Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (14 page)

“There were mysterious men in civilian clothes at the autopsy. They seemed to command a lot of respect and attention – sinister looking people. They would come up and look over my shoulder or over Dr. [J. Thornton] Boswell’s shoulder, then they’d go back and have a little conference in the corner. Then one of them would say, ‘Stop what you’re doing and go on to another procedure.’ We jumped back and forth, back and forth. There was no smooth flow of procedure at all.”
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In the same documentary two attending ER physicians clearly indicated that the head wound was fired from the front, blowing out the back of his head. Dr. Paul Peters used his right hand to indicate the back of his head behind his right ear to describe JFK’s head wound that he saw as having blown out the right occipital-parietal part of JFK’s brain and skull. Dr. Robert McClelland said on film that almost a fifth to a quarter to “the right back part of the head” had been blasted out, along with most of the brain tissue in that area while reaching behind his right ear to indicate the back right of JFK’s head was where he too saw the massive wound. The JFK autopsy photographs, however, show the back of JFK’s head intact, with his hair in place.

At the end of the Zapruder film, as the presidential limo is about to go under the triple overpass, a remarkable series of frames shows a frantic Jackie Kennedy in the back seat propping her husband up to a full sitting position, as if he were alive. The sequence of the Zapruder film, rarely watched or studied, begins around frame 454. In the instants after the fatal headshot, Jackie Kennedy reacted with the type of hysteria that some unfortunate victims experience who have lost an appendage or part of an appendage, such as a finger, a hand, or even an arm. Just as those victims will try to jam the severed appendage back in place, in the film Jackie scrambles onto the trunk of the limo trying to grab some part of JFK’s skull or brain matter. Once Jackie gets back in the seat, it appears she desperately tries to put Jack back together again to the point of moving the head flap back in place. By frame 464, JFK can be seen in an upright sitting position, looking reasonably well, even though he is completely brain dead from the massive headshot wounds.
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Jackie Kennedy was in shock. In her testimony to the Warren Commission, Jackie Kennedy was asked if she remembered Secret Service Agent Clint Hill who climbed on the back of the limo to help. “I don’t remember anything,” she answered honestly, adding a few questions later that she had no recollection whatsoever of climbing out on the back of the car after the shooting.
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Secret Service Agent Clint Hill wrote a book,
Mrs. Kennedy and Me
, in 2012 in which he describes his experience during the JFK assassination. “I heard the shot. The third shot,” he wrote. “The impact was like the sound of something hard hitting something hollow—like the sound of a melon shattering onto the cement. In the same instant, blood, brain matter, and bone fragments exploded from the back of the president’s head. The president’s blood, parts of his skull, bits of his brain were splattered all over me—on my face, my clothes, in my hair.” The various photographs of the JFK assassination make clear that Hill was running to get on the trunk. For Hill to have seen brain matter explode out of JFK’s head meant the wound at the back of JFK’s head had to have been an exit wound. “As I peered into the backseat of the car,” Hill recalled. “I saw the president’s head in [Jackie’s] lap. His eyes were fixed, and I could see inside the back of his head. I could see inside the back of the president’s head.”
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The importance of these few frames at the end of the Zapruder film is that we get a fleeting view at the back of JFK’s head. The hair around the back head wound is a richer brownish-red color, and the wound adjacent to the right ear is the size of a grapefruit. These are the first frames with a direct view of the back head wound. The exit wound at the back of JFK’s skull is confirmation of the near unanimous testimony of the Parkland Hospital medical team that the wound they observed in the occipital range of JFK’s head near the right ear, a wound most described as being the size of a grapefruit, was an exit wound and the shot that had killed JFK.

At the Parkland Hospital press conference held one hour and fifteen minutes after JFK had been pronounced dead, Dr. Malcolm Perry, one of the attending physicians in the emergency room, and Dr. Kemp Clark, a neurosurgeon who also attended to JFK in the emergency room, attributed the cause of death to a massive wound at the back of his head.
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These two physicians knew almost nothing about the facts of the assassination, and were cautious about making deductions from the medical evidence. Dr. Kemp Clark exhibited caution when he told a reporter that “the head wound could have been either the exit wound from the neck or it could have been a tangential wound, as it was simply a large, gaping loss of tissue.” Either way, it’s clear the two doctors considered the gaping hole at the back of JFK’s skull to have been an exit wound and the bullet hole observed in JFK’s neck to have been an entrance wound.

Dr. Charles Carrico, a surgeon doing his residency at Parkland Hospital at the time, was the first physician to treat JFK in the emergency room. In his testimony to the Warren Commission, Dr. Carrico described JFK’s head wound as follows:

Dr. Carrico
: This [JFK’s head wound] was a 5- by 51-cm defect in the posterior skull, the occipital region. There was an absence of the calvarium or skull in this area, with shredded tissue, brain tissue present and initially considerable slow oozing. Then after we established some circulation there was more profuse bleeding from the wound.

Mr. Specter
: Was any other wound observed on the head in addition to this large opening where the skull was absent?

Dr. Carrico
: No other wound on the head.
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Again, the head flap at JFK’s right forehead was not of immediate interest to the Parkland Hospital physicians in the emergency room, probably because the massive wound at the back of JFK’s head was enough to be fatal and saving JFK’s life, not performing an autopsy, was the sole focus of the emergency room doctors at Parkland. “All we had time to do was to determine what things were life-threatening right then and there and attempt to resuscitate him and after which a more complete examination would be carried out and we didn’t have time to examine for other wounds,” Carrico testified to the Warren Commission. “After the President was pronounced dead … his wife was there, he was the President, and we felt certainly that complete examination would be carried out and no one had the heart, I believe, to examine him then.”
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Dr. Robert McClelland, a surgeon on the staff of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, was giving a lecture at Parkland Hospital when JFK was brought into the emergency room. Summoned to the emergency room, McClelland arrived after the tracheotomy had been given. Putting on surgical gloves, McClelland also observed a massive wound to the back of JFK’s head. He testified to the Warren Commission that through that wound, “you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that possibly a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.”
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McClellan’s testimony shows that the emergency room doctors were more concerned with trying to save the president’s life than trying to figure out how he had been shot. “The initial impression that we had was that perhaps the wound in the neck, the anterior part of the neck, was an entrance wound and that it had perhaps taken a trajectory off the anterior vertebral body and again into the skull, exiting out the back, to produce the massive injury in the head,” he testified. “However, this required some straining of the imagination to imagine that this would happen, and it was much easier to explain the apparent trajectory by means of two bullets.”
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The basic logic of gunshot wounds applies: entrance wounds tend to be small, bullet-size holes (as the Parkland Hospital emergency room physicians observed in JFK’s neck wound before the incision was made for the tracheotomy) while exit wounds tend to be larger, such as the grapefruit-sized, gaping wounds (as the Parkland Hospital emergency room physicians observed in the back of JFK’s head). The Warren
Commission, in its effort to portray Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin, had to ignore or otherwise obfuscate the abundant medical evidence and testimony that confirmed JFK suffered an exit wound in the back of his head.

The initial television reports, including one broadcast nationally by CBS, said that the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was a 7.65 Mauser bolt-action equipped with a scope, not a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano. Dallas County deputy constable Seymour Weitzman, the same police officer who found a piece of JFK’s skull and encountered what he thought was a Secret Service agent in the aftermath of the shooting, was present when the rifle was found. In an affidavit sworn on the day after the assassination, Weitzman described how the rifle was found:

I immediately ran to the Texas Building and started looking inside. At this time Captain Fritz [Dallas Police Department] arrived and ordered all of the sixth floor sealed off and searched. I was working with Deputy S. Boone of the Sheriff’s Department and helping in the search. We were in the northwest corner of the sixth floor when Deputy Boone and myself spotted the rifle about the same time. The rifle was a 7.65 Mauser bolt action equipped with a 4/18 scope, a thick leather brownish-looking sling on it. The rifle was between some boxes near the stairway. The time the rifle was found was 1:22 p.m. Captain Fritz took charge of the rifle and ejected one live round from the chamber. I then went back to the office after this.
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In his testimony to the Warren Commission, Weitzman acknowledged he told the FBI the rifle he found was a 7.65 Mauser.
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Deputy Eugene Boone, in an investigative report filed with the Dallas County Sheriff’s office on the day of the assassination, reports how he found the 7.65 Mauser:

I proceeded to the sixth floor of the building to search for the rifle. I started on the east end of the building and worked my way to the west end of the building. In the northwest corner of the building approx.
three feet from the east wall of the stairwell and behind a row of cases of books I saw the rifle, what appeared to be a 7.65 Mauser with a telescopic site. The rifle had what appeared to be a brownish-black stock and blue steel, metal parts. Capt. Fritz DPD was called to this location and along with an ID man DPD took charge of the rifle.
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In his testimony to the Warren Commission on March 25, 1964, Deputy Boone repeated his claim the rifle he discovered on the sixth floor was a 7.65 Mauser:

Mr. Ball
: There is one question. Did you hear anybody refer to this rifle as a Mauser that day?

Mr. Boone
: Yes, I did. And at last, not knowing what it was, I thought it was a 7.65 Mauser.

Mr. Ball
: Who referred to it as a Mauser that day?

Mr. Boone
: I believe Captain Fritz. He had knelt down there to look at it, and before he removed it, not knowing what it was, he said that is what it looks like. This is when Lieutenant Day, I believe his name is, the ID man was getting ready to photograph it.

We were just discussing it back and forth. And he said it looks like a 7.65 Mauser.
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In a press conference after midnight on the day of the assassination, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, in response to a reporter’s question, described the make of the rifle: “It’s a Mauser, I believe.”
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The story appeared to change on Saturday, November 23, 1963, the day following the assassination, after the FBI tracked the purchase and shipment of an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano carbine to an A. Hidell in Dallas, Texas. That name matched a forged Selective Service card with a photograph of Oswald and the name Alex James Hidell that Dallas police claimed to have found in Oswald’s wallet at the time Oswald was arrested. Warren Commission critic Mark Lane, in his 1966 book,
Rush to Judgment
, pointed out as a condition of testifying to the Warren Commission, he obtained permission to examine the rifle. Finding that the words “MADE ITALY” and “CAL 6.5” were stamped on the rifle, Lane found it not credible that any policeman finding the rifle on the sixth
floor of the School Depository could possibly mistake the weapon for a German-made 7.65 Mauser.

Lane made this point to the Warren Commission emphatically, when he testified on March 4, 1964:

That following day, on the 23rd [of November, 1963], when it was announced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Oswald had purchased an Italian carbine, 6.5 millimeters, under the assumed name, A. Hidell, then for the first time the district attorney of Dallas [Henry Wade] indicated that the rifle in his possession, the alleged murder weapon, had changed both nationality and size, and had become from a German 7.65 Mauser, an Italian 6.5 carbine.
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Lane further indicated his surprise that District Attorney Wade would make such a mistake given that Wade “is a very distinguished prosecuting attorney, has been for some thirteen or fourteen years, and I believe was an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation prior to that time.”
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Lane pointedly asked regarding Wade: “I would like to know how he could have been so wrong about something so important.”

For the answer, consider CE399, the pristine bullet Warren Commission counsel Arlen Specter used as the foundation for his single-bullet theory. Once the Commission established that CE399 had been fired from the 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, Specter felt he had a “lock” on the case, if only he could establish that CE399 was the bullet that hit both JFK and Connally. The problem remained that no authoritative chain of custody could be established for CE399, since the suspicion remained that CE399 might have been planted on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital where it was found by Darrell C. Tomlinson, a senior engineer in charge of the hospital’s power plant. Similarly, the 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano was the government’s rifle of choice after the alias A. Hidell established a link between Oswald as the buyer of the weapon and a mail-order shop in Chicago as the seller of the weapon. Again, what happened to the 7.65 Mauser? The German rifle simply disappears from the case once the Commission realizes linking the murder weapon to Oswald becomes a lot easier to establish if the weapon used to assassinate JFK was the 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, not a 7.65 Mauser.