Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (13 page)

Mr. Liebeler
: You didn’t see any other policemen around in the area?

Mr. Tague
: Not for 4 or 5 minutes. If Oswald was in that building [the Texas School Book Depository], he had all the time in the world to calmly walk out of there.
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As soon as the motorcade cleared Elm Street, passing under the triple underpass, Dallas police opened Dealey Plaza to normal traffic. Studying the various videos of the assassination aftermath in Dealey Plaza, it is unclear if the grassy knoll or the parking lot and railroad yard beyond were ever secured as a crime scene. The Texas School Book Depository remained unsealed for a minimum of fifteen minutes and possibly as long as twenty-five minutes or a half hour before Dallas police sealed the building. With the instant flood of onlookers into the kill zone, the value of Dealey Plaza as a crime scene was irreparably lost. Any evidence of the assassination that might have been found and properly identified for use in subsequent criminal proceedings was squandered, as bystanders and police picked up pieces of evidence—even fragments of JFK’s skull—from the pavement and handed them over to people they perceived as authorities, or possibly even to pocket as souvenirs. The swarm of people, still in the grip of shock and disbelief, that descended on Dealey Plaza in the aftermath of the shooting is a case study only in how rapidly police can and do lose control of a crime scene in a downtown outdoor venue open to the public.

Josiah Thompson conducted an analysis of the Zapruder and the Nix films of the assassination for his 1967 book,
Six Seconds in Dallas
. He concluded the headshot that killed JFK was a double shot, with one bullet hitting him in the back of the head, followed a fraction of a second later by a shot from the front. Viewing the Zapruder film frame by frame to measure the distance between the back of JFK’s head and the top of the back seat, Thompson documented JFK’s head moved forward violently, beginning in frames 311–312, only to be driven violently back and to the left, beginning in frames 313–314.

These findings suggested crossfire on Elm Street, as the car approached the triple underpass. More than one shooter, by definition, means JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy. Moreover, the trajectory of the shot to the back of the head appears level, as if the shot came from one of the lower floors in the buildings along Houston Street—the Dal-Tex building north of Elm and across the street from the Texas School Book Depository or one of either the County Records Building or the Criminal Courts Building on Houston St. south of Elm. In the sequence starting at frame 313 the Zapruder film shows JFK’s head being blasted apart with brain matter jetting out in a cloud through what appears to be an exit wound in the forehead. The Zapruder film then shows JFK’s head being thrown violently back and to the left, a motion that suggests a shot came from the front and left side of the limo to the front. The right part of his forehead flaps open and a massive section of JFK’s skull in the back is blown out. Bone fragments and brain matter from JFK’s skull and brain spew out onto the trunk of the limousine, spraying the Dallas Police Department motorcycle officers riding to the rear left of the limo and Secret Service Agent Clint Hill as he rushes forward to get his foot on the left running board at the back of the limo and grab the left handrail on the limo’s trunk.

Thompson argued his findings of a double headshot almost simultaneously hitting JFK from the front and rear explain the contradictory medical testimony from Parkland Hospital that identified JFK’s head wounds as entry wounds and the medical testimony from Bethesda Naval Hospital where autopsy photographs show the back of JFK’s head appeared virtually intact, except for a small, round bullet hole that appeared to be an
entry wound. The puzzle remains that the Bethesda autopsy photos fail to show the large gaping exit wound in the right back of JFK’s head that the doctors at Parkland described. That there was a headshot from the front would also explain why Jackie Kennedy climbed out onto the back of the limousine, not to help Secret Service Special Agent Clint Hill to get into the moving vehicle, but to pick up a piece of her husband’s skull. And why the “Harper fragment” found in Dealey Plaza the day after the assassination—the largest fragment of JFK’s skull to have flown clear of JFK’s body in the explosion of his head resulting from the headshots—has been identified as occipital bone, from the back of JFK’s skull.

Thompson summarized his findings as follows:

The pattern that emerges from this study of medical evidence is a dual one. From the Parkland doctors we get the picture of a bullet that struck the right front of the President’s head on a tangent, ranged backward causing massive damage to the right brain hemisphere, sprung open the occipital and parietal bones, and exploded out over the rear of the limousine. From the Bethesda surgeons we get the picture of a bullet entering the rear of the President’s head and driving forward to the mid-temple region. Putting the two pictures together, we discern the outlines of the double impact. First, a bullet from behind exploding forward, and in that same split second another bullet driving into the exploding mass, forcing tissue and skull in the opposite direction. This is not a pretty picture, but it reconciles the evidence of the Zapruder film, eye- and ear-witness reports, and the curious double dispersion of impact debris. A coincidence certainly, but a coincidence whose reality is confirmed by the overwhelming weight of evidence.
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Thompson goes so far as to suggest the explosive impact of two bullets on JFK’s skull blew out all traces of the right front entry wound, or that no entry wound is found in the right front of JFK’s skull simply because the bullet from the shooter positioned on the grassy knoll entered JFK’s head at the point of the exit wound from the rear shot, an instant after the rear-shot exit wound exploded the top right of JFK’s head with a gruesome head flap that blew open over the right forehead. Much of the confusion interpreting the ballistics of JFK’s headshot involves attempting to explain all the conflicting damage observed by one bullet, either from the front or from the rear. But realizing multiple shooters could be positioned at various
places within Dealey Plaza to take advantage of both high and low trajectories as well as both rear and frontal shots, allows the medical and ballistic evidence to be sorted out with a completely different set of assumptions.
¹⁵⁸

David S. Lifton’s 1980 bestselling book,
Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
, attempted to explain the discrepancy between the Parkland Hospital’s report that the shots came from the front and Bethesda Hospital’s report that the shots came from the rear by suggesting JFK’s body had been stolen away after Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base the evening of November 22, 1963, in order to be surgically altered in a secret autopsy.
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The goal, Lifton argued, was to alter JFK’s body—the “best evidence” of the crime that had been committed—so the medical examiner would conclude all shots had been fired from the front, a requirement if a patsy like Lee Harvey Oswald was to take the fall as the lone shooter. “Altering the body provided a means of hiding basic facts about the shooting,” Lifton argued. “Surgery on the wounds changed the bullet trajectories and concealed the true location of the shooters. Bullet retrieval insured that bullets and bullet fragments from the weapons that actually murdered the President would never reach the FBI Laboratory.”
¹⁶⁰
The ability to conduct a secret autopsy was the crux of Lifton’s attempt to explain how the conspirators that killed JFK planned to get away with the crime: “Alteration of the body suppressed evidence of shots from the front. If the body were altered in accordance with the trajectory-reversal scheme, plotters must have put a rifle and a sniper’s nest behind and above the motorcade, but shot Kennedy from the front. Such falsification of the circumstances of death was integral to the crime.”
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Lifton’s point is that a conspiracy to assassinate JFK required a conspiracy to alter or eliminate any medical evidence that contradicted the one-shooter theory. In a sense, this is precisely what the Warren Commission did, even if Lifton’s postulated secret autopsy is dismissed as unlikely or impossible. Arlen Specter invented the single-bullet theory to force all the evidence into a conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone-nut gunman whose psychological problems led him to plan and commit the JFK assassination without accomplices. Once the ballistic
evidence frees us from this conclusion, for instance, simply by a realization that the throat wound was an entry wound or that JFK’s back wound was a superficial wound that did not penetrate the body, we are open to a whole new range of possible solutions. Josiah Thompson argues, for instance, that even if ballistic evidence shows bullet fragments found in the limousine after the shooting were fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano, that does not prove Lee Harvey Oswald fired the weapon. What becomes untenable as evidence accumulates, however, is the assumption the Mannlicher-Carcano, or any one particular weapon for that matter, was the only weapon fired. By freeing Oswald from having to be the lone shooter, we free Oswald from having to be a shooter at all—even if we subsequently find Oswald had deep ties to various conspirators who were involved in killing JFK.

One of the key witnesses in Lifton’s book was Paul O’Connor, a laboratory technician at Bethesda Naval Hospital who witnessed the autopsy. O’Connor told Lifton that JFK’s body arrived at Bethesda in a “simple shipping casket.” This shook Lifton, who recalled JFK’s body was taken from Parkland Hospital in Dallas in an elaborate casket provided by a private funeral home, “and for which the Government was billed almost $4,000.”
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Lifton pressed O’Connor, but he was adamant. “Well, I used to work in a funeral home as a kid,” O’Connor explained to Lifton, “and a shipping casket is nothing but a cheap casket. It was a kind of pinkish gray, and it’s used, for example, say a person dies in California and he wants to be buried in New York. They just bring him in a casket like this, and they ship him to New York, and they bury him. It’s nothing fancy. It’s just a tin box.”
¹⁶³
Even more startling, O’Connor told Lifton the body arrived in a body bag, which he described as “a heavy rubber bag with a zipper.” This too startled Lifton because he knew that a sheet of plastic had been used to line the Dallas casket before JFK’s body was placed into the casket.

O’Connor’s testimony supported Lifton’s hypothesis that JFK’s body had been taken from Andrews Air Force Base and was transported by helicopter to the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital, or one of the outlying hospitals the Army maintains as part of the Walter Reed system where a secret autopsy was performed to remove any bullet fragments or medical evidence that would prove JFK was shot from the front. Lifton believes JFK’s body was then delivered to Bethesda Naval Hospital for the official autopsy.

In the report of the autopsy, FBI agents O’Neill and Silbert comment that when JFK’s body was placed on the autopsy table, “it was apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed, as well as surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.”
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The word “surgery” jumped out at Lifton. There was no intermediate stop recorded on the official timetable where any “surgery” on JFK’s skull had been done. O’Connor had told Lifton that when JFK’s body arrived at Bethesda, he observed a “terrific wound” measuring eight inches by four inches in the occipital-parietal area of the skull that went “clear up around the frontal area of the brain.” Moreover, O’Connor said it looked as if the fatal head shot “blew out all of his brains – literally.” O’Connor said there were no brains in the skull to remove at the Bethesda autopsy because JFK’s cranium was “empty” when the body arrived at the naval hospital.
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Lipton’s suspicion was that in the time between the assassination at 12:30 a.m. CST in Dallas and the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital beginning at 8:00 p.m. EST in Washington the FBI and LBJ had assumed control over the criminal investigation and the “best evidence of the crime,” namely, JFK’s body. At approximately 11:45 p.m. on the night of the assassination, FBI agent Vince Drain took possession of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and the three empty shell casings found after the shooting on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He interrupted the work of Dallas Police crime scene specialist Lieutenant J. C. Day as he was attempting to lift a palm print off the rifle in order to fly both key pieces of evidence back to the FBI Laboratory in Washington that night.
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With the rifle in the FBI Laboratory in Washington before the Dallas Police Department had time to complete their investigation. There was no way to know how any fingerprint or palm print information gained from the rifle was not planted there. The FBI had taken over the investigation of the crime, despite lacking the legal justification to do so. With control of the case moving to Washington, altering of evidence to fit the official theory of the assassination was a possibility that could no longer be ruled out.

Dr. Earl Rose, a physician and lawyer who became county medical examiner six months before the assassination, stood in the doorway at Parkland Hospital while insisting JFK’s body remain in Dallas so he could conduct a proper autopsy, as was required by Texas law. Federal agents threatened Rose with automatic weapons to get him to stand out
of the way. “As Mrs. Kennedy emerged from the trauma room beside a gurney carrying the casket, tension mounted,” noted
The New York Times
obituary for Dr. Rose. “Roy Kellerman, head of the White House Secret Service detail, squared off against Dr. Rose. Obscenities were shouted. Unconfirmed accounts said Mr. Kellerman had pointed a gun at Dr. Rose. Years later, Dr. Rose said that might have happened but that he was not sure. ‘Finally, without saying any more, I simply stood aside,’ Dr. Rose said.”
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Until the day he died in Iowa in 2012, at the age of eighty-five, Rose was convinced that many of the controversies surrounding JFK’s assassination could have been avoided if he had been allowed to do a careful, thorough, and fully documented autopsy, instead of the hurried-up, sloppy, incomplete, and highly political autopsy conducted that night at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington. Medical technician Paul O’Connor agreed with Dr. Rose’s assessment of the Bethesda autopsy. Interviewed extensively on film for Nigel Turner’s multi-episode television documentary
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
, O’Connor described the autopsy room at Bethesda Naval Hospital as follows: