order to make their tracheostomy incision.
shot #3 Hits at street level, then ricochets, wounding bystander James Tague in his cheek.
shot #4 Hits Governor Connally in the back, traveling through his chest, cracking a rib and exiting through his right nipple.
shot #5 Hits President Kennedy in his back, four inches below the nape of his neck and to the right of his spine (fired from the rear of the limousine).