Evidence of Deception Regarding President Kennedy’s Back Wound

“During the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital another bullet hole was observed at the base of the back of President Kennedy’s neck slightly to the right of his spine which provides further enlightenment as to the source of the shots. The hole was located approximately 5 1/2 inches ( 14 centimeters ) from the tip of the right shoulder joint and approximately the same distance below the tip of the right mastoid process, the bony point immediately behind the right ear.” ( Report pgs. 88-89 )

No piece of evidence in this case screams “deception” louder than the President’s non-fatal back wound. That deception mainly concerned the destruction of Dr. Humes’ original autopsy notes and then re-writing of his autopsy report which misrepresented of the location of the wound.
But the autopsy photographs indicate that the prosectors were incompetent in the manner of how they handled the body when taking measurements.

Deceptive measurements

Using the mastoid process and the acromion as measuring points was brilliant from a deception standpoint. The mastoid process is the bony structure behind the ear and by being part of the head, is easily moved as the head moves.
The Acromion is top outer edge of the shoulder blade and is also easily moved by moving the shoulder up and down.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, Director of the Institute of Forensic Sciences at Duquesne University School of Law and Chief Forensic Pathologist of Allegheny County ( PA ) wrote in a letter dated February 10, 1967 :

“the acromion and/or the mastoid process are not customaarily or routinely used by forensic pathologists as landmarks in pinpointing the location of bullet wounds on the body. Therefore, one must ask why these points were used by the pathologists who performed the autopsy on President Kennedy.” ( Accessories After the Fact, Sylvia Meagher, 1967, pg. 141 )

Dr. Wecht’s point is not only well taken, it’s a proven fact.

When we look at Oswald’s autopsy report ( CE 1981 ), also a murder that involved a gunshot wound to the torso, we see that the measurements were taken from the top of the head and the midline of the body.

Using the mastoid process and the Acromion as landmarks is ridiculous because neither one is stationary and both can be moved easily to produce whatever measurement is required.
And the evidence indicates that that’s exactly what they did.

Forcing the head backward

The below graphic shows how the distance between a fixed location ( bullet hole B ) and the mastoid process ( A ) is shortened when the head is tilted backward.

If measurements are taken while the head is tilted backwards, not only is the distance going to be shorter than it really is, when the head is returned to its normal position, the “B” position will move up closer to the reference point “A”.

This is what they did to President Kennedy. They forced his head all the way back to take measurements and one of the autopsy photos shows the creases in his neck as a result of the head’s forced position.

By using these false measurements in the 1964 drawings done by Harold Rydberg, it created the fallacy that the wound was in the base of the President’s neck rather than below the top of his shoulders, as seen in the autopsy photo.

It also was stated in Humes’ re-written autopsy report that located the wound was in the “base of the right side of the neck”. ( 16 H 983 )
This was not supported by the autopsy photos, the autopsy face sheet, the death certificate, the clothes of the President or the testimony of witnesses.

Exposing the deception

Any error regarding the location of the President’s back wound begins and ends with Commander Humes. Dr. J. Thornton Boswell assisted Humes in the autopsy and on his face sheet is the correct location of the back wound.

I say correct because the location of the back wound on Boswell’s face sheet is corroborated by the holes in the President’s shirt and coat and Dr. Burkley’s death certificate.

In his testimony, Dr. Humes admitted that he had not spoken with Dr. Perry about the tracheotomy until Saturday morning and that’s when he found out about the wound in the throat.

Humes testified that, “he had done a tracheotomy and as a point to perform his tracheotomy he used a wound which he interpreted as a missile wound in the low neck, as the point through which ot make his tracheotomy incision.”
Mr. SPECTER. When did you have that conversation with him, Dr. Humes ?
Commander HUMES. I had that conversation with him early on Saturday morning, sir.
Mr. SPECTER. On Saturday morning November 23d ?
Commander HUMES. That is correct, sir. ( 2 H 362 )

But Parkland nurse Audrey Bell said that Dr. Perry told her on Saturday morning that he had been up most of the night with “Bethesda” arguing whether or not the wound in the throat was an entry wound.

Nurse Bell’s revelation indicates that Dr. Humes not only spoke to Dr. Perry on Friday night, he was well aware of an entrance wound in the throat.

In addition, Dr. Humes’ own notes indicate that he had Dr. Perry’s home phone number.

So if the only times Dr. Humes spoke to Perry was twice on Saturday morning, and that was at Bethesda, why did he have Dr. Perry’s home phone number ?

Because he called him at home Friday night. That means Humes knew about Perry seeing a wound of entry in the throat on Friday night.

During his Warren Commission testimony, Dr. Perry slipped and said that he had spoken to Bethesda on Friday:

“I was under the initial impression that I talked to him on Friday, but I understand it was on Saturday”. ( 3 H 380 )

Common sense tells you that a tracheostomy made for seemimgly no reason would tend to make the prosectors call Dallas to find out why the incision was made.

The official story says they didn’t. I believe this evidence says they did.

The Documents

The location of the back wound on Dr. Boswell’s original face sheet, showing the back wound to be below the top of the shoulders, is corroborated by other evidence.
President Kennedy’s personal physician, Dr. George Burkley’s death certificate describes the location of the wound at “about the level of the third thoracic vertebra”. ( red dot )

The report of the two FBI agents present during the autopsy, James Sibert and Frank O’Neill, reported that “Dr. Humes located an opening which appeared to be a bullet hole which was below the shoulders and two inches to the right of the midline of the spinal column.” ( ARRB MD 44, pg. 5 )

The President’s clothing

Dr. Humes’ location of the wound at the base of the neck would have require the holes in his shirt and jacket to be just BELOW the collar. But this is not the case. More corroboration of a bullet hole below the top of the shoulders comes from the physical evidence provided by Kennedy’s shirt and jacket. Both show bullet holes not only below the collar, but well below the top of the shoulders.

The true location becomes more apparent when you look at the President’s shirt from the front. It becomes obvious that the bullet hole is well below the top of the shoulders and well below the knot of the tie.

In his own testimony to the Warren Commission, Dr. Humes testified that the holes in the President’s coat and shirt were 6 inches below the top of the collar. ( 2 H 365 )

The FBI also measured the holes in the back of the President’s shirt and coat and found that the hole in the coat was 5 3/8″ below the collar and the hole in the shirt was 5 3/4″ below the top of the collar. It reasoned that the 3/8″ difference was due to the shirt collar “sticking up above the coat about a half an inch.” ( 5 H 60 )

As anyone can see, the mastoid process is well ABOVE the top of the collar, meaning that any measurement below the top of the collar using the mastoid as a reference point should be greater than the measurement to the top of the collar.

Unless, of course, you jerk the head backwards to take your measurements. Which is what they did.

Humes tried to explain the discrepancy by saying the Kennedy was waving to the crowd and this waving process caused the coat and shirt to rise up. ( 2 H 366 )
He used Commission Exhibit 396 to prove his point. But CE 396 shows the President with his elbow resting on the body of the car and his hand raised.

Here’s JFK sitting in the back seat with his arm up on the car. As you can see, his shirt and coat are certainly not “bunched up” enough to align the holes in the shirt and coat with the hole in the back.

Not only was the hole in the President’s back too low to have exited just below his Adam’s apple, the path of the bullet that caused it was estimated at 45-60 degrees DOWNWARD. ( ARRB MD 44, pg. 5 )

If the coat and shirt were “bunched up” as Humes and his defenders claim, there should have been multiple bullet holes in each, since the garments would have had to have been folded onto themselves. The only way to have the bullet holes in the clothing line up with a neck wound is if the shirt and coat were LIFTED up the same amount. Researcher Paul Lee demonstrates exactly how ridiculous the amount of “bunching up” the jacket and shirt had to do in order for the bullet holes to line up.

In addition, the FBI’s photos of the front of the President’s shirt deliberately hid the fact that the bullet hole was too low to make the throat wound by making sure the shirt was closed enough so the hole wouldn’t show from the front.

The FBI’s photographs of the shirt and coat were omitted from the Warren Commission exhibits. And there was another problem for the Commission : the bullet that made the holes in that clothing never transited the body.

Lack of a track

It is a complete and utter impossibility for a bullet to travel through a human body and not leave a bullet track in its wake.
In this case, the prosectors tried to probe the back wound and could not.

Dr. Humes testified to the Commission that, “attempts to probe in the vicinity of this wound were unsuccessful without fear of making a false passage.” ( 2 H 361 )
He further testified that, “we were unable, however, to take probes and have them satisfactorily fall through any definite path at this point.” ( ibid. )

In his deposition to the ARRB, Col. Pierre Finck was asked about probing the back wound:
Q: Did you insert a probe into the wound in the back ?
A: From what I remember, we tried at the time. It was unsuccessful. ( ARRB deposition of Pierre A. Finck, MD, 5.24.96, pg. 92 )

When questioned about the probing, Dr. J. Thornton Boswell told the ARRB that it went in a “very short distance. Three inches about.” ( ARRB deposition of Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, 2.26.96, pg. 128 )

In their 11/26/63 report on the autopsy, FBI agents Sibert and O’Neill said that the back wound was “probed by Dr. Humes with the finger” and that “further probing determined that the distance travelled by this missile was a short distance inasmuch as the end of the opening could be felt with the finger.” ( ARRB MD 44, pg. 5 )

Their report went on to say that, “no bullet could be found in the back” and that inspection revealed there was “no point of exit”. ( ibid. )

This evidence indicates that an attempt was made to probe the back wound that and attempt revealed that the bullet that caused it penetrated only a short distance, so short that its end could be felt with the fingertip.
This unsuccessful probing proves that the bullet did not transit the body and that there was no connection between the back wound and the wound in the President’s throat.

Could the back wound have been caused by a 30.06 ?

According to the autopsy face sheet, the President’s back wound measured 7×4 mm.

As a bullet enters the skin, tissue accelerates radially and is displaced centrifugally. The size of the entry wound is transiently larger than the caliber of the bullet, but typically the defect reversibly contracts to a diameter smaller than the cross-sectional area of the bullet due to the highly elastic properties of skin.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9462949

In other words, the 7mm bullet hole in Kennedy’s back was made by a bullet whose diameter was larger than 7mm ( 0.284 inches ). The 6.5mm bullet’s diameter is only 0.264 inches., making it doubtful IMO, that the wound was created by 6.5 ammo.

As I’ve mentioned in my essay on the 7.65 Mauser, one of the two rifles brought into the Texas School Book Depository two days before the motorcade was a Mauser which had been converted to a 30.06. The diameter of 30.06 ammo is .308 inches, larger than 7mm and certainly capable of having made the wound.

Again, this is only my opinion based on the contracting of the skin from the wound’s original size in comparison to the diameter of the ammunition.

Conclusion

For the bullet wound to have been located at the base of the neck where it meets the shoulder, as the autopsists claimed, the holes in the shirt and coat would have had to have been just below the lip of the collar.

It evidence shows it was much lower.

Humes not only lied to the Warren Commission, he lied about the location of the “neck” wound in his description to Harold Rydberg who did the drawings. 

In February 2003, author William Matson Law did a telephone interview with Rydberg. That interview is documented in Law’s book, In the Eye of History , beginning on page 289.

On pages 293-94, Rydberg tells Law regarding Humes’ location of the wounds :

“He was giving me anatomical landmarks…the neck wound was explained the same way. It was down at the C-6, C-7 on the cervical vertebrae and it was angled down bruising the pleural area of the right lung–the superior portion of it  and exiting out by the knot of the tie”.

Law: That’s what Humes told you ?

Rydberg: yes.

Law: Did they have notes with them ?

Rydberg: No.

Law: They just did this off the top of their heads ?

Rydberg: Yes. They wanted no  paper trail.

Humes knew damn well that the wound was at T-3 below the top of the shoulders, where the shirt and coat said it was, where Burkley’s death certificate said it was , where Boswell’s original face sheet said it was and where the autopsy photos showed it was. Rydberg drew it up according to Humes’ description which Boswell agreed with.

Humes did a lot of lying, pure and simple. There is NO CORROBORATION for the prosectors’ location of the wound at the base of the neck ( or at C6/C7 ) from the documentation, physical evidence, witness testimony or autopsy photos. This means that the whole Single Bullet Theory is in error because it’s predicated on a mislocation of the back wound. If Humes lied or was mistaken about the location of the “neck” wound, then is SBT is debunked.

On page 2 of the FBI’s Supplemental Report dated January 13, 1964, the report reads, “there was a small hole in the back of his shirt and coat approximately six inches below the collar.”
The Report goes on, “the bullet that entered his back had penetrated to a distance of less than a finger length.”

Secret Service Agent Clint Hill testified that he saw the back wound at Bethesda after the autopsy was completed, as the morticians were preparing it to be placed in the casket. He described its location as, “about 6 inches below the neckline to the right hand side of the spinal column.” ( 2 H 143 )

Secret Service Agent Glen Bennett was on the running board of the followup car and reported that he saw a “shot hit the President about 4 inches down from the right shoulder”. ( 18 H 760 )

None of the physical evidence and none of the witnesses’ descriptions corroborate a wound at the base of the neck or anywhere above the shoulder.

None.

But that didn’t stop the House Select Committee on Assassinations from publishing a drawing of JFK depicting his position as the bullet transited his body. It was a most ridiculous rendering, showing Kennedy leaning forward and the bullet entering his back above the shoulder at the level of the 7th cervical vertebra.

The truth is that the witnesses were correct that the wound was below the top of the shoulders. The autopsy photo shows the wound below the top of the shoulder. The death certificate indicates the wound was below the top of the shoulder. The autopsy face sheet shows that the wound was below the top of the shoulder.
All of this evidence is correct. The wound was below the top of the shoulder.

Humes had been confused because there were no bullets in the body and the back wound had not penetrated very far. The FBI called their office and found out a bullet had been found on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital. Humes assumed that that was the bullet that had made the wound in the back and had fallen out during cardiac massage. ( MD 44, pg. 5 )

I suggest that this is what was in his original autopsy notes, which he destroyed.

The deception began on Friday evening, when Dr. Humes spoke to Dr. Perry on the phone and found out that there had been an entry wound in the throat. Dr. Humes gleaned from Dr. Perry any and all information regarding Dr. Perry’s observations of the throat wound and the damage to the surrounding area, including the trachea.

“Dr. Humes concluded that the missile that entered the upper back had traversed the body and exited in the anterior portion of the neck although he had not observed…any such hole during the examination of the body.” ( 7 HSCA 16 )

How is that even possible ? How on earth can anyone conclude that a wound is a wound of exit if they’ve never even seen it ? They can’t.

Humes took the hit for not examining the throat wound. He was told by Dr. Perry that it was a wound of entry. He ignored that opinion and because there were no bullets in the body, he assumed it was a wound of exit. The physical evidence, the witness observations and the documentation presented here are all contrary to that assumption.

The Warren Report states that, “President Kennedy was first struck by a bullet that entered at the back of his neck, causing a wound which would not have been necessarily fatal.” ( Report, pg. 19 )

The man responsible for this statement was Commission member Gerald Ford ( R-Mich ), the future President. At least one person, FBI agent James Sibert, believed Ford’s movement of the back wound to the neck was tantamount to the crime of evidence tampering.

As a postscript, Dr. Boswell told the HSCA in 1977 that the location of the back wound in his original face sheet was incorrect. He amended that location by moving the wound up to the collar. ( black arrow below )

Dr. Boswell was never asked why his original “error” was supported by the death certificate, the President’s clothing and the witness accounts, but his new “amended” location was not.

All of the witness observations and documentation putting an entry wound in the President’s back were made before Dr. Humes found out that there was a bullet hole in the front of the President’s throat. The documentation which put the entry wound in the President’s neck, was all done after Humes found out about the throat wound.

That’s when the deception began.