A rational solution to the "shipping casket" factoid?

[Mitch Todd]

I have now spent an additional hour on this issue. FWIW, I discovered that in a 2024 piece at Kennedys & King, conspiracy god James DiEugenio describes Boyajian as "not reliable," notes (as I did) that Boyajian never says "the casket" arriving at 6:35 PM was JFK's, and seems to go so far as to suggest the unsigned Boyajian report is bogus. Well, how rude. I won't go that far. I also note that Dennis David was likewise not told that the casket was JFK's. He was told "your visitor has arrived."

But forget all that. I think Boyajian and David were operating on the basis of good faith - but mistaken - assumptions that the shipping casket contained JFK's body. I suspect - stay with me here - it was EMPTY but was indeed delivered in connection with JFK's body. After I had this epiphany, I discovered that good old Harold Weisberg had reached the same conclusion way back in 1990. Well, if researchers of the caliber of Old Harold (RIP) and Old Lance think alike on an issue, you can pretty well take their conclusions to the bank - no?

The original plan, up until very late in the afternoon of 11-22, was that the embalming of JFK would take place at Gawler's funeral home, not at Bethesda. The Military District of Washington (MDW) had actually sent personnel to Gawler's and set up a command post in anticipation of this. Jackie was apparently adamant that it would not take place there, so Gawler's had to scramble and send portable embalming equipment to Bethesda. Some members of Gawler's embalming team may have arrived as early as 8 PM, others around 11 PM, but in any event by the time they arrived JFK was out of any casket and on the autopsy table. Sometime before 11 PM, Kennedy aides arrived at Gawler's and selected the mahogany burial casket, which was then transported to Bethesda in Gawler's hearse (the damaged and badly stained Dallas casket going back to Gawler's).

No one from Gawler's had any idea as to how JFK's body had arrived at Bethesda. The famed Gawler's "First Call Sheet" that says "body removed from metal shipping casket at USNH at Bethesda," https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/md129/html/md129_0001a.htm, was in Joe Hagan's handwriting. Hagan described to Doug Horne that this was just an assumption on his part because he was told at some point (not necessarily 11-22) that the body had arrived in a "metal" casket - which the bronze casket from Dallas indeed was. You can find all this in Doug Horne's notes of his conversations with Hagan in April, May and June of 1996, which he seems to have conveniently forgotten in his enthusiasm for the body alteration theory: https://www.washingtondecoded.com/files/md182-1.pdf.

Now back to Old Harold: He discovered that it was standard operating procedure for a metal shipping casket to be delivered to EVERY military autopsy. It would be used to transport the autopsied body to the funeral home. He had no doubt that one had been delivered to Bethesda as reported by Boyajian, nor do I. He thus thought, as do I, that the shipping casket brouhaha was the proverbial Much Ado About Nothing.

Surely, an EMPTY metal shipping casket was delivered to Bethesda by the MDW at 6:35 in the expectation that JFK's body would be going to Gawler's for embalming. Hagan made clear to Horne that the very first call relating to JFK was received at 4:25, things were in a state of flux and confusion, and the call instructing Gawler's not to send a hearse to Andrews AFB was made at the "last minute." It is entirely plausible that, at 6:35, the MDW folks responsible for taking a shipping casket to Bethesda in accordance with standard operating procedure would not have been aware that the embalming would take place at Bethesda. Those like Boyajian and David who thought it contained JFK's body were simply and understandably mistaken. (David became such a conspiracy fixture, with some of his "memories" recovered under hypnosis, that I am less inclined to be charitable toward him.)

You're welcome. Next factoid, please.

A few things to remember:

1.) There is no kind of casket called a "shipping casket." The military term for the item is a "Human Remains Transit Case." It's not a casket, per se, as it's not intended to be used for burials, but to transport human bodies (and be reused). There are civilian analogues, particularly the "Ziegler case" that do the same thing, and are also not considered to be caskets. While Hagen did write "shipping casket," he explained that the term referred literally to a casket in which the body was shipped. That is, JFK was shipped in casket, not a case, and Hagen should know the difference. "Shipping casket" is a personal term invented by Paul O'Connor, as he says in the Best Evidence research video. It's interesting that O'Connor didn't use any variation of "transit case," implying that he had little, maybe no, experience with them while a corpsman.

2.)  Eaglesham and Palmer looked into Dennis David's stories about William Pitzer's death and found that every claim made by David was simply wrong. When they found an officer at Bethesda that could corroborate anything Dennis David said, and wanted him to help them contact her to verify his story, David cut off all contact with them. Later, they sent him a message that they had discovered that she had died, and he immediately went back to being buddy-buddy with them. A guilty conscience, and all that. Dennis David was nothing more than a fabulist.

3.) Now, some will try to rehabilitate David with the story told by Rebentisch, but the two stories are fatally different. According to David, he didn't know that the casket his team was bringing in contained the President until well after 11/22. In Rebentisch's version, everyone in his crew knew from the very beginning that JFK was going to be in the casket that they were going to handle. In Rebentisch's account, this casket arrived in a '58 chevy. David said it came in a Cadillac. It's worth mentioning that David and Rebentisch served together and El Toro and, per Lifton, knew each other well enough to know the other's wife's name. The two accounts cannot then be depended on to be independent of each other.

4.) In Boyajian's report, Boyajian divided his command into two groups. One (led by Boyajian himself) patrolled the hallways of Bethesda, keeping unauthorized personnel away from the morgue area. A second group "was to have been used as a cordon about the ambulance to keep newsmen from interfering with the movement of the casket." Note the phrase "was to have been used." The only time people say it that way is when you know that someone is supposed to do something, but either you don't know if they did it, or you know that they didn't. Consequently, Boyajian could not have known either firsthand nor via his "casket team" when the casket was brought in. Manchester reported that when Sam Bird's joint casket team landed and disembarked from their helicopters at 6:40PM, they were swarmed by newsmen and photographers who thought that the casket was on board with them. It may be as simple as Boyajian hearing the helicoptery commotion outside, he also presumed that the body arrived.

[Lance Payette]

A few things to remember:

1.) There is no kind of casket called a "shipping casket." The military term for the item is a "Human Remains Transit Case." It's not a casket, per se, as it's not intended to be used for burials, but to transport human bodies (and be reused). There are civilian analogues, particularly the "Ziegler case" that do the same thing, and are also not considered to be caskets. While Hagen did write "shipping casket," he explained that the term referred literally to a casket in which the body was shipped. That is, JFK was shipped in casket, not a case, and Hagen should know the difference. "Shipping casket" is a personal term invented by Paul O'Connor, as he says in the Best Evidence research video. It's interesting that O'Connor didn't use any variation of "transit case," implying that he had little, maybe no, experience with them while a corpsman.

FWIW, in the follow-up conversation between Hagan and Horne on 6/18, Horne specifically asked if the term shipping casket had a specific meaning in the funeral trade. Hagan said it did and went on to describe what you call a transit case. He said he had only been told that JFK had arrived in a metal casket, so he apparently assumed this meant a transit case - probably because Gawler's was the premier funeral home in Washington and had lots of contact with the MDW and thus with transit cases. So he was thinking "transit case" but wrote "shipping casket" to mean the same thing. He said he had not realized JFK was shipped in a "ceremonial casket" that was in fact metal (bronze).

[Royell Storing]

Good Lord, give it up. I have no idea what point you think you are making. Humes first saw the body when he opened the Dallas casket. You are the one insisting his ARRB testimony of seeing the body at approximately (very approximately) 6:45 or 7 somehow supported Horne and Boyajian's description of the arrival of a shipping casket at 6:35. You seemingly saw the coincidence between 6:35 and Humes' ARRB testimony as some sort of smoking gun. What are you now suggesting - the body was received in a shipping casket at 6:35 and tampered with by someone else before it was put back into the Dallas casket in its Parkland wrappings for Humes and Boswell to open at 6:45 or 7??? What the hell sense does that make? I simply pointed out that Humes' testimony at the WC and HSCA was consistent about the body arriving in the Dallas casket shortly before the autopsy began at around 8 and that his very uncertain time estimate in 1996 was some 33 years after the event and he made clear that he had done no preparation at all.

My belief is that an empty shipping casket was indeed delivered by MDW at 6:35 but was never used because a decision was made that the embalming would take place at Bethesda rather than Gawler's, the Dallas casket with JFK's body arrived sometime around 7:17, and Humes participated in opening the casket shortly thereafter. Not sexy enough for CTers, I know, but not batspombleprofglidnoctobuns crazy either.

   You are behind the curve with respect to Doug Horne and Gunn/ARRB. They think there was More than 1 "autopsy". I would recommend you read "Best Evidence" by Lifton. That will supply you with a very solid foundation. You're currently punching above your weight.

[Lance Payette]

   You are behind the curve with respect to Doug Horne and Gunn/ARRB. They think there was More than 1 "autopsy". I would recommend you read "Best Evidence" by Lifton. That will supply you with a very solid foundation. You're currently punching above your weight.

BEST EVIDENCE was one of the first JFK books I read when I became relatively seriously interested eons ago, just about the time it was published in 1980. Over the years, David Lifton (RIP) established to my satisfaction that he was as close to completely insane as one is likely to find in the CT community, and that's pretty damn close to completely insane. You vastly underestimate my knowledge of the JFKA if you think I need to read BEST EVIDENCE to educate myself. I enjoyed Horne's documentary only because it clearly set forth the casket issue in a way that clarified the physical aspects of Bethesda and what the body alteration loons are talking about, albeit without addressing the critical issue of how the body got from Air Force One to the mystery helicopter without anyone noticing. I had never given ten seconds of thought to the "shipping casket" factoid because I had dismissed the body alteration stuff as absurd long ago, but now that I have I can see how bogus Horne and his work is. He is well on his way to joining Lifton in my pantheon of the completely insane, as distinguished from the merely whacked-out.

Has anyone else pointed out that you never actually respond when someone points out the flaws in your posts? You just move on to interject another non-responsive point. It is truly like playing Whack-a-Mole, for which I have limited patience.

[Royell Storing]

 "Surgery to the head area" all by itself puts Lifton in the JFK Researcher's Hall Of Fame. I do like that Horne credited "The JFK Theorist" in the beginning of his presentation. That teenager is all over this case.

[Michael T. Griffith]

I have now spent an additional hour on this issue. FWIW, I discovered that in a 2024 piece at Kennedys & King, conspiracy god James DiEugenio describes Boyajian as "not reliable," notes (as I did) that Boyajian never says "the casket" arriving at 6:35 PM was JFK's, and seems to go so far as to suggest the unsigned Boyajian report is bogus. Well, how rude. I won't go that far. I also note that Dennis David was likewise not told that the casket was JFK's. He was told "your visitor has arrived."

This is your very first paragraph, and it is stuffed with baffling errors. The only casket that Boyajian would have guarded would have been JFK's because his detail was the Marine security detail charged with entry security and with ensuring the safe arrival of JFK's casket for the autopsy. Boyajian's memo notes that "the casket" arrived "at the morgue entrance" and was "taken inside."

Pray tell, why would Boyajian's security detail have guarded any other casket except JFK's casket, given that guarding JFK's casket to ensure its safe entrance into the morgue was one of its two primary duties?

Moreover, the Gawler's Funeral Home call sheet specified that JFK's body arrived in a shipping casket. Six other sources likewise said JFK's body arrived in a shipping casket.

Furthermore, Dennis David said that Dr. Boswell confirmed to him that the shipping casket contained JFK's body.

Mortician Tom Robinson saw Dr. Humes sawing JFK's skull before the official autopsy began. Obviously, this would have been impossible if JFK's body had not already been brought to the morgue.

All of these facts are discussed in Doug Horne's new documentary on three caskets arriving at Bethesda, which you said you watched. How did you miss the information?

Your "solution" is anything but "rational." Your supposed "factoid" is a fact that is documented by two written sources (Boyajian's report and the funeral home call sheet) and by six witnesses.

[Alex Harris]

Hi,

I happen to be "that teenager".

I didn't ever give Horne permission to use those photos or that film, nor did he ever actually consult me on anything regarding it.

He released that video without my knowledge and I don't agree with any of his bs.

-Alex Harris