(Sections indicating that Morgan in particular, and the Clark Panel in general, were far from unbiased in their analysis and had a clear-cut agenda to refute Thompson and derail Jim Garrison's trial of Clay Shaw are highlighted in bold.)

EXPERT AFFIRMS 1-BULLET VIEW

A radiologist who examined the X-rays of President Kennedy's fatal head wound said in Denver Friday they prove conclusively that only one bullet--fired from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository building in Dallas--caused his death. 

Dr. Russell H. Morgan, dean of the medical school at  John Hopkins University, said the films--could they be released by the Kennedy family--would effectively remove all doubt and controversy that the assassination may have been the result of shots from more than one direction.

However, because the films haven't been released for publication and because a report on their examination wasn't included in the Warren Commission study, the controversy has continued, Dr. Morgan said.

The medical school dean made his remarks in an interview prior to speaking to some 300 physicians, attending the 34th annual mid-summer meeting of the Rocky Mountain Radiological Society in the Brown Palace Hotel. The meeting, which began Thursday, continues through Saturday.

Dr. Morgan was the only radiologist on a panel of four persons asked by then Attorney Gen. Ramsey Clark to review the X rays because of controversies surrounding the autopsy report.

But because the panel's report, released in April 1968, largely supported the conclusions of the Warren Report. Morgan said, it failed to receive much circulation. His talk here Friday on the subject was the first outside University organizations. The other members of the panel, all pathologists, have never spoken on the matter. 

BULLET'S PATH

He said the X rays in conjunction with an analysis of the movie shot by amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder, show "rather conclusively" that the path of the fatal bullet--because the President's head was bowed and tilted to one side--was consistent with being fired from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository building.

Further, he said, the X rays show the path of the bullet was strewn with thousands of bone fragments and that no other bullets entered from either the right or left sides of the skull, as some critics of the Warren Report have maintained.

Had other bullets entered the right or left side of the skull, they would have left paths of bone fragments, and no such paths were indicated. In addition, the entrance of a bullet is small, the exit point much larger, the doctor added, and both the entrance and the exit of the fatal bullet are characterized by this fact.

THEORY UNSUPPORTED

Morgan said his study of the X rays and the movie film also disprove the theory that another shot struck Kennedy from an overpass under which the president's car was preparing to pass.

The Zapruder film shows Kennedy's body lurching forward from one shot and then lurching backward, as though from a second. 

Morgan said the backward lurch was a reflex action of Kennedy's shattered brain, which caused the president's muscles to tense, and react in a spasm. It was this sudden straightening of the body which was interpreted as being the result of a second shot, he declared. 

The fatal bullet killed Kennedy instantly, Morgan said, and the subsequent emergency action at Parkland Memorial Hospital was in response to purely reflex activity. 

ASSUMPTION CITED

Morgan speculated that the reason the X rays weren't included in the Warren Commission Report is that when doctors first examined Kennedy, they thought the bullet entered lower in Kennedy's head.

Had their assumption been correct, the bullet would have to have been fired from below the level of the presidential limousine, he said.

Morgan said the X rays can now be studied with permission of the Kennedy family, though the photographs of the injury, which he described as "pretty gory," are still closed to examination. He said he feels publication of the X rays has been prohibited because the Kennedy family equates them with the photographs.

SINGLE STUDENT

To date, he said, the X rays have been studied by only one person since being released for study last November, and that was by a urologist from Columbia University interested in the phenomenon of assassination.

Should the X rays ever be released for publication, he explained, great care and special techniques would be required before they would show the conclusive evidence, because they were produced in a hurry under extremely trying conditions and were over-exposed. 

EXPERT SAYS 4-INCH ERROR LED TO FALSE SPECULATIONS IN JFK DEATH DENVER  

(AP) — A leading medical expert says a four-inch mistake by a pathologist who examined the body of John F. Kennedy after he was shot to death in Dallas produced a series of false speculations about the assassination.

Dr. Russell H. Morgan said the bullet actually entered the president's skull some four inches higher than initially reported, but the Warren Commission's detailed report on the assassination failed to clarify this point.

Morgan, dean of the medical school at Johns Hopkins University, is the only radiologist to examine the X-ray photographs of the slain president's skull. 

The matter became an issue of great importance in New Orleans between 1967 and 1969 when Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison was attempting to prove that the slaying of Kennedy was plotted here.

Garrison contended that Kennedy was shot from the front, rather than from behind as the Warren Report concluded, and that the X-rays would prove it. He made many legal attempts to gain access to the X-rays examined by Dr. Morgan, but failed.

The D.A.'s probe died after Clay L. Shaw was acquitted  March 1, 1969, of charges of conspiring to kill the president, though legal maneuvering continued long after that and only recently did the U.S. Supreme Court uphold an injunction prohibiting further prosecution of Shaw by Garrison. 

In an address to the 34th midsummer conference of the Rocky Mountain Radiological Society here, he gave X-rays the credit for finally revealing the pathologist's error and disproving many of the more extreme speculations spawned by the mistake, which is included in the Warren Commission report. 

Morgan's four-year investigation of the photographs and the Abraham Zapruder film of the assassination led him to several conclusions, he said. 

The most important finding was that one of the pathologists who examined Kennedy's body in Washington the night of the assassination erred in saying the fatal bullet entered the "occipital protuberance," or the bulge at the lower section of the back of the skull. 

This statement, which Morgan said later proved to be false, was included in the Warren report. Critics of the report immediately noted a major inconsistency between that alleged entry point and several features of the Zapruder film which showed a frame-by-frame sequence of the shooting. Critics said the film showed the president's head in a near vertical position when the bullet hit and also showed him lurching backward, leading to speculation the bullet came from the front.  

The angle of the bullet became controversial. Some contended it couldn't have been fired from Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and entered the skull where the pathologist said it did. 

Morgan said Friday the Warren Commission, which named Oswald as the assassin, made no effort to explain the contradiction, allowing it to provide controversy for several years. 

When he was given two days to examine the X-ray photographs, Morgan found them of poor quality, severely over-exposed. Of the 14, he said, only three were of the head wound.  He said one had pencil marks on the negative itself showing "where somebody thought the bullet had gone."  

(The remaining  paragraphs were found in the version of the article published by the Galveston Daily News the next day.)

The penciled line corresponded to the mistaken pathologists' conclusion that the bullet entered the base of the skull and exited at an upward angle out of the right of the forehead. But Morgan said he found the actual entry wound was 120 millimeters away from the penciled line, more than four inches higher on the back of  the head.

The lurching of the president's body backward, he said, was caused by body spasms after the massive wound was inflicted.

Morgan said the Zapruder film, the ballistics tests, the projected line of fire and the angle of entry of the fatal bullet all were consistent with the explanation that a single shot fired from above and behind killed the president.  

"The Warren Commission's diagnosis was correct," he, said, "even though the evidence cited was inconsistent."

Wounds of Contention 

Such was the Justice Department's own skepticism of the Clark Panel's conclusions, however, that Carl Eardley, who'd been working with the doctors on their reviews and reports for years, and who'd been one of the driving forces behind the Clark Panel, asked Dr. Boswell to participate in the autopsy of Dr. Martin Luther King. This was April 4, 1968, but 5 weeks after the Clark Panel had viewed the autopsy materials, and had questioned the competence of Boswell and his colleagues. Boswell, to his credit, refused. While one could make the argument that Eardley remained ignorant of the Clark Panel's findings until after it had been written up, reviewed, and signed, and that the last signature on the report was dated April 9, that still doesn't explain why Boswell's equally discredited colleague Dr. Finck was allowed to participate in the autopsy of Senator Robert F. Kennedy two months later, with no objection from the Justice Department. This also fails to explain why, even after the release of the panel's report, both Finck and Boswell were asked to help the government in the defense of Clay Shaw, and defend the Clark Panel's findings. Unless the government failed to fully trust the Clark Panel, there is a huge question as to why the government would continue to use Boswell and Finck as experts long after the Panel, in an official government report prepared on behalf of the Attorney General, had made them out to be total incompetents. For how else can one describe a doctor who mistakenly records a head wound high on the back of a man's skull as low on the back of his skull, creates a face sheet and autopsy protocol affirming this location, and then confirms this location again after reviewing the man’s autopsy photos...TWICE?   

The possibility that Eardley and the Justice Department thought the autopsy doctors competent, but grossly mistaken on the location of the entrance into the skull, simply makes no sense in light of the doctor's subsequent reports claiming the autopsy photos supported their original findings. That is...unless...Eardley knew the subsequent reports were created for political reasons and not to be taken seriously. Hmmm... 

An article in the 2-24-69 Manchester Union Leader helps shed some light on Eardley's mindset. During  a hearing in which New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison sought access to the JFK assassination autopsy materials for use in his trial of Clay Shaw, in which Dr. Cyril Wecht cited the recently released Clark Panel report to question the competence of the original autopsy, Eardley reportedly snapped: "But you weren't at the autopsy, were you? Have you ever attended the autopsy of a famous person like the President? You never have been surrounded by Treasury Agents, FBI agents, Admirals, and doctors, all asking to have this thing over with? It makes a difference, doesn't it?"

I'll give you a second to get over that one. Yep, the Justice Department, which from 1963-1969--the entire span of Lyndon Johnson's presidency--had insisted that Kennedy had received both an adequate and accurate autopsy, IMMEDIATELY changed tone after Johnson left office, and began touting that not only had the original autopsists made mistakes, but that these mistakes WERE NOT THEIR FAULT, but the fault of the Johnson Administration, which had failed to insure the doctors were allowed the peace, quiet, and solitude necessary to distinguish a bullet entrance near the top of the head from one four inches away. What disgusting nonsense!!!

Of course, the Justice Department was not alone in pretending that one could both claim the original autopsy was authoritative and that the head wound location was incorrectly recorded, and off by four inches. They had plenty of support from an unsurprising source...former counsel for the Warren Commission. In May 1975, former Warren Commission counsel W. David Slawson and Richard M. Mosk wrote an article for the L.A. Times arguing that any re-investigation of the assassination be restricted to the behavior of the FBI and CIA, and that there was no need to re-investigate the actual crime. This was a flip from Slawson's position in 1966 that a re-investigation of the medical evidence could prevent an investigation of the behavior of the FBI and CIA. Anyhow, in this article the dynamic duo made the amazing claim that "The evidence concerning the wounds conclusively dispels the idea of shots from the front...The wounds both slanted downward from Kennedy's back. This is clear beyond doubt from the autopsy and from the photographs and X rays of the body...to doubt the evidence of the wounds is to label as liars the doctors who examined the body, the pictures and the X rays for the commission." 

Well, this was more disgusting nonsense. Pure horseshit... 1) The wounds did not both slant downward. The head wound, as originally interpreted, slanted upwards. The wound was then re-interpreted, and re-located, so that the wound could slant downwards. 2) Claiming that doubting the medical evidence is to label the autopsy doctors "liars" is hypocrisy at its worst. Did Slawson and Mosk forget that the government itself doubted the interpretations of the autopsy doctors, and embraced a review of their work in which it was declared they'd incorrectly recorded and remembered the location of the fatal head wound? If not, then why did they not only not denounce this outrage, but embrace the review themselves, by claiming the head wound slanted downward? 3) Slawson and Mosk knew DAMN WELL that the doctors were forbidden from examining the body, pictures and X rays for the commission, and their pretending they were not is offensive. No, more than offensive. The rapid fire assault on the truth by these men is so brazen, in fact, that their own words label themselves as "liars" and hypocrites, for then and evermore. 

And they were far from alone... The March 1977 article on Dr. Fisher in the Maryland State Medical Journal and a March 22 1977 article on Dr. Lattimer carried by the Ridder News Service revealed that although they each had come to conclusions contrary to those of the autopsy doctors while performing their own limited examinations of the medical evidence, they felt no further investigation was necessary. Even more disturbing, a September 17, 1977 article distributed by UPI reported that Dr. Russell Morgan had just spoken at Michigan State University, and had told reporters that "Mr. Kennedy's X-rays showed conclusively that a single-bullet fired from behind was the cause of death" and that "Congressional investigators should concentrate on other elements in their inquiry into the assassination."

Well, this is quite interesting. The last time Dr. Morgan had been quoted in the press about the assassination was but days before Dr. Cyril Wecht was to become the first non-government-affiliated pathologist to view the assassination materials at the archives, and in effect review his findings. And now, but 6 days before 6 members of the HSCA pathology panel were to review his findings, on behalf the government, no less, he re-appears, urging that no re-investigation be conducted. Should everyone to look at the autopsy materials in between these two appearances have confirmed his findings, that would be one thing...but in 1975, Dr. Fred Hodges, a Professor of Radiology at the John Hopkins School of Medicine, where Morgan served as Dean, was asked to study Kennedy's X-rays on behalf the Rockefeller Commission, and had provided them a report which directly contradicted Morgan's re-interpretation of the head wound location. Yes, in a little discussed report long withheld from the public, in a passage rarely if ever quoted before I started broadcasting it all over the internet, Hodges refuted the findings of the Clark Panel, noting instead that "a small round hole visible from the intracranial side after the brain was removed is described in the autopsy report in the right occipital bone, and many of the linear fracture lines converge on the described site." Even worse, for Morgan, was the next line: "The appearance is in keeping with the colored photographs showing a large, compound, comminuted injury in the right frontal region, and a small round soft tissue wound in the occipital region." Morgan, of course, had claimed there was no wound in the occipital bone on the X-rays or photographs, and had pushed the Clark Panel into concluding the wound was actually four inches or more higher on the back of Kennedy's skull, in the parietal bone.

Hodges' then still-secret report was thus bad news for Morgan. And seeing as Morgan was Hodges' boss, it was bad news that Morgan would almost certainly have discovered. It follows then that Morgan's urging congressional investigators to forget about the X-rays and focus on other matters may not have been so innocent, and was instead a plea designed to protect his own reputation. While this might seem a little harsh, let's remember Morgan's viewpoint but five years earlier. While he once was reportedly of the opinion that the X-rays were "produced in a hurry under extremely trying conditions" and were of "poor quality" and "severely over-exposed.," and that "great care and special techniques would be required before they would show the conclusive evidence," he now claimed they "showed conclusively that a single-bullet fired from behind was the cause of death" and that no further investigation was necessary. Perhaps he'd simply changed his mind and no longer felt the cowlick entrance he'd thought he'd "discovered" was a necessary ingredient to the single-assassin conclusion, and worth verifying. Or perhaps he simply didn't care if Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy or not, as long as his own reputation was protected.

While one might assume from all this that Morgan and the Clark Panel, in their zeal to refute Thompson, had made a mistake in moving the head wound, the HSCA pathology panel, which corrected the Clark Panel's misrepresentation of the back wound when compared to the neck wound, nevertheless confirmed the Clark Panel's new and improved location for the head wound.

This amazing migration is still much-discussed among students of the assassination...and largely ignored by most everyone else. Vincent Bugliosi, in his monster tome Reclaiming History, repeats without comment the claim by Dr. Werner Spitz, a colleague of Dr. Fisher's who served on both the Rockefeller and House Select Committee panels, that "It's just a red herring. We know from the autopsy photos and X-rays that there was only one entrance wound to the back of the president's head . The only significance this matter has is academic. If the bullet had entered where the autopsy surgeons said it did—and we know from the photos and X-rays they were wrong—it would have been an unusual deflection for the bullet to have exited where it did. This was a military-type bullet and it is unlikely that it would be deflected so sharply upwards." That Bugliosi--who prides himself on his cool-headed logic--lets Spitz get away with such nonsense is embarrassing. I mean, shouldn't he have noticed that Spitz, as Fisher and the Clark Panel before him, was working backwards--that his conclusion that the trajectory for a single bullet entering low on the head and exiting high on the head didn't work had led him to believe the bullet must have entered higher on the head, and reject the statements of everyone who'd actually seen the entrance? I mean, really, is it actually possible Bugliosi thinks such a massive dispute over the president's wound locations is merely "academic"? Of course not. It follows then that he was blowing smoke at his readers in his lawyerly manner and hoping they wouldn't notice that "Hey, something's wrong here!"

But at least Bugliosi talked to a doctor before claiming the migration was meaningless. In 2006, former detective Mark Fuhrman wrote a much-publicized book, A Simple Act of Murder, in which he investigated and dismissed the single-bullet theory using arguments similar to those provided in the previous chapters. He concluded, nevertheless, that Oswald acted alone. While barely dealing with the head wounds, Fuhrman mentioned in passing that the HSCA forensic medical panel, after viewing the autopsy photos and x-rays, concluded that the entrance wound on Kennedy's skull was “four inches higher than originally believed by the Warren Commission.” In what has become a typical gesture among those claiming Oswald acted alone, however, he made up an excuse for this, and claimed that the Warren Commission had not actually seen the autopsy materials. This, of course, was nonsense. Not only had Justice Warren admitted viewing the materials, but the autopsy doctors had twice viewed the materials and confirmed the entrance wound location prior to Morgan and the Clark Panel's re-interpreting the wound location. Fuhrman’s treatment of the head wounds was thus shallow and deceptive.

Which was pretty much par for the course...

HSCA Ida Dox Drawings

With the re-opening of the investigation by the HSCA, there was great optimism that this time the medical experts would get things right and not present the American people with anything as misleading as the Rydberg drawings.  But this was not to be.  When one compares the HSCA’s drawings of the damage to the President’s skull with the HSCA’s drawing of the back of the President’s head taken from what is purported to be an actual autopsy photo, it is easy to discern that something is wrong.  While the first depicts an explosion of bone fragments from the back of the head, the drawing from the autopsy photo depicts this portion of the head as intact, with the only area missing bone a line of fracture from the top of the President’s head down towards his right temple.  While the argument could be made that the first drawing depicted bones from the back of the head blown out of the hole by the temple, the testimony of the autopsy surgeons reflected that the skull high on the back of the head near the new Clark Panel-determined in-shoot, although badly fractured,  remained beneath the scalp. It makes little sense then that the skull fragments exploding from just in front of the entrance in the cowlick in the first drawing represent fragments which the second drawing demonstrates came from the front half of Kennedy's skull. That the drawing depicting the fragments fails to depict the blown-out “wing” of bone near Kennedy’s temple, which is clearly evident on the autopsy drawing, is yet further testament to its inaccuracy.

So how did this inaccurate drawing come to be? Helpfully, HSCA medical illustrator Ida Dox testified “a skull was used that had the dimensions of the President’s and the photographs of the retrieved bone fragments were traced to get the outline. This paper was cut out along the outline and taped on the skull in the position that the x-rays indicated there was bone missing, and from this paper and skull reconstruction I made my drawing.”  Sounds pretty scientific. Unfortunately, the aforementioned x-rays in fact showed there was plenty of skull left towards the back of the head, and that the recovered fragments must have come from somewhere closer to the wound of exit near the President’s right ear.   

This is no simple mistake, mind you. This is a real whopper. From this one can only conclude that the HSCA medical panel, and its chief spokesman Dr. Michael Baden, were fairly clueless, that they were deliberately trying to deceive, or that they were both fairly clueless and deliberately trying to deceive.

I'm leaning to the last one. While it’s true that soft-nosed bullets are designed to gradually peel back as the bullet traverses flesh, as this gives the bullet more stopping power, full metal jacket bullets like the ones purportedly fired from Oswald’s rifle are designed not to break-up at all. As a result, it takes a tremendous impact to break-up such a bullet. The bullet striking Kennedy was shattered and scattered. While many have argued that this break-up could have occurred as the bullet crossed the brain, they ignore the fact there was minimal damage to Kennedy’s mid-brain, and no reported bullet fragments along the Warren Commission's proposed path from the entrance observed at autopsy to the large defect presumably of exit. This pretty much destroys the bullet trajectory as outlined by the Warren Commission, and suggests that the Clark Panel and HSCA were correct in searching for a higher entrance. 

But not so fast. There are also problems with their new proposed entrance location. Since the damage to the upper brain started just left of the newfound entrance in the cowlick and led straight across the skull to the forehead, and since the expected trajectory through Kennedy would have been an ever-widening cone of fragments centered around an outshoot above the temple, the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel should have suspected that something was  not quite right. I mean, why didn't any of the fragments from this ever-widening cone embed within the brain on a level below the trajectory from the sniper's nest? 

Apparently, someone asked this question. And had no answer. It seems more than a coincidence that not one HSCA exhibit depicts the break-up of the bullet as it traversed the skull from its entrance near the cowlick. Curiously, the drawings used by the HSCA to depict beveling on the skull, the analysis of which led both the autopsy doctors and the HSCA to conclude the fatal bullet was fired from behind, depicted an intact bullet like those used in Oswald’s rifle entering and exiting a skull, even though, according to the HSCA’s own findings, no such thing occurred.  This is undoubtedly confusing.

There is reason to suspect, then, that Exhibit F-66, made to the specifications of Dr. Michael Baden, was a deliberate deception. But what about the tracing of the autopsy photo? Was that a deception as well?

Now You See it! Now You Don't!

When the HSCA forensic pathology panel showed Dr. James Humes a photo displaying what they believed was the actual entrance hole on the back of the head, the small oval shape in the cowlick, Dr. Humes, who’d led the autopsy of President Kennedy and had repeatedly asserted that the hole was near the President’s hairline, responded “I don’t know what that is.  Number one, I can assure you that as we reflected the scalp to get to this point, there was no defect corresponding to this in the skull at any point.  I don’t know what that is.  It could be to me clotted blood…it certainly was not any wound of entrance.”  While Dr. Humes’ irritation was spurred no doubt by the Clark Panel’s decision to change the location of the entrance hole, when one compares the HSCA drawing of the autopsy photo to the original autopsy photo, there’s reason for us all to be irritated, even outraged. 

One source of anger comes from looking at the mark in the cowlick, which was repeatedly re-drawn to look more like a bullet entrance by medical artist Ida Dox, at the request of pathology panel spokesman Dr. Michael Baden. At a 2003 conference on the assassination, Dr. Randy Robertson showed the audience a 5-9-78 memo from Baden to Dox found in the National Archives. This memo was a photocopy of  a page from Dr. Spitz's book Medicolegal Investigation of Death, with a drawing of a typical entrance wound. Beside the drawing, Dr. Baden had written "Ida, you can do much better." Apparently, Dox's early versions of the "bullet hole" were still too close to the original photo, and made the "bullet hole" appear more like the “clotted blood” Dr. Humes described, than the bullet hole Dr. Baden wanted to be there.   

This proved to be a big problem..for Humes. HSCA counsel Andy Purdy told the ARRB that, after Humes made his comments,  Dr. Charles Petty took him outside and yelled at him. And that was just the beginning. In his book Real Answers, HSCA Counsel Gary Cornwell admits that, as a result of Humes' failure to agree with the new and improved entrance location, he was all set to treat Humes as a hostile witness and aggressively question him on the witness stand about his many mistakes and inconsistencies. Cornwell explains that a still unnamed doctor warned Humes of this plan. Still, his plan was successful. A year after Dr. Humes called the supposed entrance in the cowlick "clotted blood" he testified that he had been mistaken and that he now thought it was the entrance wound described in the autopsy report. 

But this wasn't the end to Humes' humiliation. In what may have been an attempt to hide Humes' description of the supposed wound in the cowlick as "clotted blood," the report of the HSCA forensic pathology panel, in its discussion of the controversy over the wound location, noted, when discussing the proposed cowlick entrance, that "Dr. Humes first suggested that it might represent an extension of a more anterior scalp laceration, incident to the exit wound, in spite of the fact that within the photograph the margins of the wound appear to be intact around the entire circumference." Well, this, as we've seen, is not true. It was, in fact, Dr. Boswell who said it could have been the end of a scalp laceration, and not Humes. Still, this may have been an innocent mistake. 

But then again, perhaps not. When the panel was working on its report, they may very well have been under the assumption their interview with Humes and Boswell would be locked up for 50 years, a la their interviews with his colleagues Finck and Ebersole. As a result, their attributing an easily disproved theory to Humes may not have been an innocent mistake at all, but a conscious decision to damage his credibility, and hide his initial objections to their dubious re-interpretation of the entrance wound.

That Humes was not pleased with this, and was pressured into acting as though he'd changed his opinion, when he never really had, is demonstrated by the strange fact that by 1992 he’d changed his mind back.  

The other two autopsists never even pretended to change their minds. Humes’ colleague from the autopsy, Dr. Boswell, never wavered in his opinion that the entrance location was in the general area of the brain matter low on the skull. Not surprisingly, he was never called before the committee. The third autopsist, Dr. Finck, was interviewed by the medical panel on March 11 and 12, 1978 and put under tremendous pressure to change his interpretation of the entrance wound's location and agree with the panel that the real wound was in the cowlick. Apparently they felt that Finck, as a forensic pathologist, would be more understanding of their plight, and more agreeable to their points of view. In any event, in a section of the interview conveniently left of the official transcript, and only found on the tape, Dr. Weston kept asking Finck if it was possible there'd been some sort of transcription error when the autopsists reported that the wound was near the EOP. Finck admitted that yes, it was possible. Dr. Baden then pounced and told Finck that the wound in the cowlick in the photos was determined to be 15 mm by 6 mm--the same size of the wound measured at autopsy. He also told Finck that the x-rays showed an entrance wound exactly where the mark is in the cowlick. (Neither of these assertions was true or repeated in the the panel's final report.) Baden then remarked that everything mentioned in the autopsy report pointed to the wound being in the cowlick. (This is absolute nonsense.)  At this point, Dr. Wecht and Dr. Petty disavowed Weston's and Baden's "cross-examination" and "badgering" of Finck. Ultimately, Finck held firm and said he believed the wound was as measured at autopsy, and beneath the white glob of matter in the autopsy photos. No surprise, he was also never called before the committee. Radiologist John Ebersole, autopsy photographer John Stringer, and Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, who also claimed to have seen the small wound low on Kennedy's skull, were also not called before the committee. This means that Dr. Humes was the ONLY autopsy witness or participant to say the cowlick mark in the photos was the entrance wound, and he said so exactly ONCE, while under duress, in the ONLY testimony of an autopsy witness before the committee, and rapidly retracted it afterward. 

Of course, that doesn't stop the most ardent single-assassin theorists from trying to claim otherwise. In his 1993 book Case Closed, single-assassin theorist Gerald Posner suggested that he'd spoken to both Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell, and that they'd both told him the HSCA had convinced them the wound was really 10 cm above the EOP. They both denied this, of course. But the damage had been done. In a March 1993 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Robert Artwohl, while trying to refute the claims of conspiracy theorists angry over the magazine's recent articles supportive of Dr.s Humes, Boswell, and Finck, exposed his true agenda by first admitting that "for a bullet to enter just above the EOP and exit the right frontotemporoparietal area, it would have had to travel in an upward direction, fired from inside the limousine's trunk," and then twisting Dr. Boswell's statements into somehow confirming that the wound was actually 4 inches higher. The spin was dizzying, nauseating even; Artwohl actually dismissed the evidence for the lower entrance by claiming that "Boswell's testimony and autopsy drawing refutes such a low entry point." He then spun that since Boswell told the HSCA that the entry wound was at the posterior edge of the large defect, and since the X-rays showed the posterior edge of the large defect to be near the top of the head, close to the HSCA's cowlick entrance, that Boswell's statements were actually more "consistent with an entry wound 10 cm above the EOP at the posterior edge of the large skull defect."

This was absolute rubbish, of course, and mighty strange rubbish at that. First, Artwohl overlooked that the posterior edge of the large defect changed locations after the scalp was peeled back and skull fell to the table, and that Boswell was most certainly referencing the posterior edge of the second much larger defect. Second, he was willfully avoiding that the lower wound location was not just Boswell's recollection, but was confirmed by the rest of the autopsy team. And third, he was boldly ignoring that Humes and Boswell, in the very article under attack by the conspiracy theorists--the very article he was supposedly defending--had confirmed their original impression of the entrance wound by claiming the wound was "slightly above" the EOP, and that his article was as much an attack on their competence as anything published by what he condescendingly called the "conspirati." 

But the dishonesty and/or hypocrisy of those claiming the bullet wound was higher is not the only reason to believe the autopsy's description of the entrance wound was correct, and that the Clark Panel and HSCA's proposed entrance "clotted blood" of some sort. When one considers that the hole described in the autopsy report is 15 mm x 6 mm, a proportion of 2 ½ x 1, and that Humes' handwritten version of the report further notes that this entrance was "tangential to the surface of the scalp", and then considers that the hole or clotted blood in the cowlick is almost round, and is, at most, 1 x 1 ½, and a through and through hole, then it should be clear that the shape in the cowlick is not the entrance wound described by the doctors. When one considers further that NOT ONE witness of the dozens interviewed who saw the President after the assassination in Dallas and Bethesda recalled seeing an entrance wound in this cowlick location, moreover, this fact should be startlingly clear. Crystal. 

So what happened to the wound described by the doctors?  While in the Dox Drawing there seems to be no trace of a bullet entrance anywhere near the splash of gray matter (where the autopsy doctors placed the entrance), on the original photograph there appears to be a small hole just above and to the right of this matter.  I suspect this is the entrance hole observed at the autopsy. That this hole was added to this never-officially released  photo by someone from the research community is refuted by the simple fact that no one from the research community has ever acknowledged its existence, and that this shape is indeed apparent on the Dox drawing, once one notices it in the autopsy photo.   

Well, why hasn't anyone noticed this before? That an entrance hole in the hairline vindicating Humes’ testimony runs counter to three of the most widely held conspiracy theories on the assassination, i.e. that the bullet striking the President in the head came from the front and exited from the back of his head, that the autopsy doctors were, of necessity, party to the conspiracy, and that the autopsy photos were altered to hide an exit hole in the back of the head, could very well be a factor in many a conspiracy theorist's failure to notice the hole. But there are many single-assassin theorists out there on the constant lookout for anything that will support the findings of the original autopsy. Why can't they see it?

Well, perhaps they haven't spent as much time looking at these photos as I. I studied the photos for a year or more before I noticed the hole.

And there's also the possibility that--dare I say it--I have a heightened ability when it comes to interpreting certain kinds of images. I recall a gator watch on the bayou during a vacation in New Orleans. There were roughly 25 people on the boat. Out of the roughly 20 gators spotted by this group, I was the first to spot 12-15 of them. I have no idea why. People on the boat were laughing, and accusing me of being some sort of ringer, or of having Superman's eyes.

Above or Below?

Only adding to my suspicion that the dark shape on the autopsy photo is the entrance observed at autopsy is that when one compares the dark shape with the entrance location marked on a skull by the autopsy doctors, they nearly overlap. While the autopsy report and the marked skull depict the wound as being slightly above the EOP—the external occipital protuberance, the bump at the back of Kennedy’s head--and the photos indicate it was slightly below, the doctors were inconsistent in their testimony as to whether the entrance was above or below. During Dr. Humes’ discussion with the HSCA, for example, he told them that after looking at the autopsy photos he now believed the wound was slightly below the EOP.  

So why couldn’t the doctors from the autopsy successfully point out the low entrance wound when shown the autopsy photos by the HSCA in 1978 and The Assassinations Records Review Board (The ARRB) in 1996?  After all, they’d found it twice before.  Twice…

As already discussed, when the Kennedys turned the autopsy materials photos over to the National Archives, the Archives arranged for Dr. Humes, Dr. Boswell, the autopsy radiologist John Ebersole, and the autopsy photographer John Stringer to catalogue the photographs and x-rays and create a Report of Inspection on November 1, 1966.  This was the first time the autopsists had been allowed to see the photographs.  Their report, signed November 10, 1966, describes photos 15 and 16 as “depicting a wound of entrance in right posterior occipital region” and transparencies 42 and 43 as “color prints of the missile wound in right occipital region.”

Similarly, on the January 26, 1967 report prepared for the Justice Department, Humes, Boswell, and (a rushed-back-from Vietnam ) Finck assert that “the autopsy report states that a lacerated entry wound measuring 15 by 6mm (.59 by 0.24 inches) is situated in the posterior scalp approximately 2.5 cm (1 inch) laterally to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance” and that “Photographs No.s 15, 16, 42, and 43 show the location and size of the wound.” 

Were they lying when they said they saw the entrance wound?

Were they scared to point it out after the Clark Panel and the government “officially” decided this entrance didn’t exist?

Or were the photos in the archives “doctored” between 1967 and 1977?

If so, it would most probably have taken place after 1975. The April, 1975 report of Dr. Fred Hodges to the Rockefeller Commission reflects that in his interpretation a colored autopsy photo (presumably the one above)  showed “a large compound comminuted injury to the right frontal region, and a small round soft tissue wound to the right occipital region” which was "in keeping" with the wound "described in the autopsy report in the right occipital bone." The Clark Panel and HSCA's "cowlick" entrance is, of course, in the parietal bone.

And then there's this little morsel... Doug Horne, a member of the ARRB staff, is reported to have told a crowd at a 1998 assassination conference that he witnessed both Humes and Boswell point out where they believed the entrance to be during their ARRB testimony, and that this entrance was the same for each man. According to Joe Backes’ notes on the conference, Horne then said the spot they selected was a spot behind the right ear “that seemed dark and intact in the photo.” While this could be a reference to the entrance proposed above, the transcripts of the doctors’ testimony do not reflect they ever pointed out such a spot to their interviewer Jeremy Gunn. Hmmm.  If  Backes’ notes and Horne’s words are to be trusted, this suggests that either Gunn failed to make a note of where the doctors pointed (which seems strange considering that that they were interviewed, in no small part, so that he could record their impressions of the wound locations) or that even the ARRB transcripts have been “doctored.”

HSCA Figure 15/Fox Autopsy Photo Comparison

As a result of the autopsy doctors’ failure to point out a hole in the hairline, outside of vague comments that it was near the splash of mysterious gray matter, the HSCA’s pathology panel opted to confirm the findings of the Clark Panel and assert that the three doctors who actually inspected the President on the night of the autopsy, Humes, Boswell, and Finck, were all incredibly mistaken and had even recorded his head wound in the wrong bone.  Suspiciously, in the pathology panel’s report, they mentioned that they searched the area around the splash of gray matter near the hairline but were convinced there was no wound at that location.  What was not stated was that the close-up of the gray matter they placed in their report was a close-up of gray matter taken from a different photo than the one they had Ida Dox copy. The photo they took the close-up from can be found on the internet, however. While the bullet hole is less apparent in this photo, it is still visible, which makes me suspect that it is indeed a bullet entrance and not just an aberration on the other autopsy photo.  In fact, the only aberration seems to be that the HSCA medical panel cropped this photo just below the possible bullet hole, so that the bullet hole can not be seen on the close-up image shown the autopsy doctors, and subsequently  published. Or was this just another coincidence?

That this hole near the EOP was deliberately ignored because it was inconsistent with the damage done to the President’s brain and skull, and would therefore necessitate an additional shot, is lent credence by the testimony of Dr. Humes before the HSCA. Oddly, it is the testimony where he admits he was wrong and confirms that the hole in the cowlick was the real entrance. He says: “We described the wound of entrance in the posterior scalp as being above and to the right of the external occipital protuberance…it is obvious to me as I sit here how…the upper defect to which you pointed or the upper object is clearly in the location of where we said approximately where it was, above the external occipital protuberance; therefore, I believe that is the wound of entry…By the same token, the object in the lower portion, which I apparently and I believe now erroneously identified before the most recent panel, is far below the external occipital protuberance and would not fit with the original autopsy findings..”  Humes’ contention that the gray matter’s location was ruled out because it was a centimeter or so below the original measured position by the EOP, and that therefore the wound in the cowlick 10 centimeters above the EOP must be the real location, is one of the strangest statements of all time.  It’s akin to someone viewing a police line-up where the perpetrator was believed to look like Mel Torme, and choosing Shaquille O’Neal because Mickey Rooney was just too damned short.  Humes’ focus on the EOP is nevertheless a red flag indicating there was great concern that his saying the entrance wound was below the EOP would bring the medical panel’s findings there was one shooter firing from behind into question.  Notice the way he says “clearly in the location of where we said approximately where it was” when it was four inches away on a different bone.  Clearly, wrongly admitting a colossal error in order to help perpetuate a lie didn’t come easy to the man.  According to author David Lifton, who spoke to Humes afterward, Humes’ hands were trembling.  According to Dr. Boswell, when he confronted Humes with the rumor that Humes had agreed that their autopsy report was wrong and that the entrance was near the top of the head, Humes flatly denied it.

When asked about his twists and turns regarding the position of this entrance wound by Jeremy Gunn of the ARRB, Humes only got himself in deeper, stating “I experienced great difficulty in interpreting the location of the wound of entrance in the posterior scalp from the photograph. This may be because of the angle from which it was taken, or the position of the head, etc.  It is obvious that the location of the external occipital protuberance cannot be ascertained from the photograph.  I most firmly believe that the location of the wound was exactly where I measured it to be.”  Could it really have been that difficult to distinguish between the position of the EOP, near the middle of Kennedy’s head, in the occipital bone, and the purported in-shoot in the cowlick, 4 inches away near the top of Kennedy’s head in his parietal bone, when you have a photograph of his entire head and neck??? 

Eye of the Beholder

When I compare the photos of the back of Kennedy's head, I find it remarkable that what appears to be a small hole appears in each photo slightly above and to the right of the gray matter, Even more remarkable is that this hole is in the exact same spot in each photo, and precisely where the doctors said there was a bullet hole. To me, this is clearly the wound described at autopsy. But that's just me. Now years after I first came forward to promote this round shape as the long-lost entrance on the back of Kennedy's head, I've found few theorists of any stripe willing to abandon their pre-conceptions.

But the wound is there, nevertheless, plain as day. It really makes me wonder if truth, much as beauty, is purely in the eye of the beholder. 

When I compare the cowlick entrance in the photos, I find something else to shake my head about. For here, it seems equally clear that the purported hole in the cowlick is much fainter on the black and white photo, and almost certainly not a bullet entrance. I'm not the first to notice this. Dr. Humes noticed this as well, and pointed this out in his discussion with the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel.  He explained that he rejected the mark in the cowlick as an entrance because:  “despite the fact that this upper point that has been the source of some discussion here this afternoon is excessively obvious in the color photograph, I almost defy you to find it in that magnification in the black and white.”

That the mark seen on the black and white photo is so clearly not a bullet hole, unfortunately, has led some conspiracy writers to place this photo next to the Ida Dox drawing of the entrance in the cowlick and create the illusion that the entrance wound on the drawing was completely fabricated. This is undoubtedly deceiving, and is yet another reminder that conspiracy theorists are every bit as capable of deception as single-assassin theorists. Incredibly, in two separate articles in the collection Murder in Dealey Plaza, Dr.s Gary Aguilar and David Mantik place the Ida Dox drawing by the black and white photo for comparison.  Dr. Aguilar’s caption reads: “…The small spot towards the top of the skull, which appears red in color photographs, was said to be an entrance location…The wound described is not evident in the actual photo.”  By his use of the phrase “actual photo,” Aguilar had implied that the color photo was but a color version of the black and white. This was not true.

Fortunately, he tried to correct this mistake. In September 2006, when challenged online by an irate single-assassin theorist about this caption, Dr. Aguilar readily admitted his error, stating “it appears that I did indeed use the wrong image of the back of JFK's head. The only one I had was from a high quality black and white, 8x10 set that I'd gotten from Tink Thompson and used for this image. My error was in not realizing that there was a tiny change in perspective in the correct image vs. the one I showed.”  Dr. Aguilar has in fact used the color photo in subsequent comparisons.  He has also disavowed his use of the term “actual photo”. He related “I never noticed that phrasing before and I don't think I'd write it that way today, if I actually wrote it originally, as opposed to the editor's having written it. I simply don't now recall.” 

Intriguingly, this last statement suggests that the misleading caption was written by the editor of Murder in Dealey Plaza, Dr. James Fetzer. If true, this might help explain why a nearly identical mistake was made in Dr. Mantik’s article in the same book. Dr. Mantik’s caption reads: “Ida Dox inexplicably enhanced the red spot in her drawing. The actual entry is not visible; no other photograph shows it either."   

Dr. Fetzer, however, was later to insist that both captions were written by the authors. In a January 2010 post on the Education Forum, he explained:"I shall have more to say about this, but Speer appears to have noticed something that has escaped the rest of us. These captions were the author's own. Notice that Gary's captions tend to be rather longer and more detailed than my captions in the Prologue, for example, where only rarely do I offer more complex ones. I have no doubt the captions weer authored by Gary and by David themselves. If they were missing from the original manuscripts, I may have called them to compose them." So it appears two respected writers made an identical mistake, and their editor failed to catch it.  

Still, whenever one points out the mistakes of researcher/writers such as Aguilar, Mantik, and Fetzer, one should also inject some perspective, and note that, while their mistakes may mislead a few unsuspecting readers, they positively pale in comparison to the mistakes made by the mainstream media most every time they write a bout the assassination. In a May 20, 1992, AP article reporting on a press conference held by Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell, for example, the AP printed drawings of an entrance wound on the back of a head and beveling of the skull.  Hundreds of thousands of readers were fooled into thinking these drawings supported the statements of the doctors, who, in an effort to combat some of the assertions in Oliver Stone’s film JFK, had asserted “The second, fatal shot entered the back of this head and exploded the right side of the skull.” The problem was that the drawing provided by the AP depicted the bullet entering near the top of Kennedy’s skull, in the HSCA entrance, when the doctors were describing the wound as measured at autopsy, 4 inches below this entrance. This “mistake” by the mainstream press hid from the public that the doctors were not only arguing against Oliver Stone, but also EVERY government panel to look at the assassination since 1968. Apparently, the AP didn't consider that news worth reporting.

Back of the Head Comparison

An additional reason to believe our proposed hole in the hairline is Dr. Humes’ long-lost entrance near the EOP comes from the fact that, when one looks at the gruesome autopsy photo of the back of the President’s head once his brain was removed, the hole is once again right where you’d expect it to be, showing signs of the “tunneling’ described by the doctors.

Significantly, if one matches the open-cranium photograph and the back of the head photo one can use the ruler in the latter to measure the size of the wound in the former.  If one estimates that the camera was 12 inches from the ruler, and that the wound was 1 inch beyond that, and assumes the camera was not using a zoom lens, then one can guesstimate that the wound was 8 percent larger in reality than measured on the ruler.  This makes the wound approximately 16 mm wide.  The entrance wound measured by the doctors was 15 mm wide.  I firmly believe this is that wound.

Since this autopsy photo of the cranial cavity has never been officially acknowledged or released, however, the possibility exists it's a fake. A look at the history of this photo, and of its use by conspiracy theorists, however, should lay these concerns to rest. While the open-cranium photo has been published in the books of David Lifton, Robert Groden, Harrison Livingstone, and Walt Brown, none of these books mentioned the bullet hole. While Noel Twyman, in his book, Bloody Treason, acknowledges that something is there, his drawing of the photo suggests the hole is the external occipital protuberance, the bump on the back of Kennedy’s head.

On November 20, 2004, I met Robert Groden in Dealey Plaza and asked him about the autopsy photographs’ depiction of a hole in the hairline. Surprisingly, he readily agreed that the hole near the hairline in the open cranium photograph was an entrance wound.  Even more surprising, he insisted that he’d always acknowledged it as so.  In The Killing of a President, in which Groden summarized his views on the assassination, Groden described 8 likely shots, none of which entered low on the President’s skull from behind.  One hopes this was just a misunderstanding. 

On January 25, 2006, via personal correspondence, David Lifton also acknowledged that the proposed bullet hole on the open cranium photograph was the entrance wound described at autopsy. Consistent with his theory that the body was changed between Dallas and Bethesda, Lifton explained that in his opinion the men who faked the bullet entries on Kennedy’s body created two false entries on the back of Kennedy’s head, one low and one high. He theorized that Dr. Humes was pressured into acknowledging only one of them in his autopsy report.  From this it appears that Lifton has made some subtle changes to the theory he first presented in his best-seller Best Evidence.

And, oh yeah, FWIW, everything-is-fake theorist Jack White has acknowledged multiple times that he believes the presumed bullet hole in the black and white photo of the open cranium is the bullet hole described at autopsy.