Appreciating the Research of Howard Donahue

[Michael T. Griffith]

Howard Donahue was a court-certified ballistics and firearms expert. He was also a WWII veteran and a world-class rifleman. He was one of the 12 riflemen invited to fire in the 1967 CBS rifle test, and he was the only one who scored three hits in under 6 seconds (he did so on his third attempt). Donahue became interested in the JFK case and produced important research on the JFK shooting. Donahue's research is the subject of Bonar Menninger's 1992 book Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK. Donahue passed away in December 1999.

Donahue realized early on that the ammo that hit JFK's head could not have produced the fragmentation seen on the autopsy skull x-rays. He also realized that the trajectory of the head damage was impossible to line up with the sixth-floor window. He eventually concluded that Secret Service agent George Hickey, riding in the follow-up car, accidentally fired a shot with his AR-15 rifle and that this shot hit JFK in the back of the head. Donahue believed that Oswald fired shots from the sixth-floor window but that Oswald did not fire any shots that hit JFK's head.

Few people know that Donahue met with HSCA staffers during the committee's investigation and discussed the problems with the idea that Oswald fired the ammo that hit JFK's head. Donahue was also in contact with four members of the HSCA's medical panel (FPP) during the investigation. Dr. Michael Baden, the chairman of the FPP, simply ignored Donahue's evidence.

I knew Howard Donahue. He was a truly decent person, sincere and honest. He and I had several friendly dialogues about the JFK case. He even gave me one of his WCC shells as a souvenir. Howard was a patriot who loved America. He simply could not bring himself to believe that his government would cover up an assassination conspiracy. When I explained to him Dr. David Mantik's research based on optical-density measurements of the skull x-rays, Howard literally could not bring himself to read it; he believed there just had to be some other explanation.

Here is a summary of Donahue's research:

-- Donahue realized that the ammo that hit Kennedy's head behaved like high-velocity, frangible ammo, whereas Oswald is said to have used medium-velocity, non-frangible ammo, i.e., full-metal-jacketed (FMJ) ammo. The JFK autopsy x-rays show dozens of tiny fragments in the right-frontal region, along with fragments on the outer table of the skull in the back of the head. Donahue knew that an FMJ bullet never would have fragmented in this manner.

Donahue noted that the wound ballistics test cited by the HSCA argued against the idea that FMJ ammo caused all of Kennedy's head wounds. In the tests, three kinds of bullets were fired through blocks of ballistics gelatin: a 6.5 mm FMJ missile (Oswald's alleged ammo), a .30 caliber FMJ bullet. and a .223 M-16/AR-15 frangible bullet. Side-view photos showed that the 6.5 mm and .30 caliber FMJ bullets punched straight, relatively narrow channels through the gelatin, wounds in no way consistent with the damage done to JFK's brain. The M-16/AR-15 bullet, however, gouged a huge portion from the gelatin and left numerous tiny fragments near the front of the block, closely resembling the damage seen in the autopsy skull x-rays. Baden saw to it that the FPP's report ignored this revealing test.

-- Donahue realized that the 6.5 mm object seen on the autopsy skull x-rays on the outer table of Kennedy's skull in the back of the head could not have come from the kind of ammunition that Oswald allegedly used. Forensic science knows of no case where an FMJ bullet has ever deposited a sizable fragment on the outer table of the skull upon entering the skull. Such behavior by FMJ bullets is simply unheard of.

Dr. Russell Fisher of the Clark Panel told Donahue that the panel believed the 6.5 mm object had to be a ricochet fragment. Donahue came to agree with this conclusion, deducing that the bullet that five witnesses saw strike the pavement early in the shooting sent fragments streaking toward the back of JFK's head, and that one of them was the 6.5 mm object.

Donahue realized that Dr. McDonnel's discovery of an additional fragment on the back of the head near the 6.5 mm object on the skull x-rays was further ironclad proof that the bullet could not have been an FMJ missile and that the McDonnel fragment, like the 6.5 mm object, was a ricochet fragment from the pavement bullet. (Donahue could not bring himself to consider Dr. Mantik's discovery that the 6.5 mm object is not metallic but is a ghosted image that was placed over a genuine 6.3 x 2.5 mm metal fragment and a few smaller fragments.)

Donahue met with Dr. Alfred Olivier, who assisted with the WC's wound ballistics tests. Olivier told Donahue that the FMJ bullets in their tests did not break into dozens of tiny pieces. BTW, the x-rays of the skulls from the WC's tests show minimal fragmentation, and the fragmentation they show is markedly different from the fragmentation seen on the autopsy skull x-rays (a fact first noted in 1976 by researcher and attorney Howard Roffman).

Donahue interviewed several forensic pathologists, and none of them had ever heard of an FMJ bullet shearing off a large fragment at the entry point and then shattering into dozens of fragments inside the skull. Donahue noted that one of the leading forensic experts in the world, Dr. Vincent DiMaio, observed that FMJ bullets will never behave in this manner and that skull x-rays that show numerous small fragments rule out FMJ ammo.

-- Donahue discovered that the jacket of one of the fragments that were reportedly recovered from the limousine is peeled backward 180 degrees and folded almost flat. One edge of this folded section literally forms a razor edge. Donahue realized that it was extremely unlikely that such a sharp edge could have been fashioned as the bullet traveled through the skull and cranial tissue, but that it was entirely possible that this sharp edge was caused by striking pavement.

-- Donahue discovered that there are no traces of human tissue on the fragments that were allegedly found in JFK's limousine, yet the WC said these fragments came from the bullet that hit Kennedy in the head. If these fragments had in fact passed through JFK's skull, they would have traces of brain tissue, blood, and fluid on them. Donahue examined the fragments at the National Archives using a 30-power jeweler's loupe. He found no traces of blood or tissue on them, not even in their grooves. Donahue correctly saw this as further evidence that those fragments were from the pavement bullet.

-- Donahue realized that CE 543, the dented shell allegedly left behind by the sixth-floor shooter, could not have been used to fire a bullet during the assassination. A number of other firearms experts have said the same thing, and two ballistics tests with FMJ bullets failed to produce a single shell as dented as CE 543.

-- Donahue found that the official trajectories given for the alleged rear entrance wound on JFK's head are incompatible with a shot from the sixth-floor window. Donahue said this applied to both the EOP entry site and the cowlick entry site.

-- Donahue noted that the reported width of the rear entrance wound in the head, 6.0 mm, is incompatible with the diameter of a 6.5 mm Carcano bullet. (Dr. James Humes, the chief autopsy pathologist, said he measured the rear entrance wound on the head and that it was 6 mm wide, which means it could not have been caused by a 6.5 mm missile.)

-- Donahue recognized that the windshield damage was too high to have been caused by a bullet coming down into the car from the alleged sniper's nest. (Even the HSCA's trajectory expert tacitly admitted this seemed to be the case.)

-- Donahue noted that a number of witnesses said two of the shots came in very rapid succession, nearly simultaneously, too quickly to have been fired from the bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. (The HSCA's acoustical evidence confirms this fact: even excluding the 104.32 gunshot impulse, the shots occurred on the recording at intervals of 1.7 seconds, 4.8 seconds, and 0.7 seconds, when the timing is adjusted for tape speed. If we include the 104.32 gunshot impulse, we get an additional interval of 1.1 seconds. An expert rifleman may have been able to fire the alleged murder weapon in 1.7 seconds, but no one could have fired it in 0.7 seconds or 1.1 seconds.)

-- Donahue concluded that the Zapruder film shows JFK reacting to a wound much earlier than Z225. Numerous experts, including the HSCA's Photographic Evidence Panel, have reached the same conclusion. (See, for example, Don Olson and Ralph Turner's article “Photographic Evidence and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in October 1971. Olson was a professor of physics at the University of California, while Turner was a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University. They determined that JFK begins to react by no later than Z194.)

-- Unlike other WC apologists, Donahue took seriously the numerous witnesses who said they smelled gun powder on the grassy knoll or on the part of Elm Street that runs by the knoll. He noted that some of those witnesses were combat veterans and/or police officers who knew what gun powder smelled like, and that gun powder has a pungent and unique odor. He concluded that Hickey's shot produced the gun powder that numerous witnesses smelled.

Donahue's theory that Hickey accidentally shot JFK in the head has been refuted, but the theory is based on a considerable amount of solid forensic and ballistics evidence and a valid rejection of the WC and the HSCA's conflicting trajectory analyses for the rear head shot. Donahue could not bring himself to posit a grassy knoll gunman or more than one head shot, so he tried to find another source of gunfire that was behind JFK. Although his mortal error theory has been refuted, he produced a great deal of valuable research on the assassination.

[John Corbett]

Howard Donahue was a court-certified ballistics and firearms expert. He was also a WWII veteran and a world-class rifleman.

He was also an idiot. His theory that Hickey accidentally shot JFK in the back of the head is one of the most ludicrous ever presented. It's right up there with the one that says Greer shot JFK from the driver's seat of the limo.

He was one of the 12 riflemen invited to fire in the 1967 CBS rifle test, and he was the only one who scored three hits in under 6 seconds (he did so on his third attempt).

A completely pointless exercise because Oswald took more than 6 seconds to fire his three shots.

Donahue became interested in the JFK case and produced important research on the JFK shooting. Donahue's research is the subject of Bonar Menninger's 1992 book Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK. Donahue passed away in December 1999.

Donahue realized early on that the ammo that hit JFK's head could not have produced the fragmentation seen on the autopsy skull x-rays. He also realized that the trajectory of the head damage was impossible to line up with the sixth-floor window. He eventually concluded that Secret Service agent George Hickey, riding in the follow-up car, accidentally fired a shot with his AR-15 rifle and that this shot hit JFK in the back of the head. Donahue believed that Oswald fired shots from the sixth-floor window but that Oswald did not fire any shots that hit JFK's head.

Prima facia evidence of my earlier statement that Donahue was an idiot. The Carcano bullet that Oswald fired into the back of JFK's head did fragment as evidenced by the fact the Secret Service found the fragmented bulled in the limo the night of the assassination. If not JFK's skull, what did Donahue think caused that bullet to frament?

Few people know that Donahue met with HSCA staffers during the committee's investigation and discussed the problems with the idea that Oswald fired the ammo that hit JFK's head. Donahue was also in contact with four members of the HSCA's medical panel (FPP) during the investigation. Dr. Michael Baden, the chairman of the FPP, simply ignored Donahue's evidence.

Kudos to Baden for that.

I knew Howard Donahue. He was a truly decent person, sincere and honest.

Sincere, honest and stupid.

He and I had several friendly dialogues about the JFK case. He even gave me one of his WCC shells as a souvenir. Howard was a patriot who loved America. He simply could not bring himself to believe that his government would cover up an assassination conspiracy. When I explained to him Dr. David Mantik's research based on optical-density measurements of the skull x-rays, Howard literally could not bring himself to read it; he believed there just had to be some other explanation.

Yes there was. Oswald shot JFK all by himself.

Here is a summary of Donahue's research:

-- Donahue realized that the ammo that hit Kennedy's head behaved like high-velocity, frangible ammo, whereas Oswald is said to have used medium-velocity, non-frangible ammo, i.e., full-metal-jacketed (FMJ) ammo. The JFK autopsy x-rays show dozens of tiny fragments in the right-frontal region, along with fragments on the outer table of the skull in the back of the head. Donahue knew that an FMJ bullet never would have fragmented in this manner.

Yet it did as evidenced by the fragmented 6.5mm Carcano bullet found in the limo with two of the fragments positively matched to Oswald's rifle. How did Donahue explain that away?

Donahue noted that the wound ballistics test cited by the HSCA argued against the idea that FMJ ammo caused all of Kennedy's head wounds. In the tests, three kinds of bullets were fired through blocks of ballistics gelatin: a 6.5 mm FMJ missile (Oswald's alleged ammo), a .30 caliber FMJ bullet. and a .223 M-16/AR-15 frangible bullet. Side-view photos showed that the 6.5 mm and .30 caliber FMJ bullets punched straight, relatively narrow channels through the gelatin, wounds in no way consistent with the damage done to JFK's brain. The M-16/AR-15 bullet, however, gouged a huge portion from the gelatin and left numerous tiny fragments near the front of the block, closely resembling the damage seen in the autopsy skull x-rays. Baden saw to it that the FPP's report ignored this revealing test.

Ballistic gelatin simulates what a bullet will do when passing through soft human flesh. It doesn't come close to mimicking what a bullet will do when it strikes a human skull.

-- Donahue realized that the 6.5 mm object seen on the autopsy skull x-rays on the outer table of Kennedy's skull in the back of the head could not have come from the kind of ammunition that Oswald allegedly used. Forensic science knows of no case where an FMJ bullet has ever deposited a sizable fragment on the outer table of the skull upon entering the skull. Such behavior by FMJ bullets is simply unheard of.

Do you think homicides committed by firing a 6.5mm Carcano bullet into a human skull is a common occurrence? Do we have a large sample size of such homicides? Or are we limited to just one?

Dr. Russell Fisher of the Clark Panel told Donahue that the panel believed the 6.5 mm object had to be a ricochet fragment. Donahue came to agree with this conclusion, deducing that the bullet that five witnesses saw strike the pavement early in the shooting sent fragments streaking toward the back of JFK's head, and that one of them was the 6.5 mm object.

Are we supposed to believe JFK was hit in the back of the head by a ricochet from the first shot and he never reacted to it?

Donahue realized that Dr. McDonnel's discovery of an additional fragment on the back of the head  near the 6.5 mm object on the skull x-rays was further ironclad proof that the bullet could not have been an FMJ missile and that the McDonnel fragment, like the 6.5 mm object, was a ricochet fragment from the pavement bullet. (Donahue could not bring himself to consider Dr. Mantik's discovery that the 6.5 mm object is not metallic but is a ghosted image that was placed over a genuine 6.3 x 2.5 mm metal fragment and a few smaller fragments.)

See above.

Donahue met with Dr. Alfred Olivier, who assisted with the WC's wound ballistics tests. Olivier told Donahue that the FMJ bullets in their tests did not break into dozens of tiny pieces. BTW, the x-rays of the skulls from the WC's tests show minimal fragmentation, and the fragmentation they show is markedly different from the fragmentation seen on the autopsy skull x-rays (a fact first noted in 1976 by attorney Howard Roffman).

Were any of those test bullets fired into a human skull?

Donahue interviewed several forensic pathologists, and none of them had ever heard of an FMJ bullet shearing off a large fragment at the entry point and then shattering into dozens of fragments inside the skull. Donahue noted that one of the leading forensic experts in the world, Dr. Vincent DiMaio, observed that FMJ bullets will never behave in this manner and that skull x-rays that show numerous small fragments rule out FMJ ammo.

I would be interested in seeing an exact quote from Di Maio about that, not your interpretation of what he said.

-- Donahue discovered that the jacket of one of the fragments that were reportedly recovered from the limousine is peeled backward 180 degrees and folded almost flat. One edge of this folded section literally forms a razor edge. Donahue realized that it was extremely unlikely that such a sharp edge could have been fashioned as the bullet traveled through the skull and cranial tissue, but that it was entirely possible that this sharp edge was caused by striking pavement.

On what does he base this opinion?

-- Donahue realized that CE 543, the dented shell allegedly left behind by the sixth-floor shooter, could not have been used to fire a bullet during the assassination. A number of other firearms experts have said the same thing, and two ballistics tests with FMJ bullets failed to produce a single shell as dented as CE 543.

Donahue realized a lot of things that are just FUBAR.

-- Donahue found that the official trajectories given for the alleged rear entrance wound on JFK's head are incompatible with a shot from the sixth-floor window. Donahue said this applied to both the EOP entry site and the cowlick entry site.

Dale Meyers' work says otherwise.

-- Donahue noted that the reported width of the rear entrance wound in the head, 6.0 mm, is incompatible with the diameter of a 6.5 mm Carcano bullet. (Dr. James Humes, the chief autopsy pathologist, said he measured the rear entrance wound on the head and that it was 6 mm wide, which means it could not have been caused by a 6.5 mm missile.)

Humes was not an experienced forensic medical examiner. The prosectors made numerous mistakes during the autopsy. A measurement error a half a millimeter is very plausible.

-- Donahue recognized that the windshield damage was too high to have been caused by a bullet coming down into the car from the alleged sniper's nest. (Even the HSCA's trajectory expert tacitly admitted  this seemed to be the case.)

Did Donahue think that when a bullet fragments, all of the fragments exit the body on the same vector at the bullet did when it entered the skull?

-- Donahue noted that a number of witnesses said two of the shots came in very rapid succession, nearly simultaneously, too quickly to have been fired from the bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. (The HSCA's acoustical evidence confirms this fact: even excluding the 104.32 gunshot impulse, the shots occurred on the recording at intervals of 1.7 seconds, 4.8 seconds, and 0.7 seconds, when the timing is adjusted for tape speed. If we include the 104.32 gunshot impulse, we get an additional interval of 1.1 seconds. An expert rifleman may have been able to fire the alleged murder weapon in 1.7 seconds, but no one could have fired it in 0.7 seconds or 1.1 seconds.)

Oh, goody. Another example of someone said something so it must be true.

-- Donahue concluded that the Zapruder film shows JFK reacting to a wound much earlier than Z225.

More evidence that Donahue was an idiot.

Numerous experts, including the HSCA's Photographic Evidence Panel, have reached the same conclusion. (See, for example, Don Olson and Ralph Turner's article “Photographic Evidence and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in October 1971. Olson was a professor of physics at the University of California, while Turner was a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University. They determined that JFK begins to react by no later than Z194.)

Just what form does this reaction take. All I see is JFK starting to lower his right hand after waving to the spectators on Elm St. Is this the normal reaction of someone who has just been shot?

-- Donahue discovered that there are no traces of human tissue on the fragments that were allegedly found in JFK's limousine, yet the WC said these fragments came from the bullet that hit Kennedy in the head. If these fragments had in fact passed through JFK's skull, they would have traces of brain tissue, blood, and fluid on them. Donahue examined the fragments at the National Archives using a 30-power jeweler's loupe. He found no traces of blood or tissue on them, not even in their grooves.

Bullets are generally cleaned prior to testing for ballistic matching. Any debris on the bullet could obscure the markings that are used to match a bullet recovered from a crime scene to a test bullet.

-- Unlike other WC apologists, Donahue took seriously the numerous witnesses who said they smelled gun powder on the grassy knoll or on the part of Elm Street that runs by the knoll. He noted that some of those witnesses were combat veterans and/or police officers who knew what gun powder smelled like, and that gun powder has a pungent and unique odor. He concluded that Hickey's shot produced the gun powder that numerous witnesses smelled.

The smell of gun residue is not limited to the location of its discharge.

Donahue's theory that Hickey accidentally shot JFK in the head has been refuted, but the theory is based on a considerable amount of solid forensic and ballistics evidence and a valid rejection of the WC and the HSCA's conflicting trajectory analyses for the rear head shot. Donahue could not bring himself to posit a grassy knoll gunman or more than one head shot, so he tried to find another source of gunfire that was behind JFK. Although his mortal error theory has been refuted, he produced a great deal of valuable research on the assassination.

Donahue's theory is based on FUBAR analysis.