Pat Speer

Thanks, Roger, for your civil tone. Clark said he studied the head wound in an effort to determine if it was a survivable wound, and quickly realized the answer was no. Now, he did say he saw cerebellum. And never retracted that statement. And I consider that a problem for my conclusion he was mistaken. But he refused to talk to conspiracy theorists, and denounced them in the press, and worked with Lattimer, so I think his ultimate position was probably that he was indeed mistaken. While studying his statements, moreover, I noticed that he claimed in the press conference, his report, and in his testimony, that the wound appeared to be a tangential wound. That led me to wonder 1) why those obsessed with his statements regarding cerebellum never discussed the significance of these statements, and 2) what was the implication of these statements. This sent me a on years-long journey into forensics journals and books on wound ballistics, and to the ultimate realization Clark was absolutely correct on this point. This is spelled out in chapter 16b Digging in the Dirt. As far as messages, my inbox is probably full and I probably need to clean up a few. I have been holding onto old messages from people like Gerry Hemming, Gary Mack, and David Lifton. This raises a question. Should I make these messages public now that they are no longer with us? Is that cool, and in the spirit of this website? I don't know.

Well, that's your loss, LOL. I've learned as much from studying the statements of those with whom I now disagree, as I have with whom I now agree.

It's not a matter of believing me. It's what a number of the doctors themselves said, and what experts on brain injuries have said. Macerated/scrambled brain tissue when soaked with blood gives a similar appearance, whether it be cerebellum or cerebrum. The best explanation I think comes from Carrico. He said he saw what he thought to be cerebellum, but later realized he never ever even looked at the back of the head, where he would need to have looked to see cerebellum. Their job was to get him breathing. They weren't particularly concerned with the location of the head wound, etc. Professionals focus on their jobs. It's a way to block out the horror, IMO.

I'll answer as part of an experiment. It has been my suspicion for months now that certain "members" are committed to making sure any mention of the medical evidence on my part is drowned out by pages and pages of rehashed information, much of which is questionable or flat-out wrong. 1. Mantik's work has been an unfortunate distraction, IMO. 2. While I suspect Mantik's OD readings are accurate, his interpretation of them is highly suspect, and almost certainly flat-out wrong. His original claims were questionable, but when he started claiming his OD readings prove there is a gigantic hole on the back of the head that can't be made out with the naked eye when looking at the x-rays, well, that was a red flag. It's junk science, people. 3. The white patch is real and is indicative of overlapping bone--bone that can be observed on the autopsy photos. While Mantik originally claimed the white patch was added to cover-up the hole from which the Harper fragment had been dislodged he alter changed it to be where the site patch was added to hide that brain was missing--which is in keeping with what was claimed by the doctors. So it's nonsense. 4. The dark area on the back of the head in the Z-film is apparent on the back of other heads as well, so I suspect it's just a photographic anomaly. But I would admit that IF any alteration was performed on the film, it would be of this nature. Now, some have claimed that the explosion of the skull on the front of the head was faked as well, but that's just ludicrous, akin to claiming someone confessed to a crime so we would think he was innocent. The large head wound is 100% clear proof the shooting did not go down as purported by the WC. I dug through the dirt and went back and read dozens of articles on the wound ballistics of the rifle, and proved the WC and HSCA wonld ballistics experts, Olivier and Sturdivan, lied through their teeth, in order to confess the public JFK's wound was a typical military rifle wound. It was not. Now, my friend Gary Aguilar has taken from this that non-military ammo was used, and that they covered this up, and I think that's worth thinking about, but this idea that they faked a gigantic head wound to make people think it was lil' ole Oswald firing from behind makes little sense. 5. As far as the red spot...it is not a hole. No one at the autopsy saw a hole in that location. Even worse, this hole was "discovered' after the Clark Panel realized the trajectories from the building and through the brain proposed in the autopsy report made no sense. So, instead of rethinking their conclusions as to how many shots were fired, or from where they were fired, they simply moved the wound. It is a total HOAX in my opinion. One of my many frustrations with the research community is this focus on the Parkland witnesses and so on in hopes of making the historical case the back of the head was blown out. Well, even if true, this is HOPELESS, IMO, as too many witnesses said it was not so, and so many of the original witnesses changed their statements over the years. In the meantime, however, year after year, decade after decade, the public was told NOTHING about the movement of the head wound, and that a paper trail demonstrates for fact it was moved for political reasons. I mean, which is a bigger story...in REALITY...that a 90 year old Secret Service agent has started making claims at odds with the official story, and everyone else's story...OR that there is a slam dunk case proving the President's fatal wound was moved in medical reports so the government could claim it was single assassin. Quite OBVIOUSLy, the second, right? And yet when I talk to normies about the case most all have heard of Landis and maybe even Donahue's Hickey-did-it theory, etc, but virtually none of them are aware of the historical fact lawyers and doctors working for the government moved, first, Kennedy's back wound, and second, the entrance wound on the back of Kennedy's head.

You miss a big something. The evidence was never entered into evidence during a trial, OR even entered into evidence by a government commission. As far as the law is concerned, the public has NO right to see the evidence. As far as the "expert" opinions of David Mantik, you really shouldn't go there. He is not an expert in forensic radiology, or criminology or any of the related fields, and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't claim any special expertise in this field. What he is is someone with a background in science, There are literally millions of people in this country who can make the same claim. And even then it's not worth much. As you are probably aware, I originally deferred to Mantik on all things x-ray, and then started reading up on this stuff on my own. And then caught him on a tremendous mistake, which he denied for years. Apparently word of this reached Cyril Wecht because he ended up inviting me to debate Mantik on this issue at a conference. At which Mantik admitted his mistake. So it's best not to defer to any experts on this case, IMO.

Yikes. The autopsy photos were not officially studied by the doctors in preparation for their testimony before the Warren Commission and were thereby not considered part of the historical record. As a consequence, someone decided to give the autopsy photos and materials to the Kennedy family. When this became public the research community was outraged. So, as a compromise, some of the materials were returned to the custody of the government. Now, I wrote "some" because it turns out that the government never asked for the return of the brain and tissue slides, and that no one knows what happened to them. It is widely believed however that RFK destroyed them. I would like to believe he put them in a vault somewhere and that Caroline will pull them out when the time is right, but it seems likely this won't come to pass. In any event, in order to effect the return of the materials from the Kennedy family, the government signed a legal agreement stating that the materials can never be released or even viewed except by permission of a designated representative of the family. And that is how it has been for 56 years...Any person or agency wanting to view the materials can do so as long as they make a request, and have a background as a doctor or scientist. And, even then the request may not be granted. A number of well-known doctors have been shown the materials only to leave the archives and tell everyone they are fake or whatever...who have then made additional requests to view the materials...and been refused. I mean, when you think of it. that's not really much of a surprise. In any event, it is incorrect to blame the government or deep state or whatever for the continued control of the materials by the family. The HSCA released tracings that were largely accurate, and even published a few crops from the photos. And the family has never sued or even threatened to sue those publishing the materials now in the public domain. Heck, Groden tried to copyright his bootleg set of photos, claiming HE owned the rights to all the color photos, since he was the one who illicitly photographed them and sold them for profit. But the family has never done such a thing.

Well, you are correct, in that much of what is discussed on TV is rehash of rehash of rehash. It makes me bonkers when, year after year, they report the same old stuff as opposed to looking for new stuff. My point was that the major networks aren't afraid of the case, because they know they can simply report whatever they want to on the case, much as they have for 60 years.

An inventory list for the photos was created in 1966. Nothing has disappeared since that time. IF "they" were to have disappeared some photos to support the single-assassin solution at that time, they would have almost certainly have disappeared the back wound photos, which proved the single-bullet theory to be incorrect, and were so problematic that both Dr. Boswell, to the press in 1966, and Dr. Humes to CBS in 1967, flat-out lied about the location of the wound in the photos. And yet, there the photos were, when subsequently studied by others. Heck they were so problematic that the HSCA pathology panel refused to play along, and finally came clean about the location of the wound in the photos.

1. The photos available to researchers such as yourself are the same as those in the archives. The photos in the archives are not cropped as much, and have better resolution, but there is nothing drastically different. This has been confirmed by those who've worked with the archives prints, such as Groden, Wecht, Baden, Artwohl, Robertson, Aguilar, Mantik, Horne, Chesser and so on. 2. Archives.org is not a government website. It is an aggregator of material from other websites. Most of the autopsy photos online today were taken from the JFK LANCER website, and were digitized photos from the books of David Lifton and Robert Groden. The original Fox set, which is the source material for all the quality black and white shots, has never been digitized, to my knowledge. So we're forced to work with digital copies of photos of photos. 3. It's highly unlikely the Fox set was deliberately leaked. I am fairly certain Fox "traded" the photos to an acquaintance, Mark Crouch, for some rare WWII materials (he was a collector) and that Crouch then allowed Lifton, Livingstone, and Groden to photograph his copies. If memory serves, moreover, they all held off publicly showing or publishing the photos until after Fox had passed, years later. 4. As far as Groden...Groden became famous after surreptitiously copying the Zapruder film and showing it on TV. He was then hired as a photo analyst by the HSCA (which was desperately trying to establish its credentials with the research community). It remains possible then that Blakey knew full well Groden would copy the photos for his own use, but Blakey denies ever having told him to do so. And if he did so, well, he did so to help sell the possibility of a conspiracy. Let's not forget that for decades most CTs thought of the photos as proof for a conspiracy--the back wound was just too low to support the SBT, and was proof the WC covered up the back wound's actual location. And that it was only years later that people started claiming the photos were fake. So, yeah, it seems unlikely Blakey would leak the photos to try to convince people it was Oswald acting alone, when the photos would convince no one of such a thing, and Blakey himself never believed that.

I don't agree, actually. For the 50th anniversary, CNN created a proud Oswald-did-it program, in conjunction with Tom Hanks' production company, which had bought the rights to Bugliosi's book. They ran this program multiple times. Over the course of the next year, this program was edited down to an hour, and broadcast over and over again as part of a series of programs on the sixties, if I recall. It has been shown many times since. In any event, CNN is not remotely afraid of stirring things up. It's just that in this case, they probably figure there's nothing new worth reporting.

To be clear, I didn't create this gif. I think it may have been Jerry Organ or someone over on the JFK Assassination Forum website. It had long been argued, at one time even by myself, that the two photos were not compatible. There was a member of this forum, Craig Lamson, who scoffed at such things, however, and argued that the photos showed the same boxes from two vastly different angles. I performed some home experiments with boxes in my living room and saw he was correct. Years later, moreover, I came across the gif, which demonstrates the point. The box that seems to move is a box in the background, and it appears to move because the photos were taken from two different angles.

Maybe I'm having a brain fart, Robert, but I thought the Warren Commission's hearings were held in their offices, in the National Archives Building. Your man Wolff makes out that they took testimony in the Supreme Court Building. Is this a colossal blow to his credibility, or am I in fact having a brain fart? P.S. I distinctly recall something about poor Warren having to race back and forth between the hearings and the Supreme Court. If they were in the same building, well, it wasn't all that big of a deal, was it?

None of the articles I found on O'Donnell mentioned his testifying before the ARRB. In fact, I believe I was the first to make the connection that it was the same guy. Needless to say, when I first brought this up, those propping up his nonsense as important were displeased. I had a similar experience when I exposed Michael Kurtz. He came forth in 2006, after writing about the JFK Assassination for 30 years, with a book in which he claimed he'd interviewed dozens of important witnesses and historical figures over decades and decades, who'd told him all sorts of incredible stuff. The problem was that he gave dates for these supposed interviews, and I checked those dates against the death dates of some of these witnesses and found that a dozen or so of these supposed interviews took place after the interview subject was dead. IOW, Kurtz had just made them up, which meant that we should distrust what he claimed of his other interviews. But some people like his obvious iies, and continue citing them to support their own theories. Now, should you be tired of my complaining about conspiracy theorist bs artists, let me regale you with the tale of Michael West--a lone nut bs artist of the highest order. Why We Fight Those assuming that they need to play along with the "conservative" view of the assassination in order to get ahead in the medical profession miss that the medical professionals who have chosen to associate themselves with the single-assassin theory have been among the least credible individuals associated with the case. We have already discussed the failings of Dr. Michael Baden, and the many foolish and easily disproved statements he's made about the assassination. We have also discussed Dr. John Lattimer, a Urologist, with his strange belief Kennedy was a hunchback, and his odd diagrams presenting Kennedy's lung above his throat, and his long-time obsession with Nazis, and his odd habit of collecting celebrity genitalia. We have also discussed Dr. Chad Zimmerman, a Chiropractor, and the many flaws in his "experiments". But what we haven't fully discussed is that there has been virtually NO ONE from the world of medicine to publicly associate themselves with the single-assassin conclusion over the past 20 years, with whom other doctors would want to be associated. If one gets the opportunity to view a video of the 1993 symposium on the medical evidence held in Chicago one will see precisely what I'm talking about. First up was Dr. George Lundberg, then editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. (Thanks to researcher Dave Reitzes for posting Lundberg's statements online.) Lundberg opened by admitting he knew next to nothing about the case, and then concluded: "What then and whom then do I trust? I have known Dr. James Humes, the principal autopsy pathologist, personally since 1957. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, who was paraphrasing Lloyd Bentsen: I know Jim Humes. He's a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life. Dr. Humes is an outstanding general pathologist, before and after 1963, acclaimed by his peers for thirty years -- forty years, perhaps -- but never was before, during, or after a fully trained forensic pathologist and never claimed to be. He didn't volunteer to do that job; he was assigned. Moving from 1963 to 1968, the United States Attorney General appointed a four-person, blue-ribbon panel to study and reevaluate the JFK autopsy. The reason that was appointed was a request by the second autopsy pathologist, Dr. Jay Boswell, that there be such an independent investigation. This four-member panel had developed unanimous support for the autopsy report, results and interpretation. A key member of that panel was the late Dr. Russell Fisher, Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Maryland, probably the world's top forensic pathologist of his time. I knew Russell Fisher. He was a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life. He concurred: two bullets from the rear. A simple story. In 1979 the forensic pathology subcommittee of the House Select Committee on Assassinations included nine members. It voted eight to one in support of the autopsy findings and basic interpretation. One of the members was Dr. Earl Rose, a forensic pathologist in Dallas in November 1963 whose legal responsibility it was to autopsy President Kennedy and who tried to stop the illegal movement of the body from Dallas. I have known Dr. Earl Rose since 1973. He is a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life. He concurs: two bullets from the rear. Another member of that 1979 subcommittee was Dr. Charles Petty. Dr. Petty is Professor of Pathology at the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. He heads up the Forensic Science Institute there, which was built in large part because of the Dallas embarrassment over the assassination and their recognition of the need for outstanding forensic science. Dr. Petty has been quiet on the JFK issue for many, many years. This year he volunteered to write for JAMA on this subject. Last week's JAMA has his editorial, which confirms and explains the Single Bullet Theory. I have known Chuck Petty since 1968. He is a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life. These are the keys to trust: Jim Humes in 1963, Russell Fisher in 1968, Earl Rose in 1979 and again in JAMA in 1992, Chuck Petty in 1979 and again in JAMA in`1993, and then there is me. To imagine or state that somehow these people say we have been duped, misled, or are somehow part of the conspiracy to deny the truth on this issue for all ages, strains the vocabulary to find strong enough words to describe such absurdity. Such charges are somewhere among the descriptors: wild and crazy, off the wall, out in left field in Cubs Park, incredible, insulting, or worse." Well, this was not exactly scientific, was it? In 1999, for reasons apparently unrelated to his controversial stance on the Kennedy assassination, Lundberg was fired from JAMA. Next up was Dr. Lattimer, reciting material from his book, claiming he knew Kennedy and Kennedy had a big hump on his back, etc. Then came Dr. Michael West, presenting a program defending the single-bullet theory that he'd previously presented to the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the FBI Academy. (The former presentation was organized by Dr. Michael Baden, no less.) West recited stuff from Lattimer's book, and showed a film in which it was argued that Governor Connally's delayed reaction to the shot when compared to Kennedy was exactly as one would expect, and that his flipping of his hat circa frame 227 of the Zapruder film was "positive proof" of a neurological response to trauma prior to the point most conspiracy theorists believe he'd been hit. (West was quoted along these lines in Gerald Posner's book Case Closed.) Erasing the Wild, Wild, West from History Well, what happened to Dr. West, you might ask? The 1998 book Tainting Evidence notes that Dr. West was a forensic dentist from Mississippi who appeared as a scientific expert in more than 60 trials in 10 states before it became clear he had a knack for seeing marks on bodies that others failed to see. As at least 20 of his appearances were in murder cases in which a suspect's life lay in the balance, moreover, the possibility West was sculpting his testimony to fit the needs of the prosecution slowly dawned on his fellow scientists. As a result, medical examiners (including Dr. Robert Kirschner, one of the ARRB's special consultants) began testifying against West, and he was denounced in a 1996 article in the American Bar Association Journal, in which he was called "a sore on the body of forensic science." The 2008 book Forensics Under Fire fleshes out the story, and uses West as a case study of an expert gone awry. Despite West's claims that a special blue light he'd personally developed had allowed him to see the bite marks on victims no one else could see, the "science" of this light was never quite established. As a result other experts began to question West's conclusions, and he gradually fell out of favor. Within a year of his presentation at the 1993 Symposium, in fact, Dr. West was pressured into leaving the international Association of Identification and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He was also suspended by the American Board of Forensic Odontology. As a result, the convictions of two men against whom he'd testified were overturned, and the charges against still another were dropped. Word rapidly got out that his word was suspect, and his court appearances dropped off considerably. He was so desperate for an appearance, in fact, that he agreed to give his opinion on a case for which he'd not done his homework. In 2001, in an effort to discredit the bite-mark analysis used against a client, lawyer Christopher Plourd hired private detective James Rix to contact West and ask if the teeth in a dental mold provided West matched the bite mark on the breast of the woman purportedly killed by Plourd's client. Two months later, after cashing a check for $750, West sent Rix a 20 Minute video explaining that, based on West's expert analysis, the odds that "these weren’t the teeth that created this bite would be almost astronomical." Oops. This was a big mistake. The dental mold sent West had not been that of Plourd's client, but of Rix, the private investigator. And from there things spiraled downward. In 2008, after the arrest of a man who'd admitted killing two toddlers in the early nineties, the lawyers for the two men previously convicted of these crimes called for West's arrest. This led Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization that examines questionable convictions and has won the exoneration of more than 200 inmates, to declare in an ABC News report that West was "a criminal" and that he'd "deliberately fabricated evidence and conclusions which were not supported by the evidence, the data or the rules of science." Neufeld further claimed "If you fabricate evidence in a capital murder case, where you know that if the person's convicted they are going to be executed — as far as I'm concerned that's the crime of attempted murder.'' He then concluded "These are not cases of sloppy forensic science. This is intentional misconduct. It's fabricated evidence to send people to death row.'' Pretty harsh words. Provocative words. Still, even though Neufeld's charges would seem a clear case of libel (should he not have been telling the truth), West refused to respond to his charges. West did, however, tell CBS' Steve Kroft that he stood by his prior testimony, and that if the DNA evidence implicated someone other than the defendants in the rapes and murders of the children they'd been convicted of killing, it meant only that someone else had raped and killed the children after the defendants had bitten them. Not willing to give an inch, West even stood by his absurd testimony that one of the defendants had bitten his victim 19 times--using only his upper teeth! And from there things only got worse for wild, wild, West. In February 2009, Reasononline posted links to a 1993 video of West (http://reason.com/news/show/131527.html) rubbing a suspect's dental impressions on the cheek of a dead child. Finding bite marks on the cheek, curiously, allowed prosecutors to charge the man responsible for her apparently accidental death with deliberation, and this, in turn, allowed them to seek the death penalty. After seeing this video, Dr. Michael Bowers, a dentist and medical examiner for Ventura County, California, broke ranks with his colleague and told Reasononline that marks appeared on the young girl's cheek after West rubbed the suspect's dental impressions on her cheek because "Dr. West created them. It was intentional. He's creating artificial abrasions in that video, and he's tampering with the evidence. It's criminal, regardless of what excuse he may come up with about his methods...You never jam a plaster cast into a possible bite mark like that. It distorts the evidence. You take a photograph, or if there are indentations, you take an impression. But you don't jam plaster teeth into them." Dr. David Averill, a former President of The American Board of Forensic Odontology, concurred with this appraisal. He told Reasononline "The video is troubling. I don't know how you can explain where those marks come from. And there's just no justification for him to push the cast into the skin like that...That isn't an acceptable way to perform a bite mark analysis." But that wasn't the end of it. The writer of the article, Radley Balko, reported that Forensic Odontologist Richard Souviron, who'd served as an expert for the defendant, Jimmie Duncan, was never shown the video prior to Duncan's trial and conviction, and had signed a new affidavit claiming the video showed "'Dr. West, violently and repeatedly, forcing a mold of Jimmie Duncan's teeth into Ms. Oliveaux's right cheek. In doing so, Dr. West creates a mark that was not previously present. Dr. West's behavior and methods are absolutely not supported by any scientific standards or protocol.' Souviron added in the affidavit that hospital photographs show that 'none of the marks were present when Ms. Oliveaux was at the hospital,' and that the abrasions that Reisner testified about for the prosecution 'were created by the flagrant misconduct of Dr. Michael West.'" Now, that was the end of Wild Wild West's adventures in bite-mark analysis... An 8-6-12 article by Jerry Mitchell in the Clarion-Ledger revealed that in a 2011 deposition West had admitted that "I no longer believe in bite-mark analysis...I don’t think it should be used in court. I think you should use DNA. Throw bite marks out” and that West had further told Mitchell that "The science is not as exact as I had hoped...DNA has made it fairly obsolete.”

Tom Robinson: I think I saw a small wound that was not a bullet hole by the temple. Tom Robinson, nineteen years later: I think I saw two or three tiny wounds by the right cheek. Doug Horne, fourteen years after that: Robinson said he saw a bullet hole high on the forehead above the right eye. Apparently some think this makes perfect sense.