Micah Mileto

Although I should add that Tom Robinson, on top of the questionable story about arriving early to the autopsy, told the ARRB that he thought the large defect on the photos was the surgery performed by the pathologists sawing the skull, not the original head wound. But, I think David here said that he believes Tom Robinson was already aware of the body alteration theory before he started telling that story.

Humes never denied using a saw during the autopsy. He told the WC that "virtually" no work with a saw was used. He told the ARRB that "we had to cut some bone". Nothing about the official story negates the use of a saw, even if Humes claimed that the skull was so fractured that pieces could come loose in his hands. Sometimes in normal autopsies, even a literal mallet is used to lightly tap the skull after most of the bone has been sawn through.

If you are interested in an explanation for how the throat defect could have been altered, maybe the photographs we have now were taken after alteration could have taken place on the autopsy table. O'Connor also believed the autopsy photos were altered to change the appearance of the throat defect. The official autopsy documents do not mention if the organs of the neck were dissected or preserved. Dr. Pierre Finck, the autopsy's assisting forensic pathologist, said the wounds of the torso were never dissected, and the neck organs were not preserved. Finck also said that that their handling of the body should not be considered a "complete" autopsy by standards of the American Board of Pathology (Shaw trial testimony, 2/24-25/1969 [text]; Resident and Staff Physician, 5/1972, Observations based on a review of the autopsy photographs, x-rays, and related materials of the late President John F. Kennedy by John Lattimer). The autopsy was judged to be incomplete by the twelve-doctor Forensic Pathology Panel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. One of the reasons given was “The bullet track in the back and neck was not dissected, so extent of injury to the neck structures was not evaluated and course through the body not fully appreciated” (HSCA Vol. 7, p. 181, 3/29/1979, Medical Panel Report, Part IV. Critique of the earlier examination, with presentation of suggested procedures to be followed in performing an investigation and examination on the remains of a gunshot victim [text]). Dr. Finck said that he arrived late to the autopsy, after the brain had already been removed from the skull cavity (ARRB MD 28, 1/25/1965 and 2/1/1965 Reports From Dr. Finck to Gen. Blumberg; Finck's Shaw trial testimony, 2/24-2/25/1969 [text]; ARRB MD 30, Finck's HSCA testimony, 3/11/1978 [text] [audio]), despite him being more qualified than the other two at identifying gunshot wounds (Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, 2007, Book One: Matters of Fact: What Happened, Kennedy's Autopsy and the Gunshot Wounds to Kennedy and Connally). If there was no dissection, that would mean the autopsy was mishandled. However, there are some other statements that suggest the neck WAS dissected during the autopsy. If that were true, it would mean that evidence was collected without being properly reported on. It could also suggest a cover-up taking place at a time when the pathologists were supposedly ignorant of the throat wound. The 1968 book The Day Kennedy Was Shot by Jim Bishop contains the passage "...Fresh bruises were found on the upper tip of the right pleural area near the bottom of the throat. There were also contusions in the lower neck. Humes called his doctors away from the table and asked the Navy photographer to shoot additional Kodachrome pictures. The lens picked up a bruise in the form of an inverted pyramid. It was a fraction short of two inches across the top, coming to a point at the bottom. A few of the contused neck muscles were removed for further examination". Bishop's sources, as written in the epilogue section, included interviews with the staff from Gawler's funeral home, as well as Secret Service agent William Greer – "...William Greer, who drove SS-100-X, has retired from the Secret Service. I visited him at his home in Maryland. His wife was ill and it was not a time to badger a man with ugly memories, but he sat and said: “Go ahead. It will take my mind off other things.” The men of Gawler’s Sons were discreet and ethical...". On 1/12/1977, the HSCA interviewed Gawler's funeral home mortician Tom Robinson. Robinson may have indicated that he saw the neck being dissected, not just the chest: Purdy: Tracheotomy. Did you ever hear any discussions that would have indicated why that was the case or what might have caused that, caused obviously the tracheotomy occurred prior to the time the body came there? Robinson: Yes, those things are done very quickly. By nature of the situation, but it was examined very carefully. The throat was. All that was removed. [...] Purdy: Did you close up the head, did you help close up other parts of the body as well? Robinson: Yes I did. Purdy: The back and the front? Robinson: I did the front, yes. Purdy: Was there much that had to be closed up in the back? Robinson: I don't remember that. I don't remember anything happened to really be done when I say in the back where the body had to be turned over. Purdy: When they do the autopsy, they basically open the front up all the way and just look around and they don't have to open the back. Robinson: ...open him up in the back. Conzelman: In the region of the throat, when you were putting him back together, did you notice that any large holes other than what could have been through the autopsy? Robinson: The tracheotomy. Conzelman: Besides that? Robinson: And if it was, a bullet wound. Purdy: Could you tell any kind of a path that the wound had taken from looking in there? Robinson: No, not really. All that had been removed. [...] Purdy: Let me clear one thing about the back. To what extent if any was that back area opened up? Or was that just all in tact? Robinson: No, it was opened up. The brain had to come out Purdy: I mean below that wound? In other words the neck and back. Robinson: It was well examined I recall. Purdy: In the sense of being cut open or being looked at closely? Robinson: Yes, I mean looked at and cut. Purdy: How big a cut, Where would the cut have gone from and to? Robinson: I don't remember if it went off in many angles. It was not a nice clean cut. Purdy: So there was a cut open in the neck to look in there. Robinson: They had this all cut. Purdy: How far down on the back of the neck did they cut open? Robinson: That's what's bothering me, I can't recall whether you would say they went into the back or not. I remember seeing the back. Purdy: So you had to close up the work they did on the neck. Robinson: Yes, it seems to me that Ed did that. Purdy: So you don't recall anything Robinson: You can't have three needles in the same area, somebody is going to get it. Purdy: So you don't recall anything unusual about the closing up, you don't personally or having talked to Mr. Strogle about it? Robinson: No. (ARRB MD 63 [text] [audio]) During a panel discussion on 4/6/1991, the autopsy's laboratory technician James Jenkins said the thyroid was removed. Dr. Phillip Williams: Did they take his adrenal glands, do you know? Jenkins: Took the adrenals, the testes, the pituitary, the thyroid. Paul O'Connor: Right. Williams: Alright, then, so if they took the thyroid, then they- they explored this [gesturing towards throat], but at no time did they say that this was a wound? Jenkins: Dr. Boswell- the- the manner that we did the post was that we would do- we would open up the cavity, we would tie off the subclavian serenals and so forth. And then, we would extract, en masse, by severing the trach at the highest point that we could actually reach. And then, we take it all out, separate the organs- you know, examine the organs by- according to the technique that that particular doctor, whether he would saw such a heart or whether he would actually open up the heart through the vessels. (Video, 5:34) On 2/13/1996, Dr. Humes gave his deposition to the Assassination Records Review Board: Q. Okay. For the thyroid over on the right column. A. Yeah. Q. There's no weight there. Do you know-- A. It probably wasn't removed. I don't know. Let me go back for one minute. I was told find out what killed the man. My focus was on his wounds. I didn't approach this like it was a medical death due to some disease or whatever. I was focusing primarily and almost exclusively on the wounds. So I don't know. I don't know if I weighed the thyroid or not. (ARRB, 2/13/1996 [text]) Dr. Boswell’s ARRB deposition was on 2/26/1996. Strangely, when asked "Were the organs of the neck dissected?", he responded "Yes": Q. Did you ever understand that there were any orders or instructions to limit the autopsy of the organs of the neck? A. No. Q. Were the organs of the neck dissected? A. Yes. [...] Q. Do you see any of the organs of the neck being weighed on Exhibit 1 on the first page? A. No, and the only organ in the neck would be the thyroid. Q. Do you know whether the thyroid was removed from President Kennedy? A. I don't remember that it was. It need not have been necessarily removed. I mean, it could have been examined in situ and not removed. But I do not remember. Q. With there being a bullet wound transiting the neck, would it not be standard autopsy procedure to remove all of the organs of the neck? A. Normally it would. The trachea, larynx, and everything. Q. Do you know whether the trachea, larynx, and thyroid were removed? A. I'm almost sure that we did not remove the trachea and larynx. I believe the lungs were removed separately. Normally you would take all the neck organs out with the thoracic organs. Q. Did anyone request that the organs of the neck not be removed? A. No. (ARRB, 2/26/1996 [text]) Some statements seem to describe a surgical instrument being used to “probe” the throat during the autopsy, not just the back (ARRB MD 16, 1/10/1967 CBS internal memo from Robert Richter to Les Midgley; ARRB MD 135, 8/11/1978 HSCA interview of Robert Knudsen [text] [audio, partial]; (The effectiveness of Public Law 102-526, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 : hearing before the Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, first session, November 17, 1993, p. 222 [text]; ARRB MD 227, 4/8/1996 ARRB interview of John Stringer; ARRB MD 180, ARRB report on 6/21/1996 interview of Tom Robinson; 7/16/1996 ARRB deposition of John Stringer [text] [audio]). If this happened, it was not reported on. I am wondering if the above statements could explain Paul O'Connor's "esophagus" sighting.

Unfortunately, no. Five years of hard labor and still haven't approached the timeline issue yet. I have, however, compiled every known reference to the "surgery of the head" statement in the Sibert and O'Neill report.

Going through BEST EVIDENCE, I was surprised to not see any reference to the well-remembered joke from the 1967 issue of The Realist about LBJ putting his penis inside of JFK's tracheotomy wound. I did not know that joke was so old. This joke seems to have influenced the zeitgeist beyond just concerns about the JFK assassination. The writer even claimed rumors of the story being mistaken for truth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Realist https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28043511?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Could Hugh Aynesworth just be a glorified Hugh Huggins?

Thank you. I am trying to gather as much information as possible so I can make a full list of information relevant to the case for an altered throat wound.

delete

Dr. Lito Porto is still alive, right? And also what about Dr. Donald Curtis, Dr. Gene Akin AKA Solomon Ben-Israel, Dr. Phillip Williams, and Nurse Phyllis Hall?

Doug Horne and David Mantik both agree that the white spot looks like some brain matter coming out of a small hole underneith it. The HSCA said it just looked like a piece of brain matter lying on top of the hair, no mention of anything that looks like a hole.

Hope the website business gets sorted out.

Sounds like it would be referenced everywhere that talks about the medical evidence, but this is apparently a rare piece of media that we don't know if we have any record of. Where is Rick Russo?

Why are there so many interesting HSCA medical interviews that we still have no digital copies of? One day I can go to DC to scan all of these things but I would need to gather resources first.

From JFK and the Unspeakable: Dr. Perry's retraction was not only manipulated but given under stress. He had been threatened beforehand by "the men in suits," specifically the Secret Service. As Dallas Secret Service agent Elmer Moore would admit to a friend years later, he "had been ordered to tell Dr. Perry to change his testimony. " Moore said that in threatening Perry, he acted " on orders from Washington and Mr. Kelly of the Secret Service Headquarters. "555 Moore confessed his intimidation of Dr. Perry to a University of Washington graduate student, Jim Gochenaur, with whom he became friendly in Seattle in 1970. Moore told Gochenaur he "had badgered Dr. Perry" into "making a flat statement that there was no entry wound in the neck."556 Moore admitted, " I regret what I had to do with Dr. Perry. "557 However, with his fellow agents, he had been given "marching orders from Washington. " He felt he had no choice: "I did everything I was told, we all did everything we were told, or we'd get our heads cut off. "558 In the cover-up, the men in suits were both the intimidators and the intimidated. [...Notes] 555 . House Select Committee witness Jim Gochenaur to interviewer Bob Kelley on Gochenaur's conversations with Secret Service agent Elmer Moore. Notes by Bob Kelley on June 6, 1975; pp. 3-4. JFK Record Number 157-10005-10280. 556. From transcribed copy by House Select Committee on Assassinations of taperecorded conversation with James Gochenaur, May 10, 1977, p. 22. JFK Record Number 180-10086-10438. 557. Author's interview with Jim Gochenaur, April 28, 2007. 558. Moore cited by Gochenaur. HSCA conversation with Gochenaur, May 10, 1977, p. 23. Also Jim Gochenaur's letter to the author, October 23, 2007.

https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2013/11/19/as-50th-anniversary-of-assassination-approaches-surgeon-who-treated-jfk-remembers/ And like many, Dr. McClelland has struggled to fill in the blanks about the details of the assassination himself. He frequently references one book “of the 32,000 out there” on the event – JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass, which argues that military and intelligence agencies in the U.S. are responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination and the subsequent cover-up. According to Douglass, those organizations were upset by JFK’s evolving stance on the Cold War and, desperate to win, they plotted Kennedy’s death because he was “getting in the way” of their plans for a nuclear strike. For McClelland, that book seems to offer answers to the questions he’s been grappling with over the last fifty years – in particular, why his colleague, Dr. Perry, who also treated the President that day, would never speak of the assassination (“If you ever even mentioned the assassination [to Dr. Perry], he would cloud up and say, ‘I don’t talk about that,’ period.”) If you take Douglass at his word, a Secret Service agent approached Perry shortly after he’d given a description of JFK’s wounds to the media – when he’d pointed to his neck and seemed to imply that the entrance wound was there. That agent supposedly threatened Perry, ordering him never to talk about the assassination again…”or else,” Dr. McClelland emphasizes.

Let's see, we have how many instances of medical witnesses being coerced against talking... 1. The story of Dr. Perry being stopped after his first press conference by a man in black who said "don't ever say that about, about that being an entrance wound" 2. Dr. Charles Baxter threatening to ruin the medical careers of anybody at Parkland who made a dime talking about the assassination 3. The autopsy pathologists being influenced by members of the military and the Kennedy family 4. The Navy gag order 5. Arlen Specter telling Dr. Ronald Jones about the unidentified "non-credible witnesses" to a gunman shooting from the front 6. Humes, Boswell, Stringer and Ebersole signing the document that said "Humes, Boswell, and Stringer signed a report stating "The X-rays and photographs described and listed above include all the X-rays and photographs taken by us during the autopsy, and we have no reason to believe that any other photographs or X-rays were made during the autopsy" despite claiming to remember other pictures being taken. Ramsey Clark claimed that he started re-investigating the assassination to "get ri of some of the trash" in Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas 7. The HSCA's Dr. Charles Petty calling Humes a "god-damned jackass" for not agreeing with their theory of a higher location for the small head wound 8. Gary Cornwell trying to coerce Humes to agree with the same thing Any more?

No such video. Sounds like you might be thinking of... PBS, Nova, 1988, Who Shot President Kennedy? [link 2] KRON, 11/18/1988, JFK: An Unsolved Murder [link 2] [link 3] 4/6/1991 Dallas conference [video, part 1] [video, part 2]

The JFK Lancer website is hardly working. Can't buy any DVDs.

On here and in the signet edition of Best Evidence, you mention a 1988 interview of Dr. Perry by PBS Nova. But Dr. Perry does not appear anywhere on that program, and I can't find any reference to such a Perry interview. Is this a garbled reference to Perry's 1992 JAMA interview?

We need an ebook version of the 5 volumes of Inside the Assassination Records Review Board that adds all of the updates Doug has talked about before.

Is there any chance McClelland is referring to something from Beyond The Fence Line? I have heard him mention that book before. I've never heard of any book that contains this story of Perry being warned.

Do you know of any special source for this information?

I just found a 2014 McClelland interview where he says the following, 24:06 in: https://www.parklandsurgical.com/home/2014/7/25/a-conversation-with-dr-robert-mcclelland Audience member: I read that Mac Perry originally had said that he characterized the neck wound as a quote 'wound of entrance'. And I also know that subsequent to that, to his dying day, he never spoke about it again. McClelland: He would not say anything to anybody, me or any other- anybody at all, he was just completely- said nothing. Recently I read a book out of all of the some three thousand books that are written about this, and apparently, according to the author of this book, someone had come up to Dr. Perry after he gave his initial testimony- or, not testimony, but initial interview to the many newsmen that were gathered in the grand rounds room at Parkland right after this event happened. And Dr. Perry had made a comment about this being possibly an entrance wound in his neck. And according to this book, and this again is, you know, maybe [inaudible], maybe not. Someone with an American flag in his lapel, you know, you know, you know, Secret Service man, maybe not, came up to him and he said 'Dr. Perry', he said, 'whatever you do, do not ever say that that was an entrance wound again if you know what's good for you'. Other than that, Not only did Dr. Perry never say that was an entrance wound, he never said anything, period, at all about it to me or to anybody else. And he left town right after this event and went down to South Texas where his mother-in-law lived.

Yeah, Sibert and O'Neill couldn't have stayed any later than 12:00 AM, and we know the restoration of the body lasted until around 3:30 AM. O'Neill couldn't be telling the truth when he described seeing Kennedy laying in his casket fixed up to look like he was sleeping.

O'Neill was almost certainly lying when he described staying at the autopsy long enough to see the restoration https://www.rareddit.com/r/JFKsubmissions/comments/drvi5r/discussing_jfks_torso_wounds_part_24_oneills/