Pat Speer

FWIW, Ben. I listened to a number of the LBJ Tapes while reading along in Max's book, and his transcripts are reasonably accurate--more accurate than the transcripts to the HSCA hearings by far. There was one curious exception as I recall but for the most part they were dead on.

My chapter digging in the dirt reports on a months-long study of wound ballistics, for the Carcano and similar rifles. I have discussed these findings with some of the most famous researches and they either agree or pretend to agree with my conclusions. In short, the large wound was either the exit of a different bullet than was found in the limo, or the entrance and exit of a bullet entering tangentially--at an angle--as first proposed by Dr. Clark.

Read the reports carefully. The top right quadrant of the brain was missing. So where then is this trail of fragments?

1. What you call the 7 by 2 fragment is not the fragment removed at autopsy. No one present at the autopsy said it was, and they all said the fragment was removed from inches away. This includes Humes. While Mantik has said Humes ID'ed this fragment as the fragment he'd removed, Mantik was blowing smoke. 2. Fragments are 3-d not 2-d. The fragments removed at autopsy could have been 7 by 2 by 9 and 3 by 1 by 11. We don't know. 3. As to your last paragraph, all of this is discussed on my website.

Wait. No one grabbed anything. Darnell and Wiegman were not free-lancers. They worked for NBC and its affiliates, right? So the films are their possessions, and are work product, basically unpublished notes. As wrong-headed as it seems, the American press claims ownership of original films and unpublished notes. Far worse than NBC's refusal to provide access to their films, is CBS' refusal to make public dozens if not hundreds of witness interviews from 1964 through 1967. It is believed many of these witnesses told CBS things they didn't tell the Warren Commission. But we don't know because CBS refuses to make the interviews available.(I think they told the ARRB they could copy them for a price, and the ARRB declined.) P.S. What do you mean by fanciful?

Ok. So where is this snail-speed movement at in its efforts to get access to better images? (My understanding is that the images were purported to be conclusive and were widely considered suggestive but not conclusive, and that no one followed up in any way. And from this I've deduced those involved figured it could go no farther.) Where am I wrong?

Look at the Altgens photo. Your large figure person is two people. Probably Shelley and Molina.

It's true that an intact FMJ bullet doesn't leave a lead trail. That was bs pushed by Baden. But an FMJ bullet striking at an angle will explode and leave lead fragments at the entry site and just below the surface of the wound. The so-called trail of fragments is not a trail. It's a splat of fragments mostly almost entirely on the outside of the skull.

A man says he saw NBA star LeBron James at the mall by his hot dog stand. He has a photo taken from 50 yards away that he says shows it. One of his co-workers doubts him. And spots a black man in the crowd 20 yards away and says that's him there and he's not by the hot dog stand. There's a photo of this man leaving the mall, however, and it's not LeBron James. Decades later I discover this weird situation, and look in the photo by the hot dog stand, and see what appears to be a a black man looking in the other direction while leaning forward. I say well, that could be him right there. Mantik and his minions: it couldn't be. The man must have been lying as part of some giant conspiracy.

All this is answered on my website.

dark red appears black on black and white film

If I catch your drift, Joe, it appears you're thinking the flap on top of the head was closed up at Parkland, but opened up in the autopsy photos. If so I think that's probably true. When I morphed the back of the photos together moreover I discovered that the rear most part of the defect at the autopsy opened up a bit between photos. Well, in such case the wound would have appeared more rearward at Parkland than in the autopsy photos. P.S. The gif showing the flap towards the back of the head can be viewed and studied towards the bottom of chapter 13 at patspeer.com,

I wrote what is essentially a book on this, Michael. And you are correct if your point is that 6.5 mm FMJ bullets don't leave small entrances an inch or two away from huge exits. And yet the size of the exit is undisputed--witnesses at both Parkland and Bethesda described a huge exit. Well, this led many a researcher to muse that hunting ammunition or AR-15 ammunition was used. But my research led me down a different road. All clues, in fact, point to a bullet's clipping the top of the head at an angle, and creating a tangential wound of both entrance and exit, with the small entrance by the eop representing a second wound.

I deal with this on my website. Many of these witnesses were most certainly not describing a wound on the far back of the head.

I broke my arm so can't type much, but you really need to stop swallowing whatever's been written by your heroes. Get a textbook on forensic radiology. Read. Get a textbook on the history of radiology. Read. Get an instruction manual for the portable x-ray machine used or one of a similar machine. Read. If you do you will realize that the front of JFK's head on the AP x-ray is magnified to a much greater extent than most doctors are used to seeing. If you do you will realize that forensic radiologists do not give precise measurements or caliber for missiles and fragments and only give approximates after determining the distances involved. All of this is covered on my website, which apparently has cooties. So blow it off and read some freakin' textbooks. Anything but continue repeating this easily refuted garbage. I mean, you're still pretending the forehead fragment is the fragment removed at autopsy. It doesn't look like the fragment photographed by the FBI and viewable in the archives. And it's inches away from where the doctors claimed they'd found a fragment. So it's elementary--freakin' obvious--it isn't the fragment. But you refuse to see this for obvious reasons.

Yes, the testimony is clear. The doctors peeled back the scalp and skull fell to the table, exposing a massive defect. There was then little left to do to remove the brain. This big hole is captured in the mystery photo. But Groden's exhibits are intended to show the wound as originally seen at Parkland and Bethesda, not after the brain was removed. He even tells his audience that the accuracy of his exhibits has been confirmed by something like 89 witnesses. It's smoke. Total nonsense. Not one credible witness at Parkland said the body arrived at their facility with the giant gaping wound in the image above and those at Bethesda who described such a wound were obviously thinking of the appearance of JFK's head after the brain had been removed.

Let's be clear. You have super-imposed Oswald's face and shirt onto Prayer Person. Someone just passing by might think you have cleaned up the photo and voila! that's Oswald. But that's not the case.

I am not bound by an NDA but I don't want to get anyone in trouble. Nevertheless, I will tell you that 1. It was a first gen copy that was shown and studied. 2. The images were still quite blurry--nearly identical to what is in the public domain. If one wants to get access to the original film, and have it studied, then fire away. Get on it. But I'm not aware of anyone who'd attended that screening believing further study will prove anything. Just saying...

I agree. From studying the statements of those involved in the cover-up, it's clear their main concern was protecting LBJ. From Chapter 1 at patspeer.com: The Delivery Men While Chief Justice Earl Warren, the chairman of the Warren Commission, and the man tasked with overseeing its investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is reported to have told his staff that "the truth was their only client," much evidence has arisen over the years to indicate that this simply was not so. The available record, in fact, now suggests that the Commission had another client, one whose interests were to be placed above and beyond the Commission's search for truth. This client was called... "national security" or, more specifically, President Lyndon Johnson. One need look no further than the memoirs of Warren, for that matter, to see that this is true. There, in the final pages written at the end of his long successful life, Warren admitted that he was strong-armed into chairing the Commission only after Johnson, Kennedy's successor, told him that if people came to believe there was foreign involvement in the assassination it could lead to a war that would kill 40 million. This, one can only assume, gave Warren the clear signal he was NOT to find for a conspiracy involving a foreign power. But when one reads between the lines--and reads other lines--a fuller picture emerges. Warren was also told he was NOT to find for a domestic conspiracy, or at least anything that could point back to Johnson. There were signs for this from the get-go. The Voice of America, the U.S. Information Agency's worldwide radio network, had initially reported, in the moments after the shooting, that Dallas, Texas, the scene of the crime, was also "the scene of the extreme right wing movement." It soon stopped doing so. This suggests then that someone in the government was particularly sensitive to the idea that the right wing would be blamed for the shooting, and had ordered the Voice of America to downplay the possibility of a domestic conspiracy. This "sensitivity," moreover, was in the air and spreading. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, whose discussions in the days after the shooting sparked the creation of the Warren Commission, testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (the "HSCA") on 8-4-78 that he sensed that the rest of the world would suspect Johnson's involvement, and that this in effect "disqualified" Johnson from leading an investigation into Kennedy's death. Katzenbach then explained that this feeling had led him to believe that "some other people of enormous prestige and above political in-fighting, political objectives, ought to review the matter and take the responsibility" of identifying Kennedy's assassin. He said much the same thing in subsequent testimony. On 9-21-78 he told the HSCA that his primary concern in the aftermath of the assassination was "the amount of speculation both here and abroad as to what was going on, whether there was a conspiracy of the left or a lone assassin or even in its wildest stages, a conspiracy by the then vice president to achieve the presidency, the sort of thing you have speculation about in some countries abroad where that kind of condition is normal." Egads. These words suggest that Katzenbach, who was only running the Justice Department in the aftermath of the assassination, considered Johnson's involvement unthinkable, and not really worth investigating. And this wasn't the last time Katzenbach suggested as much. In his 2008 memoir Some of It Was Fun, Katzenbach wrote that in the days after the assassination: "Among the many conspiracy theories floating around were those that put conservative Texas racists in the picture and even some that saw LBJ as the moving force." That Katzenbach's concern about these theories influenced the Warren Commission's investigation, moreover, seems obvious. Howard Willens, a Justice Department attorney reporting to Katzenbach, was made an assistant to Warren Commission General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, and was tasked with 1) hiring the commission's junior counsel (the men tasked with performing the bulk of the commission's investigation), 2) assigning these men specific areas of investigation, 3) supplying these men with the FBI, Secret Service, and CIA reports pertinent to their areas of investigation, 4) working as a liaison between these men and the agencies creating these reports, and 5) helping to re-write the commission's own report. On 7-28-78, in Executive Session, Willens testified before the HSCA; he admitted: "there were some allegations involving President Johnson that were before the Commission and there was understandably among all persons associated with this effort a desire to investigate those allegations and satisfy the public, if possible, that these allegations were without merit." But these allegations weren't investigated, not really. The Commission's final report amounted to a prosecutor's brief against a lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald, and the 26 volumes of supporting data published by the Commission contained next to nothing on Johnson or other possible suspects. That this "clearing" of Johnson's name was a major factor in the commission's creation is confirmed, moreover, by a 2-17-64 memo written by Warren Commission Counsel Melvin A. Eisenberg. While reporting on the Warren Commission's first staff conference of 1-20-64, Eisenberg recalled that Chief Justice Warren had discussed "the circumstances under which he had accepted the chairmanship of the Commission," and had claimed he'd resisted pressure from Johnson until "The President stated that the rumors of the most exaggerated kind were circulating in this country and overseas. Some rumors went as far as attributing the assassination to a faction within the Government wishing to see the Presidency assumed by President Johnson. Others, if not quenched, could conceivably lead the country into a war which could cost 40 million lives." Eisenberg's account of Warren's statements was supported, furthermore, by Warren Commission Counsel--and subsequent Senator--Arlen Specter in his 2000 memoir Passion for Truth. In Specter's account, Warren claimed that Johnson had told him "only he could lend the credibility the country and the world so desperately needed as the people tried to understand why their heroic young president had been slain. Conspiracy theories involving communists, the U.S.S.R., Cuba, the military-industrial complex, and even the new president were already swirling. The Kennedy assassination could lead America into a nuclear war that could kill 40 million people..." Now this, apparently, wasn't the only time Warren admitted Johnson's worries extended both beyond and closer to home than the possible thermo-nuclear war mentioned in his autobiography. In his biography of Warren, Ed Cray reported that Warren once confided to a friend that "There was great pressure on us to prove, first, that President Johnson was not involved, and, second, that the Russians were not involved." And yet Warren refused to put Johnson's fears he'd be implicated on the record. While Warren was interviewed a number of times in his final years about the creation of the Commission, he never admitted in these interviews what he'd readily told his friends and the commission's staff--that Johnson had railroaded him onto the commission in part to clear himself. In fact, Warren claimed the opposite. When interviewed by Warren Commission historian Alfred Goldberg on March 28, 1974, Warren told Goldberg the opposite of what he'd told Eisenberg and Specter (and presumably Goldberg) in 1964. Instead of claiming Johnson told him "Some rumors went as far as attributing the assassination to a faction within the Government wishing to see the Presidency assumed by President Johnson," Warren now related "There were of course two theories of conspiracy. One was the theory about the communists. The other was that LBJ's friends did it as a coup d'etat. Johnson didn't talk about that." It seems likely, then, that even Warren thought it improper for the President, the head of the Executive Branch of Government, to pressure the Chief Justice of the United States, the head of the Judicial Branch of Government, to head a Commission to help clear the President's name. Now, it's not as if Warren's fellow commissioners had a problem with serving this higher purpose--that of clearing their new President. John McCloy, Wall Street's man on the Commission, told writer Edward Epstein on June 7, 1965 that one of the commission's objectives was "to show foreign governments we weren't a South American Banana Republic." Well, seeing as the expression "Banana Republic" is not a reference to countries whose leaders have been killed by foreign enemies, but to countries whose leaders have been killed by domestic enemies, who then assume power, this is most certainly a reference to Johnson. And it's not as if this was all a big secret. The December 5, 1963, transcripts of the Warren Commission's first meeting reflect that Senator Richard Russell, Johnson's long-time friend and mentor, admitted "I told the President the other day, fifty years from today people will be saying he had something to do with it so he could be President." And it's not as if Washington insiders were unaware of this non-secret secret. In 1966, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak published Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power. There, they discussed the creation of the Warren Commission as follows: "There was first the question of the assassination itself. Inevitably, irresponsible demagogues of the left and right spread the notion that not one assassin but a conspiracy had killed John Kennedy. That it occurred in Johnson's own state on a political mission urgently requested and promoted by Johnson only embellished rancid conspiratorial theories. If he were to gain the confidence of the people, the ghost of Dallas must be shrugged off." Now, should one still doubt that Johnson was at least as concerned with suspicions of himself as of the Soviets, there is confirmation from an even better source: Johnson himself. In a rarely-cited interview with columnist Drew Pearson, cited in a November 14th, 1993 article in The Washington Post, Johnson admitted that, in his conversation with Warren, in which he convinced Warren to head his commission, Johnson brought up the assassination of President Lincoln, and that rumors still lingered about the conspiracy behind his murder 100 years after the fact. According to Pearson, Johnson admitted telling Warren that "The nation cannot afford to have any doubt this time." Well, that says it all. The doubt, according to Johnson, the nation could not afford to have, was doubt about Southern and/or military involvement in the assassination. The rumors about Lincoln's death, after all, revolved largely around his being murdered by The Confederate Army as revenge for his successful campaign to re-unite the States, or his being murdered by his own Secretary of War, or his being murdered by his Vice-President, a Southerner named JOHNSON. And Johnson acknowledged this was his concern in his presidential memoir, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency 1963-1969, published 1971. Of the national mood on 11-24-63, after the man accused of killing President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, a purported communist-sympathizer, was shot down while in police custody, by Jack Ruby, a man with connections to organized crime, Johnson wrote: "The atmosphere was poisonous and had to be cleared. I was aware of some of the implications that grew out of that skepticism and doubt. Russia was not immune to them. Neither was Cuba. Neither was the State of Texas. Neither was the new President of the United States."

Salyer went to the Lancer JFK conference and stood in front of a largely CT crowd and told them the wound was on the side and top of the head. And this wasn't new. He'd been quoted saying as much several times before. I knew what he was gonna say. But I was surprised to find he wasn't alone. Salyer, Goldstrich, and Loeb spoke at Lancer before a large audience, most of which was expecting them to say there was a large blow-out wound on the back of the head. Their appearance was made to help promote "the Parkland Doctors" movie, I think it was, in which the doctors were allowed to tell their stories. In any event, most of the audience was all excited about their appearance, thinking they were gonna say the wound was on the far back of the head and the mainstream media was finally gonna notice or whatever. But none of them did. In fact, Salyer and Loeb both said the wound was not on the far back of the head. Also attending this conference were Newman and Jenkins, both of whom similarly denied there had been a wound on the far back of the head. As stated, there were grumblings from the crowd, and much consternation on the faces of those in attendance who'd been expecting these doctors to "finally tell the truth" or some such thing. It was a lot like when Buell Frazier appeared and was heckled by a guy wanting to know why he wouldn't admit Kennedy was on the front steps, or whatever. Some--perhaps the majority--go to these conferences expecting to be told what they already believe, and get angry when told something that challenges their beliefs. After my first appearance at Lancer, Deb Conway--who wasn't familiar with my research and didn't know what to expect--came up to me and told me she thought I'd really given people something to think about, and to not worry if they don't come up and congratulate me or whatever because it wold take ten years or so to sink in. She was undoubtedly an optimist. As far as any photos published by Groden showing Salyer's interpretation of the wound location...the photo I recollect seeing is of Salyer pointing to the side of his head, by his ear. Not to the far back of his head. But, assuming Groden has such a photo, let me expand. On my website I go through Groden's "witnesses" and show how some of them were repeating what they'd been told by others or were guessing based on other information. There were two witnesses, however, whose recollections were grossly misrepresented and whose presence in Groden's book was a disgrace. As I recall the images of both Paul O'Connor and Jerrol Custer were taken from a video put out by Groden, where they described the whole top right side of JFK's head missing. (They were presumably describing the wound as seen after the doctors peeled back the scalp and bone fell to the table.) In any event, they pointed with their hand as they said the wound stretched from the front of the skull by the hairline and extended all the way back to the base of the skull. And Groden made a screen grab of them with their hands on the back of their heads and said this was where they saw the wound. This was disgraceful. He was trying to convince his readers that the Parkland doctors and Bethesda doctors saw the same wound on the back of the head, and that there had been no alteration of the body, and knew O'Connor and Custer had described a wound many times the size of the wound observed at Parkland--and were almost certainly describing the size of the wound after the brain had been removed... And yet he made out they were describing the wound in the McClelland drawing. Well, this would lead me to suspect that any photo in his possession of Salyer pointing to the far back of his head would be of a similar nature: a scam.

That is indeed a possibility. If the last two shots were fired close together with the first hitting JFK from behind and the second striking him from the front, yes, I agree, there would be no sign of this second shot on the Moorman photo.

Three points. 1. Groden colorized the mystery photo and blow-up from the mystery photo. 2. No wound is visible on the back of JFK's head in the Moorman photo. Groden has either altered the contrast to accentuate the dark shape on the photo, or used photoshop to accentuate the photo. In either case, the photo shows debris flying from the right temple area and does not show an explosion from the back of the head. 3. The clay depiction of Kennedy's wounds shown in Groden's books was created for Groden to show what he thinks Kennedy's wound looked like. Essentially he tried to have it both ways and merged the wound in the autopsy photos with the wound in the McClelland drawing. It's nonsense. The wound he depicts is much much larger than what was seen at Parkland or Bethesda, On my website, moreover, I track the evolution of Groden's depictions of the wound. For years he had two large wounds--one at the top of the head and one on the back of the head--but he finally settled on one large wound with a flap in the middle, if I recall. In any event, he purports to be presenting what the witnesses saw or some such thing but presents depictions of the wound described by no one.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying there was no entry wound on the back of the head, where Humes, Boswell, Finck et al said they saw an entry wound?

The 11/24 document reflected a phone call made after Oswald's murder, and is a companion piece to the famous Moyers memo. Essentially, Katzenbach had decided, with some encouragement ho doubt, that the country would be better off pushing that Oswald did it, at least for the time being. It's a bit shocking. But the fear things would escalate took precedence over the desire to get it right. Katzenbach claimed the government could reverse course should any evidence of a conspiracy come to light, but this was wishful thinking, at best. He failed to realize or at least ever publicly admit that once put on the Oswald-did-it highway, the FBI and Secret Service would fail to perform a thorough investigation of other possibilities, and would actually spin the information already available into a prosecutor's brief. His failure in his role as the nation's top cop is perhaps best demonstrated by his note to the Warren Commission, accompanying the FBI's initial report CD1. He told the Warren Commission they should release the FBI's report and say they agreed with it, and basically perform no investigation for themselves. But the Commission, to its credit, read the report and realized it was lacking, and would not stand the test of time. As it turned out, of course, their own report suffered this same fate.

While I am not an expert on photography I feel certain there is a zero chance of clarifying the Prayer man images to the point one can make a convincing positive identification. There just aren't enough pixels. The NASA images are of relatively close-up objects. By increasing the contrast and layering the images, details can be brought from the shadows. But the Prayer Man image is not buried in darkness. It is simply too small to be enlarged and clarified. On my website, I have dozens if not hundreds of evidence photos. One can zoom in and find new things on the hi-res large format Dallas Police photos. (Thank you, UNT!) But you cannot zoom in on the low res images published by the Warren Commission and find anything new besides blurry blobs. A 16 mm film taken from a moving car is not gonna have a clear image of someone a hundred feet away. But I guess people will just have to see this for themselves. (I know some already have.)