Eight witnesses in three different locations saw a hole in the front windshield of JFK's limousine. The lone-gunman theory has no way to explain the hole. The hole is proof of a second gunman. The eight witnesses who saw the hole were as follows:
-- Stavis Ellis, a Dallas police officer who saw JFK's limousine after it arrived at Parkland Hospital.
-- H. R. Freeman, a Dallas police officer who saw the limo after it arrived at Parkland Hospital.
-- Dr. Evalea Glanges, a medical student who was at Parkland Hospital when the limo arrived and who saw the limo there. Glanges had extensive experience with guns, having started doing recreational shooting as a child.
-- Richard Dudman, a journalist who saw the limo at Parkland Hospital.
-- Charles Taylor, Secret Service agent, who drove the limo to the White House garage. Taylor noted in an official memo that there was a "small hole" in the windshield.
-- Joe Paolella, Secret Service agent who guarded the limo at the White House garage.
-- George Whitaker, a Ford Motor Company (FMC) windshield glass technician who saw the limousine when it was brought to the company's River Rouge Assembly Plant, Building B, in Dearborn, Michigan.
-- Robert D. Harrison, an FMC automotive engineer at the company's Dearborn plant who saw the limo when it was at the plant.
Doug Weldon, a professor of criminal justice and an attorney, discusses the first seven witnesses in his chapter on the limo in
Murder in Dealey Plaza. Here's a link to the chapter:
"The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963" Weldon is the leading expert on the hole in the windshield of JFK's limo.
Another source available online on the evidence of the windshield hole is Doug Horne's article
"Photographic Evidence of Bullet Hole in JFK Limousine Windshield ‘Hiding in Plain Sight,’" June 4, 2012The eighth witness, Robert Harrison, was discovered by Dr. David Mantik, who discusses Harrison in his chapter on the windshield hole in his 2024 book
The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis (chapter 5).
Weldon interviewed Officer Ellis:
Over extensive interviews with this author, Mr. Ellis was unequivocal about observing the hole. . . . He recalls actually placing a pencil in the hole. He recounted that there were numerous people and police officers at Parkland Hospital who viewed the whole. He vividly remembers that while he was observing the hole a Secret Service agent came up to him and tried to persuade him that he was seeing a “fragment” and not a hole. Mr. Ellis noted: “It wasn’t a damn fragment. It was a hole.” Mr. Ellis has been totally consistent with this statement over the years and has not wavered in his insistence that he saw a hole in the windshield immediately after the assassination. . . .
Stavis Ellis also distinctly recalled another incident at Parkland Memorial Hospital on that day, which he found disturbing. When a young boy, who had taken photographs along the motorcade route, took pictures of the limousine at Parkland Hospital, a Secret Service agent grabbed the boy's camera and exposed his film by rolling it out of the camera. Dallas Police Officer James W. Courson, another motorcade officer, corroborated this account of the Secret Service agent destroying the film. ("The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963," pp. 139-140) In a recorded interview in 1971, Officer Freeman said,
I was right beside it [the limo]. I could have touched it. It was a bullet hole. You could tell what it was." ("The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963," p. 139)In a filmed interview shown in the documentary
The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Part 7, Dr. Glanges, who later chaired the Department of Surgery at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, said this:
We ran around the side of the building [Parkland Hospital] to the emergency room exit, and the presidential limousine was there. I had been standing there just watching the back of the emergency room when I realized there that was a bullet hole in the windshield. I talked to my friends next to me and said, “Look, there’s a bullet hole in the windshield,” and pointed it out to them. At the time, I did not know any of the details of the shooting. I was quite shocked when I looked up and saw the bullet hole. But was very clear it was a through-and-through bullet hole through the windshield of the car, from the front to the back. . . . (The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Part 7, 11:36 to 13:13Weldon interviewed Dr. Glanges in 1999 and reported the following:
She leaned against the fender and viewed the hole in the windshield. Looking from the outside she noted, "It was a real clean hole". . . .
She was insistent that the official story was “phony.” When I interviewed her, she was anticipating retirement in the near future. She confirmed that she was 100% certain that there was a hole in the windshield in the limousine at Parkland Hospital. ("The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963," p. 140) On November 27, 1963, SS agent Taylor wrote an official report on the security of the limo in the White House garage after its return from Dallas. He noted that a team of four FBI agents removed “bullet fragments” from the windshield, starting at 1:00 a.m. on November 23, 1963. Taylor noted in the report that there was a "small hole" in the windshield:
In addition, of particular note was the small hole just left of center in the windshield from which what appeared to be bullet fragments. ("Photographic Evidence of Bullet Hole in JFK Limousine Windshield ‘Hiding in Plain Sight,’" June 4, 2012)SS agent Paolella broke his silence in a radio interview with his friend Dr. John DeSalvo. Paolella recalled seeing a bullet hole in the windshield:
Walking around the car, I didn’t want to sit back there—it was pretty horrible. I noticed that there appeared to be a bullet hole in the windshield on the driver’s side, several inches over the hood of the car (i.e., elevated up on the windshield) but I, in turn, was in a state of shock myself, and I had heard that he got shot from the back, from the Dealey Plaza. So I didn’t really look to see if the glass particles from the windshield were in the driver’s side or on the hood. That would have given me some indication where the bullet came from. (Mantik, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis, p. 296) Dudman, a reporter for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, saw the limo at Parkland and reported the following:
A few of us noticed the hole in the windshield when the limousine was standing at the emergency entrance [to Parkland Hospital] after the President had been carried inside. I could not approach close enough to see on which side was the cup-shaped spot that indicates a bullet had pierced the glass from the opposite side. ("The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963," p. 139) Whitaker told Weldon in 1993 that he replaced the limousine windshield on Monday, November 25, at the River Rouge Assembly Plant, Building B. He said he saw a hole in the windshield, four to six inches to the (driver’s) side of the rearview mirror, and he was certain, based on his years of experience, that the shot came from the front.
At Whitaker’s request, Weldon kept Whitaker’s name confidential until after his death. Whitaker was very hesitant to disclose what he had seen. He almost declined to be interviewed, but his son persuaded him to do it. After Whitaker’s death in 2001, his family released Whitaker’s written testament to Nigel Turner. Here is his statement:
This is November 22, 1993, 30 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and as I will be 80 years old in about two months I think it is about time I put this bit of history in writing or on tape, so when I am gone the record will still be here. This is what I know about this part of the records. I know they are incomplete. JFK was shot and killed on November 22, 1963. This was a Friday afternoon. On Monday morning (November 25th) the Lincoln was in the Rouge Plant of the Ford Motor Co. When it [sic] around there I do not know at about 9:00 I was called to report to [the] glass laboratory, which I did. When arrived at the lab the door was locked. I was let in. There were two glass engineers there. They had a car windshield that had a bullet hole in it. The hole about 4 or 6 inches to the right of the rear view mirror [as viewed from the front]. The impact had come from the front of the windshield. (If you have spent 40 years in the glass [illegible] you know which way the impact was from.)When Weldon interviewed Whitaker in 1993, he asked him how certain was he that the bullet hole in the windshield came from the front:
Answer: I worked in the industry for forty years and I’ve seen all kinds of testing on glass and I know it came from the front.
Question: So you’re 100% certain.
Answer: I’m 100% positive that it came from the front! ("The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963," pp. 144-145)As for Harrison, his two sons confirmed to Dr. Mantik that Harrison had told them on several occasions that he had seen a bullet hole in the windshield when the limo was at the Ford Dearborn plant (Mantik,
The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis, p. 325).
Videos on the evidence of a hole in the windshield:
Doug Weldon segment on the hole in the windshield in The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Part 7JFK Limousine Windshield Bullet HoleBullet holes in the limousine and extra bullets in Dealey PlazaThe precise location of a bullet hole in the windshield of JFK's limousineThe precise location of a bullet hole in the windshield of JFK limousine - PART 3 OF 3JFK Secret Service Agent: hole in windshield of limo! INTERVIEW BY DR. JOHN DESALVO This is DeSalvo's interview with SS agent Paolella.
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