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.
