Chapter 11:  The Single Bullet Theory

For reasons beyond my grasp, the first image in each chapter sometimes fails to appear.  If there's nothing up above, don't despair; you can still see the image here

Lattimer Analysis

Only adding to my suspicion that the Clark Panel deliberately misrepresented Kennedy’s wounds to support the single-bullet theory is the strange coincidence that the next person to look at the photos, and the very first member of the private sector to be allowed to inspect the autopsy photos and x-rays, just so happened to be Dr. John K. Lattimer, the aforementioned urologist to FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover. This was suspicious for a number of reasons. Not only was Lattimer not a forensic pathologist, and not only had he headed a Federal Government research program from the late 1940's to the mid-1960's, but he'd written extensively on the JFK case already, always at a time when the public's interest was heightened, and always with the conclusion that the Warren Commission had properly addressed the evidence. In late 1966, when questions about the back wound location were on the minds of millions, up popped Lattimer with an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association asserting that Kennedy's back brace had propped him up after he was first hit, and had made him an easy target for Oswald. Now this would be bad enough, but Lattimer actually made the mistake of asserting that a second coincidence also contributed to Kennedy's death--that the misalignment of Oswald's scope had coincidentally compensated for the curve in the road, so that all Oswald had to do was fire at Kennedy, and the bullet would hit him in this exact location, even though he'd moved several feet down the road, and inches to the right.

Well, this gives up the game, and reveals Lattimer to be more propagandist than scientist. This ridiculous proposition was first offered by FBI agent Robert Frazier during his Warren Commission testimony. Perhaps Frazier was thinking of the tests undertaken AFTER he'd sighted in the scope and brought the scope and rifle in the best alignment possible without adding shims to the scope mount. These tests revealed that the rifle fired 4 inches high and 1 to the right at 100 yards. Such a misalignment would indeed allow someone to fire at JFK when he was on Elm without having to worry about a lead, should he know ahead of time the degree of this misalignment. BUT THIS WAS NOT THE MISALIGNMENT OF THE SCOPE WHEN FIRST TESTED BY THE FBI. Frazier testified that the rifle, when first tested by the FBI, fired 4 inches high and 1 to the right at ONLY 15 YARDS, and that these shots all landed within the size of a dime, and that this indicated the rifle had not recently been adjusted. Well, such a misalignment would be of no help at all to a sniper; it would force a sniper to shoot BEHIND Kennedy in order to hit him as he was moving away. It follows then that Frazier's assertion the misalignment worked to the sniper's advantage was either a total brainfart on his part or a deliberate lie, and that Lattimer's repetition of this nonsense was more of the same, or perhaps a reflection that he took his job as Hoover's urologist a bit more seriously than anyone could reasonably have imagined.

In any event, following his inspection of the autopsy materials on January 9, 1972, Lattimer told the New York Times that the photographs and x-rays “eliminate any doubt completely” about the validity of the Warren Commission’s conclusions and that Oswald fired all the shots. He said further that the photos and x-rays demonstrate that the back wound was actually higher than the Commission reported (yes, that’s right, even higher than on the Rydberg drawings). He said the wound was so high in comparison to the throat wound, in fact, that in order for the throat wound to have been an entrance wound as so many believed, someone would have to have been firing from the floor of the limousine in front of Kennedy. Lattimer didn’t seem to understand that this comment meant conversely that the bullet exiting the neck should have hit the floor and not Connally, and that this statement was therefore an argument against the single-bullet theory he was so adamantly defending. 

But that was just the beginning of Lattimer's trail of "whoa!" For Lattimer's 1972 Resident and Staff Physician article on his trip to the archives he created a drawing depicting his interpretation of Kennedy's back wound, and the path of the bullet purportedly entering Kennedy's back and exiting his throat. This drawing was amazingly, and shockingly, inaccurate. While acknowledging that the back wound was 5 cm below the neck crease “at the juncture of neck and back” in his text, Lattimer’s drawing depicts the wound as being at this juncture of back and neck. Even worse, in order to bring the bruise on Kennedy's lung closer to the bullet path and thereby explain the bruise, it depicts the President’s lung as higher than the knot in his tie. Even more absurd, to account for the holes in Kennedy's clothes being so much lower on his back than Lattimer's proposed back wound location, Lattimer's drawing depicts a gigantic fold of clothing bunched up on the back of Kennedy's neck. 

Now all that is already way too much, but Lattimer's drawing also has the bullet path descending 27 degrees through Kennedy's body, which, since the limousine was on a downhill slope of 3 degrees, means he believed the bullet was descending 30 degrees from the horizontal plane.  Since he eventually claimed the bullet came from the sniper’s nest at Z-224, when the angle of descent from the sniper’s nest was 21 degrees, this suggests he believed Kennedy was leaning 9 degrees backwards when struck.

From there Lattimer’s story gets even more absurd. There is apparently no belief too absurd, or no lie to great, for him to shy from, should it suggest Oswald's sole guilt. On May 7, 1975 he was interviewed by the Rockefeller Commission, and repeated much of what he’d told the New York Times.  He went even further, however, and told them that inspecting Kennedy’s brain would be unnecessary, seeing as Dr. Humes had been “particularly thorough about finding any foreign material in the brain” and that “we have surprisingly good x-rays of it and surprisingly good photographs of it.” He claimed further that this provided him with a “reasonable basis for knowing what the situation in the brain was, relative, at least, to the direction of the missiles.” He ignored that he'd previously concluded that the ever-thorough Humes had incorrectly identified the entrance of the bullet on the back of Kennedy’s head, and had been off by four inches.  

In November, 1976, moreover, as a response to Congressman Thomas Downing's public declaration that the Zapruder film had convinced him Kennedy was shot from the front, Lattimer popped up yet again. Somehow, someway, he just so happened to make an appearance before a luncheon of the National Press Club, and show them films of experiments he'd performed by shooting bullets into animal skulls (no doubt, your typical luncheon entertainment). Not surprisingly, these tests (later debunked by Wallace Milam) showed the skulls flying back in the direction of the bullet, and supposedly undercut Downing's claims the rearward movement of Kennedy's head suggested the fatal shot came from the front.

Evidently, these tests convinced Lattimer he’d solved everything and that no further investigation was necessary, because on March 22, 1977, an article carried by the Ridder News Service reported that Lattimer had told some 300 members of the Fayette County Medical Society that “Reviving the investigation of President Kennedy’s death would be expensive and unnecessary.” Now, why would he do this? Was he concerned that a new investigation would reveal that he had been untruthful when he asserted that the back wound was even higher than in the Rydberg drawings?  Or was he really that confident?  If he was really that confident, well, then, he had NO reason to be, as other statements attributed to him in this article reveal that he was simply making stuff up in order to justify shutting down the investigation already underway. 

According to the article Lattimer described the shots as follows: “The first shot probably struck the branch of a tree and was deflected to the pavement where it was absorbed…Five seconds later, with the limousine now only 190 feet away from Oswald’s position, the second shot was fired.  It hit the president in the back of the neck, passed through it, and entered Gov. John Connally’s side…Five seconds later, the third shot was fired from a striking distance of about 250 feet, striking Kennedy in the back of the head…”  Well, wait a second!  If the first shot was fired five seconds before the single-bullet shot, which was at the latest frame 224, then it was fired around frame 131, TWO seconds before any of the trees in front of the school book depository would interfere with a shot from the sniper’s nest. Could Lattimer really be proposing that Oswald led the limousine by 30 feet or more?  Okay.  Okay. Lattimer probably misspoke about the five seconds… But it gets worse.  The article quotes Lattimer as discussing Oswald and his motivation as follows:  “After returning to this country, Oswald began a propaganda campaign for Cuban revolutionaries in New Orleans and eventually ended up in Dallas. There, three weeks before he shot the President, he attempted to kill a retired Army general.  He learned from having tried to shoot the general that it would take more than one shot to kill Kennedy...If he’d been assigned to shoot Kennedy, he wouldn’t have been firing at someone else just three weeks before.” 

The omissions and mistakes in Lattimer’s scenario are more revealing than what he gets correct. First of all, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, with whom Oswald was affiliated in New Orleans, was not a violent or revolutionary organization, as implied by Lattimer. Second of all, Lattimer omits that this “retired general,” General Edwin Walker, was forced out of the military by Kennedy for his reactionary and racist political activities and that there is reason to doubt that anyone contemplating his assassination would kill Kennedy instead. Third, the attempt on Walker did not take place three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, as asserted by Lattimer, but on April 10, 1963, more than 7 months before!  Needless to say, Lattimer’s understanding of Oswald and his background was as wildly inaccurate as his strange belief the back wound was further above the throat wound than depicted in the Rydberg drawings.

 

"Hunchback” Analysis

To be fair to Dr. Lattimer, I think I’ve located the source of some of his confusion. I believe this same confusion contributed to the Clark Panel’s errors. When one compares the left lateral autopsy photo, which shows the location of the throat wound, with the photographs of the back wound, and focuses on a rounded hump of flesh on Kennedy’s shoulder, one can easily imagine that this shape is a “hunch” of some sort and that the bullet entrance is in the middle of this “hunch.”  Since this “hunch” in the back wound photo is clearly higher on the body than the throat wound in the left lateral photo, moreover, one can take the next step and conclude that this means the bullet traveled downwards in the body, and that the single-bullet theory is supported by the photographs.  But when one relies on hunches alone one will often be wrong.  

Some of whom have noticed this “hunch,” including Dr.s Lattimer and Baden, have even went so far as to speculate on its origins. They state, as if it were an established fact, that Kennedy grew this hunch as a result of his steroid use and his Addison’s disease. They insinuate that this hunch caused Kennedy’s clothing to bunch abnormally around his neck, whereby an entrance on his clothing more than 5 inches below the top of his collar could still be at the level of the base of his neck. They fail to see that the left lateral autopsy photo which seemingly portrays the hunch was taken with Kennedy lying flat on his back, with his shoulders rolled outwards, pushing the flesh of his back upwards. They fail to see that photos of Kennedy taken on the day of the assassination reveal no such hunch.

When one starts measuring their whole argument begins to fall apart.  Since the ruler in the un-cropped back photo is 9 by 1, one can conclude that it's small edge is 1.33 inches. From this measurement one can see how the Clark Panel came up with their determination that the back wound was 5.5 cm (a little over 2 inches) below the fold along the back of the neck.  When one matches the “hunches” one can see that the distance from the fold to the throat wound on the lateral photo approximates the 9 cm that the Clark Panel proposed. Why no one on the Clark Panel decided to measure this distance on their own bodies is another question.  I’m 6’4” and when one measures 9 cm below the fold across the back of my neck one reaches the level of my sternum, far below the level of the wound in Kennedy’s throat. Experienced doctors should have known better, or at least have been suspicious enough about the measurement to take a second look.

For when one takes a second look, one realizes that in order for this “hunch” to match in each photo, and in order for the neck lines to match, the photo of the back wound must be greatly reduced compared to the lateral photograph.  A quick comparison of Kennedy’s ears in the two photos proves that this is true. Should one use the ruler in the back wound photo to measure the size of Kennedy’s head in the lateral photo (when the hunches are made to match) one can approximate that the vertical height of Kennedy’s skull was 10.5 inches.  When the ears are made to match, however, this distance is only 9 inches.  My skull, even with my mouth slightly opened, is only 9 ¼ vertical inches from the level of my slightly opened jaw to the highest point. It's hard to believe that Kennedy’s skull would be 13% longer than my own. (Fatter maybe, longer no.)   When one takes the time to match the sizes of the ears and body proportions, therefore, one can see that the “hunch” was largely an illusion based on Kennedy’s body position, and that the back wound in the photograph was actually 25% closer to the level of Kennedy’s throat wound than when the hunches were made to match, and was in fact below the so-called “hunch”.  

When one takes notice of Kennedy's body position in the back wound photo, and sees that he's laying on his left side with his head turned to his right, moreover, it should be apparent that the back wound is, in fact, at the same level as the throat wound (when the body is in the anatomic position). 

Up the Neck

But you don't have to trust me on this. My finding that the back wound was at the same vertical level in Kennedy's body as the throat wound was shared by the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel, comprising nine of the top pathologists in the country. No, that’s not quite true. The forensic pathology panel's report, released in 1979, actually asserts that the bullet fired from the sniper’s nest at least 20 degrees above Kennedy passed through his body in a slightly upwards trajectory. 

When one looks at the testimony of Dr. Michael Baden before the committee, and compares the bullet entrance on the back of Kennedy’s clothing with its purported exit on Kennedy’s collar, one can begin to see why they came to this conclusion. The path is clearly upwards. If you’re surprised by this it’s no wonder.  While many TV shows present the single-bullet theories of Dr. Lattimer, Gerald Posner, and Dale Myers as if they are the official government theory, the theories of these men are actually at odds with both the Warren Commission and  HSCA interpretations of the wounds, trajectories, and shot sequences. 

That rant having passed, I must admit that I also have problems with the HSCA's conclusions. To begin with, it seems clear to me that the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel (FPP) was indeed mistaken in their analysis of the back wound. Not by much, mind you. While they were correct to note that the abrasion collar in the back wound photo was on the lower half of the entrance wound, and that this indicated the bullet was heading upwards along the skin, they were mistaken to say “the direction of the missile in the body on initial penetration was slightly upward, inasmuch as the lower margin of the skin is abraded in an upward direction. Furthermore, the wound beneath the skin appears to be tunneled from below upward.” As the upper back is slanted towards the neck, any bullet striking the upper back at a downwards angle less than the angle of the slant would leave a mark along the skin reflecting an upwards trajectory. The abrasion ring noted by the FPP, therefore, could have represented a bullet heading downwards within the body as well as upwards.  

Unfortunately, this is not the only point on which we disagree. Not by a long shot.

 

 T-3 or Not T-3?

But before we go on to complain about the horrendous mistakes/deceptions of the HSCA, let me congratulate them for getting at least one thing right. They resolved the location of Kennedy's back wound! In both the testimony of Dr. Baden and in their exhibits they made it clear they believed the bullet entered at the level of the first thoracic vertebra, roughly 2 inches lower than the entrance depicted in the Warren Commission's drawings. 

While my acceptance that the bullet entered at T-1 has led to at least one conspiracy theorist trumpeting that I'm intellectually dishonest, it would be intellectually dishonest for me to pretend I disagree with the HSCA on this point. I have looked through dozens of anatomy books and measured dozens of medical drawings, and am convinced that T-3, where many conspiracy theorists place the wound, is an inch or two  lower than the back wound apparent in the photos. While some point out that Kennedy's personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, placed the wound at T-3 on Kennedy's death certificate, they fail to appreciate that Burkley was far from certain about this and had, in fact, stated "a second wound occurred in the posterior back at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra." They also fail to appreciate that there is no indication Burkley did anything more than glimpse at Kennedy's body and did anything to establish the back wound's location beyond glimpsing at the confusing face sheet. 

While some note a small mark in the back wound photo near the T-3 level, and propose that this mark was the "real" back wound, I find this also has little foundation, as the size of this mark (roughly 3 mm x 3 mm, or 9 mm)  is less than 1/3 the size of the bullet wound measured at autopsy (7 mm x 4 mm, or 28 mm), and the wound at T-1 (roughly 7 mm x 5 mm) is almost precisely this size.

 

 T-1 is Enough

To no small extent, I understand the sentiments of those wanting to believe the bullet entered at T-3.  If the bullet entered as low as the third thoracic vertebra there would be no way it could avoid piercing Kennedy's lung en route to its purported exit in his throat. The single-bullet theory would be so outlandish not even Arlen Specter would lay claim to it. But I feel that an entry at T-1 is nearly as damaging. 

You see, from poring through anatomy books, trying to figure out the proper level of the back wound entrance, I came to understand that the T-1 level of the spine corresponds to the level of the first rib. This is extremely problematic for the single-bullet theory in that, if Kennedy was sitting fairly upright, a bullet entering at T-1 as depicted in the HSCA exhibits, including Exhibit F-65, would dive down below T-1, and into Kennedy's lung. According to the autopsy, which held that nothing pierced Kennedy's lung, this did not happen. An entrance at T-1 is also problematic in that, even if Kennedy was bent forward to such an extent that the bullet entering his back would head straight for his throat, the first rib would be right in its way. As the "magic bullet," CE 399, had been avoiding sweets and had a decidedly unblemished nose, this also did not happen. 

So how did the HSCA solve this dilemma? Did they accept what would seem obvious? That the lynch-pin of the single-assassin conclusion, the single-bullet theory, made little sense?

 

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. Subsequent statements by two of the panel's leading lights, Dr. Werner Spitz and Dr. Michael Baden, prove this to be true.

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.)

In 2003, at a conference sponsored by Dr. Wecht, Dr. Baden, the pathology panel's spokesman, revealed himself to be equally in the dark. 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 and Baden's continuing belief that Kennedy was hit while behind the sign in the film, and their apparent ignorance or lack of concern that this was in opposition to the single-bullet theory they'd purportedly signed off on, is disturbing, and raises the possibility that someone (perhaps Robert Blakey) knew the Zapruder film never showed Kennedy to be in a position to receive his wounds, 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. 

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, 1.33 inches, to measure the distance from Kennedy’s spine to the bullet entrance, one finds the entrance is approximately 3.6 cm. from his spine, not 4.5. If the entrance was really 3.6 cm from the spine but presented in F-58 as 5.4 cm from the spine, it follows that the wound was moved 50% 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  medical panel's exhibits, 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 is unaware of this problem. When taking the testimony of Dr. Malcolm Perry in 1964, Specter asked Perry about his initial speculation that Kennedy's throat wound and head wound were caused by but 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.  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 testimony of the HSCA's ballistics expert, Larry Sturdivan, is that the bullet was traveling over 1700 feet/second as it passed through Kennedy's neck. Later, in his 2005 book, The JFK Myths, he increased this "probable velocity" to somewhere between 2045 feet/second and 1780 feet/second. And yet, Dr. Gary Ordog, in his book Management of Gunshot Wounds, notes that the mortality rate for high-velocity bullet 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 notes further that “Cavitation stretches the smaller blood vessels, shearing and rupturing them as well as nerves and even bone.”  Ordog 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 his statements are based in large part upon 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 demonstrates that near misses traveling as slow as 1,000 fps were nevertheless likely to cause breaks in the artery.

When one remembers that the surgeon who inspected Kennedy’s throat wound at Parkland, Dr. Malcolm Perry, not only said there was little vessel damage, but initially described the exit wound as being only 3-5 mm wide--smaller than the bullets fired by Oswald’s rifle--then it becomes clear that something is just wrong with the supposed single-bullet "fact". Only making it worse, Dr. Perry testified that behind this small hole in the throat he found a “small ragged laceration of the trachea on the anterior lateral right side.”  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 and also suggests that a neck wound as simple and survivable as Kennedy's was purported to be was unlikely. In a chapter written by a former surgeon of the Fifth Army, which fought Italian forces in Sicily, it holds that when treating neck wounds they 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." From this, it seems likely that there are many military and emergency room doctors who are aware of this particular problem with the single-bullet theory, who opt to say nothing.

It seems possible, however, that there are many other doctors, including experienced forensic pathologists such as Michael Baden, who are simply 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 well-familiar with the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and its wounding properties, 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."   

One can also take comfort that at least some of the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel's members refused to let themselves believe that the damage to Kennedy's neck and throat was as minor as reported, and presumed instead that Dr. Perry's analysis of Kennedy's wounds was grossly in error.  While the Panel kept no publicly-available notes on their discussions, Dr. Baden testified to this dispute, telling the HSCA committee, "The panel could not unanimously agree as to whether or not the gunshot wound through the back and neck would necessarily be fatal because of the failure to examine the bullet track at the time of the autopsy--dissect the track. As a result we do not know whether there was injury to the spine of the President or to major blood vessels." The fact that this was even questioned, after Dr. Humes and Dr. Perry testified before the Warren Commission that there was no damage to the spine or major blood vessels, indicates that there was at least one member of the panel who realized that it didn't make a lot of sense for a high-speed bullet to create so little damage.

Dr. Baden himself quite possibly shared this view. On 8-15-78, barely three weeks before he testified on Kennedy's wounds, he 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 Perry and Humes 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 on 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 said 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. His study then would seem to 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 susbtantial bone within the body." This mean 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 this exit, should the exit have been for the bullet recovered at the hospital, and fired from Oswald's rifle. This suggests 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 (feet per second) when fired, 2015 fps upon impact with Kennedy's neck (yes, he writes "neck"), 1830 fps upon impact with Connally's back, 1450-800 fps upon penetrating Connally's rib, 500 fps upon impact with Connally's wrist, and 135 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 (380-730 fps) than from passing through 5 1/2 inches of Kennedy's neck (185 fps) or shattering Connally's wrist (365 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 Oswald's 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 reason, as far as I can tell, has ever been offered to explain why Connally's back flesh was many times as bullet-resistant as Kennedy's neck flesh.

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 proposed by Sturdivan. 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.

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. Three 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.  The fourth problem with the argument that Kennedy’s lungs were bruised by a temporary cavity 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 3cm in its largest dimension, and that the doctor claiming the back wound was small and a tangential strike, Dr. Shaw, said this 3cm 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, perhaps under the influence of Dr. Lattimer, 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." The HSCA's Final Assassinations Report further relates that when concluding 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." 

The problem with this is that Dr. Baden 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, 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. Not only did Dr. Baden oversell the significance of this ovoid shape to the HSCA, he 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 fibs upon the single-assassin theory 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 only changed his recollection "later on," (thereby ignoring that Shaw also mentioned the 1 1/2 cm measurement in his 1964 testimony before the Warren Commission). 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 statement, 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 work of Dr. Vincent Guinn. While single-assassin theorists cite Guinn as the expert on bullet-lead analysis, and endlessly tout that he testified before the HSCA that a bullet fragment reportedly removed from Connally’s wrist most probably came from the magic bullet found on a stretcher, few have actually studied Guinn's results or read his numerous articles. If they had, they wouldn't be so supportive. Until I wrote about Guinn's research in chapter 4c of this webpage, for example, very few realized that Guinn's earlier work for the Atomic Energy Commission undercut the likelihood that Oswald had even fired a rifle. 

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 with the next slide)

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.

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 discontinue the use of bullet lead matching.  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 spurred one-time HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, the man who 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 be even more suspicious of Guinn. 

 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 of bullets as was 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 above and 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.  Perhaps, faced with the fact that copper failed to match, and being aware of how bad it would look if two out of the three elements he tested failed to match, Guinn simply picked an element that would help him make his case.  I asked a prestigious metallurgist who’d helped me in the past if he knew of any good reason Guinn would use silver instead of arsenic, and have yet to receive an answer. The lack of value of silver as a determinant that two fragments have an identical source is made obvious by 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.

3.   It seems Guinn himself was skeptical of any conclusions based on only three elements.  In 1970, a report for the Atomic Energy Commission prepared by Guinn and three other scientists 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, the FBI ruled their tests inconclusive and kept them from the public. The question then is not only why did Guinn testify 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.

Should one think I'm being a nit-picker in the paragraphs above, and assume that Guinn had found his own reasons not to trust arsenic as an indicator, and his own reasons to think a single match was sufficient to pronounce that two fragments were highly probable to have come from the same source, one should read the words of Guinn himself, published both before and after his stint as HSCA consultant. In Forensic Neutron Activation Analysis of Bullet Lead Specimens, a report co-written by Guinn in 1970, arsenic was one of the three elements tested. In Nuclear Analytical Methods in the Life Sciences, a book co-written by Guinn and published in 1991, Guinn asserts "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 Sb, As, Ag, Cu, and Sn)--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." Hmmm. Note that Guinn here lists five elements--antimony, arsenic, silver, copper, and tin--that can be tested, and that they seem to be in order of importance, with antimony first and tin last, after silver and then copper. Note also that arsenic is listed second. Now, ain't that peculiar...  Even more peculiar is that while Guinn tested the Kennedy assassination bullet-lead evidence for seven elements, he failed to test the Kennedy assassination bullet-lead evidence for both arsenic and tin, two of the five elements he would later claim most relevant. In Guinn's chapter in Activation Analysis Vol. 2, published 1990, moreover, he spelled out that the content of bullet lead impurities normally ranges from 1 to 100 ppm for silver, 1 to 1500 ppm for copper, 1 to 2000 ppm for tin, and 1 to 2500 ppm for arsenic. This suggests that the likelihood of random matches for arsenic and tin was much less than the likelihood of random matches for silver, and slightly less than copper.(The levels of copper in the stretcher bullet and wrist fragment, of course, didn't match). This leads me to suspect it's possible Guinn did test arsenic and tin, but didn't like his results, and flushed them down the memory hole. While ultimately bragging that his tests produced "decisive results" Guinn didn't, after all, tell us what decision these results helped produce. 

Elsewhere in Guinn's chapter in activation Analysis Vol.2 , the arsenic poisoning of his credibility becomes positively lethal. While discussing the best way to test bullet lead, he proposes that one first test his three favorites (antimony, silver, and copper).  He then states:  "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 discusses other elements that can be tested, including tin, and then pronounces "If one is to conclude that two BL (bullet lead) or SSP specimens "match" one another to the extent that, to a high degree of probability, they had a common lead-melt origin, they must "match" one another in their concentrations of each of a number of elements measured to a respectable precision, and not exhibit any significant mismatches... For a variety of reasons, it is presently not possible to calculate a numerical probability that any two specimens had a common lead-melt origin. Instead, assuming that they do not mismatch in any element, but only match one another in one or two measured elements, one usually merely states that they might have had a common origin; with three matching elements, that they probably had a common origin; and with four, five, or six matching elements, that there is a very high probability (approaching "certainty") that they had a common origin." Later, in this chapter, Guinn trumpets that his bullet lead testing procedures have "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?

Yes, it is clear from Guinn's own writings that his conclusions re the wrist fragment and magic bullet are in error.  By his own standards, the best he could have said was that the fragment and wrist bullet "might have had a common origin." He should have, according to his own writings, tested the items for arsenic and tin before coming to even that conclusion, and have come to a NEGATIVE conclusion should either one of them failed to match. That he did not or at least claims he did not test the fragments for these elements is undoubtedly suspicious. I hereby call on those supposedly believing in the veracity of Guinn's findings to help clear up this suspicion, and begin pushing for additional testing of these fragments. Their failure to do so will only reveal their lack of faith in Guinn's work.  

That said, I have uncovered a possible innocent explanation for Guinn's mistakes, one that moves him from the category of deliberate liar to mere screw-up.  In early tests of bullet lead, Guinn and others discovered there was an apparent conformity between bullets in the same box, and sought to find practical applications for their discovery. Over time, the courts came to accept the value of bullet lead analysis and the FBI began testifying that one bullet most probably came from the same box as another.  This allowed prosecutors to convict suspects even when no gun was found. The problem, as outlined by William Tobin and the National Academy of Sciences, was that little research was done on how bullets were actually made and distributed, and that, when one studied these things, one could only conclude that virtually indistinguishable bullets were likely to end up in boxes of ammunition on opposite sides of the country.  In his research on Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition, however, Guinn found that the bullets within the same box had no apparent conformity. This led him to believe that the slight conformity between the wrist fragment and the magic bullet had significance, as other bullets from its box would be unlikely to match on antimony.  The problem was that there was NO REASON to assume the wrist fragment bullet came from the same box as the magic bullet.  Quite literally, then, Guinn was thinking inside the box when he should have been thinking outside the box! 

Or maybe he was just lying.  I hesitate to pass judgment on the man.  All I know for sure is that his conclusions about the magic bullet before the HSCA were wrong.  In July, 2006, Dr.s Erik Randich and Patrick Grant published an article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, describing a study they'd conducted with the help of Tom Pinkston. They used cross-sections of bullets to demonstrate that antimony concentrations were not standard throughout bullet lead, even within the same bullet, and that one would have to have used samples far larger than those used by Guinn before coming to any conclusions whether or not a fragment could have come from the same bullet as another fragment. They also found that other full-metal jacketed ammunition contained similar levels of antimony as the ammunition fired in Oswald's rifle.  Their conclusion reads:  “We therefore assert that, from our perspectives of standard metallurgical practice and statistical assessment of the fundamental NAA measurements a conclusion of material evidence for only two bullets in the questioned JFK assassination specimens has no forensic basis.  Although collateral information from the overall investigation might very well narrow the choices, as stand-alone primary evidence, the recovered bullet fragments could be reflective of anywhere between two and five different rounds fired in Dealey Plaza on that day.  Only the near-complete mass of CE-399, the stretcher bullet, precludes the conclusion of one to five rounds.  Moreover, the fragments need not necessarily have originated from MC ammunition.  Indeed, the antimony compositions of the evidentiary specimens are consistent with any number of jacketed ammunitions containing hardened lead."

In May, 2007, a similar article by Spiegleman, Tobin et al in the Annals of Applied Statistics confirmed Randich and Grant's conclusions, and disclosed that they had repeated Guinn's tests on random Mannlicher-Carcano bullets.  Not surprisingly, given Guinn's results, they'd found that one of the thirty random bullets used in their study was a close match to one of the assassination fragments.  This news even made the Washington Post.

Fortunately, Guinn’s tests were not the last to be performed on the fragments. In 1998, further tests were performed, this time to determine the nature of the organic material found on the fragment discovered on the front seat of the car.  To most everyone the results of these tests, conducted on behalf of the National Archives by the FBI and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Dr. Finck’s old stomping grounds, were disappointing.  The Justice Department employee who inspired the tests evidently was hoping that the material would turn out to be fibers, and that these fibers would be traced back to Connally’s clothing, which would demand a re-examination of the single-bullet theory and re-open the case. (After all, how could this fragment, which was previously determined to be from the same bullet as the fragments in Kennedy’s skull, also have been the bullet to hit Connally in the back?)  Others were disappointed when the tests revealed the material was human tissue, but couldn’t determine whose tissue.  When I recently read about these over-looked test results, however, I found the confirmation for my theory I’d doubted would ever come.  For the test results showed that 3 of the 4 fragments of organic material found on Exhibit CE 567 were made up of SKIN.  The significance of this skin will ultimately be explained.

 

The Clean-up Crew

Should one doubt that the “magic” bullet could have come from anywhere but Connally’s leg, one should consider that the bullet, had it fallen from Kennedy’s back as originally believed, would most likely have fallen out in the limousine, and that the limousine was cleaned up while sitting outside Parkland Hospital in Dallas by two Secret Service Agents, Sam Kinney and George Hickey. Although William Manchester, in his book The Death of a President, disputed that such a clean-up occurred, citing a nurse who says she was asked to bring the agents a bucket of water but failed to deliver it, Manchester overlooked the statement of an orderly, Joe Lewis Richards, admitting that he did indeed bring them the bucket.  An 11-22-63 UPI article, most likely reflecting the words of UPI’s man on the scene Merriman Smith, reported on this clean-up, stating:  “Outside the hospital, blood was cleaned from the limousine.”  Manchester also overlooked the assertion in the 11-23-63 New York Times story on the assassination that “A bucket of water stood by the car, suggesting that the back seat had been scrubbed out.” (Years later, in his book “On Press,” Tom Wicker, the writer of the Times’ report, clarified that it was “a bucket of bloody water.”)  Manchester also ignored that Time Magazine’s Hugh Sidey reported seeing “A young man, I assume he was a Secret service man, with a sponge and a bucket of red water, and he was trying to wipe up the blood and what looked like flakes of flesh and brains in the back seat.”  He also overlooked that Newsweek’s Charles Roberts, who rode along with Wicker and Sidey in the motorcade, confirmed these accounts, admitting that he saw Secret Service men “mop up the back seat.” (Clearly not the suspicious type, Roberts thought it “ironic” that one of the Secret Service agents waved him aside and told him “you can’t look.”)  In later years White House photographer Cecil Stoughton and ambulance driver Aubrey Rike  also admitted witnessing this clean-up.  In Richard Trask’s Pictures of the Pain, in fact, a series of photographs taken by Stoughton capture the clean up, with the bucket in place by the left rear tire of the limousine. One of these pictures was published in 1983 by Life Magazine--not exactly a propagator of conspiracy theories--with the caption "Outside Parkland, agents clean the bloody limousine." More recently, in 2003, the Fox News Channel agreed that a clean-up had indeed occurred and broadcast footage of a Secret Service Agent, possibly Hickey, walking away from the limousine with the bucket.  That same week, a former member of the President’s Secret Service detail in Dallas, Gerald O’Rourke, came forward, telling the Rocky Mountain News “that on the day of the assassination, one agent was ordered to clean out the cars used in the motorcade, getting rid of blood and other evidence.” (He implied this was Kinney.) Yes, it's conclusive: a clean-up indeed took place.

Should one doubt that this clean-up destroyed or removed evidence, moreover, one should reflect that Warren Commission Exhibit CE 840 consists of all the bullet fragments found in the car beyond the two large fragments found in the front seat, and comprises but three small fragments found in the carpet beneath Nellie Connally’s seat, several feet to the left of the presumed trajectory of the bullet.  That there were no bullet fragments found on the floor by Kennedy’s or John Connally’s seats or on the seats themselves is undoubtedly suspicious. Also suspicious is that one of the three fragments found beneath Nellie’s seat disappeared from the archives at some point in the sixties. Adding to the likelihood that a Secret Service agent planted the bullet on the stretcher, perhaps simply to avoid admitting that he’d screwed up and cleaned-up important evidence (neither Kinney nor Hickey ever admitted that a clean-up occurred), is that one of the two men to find the stretcher bullet, Nathan Pool, told an HSCA investigator he saw a Secret Service agent standing near the stretcher just before the bullet was discovered. 

While any theory explaining the appearance of this bullet on the stretcher is broad speculation, and any theory on the disappearance of an additional bullet (or bullets) during the movement of Connally onto the stretcher or the clean-up of the limousine is even broader speculation, I believe it is reasonable speculation, given the alternative. One of the truly laughable arguments made by the single-assassin theorist community is that since only two bullets were recovered, it is illogical to assume that more than two bullets inflicted the wounds. “Where’s the third bullet?” they will ask. They forget that their theory holds that a bullet lodged in Connally’s leg, became dislodged as his clothes were removed, went unnoticed when he was moved to the operating table, stayed unnoticed when the sheets were folded up, stayed unnoticed when the stretcher was moved downstairs, and re-appeared an hour later when two stretchers collided, on a stretcher not fitting the description of Connally's stretcher, and a stretcher that the man “discovering” the bullet, Darrell Tomlinson, suspected was, in fact, not Connally’s stretcher.   

Even worse for those disputing the bullet was planted, researcher Josiah Thompson, building upon Darrell Tomlinson's suspicions, read through Parkland Hospital's records for 11-22-63, and found that the stretcher on which the bullet was found was almost certainly the stretcher of a young boy named Ronnie Fuller, who was admitted to the emergency room after suffering a cut. Thompson's research on this issue has never been countered.  

In fact, he's continued to build upon it. At the 2003 Wecht Conference held at Duquesne University, Thompson showed how the only Parkland employees to see the bullet found by Tomlinson on 11-22 believed the bullet had a pointed tip. CE 399 has a rounded tip. Thompson also discussed the strange fact that both Governor Connally and Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade were of the impression a bullet was found in Connally's operating room. While these differing recollections could have come from the passage of time, and the resulting confusion, he related another tale that's much harder to explain. This tale sprang from an interview of Parkland's Director of Nursing, Elizabeth Wright. In this interview, conducted by researcher Wallace Milam in 1993, the former Mrs. Wright related that there was more than one bullet found on stretchers in the days after the assassination, and that this led one of the nursing supervisors, Doris Nelson, to complain: "I wish they would stop putting bullets on these stretchers." If the bullet found by Tomlinson did not look like CE 399, and other bullets were found afterwards, of course, it is entirely possible CE 399 was found at Parkland sometime later in the evening, after Oswald's rifle had been retrieved by the Dallas Police. 

If this, in fact, occurred, then it only follows that the bullet found by Tomlinson was made to disappear. And if the bullet found by Tomlinson was made to disappear, then it only follows that any other bullets or fragments found at Parkland were made to disappear.

Fortunately, we need not drive down this particular conspiracy road, as a less-conspiracy-oriented answer to the "Where's the third bullet" question is also available. It goes like this...IT...GOT...LOST. The FBI and Secret Service certainly believed as much. Their official reports on the shooting concluded that all three shots hit Kennedy and Connally, even though only one and a half bullets had been retrieved; the FBI's report even specified that CE 399 fell from Kennedy's back. Apparently, neither agency had any problem believing that the bullet striking Connally, the third bullet, had gotten lost in the Parkland shuffle. 

For this conclusion, they had plenty of support. In his 1970 book, Legal Medicine, the Clark Panel's Dr. Alan Moritz offered that "Often a bullet that has had sufficient velocity to pass through the body will be so nearly spent that it will fail to penetrate the head covering or clothing at the site of exit. Unless the doctor, nurse, or accident ward attendant is alert to this possibility, such a bullet may be lost." Elsewhere, Dr. Moritz explained that "Years of medicolegal experience in the investigation of firearm injuries confirm the truth of the generalization that the only things likely to be seen and remembered are those that are looked for with knowledge of their potential significance." Those arguing that CE 399 created Connally's wounds and was found on his stretcher, and thus that the bullet had been overlooked by at least five nurses and hospital employees prior to its discovery, thereby inadvertently confirm that other bullets, potentially including the bullet that ACTUALLY created Connally's wounds, could have been lost in the madhouse that was Parkland Hospital on November 22, 1963.

Another top pathologist believed that it was just that simple--that the bullet had been lost. Dr. Milton Helpern, who'd supervised over 10,000 autopsies of gunshot victims in his long career, explained that, clean-up or no clean-up, one can not always find the bullets involved in a homicide. Specific to the Kennedy assassination, in an interview for the book, Where Death Delights, he told former FBI man Marshall Houts:  “It is not unusual at all for spent bullets that have passed through a human body to become lost…If I had to venture a guess as to what happened to the bullet that wounded Governor Connally, I would suggest that it fell out of his pants leg while he was being removed from the car and placed on the stretcher; or it could have fallen out at any stage of his hospital experience.”  He said it.

And the FBI's Robert Frazier, the man tasked with inspecting the limousine on the night of the assassination, apparently shared his belief that this was possible. In 1995, undoubtedly as a response to the then-widespread criticism of the FBI crime lab, a book entitled Hard Evidence was published to help promote the FBI crime lab. This book, written by David Fisher, featured an interview with Frazier. When musing on the whereabouts of the still missing remnants of the bullet found in pieces on the front seat of the limousine, the carpet beneath Nellie Connally's seat, and in the President's skull, Frazier declared "What happened, I think probably in the confusion when they got to the hospital, everybody jumped out of the car, and if there were lead fragments on their clothes or in their pockets or anywhere else, they fell on the ground and were just trampled on and that was the end of it." While some might say that the likelihood of losing fragments in the chaos was significantly greater than that of losing a nearly-intact bullet, the bullet may have been in pieces and a nearly-intact bullet could easily have been picked up in the treads of a car tire. Sometimes things get lost.

But even if one should refuse to believe it got lost, there is the possibility that it simply was overlooked.  On May 13, 1964, in testimony before the Warren Commission, Robert Frazier described his search of the limousine for bullet fragments late on the night of the shooting. Two bullet fragments had already been retrieved from the front seat by the Secret Service. First, Frazier described the car: "There were blood and particles of flesh scattered all over the hood, the windshield, in the front seat and all over the rear floor rugs, the jump seats, and over the rear seat, and down both sides of the side rails or tops of the doors of the car." Then Frazier described his search: "I examined the car to determine whether or not there were any bullet fragments present in it, embedded in the upholstery of the back of the front seat, or whether there were any impact areas which indicated that bullets or bullet fragments struck the inside of the car." At this point he found three small bullet fragments on the carpet under Nellie Connally's jump seat. By his finding these three fragments, and by his using the word "examine" to describe his search, Frazier gave the clear implication that he was extremely thorough in his search for bullet fragments. 

When asked if he felt his search was indeed a "thorough examination of all aspects of the interior of the automobile," however, Frazier's response was not without its qualifications. He replied: "Yes, sir; for our purpose. However, we did not tear out all of the rugs on the floor, for instance. We examined the rugs carefully for holes, for bullet furroughs, for fragments. We examined the nap of the rug, in the actual nap of the rug, for fragments and bullet holes. We pulled the rug back as far as we could turn it back and even tore the glue or adhesive material loose around the cracks at the edges of the rug so we could observe the cracks to see whether they had been enlarged, and we examined all of the upholstery covering, on the back of the front seat, on the doors, and in the rear seat compartment, the jump seats, the actual rear seat, the back of the rear seat, and we examined the front seat in a similar manner, and we found no bullet holes or other bullet impact areas, other than the one on the inside of the windshield and the dent inside the windshield chrome." (5H58-74).

An 11-27-63 Secret Service report on this inspection, included in the Secret Service's report on the limo to the Warren Commission, CD80, confirms "a meticulous examination was made of the back seat of the car and the floor rug." But this wasn't exactly true. 

In Hard Evidence, Frazier was more forthcoming about this examination. He revealed "The President's limousine arrived back in Washington about six o'clock. Around one o'clock the next morning, Cort (Cortland Cunningham) and I started sifting through the blood looking for lead fragments. It was tough; it was very tough...We'd just reach down into the clots of blood and scoop it up in our hands and let it dribble through. Whenever we felt something gritty, we'd clean it up and if it was lead, we'd save it in a pillbox. We didn't really recover a lot of lead." Evidently, they never thought of sponging off the blood and inspecting the carpet with a metal detector and a magnifying glass. 

In any event, according to the Secret Service's own report on the limo, CD80, by the afternoon of the 23rd a Secret Service agent was requesting permission to clean the rest of the blood from the back seat and floor of the limo. At this time, he was told to wait for FBI approval. The very next day he made a second request, this time noting "that the odor from the car was becoming offensive." This request, almost certainly made after the announcement of Oswald's death, was granted "after clearance from the FBI." Late that evening, the limousine was cleaned up. No FBI agent was present. According to the Secret Service's own records, "there were still fragments of bone and hair in the debris of the car which had not been removed by the FBI search team." There's no record of what became of this "bone and hair." There's no indication that this clean-up crew looked for small fragments of lead hidden amongst this bone and hair. A Ford Motor Company memo first obtained and reported by researcher Pamela McElwain-Brown, moreover, demonstrates that within 10 days of the shooting, the carpet of the limousine had been removed by "the White House upholstery man" and had been replaced by the writer of the memo, Ford Motor company employee Vaughn Ferguson. There's no record of what this "upholsterer" did with this carpet. There's no reason to believe that a thorough inspection of this carpet was ever undertaken.

And should one STILL have any doubts, and STILL cling to the notion that the bullet hitting Connally must have remained on his person or in the limousine, and could not possibly have been cleaned-up, stolen, lost or overlooked, there is this: there is a similar-sized piece of metal from the limousine that disappeared after the shooting.  Nellie Connally, in her 2003 memoir From Love Field, reported that a Mexican peso worn by her husband as a cuff link was shot off his wrist during the shooting and was never recovered. She reported that she had a bracelet made from the remaining cuff link, and wore it thereafter as a memento of her husband's close brush with death. It follows then that any explanation for what happened to this cuff link could apply to a bullet as well.