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seen Oswald's rifle. The PSE showed considerable stress in his statements.
Ratcliffman Gerald L. Hill testified that he und three spent bullet hulls on the floor near the window from which the fatal shots allegedly were fired. The PSE showed red stress in his statements.
The rifle was one of the principal points cited by the Warren Commission to link Oswald to the assassination. The PSE substantiated the testimony that Oswald owned rifle and that the evidence supplied to ballistics expert indicated this rifle was a murder weapon. However, the PSE did not substantiate the controversial claims of Dallas police regarding the discovery of its evidence.
The hospital employee was apparently telling the truth when he recounted finding the bullet on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, but many critics have charged that the bullet had been deliberately planted there. This is the famous "single bullet" which the Warren Report says passed through the bodies of both the President and Governor Connally, and then lodged in Connally's wrist. Several researchers have tried to repeat this, firing the same type of bullet to the wrist of a cadaver. The bullets never remained perfectly intact, as the one found on the stretcher; they became twisted lumps of lead and copper.
The second link between Oswald and the assassination is the charge that he killed Officer Tippitt, a Dallas policeman, while fleeing from the scene of the first shooting. A number of eyewitnesses have testified that they saw Oswald shoot Tippitt, and one of them, Domingo Benavides, was interviewed on the CBS tapes. He was asked if there was any doubt in his mind that Oswald was the man he saw shoot Tippitt. He replied, "No, sir, there was no doubt at all." There was absolutely no stress in his statement. He was telling the truth.
The killing of Officer Tippitt by Oswald is fueled the fires of controversy over the Warren Report. Tippitt was far from his usual state when he was shot. Some witnesses have alleged that Tippitt and Oswald were seen together in Jack Ruby's nightclub. They theorize that the three men were part of an assassination conspiracy, and that Tippitt had been sent to silence Oswald, it had been beaten to the draw.
The Dallas police radio dispatcher, Officer Murray Jackson, was asked if he ought Tippitt knew Oswald. "No," he replied. "I don't think he knew Oswald." Did Jackson know Oswald? "No," answered Jackson, "I didn't either." The PSE showed heavy stress in both statements.
Perhaps the greatest source of controversy over the Warren Report is its claim that all the shots were fired by one gunman. Some eyewitnesses claim to have heard shots and seen gunsmoke in the area of the low hillock ahead and to the right of the presidential motorcade. This hillock has come to be known as "the grassy knoll." One of these witnesses was a railroad worker named S.M. Holland, who observed the scene from an overpass near the knoll. The PSE confirmed that he thought he had seen a puff of smoke on the knoll, but it could not support his claim that he had heard a shot from that direction.
Another witness, Charles Brehm, was quoted by Mark Lane as having said that he had seen a portion of the President's skull flying back over the left rear end of the limousine. Lane offered this as evidence of a shot from the grassy knoll. On the CBS tapes, Brehm stated heatedly that he had been quoted out of context, and emphatically denied that any shots had come from the knoll. Despite his emotional state, there was almost no stress in this statement.
Officer Jacks of the Dallas police, who was riding in the limousine of Vice-President Johnson, denied that any of the shots had come from the direction of the grassy knoll. The PSE turned up a fair degree of stress.
Three witnesses, Mrs. Caroline Walther, Arnold Rowland and Howard Brennan, claimed to have seen gunmen in the windows of the Texas School Book Depository building. Mrs. Walther said she saw two men, one armed with a rifle, the second with a shorter gun. Rowland told the Warren Commission he had seen two men, one an elderly Negro, in the window Oswald is alleged to have fired from, but on the CBS tapes he claimed he had seen an armed man at a different window. The Commission relied heavily on the testimony of Brennan, who claimed to have seen a gunman in the "Oswald window" actually firing the last of the shots. The PSE showed hard stress in the testimony of all three witnesses.
The PSE analysis of the eyewitnesses' testimony regarding the source of the shots is ambiguous. It supports Holland's claim to have seen a puff of smoke on the knoll, and Brehm's denial that any shots came from that direction, and it raises serious doubts about all other claims and counter-claims. This contradiction seems to result from the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses, perhaps compounded by a fair amount of fabrication. Deception, if it is present here, may have been motivated merely by a desire for attention. Or there may have been darker reasons.
There is, however, other evidence and testimony that could shed some light on the existence, number and location of assassins other than Oswald. This brings us to perhaps the most dubious and controversial element in the Warren Commission's version of the event—the autopsy.
Within minutes after the shooting, Kennedy had been rushed to the emergency room at Parkland Hospital, where Dr. Malcolm Perry tried to save his life. The physician saw that the President had suffered a massive head wound and a smaller wound in the throat. Perry performed a tracheostomy, cutting through the throat wound in an attempt to open a breathing passage. Afterward, when hope for the President had been abandoned, Perry met with the press and declared that the wound in the front of the neck had been an entry wound.
The President's body was flown to Washington, D.C. There, approximately eight hours after the shooting, an autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Because of the tracheostomy, the nature of the neck wound could no longer be observed and was, at first, overlooked. Later, after consulting the Dallas doctors, the Bethesda pathologists concluded that it was an exit wound. The autopsy report stated that there were two entry wounds, one low in the rear scalp and one at the right base of the neck; and two exit wounds, the throat wound and a large irregular wound on the right side of the head.
The confusion was compounded when two FBI agents present at the autopsy reported that a wound had been found in the President's back, and that no corresponding exit wound had been located. Diagrams made during the autopsy seemed to confirm this, showing the lower of the two entry wounds to be below the shoulders, not at the base of the neck. What became of the bullet? The agents reported that Bethesda doctors thought the bullet had dropped from the wound when the Dallas doctors attempted external heart massage. But this was the shot that the Commission claimed had passed through Kennedy and struck Governor Connally.
X-rays and color photographs of the autopsy were made. The brain was removed from the body. Brain and skin tissue slides were prepared for microscopic examination. Remarkably, the Warren Commission never asked to see any of this evidence, relying instead solely on the testimony of Captain James J. Humes, one of the pathologists who conducted the autopsy. Even more incredible is the disappearance of the brain, the slides, and some of the photographs, which were alleged to have been turned over to the National Archives by the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Both Dr. Perry and Captain Humes were interviewed on the CBS tapes. Perry was asked about the throat wound he'd seen when the President was brought to Parkland Hospital. His answer seemed evasive. He neither confirmed nor denied that he had thought it was an entry wound, talking instead about the difficulty of making such a determination and the fact that his attention had been devoted to saving the President's life. Then the interviewer asked him directly whether he had thought at the time that it was an entry wound. "Actually, I didn't really give it much thought," he replied. He
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Chief Justice Warren:
"We explored both these theories and found no evidence that either group was involved"
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