IN 2017, SANDY LARSEN SAID:
I haven't yet encountered an LNer who gives a damn about the question, "HOW DID THE MAGIC BULLET PASS THROUGH THE KNOT OF THE TIE WITHOUT MAKING A HOLE?"
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
But don't you have the exact same problem if the bullet ENTERED the throat (versus it EXITING the throat)?
Don't the CTers who think JFK's throat wound was an ENTRANCE wound still have to ask themselves the very same question you just asked me? I.E.,
"HOW DID THE BULLET PASS THROUGH THE KNOT OF THE TIE WITHOUT MAKING A HOLE?"
How does the belief that the throat wound was a wound of entry make the above question go away for the conspiracy theorists? Do they think if the bullet entered the Adam's Apple area of JFK's throat, it somehow was able to miss the tie knot area entirely? But if it exited there, it had no choice but go through the tie knot and create a hole? Is that it?
Nope, not at all. You again show that your research is decades behind the information curve.
Your question is easy to answer: The throat wound was above the tie knot/collar, just as Dr. Carrico, Dr. Jones, and Dr. Goldstrich said it was. JFK's tie and shirt slits confirm this. They confirm that Carrico was correct and truthful when he told and showed Dulles, and later Weisberg, that the throat wound was above the tie. This explains why the Parkland doctors described damage behind the throat wound that was larger than the throat wound itself, a dead giveaway and textbook indicator that the wound was an entry wound. This is a great example of evidence powerfully coming together to form a clear picture.
Dr. Ronald Jones saw JFK's body before the clothes were removed. Interviewed for the 2023 Paramount documentary
JFK: What the Doctors Saw, Dr. Jones said the throat wound was "visible" and that it was "just above where the shirt and tie was":
The first thing I noticed was a very small wound in his neck in the front. . . .
We could tell that the wound was in the front of the neck just above
where the shirt and tie was. So it was visible to you.
(18:12-18:19, 18:32-18:39)
Also, this was not the first time Jones said the throat wound was above the tie and visible before the clothing was removed. He said the same thing in an interview years earlier, in 2014:
“I noticed
a small wound in the midline of the neck just above the
tie knot that was approximately a quarter of an inch or 6 mm in diameter.”
(“The President’s Been Shot and They Are Bringing Him to the Emergency Room,”
Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Volume 218, Issue 4, April 2014,
pp. 856-868,
http://www.journalacs.org/article/S1072-7515(14)00108-2/abstract)
In the Paramount documentary, Dr. Joe D. Goldstrich, a fourth-year medical student at Parkland Hospital at the time, said he could see the neck wound when JFK's clothes were still on:
I do remember that very early on, even when his clothes were
still on, I saw the wound in his neck. (18:20-18:28)
He would not have been able to see the throat wound if it had been under/behind the tie knot and the front shirt slits.
Dr. Carrico told the WC that the throat wound was above the tie:
Dulles: Will you show us about where it was?
Dr. Carrico: Just about where your tie would be.
Dulles: Where did it enter?
Dr. Carrico: It entered?
Dulles: Yes.
Dr. Carrico: At the time we did not know --
Dulles: I see.
Dr. Carrico: The entrance. All we knew this was a small wound here.
Dulles: I see. And you put your hand right above where your tie is?
Dr. Carrico: Yes, sir. (3 H 361-362)
When Carrico spoke with Harold Weisberg in 1975, he confirmed that the throat wound was above the collar; he was “definite on this” (Weisberg,
Never Again, 2007 edition, p. 241). Weisberg continued:
When I asked him if he saw any bullet holes in the shirt or tie, he was
definite in saying “No.” I asked if he recalled Dulles’s question and his
own pointing to above his own shirt collar as the location of the bullet hole.
He does remember this, and he does remember confirming that the hole
was above the collar. . . . (
Never Again, p. 242)
Carrico also told Weisberg that the nurses used scalpels to remove the president’s shirt and tie because they were, understandably, in a big hurry, and that it was “likely” that the nurses made the slits and the nick in the tie, adding, “I saw neither the nick in the tie nor the cuts in the shirt before the nurses started cutting” (Weisberg,
Post Mortem, pp. 375-376;
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/N%20Disk/New%20York%20Times/Item%2093.pdf, p. 4;
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Matrix_for_Assassination/SC-wBAAAQBAJ?q=&gbpv=1#f=true, pp. 95-96;
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Book Images/Never Again - Draft/Never Again Draft.pdf, p. 14)
Rockefeller Foundation fellow Henry Hurt, in his book
Reasonable Doubt, notes that one of the nurses confirmed that nurses made the shirt slits when they hurriedly cut away JFK’s tie and shirt (p. 60).
Dr. Malcolm Perry diagnosed the throat wound as an entrance wound because it was small (3-5 mm in diameter), neat (no ragged edges), and punched-in, and because of the damage he saw beneath the throat wound. He believed the missile had entered the throat and then ranged downward into the chest.
Dr. Kemp Clark said that Dr. Perry discovered that the trachea was deviated, and that Perry believed the missile had ranged downward into the chest:
He discovered that the trachea was deviated so he felt that the
missile had entered the President's chest. (6 H 22)
Dr. Clark said that Dr. Perry also saw blood in the strap muscles of the neck and that Perry believed this was another indication that the bullet had entered the chest:
The part pertaining to the bullet entering the President's chest rests
on the reasons for the placing of the chest tubes which were being
inserted when I arrived. It was the assumption, based on the previously
described deviation of the trachea and the presence of blood in the
strap muscles of the neck that a wound or missile wound might have
entered the President's chest. (6 H 28)
Dr. Perry explained that in addition to the damage to the trachea and the blood in the strap muscles, he also found “free air and blood” in the “superior right mediastinum” (the upper-right part of the central compartment of the chest cavity), which further led him to believe the missile had entered the chest:
I made a transverse incision right through this wound and carried
it down to the superficial fascia, to expose the strap muscles overlying
the thyroid and the trachea. There was an injury to the right lateral
aspect of the trachea at the level of the external wound. The trachea
was deviated slightly to the left and it was necessary to divide the
strap muscles on the left side in order to gain access to the trachea.
At this point, I recall. Dr. Jones right on my left was placing a catheter
into a vein in the left arm because he handed me a necessary
instrument which I needed in the performance of the procedure.
The wound in the trachea was then enlarged to admit a cuffed
tracheotomy tube to support respiration. I noted that there was
free air and blood in the superior right mediastinum. Although I saw
no injury to the lung or to the pleural space, the presence of this free
blood and air in this area could be indicative of a wound of the right
hemithorax, and I asked that someone put a right chest tube in for
seal drain age. At the time I did not know who did this, but I have
been informed that Dr. Baxter and Dr. Paul Peters inserted the chest
tube and connected it to underwater drainage. (6 H 10)
Dr. Perry also noted there was considerable bruising in “the right lateral portion of the neck” and also the right upper mediastinum:
Mr. Specter. What did you observe, if anything with respect to bruising
in the interior portion of the President's neck?
Dr. Perry. There was considerable hematoma in the right lateral portion
of the neck and the right superior mediastinum, as I noted. (6 H 11)
The fact that this damage was on the righthand side of the superior (upper) mediastinum is important because the nick on the tie knot was in the left half of the knot, an obviously impossible trajectory given the thickness of the knot and the fact that the knot was neatly centered in the middle of the collar band.
Mortician Tom Robinson told the HSCA that he believed
the autopsy doctors found a bullet fragment in the chest (HSCA interview, 1/12/77, p. 10).
All of these facts enable us to more fully appreciate the ARRB disclosures about the back wound. We now know that on the night of the autopsy, the autopsy doctors were absolutely, completely, and totally certain that the back wound had no exit point. They established this with prolonged probing, both with fingers and with surgical probes, and even removed the chest organs and positioned the body “every which way” to facilitate and observe the probing. Men standing near the autopsy table could see the end of the probe pushing up against the lining of the chest cavity and that there was no exit point.
This explains another fact that we now know thanks to ARRB disclosures: the first draft of the autopsy report said the throat wound was caused by a fragment from the head shot.
