Dorsal to Volar

[James DiEugenio]

I was reading Humes' testimony today.  Never fails to amaze me.

He said the wrist was smashed by a bullet entering from the dorsal side and exiting the volar side.

This means that the bullet came in from the back side of the wrist, that is the part with the veins on your hand and exited the palm side.

This would seem to me to mean that Connally's wrist had to be twisted so the palm was pointed away from him.

But Humes also said that the thigh wound left particles near the bone.  That does not sound like a flesh wound to me.

(BTW, if you do not believe me go to Volume 2, p. 374)

But how could his hand be twisted like that but it would still enter into his mid thigh?

In reading this, no one on the WC batted an eyelash or asked to see any illustrations or a schematic.

Incredible.

Edited April 16, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[Tony Krome]

Washington Post sketch;

Another question would be how did Connally hold onto his Stetson after a bullet smashed his wrist

According to Gary Murr, the above image is "cadaver wrist experiments conducted at Edgewood Arsenal in April/May of 1964."

Edited April 16, 2019 by Tony Krome

[Gary Murr]

6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

I was reading Humes' testimony today.  Never fails to amaze me.

He said the wrist was smashed by a bullet entering from the dorsal side and exiting the volar side.

This means that the bullet came in from the back side of the wrist, that is the part with the veins on your hand and exited the palm side.

This would seem to me to mean that Connally's wrist had to be twisted to the palm was pointed away from him.

But Humes also said that the thigh wound left particles near the bone.  That does not sound like a flesh wound to me.

(BTW, if you do not believe me go to Volume 2, p. 374)

But how could his hand be twisted like that but it would still enter into his mid thigh?

In reading this, no one on the WC batted an eyelash or asked to see any illustrations or a schematic.

Incredible.

Jim:

As I have repeatedly indicated in both writings and presentations at various conferences John Connally never received an impacting missile wound to his right wrist. The terminology of "wrist" is now and has always been incorrect. John Connally did suffer a tangential wound of impact to the lateral surface of the distal fourth [Dr. Gregory's description] of his right radius. Put in different or more simplistic terms, the point of impact was on the "bottom" end of his right radius on the lateral/side surface. While it is true that this same missile did traverse from the "back" [dorsal] surface to an exit  point near the largest crease on the "bottom" [volar] surface of the Governor's actual wrist, it did not "smash" in any way, shape, or form this same wrist. I covered this particular aspect of the Governor's wounding in great detail in Volume 1 of "Controlling The Past", replete with illustrations, X-rays, et al in the accompanying appendices. The X-ray image that Tony has posted in his reply is from one of the cadaver wrist experiments conducted at Edgewood Arsenal in April/May of 1964.

FWIW

Gary

[James DiEugenio]

Gary:

Thanks.  I am not being a smart aleck, but can you place what you just said in just plain English, and specify precise locations to a layman?

Edited April 16, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[Pat Speer]

4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Gary:

Thanks.  I am not being a smart aleck, but can you place what you just said in just plain English, and specify precise locations to a layman?

It entered the top (the backhand side) of Connally's forearm several inches up from the wrist and exited on the underside of his arm (the palm side) just short of his wrist. The problem with this wound is that Olivier couldn't reproduce it and make the SBT work. If the bullet reproduced the wounds it had too much velocity left over and proceeded to created a much more significant thigh wound. If it lost the needed amount of velocity to make the thigh wound as described by the doctors, on the other hand, the bullet inevitably incurred far more damage than CE 399. As a result, the facts--the actual-science--strongly suggests that the bullet creating Connally's wrist wound and thigh wound (should it have been one bullet) was a subsonic bullet (i.e. a bullet fired by a trained assassin). Of course, neither Specter or Olivier or Sturdivan or Fackler or anyone in the wound ballistics world will admit this, but it's nevertheless the truth.

 

From chapter 11 at patspeer.com

I mean, let's do the math. If the bullet lost 100 fps in the air before striking anything, 125 fps in Kennedy's neck, 400 fps in Connally's chest, and 82 in Connally's wrist, it had lost a little over 700 fps before striking Connally's thigh. A subsonic rifle round is fired with a muzzle velocity around 1,000 fps. The 300 fps left over would be more than enough to pierce Connally's pant leg and damage his thigh.(Various studies have placed the speed at which a bullet will break skin between 163 and 330 fps, depending on the bullet and depending on the skin. A June 1981 article by Dr. Vincent J.M. DiMaio in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, however, attempted to clarify this issue, and settled on the minimum velocity of 70 mps (230 fps), as the speed at which a bullet is likely to break skin.)

But no one wanted to hear this. So what does Specter do? 

Mr. SPECTER Had the bullet passed through the President and then struck Governor Connally, would it have lost velocity of 400 feet per second in passing through Governor Connally or more?            

Dr. OLIVIER. It would have lost more. 
Mr. SPECTER. What is the reason for that? 
Dr. OLIVIER. The bullet after passing through, say a dense medium, then through air and then through another dense medium tends to be more unstable, based on our past work. It appears to be that it would have tumbled more readily and lost energy more rapidly. How much velocity it would have lost, I couldn't say, but it would have lost more. 

He gets Olivier to say the bullet lost more velocity than 400 fps in Connally's chest. Olivier fails to put a number to this presumption, mind you. And not only that, he also fails to tell us how much velocity it would need to lose for the single-bullet theory to make sense. Yikes. This is a huge gaping hole in Specter's presentation of the evidence. In effect, he has told the commission "We don't know if Kennedy's and Connally's wounds could have been caused by this bullet if it was traveling at the presumed velocity, and we have no reason to believe this bullet could have caused their wounds if it was traveling at the presumed velocity."

And yet, look how Specter covers this in Appendix X of the Warren Report: (Olivier and Dziemian were of the) "opinion that the wound on the Governor's wrist would have been more extensive had the bullet which inflicted that injury merely passed through the Governor's chest exiting at a velocity of approximately 1,500 feet per second. Thus, the Governor's wrist wound indicated that the bullet passed through the President's neck, began to yaw in the air between the President and the Governor, and then lost substantially more velocity than 400 feet per second in passing through the Governor's chest.314 A bullet which was yawing on entering into the Governor's back would lose substantiallymore velocity in passing through his body than a pristine bullet.315 In addition, the greater flattening of the bullet. that struck the animal's rib (Commission Exhibit No. 853) than the bullet which presumably struck the Governor's rib (Commission Exhibit No. 399) indicates that the animal bullet was traveling at a greater velocity.316 That suggests that the bullet which entered the Governor's chest had already lost velocity by passing through the President's neck.317 Moreover, the large wound on the Governor's back would be explained by a bullet which was yawing although that type of wound might also be accounted for by a tangential striking.318" 

Footnote 314 refers back to the passage cited above. As we've seen, Olivier never used the word "substantially." But guess who did... 

From the 4-21-64 testimony of the doctor who'd repaired Connally's wrist wound, Dr. Charles Gregory:

Mr. DULLES - Was the wound of exit in the wrist also jagged like the wound of entry or was there, what differences were there between the wound of entry and the wound of exit? 
Dr. GREGORY - The wound of exit was disposed transversely across the wrist exactly as I have it marked here. It was in the nature of a small laceration, perhaps a centimeter and a half in length, about a half an inch long, and it lay in the skin creases so that as you examined the wrist casually it was a very innocent looking thing indeed, and it was not until it was probed that its true nature in connection with the remainder of the wound was evident. 
Senator RUSSEL - When did you first see this bullet, Doctor, the one you have just described in your testimony? 
Dr. GREGORY - This bullet? 
Senator RUSSELL - Yes. 
Dr. GREGORY - This morning, sir. 
Senator RUSSELL - You had never seen it until this morning? 
Dr. GREGORY - I had never seen it before this time. 
Mr. SPECTER - Dr. Gregory, what was then the relative size of the wounds on the back and front side of the wrist itself? 
Dr. GREGORY - As I recall them, the wound dimensions would be so far as the wound on the back of the wrist is concerned about a half a centimeter by two and a half centimeters in length. It was rather linear in nature. The upper end of it having apparently lost some tissue was gapping more than the lower portion of it. 
Mr. SPECTER - How about on the volar or front side of the wrist? 
Dr. GREGORY - The volar surface or palmar surface had a wound disclosed transversely about a half centimeter in length and about 2 centimeters above the flexion crease to the wrist. 

(Gregory has now described two wrist wounds--an entrance wound on the back of the forearm measuring a half a centimeter by two centimeters and an exit wound on the palm side of the forearm much closer to the wrist that was essentially a centimeter and a half-long slit. The entrance wound is thereby much much larger than the exit wound. Now look how Specter spins this...)

Mr. SPECTER - Then the wound on the dorsal or back side of the wrist was a little larger than the wound on the volar or palm side of the wrist? 
Dr. GREGORY - Yes; it was. 
Mr. SPECTER - And is that characteristic in terms of entry and exit wounds? 
Dr. GREGORY - It is not at all characteristic of the entry wound of a pristine missile which tends to make a small wound of entrance and larger wound of exit. 
Mr. SPECTER - Is it, however, characteristic of a missile which has had its velocity substantially decreased? 
Dr. GREGORY - I don't think that the exchange in the velocity will alter the nature of the wound of entrance or exit excepting that if the velocity is low enough the missile may simply manage to emerge or may not emerge at all on the far side of the limb which has been struck. 

(Note that Specter has introduced the term "substantially" and pushed that the bullet's velocity had been substantially decreased and that Gregory has corrected him by telling him that it is not how much velocity that's been lost that makes for a small exit wound but how low the velocity is at the time of exit. He was thereby telling Specter that for all he knows the bullet was of low velocity to begin with. And Specter knew this. Before testifying before the commission in Washington, Gregory had testified to Specter in Dallas. On 3-23-64, he'd told Specter that the bullet creating Connally's wrist wound "had to be one of lower initial energy or a missile which had been partially expended elsewhere before it struck his wrist." Now look how Specter ignores this entirely...)

Mr. DULLES - Would this be consistent with a tumbling bullet or a bullet that had already tumbled and therefore entered back side too? 
Dr. GREGORY - The wound of entrance is characteristic in my view of an irregular missile in this case, an irregular missile which has tipped itself off as being irregular by the nature of itself. 
Mr. DULLES - What do you mean by irregular? 
Dr. GREGORY - I mean one that has been distorted. It is in some way angular, it has edges or sharp edges or something of this sort. It is not rounded or pointed in the fashion of an ordinary missile. The irregularity of it also, I submit, tends to pick up organic material and carry it into the limb, and this is a very significant takeoff, in my opinion. 

(CE 399 was, of course, perfectly rounded and nearly pristine. Gregory was thereby telling Specter that as far as he was concerned the single-bullet theory was nonsense.) 

It seems clear, then, that neither of Connally's doctors, Shaw and Gregory, bought into the single-bullet theory, and that Dr. Olivier, the doctor hired to test it, had failed to adequately do so. Arlen Specter was undoubtedly aware of this. Something was needed, then, to convince the commissioners and the public that the bullet creating Connally's chest wound lost far more velocity within Connally's chest than the 400 fps Olivier testified to. Only this could explain how the bullet barely exited Connally's wrist and barely penetrated his thigh. And so Dr. Olivier's testimony that "more" velocity than 400 fps would be lost within Connally's chest if the bullet had previously struck Kennedy became "substantially more" in the commission's report. It's called lying. 

And it almost certainly came courtesy Arlen Specter...

And he largely got away with it. The problems created by Olivier's tests--the problems Specter tried to paper over by pretending Olivier had said a bullet passing through Kennedy before Connally would have "substantially" less velocity than a bullet merely passing through Connally--were never acknowledged by the HSCA when they re-investigated the shooting in the 70's. 

 

Edited April 16, 2019 by Pat Speer