LNers Can't Explain the Two Back-of-Head Bullet Fragments

[John Mytton]

Dear Reader. Here's one of my comments on the lobes:

    "There are four major lobes in the cerebrum. The insular and a
     sixth lobe, the limbic, are deep inside the cerebrum. Many web
     sites refer only to the main four."

No attack on Griffith or appeal to authority. The sixth lobe mentioned in passing. Griffith's reply:

I guess that why I unfairly said: "You simply must have your way with even the most trivial items."

Really? A lot have chimed in on our discussion, have they? And taken your side? 

Griffith keeps rehashing the same old BS. He's thinks he's detected a mistake on my part like when he claimed Honest JohnM was referring to his nutty religion when John used the term "faith based".

BTW, why would I extensively quote or accept large parts of Pat Speer's site, if I'm only interested in one part of it? When you quote from the Warren Report or HSCA, do you add in everything and acknowledge their official conclusions? You suffer from Gish's Gallop, "a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments." It was named after a blowhard creationist.

I am glad that you have acknowledged the accuracy of the Riley drawing's location of the cowlick wound. Thank you.

Hi Jerry,

For an event that will be forever recorded in the history books as "John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by a Lone Nut, Lee Harvey Oswald", end of story! Griffith is absolutely losing it, his latest rants are a complete embarrassment, he really needs to stay calm and focus on his interpretation of the evidence.

I can just imagine Griffith sitting "quietly" at his keyboard. Hahahaha!

he claimed Honest JohnM was referring to his nutty religion

I had no idea what Griffith's religion is and as I said, I really don't care, and even when I clarified that his faith in this particular situation was based on his irrational belief in a MASSIVE conspiracy he still insisted on calling me a bigot?? Go figure?

Btw at the end of the day Griffith can mindlessly regurgitate as much medical terminology as he likes, but the impossible to fake stereoscopic autopsy photos show a single shot from behind and a massive blowout above the ear(which shows a large amount of missing skull and brain), and these simple facts are reinforced by the impossible to fake Zapruder film. Case Closed!







JohnM

[Michael T. Griffith]

In a nutshell what do you think all of this proves? Obviously, JFK was shot from behind from the 6th floor of the TSBD?

I take it that you are very new to the JFK case and that you have not bothered to read most of my replies?

What do I think all of this proves? Well, it's very simple: A bullet that entered slightly above and to the right of the EOP could not have been fired from the sixth-floor window. The only way that the WC could get the trajectory to work was to assume that JFK's head was titled over 50 degrees forward, a claim that nobody takes seriously anymore. I'll let lone-gunman theorist Dr. Robert Artwohl give his take on the trajectory problem posed by the EOP entry site:

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Given the position of the President’s head in frame 312 of the Zapruder film (the moment just before the head burst), 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. Not even the most radical or imaginative of the conspirati has supposed a sniper to have been in this location. ("JFK's Assassination: Conspiracy, Forensic Science, and Common Sense," JAMA, March 24/31, 1993, 269:12, p. 1540)
---------------------------------------

Dear Reader. Here's one of my comments on the lobes:

    "There are four major lobes in the cerebrum. The insular and a
     sixth lobe, the limbic, are deep inside the cerebrum. Many web
     sites refer only to the main four."

No attack on Griffith or appeal to authority. The sixth lobe mentioned in passing. Griffith's reply.

You're lying again. The question is, Why did you reply at all? Why did you feel the need to respond after I said that we had both goofed? Why? Because you just couldn't let it go. In fact, let me quote what I said in my reply:

---------------------------------------
I thought we were talking about the back half of the head. I was referring to the part of the cerebrum in the back half of the skull, but, alas, I see that I carelessly did not specify that. Thus, I cannot howl about your saying the cerebrum has only four lobes. This time we both goofed.
---------------------------------------

And I said nothing else on the subject in the rest of my reply and was prepared to drop the matter. But then you replied by claiming that there are four "major lobes" and that there are two more deep inside the brain. Why? Because you just had to be right (even though you were wrong). So, I replied that there are five major lobes and cited several expert sources to prove this. And in response you had the nerve to claim that I was the one who had to be right about every minor issue! 

Griffith keeps rehashing the same old BS. He's thinks he's detected a mistake on my part like when he claimed Honest JohnM was referring to his nutty religion when John used the term "faith based".

You're lying again. It's not "BS" at all. It's a simple statement of fact that anyone can easily verify by reading your previous replies, starting with your Reply #152: In response to my factual point that the brain photos show the cerebellum and the right-rear occipital lobe in virtually pristine condition, you claimed that I was wrong because the brain photos show damage to the "right cerebrum," and then you asked if I was wearing my "Mormon underwear too tight."

When I pointed out your blunder and noted that the cerebellum is not part of the cerebrum, you answered with the comical claim that you said "right cerebrum" because you thought I was assuming that the right-rear occipital lobe was part of the cerebellum, even though I had always distinguished them as two areas in my replies.

And here you are still refusing to admit that you committed an inexcusable, amateurish blunder. Granted, admitting such a blunder would show that you have no business talking about the medical evidence, but at least you'd be facing your blunder truthfully.

Incidentally, when are you going to address the problems that have been documented with the cowlick entry site? You're still ducking them.

BTW, why would I extensively quote or accept large parts of Pat Speer's site, if I'm only interested in one part of it? When you quote from the Warren Report or HSCA, do you add in everything and acknowledge their official conclusions? You suffer from Gish's Gallop, "a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments." It was named after a blowhard creationist.

You're lying again. You deliberately cherry-picked a statement from Speer's online book to give the false impression that Speer has some doubt about whether Humes reflected the scalp and saw the underlying wound in the skull, when in fact, as I proved, Speer has no doubt. But someone who had never read Speer's book would have no idea how dishonestly you quoted him.

Incidentally, when are you going to address the problems that have been documented with the cowlick entry site? You're still ducking them.

I am glad that you have acknowledged the accuracy of the Riley drawing's location of the cowlick wound. Thank you.

You're lying again. I never expressed any doubt about the accuracy of Dr. Riley's location of the cowlick entry site. You did. Dr. Riley located it where everyone has located it. This is a non-issue that you've made up to avoid admitting another blunder.

When I quoted Dr. Riley on the fact that the top-of-head photos show intact cerebral cortex in the location of the cowlick site, you said Riley was "ignorant of perspective and sightline-analysis" and then made the comical claim that by citing Riley's research on the cowlick site I was putting the site "in the vertex area" (Reply #154). I jumped all over you for this astounding gaffe:

---------------------------------------
Oh, heavens to Betsy! The "vertex area"?? Where in the world from my comments could you have conjured up this nonsense? Do you even know what the vertex is, where it is? The vertex is the highest point on the top of the skull. It is at, or within a tiny fraction of an inch from, the junction of the coronal suture and the sagittal suture (aka the bregma). It is nowhere near any point that could be 10/11 cm above the EOP.
---------------------------------------

Your first attempt to explain your blunder was to double-down on it and repeat it, saying that you refused to go along with my "fantasy that the cowlick entry site occurred in the vertex area" (Reply #156), when in fact neither I nor Riley had even remotely implied that the cowlick site was "in the vertex area."

But then, apparently, you realized that your blunder was too obvious to deny and so you changed gears by pretending that my citing of Riley somehow indicated that I was not dealing with the spatial relationship of the cowlick site to the vertex, when I'd said nothing about the vertex and when you were the one who brought up the vertex, even though it has nothing to do with the cowlick site. You just made this up out of thin air as a smokescreen to try to avoid admitting another blunder. Your argument here is a continuation of this childish smokescreen.

So, now that we've exposed your ducking and dodging and dissembling, how do you explain the fact that the top-of-head photos show intact cerebral cortex in the location of the cowlick site, as Riley discusses in his article and illustrates with his first graphic in the article? How do you explain that?

And how do you square the subcortical damage with the cowlick entry site, especially given the fact that there is no connecting path/cavitation between that damage and the cortical damage?

These are just two of the problems with the cowlick site. You have yet to address any of them. So let's just start with the two above-posed questions regarding (1) the intact cerebral cortex in the cowlick site's location and (2) the subcortical damage far below the cowlick site and the fact that there is no connecting path/cavitation between the cortical and subcortical damage.

[Mitch Todd]

MT: In the top-of-the-head photos, there is loose scalp hanging backwards and downwards, covering the rear of the head. You wouldn't be able to see a cowlick wound in those photos whether or not it was there.

This misses/avoids the point. The point is that the part of the cerebral cortex that is directly beneath the location of the cowlick entry site is undamaged, which obviously proves that no bullet entered at that spot. Yes, the red spot is not visible in the top-of-head photos, as I have previously noted, but the cerebral cortex is undamaged in exactly the same spot where the red spot would be if the scalp were in its normal position, in exactly the same spot where the high entry wound was supposedly located.

I don’t know how much more plainly I can explain this. If a bullet entered at the Clark Panel/HSCA revised entry site, aka the high entry wound/the cowlick entry wound—if a bullet entered at this location, then there cannot be intact cerebral cortex directly beneath this entry point. It is impossible. A bullet could not have entered at the cowlick site without doing considerable damage to the underlying cerebral cortex.

You're the guy missing the point here. The everted loose scalp hanging down covers the area  where the "red spot" should be. That's what you can't see it in the photo. The "cerebral cortex that is directly beneath the location of the cowlick entry site" (as you call it) is, as you said, directly beneath the "cowlick entry site." Because the  everted, hanging scalp covers the "cowlick entry site," it also covers the "cerebral cortex that is directly beneath the location of the cowlick entry site, ipso facto. And so, that area of the cerebrum is not --and cannot be-- visible in the TotH photos.

BTW:

Jerry O:
You have the vertex located to far forwards on JFK's head. In the TotH photo, you can see the top/front of the right temporal flap (as seen in the other photos) partially open. The vertex is well behind that. The vertex is closer to where to put the cowlick site than where you indicaste. 

[Jack Nessan]

I take it that you are very new to the JFK case and that you have not bothered to read most of my replies?

What do I think all of this proves? Well, it's very simple: A bullet that entered slightly above and to the right of the EOP could not have been fired from the sixth-floor window. The only way that the WC could get the trajectory to work was to assume that JFK's head was titled over 50 degrees forward, a claim that nobody takes seriously anymore. I'll let lone-gunman theorist Dr. Robert Artwohl give his take on the trajectory problem posed by the EOP entry site:

---------------------------------------
Given the position of the President’s head in frame 312 of the Zapruder film (the moment just before the head burst), 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. Not even the most radical or imaginative of the conspirati has supposed a sniper to have been in this location. ("JFK's Assassination: Conspiracy, Forensic Science, and Common Sense," JAMA, March 24/31, 1993, 269:12, p. 1540)
---------------------------------------

You're lying again. The question is, Why did you reply at all? Why did you feel the need to respond after I said that we had both goofed? Why? Because you just couldn't let it go. In fact, let me quote what I said in my reply:

---------------------------------------
I thought we were talking about the back half of the head. I was referring to the part of the cerebrum in the back half of the skull, but, alas, I see that I carelessly did not specify that. Thus, I cannot howl about your saying the cerebrum has only four lobes. This time we both goofed.
---------------------------------------

And I said nothing else on the subject in the rest of my reply and was prepared to drop the matter. But then you replied by claiming that there are four "major lobes" and that there are two more deep inside the brain. Why? Because you just had to be right (even though you were wrong). So, I replied that there are five major lobes and cited several expert sources to prove this. And in response you had the nerve to claim that I was the one who had to be right about every minor issue! 

You're lying again. It's not "BS" at all. It's a simple statement of fact that anyone can easily verify by reading your previous replies, starting with your Reply #152: In response to my factual point that the brain photos show the cerebellum and the right-rear occipital lobe in virtually pristine condition, you claimed that I was wrong because the brain photos show damage to the "right cerebrum," and then you asked if I was wearing my "Mormon underwear too tight."

When I pointed out your blunder and noted that the cerebellum is not part of the cerebrum, you answered with the comical claim that you said "right cerebrum" because you thought I was assuming that the right-rear occipital lobe was part of the cerebellum, even though I had always distinguished them as two areas in my replies.

And here you are still refusing to admit that you committed an inexcusable, amateurish blunder. Granted, admitting such a blunder would show that you have no business talking about the medical evidence, but at least you'd be facing your blunder truthfully.

Incidentally, when are you going to address the problems that have been documented with the cowlick entry site? You're still ducking them.

You're lying again. You deliberately cherry-picked a statement from Speer's online book to give the false impression that Speer has some doubt about whether Humes reflected the scalp and saw the underlying wound in the skull, when in fact, as I proved, Speer has no doubt. But someone who had never read Speer's book would have no idea how dishonestly you quoted him.

Incidentally, when are you going to address the problems that have been documented with the cowlick entry site? You're still ducking them.

You're lying again. I never expressed any doubt about the accuracy of Dr. Riley's location of the cowlick entry site. You did. Dr. Riley located it where everyone has located it. This is a non-issue that you've made up to avoid admitting another blunder.

When I quoted Dr. Riley on the fact that the top-of-head photos show intact cerebral cortex in the location of the cowlick site, you said Riley was "ignorant of perspective and sightline-analysis" and then made the comical claim that by citing Riley's research on the cowlick site I was putting the site "in the vertex area" (Reply #154). I jumped all over you for this astounding gaffe:

---------------------------------------
Oh, heavens to Betsy! The "vertex area"?? Where in the world from my comments could you have conjured up this nonsense? Do you even know what the vertex is, where it is? The vertex is the highest point on the top of the skull. It is at, or within a tiny fraction of an inch from, the junction of the coronal suture and the sagittal suture (aka the bregma). It is nowhere near any point that could be 10/11 cm above the EOP.
---------------------------------------

Your first attempt to explain your blunder was to double-down on it and repeat it, saying that you refused to go along with my "fantasy that the cowlick entry site occurred in the vertex area" (Reply #156), when in fact neither I nor Riley had even remotely implied that the cowlick site was "in the vertex area."

But then, apparently, you realized that your blunder was too obvious to deny and so you changed gears by pretending that my citing of Riley somehow indicated that I was not dealing with the spatial relationship of the cowlick site to the vertex, when I'd said nothing about the vertex and when you were the one who brought up the vertex, even though it has nothing to do with the cowlick site. You just made this up out of thin air as a smokescreen to try to avoid admitting another blunder. Your argument here is a continuation of this childish smokescreen.

So, now that we've exposed your ducking and dodging and dissembling, how do you explain the fact that the top-of-head photos show intact cerebral cortex in the location of the cowlick site, as Riley discusses in his article and illustrates with his first graphic in the article? How do you explain that?

And how do you square the subcortical damage with the cowlick entry site, especially given the fact that there is no connecting path/cavitation between that damage and the cortical damage?

These are just two of the problems with the cowlick site. You have yet to address any of them. So let's just start with the two above-posed questions regarding (1) the intact cerebral cortex in the cowlick site's location and (2) the subcortical damage far below the cowlick site and the fact that there is no connecting path/cavitation between the cortical and subcortical damage.

What do I think all of this proves? Well, it's very simple: A bullet that entered slightly above and to the right of the EOP could not have been fired from the sixth-floor window. The only way that the WC could get the trajectory to work was to assume that JFK's head was titled over 50 degrees forward, a claim that nobody takes seriously anymore. I'll let lone-gunman theorist Dr. Robert Artwohl give his take on the trajectory problem posed by the EOP entry site:

So the point being made is that the bullet, having been fired from the sixth floor window, could not possibly strike JFK’s head at the EOP sight. Irregardless of what happens after the impact.  Or is the point being made that the bullet once it penetrates the skull is not capable of changing directions. Maybe the damage is so extensive nobody really knows and the experts are just making assumptions given the bullet fragmented upon impact.

It appears the only issue that is truly being made here is that the bullet must travel in a perfectly straight line for there to even be all this confusion. Why else would the tilt of JFK's head even be an issue. Maybe you should not be so overwhelmed by an expert’s opinion that you stop thinking for yourself.

[Michael T. Griffith]

You're the guy missing the point here. The everted loose scalp hanging down covers the area  where the "red spot" should be. That's what you can't see it in the photo. The "cerebral cortex that is directly beneath the location of the cowlick entry site" (as you call it) is, as you said, directly beneath the "cowlick entry site." Because the  everted, hanging scalp covers the "cowlick entry site," it also covers the "cerebral cortex that is directly beneath the location of the cowlick entry site, ipso facto. And so, that area of the cerebrum is not --and cannot be-- visible in the TotH photos.

I suggest you take a look at Riley's first graphic in "What Struck John." The superior parietal lobule is visible in the top-of-head photos, and, as Riley notes, this is the location of the CP-HSCA entry site (https://kenrahn.com/Marsh/Autopsy/riley.html).

You might also want to read the exchanges that Dr. Riley had with lone-gunman theorists on this issue in the main JFK newsgroups, such as the alt.conspiracy.jfk Google Group. In one of his replies, Dr. Riley noted,

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We have autopsy photographs that show the top of JFK's head. Everyone agrees (including Dr. Bob Artwohl) that intact cerebral cortex is visible. If you are a neuroanatomist, you can identify the cerebral cortex (superior parietal lobule visible). What's the significance of that? Simple: that is the part of cortex that is immediately under the high entrance wound -- so, the brain at the point of the high entrance wound is not damaged. Now that is indeed a magic bullet.
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Autopsy photographer John Stringer told the ARRB that he saw the rear head entry wound, that it was very close to the EOP and "near the hairline," and that the red spot in autopsy photo F3 was not a wound (ARRB deposition, July 16, 1996, pp. 193-196; cf. pp. 87-90). He also mentioned that a cowlick wound would have been visible in the skull after the pathologists reflected the scalp. Keep in mind that Stringer also informed the ARRB that he took pictures of the head after the scalp had been reflected, at the direction of the autopsy doctors (pp. 71, 93-95).

I should add that two of the color autopsy color prints are labeled "missile wound in posterior skull with scalp reflected" (ARRB Exhibit 13, Numbers 44 and 45).

Yet, Jerry Organ continues to peddle his silly fiction that the autopsy doctors never reflected the scalp over the rear head entry wound and did not see the wound in the skull.

We should also remember what Dr. Finck said about the rear head entry wound in his testimony at the Clay Shaw trial, and note that this was after he had reviewed the autopsy materials for the Justice Department in late 1966. He said, "I don't endorse the 100 mm [relocation of the entrance wound]. . . . I saw the wound of entry in the back of the head . . . slightly above the EOP, and it was definitely not 4 inches or 100 mm above it."

One cannot be viewed as credible if one clings to the cowlick entry site without explaining the following issues (among other issues):

1. How a bullet entering at the cowlick site could have caused the subcortical damage, especially given the fact that there is no path/cavitation connecting the subcortical damage with the cortical damage. I have raised this issue repeatedly, and you guys just keep ducking it.

2. How two bullet fragments, supposedly from the cross section of an FMJ missile, could have ended up 1 cm below the cowlick site, especially if a bullet struck there at a downward angle. I defy you to cite a single case in the history of forensic science where an FMJ bullet has behaved in this manner.

3. Why not one of the FMJ bullets in the WC and Biophysics Lab wound ballistics tests deposited a fragment, much less two fragments, on the outer table of the skull or anywhere near the outer table.

4. Why not one of the skulls in the Biophysics Lab wound ballistics test showed extensive fracturing from the entry holes, even though those skulls, being dried skulls, were more brittle than live skulls. (The only plausible answer to this problem is that the extensive cracking of the skull in the back of the head was caused by an exiting bullet that struck the head in the front.)

5. Why the high fragment trail seen on the lateral x-rays does not align with the cowlick site and does not even come close to extending to the cowlick site. (Indeed, most of the high fragment trail is concentrated in the right frontal region, near the small notch in the right temple that several experts have identified on the skull x-rays. Gee, what a coincidence.)

There are other problems with the cowlick site, but these are the main ones that must be faced. Ducking them, pretending they don't exist, will not make them go away. You guys can keep posting bogus and/or irrelevant graphics and going off on endless diversionary evasions, but doing so won't make these problems disappear. It should tell you something that even a diehard WC apologist such as Dr. Larry Sturdivan, who is also your side's most qualified wound ballistics expert, has rejected the cowlick site.



 

[Jack Nessan]

I suggest you take a look at Riley's first graphic in "What Struck John." The superior parietal lobule is visible in the top-of-head photos, and, as Riley notes, this is the location of the CP-HSCA entry site (https://kenrahn.com/Marsh/Autopsy/riley.html).


All this wonderful posting and with exhibits too. Whatever is missing from this theory though. 

Oh, I know what it is. There is not a plausible explanation for the fracture in the windshield of the limousine. The fracture in the windshield of the limousine gives a clue as to the direction of travel of the bullet. The windshield fracture indicates the bullet had been traveling from the TSBD. The 6th floor to be exact. 

The bullet fragment had to have been angling up and away from the wound in the side of JFK’s head to create the windshield fracture. Guess what, the bullet had changed course from a downward angle to a horizontal if not upward angle after penetrating JFK’s skull. Is not that the conclusion basically reached by Humes? 

[Michael T. Griffith]

In a nutshell what do you think all of this proves? Obviously, JFK was shot from behind from the 6th floor of the TSBD?

Another thing that "all of this proves" is that the autopsy brain photos are fraudulent. You snipped that part of Dr. Hodges' analysis, but it is crucial. As I said, Dr. Hodges’ observation that in the skull x-rays “a goodly portion of the right brain is apparently missing” has been confirmed by several experts, including Dr. Mantik, Dr. Chesser, and Dr. Aguilar. Dr. Mantik confirmed this both with direct analysis and with OD measurements, determining that over one-half of the right side of the brain is missing in the skull x-rays.

Further confirmation of this comes from a surprising source: Dr. James Humes. Humes admitted to JAMA that "two thirds of the right cerebrum had been blown away" (Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA], May 27, 1992, p. 2798).

We also know that bits of JFK's brain were blown onto 16 surfaces, including the windshields of the two left-trailing patrolmen, the windshield of the follow-up car, Agent Kinney's clothes, Jackie's dress, the rear hood, and on several surfaces inside the limo.

Yet, the autopsy brain photos show no more than 1-2 ounces of brain tissue missing, as even Bugliosi and Baden freely acknowledged (and indeed insisted).

Thus, it is not surprising that the chief autopsy photographer, John Stringer, told the ARRB that he was certain that the brain photos in evidence are not the brain photos he took.

This is key because the only real objection to the EOP site is that it drastically contradicts the brain photos, because the brain photos show virtually no damage to the cerebellum and to the right-rear occipital lobe. The HSCA FPP members spent considerable time talking about the drastic conflict between the brain photos and the EOP entry site. Since they accepted the brain photos as authentic, they viewed them as irrefutable, definitive proof that no bullet entered at the EOP site. But once you realize that the brain photos are bogus and impossible, the only meaningful objection to the EOP site goes away.