Another key fact that Humes withheld in his WC and HSCA testimony was that there were multiple drafts of the autopsy report. Humes claimed he burned the “rough first draft” because it had blood on it, but he said there was no substantive difference between the first draft and the final draft. This lie was exposed with the release of the transcript of the 1/27/64 WC executive session, which reveals that Rankin discussed two early drafts of the autopsy report, both of which said the back wound had no exit point.
For a detailed discussion on the drafts of the autopsy report, I would refer interested readers to Doug Horne’s 64-minute video presentation
The Evolving JFK Autopsy Report..
As mentioned, the autopsy doctors were careful to conceal the fact that after the chest organs were removed, they were able to probe the back wound to its end point and could see that the wound path did not enter the chest cavity. Their later cover story was that the contracted back muscles prevented them from probing the back wound.
Only Boswell eventually abandoned this story, but he did not do so until his ARRB interview in 1996, when he said that initially the muscles prevented them from probing the back wound but that after they opened the chest, they were able to “get at” it and see that the bullet did not pierce the “lung cavity” but merely caused bleeding “outside the pleura” (the lining of the chest cavity).
In his HSCA interview, Boswell said that he and the other doctors thought the tracheotomy “was a wound.” The interviewer, Andy Purdy, added that Boswell “meant to convey the impression that that the doctors thought it was a bullet wound” (HSCA interview: J. Thornton Boswell, 8/17/77, p. 3).
Later in the interview, Boswell said he remembered “seeing part of the perimeter of a bullet wound in the anterior neck” (p. 8 ).
This brings up the crucial point that the bottom half of a round small bullet hole can be seen fairly easily in the bottom of the throat wound in autopsy photo F1. So, it is not a bit surprising that Boswell spotted this during the autopsy.
But, still later in the interview, perhaps realizing he had said too much, Boswell began to vacillate about knowledge of the throat wound during the autopsy and about when the autopsy doctors concluded that a bullet had fallen out of the back wound (which Boswell usually referred to as a “neck" wound). Toward the very end of the interview, Boswell said that “in the later courses of the autopsy” the doctors thought the tracheotomy “may have included the exit wound of a bullet” (p. 12).
Yet, we know that the first two drafts of the autopsy report said nothing about the throat wound being an exit point for a bullet. The second draft said the throat wound was an exit point for a
fragment from the head shot. Both drafts said the back wound had no exit point.
In a very revealing comment, Boswell said the doctors got themselves into trouble (“in dutch”) with the Secret Service over the "neck" (back) and throat wounds:
We had gotten ourselves in dutch with the neck and throat wounds with regard to the Secret Service” (p. 4). For some reason, the interviewer did not ask Boswell to expand on this statement, and Boswell did not volunteer why they were in trouble with the Secret Service agents over the “neck” and throat wounds.
Boswell added that one of the Secret Service agents was “on the phone most of the time” during the autopsy (p. 4).
Boswell noted that during the autopsy, Dr. Robert Karnei “served in effect as the chief assistant of the autopsy doctors” and that Dr. Karnei assisted with the post-autopsy brain exam (pp. 5, 11).
In his ARRB interview, Boswell said the doctors concluded
during the autopsy that the throat wound was the exit point for the back wound! He said their first impression of the throat wound was that it was just a tracheostomy but that after they found the back wound and after they opened the chest and saw blood outside the pleura “we had a track” (i.e., they
inferred a track, not that they actually saw it):
Q. When you referred to the wound in the anterior neck, what was your first impression as to what that wound was?
A. I'm not sure what our first impression -- oh, we thought that they had done a tracheostomy, and whether or not that was a bullet wound, we weren't sure, initially. It was after we found an entrance wound and then the blood external to the pleura that we had a track, and that proved to be the exit wound; but it was so distorted by the incision, initially we just assumed it to be a tracheostomy.
Q. Did you reach the conclusion that there had been a transit wound through the neck during the course of the autopsy itself?
A. Oh, yes. (ARRB interview: J. Thornton Boswell, 2/26/96, p. 34)In other words, Boswell claimed that the autopsy doctors deduced/inferred a back-to-throat track
during the autopsy based on the bleeding outside the pleura.
At no point did he ever claim they actually saw this alleged track. The only way they could have actually seen such a track would have been to dissect the wound, but they did no dissection because an Army general refused to let Finck dissect the wound, as Finck reluctantly admitted under cross-examination at the Clay Shaw trial.
So we see that on two occasions Boswell contradicted Humes’s tale that they were unaware of the throat wound until the following morning.
A major problem with Boswell’s statements about the back-to-throat conclusion being reached during the autopsy is that they are contradicted by the first two drafts of the autopsy report, by Dr. Karnei’s statements, by Dr. Ebersole’s statements, by med-tech Jenkins’ statements, by FBI agent O’Neill’s statements, by FBI agent Sibert’s statements, and by the Sibert and O’Neill report on the autopsy, not to mention by Humes’s WC and HSCA testimony.
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