November 27, 2025 • 56 mins
November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was shot and killed during a presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas. The President is taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital. By law, Dallas County Coroner Dr. Earl Rose had jurisdiction over the case and should have performed the autopsy. However, against Dr. Earl Rose's protestations, the body of President Kennedy was wrapped in a sheet, placed in a casket with a broken handle, and flown over 1,300 miles away to Washington DC, where 2 naval doctors, who had never conducted a forensic autopsy performed the autopsy on John F. Kennedy. Join Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack as they take a close look at the autopsy that was so bad, 60years later questions are still being asked.
Time Code Highlights
00:01:21 Discussion about the ripple effect of the assassination of JFK
00:04:31 Discussion of the moments following the shooting of JFK in Dealey Plaza
00:06:02 Talk about how autopsy "Standard Procedures" were not followed
00:06:51 Texas state law and jurisdiction over investigation and autopsy
00:07:58 Board Certified Forensic Pathologist Doctor Earl Rose was chief medical examiner for Dallas, Texas at the time and was at Parkland Memorial Hospital
00:09:22 Discussion JFK body taken from Dallas to Washington DC for autopsy
00:10:59 Talk about Secret Service preparing for President trips.
00:11:36 Discussion of JFK physical condition after being shot.
00:12:52 Talk about injuries to JFK, at least 2 gunshot wounds.
00:13:31 Discussion of tracheotomy that was performed to establish an airway
00:15:04 Discussion of Dr. Earl Rose and how his experience was dismissed
00:16:23 Dr. Earl Rose KNEW he was looking at a Murder Investigation.
00:17:47 Discussion Dallas County had jurisdiction over the body.
00:19:03 Talk about autopsy of JFK should have taken place in Dallas
00:20:08 Talk about previous Presidential assassination, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley and their autopsies.
00:22:10 Discussion of Dr. Earl Rose did the autopsy for Oswald, Officer Tippit, and Jack Ruby.
00:23:36 Discussion of JFK body being taken to Washington DC
00:25:16 Comparing Bethesda Naval Hospital to Walter Reed Hospital
00:26:04 Discussion about doctors chosen to perform JFK autopsy
00:28:42 Talk about why doctors turned bullet wound into tracheostomy
00:29:55 Presidents body wrapped in sheets. Head wrapped in gauze
00:31:09 Discussion of JFK clothing, tie changed the trajectory of round.
00:32:58 Discussion about clothing worn during the assassination
00:33:44 Talk about "magic bullet" going through JFK and Governor Connally,
00:35:08 Discussion Secret Service agents washed interior of Presidential limo.
00:36:03 Talk about crime scenes - bone fragments found and turned in later
00:37:02 Description of President's head, skull came apart in doctors hands.
00:38:04 Discussion of Assessment00:40:02 Talk about x-rays that were done on body
00:41:58 Description of the Bethesda autopsy suite
00:43:51 Ballistics expert Dr. Pierre Fink, forensic pathologist, came to Bethesda
00:44:53 JFK brain was removed before Dr. Fink arrived
00:46:05 Description of "Brain Loafing".
00:47:22 The autopsy of JFK was not a complete autopsy
00:49:21 Discussion of "family wishes" as it applies to the murder of the president.
00:50:48 Compare autopsy of John F. Kennedy and Robert F Kennedy
00:52:36 Discussion about other pathologists available to do autopsy on JFK
00:55:09 No way to know if other injuries suffered by JFK could have been lethal
00:56:04 Commentary - no excuse for what happened with autopsy of JFK
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. I lived in the
mountains from the time as a college professor up into
North George Mountains, in the Blue Ridge Mountains specifically, there
was a place I'd like to go to every now
and then, hop on my truck, sometimes by myself, many
times with my son and to my wife, and I
(00:31):
would go up there on the weekends as well, and
it's one of those places that's untouched. It's a federal park.
It's called Windfield Scott and there's actually a lake Windfield
Scott up there, and when you see it, it's surrounded
by hemlock trees and these big beautiful indigenous pones, some hardwoods,
(00:55):
and the lake is stocked with trout. But you know,
the thing about that lake is that on the surface
it's absolutely gorgeous. The water seems almost untouched, and you
can take photos up there and it's like it's frozen
in toime a place of a beauty. You almost hate
to disturb the water. But the moment you pick up
(01:15):
a stone and you throw it as you're standing on
the bank into the middle of it, there's a ripple
that goes out and anything that's on the surface is affected.
Even the picture you have in your mind's eye of
it is disrupted, and for that moment in time, you've
(01:35):
changed the face of that otherwise pristine environment. I think,
at least in my way of thinking, that sixty years
ago in Dallas, Texas, that's kind of what happened. That's
what happened on November twenty second, when our president at
the time, John F. Kennedy was shot. Because there were
(01:57):
those times prior to President Kennedy having been assassinated murdered,
and those times afterwards, and we as a country, I
think at least my generation marks that time that way.
Today we're gonna chat about the failures of the medical
(02:19):
legal system in John F. Kennedy's assassination investigation. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags. Hey, David, do you
know where I was when John Kennedy was murdered.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
I'm thinking you probably weren't born yet.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I was in utero. I was in my mommy's tummy
as it were. Yeah, that's where I was. And still,
even though you know, I obviously don't have a real
time connection to that event, so many of my friends
do that are older, and you can talk to those
folks and say, do you remember where you were when
(03:09):
the president was murdered, and they will be able to
tell you just spot on, you know, what they were doing,
where they were. It's kind of, you know, it's kind
of like nine to eleven, you know, you ask people, now,
where were you, what were you doing? And I think
that it's maybe you could, I don't know, maybe you
could go back to Abraham Lincoln's time, you know where
(03:30):
if you could talk to those people that were living
during that time post Civil war, immediately post Civil War,
and you ask them where were you when you found
out that Lincoln died or was murdered, they could probably
tell you that that's kind of etched into their memory.
But even now, sixty years later, we've got generations that
have been born afterwards and people still know the story.
(03:51):
And I think that it's still haunting us as a nation.
I think that that's probably an understatement.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I think it's one of those stories that will never end.
And what you're going to talk about with regard to
the autopsy, this is the second part of the story
that people don't know. There are plenty of theories that
have been bandied about. Most people tell you that they
don't believe Lee Harvey Alifold actor alone and shot Kennedy
from behind from the sixth floor of Texas school Book
(04:18):
Depository building, while others will say many other things and
what they've heard. Let's just start from the moment that
limousine convertible in Dealey Plaza, the President's been shot. If
we start right there, what took place with the president
of the United States of America.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Obviously, the most glaring piece of evidence is going to
be the Suppruver film. And I'm talking about just from
a death investigation perspective, nothing else. We can look at
that and think we've just witnessed it, you know, the
murder of sitting American president. And to this day there
(05:00):
are all these questions that exist. And look, people can
go down the road with a variety of different types
of scenarios that may or may not happen. But you know,
one of the reasons I wanted to do body backs was,
at least in my own little way, I could perhaps
introduce some science into things so that people from a
forensic perspective, so that people could understand, you know, what
(05:25):
they're seeing, it seems, and that sort of thing and
try to interpret some of the data that comes in,
and there was so much. I mean there truly was, Dave,
you know, in this particular case that was essentially kind
of bulldozed over for any number of reasons that have
been put out over the years as rationalees as to
(05:46):
why we didn't do this, and why we didn't do that,
and why we did this. And you look back at
it and you think that if you had just merely
taken the time to stick with the standard procedure, you
wouldn't have all these questions that are left dangling out there,
these things that people scratch their heads over, people study
(06:10):
and write books over for years and years afterwards. If
you had just taken that moment Tom to hit pause
and to work the case, That's what it comes down to,
and that's what makes this such a monumental failure to you.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Okay, the standard procedure you're talking about is about the
autopsy itself, performing the autopsy within the jurisdiction, which was
not done. According to Texas state law. The standard is
that the autopsy should have been done in Dallas County
and again per state law, which states in all cases
of accident homicide, suicide and undetermined deaths. The medical examiner
(06:46):
is mandated by Texas law to determine the cause and
manner of death. Correct. Yeah, his jurisdiction was that Joe
as a death investigator who should have been in charge
of the investigation of the murder of a man in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Well the prosecutor for Dallas County. It lays right at
that individual's feet. And what's really striking about this is
that they had Dallas County had actually a real gem
of a person in place for forensic autopsies, a man
that was for his day in time, was in the
(07:27):
forefront of well, certainly in the sense of Texas kind
of codifying the standard for death investigation. And let me
back up just a second, because a lot of people
don't understand what goes on in Texas relative death investigations.
You know that. I don't know if we discussed this before,
(07:47):
but it's kind of an interesting little aside. Traditionally Texas
not traditionally, Texas does not have corners, all right, they
actually have the Justice of the Peace is the de
facto corner in the state of Texas. And prior to
doctor Earl Rose, who was the forensic pathologist and the
(08:10):
chief medical examiner, if you will, for Dallas, Texas at
that time, and he had just taken that office not
too long before all of this went down. As matter
of fact, I think it was earlier in nineteen sixty three.
He just kind of appears doctor Earl Rose, board certified
forensic pathologist. So you're not talking about just some pathologist
(08:31):
that just walks in off the street that happens to
do hospital pathology. You're talking about a highly trained individual
that was a forensic pathologist that had done forensic autopsies,
that understood wound ballistics and could contextualize everything. And just imagine,
if you will, You're faced with seemingly probably the most
(08:57):
daunting murder investigation any jury diction could possibly be faced with,
and you have at your literally at your fingertips, access
to this fantastic forensic mind that is in the hallway
(09:18):
day of Parkland. Just let that sink in.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
To be clear, As you said, Joe Earl Rose was
the medical examiner for Dallas County, Texas at the time. However,
at the trauma room door, Rose was met by the
Secret Service and the President's personal physician, who informed Rose
that there was no time for an autopsy, and that
the body would be transported to the airport. Rose objected,
(09:42):
tried to stand in the way, but was reportedly pushed
aside by the president's aides, and the body was transported
back to Washington.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
That's what happened. I don't And here's the interesting thing.
Parkland Hospital where the pros it's motorcade went to. It's
fine hospital and had a reputation as being a fine
hospital still does. It's teaching hospital. So you had residents there,
you know, you had people that were working as neurosurgical residents.
(10:12):
A lot has been made of that because you had
all these neurosurgeon surgeons that were physically there in the
trauma room when the president rolled in. Because they called
a code. Everybody knew the president was in town. And
this in a hospital, it's like a little town. It
spread like wildfire. So everybody that was anybody sprinted towards
the trauma room when the call went up, and he
(10:34):
was there within just a few minutes. The first shots,
if I remember correctly, rang out at right at about
twelve thirty. It was all said and done in the
motorcade by twelve thirty. That third shot had rung out,
they had to Parkland, and they're on a direct route
for it. Anyway, that's in the general direction. But in
(10:56):
secret service types, they know where all the hospitals are.
As a matter of fact, before the Secret Service even
brings a president in the town, they know where all
the trauma centers are. They lay in a supply of
the president's blood. Did you know that at all of
these hospitals where there's a trauma center, they knew where
Parkland was, and they knew that they were on a
(11:18):
direct route for it. So when they go under the
viaduct over the trestle, you know, he's got his foot
on the floor. They're heading toward the er and within
twenty seven minutes, I think it's twenty seven roughly President's dead.
I mean, they've called it at that point.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So let me ask you Joe was the president based
on the condition of his body at that moment when
he was shot. Did he die in the limo or
did he actually make it? Was he alive when he
got to Parkland?
Speaker 1 (11:49):
I think that if he had any kind of.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Pulse.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
I've used this term before on body bags or agonal respirations,
which means that your chest is still rising and falling.
That's going to be at an autonomic level auto meaning
self where you're on cruise control. Even Abe Lincoln when
he was shot, Dave, you know, he shot and we
(12:15):
did a great episode of I think it's great personally,
but with Lincoln. You know, Lincoln lasted through the night
and he was shot in an area that transacted you know,
his brain. It went from I think right right to left.
The round wound up behind his left eye. I might
be way off the mark there. Either way, it criss
(12:36):
crossed across his brain.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
So it's possible the JFK was alive when it technic.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, I can't speak to the quality of life, but
he would have had at least maybe agonal respirations. But
he wasn't long for this world because he sustained at
minimum two gunshot wounds, and both of them in their
own right or horribly traumatic. The headshot alone is enough
to have taken him out just in and of itself,
(13:01):
because so much was lost, so much disruption took place.
That's an it's an unsurvivable wound, so you know, but
they knew that when he rolled in, the fact that
they were doing heroic efforts We've heard a lot about
the the trecheotomy that was performed, and I can address
that too, because that, you know, that plays into this
(13:22):
whole scenario about you know what, what are you seeing
there as a clinician when you're assessing when they would
have made those efforts. They were merely heroic efforts because
they knew that it was a president and so they're
trying to establish an airway that implies that they thought
(13:43):
that there might be a glimmer of hope. I mean, who,
you know, what physician would want to be the person
to have to answer to the question of this is
our president, why didn't you try? And so that they're
faced with that, and I'm sure and they had to
have an awareness of that. I don't know about you, Dave.
I don't know that I could. I could necessarily stand
there and separate my clinical brain from just a person,
(14:11):
a citizen. And you're standing there over the body of
the president, guy that you've seen in the news, a
guy that you've read about in the papers, Camelot.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
His wife is out in the hallway.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Yeah, and you know, how do you you know, how
is it that you do that well? In medicine?
Speaker 2 (14:27):
I would not walk out of that room without being
able to say I did everything I knew and then
made some other stuff up.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Hope. Yeah, you're going to leave it all on the field,
you know, to use a sports metaphor, I mean, you
don't want to leave anything to question.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Which is why this bothers me so much that we
have so many questions that we ought not have sixty
years after the fact. There shouldn't be one question about
what happened to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United
States of America, leader of the free world, on November
twenty second, nineteen sixty three. There should not be one
(15:02):
thing we don't know.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Right you are, Dave, And I'll tell you who did
know something. It was doctor Earl Rose. He was that
one person. He was that He was that one individual,
you know, kind of crying in the dark there shouting
(15:25):
to whoever would listen, you need to stop. He was
their first warning along the way to all those in attendance.
If they had just listened to that man, instead of
pushing him against the wall, physically threatening him and then
out those doors with the President's body to get him
(15:47):
away from there and get him away from an actual
suitable autopsy. He was that first warning along the way,
and they failed to listen to him. Earl Rose knew
that the president had been shot. He responded after the
code had been called an order, in other words, pronouncement
(16:10):
had taken place, priests had come down to give last rites.
He knew. Do you know why he knew, Dave? And
this is the one thing that really stands out in
my mind. Earl Rose was officed in the trauma center
at Parkland. A lot of people don't know that he
was literally across the hall and he knew what he
(16:32):
was looking at. He knew that he was looking at
though it was the President of the United States, he
knew that he was looking at a murder investigation. In
(17:02):
the business of death investigation, it is profoundly important that medical,
legal death investigators and forensic pathologists remain that calm, quiet
voice in the center of the storm where you bring
scientific reasoning to an otherwise chaotic environment. And I can't
(17:30):
begin to express to you, Dave. I know that I've
mentioned his name several times of what a significant moment
in time it was where you had this man standing
there telling them that is doctor Rose telling the Secret
Service and the aids of the President, telling them specifically
(17:54):
that by law, by law, this is a murdering investigation.
It has taken place in Dallas County, we have jurisdiction
over the body. And Earl Rose years later had said
that he did not want to create any more of
a stir in this environment that you know, he saw
(18:15):
that this thing was escalating beyond his control. And look,
I can't imagine what it would be like to try
to go toe to toe with the US Secret Service
and the authorities that have rolled into town, associated with
the highest echelons of the federal government. Are you going
to be that person? I don't know that I could
have been. But he warned them. He warned him because
(18:37):
he knew the law. He knew the law in his
little area of expertise, which is medical legal death investing.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Right, so he warns them that what they're about to
do is wrong. They're going to do it anyway. But
for those of us who don't understand Joe, it seemed
to me when I was growing up that to take
the president's body because he is the president of the
United States of America, what has happened is a national
tragedy that his autopsy ought not be left to a
(19:05):
local jurisdiction. It ought to go back to Washington, d C.
And be dealt with either I'm thinking Walter Read or
Bethesda something. Probably Bethesta because he was a navy man.
But you know, that's what I was thinking along those
lines as the president and all that. But in reality,
there's a reason that's not the case. There's a time
period here there, you do, You doesn't the time of
(19:28):
when you're when you're examining the body of the of
this victim. Now we are dealing with a murder victim,
and it is a murder that has taken place. It's
got to be solved. A trial would take place in Dallas.
I mean, this is still regardless of who's killed, it
is still a local crime, correct.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, Yeah. Do you know that there was not a
statute on federal books until sixty five that made the
assassination of a president of federal offense, So there was
not actually a law in the books relative to this,
And that's isn't that odd? Because you know, prior to Kennedy,
we'd had we talked about President Lincoln. We had Garfield
(20:04):
who was shot, you know in the train station, and
then we had President McKinley, so we had a history,
you know, we had a history. And every all, all
four of these men died as a result of gunshot wounds,
and the people that were involved in their examinations had
always consistently been the military up all the way through McKinley.
(20:29):
McKinley's autopsy was very thorough. I mean it was for
their time. It was a well done autopsy. I'm thinking
back right now. Lincoln's was only a partial. They essentially
examined his head. James Garfield, who probably not to make light,
(20:49):
but President Garfield died more as a result of his
treatment that he received.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Treatment, because he lived for a while. He lived for
a while and wrote letters while after he was shot.
He wrote letters of how he was doing.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Just utter agony. And X rays played played a role
in his case, just like they play a role in
President Kennedy's death because I think it was Alexander Graham
Bell introduced the first use of an X ray machine
relative to Garfield to try to locate this projectile that was,
you know, still lodged in his body. And what's interesting
(21:22):
is they when President Garfield was autopsy, they actually took
out that segment of his spine, and they still have
that segment of his spine, which I've always found quite
fascinating as well. So, yeah, that we it's not like
it's not like we don't have a history.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
There was president Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, there was and still this this this had not
been cured. And let me just interject something here. Personally,
I don't have a lot of patience with people Dave
that that say things like, well, it was a different
time back then, and their ways were not necessarily the
(22:03):
ways of that we understand today. Well, let me break
this down to you. Doctor Earl Rose actually wound up
doing the autopsy on Lee Harvey Oswald, who was the
alleged assassin. Remember he never went to trial. And in
addition to that, doctor Rose also did the autopsy on
(22:25):
Officer Tibbets, who had allegedly died at the hand of
Lee Harvey Oswald. And on top of that, he did
the autopsy on Ruby, who died in custody there in
Dallas as well. So he's connected with all those But
but yet, when you have the catalyst that kicked this
whole thing off with the death of the president, he's
(22:47):
on the outside looking in and that's what's that is
what the real tragedy is here. The Secret Service are
not you know, granted, they've got a long history, and
their main purpose when they were established, I think in
the eighteen seventies or whatever it was was not personal
security for the president and the higher ups in government.
(23:10):
It was to fight counterfeiting. And in that area they're
fantastic investigators. But back then they're not homicide investigators. That's
not what they do. It's a specific skill set.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
But Joe, let me just the people that actually did
the autopsy. Once they broke all the laws in Dallas, Texas,
once they ruined the investigation and they loaded the body
on the airplane to take it out of love Field
where he had landed. We've got the picture of Johnson
being sworn in by a judge he appointed, and we've
got Jackie standing there in her bloody outfit basically passing
(23:47):
the torch giving her approval. So there wouldn't be any
question they did that on the plane in Dallas before
they left and got in the air they fly the
body back to Washington, d C. I'm going to assume
that whoever is waiting on this in Washington, DC is
going to be a better, better trained, better doc, better
(24:07):
path thought, better everything than what was existing in Dallas,
Texas at the time. That's my assumption. That's why they're
doing it. Is that the case.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
You know what they say about assumptions, and that that's
what we're faced with, Dave, and I think that a
lot of the general public thinks, oh my gosh, yeah,
let's get him, let's get him back to DC. Well,
first off, here's the problem. According to what was what
has been put forth over all the years. And I
find this very interesting. You're talking about the homicide of
(24:37):
a president, the murder of a president, and he was
not just Jackie Kennedy's husband, he was our president. So
it has been stated that it was the wishes of
the widow for President Kennedy's body to go to Bethesda
because it was a naval hospital. Okay, And so what
(25:00):
difference does that make Because at Bethesda you don't have
any forensic pathologists, but within a stone's throw of Bethesda
you have Walter Reid. Well, guess what's housed at Walter
Reed the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Guess what's contained
within there? The Armed Forces version their division of Forensic Pathology.
(25:25):
They they actually had established the af I P I
think in uh just in the in the years just
after World War Two. And as a matter of fact,
doctor Ed Johnson, who was a colonel in the Army,
(25:45):
he was head DAVE of forensic Pathology. He was right
down the road from his place. But yet they chose
to have to completely unqualified naval physicians at Bethesda do
the autopsy. They had never either one of them, when
we get their name straight, it was Humes and Boswell.
(26:07):
They were both naval physicians. They were pathologists working at
Bethesda doing what naval pathologists at a hospital. Do you
know what that is? Looking at tumors and making diagnoses
on surgical specimens that are coming in and oh yet
managing the lab. Notice nothing in that description I just
gave you qualifies them to do forensic pathology. And as
(26:30):
it turns out, neither one of them had ever even
done a forensic autopsy period. And so you're going to trust,
arguably what turns out to be the most complicated, complex
homicide investigation that is now being performed on a body
that has been removed from the jurisdiction where it occurred
(26:51):
in a location that is, I don't know, just over
one thousand miles away. You had to take the body
there to have it done by two unqualified people. And
just to give you like a little aside about this,
many times what happens with a medical examiner's office is
(27:12):
that when you're working there and you have a trauma
case that rolls into like a major emergency room, it
doesn't have to be a major, it can be any
emergency room the corner or the medical examiner. First off,
you'll go to the hospital to examine the body and
interview the physicians that did the treatment. It wasn't until
the next morning that these two people that did the
(27:35):
autopsy on the president's body at Bethesda actually spoke with
the doctors at Parkland who had rendered treatment to the president.
At that moment time, they didn't have a frame of
reference about the now infamous tracheostomy site. And people say, well,
(27:55):
why would why would they create a tracheostomy where you've
got a gunshot wound. Well, here's why you do it
that way. If it's in a position and this happens
with some great frequency, and I can tell you why
this happens many times, So that they don't have to
traumatize the body further. All right, So you've got a hole,
(28:16):
if you will, a bullet hole that's just off center.
If people will find their larynings and kind of find
where the Adams apple would be and just go slightly
below that area right there, and it's just off center
where this defect was, they created a tracheostom site where
(28:36):
they could get an airway established. Now, this happens a lot.
People don't realize this. You have gunshot wounds to the chest.
For instance, people will uh the physicians in the trauma
room will actually use a gunshot wound that's existing in
the chest to create they'll open it up further to
put a chest tube in to get the blood out
of the chest. They'll do this a lot. It's not
(28:59):
that this is an uncommon occurrence, but with Humes and Boswel,
they had no history whatsoever of assessing trauma, ballistic trauma,
particularly at that point in time. So when they're looking
at this defect in the mid line of the neck
that they know is in fact, they believe at least
(29:21):
is a gunshot wound, they they can't factor that into
their thinking when they're doing their initial exam and of
course that's the most important thing, and because you lose
all frame of reference and the other thing that was
really odd about this case from just a practitioner standpoint,
(29:41):
when Boswel and Hume saw the body of the president,
when they initially opened up this casket that had like
a broken handle on it and all this stuff, body
was not in a body bag body. They described the
body as being swaddled, which means it was wrapped in sheets,
and the president had a big bandage over his head,
(30:03):
which is not uncommon. I mean, they'll do that with
these gaping gunshot wounds. They'll wrap gauze around the head,
that sort of thing to keep anything from kind of
falling falling out. Ideally, you would want the body they
called them, they didn't call them body bags back then,
they called them disaster pouches. You would want to be
(30:23):
able to do that. But they didn't apparently choose to
do that. They merely put him in the casket. They
when the president's body arrived at Bethesda, when they unswaddled
the body, he was nude. There was no clothing with
the body. And one of the big things that came
up over the years, is that I beg everyone that's
(30:43):
listening to this, when you take a look at the
president's suit he's wearing the president, you know, you get
pictures of him when he's in you know, Martha's vineyard
with the family, and he's wearing an open collar. This
man never went anywhere without a tie on, particularly in
(31:04):
a formal setting. He's riding in a motorcade. This is
a campaign. The fact that he had a tie on
and he sustained this gunshot wound to the back of
the neck that impacted literally the trajectory of this round
because that's what's referred to as a shored s h
(31:25):
u r ed wound. There's a lot of tension placed
over this area, so they could not appreciate what defects
there were in the clothing at that moment time. And
it's my understanding that they never actually saw the clothing
until I might have my date trong. It seems like
(31:46):
nineteen sixty six is the first time that they ever
saw the president's clothing. And it's international archives, so.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
This is after the Warring Commission has come out with
its document on what they say happened, but they still
have not even touched the clothing at it up with
the wounds they saw. Now you mentioned that that tracheotomy,
that the bullet wound. If you had the shirt and
the you know where it's button, with the tie and
all that, what would you be able to tell from that?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
It would be significant because you can track, you can listen.
Clothing moves independent. I don't care how tight your clothing is.
The clothing moves independent of the exterior of your body,
all right. That goes without saying. It doesn't matter how
tight your vestments are that you have on. And one
of the things that is brought up by Humes and
(32:32):
Boswel is that when the president is sitting in the car,
and we've seen him been there's images of him even
in the early part of the Suppruder film, his hand
is raised and he's waving. That's what politicians do in
the back of cars. They're trying to make a connection
with the crowd. Well, think about raising your arm and
you're wearing a shirt or maybe you're wearing a jacket
(32:54):
right now as you're listening to this, your your clothing
will act adjust according to the movement of your arms.
So you're guys that wear sports coats I know, I
have to wear them on air a lot. They bunch
up in the back, you'll create like a crease back there.
And so if you don't have a full appreciation of
(33:15):
the position of the individual in the vehicle and to
try to understand where they were relative to all the
other individuals in the car, and also the relationship of
the antier side of the body the neck where you
have this collared shirt, you lose all perspective. And remember this,
this bullet now that we're talking about is also known.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
As the magic bullet.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
And this is going to go on to create I
don't know, I think it's seven other wounds or something
like this. And the governor's uh, the governor's body.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
It goes into JFK's upper back correct, Yeah, comes out
his throat, makes a right hand turn into his right arm,
It goes into.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
It goes into connolly and and goes through his rib
and he's seated in a jump seat. That is actually
the pictures are are deceptive that you see it.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
They are those jumpsies are not sitting directly in front
of one another, and they're not Watch his hand, watch
his hand on the hat. That gives you an idea
of what's going on and when Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
And the trajectory when that bullet exits the President's throat,
it does strike Conley, and so it's going to take out,
you know, I think one of his ribs. It's gonna
go down and shatter, you know, his wrist, and eventually
it's going to come to rest in his left inner thigh.
So you've got this scene creating like seven different defects
(34:35):
and making crazy turns and all that sort of stuff
that many people have opined about over the years. But
just the clothing alone, and not having access to that
clothing to examine it contextually relative to the injuries that
you're seeing on the body, It's quite an amazing thing.
And you know, back in Dallas, you've still got an
(34:58):
active crime scene back there. And David, I got to
tell you one thing here that one image has always
has always struck me going back to Parkland thinking about this,
and I listen, don't believe anything I'm saying. Go look
it up yourself, is what I'm saying to my audience
right now. There's an image of a what appears to
(35:19):
be a Secret Service agent in the ambulance bay adjacent
to the Presidential limo. They have taken the trunk is
open on the car. They have taken this the bubbletop out.
Apparently it would fit back there. They've got the bubbletop
now in place on top of the car. They're standing
there day with a stainless steel bucket and they're washing
(35:43):
out the interior of that car at Parkland. And if
you don't believe me, everybody go look at it. It's
out there. There's an image of this taking place. And
so that car, that car is a crime scene. That
car is a crime scene. As a matter of fact,
(36:03):
the whole damn Dealey Plaza was a crime scene, but
it was not locked down. There were still two bone
fragments that were found later on that had to be
brought to Bethesda to be examined that were not discovered
at that period of time. And those are key because
(36:25):
what you're talking about is when you begin to think
about wom ballistics, particularly as they apply to the head
to piece together this fragment it skull, and trust me,
it was fragmented. You're talking about a six point five
millimeter military round that delivers an incredible punch. Here. If
(36:46):
you're just talking about the krcano round alone or any
kind of high end, high velocity round, the skull is
going to fragment, and it's in multiple pieces. Even Humes
and Bobs will talk about when they they didn't even
have to use the saw on the President's skull to
open it up, that when they reflected the scalp, the
skull was particulate, came a part in their hands. So
(37:08):
when you're trying to assess the skull, one of the
things that you look for is internal and external beveling,
and that gives you an indication of where a bullet
entered entered the skull. It's just like throwing a rock
through a piece of glass. One side's going to be
smooth and then the other side is not going to
be smooth. And that's one of the things we look for.
But unfortunately, I think a lot of evidence was left behind,
(37:31):
and now unfortunately we're so far down the tracks, Dave,
that I don't know that we'll ever be able to
answer some of these questions. Assessment without an assessment, in
(38:07):
any kind of homicide case, when you cannot gather the
facts appropriately from the beginning, you can lose so much
and the fact that you take arguably one of the
most complex homicide cases that has been on our radar
(38:33):
now for sixty years, in the past sixty years, and
you throw it into the sea of chaos, this political
world that's all churned up. It's a recipe for a disaster.
And when the president's body arrived in Bethesda that night
on Air Force one, with a newly sworn in president
(38:54):
and a grieving widow, it seems as though that whoever
in charge didn't know what they were doing. I think
that that's as kind as I can be with that statement,
because it was at that moment time you needed to
(39:15):
have someone that was fully in charge of their faculties
trying to understand how to direct people, what people should do.
And one of the measures of that, when you think
about forensics is you have to know your limitations, and
if you don't know what to do, you defer to
(39:39):
those individuals that do have specific knowledge about forensic science,
and you defer to them and let them handle it.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yeah, the President of the United States of America, they're
trying to rush an autopsy out of state and get
it done as quickly as they can, trying to find
a bullet. That's what it amounts to do.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, isn't that something?
Speaker 2 (39:56):
How do you know? How can you tell where the
bullet entered when it's already in that I mean, they
don't look at it the right way, You don't Where
do you start with that? If it was done the
right way, where would you start? Joe?
Speaker 1 (40:07):
Well, the most important thing in a case like this,
and just not just not just from trying to track things,
but also a documentary perspective, are X rays. And they
did do X rays, and there's been a lot of
questions about the quality of the X rays that they had.
And again, the technology then is not necessarily what it
(40:29):
is today. That's not an excuse. It's just that things
have been fine tuned since then. We have an expectation
now with the way we do X rays, they're much
more fine tuned. If you've got this radio opaque bodies
that are along the wound track, you can really pick
up a lot of the little nuanced areas. Back then,
(40:50):
you necessarily you could not necessarily pick them up the
way you can now. You could see it, but it
wasn't in as fine and detail. So X rays are
where you start before you ever do anything. And I
question even how those X rays were performed, you know,
on the President's body. You know, I talked a little
while ago about the body being swaddled in that sort
(41:10):
of thing. I really wonder if those X rays were
done prior to his head being unwound with the bandages
they had on there. And let me back up just
for a second here, when you begin to think about
what was going on at this historic moment in time,
(41:33):
when you've got the body of the commander in chief
laying there in this autopsy suite in Bethesda. They've got
a this is a teaching area. They've actually got grand
stands in here, so there are seats for people to observe.
(41:54):
There have been some estimates that they're at any one
time there could have been up to thirty two people
in this room. So you're you, as a physician and
an experienced physician in the area of forensic pathology, you're
trying to perform a task that you've never performed before
in front of a live audience on the body of
the leader of the free world. Just let that sink
(42:16):
in just for a second. You know, I've been around
a lot of friends of pathologists in my lifetime. I've
been very fortunate and blessed to have said it at
the feet of some pretty learned, learned folks. And one
thing you always knew was that there was a master
(42:36):
and commander in that room, that they were in charge,
and by God, no one else was to be in
their period, end of story. And that was not the
case in that environment. And Humes and Bosle both have
stated that there was nobody else giving them direction in
that room. Maybe that's maybe that's so, But Dave, I
(42:58):
know that you've had an experience, I'm sure in your
life where you don't have to have anything said to you.
Merely a look, and you're talking about a military organization here,
Merely a look can convey volumes to you within this environment.
And so they're having to contend with this highly highly
technical undertaking and they're doing it under a microscope here,
(43:23):
and it's they even they realized, I think they be
in Basle and Humes realized that they were out of
their depths. And here's why I know this. They reached
out knowing that there was an autopsy that would be
(43:44):
performed to AFIP Armforces Institute of Pathology, and they sent
over doctor Pierre Fink. Now, people might not be familiar
with doctor Fink, but doctor Fink was a forendsic.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Pathologist, ballistic expert.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah, he was actually present in the room and his
his area of expertise is actually wound ballistics. So you've
heard about all of the studies that have been hinted
at over the years where the army, the military would
conduct ballistic test on cadavers, that sort of thing. He's
(44:23):
the guy that would would look and assess the bodies
that had been shot, whether they you know, primarily animals,
to try to determine the effectiveness of weaponry at that
point in time. And so he he did come to
Bethesda that night. Here's the interesting little aside. Now, this
(44:46):
guy who is I guess he is the gold standard
when it comes to ballistic assessment. Prior to him arriving,
Humes in Boswell had already removed the President's brain. It
had already been taken out of the cranial vault at
that moment time. And you know, according to their reports,
(45:07):
they took the brain and placed it in formulae to
fix it. Because you don't with brains, brains are they're
an interest. They have an interesting consistency there. It's not
as soft as like a jello. Okay, it's a bit
firmer than that. But in order to dissect a brain,
it needs to be firm. So what we normally do
(45:31):
at autopsy many times is you will take the brain
and we have a way of anchoring it with strings
through there's a little nerve bundle at the base of
the brain where the optic nerves come out and all
this sort of thing, and we can suspend the brain
in a bucket of formulaine, which is a type of formaldehyde,
and it's being anchored in there with strings, so it's
(45:51):
kind of floating in this big bucket and you let
it set. Some people will let it set up to
two weeks. And so when you take finally take the
brain out of this bucket, it has a very firm,
hard consistency. And so the dissection has done what it's
referred to as bread loafing. So you go from the
frontal lobe lobes bilatterly of the brain and you slice
(46:14):
like you're slicing a loaf of bread, and you can
actually flip through it like book leaflets almost or slices
of bread, and you can appreciate each bit of trauma
along the way, well, that was the intent with this,
but the brain had already been removed from the head
prior to Fink arriving. What's so tragic about that is
(46:36):
that doctor Fink, with his expertise, at least at minimum,
he could have been standing there to see in context
what the skull looked like, what the brain looked like
within the skull, and to have been able to assess
it before it was ever removed. As a matter of fact,
(46:57):
if it were my autopsy, I would have automatically have
deferred to doctor Fink and have said, man, you got
your scrubs on, you got your gloves on, come on
over here, man, we're gonna let you handle this part
of the dissection. Because you know, people look at the
President's autopsy and here's another thing that they don't really understand.
(47:19):
You know, his autopsy was not a complete autopsy. They
examined the heart and the lungs, but nothing else was
examined on the president's body. As a matter of fact,
probably the most critical thing that still to this day,
it just absolutely just absolutely blows my mind. The president's
(47:42):
neck was never dissected. So at autopsy, what we do
is when we actually reflect, reflect the chest essentially is
what we do. And we literally goes over the face
when we make the famous y incision that autopsies are
known for. Go in then and dissect out the trachea
(48:03):
out of the neck, I mean everything. We go all
the way up to the tongue, remove everything down, and
that way we can see all of the organs of
the neck. And there are multiple vessels that run through here.
You have the trachia that runs through here, the larynx,
the tongue, all of the stuff that runs through here.
You want to be able to see behind those organs
(48:24):
of the neck. You want to be able to see
the structure of the final column at that point in time.
I mean, I don't know. To me, that's kind of critical.
That was never done. And Humes was even quoted as
saying that, let me see, let me get the phraseology
right here. I don't want to misquote. He said. He
said it would have been it would have been a crime.
(48:44):
It's a term he used to have dissected the president's neck.
And I'm thinking, have you lost your mind? It would
have been a crime to have dissected his neck. You're
talking about an individual that had that You guys are saying,
it's got a bullet hole that is running through through
the neck and exits out of the front, and you
think that it would be a crime to remove the
organs of the neck. Give me a break, Have you
(49:06):
lost your mind? Yeah? And as it turns out, I
think that that goes to the bigger picture here, where
you're looking at this and you're thinking, you know, how
could you you know, how could you have just kind
of taken this so lightly and not done your job?
And again they defer back to the family's wishes. This
(49:30):
is something I keep hearing all the way through, and
it's kind of a weasel thing to say when you're
in authority over an autopsy and certainly a homicide investigation
of this magnitude, and you're saying, well, we're going to
stick with the family's wishes. But he was also everybody's president.
And now, sixty years later, because such a poor job
(49:55):
was done, I don't know that, you know, looking back
recor respectively, I think a lot of people would have
wanted to have had a more thorough autopsy. You jump
you jump forward, Dave, We'll see that was in sixty three.
You jump forward to sixty eight, the President's the President's
brother Bobby was at the Ambassador. He had just given
(50:21):
this fantastic speech. He's going through the kitchen at the
Ambassador Hotel and he is assassinated by Sir and Suren.
And to give you an idea how how much things
had changed between sixty three and sixty eight. As you
well know, that took place in Los Angeles County. Well,
(50:42):
who was the chief medical examiner slash corner. It was
doctor Tom to get He's one of my heroes, as
you know. And the family had told the folks with
LA County at that point in time, look up, Yeah,
we don't really need need the autopsy. We know what
killed him. Doctor Nogucci said, you know what, I think.
(51:03):
We're going to go ahead and do an autopsy, and
not only going to do it, but when I do it,
I'm going to have like five forensic pathologists in the
room with me. He actually to show you how thorough,
doctor Noguchu. And just so the people understand, Bobby Kennedy's
autopsy has been named in it has been cited a
(51:24):
couple of times as the most thorough forensic autopsy that's
ever been conducted. Just let that sink in compared to
what happened to the President's body. Forensic pathology, medical, legal
death of us such a small community, even though we
didn't know in sixty eight what we know now. People talk,
all right, and Nogucci would have been fully aware of
(51:49):
the rumor mial. He would have heard about what had
gone on in Bethesda that night. He not only reached
out to a FIP and had them send people. Doctor
Fink was present for Bobby's autopsy in LA. That's quite
fascinating when you look at that, you know, in its totality,
(52:12):
you think about how much the how much things had
changed just in that period of time. And I never
want to hear anybody say that, you know that they
didn't know any better at the time of the President's assassination,
that it was you know, well, one pathologist is just
(52:34):
as good as any other pathologists. No, that's not the case,
because Earl Rose had been doing homicide autopsies in Dallas. Uh,
there were as a matter of fact, let's just say
for the sake of argument that, okay, going back to
d C with the President's remains was a good idea
(52:55):
which you could never convince me that it is or
was within an hour, within an hour's plane flight, you
could have had, arguably at that point time in sixty three,
you could have had the top forensic pathologist in the
country standing in DC there to do that autopsy. But
(53:18):
yet you choose to go down this path utilizing two
naval physicians who I'm sure were fine hospital pathologists, but
not for this particular case. You could have had Milton Helpern.
You could have had doctor Fisher who was in Baltimore.
(53:39):
You could have had Werner Spitz who was in Detroit.
You could have had literally a pantheon. There's a pantheon
of these forensic pathologists that are out there that were
practicing at the time that now we look back and
if in forensic pathology, if we had a mount rushmore,
these guys' faces would be on it. But yet you
(54:02):
chose not to do that. You chose to go down
this path. And this is, you know, my my little
slice of the pie here from a medical legal standpoint,
it's just a small portion of the overall case, you know,
relative to how the president's murder was handled. I hate
calling an assassination. Yeah it was an assassination, but that's
such a political term. At the end of the day,
(54:23):
you're talking about a murder, a murder that occurred in
Dallas County, Texas.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
A husband and father was taken away from his family
and they didn't get answers. They had to have been haunted.
But Joe, this is one of the things that goes
that feeds the conspiracy. I want to ask you about
the wounds. Were any of the other wounds he's sustained.
Were they life threatening other than the headshot? Was the
back the shot to the back? Was it deadly?
Speaker 1 (54:49):
I don't, well, Gee, Dave, I don't know because the
neck wasn't dissected, you know. And again, I know, you
know I'm being flipped by saying that, But you know,
when you know, I would love to be able to
answer that question, and I think that many people would
(55:10):
would like an answer to that question definitively. But if
you're looking at this from the perspective of, you know,
gee whiz, I wish we had time to go back
and get a do over. There are no mulligans in
forensic pathology. You don't get a do over. You get
to do it the first time. When people are quick
(55:31):
to say again, I have to emphasize this point. Well,
they didn't do things back then like they do them now.
It's unfair to judge that they were talking about we're
talking about the same generation that within five years would
put a man on the moon. Are you kidding me?
You're not intellectually sophisticated enough, medically sophisticated enough at this
(55:54):
point in time to understand the gravity of what you're
in the middle of that you're going to allow people
to make decisions driven by emotion at that moment, Tom
is beyond the pale. I don't think that there's any
There was no excuses then, there's still no excuses today
for it, because now you've left this generation and generations
to come without any solid answers. And Dave, I don't
(56:18):
know that we'll ever have any conclusive answers as time
goes on. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Body backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. I lived in the
mountains from the time as a college professor up into
North George Mountains, in the Blue Ridge Mountains specifically, there
was a place I'd like to go to every now
and then, hop on my truck, sometimes by myself, many
times with my son and to my wife, and I
(00:31):
would go up there on the weekends as well, and
it's one of those places that's untouched. It's a federal park.
It's called Windfield Scott and there's actually a lake Windfield
Scott up there, and when you see it, it's surrounded
by hemlock trees and these big beautiful indigenous pones, some hardwoods,
(00:55):
and the lake is stocked with trout. But you know,
the thing about that lake is that on the surface
it's absolutely gorgeous. The water seems almost untouched, and you
can take photos up there and it's like it's frozen
in toime a place of a beauty. You almost hate
to disturb the water. But the moment you pick up
(01:15):
a stone and you throw it as you're standing on
the bank into the middle of it, there's a ripple
that goes out and anything that's on the surface is affected.
Even the picture you have in your mind's eye of
it is disrupted, and for that moment in time, you've
(01:35):
changed the face of that otherwise pristine environment. I think,
at least in my way of thinking, that sixty years
ago in Dallas, Texas, that's kind of what happened. That's
what happened on November twenty second, when our president at
the time, John F. Kennedy was shot. Because there were
(01:57):
those times prior to President Kennedy having been assassinated murdered,
and those times afterwards, and we as a country, I
think at least my generation marks that time that way.
Today we're gonna chat about the failures of the medical
(02:19):
legal system in John F. Kennedy's assassination investigation. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags. Hey, David, do you
know where I was when John Kennedy was murdered.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
I'm thinking you probably weren't born yet.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I was in utero. I was in my mommy's tummy
as it were. Yeah, that's where I was. And still,
even though you know, I obviously don't have a real
time connection to that event, so many of my friends
do that are older, and you can talk to those
folks and say, do you remember where you were when
(03:09):
the president was murdered, and they will be able to
tell you just spot on, you know, what they were doing,
where they were. It's kind of, you know, it's kind
of like nine to eleven, you know, you ask people, now,
where were you, what were you doing? And I think
that it's maybe you could, I don't know, maybe you
could go back to Abraham Lincoln's time, you know where
(03:30):
if you could talk to those people that were living
during that time post Civil war, immediately post Civil War,
and you ask them where were you when you found
out that Lincoln died or was murdered, they could probably
tell you that that's kind of etched into their memory.
But even now, sixty years later, we've got generations that
have been born afterwards and people still know the story.
(03:51):
And I think that it's still haunting us as a nation.
I think that that's probably an understatement.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I think it's one of those stories that will never end.
And what you're going to talk about with regard to
the autopsy, this is the second part of the story
that people don't know. There are plenty of theories that
have been bandied about. Most people tell you that they
don't believe Lee Harvey Alifold actor alone and shot Kennedy
from behind from the sixth floor of Texas school Book
(04:18):
Depository building, while others will say many other things and
what they've heard. Let's just start from the moment that
limousine convertible in Dealey Plaza, the President's been shot. If
we start right there, what took place with the president
of the United States of America.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Obviously, the most glaring piece of evidence is going to
be the Suppruver film. And I'm talking about just from
a death investigation perspective, nothing else. We can look at
that and think we've just witnessed it, you know, the
murder of sitting American president. And to this day there
(05:00):
are all these questions that exist. And look, people can
go down the road with a variety of different types
of scenarios that may or may not happen. But you know,
one of the reasons I wanted to do body backs was,
at least in my own little way, I could perhaps
introduce some science into things so that people from a
forensic perspective, so that people could understand, you know, what
(05:25):
they're seeing, it seems, and that sort of thing and
try to interpret some of the data that comes in,
and there was so much. I mean there truly was, Dave,
you know, in this particular case that was essentially kind
of bulldozed over for any number of reasons that have
been put out over the years as rationalees as to
(05:46):
why we didn't do this, and why we didn't do that,
and why we did this. And you look back at
it and you think that if you had just merely
taken the time to stick with the standard procedure, you
wouldn't have all these questions that are left dangling out there,
these things that people scratch their heads over, people study
(06:10):
and write books over for years and years afterwards. If
you had just taken that moment Tom to hit pause
and to work the case, That's what it comes down to,
and that's what makes this such a monumental failure to you.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Okay, the standard procedure you're talking about is about the
autopsy itself, performing the autopsy within the jurisdiction, which was
not done. According to Texas state law. The standard is
that the autopsy should have been done in Dallas County
and again per state law, which states in all cases
of accident homicide, suicide and undetermined deaths. The medical examiner
(06:46):
is mandated by Texas law to determine the cause and
manner of death. Correct. Yeah, his jurisdiction was that Joe
as a death investigator who should have been in charge
of the investigation of the murder of a man in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Well the prosecutor for Dallas County. It lays right at
that individual's feet. And what's really striking about this is
that they had Dallas County had actually a real gem
of a person in place for forensic autopsies, a man
that was for his day in time, was in the
(07:27):
forefront of well, certainly in the sense of Texas kind
of codifying the standard for death investigation. And let me
back up just a second, because a lot of people
don't understand what goes on in Texas relative death investigations.
You know that. I don't know if we discussed this before,
(07:47):
but it's kind of an interesting little aside. Traditionally Texas
not traditionally, Texas does not have corners, all right, they
actually have the Justice of the Peace is the de
facto corner in the state of Texas. And prior to
doctor Earl Rose, who was the forensic pathologist and the
(08:10):
chief medical examiner, if you will, for Dallas, Texas at
that time, and he had just taken that office not
too long before all of this went down. As matter
of fact, I think it was earlier in nineteen sixty three.
He just kind of appears doctor Earl Rose, board certified
forensic pathologist. So you're not talking about just some pathologist
(08:31):
that just walks in off the street that happens to
do hospital pathology. You're talking about a highly trained individual
that was a forensic pathologist that had done forensic autopsies,
that understood wound ballistics and could contextualize everything. And just imagine,
if you will, You're faced with seemingly probably the most
(08:57):
daunting murder investigation any jury diction could possibly be faced with,
and you have at your literally at your fingertips, access
to this fantastic forensic mind that is in the hallway
(09:18):
day of Parkland. Just let that sink in.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
To be clear, As you said, Joe Earl Rose was
the medical examiner for Dallas County, Texas at the time. However,
at the trauma room door, Rose was met by the
Secret Service and the President's personal physician, who informed Rose
that there was no time for an autopsy, and that
the body would be transported to the airport. Rose objected,
(09:42):
tried to stand in the way, but was reportedly pushed
aside by the president's aides, and the body was transported
back to Washington.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
That's what happened. I don't And here's the interesting thing.
Parkland Hospital where the pros it's motorcade went to. It's
fine hospital and had a reputation as being a fine
hospital still does. It's teaching hospital. So you had residents there,
you know, you had people that were working as neurosurgical residents.
(10:12):
A lot has been made of that because you had
all these neurosurgeon surgeons that were physically there in the
trauma room when the president rolled in. Because they called
a code. Everybody knew the president was in town. And
this in a hospital, it's like a little town. It
spread like wildfire. So everybody that was anybody sprinted towards
the trauma room when the call went up, and he
(10:34):
was there within just a few minutes. The first shots,
if I remember correctly, rang out at right at about
twelve thirty. It was all said and done in the
motorcade by twelve thirty. That third shot had rung out,
they had to Parkland, and they're on a direct route
for it. Anyway, that's in the general direction. But in
(10:56):
secret service types, they know where all the hospitals are.
As a matter of fact, before the Secret Service even
brings a president in the town, they know where all
the trauma centers are. They lay in a supply of
the president's blood. Did you know that at all of
these hospitals where there's a trauma center, they knew where
Parkland was, and they knew that they were on a
(11:18):
direct route for it. So when they go under the
viaduct over the trestle, you know, he's got his foot
on the floor. They're heading toward the er and within
twenty seven minutes, I think it's twenty seven roughly President's dead.
I mean, they've called it at that point.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So let me ask you Joe was the president based
on the condition of his body at that moment when
he was shot. Did he die in the limo or
did he actually make it? Was he alive when he
got to Parkland?
Speaker 1 (11:49):
I think that if he had any kind of.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Pulse.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
I've used this term before on body bags or agonal respirations,
which means that your chest is still rising and falling.
That's going to be at an autonomic level auto meaning
self where you're on cruise control. Even Abe Lincoln when
he was shot, Dave, you know, he shot and we
(12:15):
did a great episode of I think it's great personally,
but with Lincoln. You know, Lincoln lasted through the night
and he was shot in an area that transacted you know,
his brain. It went from I think right right to left.
The round wound up behind his left eye. I might
be way off the mark there. Either way, it criss
(12:36):
crossed across his brain.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
So it's possible the JFK was alive when it technic.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, I can't speak to the quality of life, but
he would have had at least maybe agonal respirations. But
he wasn't long for this world because he sustained at
minimum two gunshot wounds, and both of them in their
own right or horribly traumatic. The headshot alone is enough
to have taken him out just in and of itself,
(13:01):
because so much was lost, so much disruption took place.
That's an it's an unsurvivable wound, so you know, but
they knew that when he rolled in, the fact that
they were doing heroic efforts We've heard a lot about
the the trecheotomy that was performed, and I can address
that too, because that, you know, that plays into this
(13:22):
whole scenario about you know what, what are you seeing
there as a clinician when you're assessing when they would
have made those efforts. They were merely heroic efforts because
they knew that it was a president and so they're
trying to establish an airway that implies that they thought
(13:43):
that there might be a glimmer of hope. I mean, who,
you know, what physician would want to be the person
to have to answer to the question of this is
our president, why didn't you try? And so that they're
faced with that, and I'm sure and they had to
have an awareness of that. I don't know about you, Dave.
I don't know that I could. I could necessarily stand
there and separate my clinical brain from just a person,
(14:11):
a citizen. And you're standing there over the body of
the president, guy that you've seen in the news, a
guy that you've read about in the papers, Camelot.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
His wife is out in the hallway.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Yeah, and you know, how do you you know, how
is it that you do that well? In medicine?
Speaker 2 (14:27):
I would not walk out of that room without being
able to say I did everything I knew and then
made some other stuff up.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Hope. Yeah, you're going to leave it all on the field,
you know, to use a sports metaphor, I mean, you
don't want to leave anything to question.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Which is why this bothers me so much that we
have so many questions that we ought not have sixty
years after the fact. There shouldn't be one question about
what happened to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United
States of America, leader of the free world, on November
twenty second, nineteen sixty three. There should not be one
(15:02):
thing we don't know.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Right you are, Dave, And I'll tell you who did
know something. It was doctor Earl Rose. He was that
one person. He was that He was that one individual,
you know, kind of crying in the dark there shouting
(15:25):
to whoever would listen, you need to stop. He was
their first warning along the way to all those in attendance.
If they had just listened to that man, instead of
pushing him against the wall, physically threatening him and then
out those doors with the President's body to get him
(15:47):
away from there and get him away from an actual
suitable autopsy. He was that first warning along the way,
and they failed to listen to him. Earl Rose knew
that the president had been shot. He responded after the
code had been called an order, in other words, pronouncement
(16:10):
had taken place, priests had come down to give last rites.
He knew. Do you know why he knew, Dave? And
this is the one thing that really stands out in
my mind. Earl Rose was officed in the trauma center
at Parkland. A lot of people don't know that he
was literally across the hall and he knew what he
(16:32):
was looking at. He knew that he was looking at
though it was the President of the United States, he
knew that he was looking at a murder investigation. In
(17:02):
the business of death investigation, it is profoundly important that medical,
legal death investigators and forensic pathologists remain that calm, quiet
voice in the center of the storm where you bring
scientific reasoning to an otherwise chaotic environment. And I can't
(17:30):
begin to express to you, Dave. I know that I've
mentioned his name several times of what a significant moment
in time it was where you had this man standing
there telling them that is doctor Rose telling the Secret
Service and the aids of the President, telling them specifically
(17:54):
that by law, by law, this is a murdering investigation.
It has taken place in Dallas County, we have jurisdiction
over the body. And Earl Rose years later had said
that he did not want to create any more of
a stir in this environment that you know, he saw
(18:15):
that this thing was escalating beyond his control. And look,
I can't imagine what it would be like to try
to go toe to toe with the US Secret Service
and the authorities that have rolled into town, associated with
the highest echelons of the federal government. Are you going
to be that person? I don't know that I could
have been. But he warned them. He warned him because
(18:37):
he knew the law. He knew the law in his
little area of expertise, which is medical legal death investing.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Right, so he warns them that what they're about to
do is wrong. They're going to do it anyway. But
for those of us who don't understand Joe, it seemed
to me when I was growing up that to take
the president's body because he is the president of the
United States of America, what has happened is a national
tragedy that his autopsy ought not be left to a
(19:05):
local jurisdiction. It ought to go back to Washington, d C.
And be dealt with either I'm thinking Walter Read or
Bethesda something. Probably Bethesta because he was a navy man.
But you know, that's what I was thinking along those
lines as the president and all that. But in reality,
there's a reason that's not the case. There's a time
period here there, you do, You doesn't the time of
(19:28):
when you're when you're examining the body of the of
this victim. Now we are dealing with a murder victim,
and it is a murder that has taken place. It's
got to be solved. A trial would take place in Dallas.
I mean, this is still regardless of who's killed, it
is still a local crime, correct.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, Yeah. Do you know that there was not a
statute on federal books until sixty five that made the
assassination of a president of federal offense, So there was
not actually a law in the books relative to this,
And that's isn't that odd? Because you know, prior to Kennedy,
we'd had we talked about President Lincoln. We had Garfield
(20:04):
who was shot, you know in the train station, and
then we had President McKinley, so we had a history,
you know, we had a history. And every all, all
four of these men died as a result of gunshot wounds,
and the people that were involved in their examinations had
always consistently been the military up all the way through McKinley.
(20:29):
McKinley's autopsy was very thorough. I mean it was for
their time. It was a well done autopsy. I'm thinking
back right now. Lincoln's was only a partial. They essentially
examined his head. James Garfield, who probably not to make light,
(20:49):
but President Garfield died more as a result of his
treatment that he received.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Treatment, because he lived for a while. He lived for
a while and wrote letters while after he was shot.
He wrote letters of how he was doing.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Just utter agony. And X rays played played a role
in his case, just like they play a role in
President Kennedy's death because I think it was Alexander Graham
Bell introduced the first use of an X ray machine
relative to Garfield to try to locate this projectile that was,
you know, still lodged in his body. And what's interesting
(21:22):
is they when President Garfield was autopsy, they actually took
out that segment of his spine, and they still have
that segment of his spine, which I've always found quite
fascinating as well. So, yeah, that we it's not like
it's not like we don't have a history.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
There was president Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, there was and still this this this had not
been cured. And let me just interject something here. Personally,
I don't have a lot of patience with people Dave
that that say things like, well, it was a different
time back then, and their ways were not necessarily the
(22:03):
ways of that we understand today. Well, let me break
this down to you. Doctor Earl Rose actually wound up
doing the autopsy on Lee Harvey Oswald, who was the
alleged assassin. Remember he never went to trial. And in
addition to that, doctor Rose also did the autopsy on
(22:25):
Officer Tibbets, who had allegedly died at the hand of
Lee Harvey Oswald. And on top of that, he did
the autopsy on Ruby, who died in custody there in
Dallas as well. So he's connected with all those But
but yet, when you have the catalyst that kicked this
whole thing off with the death of the president, he's
(22:47):
on the outside looking in and that's what's that is
what the real tragedy is here. The Secret Service are
not you know, granted, they've got a long history, and
their main purpose when they were established, I think in
the eighteen seventies or whatever it was was not personal
security for the president and the higher ups in government.
(23:10):
It was to fight counterfeiting. And in that area they're
fantastic investigators. But back then they're not homicide investigators. That's
not what they do. It's a specific skill set.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
But Joe, let me just the people that actually did
the autopsy. Once they broke all the laws in Dallas, Texas,
once they ruined the investigation and they loaded the body
on the airplane to take it out of love Field
where he had landed. We've got the picture of Johnson
being sworn in by a judge he appointed, and we've
got Jackie standing there in her bloody outfit basically passing
(23:47):
the torch giving her approval. So there wouldn't be any
question they did that on the plane in Dallas before
they left and got in the air they fly the
body back to Washington, d C. I'm going to assume
that whoever is waiting on this in Washington, DC is
going to be a better, better trained, better doc, better
(24:07):
path thought, better everything than what was existing in Dallas,
Texas at the time. That's my assumption. That's why they're
doing it. Is that the case.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
You know what they say about assumptions, and that that's
what we're faced with, Dave, and I think that a
lot of the general public thinks, oh my gosh, yeah,
let's get him, let's get him back to DC. Well,
first off, here's the problem. According to what was what
has been put forth over all the years. And I
find this very interesting. You're talking about the homicide of
(24:37):
a president, the murder of a president, and he was
not just Jackie Kennedy's husband, he was our president. So
it has been stated that it was the wishes of
the widow for President Kennedy's body to go to Bethesda
because it was a naval hospital. Okay, And so what
(25:00):
difference does that make Because at Bethesda you don't have
any forensic pathologists, but within a stone's throw of Bethesda
you have Walter Reid. Well, guess what's housed at Walter
Reed the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Guess what's contained
within there? The Armed Forces version their division of Forensic Pathology.
(25:25):
They they actually had established the af I P I
think in uh just in the in the years just
after World War Two. And as a matter of fact,
doctor Ed Johnson, who was a colonel in the Army,
(25:45):
he was head DAVE of forensic Pathology. He was right
down the road from his place. But yet they chose
to have to completely unqualified naval physicians at Bethesda do
the autopsy. They had never either one of them, when
we get their name straight, it was Humes and Boswell.
(26:07):
They were both naval physicians. They were pathologists working at
Bethesda doing what naval pathologists at a hospital. Do you
know what that is? Looking at tumors and making diagnoses
on surgical specimens that are coming in and oh yet
managing the lab. Notice nothing in that description I just
gave you qualifies them to do forensic pathology. And as
(26:30):
it turns out, neither one of them had ever even
done a forensic autopsy period. And so you're going to trust,
arguably what turns out to be the most complicated, complex
homicide investigation that is now being performed on a body
that has been removed from the jurisdiction where it occurred
(26:51):
in a location that is, I don't know, just over
one thousand miles away. You had to take the body
there to have it done by two unqualified people. And
just to give you like a little aside about this,
many times what happens with a medical examiner's office is
(27:12):
that when you're working there and you have a trauma
case that rolls into like a major emergency room, it
doesn't have to be a major, it can be any
emergency room the corner or the medical examiner. First off,
you'll go to the hospital to examine the body and
interview the physicians that did the treatment. It wasn't until
the next morning that these two people that did the
(27:35):
autopsy on the president's body at Bethesda actually spoke with
the doctors at Parkland who had rendered treatment to the president.
At that moment time, they didn't have a frame of
reference about the now infamous tracheostomy site. And people say, well,
(27:55):
why would why would they create a tracheostomy where you've
got a gunshot wound. Well, here's why you do it
that way. If it's in a position and this happens
with some great frequency, and I can tell you why
this happens many times, So that they don't have to
traumatize the body further. All right, So you've got a hole,
(28:16):
if you will, a bullet hole that's just off center.
If people will find their larynings and kind of find
where the Adams apple would be and just go slightly
below that area right there, and it's just off center
where this defect was, they created a tracheostom site where
(28:36):
they could get an airway established. Now, this happens a lot.
People don't realize this. You have gunshot wounds to the chest.
For instance, people will uh the physicians in the trauma
room will actually use a gunshot wound that's existing in
the chest to create they'll open it up further to
put a chest tube in to get the blood out
of the chest. They'll do this a lot. It's not
(28:59):
that this is an uncommon occurrence, but with Humes and Boswel,
they had no history whatsoever of assessing trauma, ballistic trauma,
particularly at that point in time. So when they're looking
at this defect in the mid line of the neck
that they know is in fact, they believe at least
(29:21):
is a gunshot wound, they they can't factor that into
their thinking when they're doing their initial exam and of
course that's the most important thing, and because you lose
all frame of reference and the other thing that was
really odd about this case from just a practitioner standpoint,
(29:41):
when Boswel and Hume saw the body of the president,
when they initially opened up this casket that had like
a broken handle on it and all this stuff, body
was not in a body bag body. They described the
body as being swaddled, which means it was wrapped in sheets,
and the president had a big bandage over his head,
(30:03):
which is not uncommon. I mean, they'll do that with
these gaping gunshot wounds. They'll wrap gauze around the head,
that sort of thing to keep anything from kind of
falling falling out. Ideally, you would want the body they
called them, they didn't call them body bags back then,
they called them disaster pouches. You would want to be
(30:23):
able to do that. But they didn't apparently choose to
do that. They merely put him in the casket. They
when the president's body arrived at Bethesda, when they unswaddled
the body, he was nude. There was no clothing with
the body. And one of the big things that came
up over the years, is that I beg everyone that's
(30:43):
listening to this, when you take a look at the
president's suit he's wearing the president, you know, you get
pictures of him when he's in you know, Martha's vineyard
with the family, and he's wearing an open collar. This
man never went anywhere without a tie on, particularly in
(31:04):
a formal setting. He's riding in a motorcade. This is
a campaign. The fact that he had a tie on
and he sustained this gunshot wound to the back of
the neck that impacted literally the trajectory of this round
because that's what's referred to as a shored s h
(31:25):
u r ed wound. There's a lot of tension placed
over this area, so they could not appreciate what defects
there were in the clothing at that moment time. And
it's my understanding that they never actually saw the clothing
until I might have my date trong. It seems like
(31:46):
nineteen sixty six is the first time that they ever
saw the president's clothing. And it's international archives, so.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
This is after the Warring Commission has come out with
its document on what they say happened, but they still
have not even touched the clothing at it up with
the wounds they saw. Now you mentioned that that tracheotomy,
that the bullet wound. If you had the shirt and
the you know where it's button, with the tie and
all that, what would you be able to tell from that?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
It would be significant because you can track, you can listen.
Clothing moves independent. I don't care how tight your clothing is.
The clothing moves independent of the exterior of your body,
all right. That goes without saying. It doesn't matter how
tight your vestments are that you have on. And one
of the things that is brought up by Humes and
(32:32):
Boswel is that when the president is sitting in the car,
and we've seen him been there's images of him even
in the early part of the Suppruder film, his hand
is raised and he's waving. That's what politicians do in
the back of cars. They're trying to make a connection
with the crowd. Well, think about raising your arm and
you're wearing a shirt or maybe you're wearing a jacket
(32:54):
right now as you're listening to this, your your clothing
will act adjust according to the movement of your arms.
So you're guys that wear sports coats I know, I
have to wear them on air a lot. They bunch
up in the back, you'll create like a crease back there.
And so if you don't have a full appreciation of
(33:15):
the position of the individual in the vehicle and to
try to understand where they were relative to all the
other individuals in the car, and also the relationship of
the antier side of the body the neck where you
have this collared shirt, you lose all perspective. And remember this,
this bullet now that we're talking about is also known.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
As the magic bullet.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
And this is going to go on to create I
don't know, I think it's seven other wounds or something
like this. And the governor's uh, the governor's body.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
It goes into JFK's upper back correct, Yeah, comes out
his throat, makes a right hand turn into his right arm,
It goes into.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
It goes into connolly and and goes through his rib
and he's seated in a jump seat. That is actually
the pictures are are deceptive that you see it.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
They are those jumpsies are not sitting directly in front
of one another, and they're not Watch his hand, watch
his hand on the hat. That gives you an idea
of what's going on and when Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
And the trajectory when that bullet exits the President's throat,
it does strike Conley, and so it's going to take out,
you know, I think one of his ribs. It's gonna
go down and shatter, you know, his wrist, and eventually
it's going to come to rest in his left inner thigh.
So you've got this scene creating like seven different defects
(34:35):
and making crazy turns and all that sort of stuff
that many people have opined about over the years. But
just the clothing alone, and not having access to that
clothing to examine it contextually relative to the injuries that
you're seeing on the body, It's quite an amazing thing.
And you know, back in Dallas, you've still got an
(34:58):
active crime scene back there. And David, I got to
tell you one thing here that one image has always
has always struck me going back to Parkland thinking about this,
and I listen, don't believe anything I'm saying. Go look
it up yourself, is what I'm saying to my audience
right now. There's an image of a what appears to
(35:19):
be a Secret Service agent in the ambulance bay adjacent
to the Presidential limo. They have taken the trunk is
open on the car. They have taken this the bubbletop out.
Apparently it would fit back there. They've got the bubbletop
now in place on top of the car. They're standing
there day with a stainless steel bucket and they're washing
(35:43):
out the interior of that car at Parkland. And if
you don't believe me, everybody go look at it. It's
out there. There's an image of this taking place. And
so that car, that car is a crime scene. That
car is a crime scene. As a matter of fact,
(36:03):
the whole damn Dealey Plaza was a crime scene, but
it was not locked down. There were still two bone
fragments that were found later on that had to be
brought to Bethesda to be examined that were not discovered
at that period of time. And those are key because
(36:25):
what you're talking about is when you begin to think
about wom ballistics, particularly as they apply to the head
to piece together this fragment it skull, and trust me,
it was fragmented. You're talking about a six point five
millimeter military round that delivers an incredible punch. Here. If
(36:46):
you're just talking about the krcano round alone or any
kind of high end, high velocity round, the skull is
going to fragment, and it's in multiple pieces. Even Humes
and Bobs will talk about when they they didn't even
have to use the saw on the President's skull to
open it up, that when they reflected the scalp, the
skull was particulate, came a part in their hands. So
(37:08):
when you're trying to assess the skull, one of the
things that you look for is internal and external beveling,
and that gives you an indication of where a bullet
entered entered the skull. It's just like throwing a rock
through a piece of glass. One side's going to be
smooth and then the other side is not going to
be smooth. And that's one of the things we look for.
But unfortunately, I think a lot of evidence was left behind,
(37:31):
and now unfortunately we're so far down the tracks, Dave,
that I don't know that we'll ever be able to
answer some of these questions. Assessment without an assessment, in
(38:07):
any kind of homicide case, when you cannot gather the
facts appropriately from the beginning, you can lose so much
and the fact that you take arguably one of the
most complex homicide cases that has been on our radar
(38:33):
now for sixty years, in the past sixty years, and
you throw it into the sea of chaos, this political
world that's all churned up. It's a recipe for a disaster.
And when the president's body arrived in Bethesda that night
on Air Force one, with a newly sworn in president
(38:54):
and a grieving widow, it seems as though that whoever
in charge didn't know what they were doing. I think
that that's as kind as I can be with that statement,
because it was at that moment time you needed to
(39:15):
have someone that was fully in charge of their faculties
trying to understand how to direct people, what people should do.
And one of the measures of that, when you think
about forensics is you have to know your limitations, and
if you don't know what to do, you defer to
(39:39):
those individuals that do have specific knowledge about forensic science,
and you defer to them and let them handle it.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yeah, the President of the United States of America, they're
trying to rush an autopsy out of state and get
it done as quickly as they can, trying to find
a bullet. That's what it amounts to do.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, isn't that something?
Speaker 2 (39:56):
How do you know? How can you tell where the
bullet entered when it's already in that I mean, they
don't look at it the right way, You don't Where
do you start with that? If it was done the
right way, where would you start? Joe?
Speaker 1 (40:07):
Well, the most important thing in a case like this,
and just not just not just from trying to track things,
but also a documentary perspective, are X rays. And they
did do X rays, and there's been a lot of
questions about the quality of the X rays that they had.
And again, the technology then is not necessarily what it
(40:29):
is today. That's not an excuse. It's just that things
have been fine tuned since then. We have an expectation
now with the way we do X rays, they're much
more fine tuned. If you've got this radio opaque bodies
that are along the wound track, you can really pick
up a lot of the little nuanced areas. Back then,
(40:50):
you necessarily you could not necessarily pick them up the
way you can now. You could see it, but it
wasn't in as fine and detail. So X rays are
where you start before you ever do anything. And I
question even how those X rays were performed, you know,
on the President's body. You know, I talked a little
while ago about the body being swaddled in that sort
(41:10):
of thing. I really wonder if those X rays were
done prior to his head being unwound with the bandages
they had on there. And let me back up just
for a second here, when you begin to think about
what was going on at this historic moment in time,
(41:33):
when you've got the body of the commander in chief
laying there in this autopsy suite in Bethesda. They've got
a this is a teaching area. They've actually got grand
stands in here, so there are seats for people to observe.
(41:54):
There have been some estimates that they're at any one
time there could have been up to thirty two people
in this room. So you're you, as a physician and
an experienced physician in the area of forensic pathology, you're
trying to perform a task that you've never performed before
in front of a live audience on the body of
the leader of the free world. Just let that sink
(42:16):
in just for a second. You know, I've been around
a lot of friends of pathologists in my lifetime. I've
been very fortunate and blessed to have said it at
the feet of some pretty learned, learned folks. And one
thing you always knew was that there was a master
(42:36):
and commander in that room, that they were in charge,
and by God, no one else was to be in
their period, end of story. And that was not the
case in that environment. And Humes and Bosle both have
stated that there was nobody else giving them direction in
that room. Maybe that's maybe that's so, But Dave, I
(42:58):
know that you've had an experience, I'm sure in your
life where you don't have to have anything said to you.
Merely a look, and you're talking about a military organization here,
Merely a look can convey volumes to you within this environment.
And so they're having to contend with this highly highly
technical undertaking and they're doing it under a microscope here,
(43:23):
and it's they even they realized, I think they be
in Basle and Humes realized that they were out of
their depths. And here's why I know this. They reached
out knowing that there was an autopsy that would be
(43:44):
performed to AFIP Armforces Institute of Pathology, and they sent
over doctor Pierre Fink. Now, people might not be familiar
with doctor Fink, but doctor Fink was a forendsic.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Pathologist, ballistic expert.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah, he was actually present in the room and his
his area of expertise is actually wound ballistics. So you've
heard about all of the studies that have been hinted
at over the years where the army, the military would
conduct ballistic test on cadavers, that sort of thing. He's
(44:23):
the guy that would would look and assess the bodies
that had been shot, whether they you know, primarily animals,
to try to determine the effectiveness of weaponry at that
point in time. And so he he did come to
Bethesda that night. Here's the interesting little aside. Now, this
(44:46):
guy who is I guess he is the gold standard
when it comes to ballistic assessment. Prior to him arriving,
Humes in Boswell had already removed the President's brain. It
had already been taken out of the cranial vault at
that moment time. And you know, according to their reports,
(45:07):
they took the brain and placed it in formulae to
fix it. Because you don't with brains, brains are they're
an interest. They have an interesting consistency there. It's not
as soft as like a jello. Okay, it's a bit
firmer than that. But in order to dissect a brain,
it needs to be firm. So what we normally do
(45:31):
at autopsy many times is you will take the brain
and we have a way of anchoring it with strings
through there's a little nerve bundle at the base of
the brain where the optic nerves come out and all
this sort of thing, and we can suspend the brain
in a bucket of formulaine, which is a type of formaldehyde,
and it's being anchored in there with strings, so it's
(45:51):
kind of floating in this big bucket and you let
it set. Some people will let it set up to
two weeks. And so when you take finally take the
brain out of this bucket, it has a very firm,
hard consistency. And so the dissection has done what it's
referred to as bread loafing. So you go from the
frontal lobe lobes bilatterly of the brain and you slice
(46:14):
like you're slicing a loaf of bread, and you can
actually flip through it like book leaflets almost or slices
of bread, and you can appreciate each bit of trauma
along the way, well, that was the intent with this,
but the brain had already been removed from the head
prior to Fink arriving. What's so tragic about that is
(46:36):
that doctor Fink, with his expertise, at least at minimum,
he could have been standing there to see in context
what the skull looked like, what the brain looked like
within the skull, and to have been able to assess
it before it was ever removed. As a matter of fact,
(46:57):
if it were my autopsy, I would have automatically have
deferred to doctor Fink and have said, man, you got
your scrubs on, you got your gloves on, come on
over here, man, we're gonna let you handle this part
of the dissection. Because you know, people look at the
President's autopsy and here's another thing that they don't really understand.
(47:19):
You know, his autopsy was not a complete autopsy. They
examined the heart and the lungs, but nothing else was
examined on the president's body. As a matter of fact,
probably the most critical thing that still to this day,
it just absolutely just absolutely blows my mind. The president's
(47:42):
neck was never dissected. So at autopsy, what we do
is when we actually reflect, reflect the chest essentially is
what we do. And we literally goes over the face
when we make the famous y incision that autopsies are
known for. Go in then and dissect out the trachea
(48:03):
out of the neck, I mean everything. We go all
the way up to the tongue, remove everything down, and
that way we can see all of the organs of
the neck. And there are multiple vessels that run through here.
You have the trachia that runs through here, the larynx,
the tongue, all of the stuff that runs through here.
You want to be able to see behind those organs
(48:24):
of the neck. You want to be able to see
the structure of the final column at that point in time.
I mean, I don't know. To me, that's kind of critical.
That was never done. And Humes was even quoted as
saying that, let me see, let me get the phraseology
right here. I don't want to misquote. He said. He
said it would have been it would have been a crime.
(48:44):
It's a term he used to have dissected the president's neck.
And I'm thinking, have you lost your mind? It would
have been a crime to have dissected his neck. You're
talking about an individual that had that You guys are saying,
it's got a bullet hole that is running through through
the neck and exits out of the front, and you
think that it would be a crime to remove the
organs of the neck. Give me a break, Have you
(49:06):
lost your mind? Yeah? And as it turns out, I
think that that goes to the bigger picture here, where
you're looking at this and you're thinking, you know, how
could you you know, how could you have just kind
of taken this so lightly and not done your job?
And again they defer back to the family's wishes. This
(49:30):
is something I keep hearing all the way through, and
it's kind of a weasel thing to say when you're
in authority over an autopsy and certainly a homicide investigation
of this magnitude, and you're saying, well, we're going to
stick with the family's wishes. But he was also everybody's president.
And now, sixty years later, because such a poor job
(49:55):
was done, I don't know that, you know, looking back
recor respectively, I think a lot of people would have
wanted to have had a more thorough autopsy. You jump
you jump forward, Dave, We'll see that was in sixty three.
You jump forward to sixty eight, the President's the President's
brother Bobby was at the Ambassador. He had just given
(50:21):
this fantastic speech. He's going through the kitchen at the
Ambassador Hotel and he is assassinated by Sir and Suren.
And to give you an idea how how much things
had changed between sixty three and sixty eight. As you
well know, that took place in Los Angeles County. Well,
(50:42):
who was the chief medical examiner slash corner. It was
doctor Tom to get He's one of my heroes, as
you know. And the family had told the folks with
LA County at that point in time, look up, Yeah,
we don't really need need the autopsy. We know what
killed him. Doctor Nogucci said, you know what, I think.
(51:03):
We're going to go ahead and do an autopsy, and
not only going to do it, but when I do it,
I'm going to have like five forensic pathologists in the
room with me. He actually to show you how thorough,
doctor Noguchu. And just so the people understand, Bobby Kennedy's
autopsy has been named in it has been cited a
(51:24):
couple of times as the most thorough forensic autopsy that's
ever been conducted. Just let that sink in compared to
what happened to the President's body. Forensic pathology, medical, legal
death of us such a small community, even though we
didn't know in sixty eight what we know now. People talk,
all right, and Nogucci would have been fully aware of
(51:49):
the rumor mial. He would have heard about what had
gone on in Bethesda that night. He not only reached
out to a FIP and had them send people. Doctor
Fink was present for Bobby's autopsy in LA. That's quite
fascinating when you look at that, you know, in its totality,
(52:12):
you think about how much the how much things had
changed just in that period of time. And I never
want to hear anybody say that, you know that they
didn't know any better at the time of the President's assassination,
that it was you know, well, one pathologist is just
(52:34):
as good as any other pathologists. No, that's not the case,
because Earl Rose had been doing homicide autopsies in Dallas. Uh,
there were as a matter of fact, let's just say
for the sake of argument that, okay, going back to
d C with the President's remains was a good idea
(52:55):
which you could never convince me that it is or
was within an hour, within an hour's plane flight, you
could have had, arguably at that point time in sixty three,
you could have had the top forensic pathologist in the
country standing in DC there to do that autopsy. But
(53:18):
yet you choose to go down this path utilizing two
naval physicians who I'm sure were fine hospital pathologists, but
not for this particular case. You could have had Milton Helpern.
You could have had doctor Fisher who was in Baltimore.
(53:39):
You could have had Werner Spitz who was in Detroit.
You could have had literally a pantheon. There's a pantheon
of these forensic pathologists that are out there that were
practicing at the time that now we look back and
if in forensic pathology, if we had a mount rushmore,
these guys' faces would be on it. But yet you
(54:02):
chose not to do that. You chose to go down
this path. And this is, you know, my my little
slice of the pie here from a medical legal standpoint,
it's just a small portion of the overall case, you know,
relative to how the president's murder was handled. I hate
calling an assassination. Yeah it was an assassination, but that's
such a political term. At the end of the day,
(54:23):
you're talking about a murder, a murder that occurred in
Dallas County, Texas.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
A husband and father was taken away from his family
and they didn't get answers. They had to have been haunted.
But Joe, this is one of the things that goes
that feeds the conspiracy. I want to ask you about
the wounds. Were any of the other wounds he's sustained.
Were they life threatening other than the headshot? Was the
back the shot to the back? Was it deadly?
Speaker 1 (54:49):
I don't, well, Gee, Dave, I don't know because the
neck wasn't dissected, you know. And again, I know, you
know I'm being flipped by saying that, But you know,
when you know, I would love to be able to
answer that question, and I think that many people would
(55:10):
would like an answer to that question definitively. But if
you're looking at this from the perspective of, you know,
gee whiz, I wish we had time to go back
and get a do over. There are no mulligans in
forensic pathology. You don't get a do over. You get
to do it the first time. When people are quick
(55:31):
to say again, I have to emphasize this point. Well,
they didn't do things back then like they do them now.
It's unfair to judge that they were talking about we're
talking about the same generation that within five years would
put a man on the moon. Are you kidding me?
You're not intellectually sophisticated enough, medically sophisticated enough at this
(55:54):
point in time to understand the gravity of what you're
in the middle of that you're going to allow people
to make decisions driven by emotion at that moment, Tom
is beyond the pale. I don't think that there's any
There was no excuses then, there's still no excuses today
for it, because now you've left this generation and generations
to come without any solid answers. And Dave, I don't
(56:18):
know that we'll ever have any conclusive answers as time
goes on. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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