Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (3 page)

Making Tomlinson’s testimony even weaker, at no point while Tomlinson
was under oath did Specter show Tomlinson CE399, or a photograph of CE399, to ask him if it was the bullet he found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital. Just to be clear, the interview under oath ended without Tomlinson making a positive ID of CE399 as the bullet he found.

Tomlinson testified that he handed the bullet over to Mr. O. P. Wright, the personnel director of security for the Dallas County Hospital District and a former police detective with the Dallas Police Department. Commission Exhibit 1024, CE1024 for short, is a note from FBI Special Agent E. Johnson, dated 7:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963. Johnson explains how the bullet found by Tomlinson was handed over to the FBI:

The attached expended bullet was received by me about 5 min. prior to Mrs. Kennedy’s departure from the hospital. It was found on one of the stretchers located in the emergency ward of the hospital. Also on this same stretcher was rubber gloves, a stethoscope and other doctor’s paraphernalia. It could not be determined who had used this stretcher or if President Kennedy had occupied it. No further information was obtained. Name of person from who I received this bullet: Mr. O. P. Wright.
¹⁹

Again, no photograph of the bullet accompanied CE1024. An exhaustive search of the documentary record failed to produce any photograph of the bullet found on the stretcher before the FBI removed the bullet from Parkland Hospital. FBI Special Agent Johnson made no note of the two bloody sheets Tomlinson noticed on the stretcher he found in the hall on the ground floor.

According to Commission Exhibit 2011 (CE2011), on June 12, 1964, FBI Special Agent Bardwell Odum showed Tomlinson and Wright CE399 and both stated that while the bullet looked like the bullet Tomlinson found on the stretcher, neither of them positively identify CE399 as the bullet.
²⁰
A declassified FBI memo dated June 20, 1964, provides additional evidence, stating without qualification that neither Tomlinson nor Wright could positively identify CE399 as the bullet they found at Parkland Hospital.
²¹
In subsequent interviews Odum refused to back up CE2011, claiming he never had in his possession any bullet related to the JFK assassination and he never showed CE399 to anyone at Parkland Hospital to get confirmation of the bullet found there on November 22, 1963.
²²

In an interview in November 1966 O. P. Wright told Josiah
Thompson, author of the 1967 book
Six Seconds in Dallas
, that the bullet Tomlinson found on the stretcher on November 22, 1963, had a pointed tip, which obviously did not meet the description of the rounded tip of CE399. Wright reached into his desk and produced for Thompson a pointed .30 caliber round he claimed looked like the bullet Tomlinson found. Thompson was so impressed by the discrepancy that he photographed Wright’s pointed-tip round next to a key to give an indication of size. (The photo appears in Thompson’s book,
Six Seconds in Dallas
.) Clearly, the pointed .30 caliber round Wright produced is shorter than CE399 and bears a pointed tip distinct from CE399’s rounded tip. “As a professional law enforcement officer, Wright has an educated eye for bullet shapes,” Thompson noted.
²³

Thompson also researched and ruled out that the stretcher on which Tomlinson found the bullet was the stretcher used for either President Kennedy or Governor Connally. When the presidential limo arrived at Parkland, JFK was taken to Trauma Room 1, where he was pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m., approximately the same time Tomlinson testified he found the bullet. JFK’s body remained on his stretcher until 1:45 p.m., when the casket arrived. Connally was taken to Trauma Room 2 on a stretcher and then wheeled into Operating Room 5. The stretcher was wheeled out of Operating Room 5, placed on an elevator, and returned to the ER at approximately 1:00 p.m., as Connally was being placed under anesthesia in Operating Room 5. Again, Tomlinson testified he found the bullet at approximately 1:00 p.m. on a stretcher located on the ground floor that was already in the hall when his elevator door opened.
²⁴

Yet, the Warren Commission concluded CE399 had to have been found on Connally’s stretcher, since it was not found on JFK’s stretcher. In the final report, the Warren Commission wrote, “Although Tomlinson was not certain whether the bullet came from the Connally stretcher or the adjacent one, the Commission concluded that the bullet came from the Governor’s stretcher. That conclusion is buttressed by evidence which eliminated President Kennedy’s stretcher as a source of the bullet.”
²⁵
Here the Warren Commission committed a classic error of forcing the evidence to fit a pre-determined theory, rather than presenting the evidence and letting the theory follow from the evidence.

Clearly, the Warren Commission wanted CE399 to have been found
on Connally’s stretcher because that would support the single-bullet theory that assumes CE399 wounded Connally after wounding JFK in the back and neck. The assumption was that CE399 dropped out of Connally’s thigh. Finding CE399 on Connally’s stretcher would eliminate the problem that no bullet had been found in either body. The Warren Commission’s logic that because CE399 was not found on JFK’s stretcher it had to be found on Connally’s stretcher is shaky when we realize that four other emergency cases were admitted to Parkland Memorial Hospital in a space of twenty minutes, with two of these patients bleeding profusely. At 12:38 p.m., a woman identified as Helen Guycion was admitted to Parkland Hospital, bleeding from the mouth. Sixteen minutes later, Arnold Fuller, a two-and-a-half-year-old child, was admitted with a deep cut on his chin. “It is possible that this second stretcher belonged to one of these patients,” assassination researcher Jerry McKnight commented. “The Commission, however, opted to leave this possibility unexplored.”
²⁶

Yet another possibility remains to explain how CE399 got on the stretcher. Secret Service Agent Andrew Berger, in a memorandum placed into evidence with the Warren Commission’s Report as Commission Exhibit 1024, described a bizarre incident where a man claiming to be an FBI agent tried to force his way into the ER trauma room where JFK was being treated. Berger wrote:

At approximately 1:30 PM, the Chief Supervising nurse, a Mrs. Nelson started to enter the emergency room with an unidentified male (WM, 45yrs, 6’2”, 185–190 lbs, grey hair). As the reporting agent and SA Johnsen started to ask his identity he shouted that he was FBI. Just as we began to ask for his credentials, he abruptly attempted to enter the emergency room and had to be forcibly restrained by us. ASAIC Kellerman then appeared and asked this individual to go to the end of the hall.
²⁷

Josiah Thompson pointed out that two witnesses to the Warren Commission testified to having seen Jack Ruby at Parkland Hospital at about the time JFK’s death was announced.
²⁸
Jack Ruby was a colorful character in Dallas. A nightclub owner with connections to the mob, he had a habit of schmoozing with police to make sure his business was not harassed, especially as Ruby’s Carousel Club featured burlesque-like
strip-tease dancers. It was not unusual to see Ruby milling around the heart of the action anytime the police radio announced something of special interest was happening in the city. Seth Kantor, a Scripps Howard newspaper writer, testified to the Warren Commission on June 2, 1964, that he saw Ruby near the entrance to Parkland Hospital immediately after the JFK shooting. According to Kantor, Ruby and he shook hands and Ruby asked whether he should close his nightclubs because of “this terrible thing.” Kantor commented it seemed just perfectly normal to see Jack Ruby standing there, because Ruby was a known “goer to events.”
²⁹
A woman, standing outside the ER at Parkland next to Ruby, heard Ruby comment that he would be happy to donate a kidney to save Governor Connally, in response to a rumor that Connally had been shot in the kidney.
³⁰
“A number of people could have had access to that hospital vestibule on November 22,” Josiah Thompson commented. “It would have been a task of no great difficulty to plant a bullet on the stretcher where CE399 was found.”
³¹

The lone assassin theory came to hinge on the Warren Commission proving the near-pristine bullet CE399 struck both JFK and Governor John Connally. However, the Warren Commission’s failure to consider the possibility CE399 was planted on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital, possibly by Jack Ruby, suggests the Warren Commission was primarily interested in CE399 because it could be made to fit the predetermined theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

Dr. Robert Roeder Shaw, the chief of thoracic surgery at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, operated on Connally’s obvious and serious chest wound. Testifying to the Warren Commission on April 21, 1964, Shaw established that he had personal experience with approximately one thousand cases involving bullet wounds, both at Parkland Hospital and during World War II, when he served as chief of thoracic surgery in Paris, France. Shaw testified that a bullet entered Connally’s back just below his right shoulder blade, proceeded to shatter Connally’s fifth rib, and exited just below Connally’s right nipple. When asked if one or two bullets had caused the injuries to Connally, Shaw testified that he assumed at the time the
wounds to Connelly’s chest, wrist, and thigh had been caused by the same bullet, although he also considered it possible that a second or even a third bullet might have caused the wrist and thigh wounds. With his focus on making sure Connelly could breathe, Shaw gave Connelly’s wrist and thigh wounds only cursory thought or examination.

Warren Commission counsel Arlen Specter then asked Shaw whether he believed CE399, the pristine bullet found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital, could have caused all three of Connally’s wounds. Shaw answered in a way that summarized the medical evidence so as to devastate the single-bullet theory: “I feel that there would be some difficulty in explaining all of the wounds as being inflicted by bullet Exhibit 399 without causing more in the way of loss of substance to the bullet or deformation of the bullet.”
³²
In other words, a single bullet that caused such extensive wounds including shattering a rib and breaking a wrist, would be expected to have lost substantial mass through fragmenting or would have been seriously deformed, or both. For CE399 to have emerged in near-pristine shape after having inflicted the wounds Shaw observed and treated on Connally was simply not credible.

Dr. Milton Helpern, formerly chief medical examiner of New York City who had conducted autopsies on more than two thousand victims of gunshot wounds and was credited by
The New York Times
as knowing “more about violent death than anyone else in the world,” expressed similar doubt when questioned about CE399:

The original, pristine weight of this bullet before it was fired was approximately 160–161 grains. The Commission reported the weight of the bullet recovered on the stretcher at 158.6 grains in Parkland Hospital. This bullet wasn’t distorted in any way. I cannot accept the premise that this bullet thrashed around in all that bony tissue and lost only 1.4 to 2.4 grains of its original weight. I cannot believe either that this bullet is going to emerge miraculously unscathed, without any deformity, and with its lands and groves intact.… You must remember that next to bone, the skin offers greater resistance to a bullet in its course through the body than any other kind of tissue.… This single-bullet theory asks us to believe that this bullet went through seven layers of skin, tough, elastic, resistant skin. In addition … this bullet passed through other layers of soft tissue; and then shattered bones! I just can’t believe that this bullet had the force to do what [the
Commission] have demanded of it; and I don’t think they have really stopped to think out carefully what they have asked of this bullet, for the simple reason that they still do not understand the resistant nature of human skin to bullets.
³³

More evidence against the single-bullet theory is Dr. Shaw’s testimony about his examination of Connally’s wrist. X-rays showed that there were more than three grains of metal from the bullet lodged in the wrist, ruling out the possibility that CE399 was the bullet that hit Connelly’s wrist.
³⁴
Testifying before the Warren Commission on March 16, 1964, Dr. James Humes, the presiding pathologist at JFK’s autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, also hesitated to agree that CE399 was responsible for Connally’s injuries. First, Humes rejected the contention that CE399 caused Connally’s wrist injuries, saying it was “highly unlikely,” explaining, “… this missile [CE399] is basically intact,” and elaborating, “its jacket appears to me to be intact, and I do not understand how it could possibly have left fragments [in Gov. Connally’s wrist].”
³⁵
Then, continuing with his testimony, Humes also rejected the contention CE399 was the bullet that struck Connally’s thigh. Referring to X-rays that show “metallic fragments in the bone” apparently not removed from Connally’s thigh, Humes testified it was highly unlikely CE399 was the bullet that hit Connally because he could not “conceive of where they [the bullet fragments shown in the X-rays of Connally’s thigh] came from in this missile [CE399].”
³⁶
Testifying that same day, Dr. Finck, a US Army physician who served for three years as the chief of the Wound Ballistics Pathology Branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and participated in the JFK autopsy, rejected the contention that CE399 was the bullet that injured Connally’s right wrist, answering, “No; for the reason there are too many fragments described in that wrist.”
³⁷

On May 6, 1964, FBI special agent Robert A. Frazier, then assigned to the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C., testified to the Warren Commission that he placed into evidence as Commission Exhibit 842 a metal fragment weighing a half-grain that he was told had been removed from Connally’s wrist.
³⁸
At the 1991 Dallas Conference on the Assassination of President Kennedy, Parkland Hospital nurse Audrey Bell drew a life-size picture of five bullet fragments she placed in a vial after physicians
removed the fragments from Connally’s body. Bell claimed, “Well, we had too much [metal] to go on the ‘Magic Bullet’!”
³⁹
Charles A. Crenshaw, M.D., a physician present at Parkland confirmed Bell’s testimony. Crenshaw observed Dr. William Osborne hand at least five bullet fragments to Bell that he had removed from Connally’s arm. Osborne had assisted Dr. Charles Frances Gregory, who was the lead surgeon operating on Connolly’s wrist and then a professor of Orthopedic Surgery at the University of Texas Medical School.
⁴⁰
The only documentation of the fragments collected by nurse Bell is a Dallas Police Department summary of evidence transferred to the FBI, reproduced in Volume 24 of the Warren Commission Report and listed as CE2003 on
page 260
, stating: “Bullet fragments taken from body of Governor Connally.” The notation on the exhibit lists that Mrs. Audrey Bell, operating room nurse, gave the bullet fragments to Bob Dolan of the Dallas Police Department, who gave them to Captain Fritz of the Dallas Police Department, who transferred the fragments to the Dallas Police Department crime lab. From there they were sent to the FBI. The notation does not list the number or the weight of the fragments. Who received the bullet fragments at the FBI and when are not indicated, leaving open the question whether the bullet fragments nurse Bell placed in a vial in the Parkland Hospital operating room are the same fragments that ended up in the FBI crime laboratory in Washington.