Fourth Edition of "Forensic Science and President Kennedy's Head Wounds"

[John Corbett]

Indeed the Carcano bullet tends to yaw upon exiting.  I’ve recreated it with ballistic dummies with pigskin wrapped around the neck while wearing a dress shirt, necktie and suit coat.  In fact most times (3 of 4 in my testing) made full side on entries in the Connally dummy.  But Connally’s jacket didn’t reflect a side on entry but a 1/2 by 3/8 inch hole (which was compromised as evidence because it was dry cleaned before being properly analyzed.  Haag incorrectly said that Connally had a full side on wound.  Dr Shaw described the wound as elliptical and 1.5 cm in its greatest diameter.  He later told the HSCA he felt the wound was from a tangential entry rather than a yawing bullet.  But I agree, an elongated wound could indicate the bullet had been knocked off a stable trajectory (ie going thru JFK first). However, Connally said consistently until the day he died that he was turning as he was hit.  I know from many firearms training sessions in the FBI using turning targets that a stable bullet striking a rotating target will leave an elongated entry.  So I did tests on the range shooting into the Connally target while it was rotated from its right to left.  The results were an elongated entry approximately 1.5 cm wide. 

Regarding the Australian test, if you’re talking about the one done for Unsolved History (JFK Beyond the Magic Bullet) by Alex Krstic, they didn’t shoot animals (the Edgewood testing did) but ballistic dummies with bones embedded in the Connally dummy.  They set it up following the SBT parameters fairly accurately.  Yet despite an exit well below the throat in JFK’s chest. They recovered the bullet and its nose was deformed and the shaft of the bullet was bent.  Despite both these discrepancies, the narrator stated the single bullet theory had been confirmed. 

Interestingly when I first started my testing, I tried simply to replicate the 1/2 inch overlapping vertical slits in the dress that J Edgar Hoover told the WC was typical of a bullet exiting cloth.  I also faithfully set up my dummy (with the same ballistic gel covered around the neck with pigskin and wearing a suit) by the WC parameters.  My aim point was 5 3/8 inches below the top of the suit collar with the jacket bunched approximately 2 inches and the dummy sitting normally upright.  With a 17 degree shot to that point, I not only got a round exit hole but an exit in the chest 2 1/2 inches below the throat.  To get the bullet to exit near the shirt collar, it took a near horizontal shot aimed at the suit collar.  I ran it 19 times and got 19 round exit holes—not a single vertical slit.  But the trajectory discrepancy really intrigued me and led to the remainder of my SBT testing.

So you want to dismiss the Aussie test because the bullet didn't come out looking exactly like CE399. IOW, you expect a perfect replication. Why would CE399 have a damaged nose if the nose never struck bone. The smaller exit wound in JBC's chest simply indicates it had continued to yaw as it passed through his chest and had down almost a full 180 by the time it exited his chest and headed toward his wrist.

You didn't even try to explain why if JBC wasn't far enough to the left of JFK to be struck next to his right armpit that the bullet didn't hit JBC farther to the left on his back. How could a bullet exiting JFK's throat have missed him completely? I've never seen a CT who claimed that JBC's wounds didn't line up with JFK's exit wound even try to explain that.

A bullet striking JFK two inches to the right of his spine and exiting from the center of his throat would have been going directly at JBC's back and would have to have hit him somewhere. We know what they somewhere was. Furthermore, how could a different bullet whether from Oswald's gun or a second shooter have hit JBC next to his armpit, exited from below his right nipple, and hit his wrist with  JFK in the way? People who dispute the SBT never seem to have any interest in providing a plausible alternative. You'd think if the SBT was false, somebody could have at least come up with a plausible alternative after 62 years. As it is, the SBT wins by default as the only plausible explanation for JFK's non-fatal wounds and all of JBC's wounds.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Have you read the WC Testimonies of Alfred Olivier and Arthur Dziemian and their "Wound Ballistics of 6.5 mm Mannlicher Carcano Ammunition" report? Their firing of WCC 6.5 mm FMJ bullets into the skulls of human cadavers resulted in the bullets massively fragmenting and the heads exploding as well.

This is incorrect, as I've explained to you before in other threads, and as I document in my article "Forensic Science and President Kennedy's Head Wounds," which is the subject of this thread. Have you read my article yet? It deals extensively with the WC's head-shot wound-ballistics test.

For starters -- again, as I've pointed out to you before -- the extant x-rays of the skulls from the WC's test refute any notion that the bullets exploded into dozens of fragments, much less that their fragmentation pattern resembles the pattern we see in the JFK autopsy skull x-rays.

Dr. Olivier specified to Howard Donahue in 1969 that the bullets in the WC's test only broke into a few fragments each time.

Even if we take CE 857 and CE 859 at face value, they show that the WC's test did not duplicate the fragmentation seen in the autopsy skull x-rays. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I quote from my article:

CE 859 shows more fragments than are seen in CE 857. It appears to show between 26 and 30 fragments, and all of them are either small or very small—not one of them is as large as the two large fragments seen in CE 857.
Yet, even CE 859 shows fewer fragments than the JFK autopsy skull x-rays show. The skull x-rays show about 40 tiny fragments just in the right-frontal region alone—these fragments have been described as a "snowstorm.” To the viewer's left of this fragment cloud we see a number of other fragments that are larger in size than the cloud fragments and that extend upward to a point at least 1 inch from the debunked cowlick entry site. Not one of the bullets in Olivier's
head-shot test deposited a "snowstorm" of tiny fragments in the right-frontal region, or in any region, and none of them left a trail of fragments that ranged upward from the fragment cloud.

In addition, the JFK autopsy skull x-rays show at least two fragments on the back of the skull, one in the outer table and another between the galea and the outer table. Not one of the bullets in the WC's tests deposited fragments on or above the outer table.

Given Dr. Olivier’s statements to Donahue in 1969, and given the obvious discrepancy between the fragments seen in CE 857 and CE 859, it seems apparent that the two exhibits consist of fragments from more than just one of the FMJ bullets, and perhaps from all 10 of the FMJ bullets, that were fired in Olivier’s test.

Furthermore, if the CE 857 and CE 859 fragments really came from only one of the test bullets, what about the fragments from the nine other bullets? Leaving aside the fact that the two exhibits obviously do not contain the same fragments, even though Dr. Olivier said they should, the fact that no fragments from the nine other bullets were identified as such or entered into evidence as such raises serious doubts about the integrity of the two exhibits. (pp. 12-13)