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The Official Autopsy Photos and X-Rays Were Altered

This one comes as a shocker to most people, but keep this point in mind as you read about the photos and X-rays: the evidence proves it, and I’m going to show you how.

There are many contradictions in the publicly available autopsy images. Some of the photographs which were finally released to the public are inconsistent with the X-rays, and neither the photos nor the X-rays agree with what eyewitnesses [who were doctors and law enforcement professionals] described in Dallas or Bethesda. Some of the X-rays and photos have been identified as forgeries by experts.³⁴¹

As I established in the very first entry of this book, literally dozens of highly credible eyewitnesses to President Kennedy’s wounds clearly document a massive wound at the right rear portion of his head that could only have been from the exit of a bullet.

Here are some of their comments and please excuse the fact that some of them are gory and graphic. Pretend you’re on a jury and you have to weigh the grisly evidence:

•  SECRET SERVICE SPECIAL AGENT CLINT HILL: The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. There was blood and bits of brain all over the entire rear portion of the car. Mrs. Kennedy was completely covered with blood. There was so much blood you could not tell if there had been any other wound or not, except for the one large gaping wound in the right rear portion of the head.

•  NURSE DIANA BOWRON: There was a gaping wound in the back of his head. It was gone. Gone. There was nothing there. Just a big gaping hole. There might have been little clumps of scalp, but most of the bone over the hole, there was no bone there. There was no damage to the front of his face, only wound in the back of his head and the entry wound in his throat. The wound was so large I could almost put my whole fist into it.

•  NURSE DORIS NELSON (when shown the rear of head autopsy photo): There wasn’t even hair back there. It was blown away. All that area was blown out.

•  NURSE PAT HUTTON: A doctor asked me to place a pressure dressing on the head wound. This was of no use, however, because of the massive opening on the back of the head.

•  DR. MALCOLM PERRY: There was blood noted on the carriage and a large avulsive wound on the right posterior cranium.

•  DR. RONALD JONES: There was a large defect in the back side of the head as the President lay on the cart with what appeared to be some brain hanging out of this wound with multiple pieces of skull noted next with the brain and with a tremendous amount of clot and blood.

•  DR. PAUL PETERS: I noticed the head wound, and as I remember—I noticed that there was a large defect in the occiput. It seemed to me that in the right occipital parietal area that there was a large defect. There appeared to be bone loss and brain loss in the area . . . we speculated as to whether he had been shot once or twice because we saw the wound of entry in the throat and noted the large occipital wound.

•  DR. KEMP CLARK: I then examined the wound in the back of the President’s head. This was a large, gaping wound in the right posterior part, with cerebral and cerebellar tissue being damaged and exposed.

•  NURSE MARGARET HINCHCLIFF: The President had a gaping wound in the back of his head and an entrance wound in his throat.

•  BETHESDA PHOTOGRAPHER FLOYD RIEBE: A big gaping hole in the back of the head.

•  FBI SPECIAL AGENT FRANK O’NEILL: A massive wound in the right rear.³⁴²

So—here’s the huge question: What happened to the rear head wound that all those witnesses saw but isn’t in the autopsy photos?

You obviously can’t miss a thing like that, especially when you’re taking official autopsy photographs for the specific purpose of wound documentation. But in the official autopsy photos, there’s no rear exit wound. That simply isn’t possible. Unless the photos were altered, the wounds were altered, or all those emergency doctors and other personnel were lying.

Well, the doctors weren’t lying. They know what they saw. They also documented it in a highly adequate and thoroughly professional manner.

I should point out that not only did they document the massive exit wound, they also documented the entry wound in the front that caused that huge exit at the back:

Multiple witnesses, who were medically and otherwise credible, confirmed that they clearly saw an entry wound in the FRONT of President Kennedy’s head, in his upper right forehead at the hairline.³⁴³

So this is a no-brainer from a medical standpoint. Those doctors were there and they saw a small entry wound at the front and the big exit wound at the right rear. So how did that massive wound magically disappear?

As wild as it sounds—in the official U.S. government autopsy photos and X-rays, there were different wounds on the body of the President. And I emphasize that point because it’s a point that bears emphasis. Imagine such a thing: The wounds were changed.

Well, there was further eyewitness testimony that indicated that what took place after the autopsy was—they basically patched that hole in the back the President’s head:

•  MORTICIAN THOMAS ROBINSON: About the size of a small orange . . . circular . . . ragged . . . directly behind the back of his head . . . they brought a piece of heavy duty rubber, again to fill this area in the back of the head . . . it had to be all dried out, packed, and the rubber placed in the hair and the skin pulled back over . . . and stitched into that piece of rubber.

•  QUESTION: Can you give me some information on the head wound?

•  FBI SPECIAL AGENT JAMES SIBERT: Oh, it was a good size, in the back part of the head there. Well, I think about three and a half inches one way, then quite a bit the other . . . now those two (Dr. Boswell and Dr. Humes, who performed the autopsy) stayed there till about 5:30 in the morning as I recall. That was their admission—that they stayed and helped the morticians. In other words, they must have taken some other pictures too, because they showed the pictures at that deposition that were neat in appearance, and boy, I don’t remember anything like that . . . but my recollection of the way the head looked is nothing that would appear as this photograph shows. This photograph is too neat. Right back here is where you would have had that massive wound, right in here, and you see that’s neat. My thought was that that was probably taken after reconstruction was done . . .³⁴⁴

Some of the Navy personnel also seemed to have viewed photos from the “original” or “real” autopsy before the wounds were changed. Because the wounds they described in those photos did not exist in the official photos and the photos they referred to have completely disappeared:

Petty Officer Saundra Spencer: They had one [autopsy photo] showing the back of the head with the wound at the back of the head. It was just a ragged hole.³⁴⁵

When the official version of the autopsy photos were shown to people who had viewed the body in Dallas or at Bethesda prior to the autopsy—solid eyewitnesses who saw the wounds—they said things like, “Those are not the wounds I saw.”³⁴⁶

Douglas Horne was Chief Analyst for the Military Records Team of the Assassination Records Review Board in Washington, D.C. and oversaw the disposition of mountains of records related to the JFK assassination from 1995 to 1998. Horne then spent the next several years of his life writing his epic compilation of that project, a five-volume study totaling 1,807 pages, entitled Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK. That book, released in 2010, is the most thorough and exhaustive study of the evidence in the JFK assassination in existence, particularly as it relates to the medical evidence in the case.

Horne’s work—as well as that of Dr. David Mantik and others—have established that a lot of awful shenanigans took place during the autopsy of President Kennedy.³⁴⁷ That was established by extensive scientific comparison of the official X-rays and photographs, with the placement of the wounds clearly substantiated by the doctors in Dallas. And they do not match.

Dr. Mantik examined the official materials many times and also found a number of other anomalies in the medical evidence which he explains in detail, complete with slides, in a study online called, “The JFK Autopsy Materials: Twenty Conclusions after Nine Visits” at: assassinationresearch.com/v2n2/pittsburgh.pdf.

First, the official skull X-rays do not show the condition of the skull or the brain as seen at Parkland.³⁴⁸

Stop and think about that for a second. The wounds in the official X-rays did not match the wounds documented by the emergency room doctors. They were dramatically different. They reflect an entry wound from the rear, whereas the wounds that were seen in Dallas clearly reflected an entry wound from the front.

Now read the following entry very carefully. It’s written by a doctor, so it’s in medical lingo, but play close attention to what he concludes:

Instead, they [the official autopsy photos and X-rays] were taken after tampering by H&B [Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell, the two physicians who performed the autopsy of President Kennedy], perhaps even after significant tampering, especially if Robinson and Reed are correct. Furthermore, the massive damage seen in the photographs and X-rays was not caused just by a bullet or even by multiple bullets, but instead by pathological hands. In particular, for a single, full metal-jacketed bullet—the Warren Commission’s inevitable scenario—to generate such an enormous defect has always defied credibility. Likewise, Boswell’s sketch [for the ARRB; Assassination Records Review Board] on a skull of this enormous defect only shows the condition of the skull after tampering by H&B—and does not reflect the skull as seen at Parkland [Hospital in Dallas]. The Parkland witnesses fully concur with this. On the other hand, many witnesses at Bethesda saw the condition of the skull before such tampering began. These witnesses, both physicians and paraprofessionals uniformly describe a right occipital blowout [right rear of skull], consistent with a shot from the front.³⁴⁹

In other words, the wounds didn’t change by themselves. What that means in plain English is that they were altered and the massive exit wound at the rear was disguised medically so that it could be represented in the official autopsy photos and X-rays as displaying the effects of a shot from the rear.

At this point, Dr. Humes performed clandestine surgery on the head to enlarge the head wound to create ‘evidence’ of a temporal/ parietal exit and an incision was made to remove evidence of a right forehead entry. The scalp and skull were manipulated to conceal the size and location of the occipital ‘blowout’ and a ‘wound’ was created to simulate a small entrance wound on the back of the head.³⁵⁰

So, in even plainer English, there was illicit surgery at the Bethesda morgue.³⁵¹ They had to change the physical evidence to fit their lone gunman scenario of one shooter and a head shot from the rear. So, incredible as it sounds: Even though it was the body of the President of the United States, that’s what they did. Gruesome, horrifying, outrageous, and also, by logical deduction, as Mr. Horne and Dr. Mantik have proved, necessarily true.

Chew on that one for awhile.

³⁴¹ Kent Heiner, Without Smoking Gun: Was the Death of Lieutenant Commander William Pitzer Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up Conspiracy? (TrineDay: 2004).

³⁴² Brad Parker, First on the Scene: Interviews with Parkland Doctors (JFK Lancer: 2005): jfklancer.com/parkland_drs.html

³⁴³ Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK (Douglas P. Horne: 2009).

³⁴⁴ Parker, First on the Scene: Interviews with Parkland Doctors.

³⁴⁵ Ibid.

³⁴⁶ Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.

³⁴⁷ David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., “The JFK Autopsy Materials: Twenty Conclusions after Nine Visits,” November 20—23, 2003: assassinationresearch.com/v2n2/pittsburgh.pdf

³⁴⁸ David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB) by Douglas Horne: A Nearly-Entirely-Positive Review,” 26 Feb. 2010. assassinationscience.com/HorneReview.pdf (accessed 6 May 2013).

³⁴⁹ Ibid.

³⁵⁰ Brian Rooney, “Burying The Truth—book review of Doug Horne’s epic effort,” April, 2010, JFK: Deep Politics Quarterly.

³⁵¹ Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.”