The HSCA Single Bullet Theory

If one were told in 1976 that the HSCA was going to determine that the Warren Commission and Clark panel were wrong, and that the back wound was at the same level as or even slightly below the wound in Kennedy’s throat, one would rightly have concluded that the single-bullet theory had been debunked  Instead, when the HSCA published its final report in 1979, the committee concluded that the theory was still valid. To do this, they proposed that Kennedy was leaning a lot further forward than had previously been  presumed.

This was doubly surprising since the HSCA had also decided that Kennedy was first hit at Zapruder frame 190, at a point when he is clearly sitting up in his seat. The Warren Commission, we should remember, concluded he was hit somewhere between frames 210-225 of the Zapruder film, when he was behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, and his forward lean could not precisely be determined. Equally troubling, by moving up the proposed moment of impact, the HSCA put Kennedy closer to the Texas School Book Depository at the time he was shot, and made the angle of descent for the "magic bullet" that much sharper. A quick comparison of Kennedy's position in Zapruder frame 188, 1/9 of a second before the supposed impact, to Kennedy's position in HSCA Exhibit F-46, a drawing of Kennedy leaning forward to the degree required for a non-deflected bullet to pass through his back and neck and then hit Governor Connally, demonstrates that Kennedy was not in the proper position to receive his wounds as proposed.

This forces one to wonder if the drawing was simply in error, or if the doctors truly believed the single bullet-theory they were depicting. Some quick measurements show that Kennedy’s neck is bent forward 31 degrees in the drawing, and that the arrow descends at 27 degrees. A bullet on such a trajectory would ascend 4 degrees through Kennedy’s body. As this matches the pathology panel’s analysis of the back wound, it seems clear, then, that they expended some effort on the drawing, and were not just guessing. Which makes it hard to explain why the arrow in the drawing descends at 27 degrees. The angle of descent from the sniper's nest at frame 190, when the HSCA proposed Kennedy was first wounded, was only 24 degrees.  

A careful reading of the panel's report offers a partial explanation for these errors. It indicates that F-46 was only supposed to demonstrate the relationship between Kennedy’s wounds, and that determining the actual position of Kennedy at the moment of the shot and the trajectory of the bullet was the responsibility of the trajectory panel. This sets off my bullshit detector. 

The 9-7-78 testimony of Dr. Cyril Wecht only adds to my concern. About the single-bullet theory, Wecht testified: "How does a bullet that is moving slightly upward in the President proceed then to move downward 25 degrees in John Connally. This is what I cannot understand. My colleagues on the panel are aware of this. We discussed it, and what we keep coming back to is, "well, don't know how the two men were seated in relationship to each other." I don't care what happened behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, there is no way in the world that they can put that together, and likewise on the horizontal plane, the bullet, please keep in mind, entered in the President's right back, I agree, exited in the anterior midline of the President's neck, I agree, and was moving thence by definition, by known facts, on a straight line from entrance to exit, from right to left. And so with that bullet moving in a leftward fashion, it then somehow made an acute angular turn, came back almost two feet, stopped, made a second turn, and slammed into Gov. John Connally behind the right armpit, referred to medically as the right posterior axillary area. The vertical and horizontal trajectory of this bullet, 399, under the single bullet theory is absolutely unfathomable, indefensible, and incredible."

Wecht's testimony indicates that some members of the panel supported the theory under the belief the shot was fired when Kennedy and Connally's positions were unclear. Earlier and subsequent statements by four of the panel's leading lights, Dr. Werner Spitz, Dr. James Weston, Dr. Charles Petty, and Dr. Michael Baden prove this to be true, and prove them to have been a bit, shall we say, clueless.

Shortly after he'd first studied the photos and X-rays on behalf the Rockefeller Commission, in a May 25, 1975 appearance on the Lou Gordon Show, Spitz declared that no one could say Kennedy and Connally were not in position to have a single-bullet create all their non-fatal wounds "since you don't really know what had happened behind the sign when the President's motorcade was behind the sign which is noted on the Zapruder film. Since you don't really know what happened there, that the Governor may have turned around..."  Well, this is strange. Spitz had elsewhere acknowledged that the back wound was below the throat wound but was so clueless he didn't realize that the issue had then become whether or not Kennedy had leaned forward while behind the sign, not whether Connally had turned around.

By 1988, he at least seemed to know that the imaginary act he needed to propose involved President Kennedy, and not the governor. In a 1988 interview on radio station WXYT, Dr. Spitz insisted that we didn't know the position of Kennedy when he was shot because "The first shot, when Kennedy is hit, is when he is passing behind a road sign which indicates the upcoming freeway and you really don't know when at exactly the point when Kennedy was hit in the shoulder. You think you know because of the echo, but we know very well that the echo follows the sound." (What echo? What is he talking about?) Spitz then revealed that he--and by extension the entire pathology panel--had never been told that the photography panel had determined Kennedy to have been hit before he went behind the sign. When told that photographs indicate Kennedy was hit before he went behind the sign, he thundered: "No, that's not true. You see him with a distorted face when he comes out from the sign. When he goes behind the sign, he's smiling and waving to the people on the right." (The photography panel had rejected this argument, and had determined that Kennedy was in fact in distress when he went behind the sign.)

Dr. Weston was equally in the dark. After viewing the autopsy materials in 1975, at the request of CBS News, he emerged with a similar attitude as Spitz. According to a November 28, 1975 AP article, published nationwide, Weston claimed that while a better autopsy and a photo of Kennedy when the bullets struck could have helped "determine the bullet's point of origin," the "president's car is hidden by a roadside sign in the only films of the crucial seconds when he was hit."

Dr. Petty apparently concurred. While he never said anything, from what I have found, about the shot's impacting while Kennedy was hidden behind the sign in the Zapruder film, he did make some statements suggesting that he believed Kennedy's appearance in the frames when he was not behind the sign incompatible with the single-bullet theory. In his 1978 HSCA testimony, taken right after Dr. Wecht's testimony (perhaps to dull its impact), he defended the single-bullet theory's viability. After acknowledging that he believed the bullet trajectory to have been upward in Kennedy's body, he asserted, "But the President was not upright at the time he was shot, he was certainly not in the anatomic position." Shrewdly, he failed to mention when this was. If there had been a frame in which Kennedy had been leaning forward enough to support Petty's claim, one can only assume, Petty would have mentioned it.

That Petty had problems locating a frame in which Kennedy and Connally's wounds were in alignment is supported, moreover, by his statements a few moments later. When discussing the horizontal trajectory, and Dr. Wecht's claim Kennedy's throat wound was not aligned with Connally's back wound for a shot from the sniper's nest, Petty asserted "the apparent relative positions of the President and the Governor are somewhat misleading, that is, that one cannot determine by looking at a flat two dimensional view of one side of the limousine and the contained individuals precisely what relationship they had one to another." By saying the apparent relative positions of the two men in the film were somewhat misleading, of course, Petty was as much as admitting that the film suggested, even to him, that Kennedy and Connally were never aligned in a manner supporting that they were struck by one bullet as proposed. One can only assume, then, that he, as his colleagues, felt comfortable with the assumption they were hit when their exact positions could not be observed. 

In 2003, at a conference sponsored by Dr. Wecht, Dr. Baden, the pathology panel's spokesman, revealed himself to be yet another more comfortable with the blinders on. When asked to point out the moment in the Zapruder film that Kennedy is first hit, he asserted: "My impression is that he (Kennedy) is shot behind the Stemmons Freeway sign; that's why we don't see it." When Wecht correctly pointed out that Kennedy was only behind the sign for .9 seconds, hardly enough to lean forward and then back, Baden then explained: "I think Kennedy's neck has to be leaning forward a little bit, waving to somebody as you do, and that would put him in position."

Spitz, Weston, Petty, and Baden's supposition that Kennedy was hit while behind the sign in the film, and/or unscientific belief one couldn't accurately determine the relative positions of Kennedy and Connally in the limo, is inconsistent with the HSCA's findings. This, then, raises the possibility that someone (perhaps Robert Blakey) knew the Zapruder film never showed Kennedy to be in a position to receive his wounds as proposed, and had sought out someone less concerned with his reputation to claim just the opposite. That way, when confronted with the fact that Kennedy never was in such position, the doctors could always raise their hands and do their best Freddie Prinze impression, protesting, "It's not my yob, mang!"

Well, then whose job was it? As the job was virtually impossible, they gave it to another 70's television icon, a man who regularly did the impossible: Mr. Phelps.  

The Portable Hole

No, not quite Mr. Phelps of Mission Impossible fame, but close. They called NASA, and NASA sent them a trajectory expert named Thomas Canning. To their eternal shame, the HSCA then gave Canning the ability to move the wounds as he saw fit, in order to better align the trajectories and, one can only assume, make sure they all pointed back to the sniper's nest. 

Since this last assertion is really hard to swallow, let me quote the part of the HSCA report that makes this clear. On page 33 of HSCA Appendix Vol. 6, in the report on the trajectory analysis, when describing the procedures used to establish the bullet trajectories, it declares "The Forensic Pathology Panel was responsible for providing, to the extent possible, the precise locations of the wounds sustained by Kennedy and Connally." But there is an asterisk after this. At the bottom of the page, in an explanation of this asterisk, the report acknowledges "While the Forensic Pathology Panel did provide this information, the actual measurements related to wound locations were determined by the NASA scientist who was responsible for supervising the trajectory project.  He was in frequent consultation with members of the Forensic Pathology Panel and with forensic anthropologists from both the FAA's Civil Aeromedical Institute, and the Smithsonian Institute."  How frequent he consulted with these unidentified panel members isn't stated.  But if any of the members disagreed with Baden's testimony regarding the back wound location, and disagreed with the exhibits he presented to the committee, they were free to testify and voice their dissent. None did.

In any case, under the encouragement of others or not, when Canning testified on 9-12-78, it became clear he'd taken liberties with the wound locations. Despite the fact that Dr. Baden had testified but 5 days before, and had presented a number of exhibits, including exhibits 46, 58, and 65, depicting the bullet entering at the T-1 level, Canning boldly dragged Exhibit 376, which showed this same bullet entering considerably above the T-1 level and the problematic first rib, before the committee.

Much as a character on the old Mission: Impossible TV series, or a cartoon character, or a decent Dungeons and Dragons player, he had availed himself of a portable hole.

Apparently, his conscience had fallen down that hole. Although the wound locations in his exhibits were undoubtedly at odds with the wound locations described in the pathology panel's report, he had the cojones to entitle Exhibit 376 "JFK Wound Locations Deduced from Pathology Panel Report." 

Now, in the House of Representatives they might call this creative interpretation., but in my house, we call it LYING.

And there's reason, moreover, to think others put Canning up to it. Not doctors, but the HSCA staff... HSCA Deputy Chief Counsel Gary Cornwell, in his 1998 book Real Answers, makes a bizarre claim that shows that Canning was far from alone in misrepresenting the back wound location as interpreted by the pathology panel. Here it is: "In the end, when the errors committed by the original clinical pathologists as set out in the Warren Commission Report are corrected, and the Warren Commission's alleged 'precision' of wound location and bullet trajectories are recognized as actually being quite imprecise, there is nothing necessarily 'magical' about the path of the single bullet."

Feel free to read that again... Yep, Cornwell was claiming that the HSCA's being more 'precise' than the Warren Commission in its determination of the wound locations made the single-bullet theory less magical, and therefore more probable. What a crock! There isn't a soul alive--outside perhaps Cornwell--who thinks the HSCA pathology panel's re-interpreting the back wound location at a point 2 inches lower on Kennedy's back--at a point actually below the throat wound--made it more believable these wounds were connected by the path of a bullet sharply descending from above, and entering from behind.

Real Answers? Get real!

Cunning Canning and Bad Bad Baden

But the incorrect placement of the back wound in F-376 is just the tip of the iceberg. For its lateral depiction of the single-bullet theory in Exhibit F-376, the trajectory panel placed the back wound on the back of the neck in nearly the exact location used in Warren Commission Exhibit CE 385. F-376, it bears repeating, was presented to the committee by Thomas Canning five days after Dr. Baden testified that the back wound in CE 385 was two inches higher than its actual location. Not stated previously, however, is that Dr. Baden presented CE 385 into evidence as HSCA Exhibit F-47. Canning had thereby presented an exhibit to the commission that confirmed the wound location in an exhibit already presented to the committee as an example of an inaccurate exhibit. Even worse, Canning claimed the wound locations in his own exhibit had come from the panel claiming the wound locations in F-47 were inaccurate! Now, I don't know which is more shocking--that Canning would misrepresent the evidence in so brazen a manner or that no one on the committee noticed that his exhibits directly contradicted the more credible testimony of the forensic pathology panel.

The forensic pathology panel's exhibits, unfortunately, weren’t much better. On Exhibit F-58, for instance, the back wound was shifted slightly further from the spine than was indicated by the autopsy photos or by the measurements. The entrance was measured as being 4.5 cm from the mid-line of Kennedy’s spine.  If the entrance on this drawing is 4.5 cm from his midline, however, then Kennedy measured only 13.6 cm to his shoulder. The Clark Panel measured 16 cm to his shoulder, which is as one should expect for a man of his size. If he was indeed 16 cm to his shoulder, the wound in exhibit F-58 is 5.4 cm from his spine, not 4.5.  In addition, if one uses the width of the ruler in the photo (which appears to be a centimeter ruler), 37 mm or 1.46 inches, to measure the distance from Kennedy’s spine to the bullet entrance, one finds the entrance is approximately 3.9 cm. from his spine, not 4.5. If the entrance was really 3.9 cm from the spine but presented in F-58 as 5.4 cm from the spine, it follows that the wound was moved almost 40% further from the spine.

This convenient movement of the back wound, courtesy Dr. Baden, who worked on the drawings with medical illustrator Ida Dox, allowed the bullet path to seem outside the width of Kennedy’s spine. That this entrance was at the level of the first rib, and the first rib was not depicted, on this or on any other of the exhibits created for the medical panel, is also suspicious.

But Canning was not to be outdone. Canning held that Kennedy was leaning forward 14 degrees compared to the street when he received the back wound and that a proper analysis of his wounds and a proper analysis of his body position at frame 190 of the Zapruder film indicated the bullet was descending 4 degrees as it passed through his body. This, of course, directly contradicted the professional opinions of the doctors, who said the bullet passed upwards in his body. Canning held, furthermore, that when one added in the 3 degree slope of the street to the 14 of the forward lean and the 4 of the descent within the body one could project back 21 degrees from the point of impact to establish the location of the shooter. Not surprisingly, he said this was just below the sniper’s nest. By deciding that Kennedy was leaning forward 14 degrees from the street and then adding the slope of the street on top of it, of course, Canning had testified that Kennedy was leaning forward 17 degrees from vertical at frame Z-190. This was far less than the 31 degrees offered by the forensic pathology panel but was still far more than was evident in the Zapruder film.

If you're having trouble grasping this, it's no wonder. There were two interpretations of Kennedy's wounds  and body position put forth in major disagreement with each other. One interpretation came from nine prominent doctors and presented Kennedy leaning forward 31 degrees before he was shot, and the other interpretation came from a man with no medico-legal background whatsoever, who re-arranged the wounds and re-positioned the body to come up with something more acceptable to the committee.

That Canning's report was a confusing mess is easily demonstrated. When depicting Kennedy's wound locations he presents Figure II-13, which is the same as the anterior view of Exhibit F-376 above. This depicts a bullet entrance above Kennedy's first rib, and an exit slightly below it just above the level of the first rib. Amazingly, however, in the text of the report he tells a different story. When discussing the back wound, he writes "the back wound was located at a point 4.4 cm to the right of and 1.1 cm above Kennedy's neck wound at the time of the shot. The bullet was moving from right to left by 18 degrees and downward by 4 degrees relative to Kennedy if he were sitting erect".  When discussing the single-bullet theory, he explains further "Kennedy's neck wound was 1.1 cm below the first thoracic vertebra." What? Is it really possible that Canning didn't know that the first rib was at the level of the first thoracic vertebra? Why else would he depict the bullet entrance above the rib on the drawing, and then admit it was actually at the same level as the rib in the text? And why else would he depict the exit just above the level of this rib in the drawing, and then claim it was 1.1 cm below this level in the text? Someone was pulling a fast one, or simply screwing up big time.

Where’s Jackie?

When one compares Canning's depiction of the single-bullet theory to the Zapruder film one discovers another reason to doubt not only the single-bullet theory as proposed, but his commitment to the truth. As stated, by moving the single-bullet theory to Z-190 from the Warren Commission’s estimation of Z-210—Z-225, the HSCA had not only increased the vertical trajectory from the sniper's nest, but the right to left trajectory of the bullet entering the limo. This forced them to re-assess Connally's position in the limousine.  In order to explain how he could be hit in the armpit by a bullet exiting Kennedy’s throat, Canning decided Connally was sitting near the middle of the limousine, turned to his right. This contradicted Connally’s testimony that after the first shot, he tried to turn to his right but couldn’t see the President, and was starting to turn to his left when hit.  A man in the position Canning proposed for Connally could see the President quite easily when turned to his right, and would never have turned to his left in hopes of a better view.  

Upon close inspection, it seems clear that Canning paid little attention to the Zapruder film when preparing this drawing.  In the film, not only is Connally closer to the door than depicted in the trajectory drawing, but his torso is turned further to its right. A bullet hitting Connally at the angle determined by Canning, it follows, would probably have pierced his heart, and exited his left side.  If Canning had studiously compared the Z-frames to the drawing  he would also have noticed that Jacqueline Kennedy is in the film at Connally’s left, but that the only way she could be at his left in the drawing would be if she were hanging over the left side of the car.  Since a viewing of this sequence reveals she was sitting against the back of her seat, the only logical conclusion to be made is that Connally was closer to the door than depicted.

A photo taken a few minutes before Z-190, but from a similar angle, supports this conclusion.  As it depicts Jackie Kennedy sitting considerably inward from her side of the car, but still outside of Connally, it suggests that Connally was sitting in a similar position in Z-190.  If one can look at Canning's exhibit and visualize Connally sliding back to the position depicted in this photo, moreover, then one can see how the backwards trajectory through Kennedy’s neck on to the sniper's nest would pivot to his left, right off the face of the school book depository and right onto the face of the Dal-Tex Building.

It gets worse. When one looks closer at the drawing, which was entered into evidence as Exhibit F-144 and re-printed in the final report the next year as Figure II-24, one can see that the line supposedly leading to the sniper’s nest actually leads back to the far east corner of the school book depository, approximately 5 feet from the sniper's nest. This means that if Connally was even one inch closer to the door than depicted in the drawing then the rearward projection of his wounds through Kennedy would miss the school book depository altogether and point accusingly back towards the Dal-Tex Building. Although the wound locations and their relative positions within the limousine were purportedly determined independently, and then projected back towards the sniper's location, the incredible coincidence that this trajectory just so happened to point to the corner makes me suspect that the original trajectories did in fact point towards the Dal-Tex Building, and that Canning subsequently moved Connally further and further inwards from the door until the trajectory from his back wound location through Kennedy’s neck reached the school book depository. Call me paranoid if you like. But there's nothing about Canning's work for the HSCA that remotely inspires trust.

In fact, it inspires mucho mistrust. Canning's drawing reminds me of an earlier drawing used to support the single-bullet theory. In his 1966 book, Our Murdered Presidents, a book supporting the Warren Report and its single-bullet theory, writer Stewart M. Brooks reprinted an early cartoon depiction of the shooting. This Boston Globe cartoon inaccurately depicted the Texas School Book Depository, on the northwest corner of Houston and Elm, in the actual location of the Dal-Tex Building, on the northeast corner of Houston and Elm. Brooks thus misled his readers into believing the Warren Commission's purported single-bullet shot came from directly behind Kennedy and Connally. Now, was this just a dumb mistake?? Or was Brooks deliberately deceiving his readers, knowing full well that the Dal-Tex location was the more "logical" source for a shot striking both men on the right sides of their bodies? Call me paranoid if you like. But I'm not so sure these innocent mistakes are "innocent."

The Smoking Spine?

The realization that Baden's Exhibit F-58 misrepresented the location of Kennedy's back wound, and moved it further from the spine, led me to wonder just how a bullet entering a back within two inches of the middle of a grown man’s spine can exit from the middle of his throat without striking his spine. Since there was NO damage to the nose of the purported magic bullet, the slightest tick of a transverse process destroys the single-bullet theory. Someone needs to show us then how the proposed magic bullet made its way through Kennedy’s body without striking any bone.  Every time a single-bullet theorist such as Arlen Specter makes an appearance the audience should start chanting “spine…spine…” until he deals with this problem. I’m almost serious. 

Now it's not as if Specter, when developing his theory, was unaware of this problem. Pathologists consulted for an 11-24-63 article for the Associated Press had claimed that any bullet entering or exiting near the Adam's Apple would "probably" have "struck the spinal cord." When taking the testimony of Dr. Malcolm Perry in March 1964, moreover, Specter asked Perry about his initial speculation Kennedy's throat wound and head wound were caused by one bullet. To this, Perry replied "Since I observed only two wounds in my cursory examination, it would have necessitated the missile striking probably a bony structure and being deviated in its course in order to account for these two wounds...It required striking the spine." Well, if Dr. Perry thought a bullet entering the middle of  Kennedy's throat and exiting the right side of his head might very well have hit his spine, shouldn't Specter have considered the likelihood a bullet on the opposite right to left trajectory would similarly strike his spine?

So, why didn't he? Was he afraid of what he'd find?  Both Dr. John Nichols in the seventies, and Dr. David Mantik in the nineties, studied the anatomy of the neck, and the trajectory of the bullet through Kennedy's neck, and concluded that the bullet, should it have entered the entrance described in the autopsy report, and exited the exit described in the autopsy report, would have struck his spine. This is so readily apparent, in fact, that one of the first articles on the president's wounds, by Frank Carey for the Associated Press, noted: "Pathologists here speculated that President Kennedy's spinal cord and some vital nerve tracts near the base of his brain may have been badly damaged by the bullet that killed him on Friday...the Washington pathologists said that if the neck wound was near the Adam's Apple, which is on the mid-line of the neck, the bullet probably struck the spinal cord, which runs up to the brain via the back of the neck, also at the mid-line. They said a bullet entering the body near the Adam's Apple--or leaving it at that point--could also plow into vital nerve channels at the base of the brain."

When I looked at this issue myself, I just couldn’t find a way for the bullet to squeak through.  Although some single-assassin theorist trajectories begin above T1, they nevertheless entail that the bullet passed the spine at T1, a level where the spine is considerably wider than it is higher up on the neck (even when one ignores the problematic first rib). From photos and x-rays and from the HSCA’s Exhibit F-58, I was able to estimate that the spine at T1 is 60% the width of the neck above it.  As my neck is approximately 5 inches wide, I estimated that Kennedy’s spine was 3 inches wide at T1. This means that it extended 1.5 inches across the midline.  Since the spine is slightly more than halfway between the back wound and the throat wound, however, this means that, even if the middle of the bullet entrance (which was ¼ inch wide) was 2 inches to the right of the midline the bullet would strike the spine at just less than one inch from the midline, a half inch or so in from the tip of T1. If the bullet entered closer to the spine—by my analysis the entrance was roughly 1 ½ inches from the midline of the spine--then the bullet would have struck the spine at a point more than ¾ of an inch in from the tip.  The width of the spine at T1 alone, therefore, even without the problematic first rib, necessitates that the bullet passed either above or below this level. But if the bullet entered at T-1 and passed above this level, the bullet would not be likely to exit at the T1 level of Kennedy's throat, as described by the doctors and demonstrated by the autopsy photos.

Which means the only way to make the single-bullet theory work is to bend it like Canning and disregard the medical experts and assert that the bullet entered above T1 and passed slightly above T1 and the first rib en route to an exit at approximately the T1 level. This has its own set of problems, however. A bullet passing just over T1 would pass at C7. In 2012, at a shopping mall, I noticed that within a series of booths set up to welcome runners returning from a 10k race for charity there were two chiropractors, and that each of them had a model spine set up to advertise his wares. I inspected these spines and spoke to these chiropractors, and they both confirmed without any hesitation whatsoever that there was "no way" a bullet could pass between the transverse processes of C7 and T1 without striking bone. (This confirmed a point I'd made years before with single-assassin theorist John McAdams, who'd repeatedly claimed a bullet could have passed on such a trajectory, and that he'd demonstrated this many times with a dowel.) In any event, this suggests that, for the bullet to pass over T1 without incident, it would have to pass the spine at C6 or higher--inches above the level of the trajectory proposed by the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel.

If there’s some reason to believe Kennedy’s spine at T1 is not as wide as I’ve ventured, however, or if there is some reason to believe that the bullet entered higher than C7 and just missed striking bone, I’d appreciate someone demonstrating just how this occurred. Similarly, if someone can come up with a reason to believe Kennedy was bent over at the moment of impact, as depicted in HSCA Exhibit F-46 (only with a higher back wound), then maybe the single-bullet theory can be defended.  

Even then, however, there will still be significant problems with this fantastic theory, reviled the world over, that some nevertheless claim as a “fact.”

The Speed Trap

The testimony of the HSCA's wound ballistics expert, Larry Sturdivan, is that the first bullet to strike Kennedy was traveling over 1700 feet/second as it passed through his neck. Later, in his 2005 book, The JFK Myths, he increased this "probable velocity" to somewhere between 2045 feet/second and 1780 feet/second. This bullet was purported to have struck only soft tissue, and done little damage to the neck. And yet, Dr. Gary Ordog, in his book Management of Gunshot Wounds, notes that the mortality rate for high-velocity gunshot wounds to the neck is over 50%. He explains: “Vascular injury caused by missile wounds from bullets moving faster than 1,000 feet/second has been shown to occur by neat shearing of the vessel without stretching it first, as occurs with low-velocity missiles. This is followed by cavitation that damages a more extensive area of the blood vessel, possibly extending for at least 20 mm on each side of the bullet’s path.” He further explains that “Cavitation stretches the smaller blood vessels, shearing and rupturing them as well as nerves and even bone.”  He later concludes: "In the author's experience, up to 100% of patients with high-velocity bullet wounds of the neck have major structural damage requiring surgery."

Should one think that Ordog was some ill-informed civilian spouting his personal impressions, one should know that in support of his statements he cited a study performed by Sturdivan's employer, Edgewood Arsenal, and published in the Archives of Surgery in August 1970. This study concludes "The high velocity missile neatly shears the arterial wall, but the apparent explosive effect of the temporary cavity causes 'blunt' trauma in a crushing manner." A chart prepared for this study, moreover, shows that a high-velocity bullet just missing an artery will nevertheless cause breaks in the artery, even when traveling as slow as 1,000 fps.

Now compare those descriptions of the damage one might expect to find with what Kennedy's autopsist, Dr. James J. Humes, told the Warren Commission he actually found. From his March 16, 1964 testimony: "We examined in the region of this incised surgical wound which was the tracheotomy wound and we saw that there was some bruising of the muscles of the neck in the depths of this wound as well as laceration or defect in the trachea...it is our opinion that the missile traversed the neck and slid between these muscles and other vital structures with a course in the neck such as the carotid artery, the jugular vein and other structures because there was no massive hemorrhage or other massive injury in this portion of the neck."

While high-velocity bullets "shear" and "rupture" blood vessels in the neck, the bullet traversing Kennedy's neck was reported to have only "slid between" these vessels. While Dr. Ordog noted that up to 100% of those receiving a high-velocity gunshot wound to the neck have "major structural damage requiring surgery" Dr. Humes claimed there was "no massive hemorrhage or other massive injury" to Kennedy's neck. Hmmm...  

Okay, you might be thinking, this was just the opinion of one of the autopsists, Dr. Humes. Perhaps Dr. Humes had missed something, and the other doctors disagreed and hadn't bothered to correct him. But this wasn't just Humes' speaking for the others... In 1965, Dr. Finck wrote his superior, General Blumberg, and told him not only that "I examined the tracheotomy skin wound and the trachea and did not find evidence of a bullet wound," but that all three autopsists had examined the tracheotomy wound and that "None of us noticed a bullet wound along its course." Double hmmm...

And to close the circle, when discussing the throat wound with the HSCA's Andy Purdy on August 17, 1977, Dr. Boswell is reported to have claimed he was "certain...no major blood vessel (was) damaged by the path of the missile." Triple hmmm...

When one considers that Dr. Charles Carrico, the emergency room doctor who first examined Kennedy, also noted only minor damage to his throat, telling the HSCA that he'd observed "some modest amount of hematoma in the recesses to the endo right of the trachea" and that Malcolm Perry, the Parkland surgeon who performed Kennedy's tracheotomy, not only confirmed Carrico's conclusion there was little damage to the neck, but initially described the exit wound as being only 3-5 mm wide--smaller than the bullets fired by Oswald’s rifle--well, then it becomes pretty darned clear that something is just wrong with the supposed single-bullet "fact". It just doesn't add up. The bullet creating Kennedy's throat wound--if it was a bullet--was almost certainly not traveling at a high velocity.

The more one digs, the clearer this becomes. Beyond testifying to his observing a small hole in the throat, and a lack of damage to the blood vessels, Dr. Perry told the Warren Commission that, before it was obscured by a tracheotomy incision, he had observed a “small ragged laceration of the trachea on the anterior lateral right side.” A small laceration. 

He later specified just how small. In 1978, when contacted by the HSCA and interviewed by its counsel Andy Purdy, he claimed that the laceration "was on the right side of the trachea, and that it was incomplete, and I don't remember whether it was a third or a quarter of the circumference..." 

As you might have guessed, this makes little sense should Kennedy have actually been hit by a high-velocity bullet. According to Dr. D.F.N. Dixon in Management of Gunshot Wounds, “Direct impact on larynx or trachea from bullets fired from high velocity military rifles or carbines will produce severe damage from their high kinetic energy, tumbling, or cavitation effect.” Furthermore, Dr.s Kenneth and Roy Swan in their book Gunshot Wounds: Pathophysiology and Management note that "Gunshot injuries of the larynx and trachea are infrequently seen in emergency rooms" due to such injuries usually being associated with "fatal exsanguination (bleeding) from injured common carotid arteries and internal jugular veins."  

Surgery in World War II, a book released by the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army in 1962, confirms this harsh assessment. A chapter written by a former surgeon of the Fifth Army, which fought Italian forces in Sicily, reports that when treating neck wounds he needed to effect "Debridement (the removal of dead and damaged tissue) of all structures" as "Multiple involvement was the rule because of the anatomy of the area." And it's not as if this understanding was restricted to military surgeons;  Earl Ubell, Science Editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, described Kennedy's wounds on 11-23-63 in a manner suggesting he knew something of the destruction brought by a high-velocity bullet's slicing through a neck. He wrote "The bullet that crashed through President Kennedy's neck and head probably took with it blood vessels and nerves leaving his entire body stunned and helpless." 

From this it seems likely that, in 1964, when the Warren Commission first released the medical reports and testimony regarding President Kennedy, there were many military and emergency room doctors, and even science editors for daily newspapers, who were aware of the single-bullet theory's speeding problem, who opted to say nothing.

It seems possible, however, that there are many other doctors, including experienced forensic pathologists such as Michael Baden, who are currently unaware of this problem. In 1980, during a seminar on forensic pathology and homicide investigation in Toronto, Ontario, Dr. Baden admitted that "less than a tenth of 1%" of the gunshot wounds studied by his New York coroner's office were by "military rifles," and that almost all the rest came from handguns or shotguns. He admitted further that Kennedy was killed "by rifle type ammunition which we know very little about."  

While one might assume that thousands of doctors with WW II experience would know more than Baden, and would have been able to assist the HSCA, this is not necessarily true. Surgery in World War II confirms the rarity of Kennedy's wounds. Among its graphs and charts it reveals that intra-cranial head and neck wounds each accounted for but 2% of the wounds seen at the hospital level, and that rifle fire accounted for but 5% of the wounds studied. From this one can estimate that during WW II a U.S. doctor would see someone with a head wound created in the same manner as Kennedy's was purportedly created, oh, once every thousand patients or so, and someone with a neck wound created in the same manner as Kennedy's was purportedly created, also about once every thousand patients or so. This brings up the additional question of why neither the Warren Commission nor the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel consulted with doctors who'd seen the effects of Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition on soldiers, and instead used doctors affiliated with the U.S. military and/or large research facilities dependent on government grants.

Should one think it unlikely that a layman as myself should recognize this problem with the single-bullet theory bullet's velocity, when so many supposed experts, including those on the HSCA's Forensic Pathology Panel, have looked the other way, one can take comfort that one of Kennedy's emergency room doctors, Dr. Ronald Jones, mentioned this problem long before I. When asked by Arlen Specter if the throat wound could have been an exit of an M/C rifle bullet, he told the Warren Commission: "If this were an exit wound, you would think that it exited at a very low velocity...to the point that you might think that this bullet barely made it through the soft tissues and just enough to drop out of the skin on the opposite side."  

This member, if it was but one member, may have been Baden himself. On 8-15-78, barely three weeks before he testified on Kennedy's wounds, Baden testified before the HSCA on Dr. Martin Luther King's fatal wound. Dr. King had also been killed by a high-velocity rifle bullet; it entered his right cheek, smashed through his jaw bone, re-entered his neck, smashed through his spine and was found beneath the skin on the left side of his back. During his questioning, Dr. Baden was asked by Congressman Sawyer if a high-velocity bullet would cause "extensive damage and severe damage to tissue out beyond its track because of the lines of force it creates within the body." Dr. Baden's answer is most informative; after discussing the bones actually hit by the bullet, he added "If the bullet continued through the spine, it would have severed the spinal cord. If it didn't continue through the spinal canal and sever the spinal cord, the lines of force from the impact would have severely damaged the spinal cord without even touching it; and much of the extensive hemorrhaging and destruction of the tissues in the face and neck area of Dr. King were due to the lines of force that you allude to, sir."

The wound as reported by Carrico, Perry and the autopsy doctors was just not severe enough to have been created by a high-velocity rifle bullet. A WW II-era report on the Bougainville Campaign, found online, describes a dozen or so chest wounds caused by 6.5 mm ammunition. The average wound of exit was many times that of the average wound of entrance, with several more than 10 times as large. While the entrance wound in Kennedy’s back is believed to have been larger than the exit in his throat, I found no instances of thoracic wound entrances being larger than their exits, and only one instance where the entrance was more than one third the size of its exit. While these shots were virtually all at closer range than the shots striking Kennedy, and while all these shots were fatal, and therefore automatically more severe than the one striking Kennedy, the small size of the exit in Kennedy’s throat still seems curiously disproportionate. By way of example, one man shot by a sniper from 150 yards, more than twice the length of the shot from the sniper’s nest to Kennedy at Z-224, was found to have a 3 cm by 1.5 cm exit wound on his chest, more than ten times the size of the small wound observed in Kennedy’s throat. 

Yes, the wound was just too small. While some, including Dr. Lattimer, have noted that bullets exiting from skin covered by tight clothing will often create an exit smaller than the width of the bullet, they fail to comprehend or acknowledge that such an exit, often referred to as a "shored" or "supported" exit, leaves behind a tell-tale sign. According to Dr. Vincent J. M. Di Maio, in his 1992 book Gunshot Wounds, and as demonstrated online in Milicent Cranor's article Trajectory of a Lie, shored exit wounds are "characterized by a broad irregular band of abrasion of the skin around the exit. In such wounds the skin is reinforced, or "shored," by a firm surface at the instant the bullet exits...Shored wounds have very wide, irregular abrasion collars and when dry may simulate contact wounds." 

Now this is nothing new. In 1976, Abdullah Fatteh, in his book Medicolegal Investigation of Gunshot Wounds, noted: "If a bullet exits the skin without any resistance other than the tissue resistance, an exit hole with subsidiary tears results...If, however, the bullet exits from the skin against pressure from a firm or hard object in contact with the skin, the appearances of the exit wounds are different...If the object in contact with the skin is hard and the bullet exits against considerable resistance from it, the exit wound may not only be round but it may show a rim of abrasion in its margins. Such exit wounds could easily be mistaken for entrance wounds. Exit wounds of this nature may be seen when the victim is lying on the ground or standing against a wall when and the exited bullet is stopped by the ground or the wall. They may also be caused when the exited bullet hits a belt, buckle, tough clothing or a similar object in tight contact with the skin." Notice that Fatteh says such a wound "may" show a rim of abrasion, not that one can expect it to show such a rim. 

A 1981 article by Dr. Douglas Dixon in the Journal of Forensic Sciences entitled The Characteristics of Shored Exit Wounds, however, proclaimed: "If the exit wound is "shored" or abutted by a firm support such as clothing, furniture, or building materials, then the exit wound may take on appearances of an entrance wound, such as a circular defect with an abraded margin. This can occur with contact, close range, or distant shots. 92% of shored exit wounds in one study had a round or ovoid defect, and all had some degree of abrasion. The degree of shoring abrasion increased directly with the KE of the projectile and the rigidity of the shoring material." Notice that Dixon concludes that all such wounds have some degree of abrasion and that the abrasion is related to the amount of energy released in the tissue and the rigidity of the shoring material. 

A September 1983 article by Dr. Josephino Aguilar in the Journal of Forensic Medical Pathology, moreover, shared this conclusion. Aguilar concluded that one could distinguish shored wounds of exit from entrance wounds by the “scalloped or punched-out abrasion collar and sharply contoured skin in between the radiating skin lacerations marginating the abrasion.”

These studies then support Di Maio's subsequent claim that abrasion rings are "characteristic" of such wounds, and would most certainly be expected at the shored exit of a military rifle bullet.

This appears to be the modern consensus. The "abrasion ring problem" discussed by Cranor is reinforced by numerous other textbooks and articles, which refer to "supported" wounds--Lattimer's term for the small exit created by the tie--and "shored wounds", the more commonly used term, interchangeably. The chapter on gunshot wounds in the Encyclopedia of Forensic Sciences (2000) by Stefan Pollak and Pekka J Sauko, for example, claims: "Occasionally, the margins of the exit wound are abraded (shored) when a firm object (e.g., tight-fitting clothes, floor, wall or back of a chair) is pressed against the body at the site of the exiting projectile (Figures 3c and 5c). Under such circumstances, the skin around the exit is abraded by the supporting surface. In contrast to the “original” abrasion ring around the entry wound, in “shored” or “supported” exits the area of abrasion is not concentric, but irregular or lopsided and often disproportionately large [17]." Notice that the "rim of abrasion" Fatteh once said "may" be seen is now to be expected.

The doctors describing Kennedy's throat wound at Parkland described a small hole, with no noticeable abrasion ring. The autopsy doctors also failed to observe this abrasion ring. And there is no abrasion ring apparent in the autopsy photos. Even the HSCA pathology panel, which took Lattimer's cue and believed the throat wound to be a shored wound of exit, noted that the margins of what they took to be the exit wound along the bottom of the tracheotomy incision in the photos were only "slightly denuded and reddish-brown." They failed to note an abrasion ring. It follows then that there is no evidence the small hole in Kennedy's throat was a shored or supported (Lattimer's term) exit, and that the evidence, in fact, suggests it was not. The report of the HSCA pathology panel noted: "Several panel members are also of the opinion that an unshored exit wound of a missile of comparable size and velocity might be similar if the missile were not misshapen by striking a substantial bone within the body." This means the bulk of the panel was not of this opinion, and believed the shoring of the throat wound to be the only logical excuse for the small size of this exit, should the exit have been for the bullet recovered at the hospital, and fired from Oswald's rifle. This suggests that the small size of the throat wound is, in the eyes of modern forensic science, an unsolved mystery.

When I pored through forensics journals looking for any record of a bullet traveling a trajectory like that purported for the so-called "magic bullet," I found further reason to doubt. The October 1975 Journal of Forensic Sciences, for example, describes the death of a woman after she was struck in the throat, in the same location as Kennedy’s throat wound, with a .25 caliber jacketed slug similar in width to the bullets fired from Oswald’s rifle. This bullet traveled on a similar trajectory as the purported trajectory through Kennedy, albeit in the opposite direction. This bullet was recovered from the right transverse process of the 7^th cervical spine, the area of the spine purportedly damaged by the passage of the bullet through Kennedy.  However, even though this bullet was accidentally discharged from a pen gun and was traveling at a much slower speed than the bullet purportedly traversing Kennedy, it severed the woman’s right common carotid artery in passage, and brought about her death.

Intriguingly, the article was co-written by Dr. Werner Spitz, a defender of the single-bullet theory, who served on both the Rockefeller Commission's medical panel and the HSCA's forensic pathology panel. Dr. Spitz needs to explain then how the supposedly high-velocity bullet striking Kennedy could traverse his neck and do so little damage, while a much slower bullet traveling on the same trajectory was so lethal. Until that time, there’s no reason we should take the single-bullet theory seriously as a theory, let alone accept it as a "fact".  

Connally’s Chest Wounds

When one looks at the presumed trajectory of the bullet striking Connally, one finds yet another reason to doubt the single-bullet theory. (I know. I know. This is reason number umpteen.  But I’m trying to put this garbage of a theory where garbage belongs, in a trash heap, NEVER to be recycled.) While a bullet traveling a flat trajectory from the entrance on Connally’s back might indeed have caused a glancing blow to his fifth rib, and have exited without penetrating his lung, the fact is that the bullet exited from just below Connally's nipple at a much wider part of his chest, and that it, to quote Dr. Robert Shaw's testimony before the Warren Commission, "stripped away" "about 10 centimeters of the fifth rib starting at the, about the mid-axillary line and going to the anterior axillary line." While the HSCA’s Dr. Charles Petty shared Dr. Shaw's impression of the wound and theorized that the bullet destroyed all this rib without ever piercing Connally's lung, this is extremely hard to believe when one looks at cross-sections of the chest and notes the entrance and exit locations on Connally. As Connally was turned to his right when struck, moreover, and as the bullet doing the striking was believed to have come from his right, he was simply not in the proper alignment to have the bullet slide along his right rib, whether on the outside or the inside of the rib. Of course, it also makes little sense for 10 cm of rib to be "stripped away" (as opposed to "fractured") by a bullet striking just a glancing blow. From this we can see why the rest of the HSCA panel rejected Petty's proposal. But this raises a dilemma for single-bullet theorists, far and wide. Unless one is to believe that the initial impact of the bullet in the armpit broke the rib into multiple pieces clear up to the point where the bullet made its exit, one is forced to concede that the bullet, having already passed through Kennedy, hit Connally’s rib upon entrance, hit it again upon exit, blasted through his wrist and then penetrated his thigh, all the while suffering no more damage than one fired into cotton.

The Warren Commission hired Dr. Alfred Olivier to see if this could be. Olivier and the staff at Edgewood Arsenal, fired Mannlicher-Carcano bullets through simulated necks, simulated chests, and actual cadavers’ wrists. He concluded the single-bullet theory was viable. He failed to simulate the wounds all at once, however.  In 1967, CBS hired him to conduct a more thorough test.  On the CBS program The Warren Report a bullet was shown passing through a simulated neck, a simulated chest, and a simulated wrist only to bounce off a simulated thigh. In a televised interview, Olivier admitted that, in Connally's "case, the bullet passed along the rib, fractured the rib, throwing fragments into the lung.  Of course, we have no rib here, but it still simulates passing through the flesh."  He went on to state that even without simulating the damage to Connally's rib, which would have greatly slowed the bullet prior to its even striking the wrist, "In some cases, it passed through the wrist; in other cases it lodged in the wrist."  Amazingly, CBS declared the tests a success anyhow, insisting that the bullet would only have needed a little more velocity to penetrate the thigh.  In 2003, the Discovery Channel created a similar simulation, with similar results. Once again the bullet, without being asked to strike any simulated ribs at the exit point of a simulated chest, bounced off a simulated thigh and the program declared its simulation a success.

In 1967, in the book Where Death Delights, Dr. Milton Helpern, a man who had supervised 10,000 autopsies on gun shot victims, explained why these tests failed.  He said:  “The single-bullet theory requires us to believe that this bullet went through seven layers of skin—tough, elastic, resistant skin….In addition to these seven layers of tough, human skin, this bullet passed through other layers of soft tissue, and then these shattered bones!...I just can’t believe that this bullet had the force to do what Mr. Specter and the Commission have demanded of it."

But this wasn’t the only test performed by Olivier to be misrepresented.  In order to “simulate” Connally’s chest wounds and the proposed glancing blow off his rib for the Warren Commission, Olivier arranged for thirteen sedated goats to be shot.  In only one of these attempts did the bullet glance off the bone as proposed. The recovered bullet from this attempt, furthermore, was far more damaged than the magic bullet, even though it had struck a smaller bone. After Dr. Cyril Wecht brought this up before the HSCA, HSCA special counsel I. Charles Mathews asked their ballistics expert Larry Sturdivan for an explanation.  Sturdivan testified: “Exhibit 853 was a bullet that has ricocheted from the rib of a goat carcass, as Dr. Wecht indicated.  However, let’s remember that the goat, which is roughly 100 pounds, is much, much smaller than Governor Connally and, therefore, the bullet passed through a relatively small amount of tissue before it hit the bone, and therefore, lost correspondingly less velocity. So we would have to say that the striking velocity on that bullet, CE 853, was much in excess of the striking velocity on Governor Connally, even if the bullet had passed through nothing before it hit Governor Connally.”  That Sturdivan was spinning in order to shut down speculation was made clear by his statements moments later.  After being asked for the difference in velocity between a bullet striking Kennedy and then Connally versus one directly striking Connally, he replied: “this bullet if only encountering a few inches of soft tissue would go through losing almost no velocity, 100 feet per second or thereabouts.” Thus, in Sturdivan’s expert opinion, the inch or less of flesh in Connally’s armpit overlying his rib would do more to slow a bullet’s velocity than the 5 ½ inches of muscle and tissue in Kennedy’s back and throat! The wounds are seemingly from different worlds.  And at war with one another.

The absurdity of this war was reinforced by Sturdivan in his 2005 book The JFK Myths. In Table III he relates the probable speed of the magic bullet at seven steps of its voyage.  Sturdivan proposes that the bullet was traveling at 2160 fps (plus or minus 30 fps) when fired, 2015 fps (plus or minus 30 fps) upon impact with Kennedy's neck (and yes, he writes "neck"), 1830 fps (plus or minus 50 fps) upon impact with Connally's back, 1450-800 fps (plus or minus 100 fps) while penetrating Connally's rib, 500 fps (plus or minus 100 fps) upon impact with Connally's wrist, and 135 fps (plus or minus 20 fps) upon impact with Connally's thigh. This is PREPOSTEROUS. Amazingly, he actually proposes the bullet lost more velocity in Connally's back before penetrating his rib (380 fps plus or minus 100 fps)  than from passing through 5 1/2 inches of Kennedy's neck (185 fps plus or minus 50 fps) or shattering Connally's wrist (365 fps plus or minus 20 fps).  

If you're wondering how a supposed expert could dream up anything so ludicrous, well, you need to look at Table II in Sturdivan's book. In Table II, he notes the speeds at which bullets like those used in the assassination rifle will deform. Here, Sturdivan relates that such a bullet traveling point first will deform on bone (such as Connally's rib) at 1700 fps and that such a bullet traveling sideways will deform on bone at 1400 fps. As the magic bullet was purportedly traveling sideways as it impacted Connally's rib, and emerged almost unscathed, Sturdivan had to find a way to lower its velocity from the 1830 fps or so it would be traveling upon exit from Kennedy's neck. So he simply decided that Connally's back flesh substantially slowed the bullet before it impacted on Connally's rib around 1450 fps. There were no tests to support this conjecture, at least none mentioned in his book. He simply decided. 

No, that's not quite fair. In Appendix B of his book, Sturdivan offers an explanation for his conclusion. It's an extremely weak explanation, but an explanation nonetheless. You see, Sturdivan realized that the bullet traveled approximately 25-30 cm through Connally's back and chest, and was purported to have destroyed 10 cm of Connally's rib. He then assumed from this, on no apparent basis, that this 10 cm represented the middle third of the bullet trajectory, and that, therefore, the bullet traveled as much as 10 cm or 4 inches through Connally's body before striking his rib. Apparently, it never occurred to him to look at the entrance location near Connally's armpit, and project 4 inches forward along the trajectory from this entrance. If he had he would have seen that a bullet traveling sideways, as proposed, was on a direct course for the rib, and would have impacted the rib within the first inch or so of its journey.

If you're thinking that Sturdivan is a scientist, and his writings above reproach, you should consider that wound ballistics expert Dr. Martin Fackler, in his testimony in the 1992 ABA mock trial of Oswald, testified that, in his estimation, the bullet exited Connally's rib and struck Connally's wrist at 900 fps. This is almost twice the speed of the bullet traveling 500 fps (plus or minus 100 fps) proposed by Sturdivan, and makes little sense if one considers Sturdivan's approximation that the bullet traversing Connally's chest lost 1200 fps or more in velocity accurate. This not only demonstrates the speculative nature of this "science," but suggests that Sturdivan stealthily cut the velocity of the bullet before it hit the rib, as here proposed. I mean, let's think about it: if the bullet had struck Connally's back at 1830 fps, as proposed by Sturdivan, and struck Connally's wrist still traveling 900 fps, as proposed by Fackler, it would most certainly have struck and penetrated Connally's rib at a speed well over 1400 fps, at a speed at which the rib would have grossly deformed the bullet.

And should one still think my suspicion of Sturdivan unfair, and that he would not have changed his findings to support that the bullet striking Connally could have been as undamaged and as nearly pristine as CE 399, one should consider the testimony of one of the HSCA's experts that "the bullet would begin to deform, if it strikes say, soft tissue, at something--remember, the density of soft tissue is around one, the density of water, and it will begin to deform at something in excess of 2,000 feet per second. In other words, at the muzzle velocity of the Mannlicher-Carcano. If it strikes bone, which is twice as dense, then it would begin to deform nose on at approximately 1,400 feet per second. If the bullet turns sideways, which is a weaker orientation, it will deform down to around 1,000 feet feet per second."

Now, this expert's testimony was clearly at odds with Sturdivan's later assertion that the bullet would not deform if traveling below 1400 fps. And this expert's testimony, if accurate, clearly supports the testimony of Dr. Cyril Wecht that CE 399 would have to have been far more damaged for the single-bullet theory to be credible. And this expert was, furthermore, someone with whom Sturdivan would most certainly have compared notes before deciding the bullet wouldn't deform at 1400 fps. So who was this expert, you ask? Yeah--you guessed it--Larry Sturdivan himself...

The Upside-Down Pyramid

The bruise on the President's lung also raises some questions. When one considers that Dr. Humes told the Warren Commission that the magic bullet did not pierce the President’s lung but that it nevertheless left a 5 cm wide “pyramid-shaped” bruise at the lung’s tip, it should seem obvious that the damage stretched an inch and a half or more below the presumed bullet path. This is a wider bullet path than one would expect. Single-bullet theorists will explain this by insisting that the bruised lung was caused by the temporary cavity created by the supersonic passage of the bullet. They’ll claim this same cavity caused the damage to the transverse process of the first thoracic vertebrae apparent on the x-rays.

But there are severe problems with this.  For one, the ballistics experts of the Warren Commission and HSCA testified that the bullets fired by Mannlicher-Carcano rifles were among the most stable they ever tested, and, as a result, could pass through one man and hit another with relative ease. Unspoken but implicit in their testimony, however, is that these bullets transmit less energy into the surrounding tissue than other bullets of their class and leave a narrower wound track. (This characteristic of Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition was not exactly unnoticed by those who make it their business to notice such things. As far back as 1897, The Columbus Medical Journal noted that "In the Abyssinian campaign of the Italians, the disabling effect of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle of 6.5 millimeters, with which they were armed, was so slight that it was thought that the ammunition had been tampered with: for the natives overcame them with frightful slaughter.") 

A second problem is that, even if a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet was able to create such a cavity, since the bullet would presumably be at the center of this cavity, the temporary cavity would be around 3 inches wide. A study by the Biophysics Division of the Army's Chemical Warfare Laboratory published in Military Medicine in 1957 correlates the size of temporary cavities to permanent cavities and demonstrates that a bullet creating a 3 inch wide temporary cavity would be likely to leave a permanent cavity 15mm wide or better. When one considers that the passage of this particular bullet was impossible to probe at autopsy, left the major vessels of the neck unharmed, and left only a 3-5 mm round hole upon exit, it seems highly unlikely such a large cavity was created. 

Ab even bigger problem is that lung is, according to the dozens of articles I’ve read on wound ballistics, among the least dense tissues in the body, and, as a result, “little energy transfer occurs, and temporary cavities are small.”  Michael S. Owen Smith made this lack of lung density and how it relates to the Kennedy assassination breathtakingly clear in the 1988 book Management of Gunshot Wounds.  He said “The thorax behaves differently from the abdomen because it is largely filled with air owing to the large volume of the chest that is occupied by the lungs. Therefore, since the tissues are not mainly liquid-like, the conditions for the formation of the temporary cavity are not met. The heart and great vessels, which are filled with fluid, are extremely susceptible to damage from cavitation, and such injuries from a rifle bullet are fatal.  The lung itself is remarkably resistant to damage from high-velocity bullets.  Indeed, it is true to say that the lung and the skin are the two tissues that are most resistant to damage from cavitation.”  Hmmm. 

There is still another problem with the argument Kennedy’s lungs were bruised by a temporary cavity and it is that, if one is to assume there was a 3” temporary cavity around the bullet as it passed through Kennedy, one should assume there was an equally large or greater cavity around the bullet as it passed though Connally. 

Let me explain. Connally’s doctor testified that the bullet passed within an inch of Connally’s heart. While my study of the trajectories indicates this wasn’t so, that it was more like 3 inches, it also shows that for the bullet to have exited where it did from Connally’s lung, it would have to have passed within an inch or so of Connally’s liver. (The lower lung where the bullet made its exit sits atop the upper dome of the liver like a sailor’s cap sits atop your head.) This bullet is also purported to have struck Connally's back and fifth rib at an angle, and to have traveled sideways through his body along his rib until it exploded outwards, leaving a gaping hole in his chest. 

There's a problem with this. According to a June 1990 article in the British Journal of Surgery by Dr.s G. J. Cooper and J. M. Ryan, bullets traveling sideways impart more than three times the energy into the surrounding tissue as bullets traveling straight ahead. The reasons for this are explained in 1997's Ballistic Trauma, by Dr.s Jeanine Vellema and Hendrik Johannes Scholtz.

"The greater the angle of yaw when a bullet strikes a body, the greater the retardation of the bullet and consequently the greater the amount of kinetic energy transfer. This explains why unstable projectiles in flight cause larger entrance wounds on impact with the body. Once the bullet enters the denser medium of tissue, its yaw angle increases progressively until the bullet becomes completely unstable, tumbles and rotates by 180 degrees, and ends up traveling base forward. Tumbling of the bullet in tissue increases the presented cross-sectional area of the bullet, resulting in more direct tissue destruction and increased retarding (drag) forces, with consequently greater kinetic energy transfer and larger temporary cavity formation. The sudden increase of the drag force also puts strain on the bullet, which may lead to the break up of the bullet and more tissue destruction."

Now plug this in to the official story. According to the HSCA ballistics expert Larry Sturdivan, the bullet struck Kennedy in the back at 1800 feet per second, met minimal resistance, struck Connally at 1700 feet per second, and blasted out his rib at 1,100 to 1,300 feet per second. This indicates the bullet passed nearest the liver between 1300 and 1500 feet per second, traveling sideways, creating a temporary cavity much larger than the temporary cavity created in Kennedy's neck. 

Now consider the damage this would do to Connally's liver.

Once again, Michael S. Owen-Smith in the book Management of Gunshot Wounds: “Direct damage from a high velocity missile is catastrophic, because the liver is extremely susceptible to cavitation damage and the resultant pulping of liver tissue is so extensive that most cases are fatal…Liver and spleen are so sensitive to cavitation and shock effects that they may be damaged even when the rifle bullet passes through the chest…Lesser degree of damage from bullets passing close to the liver would result in damage similar to that from low-velocity bullets or blunt injury." No such damage was reported. The Textbook of Military Medicine, put out by the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, moreover, confirms: “Liver, spleen, and kidney are highly vascular, friable organs (that is, the tissues lack elasticity, they tear when they are stretched). Temporary cavitation causes severe tissue disruption...Such injuries are rapidly fatal.” 

Ironically, the fact that Connally survived raises grave doubts about the manner in which Kennedy died.

Ovoid? Oy Vey!

Despite the problems presented by Connally's wounds discussed above, the Warren Commission, in its report, cited the size of Connally's back wound as possible evidence the bullet had first struck Kennedy. This was clearly spin, however. On page 92, the report claims "Because of the small size and clean-cut edges of the wound on the Governor's back, Dr. Robert Shaw concluded that it was an entry wound." Then, on page 109 it claimed "the large wound on the Governor's back would be explained by a bullet which was yawing, although that type of wound might also be accounted for by a tangential striking." The report failed to note that the expert stating that the back wound was large and that the bullet may have been yawing, Dr. Olivier, did so under the impression the back wound was 3 cm in its largest dimension, and that the doctor claiming the back wound was small and a tangential strike, Dr. Shaw, testified that this 3 cm measure was not the actual measurement of the wound, but the measurement made after he'd cut away the damaged skin along its edge.

By the time of the HSCA, unfortunately, the Warren Commission's use of the back wound size as possible evidence had ballooned into its use as conclusive evidence. The HSCA's Dr. Baden, almost certainly under the influence of a November 1974 article by Dr. Lattimer in Medical Times, cited the shape of Connally's back wound as clear-cut evidence for the single-bullet theory. In his testimony before the committee, Dr. Baden testified that "the panel concluded, based on the enlarged nature of the entrance perforation in the Governor's back, that the bullet was wobbling when it struck him and had to have struck something before striking the Governor."

It seems evident, however, that not everyone on his panel concurred. The report of Baden's Forensic Pathology Panel, published the next year, claimed instead that "The panel believes that the ovoid characterization of this wound requires interpretation...One possible interpretation is that the avoid entrance wound, as described, could have resulted from the missile striking the skin surface on a tangential plane...Another possible interpretation of this ovoid wound is that the missile itself, just, prior to striking the body, was out of alignment with its trajectory (due to striking an intervening object). That is to say, it had tumbled slightly before entering the body, thereby creating an elongated defect...The panel, in its evaluation, also considers it important that the shape of the defect in the clothing would have been a more uniformly round hole if the bullet had struck on a tangential plane with the missile aligned with its trajectory. The panel (except for Dr. Wecht) concludes, therefore, that the wound in Governor Connally was probably inflicted by a missile which was not aligned with its trajectory but had yawed or tumbled prior to entry into the Governor."

Baden testified that the panel had concluded that the bullet creating Connally's back wound "had to have struck something before striking the Governor" when the panel, with one exception, had actually concluded that the back wound was "probably" inflicted by a missile which was out of alinement. The panel's report said nothing about this bullet having to have hit something before striking the Governor. Dr. Baden had ballooned this possibility into a fact during his testimony, but his colleagues had failed to back him up on it.

Not that anyone noticed. The HSCA's Final Assassinations Report claimed that Kennedy's and Connally's wounds were "consistent with the possibility that one bullet entered the upper right back of President Kennedy, and, after emerging from the front of the neck, caused all the Governor's wounds...A factor that influenced the panel significantly was the ovoid shape of the wound in the Governor's back, indicating that the bullet had begun to tumble or yaw before entering" because "An ovoid wound is characteristic of one caused by a bullet that has passed through or glanced off an intervening object." 

It seems clear, then, that Dr. Baden had misled the Committee about the significance of this ovoid wound. As previously mentioned, and as discussed in Milicent Cranor's excellent online article, Trajectory of a Lie, Dr. Robert Shaw, Governor Connally's doctor, testified before the Warren Commission in 1964 that Connally's back wound was about 1.5 x 5/8 centimeters (4H104), but that he later removed the damaged skin around this entrance and enlarged it to about 3 cm (6H188). By 1974, however, Dr. Lattimer, noticing that 3 cm was the same size as a 6.5 mm Mannlicher/Carcano bullet traveling sideways, seized upon this second measurement and started claiming in his articles that this was the actual size of the wound. Not surprisingly, he asserted that the size of Connally's wound demonstrated the bullet was traveling sideways and not merely at an angle to Connally's back, as testified to by Shaw. As demonstrated by Cranor, Lattimer let out a big smelly lie in the process.

This, of course, would have been the word of but one sloppy researcher/zealot had Baden and others not fallen under Lattimer's smell/spell. Although Dr. Shaw repeated his claim the wound was really 1.5 x 5/8 cm to an HSCA investigator, and was even quoted on this in the report of Baden's Panel,  Dr. Baden oversold the significance of this ovoid shape in his testimony before the committee and produced a smelly lie of his own in his 1989 book Unnatural Death. While an HSCA report written by Baden records the length of Connally's back scar as 1 1/8 inches (or 2.9 cm), Baden told Unnatural Death's readers the back wound scar was 2 inches long (or 5 cm).

The impact of Lattimer's and Baden's lies has been palpable. In 1992, in the mock trial of Oswald put on by the American Bar Association and televised on Court TV, Dr. Martin Fackler, testifying for the prosecution, repeated the 3 cm lie, and made matters worse by incorrectly testifying, when it was pointed out to him that Dr. Shaw had told the HSCA that the wound was really 1.5 cm, that Dr. Shaw had only changed his recollection "later on." (Dr. Shaw had, in fact, insisted since first asked that the bullet hole was 1.5 cm long, and that the 3 cm measurement on his report reflected not the size of the bullet hole, but the size of the wound after skin had been removed.) Since then, "researchers" (more like single-bullet theory aficionados or Lattimerites) such as Gus Russo and Dale Myers have also misrepresented the back wound as 3 cm or more in their work. Myers, on his website, actually links to an HSCA report to support that the wound was 3 cm, failing to tell his readers that just below the statement by Shaw in this report is another statement, in which Shaw clarifies his earlier statements, and insists the 3 cm measurement was the measurement of the wound after he'd cut away some of Connally's skin.

Not only do these theorists misrepresent the size of Connally's back wound to sell their theory, they miss that the hole on Connally's jacket and shirt were, according to the HSCA, 1.7 x 1.2 cm and 1.3 x .8 cm, respectively, an impossibility if the wound was truly 3 cm wide, as they propose.

While acknowledging this 1.7 cm tear, HSCA ballistics expert Larry Sturdivan, in his 2005 book The JFK Myths, argues that a 1.5-1.7 cm entrance is still ovoid and is therefore still an indication that the bullet struck something--such as a President--before striking Connally. He, as Baden before him, fails to acknowledge that the HSCA determined the defect in Kennedy's jacket was even more ovoid (1 by 1.5 cm) than Connally's jacket (1.7 x 1.2 cm) and that the defect in Kennedy's shirt was also an ovoid .8 x 1.2 cm (to Connally's 1.3 x .8 cm).  He also overlooks that the entrance on Kennedy's back was originally measured at an ovoid .7 x .4 cm and that the entrance on the back of Kennedy’s head was measured at an absolutely ovoid 1.5 x .6 cm.  While the ovoid nature of these entrances could indicate that the bullets were tumbling, they more probably indicate that the bullets entered at an angle, exactly as proposed by Dr. Shaw way back in 1964. 

Still, there's another possibility. Papers by Ronchi and Ugolini (Zacchia, 1980) and Menzies et al (Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1981) found that a bullet wound of abnormal length or width can be taken as an indication that the weapon firing the projectile was equipped with a silencer. This assertion has been repeated, furthermore, in books such as 1997's Ballistic Trauma, by South African forensic pathologists Jeanine Vellema and Hendrik Johannes Scholtz. 

Just a little something to think about.

As is this... When the Discovery Channel attempted to replicate Kennedy's and Connally's wounds for their 2004 program Beyond the Magic Bullet, the wound on the Connally torso's back created by the tumbling bullet in the program was not ovoid at all, but "keyhole" shaped, and measured 50 x 45 mm.

Ovoid? Oy Vey!

Neutron Activation Analysis Analysis

Another strong argument against the single-bullet theory can be found in the words and works of Dr. Vincent Guinn. While single-assassin theorists cite Guinn as an expert on bullet-lead analysis, and endlessly tout that he testified both before the HSCA and in subsequent televised appearances (such as 1988's PBS program Who Shot President Kennedy?) that his test results indicated only two bullets struck Kennedy and Connally, and that the bullet fragment removed from Connally’s wrist "matched" and most probably came from the bullet purportedly found on Connally's stretcher, few have actually studied Guinn's results or read his numerous articles.

If they had, they wouldn't be so supportive.  

And that's not just me talking. In his book Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2000), noted forensic scientist Dr. Zakaria Erzinclioglu reported that, when one actually studies Guinn's results, "it is clear that the trace element evidence shows that more than two bullets were fired."

Still, on what basis can a layman as myself question the findings of a nuclear physicist?

Well, without even going into the substantial circumstantial evidence indicating that the bullet supposedly found on Connally’s stretcher after falling from his leg was, in fact, found on someone else’s stretcher (as per the hospital employees who discovered it—Darrell Tomlinson and Nathan Pool), was never seen until at least an hour after Connally had been rushed into the hospital (as per the nurses and orderlies who removed Connally’s clothes and wheeled away his stretcher—Doris Nelson, Ruth Standridge, Jane Wester, and R. J. Jimison) and never lodged in his leg (as per Connally’s doctor, Dr. George Shires), there is reason to doubt Guinn’s results proved what so many believe. (An alternative explanation for the bullet’s presence on the stretcher appears at the end of this chapter.)

If one looks at Guinn’s results, one realizes there is a surprising lack of uniformity in the make-up of Mannlicher-Carcano bullets, both from bullet to bullet and box to box. This is because the type of ammunition used in the gun believed to be Oswald’s was made from the melted-down lead of other bullets. When one looks even closer at Guinn’s analysis, one finds that his interpretation of his test results leaves even more to be desired. Since Guinn believed that similar counts in parts per million of certain elements could leave an identifiable fingerprint of exact bullets, and that antimony, silver, and copper were the most reliable of these elements, let’s make a comparison between three sets of bullets on these elements, and Guinn’s subsequent conclusions.

Numbers reflect the counts of the two samples in parts per million.

A vs. B. 647-602 antimony, 8.6-7.9 silver, and 44-40 copper.

C vs. D, 833-797 antimony, 9.8-7.9 silver, and 994-58 copper.

E vs. F, 732-730 antimony, 15.9-15.3 silver, and 23-21 copper.

So which two samples were described by Guinn as being from the same bullet?

Well, that's actually a trick question, as A vs. B actually represents FOUR samples, a fragment found in Kennedy's brain, two fragments found on the floor of the limousine, and the nose of the bullet found on the front seat. And yet notice how uniform they seem to be. One might actually conclude they are probably from the same bullet. And Guinn did. Well, since they were so uniform and since Guinn also concluded the wrist fragments came from the magic bullet, then E vs. F must be the comparison between the magic bullet and the wrist fragment, right?

WRONG. E vs. F is a comparison between 6001B and 6003A, test bullets taken from separate batches of ammunition from separate years. Subsequent tests showed them to be quite dissimilar. 

Which leaves C vs. D as the wrist/magic comparison. Since the silver and copper ranges are substantial, it's safe to say Guinn's conclusion came purely from the similarity on antimony. He ignored everything else and focused on those two numbers...833-797. And yet, when one looks at the test results, one finds that 6002 A2 was at 869, and 6001 B4 was at 791, within 36 ppm of the magic bullet and the wrist fragment, respectively, and this out of only 40 tests beyond the magic bullet and wrist fragment. This translates to there being a 5% chance for the wrist and magic fragments to fall within 36 ppm randomly. Of the 14 different  bullets tested from assorted boxes of Western Cartridge ammunition, in fact, 3, 6000a, 6001d, and 6001A, were within 15 ppm on antimony, even though they were from different years and different batches. This reduces the 833-797 numbers to nothing near the relevance Guinn and such disciples as Kenneth Rahn attach to it. When one takes into account the other six elements tested, in fact, the logical deduction is amazingly the opposite of Guinn's ...that it's highly probable the magic bullet and the wrist fragment ARE NOT related.

A comparison of ranges of the 4 fragments found in the limousine vs. the magic bullet/wrist fragment on the 7 elements tested by Guinn:

Antimony: 4 fragments 647-602, magic/wrist 833-797
Silver: 4 fragments 8.6-7.9, magic/wrist 9.8-7.9
Copper: 4 fragments 44-40, magic/wrist 994-58
Aluminum: 4 fragments 5.5-1.1, magic/wrist 8.1-0
Manganese: 4 fragments 0.1-0.01, magic/wrist 0.09-0.07
Sodium: 4 fragments 134-9, magic/wrist 120-5
Chlorine: 4 fragments 59-22, magic/wrist 257-19

Since the range of 2 related samples should be smaller than the range of 4 related samples (7 out of 8 times), and since the range difference should usually be significant, it's clear that manganese is the only element that suggests the magic bullet and wrist fragment are related, and that antimony and sodium are also consistent with that analysis. It's equally obvious that the other 4 elements tested are strongly suggestive there was NO relation at all between the two, as the range of the 2 samples is many times that of the 4. The proper conclusion then should be that the magic bullet and the wrist fragment are most probably not related. This conclusion is supported by the additional fact that CE 399, while missing some lead, is not believed to have lost any size-able amount of copper.  As both Connally’s coat by his exit wound and the wrist fragments themselves were found to contain inordinate amounts of copper, one should conclude he was struck by a separate bullet whose jacket had been badly damaged. In short, anyone whose argument for the single bullet theory relies on Guinn's analysis has clearly never studied Guinn's results with an open mind. His conclusion was wrong; whether he sincerely believed his testimony or was asked to lie is open to conjecture. 

The FBI v Guinn

While I had not planned on engaging in such conjecture, recent developments in bullet lead analysis have alerted me to much that is suspicious with Guinn’s analysis...beyond his incorrect conclusions. On September 1, 2005, the FBI announced they would no longer analyze bullet lead. Their decision was spurred on by a February 2004 report by the National Academy of Sciences questioning the value of bullet lead analysis, particularly in light that it had never been tested by scientists outside those whose careers depended on its presumed worth, including Vincent Guinn.  Surprisingly, this study was performed by the Academy on behalf of the FBI itself, after a former FBI metallurgist named William Tobin began writing articles critical of the probative value of bullet lead analysis. Shockingly, this study even spurred one-time HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, the man who'd pushed Guinn's findings on the House Committee, to reverse himself and publicly denounce Guinn's findings as "junk science."

Among the reports written by Mr. Tobin and members of the Academy, I found at least three good reasons to suspect that Guinn knew his HSCA testimony was questionable. 

 1.  Although bullet lead analysis was conducted by the FBI for over 30 years, the FBI would not allow its employees to testify beyond that a bullet (usually found within a body) was likely to have come from the same box as bullets found somewhere else (usually in the home of a suspect). The FBI's Cortlandt Cunningham, then Chief of the Firearms section of the FBI Crime Lab, testified in court on February 24, 1977, only months before Guinn's tests, that his agents could only testify that a bullet "could have come from that source or another source with that same composition" and could not identify a fragment as having come from a particular bullet. Guinn’s testimony that it was “highly probable” the wrist fragments and the magic bullet were parts of the same bullet is therefore perhaps the only time in history someone has testified to such a degree. Since the National Academy has now found that “The available data do not support any statement that a crime bullet came from, or is likely to have come from, a particular box of ammunition,” and that the possible existence of coincidentally indistinguishable bullets “should be acknowledged in the laboratory report and by the expert witness” it would seem apparent that Guinn’s expert opinion went well beyond what was warranted. 

2.  While Guinn said his opinion was based on the results of three elements, antimony, silver, and copper, the FBI at that time was using antimony, copper, and arsenic.  Even when Guinn expanded his test to seven elements, arsenic was not included. This forces one to consider the possibility that Guinn tested arsenic, found it did not match, and excluded it from his results.  Since silver, which the FBI started using as one of its seven elements in 1990, is reported to have little value, as most bullets are within a small range in parts per million, and are considered to match, its propping up by Guinn as the second most valuable element is also intriguing. Guinn’s own results, where more than half of the test bullets matched the wrist fragment in silver, with many of them closer in parts per million than the “magic” bullet determined by Guinn to be identical, support that such a match is not really much of a match.

3.   It seems Guinn himself was skeptical of any conclusions based on only three elements.  In 1970, Forensic Neutron Activation Analysis of Bullet Lead Specimens, a report prepared by Guinn and three other scientists for the Atomic Energy Commission, concluded “two bullets with the same pattern of only three identification points are not usually definitively identified as having a common source, Matching concentrations of all three elements does not indicate that two bullets came from the same lot.”  Since the FBI began using seven elements 20 years later, and since it was necessary for a bullet to match on all three elements tested up until that time, and all seven elements afterwards, before the FBI would even find that a bullet was likely to have come from the same box as another bullet, it seems clear that, due to the problems with copper, at no time in its history would the FBI have testified that the wrist fragments and the magic bullet matched.  In fact, when given the opportunity to do so, in 1964, without even testing copper, the FBI ruled their tests inconclusive and kept them from the public. The question then is not only why Guinn testified in the manner he testified, in contradiction to his previous reports and the accepted standards of the FBI, but whether the FBI was deliberately removed from the process.

Should one suspect I'm exaggerating the vast divide between Guinn's methodology and that of the FBI's crime lab, one need but read The Basis for Compositional Lead Comparisons, an article by Charles Peters of the FBI's Materials Analysis Unit, published in the July, 2002 issue of Forensic Science Communications, and available on the FBI's website. Peters explains: "Years of analysis in the FBI Laboratory have demonstrated that the distinctiveness of a melt is defined not only by the number of elements measured but also by the relative scarcity of other alloys in that melt. Not all measured elements are equally effective at discriminating among lead sources, however. In general, for most lead products, the relative source discrimination power of the measured elements decreases in the following order: copper, arsenic, antimony, bismuth, and silver (Peele et al. 1991). Tin is not included in this list because in many lead sources it is not present at detectable levels. However, when tin is present, it provides excellent discrimination among melts of lead. Antimony, specified by the ammunition manufacturers, is alloyed with lead in order to harden the bullets. The other elements are present in trace amounts and can vary from one product to another." Note that Peters considers both copper, which Guinn found did not match, and arsenic, which Guinn inexplicably failed to test, more reliable indicators than antimony, which Guinn upheld as the only element that mattered. From this it seems clear that, should they have been forced to testify, and encouraged to tell the truth, the FBI's crime lab employees would have told the HSCA that the stretcher bullet and wrist fragments did not match, and that the single-bullet theory, which their former Director J. Edgar Hoover never believed anyhow, was bunkum. This brings us back to the question of why Guinn and Guinn alone was called.

Arsenic Poisoning

Should one think I'm being a nit-picker, and assume that Guinn had found his own reasons not to trust arsenic as an indicator, and his own reasons to think a single true match was sufficient to pronounce that two fragments were highly probable to have come from the same bullet, let alone the same source, one should read the words of Guinn himself. The bulk of the tests described in Guinn's 1970 report to the AEC were for antimony, copper, and arsenic. Although antimony and copper were found in much more consistent numbers from lot to lot, and box to box, of the same type bullets tested, than arsenic, making arsenic the least reliable, there was no call that arsenic be dropped. In Chemistry and Crime, an anthology published by the American Chemical Society in 1983, moreover, Guinn claimed that "small samples of bullet lead can be analyzed rapidly, quantitatively, and non-destructively for their concentrations of antimony, silver, copper, arsenic, and sometimes tin." He then explained that antimony, silver, and copper can be tested via a rapid screening method, but that the test for tin takes slightly longer, and the test for arsenic even longer. He then declared "if the rapid screening procedure reveals marked differences in the elemental composition (antimony, silver, and copper concentrations) of two bullet lead samples (e.g. a sample from a fatal bullet, and one from a cartridge found in the possession of a suspect) it is apparent they were not produced from the same homogeneous melt of lead, and hence, no further analysis is necessary. If, however, the two samples being compared are analytically indistinguishable from one another in their antimony, silver, and copper concentrations, it is desirable to also compare them via their arsenic concentrations by using the longer procedure to provide four points of comparison instead of just three. In crucial cases, it is even worthwhile to use a third (intermediate) INAA procedure, in an effort to detect and measure a fifth element, tin."

Well, hell, seeing as neither arsenic nor tin were (at least officially) tested, are we to assume that Guinn didn't consider the murder of a president a crucial case?

And it's not as if this was the only time Guinn touted the benefits of arsenic...

In Activation Analysis Vol.2 , published 1990, the arsenic poisoning of Guinn's credibility approaches a lethal dose. While discussing the best way to test bullet lead, he proposed that one first test his three favorites (antimony, silver, and copper).  He then declared:  "If this fast method clearly shows that none of the victim specimens match any of the specimens associated with a suspect, in elemental composition, no further analyses are needed. However, if one or more of the victim specimens appears to match one or more of the suspect samples, an additional analysis is called for...to add a fourth element (AS-arsenic) to the comparison."  He then discussed other elements that can be tested, including tin.  Later, in this chapter, Guinn trumpeted that his bullet lead testing procedures had "been used to advantage in many hundreds of criminal cases...including some very well known cases (e.g. the President John F. Kennedy assassination)."

Sorry, but I have to ask--to whose advantage, exactly?

In Nuclear Analytical Methods in the Life Sciences, published 1991, moreover, Guinn once again pushed arsenic and tin. There, he asserted: "Applications of the NAA method in the field of forensic chemistry--such as the detection of primer gunshot residue (detecting barium and antimony), and the analysis of evidence specimens of bullet lead and shotshell pellets (for antimony, arsenic, silver, copper, and tin)--are special to the author and used on a large scale in the investigation of gunshot homicide criminal cases, especially by the FBI Laboratory. In 1977, as part of the reinvestigation of the President Kennedy assassination, the author's reanalysis of all the bullet-lead evidence specimens, by INAA, produced decisive results."