Reclaiming History (96 page)

In addition to the above-mentioned experts, the HSCA turned to members of its own photographic panel to determine if any of the photographs or X-rays had been altered, and concluded there was no evidence of tampering.
⁴⁸

One comment before we continue our examination. As with the HSCA, the actual photographs of the president’s wounds are not being published as a part of this book, not just because their release was never authorized (only bootlegged copies have since become available and have appeared in various publications), but also because the exit wound to the president’s head is almost indescribably gruesome. I am, however, including a number of sketches produced for the HSCA by Ida Dox, a professional medical illustrator who was recommended to the HSCA by the Georgetown University School of Medicine. It was her task to illustrate the dimensions and location of the two entrance and two exit wounds in the president. She testified that she went to the National Archives and selected
original
autopsy photographs “that best showed the injuries.” Four photographs were used, per Dox. One, she said, showed “the back of the [president’s] head, another one…the upper back, then the side of the head and the front of the neck.” She said the subject photographs were copied by her “by placing a piece of tracing paper directly on the photograph, then all the details were carefully traced. Later on, while working on the final drawing, I had to have a photograph in front of me at all times. In this way I could be constantly comparing and looking back and forth at the drawing and the photograph so that no detail could be overlooked or omitted or altered in any way.” She said she had access to the original autopsy photographs “a great number of times” and also reviewed the autopsy X-rays.
⁴⁹

President Kennedy’s Wounds

Early in the autopsy, the three pathologists—Humes, Boswell, and Finck—turned their attention to the most obvious cause of death, the hole in the upper right back of the president’s head (which exited, they found, in the right frontal portion of his skull [see later discussion]). It was located, they wrote in their autopsy report, “approximately 2.5 cm. [approximately 1 inch] laterally to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance,” and the bullet causing the hole was fired, they concluded, “from a point
behind
and somewhat
above
the level of the [president].”
⁵⁰
This is entirely consistent, of course, with the known location of Oswald on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, to the president’s right rear.

The wound to the head bore all the characteristics of an entrance wound. For one, it was small, being 6 × 15 millimeters (approximately ¼ ×
³
/
₅
inch), slightly less, on the smaller dimension, than the diameter of the bullet, which was 6.5 millimeters. This is so, Humes testified before the Warren Commission, because of the “elastic recoil of the tissues of the skin. It is not infrequent…that the measured wound is slightly smaller than the caliber of the bullet that traversed it.”
⁵¹
The HSCA estimated that the bullet was descending “at an angle of 16 degrees below horizontal as it approached” the president and “from a point 29 degrees to the right of true north from the president,” which, of course, would be consistent with its having been fired from the vicinity of the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor of the Depository Building where Oswald was.
⁵²

As to the long length of the wound, the bullet “struck at a tangent or an angle causing a fifteen-millimeter cut. The cut reflected a larger dimension of entry than the bullet’s diameter of 6.5 millimeters (about a quarter of an inch), since the missile, in effect, sliced along the skull for a fractional distance until it entered.”
⁵³
This is also consistent with the location of Oswald not being directly behind the president, but to his
right
rear. Humes testified that when he “reflected the scalp [i.e., peeled the scalp skin away to see the skull bone beneath], there was a through and through defect [in the skull] corresponding with the wound in the scalp.”
⁵⁴

Additional evidence that it was an entrance wound was the “beveling of the margins of the bone when viewed from the inner aspect of the skull.”
⁵⁵
This is the “inward beveling” that one always finds in an entrance wound. When a bullet passes through a skull bone, it creates a beveling (or, as it is sometimes called, a coning or cratering) on the side of the skull opposite the side which was struck first by the bullet—in the same way a BB shot creates a crater on the opposite side when striking a plate of glass. In other words, in an entrance wound, the diameter of the wound is larger on the inside of the skull than on the outside where the bullet first hits. This physical reality has been known for centuries and has been the main basis for determining whether a wound is an entrance or exit wound. For instance, Assistant U.S. Surgeon General Dr. J. J. Woodward, who conducted the autopsy on President Lincoln on April 15, 1865, wrote in his autopsy report that “the ball [bullet]
entered
through the occipital bone about one inch to the left of the median line and just above the left lateral sinus…The wound in the occipital bone was…circular in shape, with beveled edges, the opening through the internal table being larger than that through the external table.”
⁵⁶
A bevel, then, on the inner surface of the skull is characteristic of an entrance wound, while a bevel on the outer surface of the skull indicates an exit wound. Dr. Finck, one of the autopsy surgeons, told the HSCA that “the hole in the skull in the back of the head showed no crater when examined from the outside of the skull, but when I examined the inside of the skull at the level of that hole in the bone I saw a crater, and to me that was a positive, unquestionable finding identifying a wound of entry in the back of the head.”
⁵⁷
Nine years earlier, Finck told a New Orleans jury in the Clay Shaw trial the same thing, adding, “The bullet definitely struck in the back of the [president’s] head…The wound was definitely inflicted by a shot from the rear.”
⁵⁸

In a 1967 CBS interview, Dan Rather asked Dr. Humes, “Can you be absolutely certain that the wound you described as the entry wound was, in fact, that?”

Humes: “Yes, indeed, we can, very precisely and incontrovertibly.” Humes said that as the bullet “passed through the skull, it produced a characteristic coning, or beveling effect on the inner aspect of the skull, which is scientific evidence that the wound was made from behind and passed forward through the president’s skull.”

Rather: “Is [this] conclusive, scientific evidence?”

Humes: “Yes, sir, it is.”

Rather: “Is there any doubt that the wound at the back of the president’s head was the entry wound?”

Humes: “There is absolutely no doubt, sir.”
⁵⁹

And there was yet another strong indication that the wound to the back of the president’s head was an entrance wound. The HSCA said that the “margin of this wound [to the president’s head], from 3 to 10 o’clock, is surrounded by a crescent-shaped reddish-black area of denudation…presenting the appearance of an
abrasion collar
resulting from the rubbing of the skin by the bullet
at the time of penetration
.”
⁶⁰
Dr. Baden testified that “an abrasion collar is characteristic of an entrance wound.”
⁶¹
Entrance wounds usually have abrasion collars or rings only because the bullet usually enters the skin at least at some angle, resulting, as Dr. Charles Petty, my pathologist at the London trial testified, in “little tiny tears” of skin
⁶²
—thus, the word
abrasion
for abraded skin. Per Dr. Cyril Wecht, a member of the HSCA medical panel who is a conspiracy theorist, the reason why the term
abrasion collar
or
ring
is so popular in law enforcement circles is because “it can be seen by the naked eye.” But he added that “if a bullet enters a body straight on without any angularity at all, there might not be an abrasion collar. In the Kennedy head wound there was a collar because the bullet came in at an angle.”
⁶³

Obviously, no other scientific or medical evidence is necessary to convince any rational person that the wound to the back of the president’s head was an entrance wound and the bullet that caused the wound was fired from the president’s rear.

But though unnecessary, there is additional medical evidence—indeed, conclusive proof—that the wound to the back of the president’s head was an entrance wound. The autopsy surgeons found “coagulation necrosis of the tissues” at the inner margins of the head wound.
⁶⁴
Dr. Wecht acknowledged in 1967 that coagulation necrosis is a “sure sign” of an entrance wound.
⁶⁵
Although I haven’t looked at more than fifty autopsy reports in my career, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the term
coagulation necrosis
in any of them. When I asked Dr. Wecht to define the term for me, he wrote that “in gunshot wounds of entrance, the dermis [outer layer of skin]…shows microscopic changes in the collagen, the protein material that comprises the dermis to a great extent. These changes in the collagen fibers are caused by the thermal [heat] effects of the bullet in distant wounds. In close range wounds, the changes are produced by the hot gases emerging from the muzzle of the weapon. These collagen alterations are referred to as coagulation necrosis. They cannot be seen by the naked eye.”
⁶⁶

In a follow-up phone conversation, Wecht said that although, as he indicated earlier, not all entrance wounds have abrasion collars, “
all
have coagulation necrosis.” He acknowledged that findings of coagulation necrosis normally do not appear in his autopsy reports or those of other prominent forensic pathologists, repeating that changes to the dermis can only be seen by use of a microscope.

“Doctor,” I said, “you would agree that a finding of coagulation necrosis in an autopsy report is a very sophisticated one, would you not?”

“Yes, I would.”

“How do you reconcile that, then, with the almost universal view that the autopsy surgeons in the Kennedy case conducted a very inferior and amateurish post-mortem?”

All Dr. Wecht could say was, “I’ll tell you where the coagulation necrosis finding came from—Dr. Finck. He specializes in this type of thing. I can guarantee you it didn’t come from Humes or Boswell.”
⁶⁷
It didn’t come from too poor a source. As indicated, Dr. Finck at the time was the chief of the Wound Ballistics Pathology Branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and as Finck said, he “was asked” by Humes to participate in the autopsy “specifically to interpret the wounds…It was my mission in that autopsy room. My main mission was to study the wounds.”
⁶⁸
*

So we see that despite the insistent and strident claims by conspiracy theorists that the fatal wound to the president’s head was fired from his right front,
all
of the medical and scientific evidence proves not just beyond a reasonable doubt but beyond all doubt that it was fired from his rear, and the wound to the backside of the president’s head was an entrance wound. Based on the evidence, the Warren Commission naturally concluded that “the…hole in the rear of the President’s skull was the point of entry” of the fatal bullet.
⁶⁹

Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists never stop pointing out that the Warren Commission never viewed the autopsy X-rays and photographs. Hence, they say, the Commission’s conclusions were invalid. But nearly all of them fail to add that three other later groups
did
examine the autopsy X-rays and photographs and unanimously reached the same conclusion as the Warren Commission.

In 1978–1979, the House Select Committee, based on the findings of nine forensic pathologists on its panel who examined close-up photographs and X-rays of the president’s head wound, concurred with the Warren Commission’s conclusion, saying, “The President was struck by [a] bullet…that entered in the right rear of the head near the cowlick area.” The committee added that “there is no medical evidence” that the president was struck from the front.
⁷⁰

The Clark Panel in 1968 and the Rockefeller Commission in 1975, which also examined the photographs and X-rays, came to the same conclusion, that the president was struck once in the back of the head by a bullet fired from his rear.
*
The four-member Clark Panel concluded that “the decedent’s head was struck from
behind
by a
single
projectile. It entered the occipital region 25 mm. to the right of the midline and 100 mm. above the external occipital protuberance…Photographs and X-rays indicate that it came from a site above and slightly to his right.”
⁷¹

The five-member Rockefeller Commission, citing the specific location of the head entrance wound found by the Clark Panel, concluded that this “head shot” was “fired from the rear” and that there was “no evidence to support the claim that President Kennedy was struck by a bullet fired from either the grassy knoll or any other position to his front, right front or right side…No witness who urged the view [before the Rockefeller Commission] that the Zapruder film and other motion picture films proved that President Kennedy was struck by a bullet fired from his right front was shown to possess any professional or other special qualifications on the subject.” The Rockefeller Commission noted that even Dr. Cyril Wecht had testified before the commission that the evidence establishes there was only one head shot, and it was fired from the rear.
⁷²

What this means is that the three pathologists who conducted the autopsy, the nine pathologists for the HSCA, the three pathologists (and one radiologist) from the Clark Panel, and the three pathologists, one of whom, Dr. Werner V. Spitz, was also on the HSCA medical panel from the Rockefeller Commission—that is,
seventeen pathologists
, even Dr. Wecht—
all
agreed that the wound to the back of the president’s head was an entrance wound.