Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (4 page)

The chain of custody of the Connally bullet fragments was so poorly established there was no chance any of these bullet fragments would ever be introduced in court. Assassination researcher Russell Kent has catalogued fifteen different references in the Warren Commission Reports and the House Select Committee on Assassinations that itemize various bullet fragments supposedly taken from Connally’s wrist. The references are all vague: “Four lead-like fragments,” in one instance; “One large fragment and 2–3 smaller ones,” in another reference. Kent concludes, “the confusion over the number of fragments removed from Connally’s wrist is remarkable.” He goes on to argue, “Such inconsistency would almost certainly result in the exhibit being ruled as inadmissible in a trial because it raises reasonable doubt that the fragments removed during surgery are the ones shown in the exhibit.”
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How did the FBI know for certain that the bullet fragments flown to the FBI Laboratory from Dallas were actually the bullet fragments removed from Connally’s wounds? What
happened to the bullet fragments a nurse put in a vial as doctors operated on Connally in Dallas?

Were the bullet fragments taken from Connally’s wrist marked as evidence, photographed or otherwise documented, and placed in reliable safekeeping so as to prevent substitution or tampering? The answer is a resounding “no.” The historical record of the bullet fragments taken from Connally’s wrist is woefully inadequate as the type of forensic documentation needed for these various bullet fragments to serve any purpose, including being introduced as evidence into a court proceeding to establish fact.

Were bullet fragments discarded in the operating room or simply lost? Again, the possibility remains open that only some of the bullet fragments removed from Connally’s wrist made their way into one or more of the various fifteen different exhibit references Kent catalogued. Were X-rays examined to determine where precisely in Connally’s body a particular fragment was found and extracted? The answer is inevitably a resounding “no,” judging from the JFK assassination medical record, as documented by the Warren Committee or the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

The doctors at Parkland Hospital were interested first in making sure Connally’s life was secure and second in operating on him as quickly and efficiently as possible so as to stabilize his medical condition and increase his chances of healing. But when the victim was the governor of Texas, shot in what turned out to be the assassination of the president of the United States, it is remarkable that medical considerations completely outweighed legal considerations in Connally’s emergency medical treatment. Granted, the primary concern of the doctors at Parkland Hospital was the care of Connelly as a patient. Yet, in the most important criminal case in twentieth-century US history, the forensic importance of the metal fragments in Connally’s body could not have been higher. The record shows that while the Parkland Hospital physicians did their job attending to Connally’s wounds, no similar attention was given to the legal implications of the medical evidence they were encountering while operating on their patient.

Even more remarkable was the number of law enforcement personnel Parkland Hospital allowed to be in the operating room as surgeons were
treating Connally’s wounds. They appear to have been lax regarding the importance of preserving for trial the ballistic evidence extracted from Connally’s body during the operation. Once the doctors removed the bullet fragments from Connally’s wrist, the chain-of-custody description shows law enforcement procedures—tracking the bullet fragments from the hospital to the Dallas Police Department to the FBI—were sloppy at best. Debate continues today regarding how much lead was removed from Connally’s body, where those bullet fragments ended up, and how much lead was left in Connally’s body.

So the debate over bullet fragments and the so-called “magic bullet” continues. Logically, those arguing CE399 is the same bullet that hit JFK in the back and neck and hit Connally in the chest, the wrist, and the thigh are bound to assume that all bullet fragments have been identified and measured precisely, so as to conclude the mass missing from CE399 is not exceeded by the bullet fragments that occurred in the shooting. The proof for this, however, is far from certain.

Connally died in 1993, and a frantic effort to get family permission to extract bullet fragments that remained in his body thirty years after the JFK assassination was unsuccessful. The Justice Department refused to intervene, and Connally was buried with bullet fragments from the JFK assassination still in his body.
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To make matters even worse, in the fifty years intervening since the JFK assassination, the bullet fragments extracted from Connally’s chest, wrist, and thigh, had been so poorly handled that since 1963 some bullet fragments have simply disappeared.
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The inability to examine the bullet fragments remaining in Connally’s body, plus the fact that bullet fragments taken from Connally’s body are missing, make it impossible for proponents of the single-bullet theory to argue convincingly that the mass of fragments removed from Connally’s wrist or known from X-ray analysis to have remained in Connally’s body, including bullet fragments in his chest and thigh, do not exceed the minimal loss in mass observed in CE399.
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Now, fifty years after the crime, there is no way to determine precisely the weight of the fragments from the bullet (or bullets) that hit Connally, unless the Connally family would give permission to have the body exhumed so the bullet fragments remaining in the body could be identified, measured, and weighed.

This problem, to an even larger extent, applies as well to JFK. Since
JFK was pronounced dead in the operating room, the doctors at Parkland Hospital never performed surgery in the attempt to save his life. Therefore, they never removed or measured bullet fragments remaining in JFK’s brain and skull. Since the head wound was obviously a fatal wound, they had no reason to find or treat any other wounds. While it is understandable that no precise determination appears to have been made at Parkland Hospital regarding what bullet fragments remained in JFK’s body at the time of his death, no precise determination appears to have been made during the subsequent autopsy at Bethesda. Moreover, given the massive nature of JFK’s head wounds, bullet fragments were widely scattered throughout the limousine, possibly even causing the fractures observed on the limousine windshield after the shooting had occurred. JFK skull and brain matter splattered out of the limousine, hitting the motorcycle officers trailing the limousine and Secret Service Agent Clint Hill as he jumped onto the limousine from behind. Yet, immediately following the assassination law enforcement officers appear to have made no attempt to precisely gather bullet fragments from the street, from bystanders, from the motorcycle officers, or from Agent Clint Hill. Remarkably, film footage taken at Parkland Hospital after the assassination shows government officials actually cleaning the limousine with a bucket of water and cloth rags to remove the blood, skull parts, and brain debris from the limo’s interior, with no apparent regard for the evidence. The JFK limousine was part of the crime scene. Yet, not only was the limousine cleaned at Parkland, the limousine was sent for repairs before forensic experts had a chance to collect evidence.

Another problem with the investigation and ballistic analysis is the lack of deformity observed in CE399. Assassination researcher Josiah Thompson found the lack of deformity in the bullet CE399 to be a major problem. Thompson argued in his 1967 book,
Six Seconds in Dallas,
that he was not convinced the weight loss evidenced in the bullet fragments precluded CE399 from being the bullet that wounded Connally. “What does preclude such a conclusion,” Thompson wrote, “is the lack of ‘deformation of the bullet’ alluded to by Dr. Shaw.”
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Thompson notes the Warren Commission was aware of this problem as early as April 1964. On April 14, 1964, various members of the Warren Commission staff arranged a viewing of the Zapruder film with two autopsy surgeons and two experts from the Army’s Wound Ballistics Branch at Edgewood
Arsenal. Thompson recorded that Assistant Counsel Melvin Eisenberg wrote a “Memorandum for the Record,” memorializing the meeting, and recording the following conclusions: “Since the bullet removed from the Governor’s stretcher does not appear to have penetrated a wrist, if he was hit by this (the first) bullet, he was probably also hit by the second bullet.” Such a conclusion, if embraced by the Warren Commission, would have been lethal to the single-bullet theory.
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A meeting in April 1964, with wound ballistics experts F. W. Light Jr. and Joseph Dolce, provided the Warren Commission additional argumentation that CE399 would have been deformed had the bullet caused the damage being attributed to it: “Drs. Light and Dolce expressed themselves very strongly that the bullet recovered from Connally’s stretcher could not have broken his radius without having suffered more distortion. Dr. Oliver [another wound ballistics specialist] withheld a conclusion until he has had the opportunity to make tests on animal tissue and bone with the actual rifle.”
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Thompson reported that, under Oliver’s direction, a slug from Oswald’s rifle was fired through a cadaver’s wrist to simulate Connally’s wrist injury. The impact badly smashed the front end of the resulting bullet, shown in the Warren Commission’s report as CE856. Oliver had another bullet fired through an anesthetized goat to simulate 66 percent of the resistance encountered by a bullet through Connally’s chest. As a result, the projectile was badly squeezed along a longitudinal axis, as seen in CE853. A third bullet was fired into a skull, with the resulting two pieces of the bullet being scarcely recognizable, as seen in CE857. “None of these bullets looks anything like CE399,” Thompson concluded. “The results of Dr. Oliver’s experiments validated a principal long accepted in wound ballistics and forensic pathology, namely, that a high-velocity bullet striking bone is always grossly deformed.”
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Thompson also reported that he showed noted forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht the X-rays of Connally’s chest and wrist together with multiple close-up photographs of CE399. Wecht left no doubt that his conclusion was that the single-bullet theory was nonsense. Wecht said:

I do not think that it could have been possible for the bullet shown as CE399 to have been a bullet that traversed the bodies of both President Kennedy and Governor Connally. I think it’s something which I could not accept, that this bullet which is not fragmented, not deformed or
mutilated, with just a slight defect at the tail could have inflicted this amount of damage. Particularly the damage I’m talking about to the bony structures, the rib and right radius (just above the junction of the wrist)—I doubt that this bullet could have done it. It just does not seem to fit with any of the cases I’ve seen of what happens to pellets after they have struck bone.
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Vincent Guinn, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, was asked by the House Select Committee on Assassinations to conduct a neutron activation analysis, or NAA, on the 6.5 mm ammunition for the Western Cartridge Company’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Guinn testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that the Western Cartridge Company Mannlicher-Carcano bullets were unhardened bullets with the unusual feature that “there seems to be no uniformity within a production lot.” He went on to specify, “That is, even when we would take a box of cartridges all from a given production lot, take 1 cartridge out and then another and then another and then another, all out of the same box—boxes of 20, these were—and analyze them, they all in general look different and widely different, particularly in their antimony content.”
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Antimony hardens the lead in commercial bullets. Are we to believe that C399 was one of the bullets where antimony had hardened the bullet to the point where it would have remained pristine despite the wounds the bullet supposedly caused in the two adult men?

Still, despite admitting the ammunition manufactured by Western Cartridge for the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle had no consistency of composition, Guinn insisted fragments allegedly from Connally’s wrist (CE842) came from CE399. Assassination researcher Russell Kent points out the problems with Guinn’s analysis: “For the HSCA, he [Guinn] tested fragments different from those tested by the FBI for the Warren Commission. Furthermore the FBI fragments are now ‘missing’ and their weights unknown. They could have been huge pieces weighing tens of grains and thus could not possibly have come from CE399.”
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Professor Ronald White points out that while Guinn concluded the CE842 fragments came from CE399 because they were similar in chemical composition, CE842 contained 2,400 percent more sodium and 1,100 percent more chlorine. Finally, CE842 contained 8.1-ppm aluminum but CE399 contained none.
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From this White argued, “it was difficult to fathom how Guinn could conclude that
CE842 and CE399 were similar in composition.” White also noted that to confirm the single-bullet theory, it is necessary to link CE399 with Kennedy’s neck and back wounds. But since no bullet fragments were removed from Kennedy’s neck and back wounds even at the autopsy, it is impossible to link CE399 to JFK with certainty, even if CE399 matched precisely the CE842 fragments in chemical composition.
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Yet another problem is that the ammunition used in the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository was World War II vintage surplus ammunition last manufactured in 1944, and was no longer available. A spokesman for Western Cartridge declared the reliability of such ammunition would be questionable today.
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This was in direct contradiction to the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the ammunition was recently made by Western Cartridge, “which manufactures such ammunition currently.”
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Two of the more prominent defenders of the single-bullet theory, former Wall Street lawyer Gerald Posner and former prosecutor from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office Vincent Bugliosi, have argued CE399 was not deformed because the velocity of the bullet had slowed to a fraction of its original speed after passing through JFK’s back, exiting JFK’s neck, puncturing Connally’s back, exiting Connally’s chest, hitting Connally’s wrist, and lodging in Connally’s thigh.
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What Posner and Bugliosi fail to explain is how a missile slowed enough so as not to become deformed upon hitting bone, yet was going fast enough to destroy 10 cm of Connally’s rib and shatter the radius bone in Connally’s wrist.