Now is a good time to discuss the HSCA testimony of Richard Lipsey. Lipsey was an aide to Major General Philip Wehle, the commanding general of the military district of Washington, D.C. Lipsey was ordered by Wehle to monitor JFK's body during the autopsy. Lipsey arrived at the autopsy just before the body was taken out of the casket, and he remained in the autopsy room long after Sibert and O'Neill left. Lipsey noted that he was about 12-15 feet from the autopsy table.
Lipsey confirmed that the autopsy doctors found that the back wound had no exit point. He said the doctors were "bound and determined to find that bullet because it didn't have an exit mark" (HSCA interview: Richard Lipsey, 1/18/78, p. 5). He said they spent some two hours trying to find the back-wound bullet (p. 7). He described how the doctors opened the chest cavity and removed all the chest organs (pp. 8, 13-14). Said Lipsey,
. . . then they cut his chest open, you know, and they got all of his insides out, that was the only gory part, they took them out a piece at a time and laid them up on, I remember, a beautiful clean stainless steel rack. . . .
I remember they were bound and determined to find that bullet because it didn't have an exit mark. . . .
But the one that I remember they spent so much time on, obviously, was the one they found did not come out. There was a bullet -- that's my vivid recollection cause that's all they talked about. For about two hours all they talked about was finding that bullet.
They turned the body up at one point to determine where that bullet that entered back here that didn't have an exit mark. Where was that bullet? And so when it got to down to where they thought it hit his chest cavity, they opened him up and started looking in here. That's why I remember one thing, they took, after they had taken all his organs out, during the autopsy they had them sitting up there: "Now let's see if we can find the bullet". . . .(pp. 5, 7, 8, 14)
In a fascinating twist, Lipsey said the doctors concluded that the bullet that hit low in the back of the head had exited the throat (pp. 7, 20). This is a revealing datum because we know from the 1/27/64 WC executive session transcript that one of the first drafts of the autopsy report said a fragment from the head shot exited the throat, that the throat wound was the exit point for a head-shot fragment. This is also further proof that the pathologists knew about the throat wound during the autopsy.
This datum is also important because it is further evidence that the rear head entry wound was near the EOP/hairline, as the autopsy doctors reported, and not 4 inches higher above the lambda in the parietal bone. Lipsey said the wound was in the "upper neck/lower part of your head" and "in the hairline" (pp. 22). Lipsey several times spoke of the area just above the hairline as being part of the "upper neck," but he clarified this to mean "lower part of your head."
BTW, Lipsey said there was visible damage to JFK's face but that the face looked "great" after the morticians did their reconstruction work. He said the visible facial damage included considerable loss of structure, and that the damaged area included the right eye, the right forehead, and an area slightly beyond the hairline (pp. 6-7).
Now this is mighty interesting because this is the damage you'd expect to see in the "stare of death" autopsy photo, given the frontal-bone damage shown in the skull x-rays. No wonder Smithsonian Institution forensic anthropologist Dr. Doug Ubelaker told the ARRB that "the apparent absence of bone in much of the anterior portion of these x-rays seems inconsistent with the intact appearance of the right forehead in the photos" (ARRB meeting report: Dr. Douglas Ubelaker, 1/26/96, p. 2).
Lipsey's testimony is also crucial because he heard the autopsy doctors talking about a wound scenario after Sibert and O'Neill left the autopsy room that was different from the one the doctors had conveyed shortly before Sibert and O'Neill had departed. Lipsey said the autopsy doctors concluded that three bullets hit JFK: one on the right side of the head, one just above the hairline, and one in the lower part of the neck. Dr. David Mantik:
Horne’s clue to this changing story came from a 1978 HSCA interview with Richard Lipsey, the former military aide to the commanding general of the military district of Washington, General Philip C. Wehle. Horne emphasized that in 1978, Lipsey “was very certain of his recollections—his oral account is noteworthy for the conviction with which he recounted his memories.” He continued: “Mr. Lipsey relayed an account that is different from both the Sibert-O’Neill report, and from the autopsy now present in the Archives, CE 387.” He then stressed the following:
"It is a virtual certainty that the autopsy conclusions he [Richard Lipsey] was privy to were identical with the contents of the first draft of the autopsy which was reviewed by Drs. Humes, Boswell, and [Robert O.] Canada [the commanding officer of the naval medical hospital at Bethesda] on Saturday, November 23rd, and which was destroyed less than twenty four hours later in the fireplace of James J. Humes."
According to Lipsey, sometime after midnight -- and after the two FBI agents had disappeared -- the pathologists declared that JFK had been hit by three shots from behind. That first autopsy draft had concluded that the sole headshot had “entered the back of the head and blew out part of the right side of the skull, creating one large defect that represented both the bullet’s entrance and exit.” It also concluded that a “second bullet entered very high up on the back of the neck, just inside the hairline [i.e., on the back of the head between the hairline and the EOP], and exited from the throat” -- and a “third bullet entered at the bottom of the neck, or high in the back, and did not exit.”
Horne asked a critical question: “Why didn’t the autopsy conclusions, reported by Richard Lipsey, and committed to writing in the first draft of the autopsy report, become the official conclusions?” He elucidated:
"The answer to this question, I believe, is a simple one. By the time Drs. Humes, Boswell, and Canada met and reviewed the draft autopsy report on Saturday, November 23rd, the entire nation, and indeed the world, had become aware that one shot had missed, and had wounded bystander James Tague in the cheek, after striking a curb on Main Street in Dealey Plaza. This account was in the Dallas newspapers Saturday morning, and 'hit the wire' the same day, thus becoming available to newspapers (and radio stations) all across the country. This meant that the autopsy conclusions witnessed by Richard Lipsey could not stand, for the central conclusion reached by the pathologists after midnight was that the President had been hit by three shots.
"It was for this reason that the autopsy conclusions witnessed by Richard Lipsey, and likely memorialized in the first written draft of the autopsy protocol, did not last for even 24 hours. Because any report that postulated that President Kennedy had been hit by three bullets was now contradicted by ‘the facts on the ground.’ James J. Humes destroyed the first draft of the autopsy protocol, along with any notes indicating three shots hit the President, in his fireplace before dawn on Sunday November 24th, 1963. In response to the missed shot that hit James Tague, the autopsy conclusions now evolved back into a two-hit scenario, but one which now accounted for the bullet wound in the anterior neck." [Quoting Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, Vol. 3, pp. 856-857, 863]
According to Lipsey, sometime after midnight -- and after the two FBI agents had disappeared -- the pathologists declared that JFK had been hit by three shots from behind. That first autopsy draft had concluded that the sole headshot had “entered the back of the head and blew out part of the right side of the skull, creating one large defect that represented both the bullet’s entrance and exit.” It also concluded that a “second bullet entered very high up on the back of the neck, just inside the hairline, and exited from the throat”—and a “third bullet entered at the bottom of the neck, or high in the back, and did not exit.” (The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis, 2024, pp. 59-61)
