JFK Assassination Forum

Warren Commission Testimony:

Mr. SPECTER. What experience, Doctor, have you had, if any, in evaluating
gunshot wounds?

Dr. (Robert) SHAW. I have had considerable experience with gunshot wounds and wounds due to missiles because of my war experience. This experience was not only during the almost 2 years in England. but during the time that I was head of the Thoracic Center in Paris, France, for a period of approximately a year.

Mr. SPECTER. Would you be able to give an approximation of the total number of bullet wounds you have had occasion to observe and treat?

Dr. SHAW. Considering the war experience and the addition of wounds seen in civilian practice, it probably would number well over a thousand, since we had over 900 admissions to the hospital in Paris.

---30---

OK, so Shaw was not only educated in medicine, he was a (very) practicing doctor in the exact field of thoracic bullet wounds.

(I consider myself a layman in these matters, so I defer to Shaw. I understand many JFKA buffs have knowledge and experience that exceed that of Dr. Shaw.)

----

Here Shaw ponders the very low probability that a missile first traveling through Gov. JBC's chest could then penetrate the dorsal (wristwatch) wide of JBC's wrist, and then exit the volar (palm) side:

Mr. SPECTER. He (Dr. Gregory) has described that he concluded that the wound of entry was on the dorsal aspect of the (Connally's) right wrist, but your thought was that perhaps that was the wound of exit?

Dr. SHAW. Yes; in trying to reconstruct the position of Governor Connally’s body, sitting in the jump seat of the limousine, and the attitude that he would assume in turning to the right---this motion would naturally bring the volar surface of the right wrist in contact with the anterior portion of the right chest.

SPECTER. Well, is your principal reason for thinking that the wound on the dorsal aspect is a wound of exit rather than a wound of entry because of what you consider to be the awkward position in having the dorsal aspect of the wrist either pointing upward or toward the chest?

Dr. SHAW. Yes, I think I am influenced a great deal by the fact that in trying to assume this position. I can’t comfortably turn my arm into a position that would explain the wound of the dorsal surface of the wrist as a wound of entrance, knowing that the missile came out of the chest and assuming that one missile caused both the chest wound and the arm wound.

Mr. SPECTER. Might not then that conclusion be affected if you discard the assumption that one missile caused all the wounds?

Dr. SHAW. Yes, if two missiles struck the Governor, then it would not be necessary to assume that the larger wound (on the volar side) is the wound of entrance.

---30---

OK, so Shaw says if a second missile struck Gov. JBC, then the wound to the dorsal side of his wrist is explicable. OK, that is informative.

Add on:

Dr. SHAW. Yes; I feel that the line of trajectory as marked on this diagram (Specter's SBT diagram) is accurate as it could be placed from my memory of this wound.

Mr. SPECTER. And, on that trajectory; how do you postulate the bullet then passed through the wrist from dorsal to volar or from volar to dorsal?

Dr. SHAW. My postulation would be from volar to dorsal.

---30---

So Shaw again posits a slug exiting JBC's chest likely could have only entered the volar (opposite of wristwatch) side of JBC's wrist. Yet Dr. Gregory, the wrist surgeon, concluded the slug had entered JBC's wrist on the dorsal side, then exited through the volar. Dr. Shaw, upon conversing with Dr. Gregory, accepted Gregory's analysis of the wrist wound.

So how did Gov. JBC receive his wrist wound?

I don't know. The reasonable explanation is the JBC's wrist wound was not inflicted by the slug that passed through JBC's chest first.

Interesting side note:

Evidently, the slug that entered JBC's thigh actually left metallic fragments on his femur (the major leg bone in the thigh), according to the WC testimony of Dr. Shaw.

So...how did this missile, embedded in JBC's leg all the way to the bone...exit his body? If it was removed in surgery, then it would have been placed in an envelope and given to police, as every hospital everywhere did then and now.

Yet we are told CE-399 caused this injury to JBC, thus was embedded near his thigh-bone, but was later found in a hallway outside Trauma Room 2, underneath a gurney.

The Parkland hospital employee Tomlimson found a pointy-head slug in the hallway, by the report of O.P. Wright, former police chief and then hospital administrator. Does this CE-399 story hold water?

In one of the most important homicide and attempted murder cases of all time, Parkland Hospital Trauma Room 2 doctors, attendants and nurses...just let a slug, removed from JBC's thigh...get lost?

You ignore the fact that Shaw was trained to patch up gunshot wounds, not figure out how they were wounded. I'm sure he picked up some knowledge in that area, but that is not his primary area of expertise.

Furthermore, Shaw never examined JFK so how could he pass judgement on the SBT. When he testified before the WC, he would not have known the relative positions of JFK and JBC. How could he possibly have known whether the bullet that passed through JBC had first struck JFK?

Here is an article from CBS8 in Dallas re the LHO-Hidell wallet:

Wallet mystery from Officer Tippit's murder settled after 50 years

Evidence from a variety of sources including vintage WFAA news film may provide the proof that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

Author: WFAA Staff and WFAA.com (WFAA)
Published: 8:09 PM PST November 20, 2013

DALLAS No other crimes have been more analyzed or scrutinized than what happened in Dallas a half-century ago.

'It's been picked apart for decades,' said Farris Rookstool III, JFK historian and former FBI analyst, 'but the tragedy of this is no one has ever taken the due diligence of time to really put these pieces together until now.'

After five decades, Rookstool is sharing the strongest evidence yet that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippit.

'The wallet puts him definitively at the scene of the crime,' Rookstool said.

Oswald's wallet has been a persistent mystery in recent years one Rookstool started studying. The mysterious billfold first appeared on WFAA in the afternoon of November 22, 1963.

WFAA program director Jay Watson, anchoring live coverage of the assassination, asked Channel 8 photographer Ron Reiland to join him on set and discuss film that Reiland just shot on the Oak Cliff street where Tippit was slain.

'Let's roll the film and we'll narrate it as we go,' Watson said on air.

Reiland, describing each scene to Watson, presumed the wallet seen on the film belonged to Officer Tippit.

'There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is Oswald's wallet,' Rookstool said.

So, Rookstool set out to prove it.

He compared the Channel 8 black-and-white film to Oswald's actual wallet in the National Archives. On each of them, circular snaps are visible, along with metal strips and perhaps the biggest similarity a zipper over the cash compartment.

Oswald's wallet is a different color and has different characteristics than Tippit's.

This month, for the first time, Marie Tippit shared her late husband's wallet with WFAA. Tippit's is black, has a different style snap no metal bar like Oswald's and does not have a zipper over the cash compartment.

A half hour east of Birmingham, Alabama is the only man alive today who saw Oswald's wallet at Tippit's murder scene.

'As I walked up, I happened to not knowingly step in a puddle of blood, which was Tippit's blood,' retired FBI Special Agent Bob Barrett recalled. 'I thought, 'Oh God, what have I done?''

He spent 27 years in the FBI and was asked to go to the Tippit murder scene that day by his friend, Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker.

After arriving at 10th and Patton in North Oak Cliff, Barrett said, he recognized a Dallas police captain thumbing through a billfold.

'He said, 'Bob, you know all the crooks in town, all the hoodlums, etc. You ever heard of a Lee Harvey Oswald?' I said, 'No, I never have.' He said 'How about an Alec Hiddell?' I said, 'No. I never have heard of him either,'' Barrett explained. 'Why would they be asking me questions about Oswald and Hiddell if it wasn't in that wallet?'

In addition, the first Dallas cop on the Tippit crime scene said he actually recovered the wallet.

Sgt. Kenneth Croy, a reserve officer at the time, put it in writing on an 8' x 10' picture for Rookstool.

'First on the scene, recovered Oswald's wallet there, too,' Croy wrote on an image of Tippit's patrol car.

But officially, Dallas police told a different story. The department said it got Oswald's wallet from Oswald himself after his arrest a short time later at the Texas Theatre.

Barrett and Rookstool believe police made that up for the official report because too many officers handled the crucial piece of evidence at the shooting scene.

'They said they took the wallet out of his pocket in the car? That's so much hogwash,' Barrett said. 'That wallet was in [Captain] Westbrook's hand.'

'Bob's in Alabama. Kenneth Croy is in Hamilton, Texas,' Rookstool said. 'They had no relationship with each other than the fate of history put them at the scene of a crime.'

Rookstool says the testimony of Barrett and Croy, Tippit's billfold, and the WFAA film prove that Oswald's wallet was at the scene of the policeman's murder.

More than shell casings and eyewitness recollections, it is the first hard evidence placing Oswald there on that day.

It's significant in tying off a historical loose end and perfecting the record fifty years later.

---30---

Well, like everything in the JFKA, clear as mud.

The WC solved the assassination, huh?! Sure they did! Umm, and never you mind that we now know that three of the seven WC members did not buy several of the WC's key conclusions,

Which means 4 got it right and 3 got it partly right.

and never mind that the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the WC's investigation was biased and poorly conducted, that two gunmen were involved, that the first hit on JFK occurred when Oswald's view of JFK would have been obstructed by the oak tree,

4 members of the HSCA dissented from the finding of a probable conspiracy which means the other 8 were idiots.

Another thread I don't even remember starting. So many crazies, so little time.

Note to sane readers: "Citations" in scholarly parlance means "number of times this piece has been cited in other scholarly journals." The journal in which Bagley's piece was published would love to say "Citations: 432." In fact, it says "Citations: 0." "Citations" in scholarly parlance does not mean "number of times works by the author of this piece have been mentioned somewhere." Jesus. If that were the defintion [sic], Bagley's works would have 9,312 "citations" just in KGB Loony Bird's posts alone.

Dear Fancy Pants Rants,

I don't know if you think "the KGB no longer exists," "it does, but it's inept," "the evil, evil CIA is much more evil," or "it's been unjustly accused of having installed Donald J. Trump as our president on 20 January 2017," but as far as I know, when he died in February 2014, Tennent H. Bagley, PhD, still believed Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK all by himself.

But that doesn't mean that Bagley believed your and Gerald Posner's boy, Yuri Nosenko, was telling the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald in the USSR -- or anything else, for that matter.

Bagley KNEW that Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 -- sent there to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about probable KGB penetrations of the CIA (can you say Bruce Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, and George Kisevalter?), the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies.

But "Pete" couldn't understand why Nosenko was implausibly proclaiming the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with the former Marine U-2 radar operator during those two-and-a-half years he lived in The Worker's Paradise.

In 2013 a former CIA officer by the name of W. Alan Messer wrote an article* titled "In Pursuit of the Squared Circle: The Nosenko Theories Revisited." In it, he agreed with Bagley that Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 but posited that Nosenko, using his "intel" on Oswald as his ticket to The Promised Land, was a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 whose bona fides the KGB, via the likes of Aleksey Kulak (FEDORA) and Igor Kochnov (KITTY HAWK) had no choice but to support.

*International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 26: 427-452, 2013

Which makes a lot of sense to me.

By the way, did you know that Major Lt. Col. "Captain" Nosenko (who, although he claimed to have been Deputy Chief of the American Embassy section of the Second Chief Directorate, didn't know how to send a cable, didn't know how many floors of the Embassy were dedicated to the CIA (3), didn't know if his secretary was assigned to him or came from a "pool," and didn't know where the cafeteria was at KGB headquarters) claimed to have read the KGB file on Oswald four times -- twice before the assassination, and twice after it?

Do you believe him?

Sad. Very, very sad.


-- Tom

LNs do not rely on time stamps to prove Oswald shot Tippit. With what is known, we can only approximate that. There is ample proof Oswald killed Tippit. There is the forensic evidence of the discarded shells which were matched to the handgun Oswald had in his possession when arrested to the exclusion of all other firearms in the world. There are also plenty of witnesses who IDed Oswald either as the shooter or the man they saw fleeing the scene. On top of that, Oswald tried to shoot one of the arresting officers when confronted in the theater. Anyone who can look at that evidence and refuse to believe Oswald was the killer is not somebody who wants to know the truth. That is somebody who wants their beliefs to be true.

It is the CTs who try to fixate on the timing because they are the ones who need to prove we should not believe all that evidence that Oswald killed Tippit. To do that, THEY are the ones who have to prove Oswald could not have been at the scene of the crime when Tippit was shot. After 62 years of trying, they have failed miserably.

LNs do not rely on time stamps to prove Oswald shot Tippit.

I didn't say they did. I said they rely on the time stamps for the time that Tippit was killed.

There is ample proof Oswald killed Tippit.

Really? I think you mean to say that there is ample evidence that Oswald killed Tippit. But not all evidence is also proof.

There is the forensic evidence of the discarded shells which were matched to the handgun Oswald had in his possession when arrested to the exclusion of all other firearms in the world.

Too bad there isn't a conclusive chain of evidence to show that the revolver now in evidence is in fact the one that was taken from Oswald when he was arrested.

There are also plenty of witnesses who IDed Oswald either as the shooter or the man they saw fleeing the scene.

Says the guy who, in post after post, claims that he doesn't put much weight on witness testimony. Now suddenly witness testimony is reliable? Hilarious!

On top of that, Oswald tried to shoot one of the arresting officers when confronted in the theater.

There is no evidence for that.

Anyone who can look at that evidence and refuse to believe Oswald was the killer is not somebody who wants to know the truth. That is somebody who wants their beliefs to be true.

I have never excluded Oswald as a possible killer of Tippit, but I look at the actual (lack of) evidence and not the BS that you consider to be solid evidence. Once again, I couldn't care less if Oswald killed Kennedy and/or Tippit or if there was a conspiracy. All I am asking is to see authentic evidence that support what ever conclusion you want me to reach.

It is the CTs who try to fixate on the timing because they are the ones who need to prove we should not believe all that evidence that Oswald killed Tippit

Wrong again. It's not innocence that needs to be proven, it's guilt... so the ball is in your corner and the mere fact that you keep whining about this only tells me that you know that you don't really have the evidence to prove guilt.

To do that, THEY are the ones who have to prove Oswald could not have been at the scene of the crime when Tippit was shot. After 62 years of trying, they have failed miserably. 

If Tippit was killed around 1:10 PM, there is no way that Oswald could have made it to 10th and Patton, at least not by walking there. That's why the LNs are so desperate to rely on the DPD time stamps to push back the time of the shooting as much as they can. The problem, which they will never agree with, is that it doesn't add up with the known facts.