At a news conference after the President was pronounced dead, Dr. Malcolm Perry answered a series of hypothetical questions and stated to the press that a variety of possibilities could account for the President’s wounds. Dr. Perry said his answers at the press conference were intended to convey his theory about what could have happened, based on his limited knowledge at the time, rather than his professional opinion about what did happen.
Commenting on his answers at the press conference, Dr. Perry testified before the Commission:
I expressed it [ his answers ] as a matter of speculation that this was conceivable. But, again, Dr. Clark [ who also answered questions at the conference ] and I emphasized that we had no way of knowing. ( Report, pg. 90 )
The truth is that Dr. Malcolm Perry was NOT answering a hypothetical question and he did NOT speculate. The question was direct and the doctor’s response was direct.
The bullet wound he saw in the throat was a wound of entry.
The first press conference
On November 22, 1963, after the President had been pronounced dead, the doctors held a press conference to advise what the President’s wounds were and to describe the treatment they used in trying to save his life.
Dr. Kemp Clark attended to the President’s head wound and Dr. Perry attended to his throat wound.
During that press conference, Dr. Perry was directly asked about the throat wound three times and three times he indicated that it was an entrance wound and its direction had been one of coming at the President.
In the 1990’s, the Assassination Records Review Board released as part of its master medical records a White House transcript of that press conference:
Nothing hypothetical
There was nothing hypothetical about the questions and Dr. Perry’s response was not one where he was speculating what was conceivable or discussing a variety of possibilities.
Perry flat out stated that “there was an entrance wound in the neck”. Further proof of his comment was published in the November 23rd edition of the New York Times.
The point is that Dr. Perry’s description of the throat wound to the press was unambiguous and more importantly the testimony he gave in his deposition for the Warren Commission was exposed by the transcripts of that press conference as being less than truthful.
In other words, he perjured himself.
In this interview with ABC News on 11/22/63, ( credit: Youtuber Alex Harris ) Dr. Perry reiterates his observations of the President’s wounds:
Another interview Dr. Perry gave, this one via telephone, was to Dallas newspaper reporter Connie Kritzberg. She reveals what Dr. Perry told her:
After these public pronouncements, Dr. Perry was warned by a man he assumed was Secret Service, to not repeat that the throat wound a wound of entry.
This warning had a profound effect on Dr. Perry and his contribution during a subsequent press conference the next day.
The second press conference
In his deposition of March 25, 1964, Dr. Kemp Clark described a second press conference held on the morning of Saturday, November 23, 1963. During that testimony, Dr. Clark said that although he attended the conference, Dr. Perry “said very little”. ( 6 H 22 )
Dr. Perry was shying away from providing information to the press. According to Dr. Clark:
“Dr. Perry stated that he had talked to the Bethesda Naval Hospital on two occasions that morning and that he knew what the autopsy findings had shown and that he did not wish to be questioned by the press, as he had been asked by Bethesda to confine his remarks to that which he knew from examining the President and suggested that the major part of this press conference be conducted by me.” ( 6 H 23 )
Perry had been “asked” to not give his opinion on the throat wound, but to only report what he observed upon examination.
In other words, Dr. Perry was being censored and being a man of principle, his being prevented from giving his honest opinion “took the wind out of his sails”.
The harrassment of Dr. Perry begins at Bethesda
The pressure on Dr. Perry to change his opinion on the throat wound started almost immediately after the body arrived at Bethesda.
Dr. Perry’s description of the throat wound is found in the notes of autopsist Commander James J. Humes, who consulted with Perry on the night of the assassination regarding the size of the wound. Those notes can be found in Commission Exhibit 397 and describe the wound that Perry told Humes he saw as 3-5 mm.
Humes knew this was too small a hole to have been a wound of exit so the debate went back and forth between Dr. Perry and Bethesda.
Parkland nurse Audrey Bell was the supervising nurse of the Operating and Recovery Rooms. She told the ARRB in 1997 that the morning after the assassination, Dr. Perry told her that he had been up almost all night with the autopsy doctors and they were trying to get him to change his mind about the throat wound being a wound of entry.
But the pressure to have Dr. Perry change his opinion didn’t stop there. He was visited by the Secret Service, according to his testimony, “at least three times”. ( 6 H 17 )
Secret Service pressures Dr. Perry
The Secret Service agent whose responsibility it was to get Dr. Perry to change his mind about that he saw was Elmer Moore.
In May 1970, Moore was the hot-tempered head of the Seattle office of the Secret Service. A graduate student named James Gochenaur was interested in the Kennedy assassination and had contacted him about obtaining a photo.
Moore invited Gochenaur to come by his office.
Once there, Gochenaur claimed that Moore went into a tirade that frightened him. Moore admitted that he was ordered to “badger” Dr. Perry into changing his testimony about the throat wound.
Armed with the autopsy reports and photographs, Moore was able to get Perry to back down and say that the wound Perry saw could have been either an entrance wound or an exit wound.
Dr. Perry gives in to the pressure
On March 30, 1964, five days after his initial testimony, Dr. Perry was deposed a second time and testified that the wound he saw could have been either an entrance or an exit wound.
By the time he testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Dr. Perry’s estimation of the size of the wound had grown from 3-5 mm in 1963, to 6-7 mm. ( 7 HSCA 94 )
By going along with the faked autopsy record, Perry had testified under oath to something he knew was not true. The problem with making false statements under oath is that it is punishable by law and once you commit to those falsehoods, there’s no going back.
So Perry was forced to publicly tow the line while privately expressing his real opinion. More on that in a little bit.
But the witnesses were not the only thing tampered with. The Secret Service collected ALL of the video from the doctors’ press conference to hide the fact that Dr. Perry had publicly described the throat wound as a wound of entry. That video evidence, like much of the evidence exonerating Oswald, has vanished into eternity.
Dr. Perry wasn’t the only one who the Secret Service took an interest in. According to Dr. Clark, he “talked to a member of the Secret Service approximately a month after the assassination. I talked to him on two occasions, once by phone, and he asked me if I had a copy of a written report by Dr. Ronald Jones and I told him I did not.” ( 6 H 27 )
The Secret Service had reason to worry about that written report because in that report, Dr. Jones described the throat wound as an “entrance wound”.
Privately, Dr. Perry tells a different story
Dr. Perry publicly stated under oath that the wound could have been either an entrance or exit wound and that remained his public stand. But privately, he gave a different opinion.
On December 1, 1971, noted researcher and author Harold Weisberg interviewed Dr. Perry at the Southwest University School of Medicine. Weisberg noted that during this interview, Perry “let a few things drop then tried to cover”.
Perhaps the most important of those was his repeated statement that when he first saw the wound in the throat, he took a quick look, wiped it off and started cutting. He added that the edges were bruised “as they always are.”
The significance of the bruising around the edges of the wound is that bruising is indicative of an entry wound. It’s called an abrasion collar. Perry described the bruised edges to the HSCA ( 7 HSCA 302 ). A typical abrasion collar around an entrance wound looks like this:
Weisberg asked Perry of he was ever asked about this signifcant fact. Perry blushed and then “tried to cover” by saying, “there was blood around the edges.” Weisberg then notes that he didn’t press Perry, that what he said was clear: if blood on the edges had initially prevented Perry from seeing them, it certainly didn’t after he had wiped it off.
Dr. Perry tells a colleague that the wound was “Definitely an entrance wound”
Another person he expressed a different opinion to was Dr. Donald Miller, who served with Dr. Perry at the University of Washington, beginning in 1975.
Dr. Miller was interested in the JFK assassaintion and asked Dr. Perry on several occassions about the throat wound. Each time Dr. Miller tried to probe for information, Dr. Perry was not interested in talking about it.
Then one day, after a long surgery, the two were in the doctors’ lounge having coffee, Dr. Miller once again pressed Perry about the throat wound. This time Perry said, “it was an entrance wound, definitely an entrance wound.”
It’s obvious that on the weekend of the assassination, Dr. Perry was sure what he had seen was an entry wound in the throat. Every description he gave was indicative of an entry wound. He was pressured from the time the President’s body arrived at Bethesda to the time he was deposed on March 25, 1964 to change his story. In the end, the government got Perry to back down publicly and at the same time destroyed any copy of the press conference video.
Scripting the testimony
The Commission dealt with the Dallas doctors by pre-interviewing them before their depositions. Dr. Perry was one of those who sat down and talked “about the purpose of this deposition and the questions I would be asking you on the record”, with none other than Arlen Specter, the father of the Single Bullet Theory. ( 6 H 18 )
As I have mentioned in other essays of mine, in an ordinary court proceeding, where there is an adversarial format and witnesses are allowed to be cross-examined by defense counsel, this would be normal. But in this format, the intent of pre-interviewing of witnesses before they go on the record can only be to control or “coach” what they’re going to say. They go over what questions will be asked and frame how the witness is to answer.
Since there is no court reporter or stenographer present, only the Commission’s counsel and the witness, the witness may also be given notes by which to refer to during his answers.
And Dr. Perry wasn’t the only one pre-inteviewed by Arlen Specter.
He pre-interviewed Dr. Charles Baxter ( 6 H 44 ), Dr. James Carrico ( 6 H 7 ), Dr. Ronald Jones ( 6 H 57 ) and nurse Margaret Henchliffe ( 6 H 142 ) as well.
In fact, anyone who described the wound in the throat as an entrance wound or a small smooth wound, was pre-interviewed by Specter.
Talk about a conflict of interest.
Clues in the testimony
“….entry wounds are generally smaller and more regular than exit wounds. Entry wounds show invagination of tissue into the wound, while exit wounds show outward beveling of tissue.”
Adding to the evidence that the wound was NOT an exit wound, Drs. Baxter ( 6 H 42 ), Perry ( 6 H 9 ), Carrico ( 6 H 3 ) and Jones ( 6 H 54 ) all described in testimony a wound whose size was much smaller than the diameter of the bullet that the Commission alleged had made it.
After a bullet enters through the skin, the skin retracts due to its elasticity and thus will make the wound appear smaller than the bullet that has passed through it, but this only applies to entrance wounds.
Exit wounds are generally larger than the entrance wound because as the round moves through the body of the victim it decelerates and shatters the tissue and surrounding muscle. The exit wound normally looks larger and significantly more destructive than the entrance wound. Its edges are ragged and seem everted or “punched out”.
In other words, the wound could not have been an exit wound and at the same time, half the size of the bullet that made it.
None of the medical staff who viewed the throat wound identified it as an exit wound. All of their descriptions of it were consistent with an entrance wound.
The medical personnel speak out
Doctor Baxter described the wound as “spherical” and “did not appear to be jagged.” ( 6 H 42 )
Dr. Carrico testified that the wound was “fairly round” and “had no jagged edges”. ( 3 H 362 ) Dr. Perry described it as “roughly spherical to oval in shape, not a punched out wound, actually, nor was it particularly ragged. It was rather clean cut..” ( 6 H 9 ).
Dr. Jones described the wound as “no larger than a quarter of an inch in diameter” with “very minimal disruption or interruption of the surrounding skin.” A wound with “relatively smooth edges around the wound”. A ” very small, smooth wound”. ( 6 H 54 )
Nurse Margaret Henchliffe told the Commission that the hole “was as big around as my little finger” and that it was “an entrance bullet hole”. When pressed by Specter if the hole could have been an exit wound, she said that she could not remember ever seeing an exit bullet hole “that looked like that”. ( 6 H 141 )
Their descriptions in testimony indicate that the wound they saw was a wound of entry.
And their descriptions of the wound under oath weren’t the only evidence that the wound they saw was a wound of entry.
Written statements that the doctors made 2-3 hours after attending the President are of immense significance. Not only are they the first accounts of trained medical professionals regarding the President’s wounds, they are pure medical data, devoid of any “single bullet theory” or other factors that would affect opinions.
Clues in the initial notes
We need to look no further that Dr. Carrico’s initial statement that the wound in the throat was a “small penetrating wound in the anterior neck in lower 1/3.”
Penetrating trauma is an open wound injury that occurs when an object pierces the skin and enters a tissue of the body, creating a deep but relatively narrow entry wound.
Dr. Carrico, within a few hours of attending the President, was describing the President’s throat wound as a “penetrating wound” or wound of entry.
There was another doctor in Trauma Room 1 that day, who was ignored by the Commission and described the type of throat wound he saw that afternoon as a wound of entry.
The ignored doctor
One of those witnesses the Commission chose to ignore was Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who was mentioned eight times in testimony as having been in attendance in Trauma Room 1. ( 15 H 761 )
Dr. Crenshaw claimed that the wound he saw was a wound of entry.
The HSCA circus
In the 1970’s the House Select Committee on Assassinations took up the issue of the clean edges of the throat wound. Its Forensic Pathology Panel gave an opinion that defies every known fact regarding bullet exit wounds. You have to read it for yourself:
“The panel members agree that the fabric of the shirt and tie and their anatomical relationship to the underlying missile wound might have served as sufficient reinforcement to diminish distortion of the skin”. ( 7 HSCA 95 )
That’s right: the President’s tie and shirt offered enough resistance to prevent the outward exploding of the tissue of the neck as the bullet exited. That’s, what they said, was the reason why the wound was small and clean.
Evidence to the contrary
There’s only one problem. A “shored” exit wound leaves a scalloped or “punched out abrasion collar”, something this wound did not have.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6637946/
Dr. Perry described it as “roughly spherical to oval in shape, not a punched out wound, actually, nor was it particularly ragged. It was rather clean cut..” ( 6 H 9 ).
Dr. Perry knew the second he looked at it that it was a wound of entrance.
In addition, the House Select Committee’s Foresnsic Pathology Panel did not address the FBI’s spectrographic tests of the President’s shirt and tie which showed that no copper was found that “could be attributed to projectile fragments.” ( 20 H 2 )
If the shirt and tie were sufficient to shore, buttress or reinforce the skin ( as the HSCA’s FPP said ), there should have been traces of the copper jacket of CE 399 left on the shirt and tie as it had in the back of the shirt and jacket.
But there were none.
The House Select Committee spent more time trying to make excuses for the Warren Commission’s evidence than trying to get to the truth.
Tests prove the throat wound was not a wound of exit
How the HSCA’s Forensic Pathology Panel could have given such a far-out opinion on the roundness of the “exit” wound is puzzling in light of the tests done for the Warren Commission that showed that the Western Cartridge bullet was unstable on exit.
In other words, the tests showed that a bullet travelling through the President’s neck would have been already tumbling before it exited.
The expert who gave the testimony was Dr. Alfred Olivier, the Chief of the Wounds Ballistics Branch of the Dept. of the Army. His group fired rifle CE 139 using Western Cartridge 6.5 ammo lot # 6000. They simulated the President’s neck by using 13 1/2 to 14 1/2 centimeters of horsemeat and/or goatmeat. They covered that with goatskin to simulate the President’s skin and covered that with a suit coat, a tie and a shirt over the entrance side only. ( 5 H 77 )
Commission Exhibit 850 is the result of the 6.5 ammo’s effect on entering and exiting skin.
Tumbling before exiting
This evidence indicates that the 6.5 Western ammo was unstable and would have started tumbling before it left the President’s neck. That SHOULD have caused an elongated exit wound, not a clean, round wound.
The fact that the 6.5 ammo was tumbling BEFORE it exited the President’s body was revealed by Dr. Olivier in his testimony:
“On the exit side they are more elongated, two of them in particular are a little more longated. The bullet had started to become slightly unstable coming out.” ( 5 H 78 )
If the throat wound WERE an exit wound, it should have been LARGER than the 7mm entrance wound in the President’s back. But the estimates made by the medical staff who saw the wound BEFORE the tracheostomy had it at 3-5 mm. The test served to prove that the throat wound was NOT made by the 6.5 ammo exiting the throat.
The Commission dealt with this by lying about the test results in its Report.
The Commission lies in its Report
In its Report, the Commission concluded that “the exit holes, especially the one most nearly round, appeared similar to the descriptions given by Dr. Perry and Dr. Carrico to the hole in the President’s throat.” ( pg. 91 )
Of course, this is all a lie. Drs. Perry and Carrico could not and did not testify to this because their testimony was given 7 weeks BEFORE that of Dr. Olivier. They were never shown the goatskins and asked if the exit holes were similar to the hole they saw in the President’s throat.
The footnotes used in the Report refer to the testimony of Perry and Carrico, but only where they said the wound was round. At no time was either asked to compare the exit holes in the goatskin with the hole in the President’s throat.
Why not ? Because the Commission knew better.
Therefore, the Commission’s conclusion that the exit holes in the goatskin were “similar” to the hole seen by Drs. Perry and Carrico is not based on any evidence or testimony.
As you can see, the exit holes were much larger than the entrance holes, regardless of their shape, further evidence that a 3-5 mm hole in the throat could not have been made by this ammunition which made a 7 mm entrance hole in the back ( or back of the neck, for that matter ).
The autopsy report refers to the wound as “presumably of exit”
On page 4 of the autopsy report, we find that the wound in the throat described by Dr. Perry is called, “presumably of exit.”
The reason why the Prosectors had to call it “presumbaly of exit” instead of “of exit” was that they never knew until the following day that there was a bullet wound in the throat. They never saw it. They never examined it. No expert in forensic pathology ever examined a bullet wound in the throat.
And without a bullet track through the body connecting it to the back wound, there is no physical or medical evidence to support anyone’s claim that there was a transiting bullet that resulted in the throat wound being a wound of exit.
Conclusion
Dr. Perry correctly identified the throat wound as an entrance wound on the afternoon of the assassination.
The transcript of the press conference released by the ARRB proves that there were no hypotehtical questions about the throat wound and Dr. Perry was not expressing possibilites.
The questions were direct and his answers were direct.
For that very public opinion, Dr. Perry paid a price. He was repeatedly harrasssed by the authorities at Bethesda and the Secret Service to the extent that his participation in any subsequent press conferences were, by his choice, minimal.
He was convinced to change his public opinion that he didn’t get a good look at the throat wound and it could have either been a wound of entry or exit.
Dr. Perry was deposed and went on the record testifying under oath to something he knew was not true. As a result, he was forced to repeat it time and time again over the years.
But privately, Dr. Perry admitted that the wound was a wound of entry.
And there, I suggest to you, lies the truth. Not in what the doctors said, but in what they described.
The truth shall set you free
Dr. Perry’s original opinion that the throat wound was an entrance wound was buttressed by the medical professionals who saw the wound before the tracheostomy and gave descriptions consistent with an entrance wound.
Dr. Perry told Harold Weisberg that the edges of the wound were bruised, consistent with an abrasion collar made by an entering bullet.
He told Dr. Donald Miller that the wound, “was an entrance wound, definitely an entrance wound.”
It becomes obvious that Dr. Perry DID examine the wound before he made the tracheostomy incision, that he had a clear indication of whether the wound was one of entrance or exit and that he based his opinion on the evidence he saw.
It also becomes evident that since he made his opinion public, he was badgered into changing that opinion and lying under oath. And it bothered him to do that to the extent that he refused to talk about the wound except in rare occasions.
At some point, Dr. Perry had to realize that he, like many of the witnesses in this case, was a victim of a coverup. A coverup that continued with the House Select Committe’s half-assed investigation based on the pre-conceived notion that organized crime was behind the assassination.
When the US Army did the wound testing, they found that the 6.5mm Western Cartrdige ammunition started tumbling BEFORE it exited the simulated neck of the President, causing elongated exit wounds. They also found that the ammuntion left LARGER wounds upon exit. This totally destroys the Single Bullet Theory and the theory that the throat wound was a wound of exit. All of this evidence indicates that the throat wound was not an exit wound.
It was a wound of entry.
Final Points
- No one at Parkland Hospital ever identified the throat wound as a wound of exit.
- The autopsists never examined the wound because they didn’t know of its existence. They didn’t find out about it until the following day.
- As a result, there was no attempt to measure the wound and thus there is no evidence that it was larger than the 7mm entrance wound in the back.
- This is why their autopsy report describes the wound as ” presumably of exit “.
- No bullet track from the back wound to the throat wound was ever established, meaning that there is no physical evidence of a transiting bullet.
- When the FBI tested the front of President’s shirt and tie for traces of the copper jacket, it found no such traces, meaning that neither were in contact with CE 399.
- The bullet tests showed that the 6.5mm Western Cartridge ammunition made a larger hole on exit than it did on entrance. Doctors who saw the throat wound prior to the trachesotomy gave estimations that put it much smaller than the entrance wound in the back.
- The HSCA’s Forensics Pathology Panel never examined the wound. They went strictly from photographs which may or may not have been altered and reports which may or may not have been accurate. They took no action to put to rest any of the questions that linger, like why the descriptions of the wound did not match that of an exit wound.