In February 1992, Dr. Robert Artwohl, who accepts the lone-gunman theory, revealed in an article on Prodigy that he had had a private conversation with Dr. Malcolm Perry in 1986 and that Perry affirmed that the throat wound was an entrance wound. Reported Artohl,
. . . one of the biggest regrets in his life was having to make the incision for the emergency tracheotomy through the bullet wound, because he was certain that it was an entrance wound. He remembered making a very good mental note of the wound since he was cutting through it. . . . Speaking with Dr. Perry that night, one physician to another, Dr. Perry stated he firmly believed the wound to be an entrance wound. (Prodigy, 2/14/92; see also https://www.kennedysandking.com/obituaries/481)We have a similar recollection from Dr. Donald Miller, a former University of Washington physician and professor. In the 1970s, Miller worked with Perry at the University of Washington School of Medicine. In 2017, Miller reported that Perry told him that the throat wound was an entry wound, and that Perry said he “was pressured by government officials and the Secret Service to back away from the entry wound claim since the official autopsy showed it to be an exit wound" (David Mantik,
The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis, Post Hill Press, 2024, p. 82).
The Church Committee heard testimony from James Gochenaur, who was working on a master's degree at the University of Washington at the time, that Secret Service agent Elmer Moore pressured Dr. Perry into changing his diagnosis of the throat wound before Perry testified before the WC. Gochenaur knew Moore, having met with him several times. When Church Committee investigators contacted Moore, he admitted he had met with Dr. Perry one week after the assassination but denied he had pressured him to change his diagnosis. Moore also admitted he had met with Gochenaur three or four times, confirming there was indeed a relationship between the two men.
Federal agents conducted numerous interviews with Parkland Hospital staff, but no reports of those interviews were ever entered into the record. After the first interview with Parkland Hospital doctors by two unnamed Secret Service agents sometime before November 29, 1963, additional interviews were conducted with the Parkland doctors, nurses, and orderlies by both the Secret Service and the FBI. There were 24 Secret Service interviews and six FBI interviews, but not a single report on those interviews was included in the Warren Commission (WC) volumes.
In a recorded interview in 1991, Nurse Audrey Bell confirmed the pressure that was placed on Dr. Perry to change his conclusion about the throat wound:
Dr. Perry was up all night. He came into my office the next day and sat down and looked terrible, having not slept. I never saw anybody look so dejected! They called him from Bethesda two or three times in the middle of the night to try to get him to change the entrance wound in the throat to an exit wound. . . . They really grilled Perry about it. They hounded him for a long time. (Mantik, pp. 57-58)Nurse Bell told the ARRB the same thing in 1997.
During a recorded interview in 1991, Dr. Perry insisted the throat wound was an entry wound:
My whole credibility as a trauma surgeon was at stake. I couldn’t have made a mistake like that. It destroys my integrity if I don’t know an entrance wound from an exit wound! (Mantik, p. 58)