I think it is clear beyond any reasonable doubt that Humes was deliberately misrepresenting the back wound's location in his CE 385 SBT diagram. He surely knew this was not even close to what he had seen. If you compare the autopsy photo of the back wound with CE 385, it is obvious that Humes mislocated the wound at least 2.5 inches higher than where the photo shows it.

The evidence that the back wound was clearly below the throat wound is truly extensive and impressive. For example:

-- As mentioned earlier, JFK's official death certificate, dated 11/23/63, prepared by Dr. George Burkley and marked "verified," placed the back wound at around T3: "a second wound occurred in the posterior back at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra" (https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/md6/html/Image1.htm). Needless to say, Dr. Burkley got a long, up-close look at JFK's body during the autopsy and after the autopsy when he witnessed the embalming.

Given how far backward JFK's head is titled in the autopsy photo, the photo certainly does not rule out the death certificate's placement of the wound. Moreover, the "at about the level of" T3 placement is confirmed by the hard physical evidence of the bullet holes in the back of JFK's coat and shirt.

"At about the level of the third thoracic vertebra" means it was not exactly at T3, so it could have been between T2 and T3. The distance between the center of T2 and the center of T3 on the average male is just shy of 3/4ths of an inch, 1.8 cm/0.70 inches. If the wound were perceived to be more than halfway between T2 and T3, "at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra" would be a perfectly valid description.

Furthermore, as we will see below, the T2-T3 placement is supported by numerous and mutually corroborating eyewitness accounts and wound diagrams. 

-- Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who was called to the morgue for the specific purpose of viewing Kennedy's wounds, said in his 11/30/63 report that the back wound was "about six inches below the neckline to the right-hand side of the spinal column" ("The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963: Statement of Special Agent Clinton J. Hill, United States Secret Service, Concerning His Activities and Official Duties on November 22, 1963," 11/30/63, p. 5; CE 1024, p. 744).

Hill's placement of the wound corresponds closely to the location of the bullet holes in the back of JFK's shirt and coat and to the placement of the back wound on the autopsy face sheet (marked "verified") and in the official death certificate (also marked "verified").

-- In the transcript of the 27 January 1964 executive session of the WC, we read that chief counsel J. Lee Rankin said the bullet entered Kennedy's back below the shoulder blade. Rankin even referred to a picture which he said
showed that "the bullet entered below the shoulder blade" and that it entered below "where the bullet came out":

. . . we have the picture of where the bullet entered in the back, the bullet entered below the shoulder blade to the right of the backbone, which is below the place where the picture shows the bullet came out in the neckband of the shirt in front. (p. 20, https://historymatters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcexec/wcex0127/html/WcEx0127_0069a.htm)

-- Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman got a very good look at JFK's body at the morgue. Kellerman was the one who called Clint Hill to the morgue to view Kennedy's wounds, and he pointed out the wounds to Hill. Kellerman told the HSCA that the back wound was a "back wound," and he put the wound several inches below the neck in his HSCA wound diagram (Kellerman's HSCA wound diagram).

-- When interviewed by the HSCA, FBI agents Sibert and O'Neill both independently put the back wound far too low for the SBT to be even theoretically possible. Sibert and O'Neill actually drew wound diagrams that put the back wound about 4 inches below C7/the base of the neck (Sibert's HSCA wound diagram; O'Neill's HSCA wound diagram). O'Neill even went out of his way to note during his interview that "I do not see how the bullet that entered below the shoulder in the back could have come out the front of the throat" (HSCA affidavit, 11/8/78, p. 5, ARRB record number MD 47).

When the ARRB asked O'Neill about his HSCA wound diagram, he said that he stood by the diagram, and that the location he marked was accurate to the best of his recollection (Deposition of Francis X. O'Neill, ARRB, 9/12/97, pp. 104-107). Indeed, O'Neill said the wound was absolutely no higher than where he marked it on his diagram.

O’Neill further said that at the end of the autopsy, there was no doubt whatsoever that the back wound had no exit point (pp. 30-31, 94).

-- In his ARRB interview, Dr. John Ebersole, the autopsy radiologist, recalled that the back wound was in the "upper right back," and called it a "back wound" (Testimony of John H. Ebersole, Medical Panel Meeting, HSCA, 3/11/78, pp. 3-4, ARRB record number MD 60). In a recorded interview with Harrison Livingstone, Ebersole said he believed the back wound was near T4 (Killing The Truth: Deceit and Deception in the JFK Case, 1993, p. 721).

Finally, as I have documented in previous replies, even the HSCA FPP's placement of the back wound at T1 destroys the SBT because it requires an upward trajectory from the back wound to the throat wound, and because the only way to align that trajectory with the sixth-floor window is to assume that JFK was leaning markedly forward when the bullet struck.

The uber-cautious Pat Speer, whom WC apologists love to quote on the rare occasions when he says something they like, has pointed out that T1 destroys the SBT:

. . . the T-1 level of the spine corresponds to the level of the first rib. This is extremely problematic for the single-bullet theory in that, if Kennedy was sitting fairly upright, a bullet entering at T-1 as depicted in the HSCA exhibits, including Exhibit F-65, would dive down below T-1, and into Kennedy's lung. According to the autopsy, which held that nothing pierced Kennedy's lung, this did not happen. An entrance at T-1 is also problematic in that, even if Kennedy was bent forward to such an extent that the bullet entering his back would head straight for his throat, the first rib would be right in its way.

So how did the HSCA solve this dilemma? Did they accept what would seem obvious? That the lynch-pin of the single-assassin conclusion, the single-bullet theory, made little sense? . . .

Well...they proposed that Kennedy was leaning a lot further forward than had previously been presumed.

Now, this was doubly surprising since the HSCA had also decided Kennedy was first hit at Zapruder frame 190, at a point before he disappeared behind the sign in the film, when he is clearly sitting up in his seat. The Warren Commission, we should remember, concluded he was hit somewhere between frames 210-225 of the Zapruder film, when he was behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, and his forward lean could not precisely be determined. Equally troubling, by moving up the proposed moment of impact, the HSCA put Kennedy closer to the Texas School Book Depository at the time he was shot, and made the angle of descent for the "magic bullet" that much sharper. A quick comparison of Kennedy's position in Zapruder frame 188, 1/9 of a second before the supposed impact, to Kennedy's position in HSCA Exhibit F-46, a drawing of Kennedy leaning forward to the degree required for a non-deflected bullet to pass through his back and neck and then hit Governor Connally, demonstrates that Kennedy was not in the proper position to receive his wounds as proposed.

. . . Some quick measurements show that Kennedy’s neck is bent forward 31 degrees in the drawing, and that the arrow descends at 27 degrees. A bullet on such a trajectory would ascend 4 degrees through Kennedy’s body. As this matches the pathology panel’s analysis of the back wound, it seems clear, then, that they expended some effort on the drawing, and were not just guessing. Which makes it hard to explain why the arrow in the drawing descends at 27 degrees. The angle of descent from the sniper's nest at frame 190, when the HSCA proposed Kennedy was first wounded, was only 24 degrees. . . .

On Exhibit F-307, the back wound was shifted slightly further from the spine than was indicated by the autopsy photos or by the measurements. The entrance was measured as being 4.5 cm from the mid-line of Kennedy’s spine. If the entrance on this drawing is 4.5 cm from his mid-line, however, then Kennedy measured only 13.6 cm to his shoulder. The Clark Panel measured 16 cm to his shoulder, which is as one should expect for a man of his size. If Kennedy was indeed 16 cm to his shoulder, the wound in exhibit F-307 is 5.4 cm from his spine, not 4.5. In addition, if one uses the width of the ruler in the photo (which appears to be a centimeter ruler), 37 mm or 1.46 inches, to measure the distance from Kennedy’s spine to the location of the bullet entrance in the photo, one finds that the distance from Kennedy's spine to the bullet entrance was actually more like 3.9 cm. from his spine, not 4.5. If the entrance was really 3.9 cm from the spine but presented in F-307 as 5.4 cm from the spine, it follows that the wound was moved almost 40% further from the spine.

This convenient movement of the back wound, courtesy Dr. Baden, who worked on the drawings with medical illustrator Ida Dox, created the illusion the proposed bullet path passed outside the width of Kennedy’s spine.  (https://www.patspeer.com/chapter11thesingle-bullettheory).

Sam Kinney driver of the follow up car heard the same as bowers Pow.........Pow...Pow

One, you're forgetting that Bowers made a point of saying he didn't recognize the two men. Bowers had been working there for years and he noticed the two men because he had never seen them before. He would have recognized Hudson.

Imagine that. Two guys who Bowers had never seen before showed up at the time and place a presidential motorcade was passing by. That's a real head scratcher.

Two, by only quoting Bowers' WC testimony, you're ignoring the fact that he gave a more detailed description of where the two men were located in his interviews with Lane and Thompson. In his interview with Lane, which Thompson quotes but which you omitted, Bowers said the two men were standing near the wooden fence and that they were standing in the vicinity of where he saw the flash of light or smoke:

The flash of light could easily be caused by the sun reflecting off the chrome or glass of a moving vehicle.

These two men were standing back from the street somewhat at the top of the incline and were very near two trees which were in the area. . . . in the vicinity of where the two men I’ve described were . . . something which occurred which caught my eye in this immediate area on the embankment. . . a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel like something out of the ordinary had occurred there" (Thompson, Last Second in Dallas, pp. 126-127).

Yeah, a POTUS getting shot would qualify as something out of the ordinary.

Three, we have seen that you, Mitch Todd, and John Corbett have no logical, credible explanation for the three cars' obvious recon of the area behind the knoll in the 25 minutes before the shooting. For starters, nobody would have accidentally taken the extension road into the parking lot. That is just silly. And, it would not have taken 3-4 minutes and longer for those cars to look for a parking space or to figure out that the extension road was the only exit from the small parking lot (Bowers himself said the parking lot was small, a fact that you can confirm by period photos of the lot).

You are a very poor judge of what is logical or credible. You were given two possible but mundane reasons why three cars might have entered that parking lot and then left. You have given us no reason to believe those cars had anything to do with a plot to assassinate JFK. As is your custom, you simply assume what you cannot prove.

You still have not laid a finger on the scientific acoustical evidence that gunfire came from the grassy knoll. Let me remind you, yet again, that the NRC/NAS panel members were only able to reduce the probability of the grassy knoll shot to 77.7%, which is still a high probability, and that they did this by introducing two inexcusable errors into their calculations.

Keep clinging to your discredited acoustics evidence that flies in the face of the entire body of evidence. It's all you have going for you 62+ years after the fact.

Your chief critic of the acoustical evidence here has proved he has no credibility by repeating the long-debunked amateurish, unscientific nonsense that N-waves are not unique to gunfire, obviously unaware that there is a big difference between gunfire N-waves and crude N-waves produced by random noise, as two of the HSCA's acoustical scientists explained in great detail when Congressman Edgar ignorantly suggested that the dictabelt's N-waves were merely random noise. Heck, if your chief critic had even bothered to Google this, he would have known better. Out of curiosity, I asked Google AI "What is the difference between an N-wave caused by random noise and an N-wave caused by gunfire?" and Google AI replied by saying that random noise "might crudely mimic" a gunfire N-wave but that there are clear differences between the two, just as the HSCA's acoustical scientists noted:

Where would you be without "long-debunked amateurish, unscientific nonsense"?

Gunfire: A bullet traveling at supersonic speeds creates a true physical shock cone (Mach cone). When this passes a microphone, it produces a mathematically clean, highly symmetric N-wave. The drop from peak overpressure to the negative under-pressure phase is a direct, smooth linear line.

Random Noise: A sudden loud noise (like a mechanical clatter, wind buffet, or digital glitch) might crudely mimic an N-wave on a graph if it has a sharp onset and decay. However, the line between its positive and negative peaks is usually jagged, asymmetrical, and filled with micro-fluctuations because it isn't governed by a uniform supersonic shock cone. (Google AI results for "What is the difference between an N-wave caused by random noise and an N-wave caused by gunfire?")

The HSCA's acoustical scientists spent many pages explaining the difference between the oscillographic traits of soundwaves created by gunfire vs. the oscillographic traits of soundwaves created by random noise. Again, even the NRC/NAS panel did not claim that the dictabelt's N-waves were merely random noise. How did the panel explain the presence of gunfire N-waves on the dictabelt? They offered no explanation for them. They just ignored them. 

Bowers never publicly mentioned "hearing a shot from the fence," but he repeatedly said he saw an unusual event behind the fence that drew his attention to that spot during the shooting ("a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel that something out of the ordinary had occurred there").

But no shooter.

We have plenty of other credible evidence of gunfire from the knoll. For example: 

-- Julia Ann Mercer, the wife of a former U.S. Congressman, told law enforcement officials on the day of the shooting that before the assassination she saw a man carrying a rifle case and heading toward the grassy knoll. She said she was driving on Elm Street when she saw a man exit the back of a truck with an encased rifle in his hand, and that the man headed toward the grassy knoll. All of her accounts contain the same essential elements: there was a parked truck; there were two men in the truck; the man who was not driving took something from the back of the truck; the object that the man took from the back of the truck looked like a rifle encased in some kind of material; the man who exited the truck carrying an encased rifle headed up the grassy knoll.

But for some strange reason she decided that wasn't worth notifying law enforcement about what she saw.

Perhaps in tacit recognition of the essential consistency in Mercer’s accounts, John McAdams allowed that her initial statements to the Dallas sheriff’s department and the FBI were truthful, and he suggested that Mercer mistook a tool box for a gun case. However, even in her first statement, Mercer specified that the object the man was carrying was 3.5 to 4 feet long and 8 inches wide at its widest point and tapered down to 4 or 5 inches wide at its narrowest point, which obviously rules out a tool box.

"She [Mercer] said, "A man was sitting under the wheel of the car and slouched over the wheel." (I defy any student of the English language to explain, from these words, the position the man was in.) ....

"But why presidential assassins...would deliberately draw attention to themselves by parking illegally and blocking traffic on a busy street in the presence of three Dallas police officers as well as lay witnesses like Miss Mercer is not known.

"Of course, conspiracy theorists never let common sense get in the way of their hallucinatory theories." -- Vincent Bugliosi; Pages 883-884 of "Reclaiming History: The Assassination Of President John F. Kennedy"

-- Five police officers said they were told by witnesses right after the shooting that gunfire had come from the grassy knoll. Anthony Summers discusses one of them:

Another policeman, Patrolman Joe Smith, was holding up traffic across the road from the Book Depository when the motorcade passed by. On hearing the gunfire—and a woman cry out, “They’re shooting the President from the bushes!”—Smith ran to the grassy knoll, the only bushy place in the area. In 1978, he still remembered what he reported shortly after the assassination, that in the parking lot, “around the hedges, there was the smell, the lingering smell of gunpowder.” (Not in Your Lifetime, 2013, pp. 42-43)

In fact, we know that four other police officers were told by witnesses moments after the shooting that gunfire had come from the grassy knoll, as Thompson documented way back in 1967:

This "unusual occurrence—a flash of light or smoke or something" was observed by other witnesses who reported it to law-enforcement officers on the scene. Deputy Sheriffs L. C. Smith, Seymour Weitzman, A. D. McCurley, and J. L. Oxford all later spoke of witnesses who called their attention to the stockade fence. Smith reported that as he ran toward the knoll "I heard a woman unknown to me say the President was shot in the head and the shots came from the fence on the north side of Elm Street" (19 H 516). Weitzman recalled that:

"As he came to the fence at the top of the grassy slope, some bystander mentioned that the firecracker or shot had come from the other side of the fence, and he requested a bystander to bend over and he used the bystander's back as a step and vaulted over the fence" (Archives, CD 5).

McCurley and Oxford independently reported being told by a witness or witnesses that smoke had been seen near the corner of the stockade fence. McCurley recalled:

"I ran over and jumped a fence and a railroad worker stated to me that he believed the smoke from the bullets came from the vicinity of a stockade fence which surrounds the park area" (19 H 514).

Oxford gave a similar account:

"We jumped the picket fence which was along Elm Street and ran over into the railroad yards. When we got there, there was a man who told us that he had seen smoke up in the corner of the fence" (19 H 530). (Six Seconds in Dallas, 1967, pp. 115-121)

-- Jesse Price was watching the motorcade from the roof of the Terminal Annex Building. Immediately after the shots were fired, Price's attention was drawn to the area behind the grassy knoll because he saw a man running across the railyard behind the knoll. He said the man was running toward "the passenger cars on the railroad siding." In a filmed interview in 1966, Price said the man "was running very fast, which gave me the suspicion that he was doing the shooting." This man, Price added, "was carrying something in his right hand," which "could have been a gun."

The "dismissal" of the two friends' accounts? That's a bit of an overstatement. The curious "garbled at best" description clearly does not apply to Mozley's statement that Bowers told him he had dangerous information about the shooting, since Thompson assumes Bowers said this to Mozley and allows that the statement may be "significant."

And, again, just a few pages earlier, Thompson says DeGaugh's and Mozley's accounts are not like the 1990s accounts from other Bowers friends that are "not to be taken seriously," and that the two men's accounts "suggest that Bowers saw more than he revealed when questioned by Joe Ball and Mark Lane" (Last Second in Dallas, 2021, p. 128). Let's read it again:

Let's read again what Thompson says:

Also not to be taken seriously are reports from people who knew Bowers that he claimed to have seen one of the men he described put a rifle in the trunk of a car. These reports surfaced in the 1990s when various TV producers were in search of a story. The same cannot be said of the reports of two individuals who, like Bowers, worked for the Union Terminal Railroad.

Both suggest that Bowers saw more than he revealed when questioned by Joe Ball and Mark Lane.

The first is Olan DeGaugh. As yardmaster, he was several levels above Bowers in the railroad company hierarchy. In an oral history interview in 2002, he described Bowers as “a good person, a good worker, a good man. . . . . He was. . . .  one of my best friends.” When asked if he had talked to Bowers about the Kennedy assassination, he replied, “Several times. I don’t know how many times. Not a real long conversation.” When asked if Bowers ever varied his story about what happened that day, DeGaugh said, “I don’t think he ever changed it.”

And what did Bowers tell DeGaugh about the assassination?

DeGaugh said, “Well, the day Kennedy was assassinated, he [Bowers] was looking out the window and there was a car parked next to the board fence out here barely where the street ends and he saw someone holding the trunk of a car put something in it and drive off. And it had been assumed that it had been Oswald. It may have been Oswald.” DeGaugh said the car “was a coupe of some kind . . . an old car.” 

The second is Barney Mozley, the switchman who relieved Bowers by taking the “second trick” in the tower that Friday afternoon.  Also in 2002, Mozley gave an oral history interview. After explaining his difficulty in getting through police lines to relieve Bowers, Mozley pointed out that from the tower, “you can’t see the assassination. I mean, when there was actually shooting. You could hear it, but you couldn’t see it. That was the way it was.” He did talk to Bowers about the assassination within days of November 22.

QUESTION: Did he ever talk to you about the assassination at all ever?

ANSWER: Yeah, he did, but he didn’t want it to be repeated. And I never did say anything about him, but I can say something about him now. He was a . . . yeah, he would do that and tell you, “Now, don’t go around talking about it because,” he said, “It’s dangerous.” But he never said dangerous from whom.

QUESTION: How long after the assassination did he tell you that?

ANSWER: Oh, it was just a few days. (Last Second in Dallas, pp. 128-129)

There is really nothing "garbled" about Mozley's and DeGaugh's accounts if we consider that they were given in interviews and thus were spoken from memory and extemporaneously. Mozley was quite specific that it was only a few days after the shooting when Bowers said he didn't want Mozley to repeat what he had told him and that the information was "dangerous," and Mozley specified that Bowers did not say from whom the danger was posed. This has the ring of truth and credibility, which is probably why Thompson assumes that Bowers did in fact say this to Mozley and why he allows that Mozley's statement may be significant. 

And DeGaugh's recollection about Bowers seeing a man put something into the trunk of a car near the fence and drive off mirrors what Bowers' friend James Sterling told New Orleans DA investigator Gary Sanders in a 1967 witness statement: Sterling informed Sanders that Bowers told him that after the shots were fired, he saw two men running from behind the fence, that they ran up to a car, threw something in the trunk, jumped in the car, and drove off. I seriously doubt that DeGaugh was aware of Sterling's 1967 statement to Sanders, yet the essential similarity between the two accounts is obvious.

What we have here with Thompson's treatment of Mozley and DeGaugh is an example of the fact that Thompson occasionally goes too far in questioning valid evidence after introducing it as credible. He'll introduce evidence with statements that endorse its credibility, but then he'll partially walk back the evidence with excessive/unjustified qualifications. Fellow researchers have criticized him for this. However, I guess Thompson's excessive caution is a good thing in a way, since it makes it all the more important when he endorses evidence without any qualification, as he does with the acoustical evidence.

And, again, notice that Thompson, even while qualifying his endorsement of the Mozley and DeGaugh accounts, assumes that Bowers did in fact tell Mozley he had dangerous information and allows that Mozley's statement may be significant.

Finally, I would again point out that Bowers' widow told Penn Jones that Bowers had been told not to talk. Of course, Mitch Todd says Jones was unreliable, but people who knew Jones considered him to be a down-to-Earth, honest, sincere person. Jones, who bravely defended civil rights in a very anti-civil rights state, was a WWII vet and the owner and chief editor of the Midlothian Mirror newspaper. I don't think Jones would have fabricated the widow's statement.

MTG offers us earwitness and nose-witness accounts of a shooter on the GK but no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence of a shooter on the GK, a shooter who wasn't seen, left no physical evidence, and didn't hit anything. Real compelling stuff.

CTs have been peddling this nonsense for over six decades and where has it gotten them. Are they any closer to identifying someone other than Oswald who was complicit in the assassination? If they can't figure out what happened with what is already known, what reason is there to believe they ever will? Do they think that after all these years, there is going to be some game changing discovery that is going to change the narrative that Oswald was the assassin? The snipe hunt continues without results.

Oliver Stone's movie came out in 1991 and soon after I discovered internet discussion sites and began arguing the case of the JFKA online. Some of the names have changed, but the same stale old arguments keep getting recycled. Old I could crush a Grape ooooh yummy yummy get polished up and presented as if they are new revelations. Nothing has changed and nothing ever will. The only question is whether after all of us are dead and gone whether future generations will still care about any of this nonsense. My guess is they will have more pressing concerns, like how to deal with the massive amount of debt we have saddled them with.

ZM-

Not sure.

Deep inside the TSBD, three boom sounds were heard. That indicates three shots from the TSBD6 sniper window, IMHO. There could have been shots from elsewhere, and the second official investigation into the JFKA, the HSCA-1979, said there was a high probability of shot from the GK.

I suppose there could have been other shots that no one heard, no one saw, that didn't hit anything, and left no trace (recovered shells, recovered bullets). That doesn't leave a lot of reason to believe there were other shots.

The shooter hears the muzzle blast first and then the sonic effect of the bullet traveling downrange with normal supersonic ammo.

And as JohnC. Reminded me, at the impact site, it’s the reverse, ie: the sound of impact precedes the sound of the muzzle blast if  the bullet was supersonic.

But would not that mean then that for each bullet fired there would be 2 sounds heard, the sound of impact followed like only 0.3 sec or or less by the boom since the distance at Z224 was only about 65 yards and the distance at Z313 about 90 yds?

Even if the 1st shot did not hit anything like the road or the manhole cover thus only one sound , the other 2 bullets at Z224 and Z313 hit fresh and bone so there would have been 2 sounds per bullet heard theoretically.

Therefore , should not Bowers and other witnesses have heard 5 sounds at the least?

I'm no expert on the subject of acoustics but I do know it can behave rather strangely. I remember from Ken Burns's series on the Civil War, the phenomenon of acoustic shadows was discovered. People 20 miles away could hear the sound of canon fire but people just mile away could not.

In the example I gave earlier, I discovered something which I cannot explain. I heard my neighbor taking target practice with his muzzle loader on the adjacent property while walking my dogs. I have a five acre wooded lot while my neighbor's property is an open field. I walk my dogs on an oval path. The sound I would hear from each shot he took would vary depending on where I was on the oval. In some places I would hear a single sound. Other places I would hear B-BOOM. Still other places I would hear BOOM-BOOM. I have no explanation for what I was hearing but it was quite easy to discern.