**Shocking evidence of a signature ritual illuminati killing is
all over the Kennedy assassination.
1. He was killed in the triangle. (See below photo).
2. He was killed with the illuminati number 11
everywhere.
3. John Kennedy - 11 letters
4. The assassination date: 11/22/63. More multiples
of 11
5. Dallas Texas - 11 letters
6. Texas School Book Depository...411 Elm Street
7. Air Force One - 11 letters
8. Grassy Knoll - 11 letters
9. Dealey Plaza - 11 letters
10. JFK'S limo was traveling at 11 mph when he was
shot.
11. Dallas Texas - 33rd parallel.
Look at the next picture of the "wicked wink" between Lyndon
Johnson and Albert Thomas on air force one when
Johnson was being sworn in. Look at the look of
satisfaction between the two as they confirm that the
"job" was now complete.
We also want to give you a final look at what
Kennedy's assassin saw from behind the picket
fence...an easy shot.....
We at The Conspiracy Zone think one of the best analysis ever of the Murder of
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was done by Frederick L. Rice. It's interesting to note
the expose' was written before the deaths of one of Kennedy's mistresses (Judith
Exner) and Frank Sinatra. None the less, still one of the most accurate findings
we have studied.
The John F. Kennedy assassination has always had the air of being a riddle
hidden inside an enigma, with various official government conclusions being
forwarded at different times depending on which government body was
investigating the Presidential murder. The Warren Commission, charged with
the first investigation of the murder at the time it actually occurred, came
up with the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald managed to do it all alone in a
crazed effort to be recognized as a man to be reckoned with.
Various researchers-some of them known charlatans but many of them honest
researchers who came up with good hard facts that poked holes in the first
official conclusion-tracked the crime back to the probability that the murder
was probably set up by either the CIA or some other organization within the
federal government, big multinational businesses, or both. The House Select
Committee on Assassinations finally got its turn at bat in the late 1970s,
and reached the conclusion that the Mob did it. This, incidentally, was in
direct contradiction to where some of its own investigators were being led by
the facts. Some of them, like Gaeton Fonzi, had zeroed in on the fact that
Oswald was CIA affiliated following his return to the States from a defection
to Russia and had been seen in the company of a CIA "handler" not too many
weeks prior to the assassination.
Further muddying the waters with an implication toward the Mob did it were
the recent revelations of Judith Exner, former JFK mistress, who now says
that she was a conduit between the President and various American Mafia
figures who were involved in covert attempts on the life of Cuban Premier
Fidel Castro. Exner, the subject of an interview in "People" magazine in
which she notes she was the President to Mafia conduit and that she lied to
one investigating U.S. congressional committee when she denied it in the
mid-1970s, is not quoted as pointing the figure at any individual or group
she considers responsible for the JFK murder. What she does detail is what
she now claims is the actual story of her relationship with the President,
which included being a liaison between JFK and the Mob as well as the
President's lover prior to and after he became President. Why does she claim
she ought to be believed today when she makes these types of claims?
She was afraid for her life before since all the principals in the story are
dead except for her and all the others murdered. That
doesn't matter any more because she, at the time, knew she as going to die from
cancer, she says, and wants to clean her conscience up before she goes on to
her final reward. She has been quoted as saying that "For the past 25 years
I have been terrified to tell the truth about my relationship with Jack
Kennedy," then goes on to note that "In fact, I've gone to great lengths to
keep the truth from ever coming out, which is probably the only reason why
I'm alive today. With the exception of Sinatra, all the key figures involved
in my story have been murdered." A mastectomy in 1978 was followed by a
diagnosis last year as having metastatic cancer. Her doctor reportedly gives
her about three years to live, even though she had her left lung removed last
August.
What her story boils down to is that for 18 months in 1960 and 1961 she was
the President's link with mobsters, regularly carrying envelopes back and
forth between the President and Sam Giancana, the head of the Chicago Mafia,
as well as Johnny Roselli, Giancana's lieutenant in Los Angeles. She arranged
about 10 meetings between Kennedy and Giancana and believes one took place
inside the White House.
Although she says she was never told what transpired between the President
and Giancana, her speculation was in the People article that one of the
meetings involved attempts to influence the crucial West Virginia Democratic
primary before the 1960 election. Others apparently involved the CIA's
collaboration with the mafia to assassinate Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. The
assassination plots, known as Operation Mongoose, featured such esoteric
devices as poison pens, pills and cigars, exploding seashells and even a
contaminated diving suit.
One of the great unexplained situations arising out of the demise of the U.S.
House of Representatives' Select Committee on Assassinations ten years ago is
the reason why its recommendation that an ongoing investigation by the U.S.
Justice Department was never followed up on. The Committee had recommended
that further investigation be made along with a review of the acoustics
evidence that led the committee to state that there was somebody shooting in
Dealey Plaza in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald. All that the recommendations
the Committee left in its wake got was short shrift from a Federal Bureau of
Investigation review of the evidence.
The FBI rapidly and with no great loss of breath noted that the acoustics
evidence really didn't amount to anything, was basically flawed and therefore
really did not prove there was a second shooter at all. There the subject
has sat for the period of time since the Committee went out of business and
issued its report. End of story, end of investigation, end of any hope of
ever finding out who was involved in the obvious conspiracy to kill the
President.
Or is it that way at all? Was the lack of a continuing investigation after
the death of the Assassinations Committee actually the end of the road for
any real answers to the investigation, or is the abrupt killing of the
investigation an answer in itself?
Some researchers who have looked into the JFK assassination over the years
would say that it is an answer as to what direction the murder came from as
well as whether or not it was a successful one in terms of killing the
President and then covering up the fact that it was a plot. According to the
view of those persons, the murder was actually the successful carrying out of
a coup d'etat from within the federal government, or at least using parts of
the executive branch to help carry the assassination out.
Following the assassination, according to that outlook, Kennedy's supposed
protectors arranged for the coverup of the crime to be put into effect. The
result was that actually unraveling the plot would be almost impossible
except for a super large, well heeled investigative agency with plenty of
cash, experienced investigators who were totally honest and some high-tech
investigative tools like computers.
In the absence of this type of scenario, the dead stop of any continuing
investigation of the JFK murder marks a turning point in American history
that has never really been tied to any of the persons who probably carried it
out on an operational level. This is to not even mention the persons who
were actually the ones who ordered it, and went about carrying it out as far
as the planning and management levels of the operation were concerned.
The Warren Commission came up with the all-too-implausible story that Lee
Harvey Oswald was a lone madman and killed Kennedy alone. That story lasted
just as long as it took people to read some of the Commission's own evidence
that pointed to an actual conspiracy operating in the murder. And, while the
Committee to Investigate Assassinations did a better job in that it set
things straight about there being a conspiracy, it was dumb enough leadership
wise to drop promising leads to go for an "organized crime did it" answer
that didn't jell with most of the real evidence floating around.
Plenty of that evidence was in the form of what had been dug up over the
years by private assassination researchers and also by investigators for the
earlier Warren Commission which had originally investigated the JFK murder.
When that acoustics evidence was shot out of the water by the FBI claiming it
was flawed and not worth looking at, all the rest of the evidence floating
around that pointed to an actual conspiracy operating in the Dallas
assassination also faded into oblivion as if it also really hadn't existed in
the first place.
The nice thing about the acoustics evidence was that it actually showed there
were two shooters in Dealey Plaza when JFK was shot. It did that through the
Committee conducting a test firing on the spot from several locations, taping
the sound of gunfire with a battery of microphones strung through Dealey
Plaza, then having a private firm analyze and compare the outcomes of the
control tape. Also analyzed was a tape inadvertently recorded during the
assassination when a radio microphone button jammed open on a Dallas Police
Department motorcycle.
When the control firing tape was compared to the tape recorded inadvertently
by the Dallas Police Department, it was discovered that there were several
shots on the tape, and at least one of them came from the grassy knoll area
in front of the President in addition to the shots from the Book Depository.
Two shooters in Dealey Plaza automatically meant a conspiracy at work, since
the coincidence factor of two lone nuts deciding on their own to begin
shooting at the President in the same general area at the same time but from
two different locations simply staggers the imagination. Besides that, there
was plenty of evidence from those eyewitnesses leading to the conclusion that
there were indeed two shooters at least operating in Dealey Plaza.
Some independent assassination researchers, including some who have gained a
reputation for serious, scholarly research in the JFK shooting, have
postulated that there were probably more based on what is known of the actual
evidence. But to date there were at least two KNOWN firing locations-the
Book Depository, which is not to say that it was necessarily Lee Harvey
Oswald who did the shooting from there, and from the Grassy Knoll area.
Abraham Zapruder was one of those Dealey Plaza witnesses. He carried a second
witness in his hands in the form of a home movie camera which recorded the
assassination as it occurred and provided a graphic record of who was hit by
gunfire and when. The Zapruder film's depiction caught the result of a
probable hit to the right temple area of the President's head when it showed
his head head snapping backward in an abrupt, very violent manner to where
JFK actually bounced off of the upright seat cushions from the force of being
thrust back by the shot.
One Dallas motorcycle policeman who was in the motorcade, Bobby Joe Hargis,
was absolutely soaked by pinkish brain matter and blood that drenched over
him like a high-speed fog with enough force that made him think at first that
he also had been hit by gunfire. Hargis rode to the left rear of Kennedy's
position in the limousine during the motorcade to the Trade Mart, which was
just one indication of a plot at work. Other witnesses in Dealey Plaza when
the shooting occurred either reported things or took actions that indicated
there was shooting from the knoll area.
One railroad worker whose job in a nearby railway yard tower allowed him a
clear view of the grassy knoll area told investigators, both official and
private, that there had been a puff of smoke or steam from the fence area at
the top of the knoll. When he went down to the area in question following the
shooting, he noticed a lot of tracks and crushed out cigarette butts which
indicated somebody had laid in ambush there for some time.
Other persons in the same area as Abraham Zapruder, including one young man
fresh out of Army basic training, quickly hit the deck when it became obvious
the shooting was coming from directly behind them and they were in the line
of fire. One police officer went charging up the Grassy Knoll area to find a
man who flashed an identification card and said he was a Secret Service man.
Secret Service personnel later told the Warren Commission that all the agents
of that department in Dallas that day had gone to Parkland Hospital with the
President following the shooting. And so it went. There were more, more than
enough to nail down the idea of two firing positions and a conspiracy.
In looking at the days leading up to the JFK assassination in terms of the
occurrences that indicated an assassination plot at work, the time line
factor is probably the best one to use to show how things transpired. In the
month prior to the Dallas trip, for instance, President Kennedy had been
scheduled to attend the Army-Air Force football game at Soldier's Field in
Chicago on Nov. 2 as well as make a visit to Miami where he spoke at that
city's Trade Mart on Nov. 18. The planned football game attendance was
abruptly canceled, with most political and Presidential observers figuring
that the overthrow and murder of President Diem in South Vietnam the same day
as the football game was the reason why.
The common sense explanation was that Kennedy was either so grieved by the
occurrence in South Vietnam that he didn't want to appear in public, or it
might have caused some large crisis he would have needed to be in Washington
to cope with, or the overthrow of the South Vietnamese was actually a U.S.
Government sanctioned plan and Kennedy wanted to keep his finger on it. In
this case, as is usual, the common sense explanation for what happened was
totally off the mark and the actual reasons indicated that the Secret Service
and probably JFK also knew that somebody was out to kill him.
Abraham Bolden, the first black Secret Service agent to serve on the White
House Detail of that organization which is charged with Presidential
protection, was a direct participant in and an obvious victim of the
goings-on relative to the Chicago trip that wasn't. That particular Secret
Service man was one of the agents called in to Chicago from his business in
the Washington area due to an investigative effort that the Service was
carrying out into the probability of a hit team being ready to try for JFK in
that town.
Anthony Summers noted in his book CONSPIRACY that Bolden claimed Chicago
Secret Service agents were alerted to a threat against the President
involving a four-man team armed with high-powered rifles. One of the men,
according to what Summers notes Bolden told him, had a Latin name. The
ex-Secret Service agent also said that two of the suspects were detained on
the eve of the President's arrival and that two others eluded a surveillance
operation. Although one other agent recalls a threat at that time, he
Assassinations Committee found nothing on the record on that threat. It
noted, however, that President Kennedy's planned visit to Chicago was
abruptly canceled when crowds were already gathering to greet him.
Bolden was reportedly surveilling a Joseph Vallee, a man who was apparently
supposed to be involved in the Presidential murder plot, when Chicago police
moved in and arrested Vallee after a brief surveillance operation. An M-1
American Army rifle along with some three thousand rounds of ammo for it were
discovered in the trunk of the car the suspect had under his control at the
time. Vallee was later sprung out of the Chicago jail system with a more
serious charge against him being bucked down to a misdemeanor offense of
possession of a hunting knife. The arrested man was a former Marine with a
history of mental illness, Summers noted, and was also a member of the John
Birch Society as well as an outspoken opponent of the Kennedy administration.
He had also arranged to take time off from his job on the day of the
President's arrival. Bolden, meanwhile, developed problems of his own when
he decided that he wanted to testify before the Warren Commission following
the assassination about shortcomings in Secret Service protection and/or
investigation of the assassination.
What finally happened was that the Secret Service man wound up going to
prison on a conviction of selling government files to a counterfeiter, which
was later shown to have been obtained through the perjured testimony of the
one man to have testified against him. Just as strange in its own way was
what happened when Kennedy actually followed through with a visit to Miami
just a few days weeks prior to the Dallas trip.
The Miami Police, as well as police departments elsewhere in the United
States, have their network of informants set up in relation to a good many
things in an effort to keep abreast of what's happening in the world of
crime. This is just one of the ways that good police officers manage to get
information that will either lead them to the successful prosecution of a
crime that's happened, or in other cases, even prevent one before it happens.
In this case, the latter was what happened during the Miami trip.
On November 9 Captain Charles Sapp, the head of the Miami Police Department's
Intelligence Bureau, sat listening to a fuzzy tape recording of a
conversation between one of the department's informants and Joseph Milteer, a
wealthy joiner of extremist groups such as the White Citizens' Council of
Atlanta, the Congress of Freedom and the National States Rights Party (which
had close links with the anti-Castro movement). Milteer noted on the tape
that "You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about
the Cubans. There are so many of them here." Milteer then went on to say in a
response to the informant's observation about Kennedy having a thousand
bodyguards that "The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him."
"Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?" the
informant asked. "From an office building with a high-powered rifle . . ."
Milteer said. "He knows he's a marked man . . ." "They are really going to
try to kill him?" the informant asked. "Oh, yeah, it is in the working . . .
." Milteer responded. "Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we have got to know
where we are at. Because you know that will be a real shake if they do that,"
the informant noted. "They wouldn't leave any stone unturned there, no way.
They will pick up somebody within hours afterwards, if anything like that
would happen. Just to throw the public off," Milteer responded.
Sapp and his team of a dozen specialized detectives had provided security on
Kennedy twice before when he had visited Miami, working closely with the
local Secret Service and the FBI, providing backup intelligence and support
on the ground. The major security problem with Miami was its population of
well over a hundred thousand Cuban exiles, which Sapp had seven months
earlier had warned of his chief of as a growing danger. Sapp's contention
then was that "violence hitherto directed against Castro's Cuba would now be
directed toward various governmental agencies in the United States" as a
result of the President's crackdown on exile raids against the Castro regime.
When Sapp heard the tape, he feared that there might be an attempt on
President Kennedy's life when he arrived for his November 18 visit in Miami.
Sapp ensured that a warning about the Milteer tape went to the FBI and the
Secret Service with a special notation about Milteer's remark that the
President's assassination was "in the working." While the Secret Service did
check on Milteer's whereabouts, he was not questioned nor arrested. The
agents responsible for the President's safety in Miami did get briefed on the
matter, and a last-minute change in plans was made in the visit. What
happened was that a planned motorcade was canceled, Sapp recalled to Summers,
for fear of trouble from the anti-Castro movement.
On arriving at Miami Airport late in the day, the President then went into
Miami via a helicopter, spoke at the Americana Hotel, then was flown back to
the airport after the speech. Then he got back on board Air Force One and
flew back home. As in the case of the Chicago incident, the Secret Service
failed to mention the Miami scare to the agents responsible for advance
planning for the trip to Texas. Dallas was four days away.
The morning of November 22 members of the Presidential party noticed the
black-lined full-page ad in a local newspaper which accused the President of
various un-American activities such as selling out to Castro, operating in
line with "the spirit of Moscow" and other nefarious activities. By the time
Air Force One reached Love Field in downtown Dallas, several key actors in
the upcoming drama were already in place.
Lee Harvey Oswald was at work in the Texas School book Depository after being
given a ride there by Buell Wesley Frazier, who questioned him at the
beginning of the drive downtown about what he had in a long, wrapped package.
Oswald had replied that they were curtain rods he had picked up at the home
of Ruth Paine, where his wife Marina and his daughter June were staying
during one of the estrangements Oswald and his wife had over the months.
On the eve of the assassination, Jack Ruby appeared to have gone about his
usual night club business until the late evening. Shortly before 10 pm he
went out to dinner with his old crony Ralph Paul, who ran a local drive-in
restaurant. After that, Ruby's moves became more interesting. A friend of
Ruby's from Chicago, Lawrence Meyers, had earlier in the evening invited the
night club operator over to the hotel where he was staying, the Cabana, for a
drink, which Ruby complied with. The two men talked for a few minutes, Meyers
said later, then Ruby said he had to return to his club.
But one of Ruby's employees later said that as late as 2:30 a.m. Ruby had
called from the Cabana. While it is hard to tell who Ruby had visited if he
had not been with his old friend from his Chicago days, he had to be meeting
someone there. The question remains of who it was. On the morning of the
assassination, there are conflicting reports of where Ruby was at. Most of
the morning he dallied for hours in the offices of the DALLAS MORNING NEWS.
He was there for breakfast, and he made himself obvious to a number of
employees during the morning.
About half an hour prior to the assassination, one woman who was caught in a
traffic jam near the overpass in Dealey Plaza later told private researchers
and official investigators, she had noticed Ruby driving a pickup truck which
had parked at the bottom of the grassy knoll area with its right wheels up on
the sidewalk. A man got out of the right side of the pickup truck, plucked a
long, wrapped object out of the bed of the truck, then went up the slope of
the knoll area toward the fence area where the Assassinations Committee years
later would show with its acoustics evidence that some of the gunfire during
the assassination came from.
But Ruby was also noticed at the morning newspaper also in the half hour
prior to the assassination, being in the advertising department with cash in
hand to pay for his club ads which was a departure from normal custom for
Ruby. Usually he was erratic in payments and tardy in submitting advertising
copy to the newspaper. Ruby was also noticed in the advertising department
just after the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, which is located just a few
blocks away from the newspaper. Some private investigators of the
assassination figure that one of the reasons that Ruby was at the newspaper
was for an alibi, at least at the time period leading up to the
assassination.
The President, meanwhile, flew from Fort Worth where he and Jackie and the
rest of his entourage had spent the night following his political appearance
in that town, then the motorcade assembled and headed for the downtown area
along the motorcade route. There are several explanations of the chronology
of events during the actual shooting that have been advanced from available
evidence over the years, depending on what interpretation of available
evidence one wants to put the most belief in.
The Assassinations Committee postulated two firing positions-one in the
School Book Depository Building with Lee Harvey Oswald firing two shots which
actually struck and killed the President with another shooter firing from the
Grassy Knoll area who missed the President. Most serious students and
researchers who have looked into the JFK assassination take into
consideration what the Assassinations Committee did not, figuring that the
backward snap of the President's head was caused by the impact of a bullet
fired from the Grassy Knoll in front of the President which hit him in the
right temple.
Several eyewitnesses told news reporters following the assassination that the
President was hit in the right temple, which is awfully hard to tie in to the
Grassy Knoll shooter missing. There is also the fact that Bobby Joe Hargis,
the motorcycle officer to the left rear of the President, was spattered with
the President's brain matter, which also indicates a gunshot which hit the
President's right temple from where it was fired from the Grassy Knoll area.
The general sequence of events most heard from assassination researchers is
as follows:
-The Presidential limousine made the hairpin curve into Dealey Plaza into the
killing zone between the Book Depository and the Grassy Knoll area at low
speed, then rolled onward at approximately 10 miles per hour.
-When the gunfire began, most people were reminded of the sound of
firecrackers, which ties in with the type of report that a small-caliber
round such as the 5.56 mm or .223 caliber round which the military M-16 round
uses.
-JFK was probably first hit in the back by a shot from the rear. Occupants of
the Presidential limousine recalled later that Kennedy said, "My God, I'm
hit" just after the firing began.
-The second shot, probably fired from the front, apparently hit JFK in the
throat. When the assassination sequence is viewed by watching the Zapruder
film, the limousine is hid for a brief time by a "Stemmons Freeway" traffic
sign. When the limousine emerges from behind the sign in the Zapruder film,
JFK is clutching at his throat. Apparently his vocal cords have been shot out
and he is incapable of making a sound after this. Parkland Hospital doctors
reported that the tracheotomy incision they made in the President's throat
was emplaced into an already-existing bullet hole.
-John Connally, then the governor of Texas, is hit by another gunshot from
the rear as he attempts to look around at President Kennedy. His cheeks puff
out from the air being forced from his lungs and further reaction to his
gunshot wound follows.
-Finally, John F. Kennedy is hit by what is apparently the last bullet to
reach a target during the assassination, when he is hit in the right temple
and his body is thrown backward violently against the back cushion of his car
seat, with his brains being sprayed out over the left rear of the open
limousine.
The mayhem following any violent event such as a murder started then. The
limousine started accelerating, while Jackie Kennedy in shock began climbing
onto the trunk of the car in a futile effort to recover some of the debris
from the head of the by-then-dead President. A Secret Service agent gallops
up to the rear of the car as it begins to accelerate, hops on board the rear
and forces Mrs. Kennedy back inside.
The vehicles of the motorcade begin rolling to Parkland Hospital at high
speed as Jesse Curry, then the Dallas police chief, broadcasts orders for
officers to get up on the overpass at the south end of the plaza and find out
what happened up there. When the President's body reaches Parkland Hospital,
various lifesaving techniques are tried in vain, including the placing of the
tracheotomy and placement of air tubes into the chest area. Those measures
prove futile since it's practically impossible for anybody to remain alive
with almost half their head blown off by gunfire.
Jack Ruby once again enters the situation by being spotted by persons who
knew him at Parkland Hospital. Speculation arises later that he had planted
the so-called "Magic Bullet," which the Warren Commission later insists
wounded both Kennedy and Connally yet only lost a few grains of its total
weight and remained in practically its original shape despite going through
two men, and hitting several large, hard bones on the way. Any other bullet
would have been severely flattened on its front end but the "Magic Bullet"
was not.
As the saga of the conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination unfolds, we
find that the Secret Service was in fishy waters up to its earlobes when it
was decided it was high time to get the Presidential party out of Dallas.
Once again we have a discrepancy between what the official story was as to
the reason for getting out of Dallas against what the real reason could have
been with a conspiracy at work.
The official story was a twofold one, which held that it was decided somehow
that the feelings of Jacqueline Kennedy were to be spared the ordeal of
staying in Dallas any longer and possibly having to come back later for an
inquest, along with a very real sense of uncertainty about what was actually
occurring. It was thought by some of the Presidential party that the death of
President Kennedy could have been the opening salvo of a coup d'etat and
others, such as vice president Lyndon Baines Johnson could well be next.
Better to pull up stakes fast and get to the airport, then get airborne for
Washington as fast as possible before anybody else got shot. After all, there
were killers in the area.
On the other hand, what the hasty departure from Parkland Hospital also did
was ensure that no independent and accurate autopsy was done on the body of
JFK. With the departure of the corpse from the hands of then-Dallas County
Medical Examiner Earl Rose, the way was clear for a fast surgical alteration
of the way the head looked, as far as the wound trajectory patterns were
concerned, and also to probably get any bullet fragments dug out of the brain
area so that manufactured evidence could be used against Lee Harvey Oswald.
Rose, in fact, did object to any idea of the Secret Service and the
Presidential party taking the corpse out of Dallas prior to an autopsy being
held there, but he had one main problem with that-he was heavily outnumbered
by men who were simply not about to listen to reason.
Aubrey Rike, who at the time of the assassination worked for the O'Neal
funeral home which supplied the bronze casket the President supposedly rode
back to Washington in, noted that the argument over whether the body should
stay or go was one of the scariest things he had ever seen in his life.
Vernon O'Neal's funeral home had the contract for part of the ambulance
service in Dallas in November of 1963. Rike, along with "Peanuts" McGuire,
another O'Neal employee, had helped put President Kennedy's body into the
bronze Brittanica casket after JFK was pronounced dead. The casket had been
lined with what Rike described as a heavy plastic sheet that is normally used
for bedwetters and other cases where body fluids leak. The body was then
wrapped in sheets and put into the coffin. Vernon O'Neal then closed the
casket and the three men, along with the Catholic priest present, were not
allowed to leave the room at the behest of the Secret Service.
Mrs. Kennedy came in twice, once to put a ring on her husband's finger and a
second time after the casket was closed. About the pushing match over the
coffin, Rike told Lifton that "I was scared to death. I was scared all the
time I was there . . . Dallas wanted to do an autopsy. The government wanted
the casket out. The government said `Take it out'; Dallas would say `Bring
it back.' You know, we'd start pushing, and somebody would grab us, and push
us back, and pull the casket back. You'd have to see it to believe it." Rike
also added that " . . . it was the most unorganized, scary type situation
that I have ever been in in my life. I'm a policeman now and I've been up
against all kinds of stuff," in his interview with Lifton.
Another angle of view to the brouhaha over the coffin was provided by William
Manchester in his book DEATH OF A PRESIDENT. In Manchester's narrative of the
incident, Earl Rose confronted the Kennedy forces led by Roy Kellerman, head
of the White House detail of the Secret Service at the time of the
assassination in the hallway of Parkland Hospital. "Rose . . . turned to
leave the nurse's station. Kellerman blocked the way. In his most deliberate
drawl, Roy said, `My friend, this is the body of the President of the united
States, and we are going to take it back to Washington.' "`No, that's not the
way things are.' Rose wagged his finger. `When there's a homicide, we must
have an autopsy.' "`He is the President. He is going with us.' "Rose lashed
back, `The body stays.' "`My friend, my name is Roy Kellerman. I am the
Special Agent in charge of the White House Detail of the Secret Service. We
are taking President Kennedy back to the capital.' "`You are not taking THE
BODY anywhere. There's a law here. We're going to enforce it.'"
Then Dr. Burkley, the White House physician, entered the fray. "`Mrs.
Kennedy is going to stay exactly where she is until the body is moved. We
can't have that.'" Rose wouldn't budge. "`It's the President of the United
States!`" Burkley said. "`That doesn't matter,' Rose replied. `You can't
lose the chain of evidence.'" But that's exactly what happened, since the
body of John F. Kennedy disappeared from the coffin it was supposed to be in
during the trip to Bethesda Naval Medical Center. The casket was wheeled to
the hearse and put inside, Jacqueline Kennedy climbed inside and sat next to
the casket, and the Secret Service commandeered the O'Neal hearse and drove
to the airport.
The hearse arrived at Air Force One at Love Field at 2:14 p.m., and Secret
Service personnel and Air Force One staff helped carry the casket up the
ramp. Secret Service reports noted that the casket was in place at 2:18 p.m.
on the aircraft, and by 2:47 p.m. Air force One was airborne following the
swearing-in of Lyndon Baines Johnson as President. The casket, ostensibly
holding the body of President John F. Kennedy, was placed in the Boeing 707's
tail compartment in the quarters normally used for Secret Service agents and
White House staff, against the port side of the aircraft just forward of the
rear door. From the time the casket went aboard the plane at Love Field in
Dallas to the time the plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland,
somebody apparently got that body out of that coffin. They then somehow got
it off the airplane and to some location during an approximate 20-minute
travel gap between Andrews and Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
The object in getting the body to that unknown location was for purposes of
surgical alteration of the President's head, which made the wound trajectory
patterns look different to a degree at Bethesda than they did at Parkland.
These conclusions were the result of David Lifton's research into the head
wound patterns and were based on actual interviews with Navy enlisted men who
worked at the Bethesda morgue on the night that the autopsy was performed on
the President.
The Parkland doctors who worked on JFK when he was brought to that hospital,
with the exception of just one, stated that a large exit hole was located in
the rear of JFK's head at Parkland, which implied that he had been shot from
the front. The official conclusions by the Warren Commission and the
Assassinations Committee, which were based on the official autopsy report
which was based on autopsy findings at Bethesda, put the exit wound at the
front right of Kennedy's head which meant he got shot in the head from
behind, namely by Lee Harvey Oswald.
What that meant, Lifton noted in BEST EVIDENCE, was that surgical head wound
trajectory alteration twisted the main piece of evidence-the body-around so
that it was made to lie. Earl Rose, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, was
also correct in stating during his tussle with the Secret Service that the
chain of evidence had to be preserved. What he meant was that it had to be
proven to a jury or a judge in a trial of anybody connected with the murder
of the President that JFK had been shot at point A, pronounced dead at point
B, autopsied at point C, a report prepared at D, and so on, with no break in
the chain of possession of the body at any point along the way. If the chain
were broken, the entire process would be flawed and the results of the
autopsy would also be flawed and tossed out of court as evidence. The autopsy
report just wouldn't exist as evidence, in short.
In the end, that is exactly what happened since the whereabouts of the body
was unknown from the time Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base
until the time it showed up at Bethesda-since there was no accounting for
where it was exactly at all times, the autopsy report was flawed and
therefore worthless as evidence. If Lee Harvey Oswald had not been killed by
Jack Ruby and had gone to trial, Dallas County authorities would have had to
do without an autopsy report and their case would probably have been gravely
weakened. This is in addition to the spectre of conspiracy raising its head
in the disappearance of the body for that small length of time along with the
appearance of the head wounds being different at Bethesda than it was at
Parkland.
The story of the arrival of John F. Kennedy's body at Bethesda Naval Medical
Center begins with personnel at that facility being informed of the arrival
of the President's body and how the autopsy proceedings would be handled, as
well as security arrangements surrounding the autopsy. J. S. Layton
Ledbetter was Chief of the Day for the Medical Center Command, and was one of
those persons who were aware of the fact that the President's body was at the
hospital before it was supposed to have arrived in the motorcade from Andrews
Air Force Base.
Ledbetter had reported to Bethesda for work at perhaps 4:20, shortly before
his shift as Chief of the Day was to start at 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963. A
phone call came in from "downtown" as Ledbetter called it as he walked in and
he took the call, with the news the call conveyed being that the President's
body would be coming to Bethesda. While he was taking the call, three Secret
Service agents showed up at his office. "I answered the phone. The White
House wanted to speak to the Officer of the Day, and . . . these three
gentlemen walked up to me and they said: `Are you Chief Ledbetter? Do you
have the Chief of the Day watch today?' And I said, `Yes, sir, I do. Can I
help you?' He said, `We're Secret Service men receiving the body of President
Kennedy back here, and . . . there's already twenty-six of us here on the
compound.' They identified themselves." Ledbetter's contact was limited to
those three Secret Service agents along with "a few more" later on but they
made it perfectly clear to him that from that point forward the autopsy was a
Secret Service operation.
Lifton noted that the Secret Service men seen by Ledbetter at 4:20 p.m. were
as unknown to the official records of the investigation as the so-called
Secret Service men that some persons ran into on the Grassy Knoll. Assuming
the ones at Bethesda who spoke with Ledbetter were authentic, the only
conclusion Lifton could reach was that the Secret Service had sent a
contingent of operatives to Bethesda but never chose to reveal that to the
Warren Commission or the FBI. Ledbetter referred the group of agents to the
Administrative Duty Officer, and arrangements were made for the handling of
the autopsy.
The Chief's account made it clear that by 4:30, some two and a half hours
prior to the time the body got to the hospital, agents were at the hospital
and had made detailed arrangements as to who would conduct the Presidential
autopsy, Lifton noted. Dennis David, for instance, was Chief of the Day for
the Medical School which was located at Bethesda Naval Hospital the day of
JFK's murder. David also told Lifton when interviewed by that author that
the coffin that arrived in the ambulance at the front of Bethesda with Jackie
Kennedy was empty. This was the big bronze Brittanica job that was offloaded
from Air Force One at Andrews while the one military helicopter was flying
away from the right side of the aircraft.
David, who retired from the Navy as a Lieutenant Commander in the Medical
Service Corps, was a Petty Officer First Class (E-6) on Nov. 22, 1963, and
was an editor of training manuals for Hospital Corpsmen affiliated with the
U.S. Navy Medical School at Bethesda. He was Chief of the Day for the
Medical School on Nov. 22 and when he heard about the assassination went to
the office of the Master at Arms and sat there listening to the radio with
Dr. Boswell, one of the doctors who later were involved in the autopsy.
At about 5 or 5:30
p.m., David noted to Lifton, the radio announcer reported that Kennedy's body
was being flown in from Texas and would be taken to the Medical School. The
Chief of the Day for the Medical Center Command was in touch with him within
fifteen minutes, David added, and Secret Service agents were also at the
hospital. "They called us together . . . I was asked to get a certain number
of people to help guard the doors, to stand at the elevators, to act as roving
patrols to keep sightseers and other morbid people out," Dennis David told
Lifton. David also had to make telephone calls to various members of the
morgue crew so that they would come in to the morgue for the upcoming autopsy.
When David got to the point where he described the arrival of the coffin with
JFK's body for Lifton the surprises really started.
What the ex-Navy man
recounted was the arrival of the body via the back door of the hospital rather
than the front, some thirty minutes prior to the arrival of the bronze casket
that it was supposed to be in, and in a plain, gray shipping casket instead of
the bronze casket it was supposed to have arrived in at the front of the
Bethesda facility later. David said that the plain shipping casket arrived
with JFK's body at approximately 6:40 p.m. at the rear loading dock of the
Medical Center, in a black Cadillac hearse with no markings on it, with two
attendants in the front and six or seven men in back with the casket whom
David assumed were Secret Service men.
The men in the rear of the hearse
opened the vehicle up and they, along with some of the sailors at the medical
facility, unloaded the casket from the hearse and took it into the morgue,
David said. The black Cadillac hearse had come down a street at the rear of
the Naval medical facility and pulled up at a loading dock at the rear of the
building, David noted, and while he personally did not see Kennedy's body
being taken from the shipping casket after it went into the morgue Dr. Boswell
told him later that JFK's corpse had been in the shipping casket. David also
noted that it was obvious that there was something in the shipping casket
because if it was empty six to eight men would have bounced it around as they
were carrying it.
This shipping casket did not bounce and you could see the
men carrying it strain as they did, he noted. Dennis David also noted that he
had been on the balcony on the interior of the front of the Medical Center
building approximately half an hour later when the official motorcade with the
bronze "official" casket arrived from Andrews Air Force Base. The ex-Navy man
noted that it was obvious that the bronze casket was empty when it was brought
in because of being told by one of the autopsy doctors earlier that it had
come in by way of the shipping casket. The men Dennis David worked with also
discussed the matter, and he recalled that one conversation that he and some
of the other Bethesda personnel had with one of the federal agents as to why
there had been so much rigmarole with more than one ambulance being involved
in getting the body to Bethesda. The answer that the federal agent gave was
that it was necessary to keep a bit more control that would be necessary on
the process because it was feared that somebody might attempt to hijack the
corpse, or there might be delays due to people perhaps gathering around and
slowing up traffic.
While Dennis David had lost sight of the shipping casket with JFK's body in it
when it went into the morgue, persons inside the morgue automatically got
their first glimpse of the conveyance that the deceased President's body
arrived in as it entered. One of those persons was Paul Kelly O'Connor, who
along with James Jenkins had the duty of preparing the body of the dead
President for the autopsy. O'Connor had been assigned to pathology at the
medical school, and that was his duty station the day John Kennedy was shot.
When the news hit Bethesda that the President had been shot, all classes were
canceled and everybody was told to report to their duty station, according to
O'Connor's recollection. That meant he had to report to the morgue, where he
and Jenkins were told that they were confined to the morgue and they were
going to have an "important visitor" that night. That was the first they knew
the President was on his way to Bethesda, O'Connor said. The body came into
the morgue in a shipping casket, O'Connor noted, which is nothing but a cheap
casket used to move dead persons from one location where they died at to
whatever their destination might be. O'Connor described the shipping casket as
a sort of slate gray color that was kind of pinkish on the edges.
The
surprise that O'Connor provided was that when the lid of the coffin was undone
by unscrewing the screws that held it down the President's body was not
wrapped in sheets as Aubrey Rike said he had been in Dallas, but was instead
discovered in a body bag. O'Connor, who had worked in a funeral home in his
Indiana hometown as a teenager, described a body bag as nothing but a rubber
bag that bodies are put into after a disaster or other violent incident which
is zipped up, the same sort of bag that dead soldiers were brought back from
Vietnam in. The President's body was naked from head to toe, O'Connor
recollected, with only a sheet being wrapped around the head. Normally the
brain is removed from a corpse for examination during an autopsy, O'Connor
told Lifton, but that just couldn't be done in the case of JFK due to the fact
that there was literally no brain left in his head. O'Connor, who at the time
Lifton interviewed him believed the Warren Report, said that the wound to his
head was "terrific," and measured some eight by four inches.
It also stretched
from the right rear of the head to the right temple area of the head when
O'Connor first saw Kennedy's body, in comparison to a much smaller wound in
the right rear of the head seen by the doctors at Parkland Hospital. The
ex-funeral home worker told Lifton that he believed the bullet must have
literally blown all the brains out of Kennedy's head, due to the fact that the
head was literally totally empty. There were some small bits of brain left in
the head, but for the greatest part there was no brain left in the head. There
was no need to remove the skullcap and open the skull as is usually done in an
autopsy, O'Connor noted. These guys in the Bethesda morgue did not have to do
that. They just looked right down into the head through that huge hole and
noticed there was nothing left in the brain case. The autopsy doctors noticed
it also and O'Connor noted that they were "aghast" when that detail of the
President's condition at the start of the autopsy was noted, probably due to
the fact there was no brain left in the head and the severity of the wound.
The morgue technicians didn't have to tell Commander Humes,the chief autopsy
surgeon, that there was no brain, O'Connor said.
The appearance of the dead
President really must have shaken Commander Humes up, from the way O'Connor
described his reaction. "He was scared to death," O'Connor told Lifton.
O'Connor had also noted that he was afraid also, because that sort of
situation on first looking at a corpse was not normal. He was also just a
junior enlisted guy with a bunch of big Admirals and whatnot about. " . . . I
just decided to keep my mouth shut," O'Connor said. James Curtis Jenkins,
also in charge of prepping the body for autopsy along with O'Connor, noted
that when he first saw the body it had a hole in the head that had taken off
at least one third of the skull which was gone.
The hole extended toward the
rear, with fragments that seemed to be hanging on, and which seemed to have
been exploded toward the rear. Jenkins, who had previous exposure to the
effects of gunshot wounds, expressed the belief that Kennedy had been shot in
the head from the front. He had not noticed a frontal entry wound and assumed
it had been blown away when the bullet struck, and concluded that the bullet
must have struck from the right front. The next day, Jenkins noted, "I found
out that supposedly he had been shot from the back. I just, you know, I just
couldn't believe it, and have never been able to believe it. "I was very
surprised by the conclusion . . . it was really kind of shocking to me. I
guess I accepted it because of the circumstances I was in . . . But, I mean, I
didn't accept it as being fact." Lifton noted in his book that it was clear
from speaking with Jenkins that he was very frightened by the experience. He
had left the autopsy room convinced of the fact that Kennedy had been shot
from front to back, only to find out from the next day's newspapers that the
opposite had been reached as an autopsy conclusion. "It frightened me," he
said. "I did not discuss it with anybody for many, many years, but I followed
it very closely . . . I eventually discussed it with my wife."
The official
story surrounding the autopsy held that conclusions about how Kennedy was shot
and from what direction were reached the night of the autopsy, but Jenkins
recalled that this was not the case. "There were no conclusions that night,"
Jenkins told Lifton. What Jenkins heard at the autopsy table he described as
"discussions." "There were some speculations-discussions-between the three
physicians, with a couple of other people-I don't know who they were. They
seemed to be in charge, or seemed to be some type of authority," Jenkins said.
Jenkins didn't know who those civilians were who had the discussions with the
doctors, but what they were talking about with the doctors was an obvious
source of friction. When the conversations came around to the fatal shot,
Jenkins noted, "There were some discussions, questions asked, and things of
that nature. but it was all kind of in a manner of-you know, searching for a
conclusion, as opposed to drawing a conclusion." As to the role of the
civilians, Jenkins said that "The people running around in civilian clothes. Jenkins
also noted that at the time he felt like Dr. Humes and Commander Boswell were
getting irritated during the autopsy, and got the idea on his own that the two
doctors were somehow being chastised. Jenkins also noted that the source of
the overall irritation in the morgue was the two or three civilians who were
there during the autopsy, but he really didn't know who they were. "I don't
know what they were, or who they were, or what their functions were, or
anything of that nature," Jenkins noted in the Lifton interview. Jenkins had
been preoccupied with the medical details of the examination and didn't
remember much about the civilians. He was tied down with handing doctors
instruments, making sure the specimens were available, taking down weights of
various things and handling other chores connected with the autopsy. Jenkins
also noted that there were more than five men in civilian clothes at the
morgue during the autopsy, pointing out that he could not give Lifton an exact
number. He noted that many more were present and they were sitting in the
"gallery" section of the morgue that was a bit removed from the morgue proper
but afforded a clear view of the proceedings.
While Jenkins was a bit vague
during the interview on some aspects of the autopsy proceedings, his recall on
the controversy over the neck trajectory was vivid. The wound at the front of
the throat was assumed throughout the autopsy to be a tracheotomy, he said.
But the civilians who seemed to be in charge seemed to be trying to get Humes
to conclude that a bullet passed from back to front through the body. Jenkins
had a clear recollection that this sort of thing was not possible, and
remembered very clearly Humes probing the back wound with his little finger.
"What sticks out in my mind is the fact that Commander Humes put his little
finger in it, and, you know said that . . . he could probe the bottom of it
with his finger, which would mean to me [it was] very narrow," Jenkins noted.
After the body was opened and the organs removed, Jenkins watched the doctors
probe it again and remembered looking inside the chest cavity and seeing the
probe through the bottom of the lining of the chest cavity, which also
indicated that the wound was not very deep.
Jenkins also noted that he had
assumed the autopsy report would have concluded that the President had been
shot once in the back from behind and the bullet could not be found during the
autopsy, and that the second shot to the head had come from the front. In
explaining how the autopsy report had come to be written the way it was, going
along with the standing Warren Commission and Assassination Committee reports
that the shots that hit Kennedy both came from behind, Jenkins
straightforwardly said that Humes was a "super-military type of person," not
in that he was authoritarian in nature but that he was concerned with his next
promotion and his military career in general. "He was the type of individual
that would do anything anybody above him told him to do . . . my personal
feeling is that he was probably directed to write the autopsy report." Jenkins
also told Lifton that he has always assumed that those types of directions
came from someone outside the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Lifton noted that the
chain of command was pretty short at the level the autopsy was performed
at-Humes's senior officers were the commanding officer of the medical school,
the Commanding Officer of the Medical Center, and the U.S. Surgeon General.
"And then you're either at the Joint Chiefs of Staff or orders from the White
House," Lifton observed. Jenkins replied that "I didn't say that, you did."
Lifton noted in the book he wrote based on his findings that it was obvious
Jenkins had given the matter some thought and was not comfortable discussing
it. What Jenkins had to say also cast some doubt on the fact that despite
that fact that Kennedy's body was altered, it was not altered sufficiently to
create the unambiguous appearance of a shot from the rear. The former morgue
attendant noted that when the body arrived in the autopsy room, at least a
third of the skullbone was not attached. Fragments were in the coffin while
some were attached to the scalp.
He noted that the right rear and right side
of the head was a large gaping area, but that most of the bones were still
there and were put back together during the autopsy. "It had just been
crushed, and kind of blown apart, toward the rear," Jenkins said. In short,
despite the wound pattern being different then, it did not give the
unambiguous appearance of a back-to-front shot. It did later after the head
area was filled in with plaster of paris, though. The main thing Jenkins
derived from the autopsy was that the President was shot in the head from the
front, and that fact was covered up from the start. Lifton noted that during
the conversation he had with Jenkins the man was still frightened. The former
corpsman was also very incredulous about the veracity and credibility of the
federal government in the wake of the mangled autopsy report. "Every time
there seems to be something of importance that affects the nation, and I'm
told one way by the government, I'm skeptical about it. Because this (the JFK
assassination) was probably the most significant thing that had happened in
this country in God knows how long, and my feelings are that the people
themselves were just-well, to be quite frank-lied to about it.**
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