Michael,
What do you make of the observation made during the autopsy that the bullet that entered the President's back (several inches below the shoulder and to the right of the spine) had hit JFK at an angle of 45 to 60 degrees
This comes from the Sibert-O'Neill report on the autopsy. It is not in the autopsy report. According to Sibert and O'Neill, at one point Humes voiced the view that the back-wound bullet hit at a 45-60-degree downward angle. Obviously, either Humes was unbelievably incompetent or he could not have been looking at the back wound seen in the autopsy photo of the wound. The wound in the autopsy photo has an abrasion ring around it that is wider on the bottom half than on the top half, proving an upward trajectory at the time of impact, as the HSCA FPP correctly noted:
A red-brown to black area of skin surrounds the wound, forming what is called an abrasion collar. It was caused by the bullet's scraping the margins of the skin on penetration and is characteristic of a gunshot wound of entrance. The abrasion collar is larger at the lower margin of the wound, evidence that the bullet's trajectory at the instant of penetration was slightly upward in relation to the body. (7 HSCA 175)Dr. Spitz had already made the same point, in writing, four years earlier in his report to the Rockefeller Commission:
There is no doubt that the bullet which struck the President’s back penetrated the skin in a sharply upward direction, as is evident from the width of the abrasion at the lower half of the bullet wound of entrance. The term "sharply upward direction" is used because it is evident from this injury that the missile traveled upwards within the body. (Report of Werner Spitz, 4/24/75, p. 1, Rockefeller Commission papers, see https://websites.umich.edu/~ahaq/correspondence.pdf)Could Humes have been so utterly incompetent as not to recognize that an abrasion ring that is wider on the bottom than on the top proves the bullet struck at an upward angle? I don't think Humes was that incompetent. Finck surely recognized what the abrasion ring indicated. Yet, not surprisingly, this crucial information never made it into the autopsy report, just as the 6.5 mm object and the high fragment trail did not make it into the autopsy report.
For all the covering up that the FPP did (read: what Baden and Weston led them to cover up), the FPP members deserve enormous credit for admitting that the bullet hit at an upward angle. My guess is that Baden would have preferred not to acknowledge this devastating fact, but Dr. Wecht was on the panel and he easily recognized what the abrasion collar meant, and, surprisingly, Dr. Spitz, who was ardently pro-WC, backed up Wecht on this crucial point. The other FPP members recognized the obvious implication of the abrasion collar as well, and so this was one of the FPP's unanimous findings. This was something Baden could not keep out of the record.
Furthermore, Baden acknowledged -- indeed, demonstrated -- that the only way to make the back wound's upward trajectory line up with the sixth-floor window was to assume that Kennedy was leaning nearly 60 degrees forward at the moment of impact. On one occasion, Baden leaned far forward for the cameras to demonstrate the point. He almost looked like he was doubled over.
and did not penetrate more than an inch or so?
Yes, this was positively established with the ARRB materials and other disclosures in the 1990s. One of the med-techs, James Jenkins, had already revealed this in the 1970s in a recorded interview, noting that he could see the end of the probe pushing up against the lining of the chest cavity. This was corroborated in the materials disclosed in the 1990s.
We now know that the pathologists even removed the chest organs so they could have a clear view of where the probe was going, and they saw that it only went a few inches and ended at the lining of the chest cavity. That's why the first two drafts of the autopsy report said nothing about the throat wound being an exit point for the back wound.
Dr. Robert Karnei was a resident surgeon at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1963 and witnessed the autopsy. In a 1991 recorded interview, Karnei said the autopsy doctors positioned the body in multiple ways to facilitate the probing of the back wound, and that “the men” who saw the probing commented that they could see the end of the finger and then the end of the probe “from inside the empty chest”! He added that the pathologists worked “all night long with the probes” to find the bullet’s path through the body:
A: They did have the body--trying to sit it up and trying to get that probe to go. . . .
Q: Why didn't they turn the body over?
A: Well, they did. They tried every which way to go ahead, and try to move it around. . . .
Q: But this was after the Y incision?
A: Yes. The men described being able to see the end of the finger and the probe from inside the empty chest. They were working all night long with probes trying to make out where that bullet was going on the back there. (Interview transcript, p. 10)In his 3/10/97 ARRB interview, Karnei said that by around midnight the autopsy doctors "had not found a bullet track through the body, nor had they found an exit wound for the entry in the shoulder" (p. 001476).
In James Jenkins' 8/29/1977 HSCA interview, he said that Dr. Humes found that the bullet tract had not "penetrated into the chest" and that Humes had been able to "reach the end of the wound." Jenkins specified that the back wound "was very shallow" and that "it didn't enter the peritoneal cavity [the chest cavity]. He noted that there was quite a “controversy” because the doctors “couldn’t prove the bullet came into the chest cavity” even though they probed the back wound “extensively” (pp. 5, 7, 10-11, 13).
In a 1979 filmed interview, Jenkins explained that he could see the end of the probe pushing up against the lining of the chest cavity (pleura):
Commander Humes put his finger in it, and, you know, said that ... he could probe the bottom of it with his finger. . . . I remember looking inside the chest cavity and I could see the probe . . . through the pleura. You could actually see where it was making an indentation. . . . It was pushing the skin up. . . . There was no entry into the chest cavity.Again, this is why the first two drafts of the autopsy report said nothing about the throat wound being an exit point for the back wound. They knew the back wound had no exit point.
Did this bullet fall out and became CE 399? The ammo was presumably as ancient as the rifle, like more than 20 years old, and perhaps the bullet wasn't discharged properly?
Yes, a squib bullet is an entirely plausible, reasonable explanation. This would explain why so many witnesses said one of the shots sounded different than the others. Another possible explanation is that a fragment from a bullet that hit the pavement behind the limo caused the back wound.
No, that bullet wasn't CE 399. As SBT believers used to love to point out, what damage there is on CE 399 proves that the bullet hit an object while traveling sideways. SBT believers, even in this forum, used to love to point this out because they were going with Lattimer's and Myers' bogus enlarged size for Connally's back wound, because they didn't know that the wound track through Connally was remarkably narrow, and because they assumed the magic bullet nicked JFK's tie knot as it allegedly exited his throat.
What is your theory about the location of the assassin to the rear of JFK?
I definitely believe that a gunman was firing at JFK from the rear, quite possibly two gunmen. There is no credible doubt that a man with a rifle was seen in the sixth-floor window.
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