I hope you didn't break your arm patting yourself on the back.

When I first saw the conversation she had at the Sixth Floor Museum, I was pleasantly surprised to discover she had a fairly accurate account of the JFKA. Thanks to Andrew Mason, I had been led to believe that her account was that JFK had been hit by the first shot. Then I come to find out that she clearly remembered hearing a shot that hadn't hit anybody (with the possible exception of Tague who she was unaware of at the time).

I never said that she recalled that JFK was hit by the first shot.  You seem to have a reading comprehension problem.

Anyone who read her DMN story knows that she said "Things are a little hazy from this point" (ie. after the first shot) but she did not think the first shot hit anyone. 

My point is that the location of JFK at the time of the first shot (after the president passed by where she was standing ie after he passed the lamp post, which he passed at z190) together with the last two shots being close together MEANS that JFK was struck by the first shot.  So her recollections of specific facts demonstrate that her hazy impression from what she did not see that led her to conclude that no one was struck by the first shot was incorrect and her specific recollections of what she did see together with the zfilm (which shows JFK reacting just after he passed by where she was standing and more than 5 seconds before the last shot) provide evidence that is inconsistent with a first missed shot.

LOL! Are you really just a child? What kind of nonsense is this? I have to wonder about your level of intelligence to make such an argument. Anyway, no, slightly horizontal is nothing like being slightly pregnant. Bullet angles are not an all-or-nothing proposition. Bullets can strike at a wide range of horizontal angles, from very slight to slight to moderate to sharp. Bullets can also yaw by a wide range of degrees, from 1 degree upward. The fact that you need this explained to you says much about your credibility.

So tell us where a bullet could have been fired from which would have produced the angled entry into JBC's back.

They's be throwing snowballs in hell before I need you to explain anything to me.

The bullet that struck Connally's back must have done so at a slightly horizontal angle or while slightly yawing because the wound path through Connally was not very wide but surprisingly narrow, as Dr. Shaw explained.

Just what would have caused the bullet to yaw if it had not struck someone or something first?

Again, a bullet striking in this manner could have easily created a 1.5 x 0.8 cm entry wound, virtually identical in size to JFK's rear head entry wound (1.5 x 0.6 cm), which in turn explains the surprisingly narrow wound path through Connally's chest. 

We still need an explanation for where such a bullet could have been fired from or what caused it to yaw. While you're at it, see if you can figure out why a bullet entering at that angle wouldn't have continued through to the left side of JBC's torso instead of exiting from the right side as it did.

To believe your whacky theory, we'd have to assume that your supposedly sideways-streaking bullet magically straightened out almost completely a few milliseconds after penetrating the back so that it could create a narrow wound path through Connally's chest.

I guess the concept of a tumbling bullet escapes you. The orientation of such a bullet is going to be constantly changing. The long axis of the bullet will go from parallel to the direction of travel, to perpendicular and everywhere in between.

Oh, Jesus, I knew it was inevitable that MTG would take this to the crackpot level, which I was assiduously trying to avoid.

A CT-friendly "problems with the autopsy" scenario is not good enough for MTG. No, the earth has to be flat to keep him happy.

Look, NO ONE this side of the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe thinks Pitzer was murdered. That's a dead horse.

Allan Eaglesham is THE premier investigator of the Pitzer murder. He did on-the-ground in-depth investigation. He started out as a full-tilt murder proponent and "Dangerous Dan" believer. He ended up as neither. He fully accepted the verdict of murder as established by two Navy investigations and an FBI investigation. He accepted that Dangerous Dan was a fantasist telling whoppers - his tale is absurd on its face and fell apart under scrutiny.

Kent Heiner's 2019 e-book that I linked is the absolute BEST work on Pitzer you will find. His 2004 edition promoted both the murder claim and Dangerous Dan. As with Eaglesham, the evidence forced him to accept the verdict of suicide and Dangerous Dan as a teller of whoppers.

DENNIS EFFING DAVID, who was almost single-handedly responsible for keeping the murder claim alive, stated at the Ed Forum that he no longer had any position on whether Pitzer was murdered or committed suicide.

The ONLY possible "mysterious" perspective on Pitzer's death is the one I articulated: The possibility that autopsy-related events surrounding the very date of Pitzer's death might have sent this perfectionist Navy career officer off the deep end. This idea wasn't wholly original with me - it occurred to me on the basis of some things Heiner had written. If this angle isn't correct, Pitzer's death is just a garden-variety inexplicable suicide, of which there are thousands of examples.

One might think that a whacked-out CTer would LOVE a theory that preserves Dennis David's credibility and posits a reason for his suicide that calls into question what actually did take place at the autopsy. But noooooo, this is entirely unsatisfactory to the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe occupied by MTG.

MTG clearly didn't read anything other than my first post before launching into his laughable litany of murder-suggesting "facts" that NO ONE WHO KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT THE PITZER CASE STILL BELIEVES.

Consistently, MTG enters threads late in the game and pisses all over the place with his nonsense. HIT LIST - HIT LIST!!! - is his authority vis-a-vis the two premier CT-oriented researchers who spent YEARS on the Pitzer "murder" and came away convinced it was a suicide and Dangerous Dan was a wacko. MTG is not only a 33rd-degree flat earth CT crackpot but an absolute nuisance. Suffice it to say, it's a good thing for MTG that I don't moderate the forum.

No, but I did sprain my right wrist again.

The problem with her Sixth Floor Museum interview, which I did find entertaining, is that she'd had 52 years of practice trying to get her story straight. I just don't see how anyone can give any evidential weight to anything she said.

By itself, no. What she told us is perfectly compatible with the Z-film and all the other forensic evidence. That's my litmus test for whether a witness is credible or not.

The Mystery of Mary, just in case anyone missed the big picture, is: Immediately after the JFKA, she wrote an article that was 100% frontal-shot CT-friendly. One thus can understand why CTers find it suspicious that the article was withdrawn from later editions of the newspaper and Mary spent the next 5+ decades tap-dancing away from what she'd written - but, thanks to an exceedingly friendly media, never really having to confront the biggest of her CT-friendly claims. And yet, her article cannot legitimately be viewed as genuinely CT-friendly because what she wrote was completely false - she wasn't anywhere near where she said she was, as an FBI interview two weeks later, the Z film and everything she said for the next 54 years makes clear. If that doesn't have you scratching your weenie noggin, I don't know what will.

I haven't seen the article she wrote. The only thing in her interview that would indicate a frontal shot was her impression the shot MIGHT have come from the bridge. I'd be interested if she said anything else in her article that is at odds with the WC findings.

Rereading William Matson Law's In the Eye of History last week sent me off on a brief William Bruce Pitzer tangent. Pitzer’s mysterious death has been the subject of previous threads here (for example: https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,984.0.html), so I’m not going to rehash all the twists and turns. The Pitzer saga has everything a JFKA junkie could want – elements of genuine mystery, tons of conspiratorial misinformation, hoaxers, crackpots, and witnesses whose credibility is difficult to assess. Your intrepid factoid-buster remains at least somewhat intrigued and perplexed.

I was fortunate to find, right off the bat, this 132-page e-book: WITHOUT SMOKING GUN: Investigating the Death of Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer, https://www.memresearch.org/wsg/WSG-2019.pdf. The author, Kent Heiner, had originally published the book in 2004. The link is to his 2019 edition. He admits that in 2004 he was too quick to jump on the conspiratorial bandwagon and align himself with one of the worst of the hoaxers/crackpots (Dan Marvin, who claimed the CIA had attempted to recruit him to assassinate Pitzer). He now accepts, as do most people who are knowledgeable about the case, that Pitzer in fact committed suicide and was not whacked as one of the "JFKA mystery deaths."

Is that the end of the story? Just a Lieutenant Commander in charge of the Audio/Visual Department at Bethesda who shot himself in the head on October 29, 1966? Everything else is just a mishmash of conspiracy factoids?

Well, no, not so fast, for three reasons that cause me to remain perplexed.

1. There is no clear – or even murky – explanation for Pitzer’s suicide. It just doesn’t fit who he was or what was going on in his life. His family was adamant that he never would have, and did not, commit suicide. Read the book. And yet, if he did kill himself, there had to be some reason, right?

2. Dennis David – one of those whose credibility is difficult to assess – was a friend of Pitzer’s. Pitzer served as a mentor to him several days a week in his quest to become an officer. On the day of the JFKA, David was Chief of the Day at Bethesda and thus was involved in the proceedings. See https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdavidD.htm. He was interviewed for Law’s book. To his credit, he made no claims about Pitzer being at the autopsy, which would have bolstered the tale I'll describe in the next paragraph; the highly dubious Jerrol Custer subsequently claimed that Pitzer was all over the place, filming the proceedings, but Custer’s story is almost surely BS.

David did claim, however, that he visited Pitzer in his office a couple of days later on personal business unrelated to the JFKA. Pitzer was surrounded by autopsy photos and was examining a 16mm film of the autopsy. Since Pitzer was the head of the Audio/Visual Department, this is not implausible. David said he and Pitzer didn’t engage in extensive discussion but did observe a bullet hole in JFK’s forehead and agreed he’d been shot from the front.

David first surfaced in 1979, when a newspaper article (in which David had simply mentioned a black hearse and a shipping casket in an offhand way) caused David Lifton to contact him during the preparation of Best Evidence. Lifton had great respect for him and wrote a memorial of sorts at the Ed Forum when he died in 2017.

David initially had all sorts of “facts” in support of a Pitzer homicide that turned out to be flat wrong (e.g., Pitzer was left-handed but the gunshot was to his right temple – in fact, Pitzer was right-handed). He did acknowledge his mistakes, however, and in posts at the Ed Forum indicated he was equivocal on the issue of suicide versus homicide. He doesn’t strike me as a publicity-seeking wacko.

3. Could David’s tale of the encounter in Pitzer’s office possibly tie into the suicide of Pitzer almost three years later, on October 29, 1966? I don’t know, but these two facts are intriguing even to a factoid-buster:

On October 24, 1966, just five days before Pitzer’s death, Lifton made his first contact with former WC attorney Wesley Liebeler, then a UCLA law professor, about his body-alteration theory. We don’t know what Liebeler did with the information.

On October 29, the very day of Pitzer’s suicide, the executors of the estate of JFK executed a deed of gift to the National Archives of the autopsy materials, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/pdf/md111.pdf. RFK had announced shortly before that the Kennedy family had made this decision.

If what David described were true, could either or both of these events have triggered Pitzer’s otherwise inexplicable suicide? A serious, by-the-book officer, did he fear he was about to be caught up in the ultimate scandal? We’ll never know, but it’s too intriguing for me to declare the Pitzer death just another busted factoid. If there is no connection, it’s certainly one more bizarre twist in an assassination that is chock-full of them.

So Pitzer supposedly killed himself because he was about to be caught up in a scandal regarding the JFK autopsy materials?! Seriously?! This is not the kind of backward logic one would expect from a self-professed "academic."

I recommend the lengthy chapter on Pitzer's death in Richard Belzer and David Wayne's best-selling book Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination, published in 2013 (chapter 26). For an online source, I recommend the article on Pitzer's death on the Spartacus Educational website: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKpitzerW.htm.

A few facts that Belzer and Wayne document:

-- Pitzer was just about to retire and had a good job lined up. He had no conceivable motive to kill himself.

-- Pitzer's right hand tested negative for GSR/nitrates, indicating he had not fired a revolver.

-- The FBI's own paraffin test in this case indicated the revolver was held some 3 feet away from Pitzer's head when it was fired.

-- The FBI was unable to find any evidence that Pitzer had acquired ammo for the revolver that was signed out from the security office in his name.

-- A heel print found near Pitzer's body was not from the shoes Pitzer was wearing.

-- Pitzer wrote himself a note to remind himself to return the revolver he had signed out.

-- Pitzer's family said he had been repeatedly threatened to keep quiet about his knowledge of the JFK autopsy.

And, pray tell, other than the fact that his story, if true, suggests Pitzer was murdered, what is your basis for saying that Lt. Col. Dan Marvin, a decorated war hero, was "one of the worst of the hoaxers/crackpots"? Where do you get that? As an Army vet and a Vietnam War scholar, I am well acquainted with Lt. Col. Marvin's outstanding service in Vietnam.

I agree with Belzer and Wayne:

Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Marvin, a decorated war hero, has testified and written extensively about how he was requested by the CIA to assassinate Lieutenant Commander Pitzer. Lieutenant Colonel Marvin had nothing to gain (and a lot to lose) by clarifying the historical record. A man of high character and loyalty, no one has been able to refute his account. (p. 288)

Lt. Col. Marvin authored the highly acclaimed book Expendable Elite: One Soldier's Journey into Covert Warfare. Marvin fought in the Korean War and then took part in Special Forces operations in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Marvin commanded Green Beret Team A-424 in South Vietnam and headed 12-man Special Forces team that attacked Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia. In Vietnam, he frequently worked with the CIA. He received three decorations for heroism.

Marvin was also honored by the Hoa Hao in Vietnam. He was awarded with the Hoa Hao purple silk scarf by the Hoa Hao Central Committee when they named Marvin an Honorary Hoa Hao, the only American ever to receive that honor.

As a 21-year Army vet myself, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when some WC apologist smears a decorated Army Special Forces veteran just because that veteran held a different view of the JFK case and of Pitzer's death. (Lt. Col. Marvin died in 2012.)