What Kind of Weapon Leaves a Shallow Wound in Soft Tissue?

[Cliff Varnell]

On 5/10/2023 at 4:22 PM, Benjamin Cole said:

Does anyone know if there are times when a metal probe is inserted into a bullet wound, and that the bullet path cannot be probed? 

In other words, an experienced pathologist, one who had done hundreds of bullet wound autopsies, might say, "Yeah that happens, not common, but it happens. You insert the probe, but it cannot follow the bullet path, it just gets blocked, as certain body parts or muscles, move back into position, or something shifts inside the body and blocks the void." 

Humes and Boswell, of course, were administrators, while Finck, brought in late and cowed by mysterious people, can only say he was military pathologist in peacetime Germany for three years. We do not know how experienced he was, but likely not much. 

That’s not what he said.  Any reason to conclude he lied other than what he says shoots down a pet theory of yours?

On 5/10/2023 at 4:22 PM, Benjamin Cole said:

From Doug Horne:

"There were kind of mysterious civilian people in civilian clothes [that] were there — it seemed like they commanded lots of respect and attention — sinister looking people. They would come up and look over my shoulder or look over Dr. Boswell’s shoulder, and run back and they’d have a little conference in the corner, and then all at once, there’s word [that would] come down and says: “stop what you’re doing and go to the other procedure.” (Horne, volume 4, page 1017.)"

Does that sound like an autopsy that could find out anything? 

I can say with 100% certitude...this was a very poor autopsy. Drawing conclusions from it...well, go ahead. 

It’s easy to figure out — there is autopsy material prepared according to autopsy protocol, and material that wasn’t.  The properly produced material corroborates the location of the holes in the clothes and a half dozen contemporaneous accounts of witnesses in position of authority.

[Cliff Varnell]

On 5/10/2023 at 8:10 PM, Michael Crane said:

While I don't subscribe to a shot going through the windshield & entering the throat,this has to be an option for losing velosity.

Hard to imagine a shooter aiming thru a windshield.

On 5/10/2023 at 8:10 PM, Michael Crane said:

Cliff we agree that JFK was shot right before going by the Stemmons Freeway sign on the Zapruder film correct?

Yes.

On 5/10/2023 at 8:10 PM, Michael Crane said:

At what angle was the Umbrella Man at this time if you happen to know?

 

To JFK’s right...2 o’clock?

Edited May 13, 2023 by Cliff Varnell

[Benjamin Cole]

2 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

That’s not what he said.  Any reason to conclude he lied other than what he says shoots down a pet theory of yours?

It’s easy to figure out — there is autopsy material prepared according to autopsy protocol, and material that wasn’t.  The properly produced material corroborates the location of the holes in the clothes and a half dozen contemporaneous accounts of witnesses in position of authority.

Does anyone know if there are times when a metal probe is inserted into a bullet wound, and that the bullet path cannot be probed? 

In other words, an experienced pathologist, one who had done hundreds of bullet wound autopsies, might say, "Yeah that happens, not common, but it happens. You insert the probe, but it cannot follow the bullet path, it just gets blocked, as certain body parts or muscles, move back into position, or something shifts inside the body and blocks the void." 

---30---

OK, answer this one. I don't know the answer:

Can you find a quote somewhere to the effect, "I am experienced pathologist. I have done hundreds of gunshot death autopsies. In every case, I was able to probe the wound successfully to its conclusion or through the body, without exception." 

You are assuming a shallow wound, as the wound could not be probed. You may be correct.  You may be incorrect. 

Do you know how often, if ever, the ability trace the path of a bullet wound with a probe is thwarted? 

PS--I have no pet theories about the direction or nature of the shots that struck JFK. I am relatively certain about the timing of the (at least certain visible) shots that struck JFK and JBC. 

Also, we know for a fact that JBC was shot with a real bullet, not a disintegrating bullet. 

In your scenario, one gunman fired at JFK with novel bullets and struck only JFK, while another gunman missed JFK with a real bullet. Unless the second gunman was aiming only at JBC. 

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Does anyone know if there are times when a metal probe is inserted into a bullet wound, and that the bullet path cannot be probed? 

In other words, an experienced pathologist, one who had done hundreds of bullet wound autopsies, might say, "Yeah that happens, not common, but it happens. You insert the probe, but it cannot follow the bullet path, it just gets blocked, as certain body parts or muscles, move back into position, or something shifts inside the body and blocks the void." 

---30---

OK, answer this one. I don't know the answer:

Can you find a quote somewhere to the effect, "I am experienced pathologist. I have done hundreds of gunshot death autopsies. In every case, I was able to probe the wound successfully to its conclusion or through the body, without exception." 

You are assuming a shallow wound, as the wound could not be probed. You may be correct.  You may be incorrect. 

James Curtis Jenkins was a lab tech at the autopsy and made this statement to David Lifton:

 (quote on)

I remember looking inside the chest cavity and I could see the probe...through the pleura [the lining of the chest cavity]...You could actually see where it was making an indentation...where it was pushing the skin up...There was no entry into the chest cavity...it would have been no way that that could have exited in the front because it was then low in the chest cavity...somewhere around the junction of the descending aorta [the main artery carrying blood from the heart] or the bronchus in the lungs.

(quote off)

[Charles Blackmon]

On 5/11/2023 at 12:10 AM, Michael Crane said:

While I don't subscribe to a shot going through the windshield & entering the throat,this has to be an option for losing velosity.

 

 

Its velocity 

[Michael Crane]

5 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

To JFK’s right...2 o’clock?

Well,I figured that it was an extreme angle.

An angle that would have damage on JFK's left side of the throat interiorly from where it entered.

 

Edited May 13, 2023 by Michael Crane

[Pat Speer]

On 5/10/2023 at 4:53 AM, Cliff Varnell said:

So you think it’s possible for 4+ inches of fabric to bunch up above the top of the back without pushing up on the jacket collar just above the base of the neck?

That strikes you as “serious”?

I just checked in, and here we go. There must be 20 threads already in which you just make stuff up to attack me. As you well know, the bunching of 4 inches or so is required to lift the clothing hole to the back of the neck hole depicted in the Rydberg drawings.  I have long proposed that the back wound was circa T-1, in line with the autopsy measurements and face sheet. The clothing hole would only need to be slightly elevated to reach that location. Back in the day I performed numerous tests where I put a mark on an old shirt at the clothing hole location, then sat with my arm and shoulders in various positions, while my wife poked toothpicks through the mark. The marks made by the toothpick were in line with the  hole depicted in the autopsy photos. 

And yeah, I know it's coming. Once you start on your parade of nonsense, you never stop. Next you'll be saying the autopsy report is not "legal" or some such thing, because it was written in the wrong way, or some such thing. When this is something I've called you on in the past and you were forced to admit you just made it up. Autopsy reports--or autopsy photos, for that matter--are not legally admissible based upon whether they are written in pen or completely filled out, etc, but whether someone will swear under penalty of perjury that it is a report they've written and that it reflects their recollections. Well, that happens to be the case. No, what you miss because you just have to or your whole house of cards collapses is that Burkley's report in which he approximates a wound at T-3 would be given no weight in a court of law, since he never swore to its accuracy and never described even how he came to make such a claim. (I mean, did he get that from viewing the body itself or by looking at the face sheet--which had a misleading body outline? Who knows? Or did he even know basic anatomy? Who knows? A lot of doctors forget the basics after 30 or 40 years of listening to coughing patients and prescribing rest and/or expensive medications. And a lot of them probably suck at anatomy from the get-go.)

 

Edited May 13, 2023 by Pat Speer

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

I just checked in, and here we go. There must be 20 threads already in which you just make stuff up to attack me.

I didn’t make anything up.  You put the back wound at T1.  You rely on autopsy material that violated multiple protocols.

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

As you well know, the bunching of 4 inches or so is required to lift the clothing hole to the back of the neck hole depicted in the Rydberg drawings.

That isn’t the issue.

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

I have long proposed that the back wound was circa T-1, in line with the autopsy measurements and face sheet.

The part of the face sheet written in pencil puts the back wound in the location of the bullet holes in the clothes.

You cite the measurements written in pen (a violation of protocol) which use two moveable landmarks (2 more violations) and in the mastoid measurement used a cranial landmark for a thoracic wound (protocol violation grand slam!)

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

The clothing hole would only need to be slightly elevated to reach that location.

The bullet holes in the clothes are 4 inches below the bottom of the collars — that’s T3.  You say 2+ inches of both shirt and jacket fabric bunched up entirely above the top of the back.  Dealey Plaza photos show a normal amount of shirt collar visible at the back.  The jacket collar was in a normal position just above the base of his neck.

Yout “home experiment” failed to involve the jacket collar, right?

Show us how multiple inches of fabric bunch up above the top of the back without pushing up on the jacket collar.

<cue Jeopardy theme>

[Cliff Varnell]

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Back in the day I performed numerous tests where I put a mark on an old shirt at the clothing hole location, then sat with my arm and shoulders in various positions, while my wife poked toothpicks through the mark. The marks made by the toothpick were in line with the  hole depicted in the autopsy photos. 

The Fox 5 photo was singled out by the HSCA as of especially poor quality.  There’s no indication that’s JFK in that photo.

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

And yeah, I know it's coming. Once you start on your parade of nonsense, you never stop. Next you'll be saying the autopsy report is not "legal" or some such thing, because it was written in the wrong way, or some such thing.

It wasn’t written according to autopsy protocol, for reasons cited above.

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

 

When this is something I've called you on in the past and you were forced to admit you just made it up.

No, Pat, you did no such thing.

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Autopsy reports--or autopsy photos, for that matter--are not legally admissible based upon whether they are written in pen or completely filled out, etc, but whether someone will swear under penalty of perjury that it is a report they've written and that it reflects their recollections. Well, that happens to be the case.

The contemporaneously recorded accounts contradict the 3 year old recollections of military men acting under orders to lie.

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

No, what you miss because you just have to or your whole house of cards collapses

You pretend the clothing evidence doesn’t exist.  You ignore the accounts of Bennett, Hill, Sibert, O’Neill, Robinson, Jenkins and yes, Burkley.

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

is that Burkley's report in which he approximates a wound at T-3 would be given no weight in a court of law, since he never swore to its accuracy and never described even how he came to make such a claim (I mean, did he get that from viewing the body itself or by looking at the face sheet--which can be misleading?)

 

Burkley’s death certificate was properly filled out and signed off as Verified, just like the autopsy face sheet filled out in pencil.

Your case requires Humes and Boswell to be unfaltering tellers of truth, material in protocol violation preferred over material that followed protocol —and a movement of JFK’s clothing that’s insane.

Edited May 13, 2023 by Cliff Varnell

[Cliff Varnell]

Dr. John Ebersole attended the autopsy and told David Mantik in a 1992 interview that the back wound was at T4. 

Chester H. Boyers was the chief Petty Officer in charge of the Pathology Department atBethesda November 1963. This is from Boyers signed affidavit:

 (quote on)

Another wound was located near the right shoulder blade, more specifically just under the scapula and next to it.

(quote off)

The location just below the upper margin of the scapula is consistent with T3.

SSA Will Greer in his WC testimony (Vol 2 pg 127) placed the back wound “in the soft part of that shoulder,” consistent with the testimony of Boyers.

SSA Roy Kellerman testified before the WC (Vol. 2 pg 93) that the wound in the back was “the hole that was in his shoulder.” Kellerman expanded on this for the HSCA witha diagram which placed the back wound in the vicinity of T-3.

Autopsy photographer Floyd Reibe stated that the back wound was a lower marking on the Fox 5 autopsy photo (Harrison Livingstone's Killing the Truth, pg 721).

Parkland nurse Diana Bowron stated the same thing to Livingstone: the back wound was lower than the "official" wound in the autopsy photo (KTT, pg 183).

Bethesda lab assistant Jan Gail Rudnicki told Livingstone that he saw "what appeared tobe an entry wound several inches down on the back." (Livingstone's High Treason 2, pg  206). This consistent with T3.

Bethesda x-ray tech Edward Reed reported seeing a back wound "right between the scapula and the thoracic column," although he thought it was an exit (KTT, pg 720). This location is also consistent with T3.

Total of 15 T3 vicinity back wound witnesses — hallucinations, Pat?

[Pat Speer]

Oh yeah, I forgot. In Cliff's world, the back wound photo--perhaps the single most damning piece of evidence ever made public by the government, as it proves the WC as a whole, and Specter and Warren in particular, as knowing perpetrators of a fraud against the American people (seeing as it proves the Rydberg drawings presented to the public and then re-presented to the public as accurate depictions of the President's wounds were a hoax) is itself a hoax. 

CBS could do a special on the medical evidence, and use the back wound photo to prove the WC's depiction of the wounding was a hoax, and that a former Senator and a former Chief Justice were behind this hoax, and Cliff would fill the forum with complaints about them using a back photo that doesn't show a face, and an autopsy protocol written in the wrong way, to distract and distract and distract and distract and distract from the truth presented by CBS. 

I mean anything--anything--but admit the truth. That the official evidence--the autopsy protocol, autopsy photos, x-rays, and photographic evidence, proves a conspiracy, that was then lied about. Nope can't have that. 

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

Oh yeah, I forgot. In Cliff's world, the back wound photo--perhaps the single most damning piece of evidence ever made public by the government, as it proves the WC as a whole, and Specter and Warren in particular, as knowing perpetrators of a fraud against the American people (seeing as it proves the Rydberg drawings presented to the public and then re-presented to the public as accurate depictions of the President's wounds were a hoax) is itself a hoax. 

HSCA Vol. 7 (emphasis added)

(quote on)

Among the JFK assassination materials in the National Archives is a series of negatives and prints of photographs taken during autopsy. The  deficiencies of these photographs as scientific documentation of a forensic autopsy have been described elsewhere. Here it is sufficient to note that:

1. They are generally of rather poor photographic quality.

2. Some, particularly close-ups, were taken in such a manner that it is nearly impossible to anatomically orient the direction of view.

 3. In many, scalar references are entirely lacking, or when present, were positioned in such a manner to make it difficult or impossible to obtain accurate measurements of critical features (such as the wound in the upper back) from anatomical landmarks.

4. None of the photographs contain information identifying the victim;such as his name, the autopsy case number, the date and place of theexamination.

In the main, these shortcomings bespeak of haste, inexperience and unfamiliarity with the understandably rigorous standards generally expected in photographs to be used as scientific evidence. In fact, under ordinary circumstances, the defense could raise some reasonable and, perhaps, sustainable objections to an attempt to introduce such poorly made and documented photographs as evidence in a murder trial.  Furthermore, even the prosecution might have second thoughts about using certain of these photographs since they are more confusing than informative. Unfortunately, they are the only photographic record of the autopsy.

 Not all the critics of the Warren Commission have been content to point out the obvious deficiencies of the autopsy photographs as scientific evidence. Some have questioned their very authenticity.  These theorists suggest that the body shown in at least some of the photographs is not President Kennedy, but another decedent deliberatelymutilated to simulate a pattern of wounds supportive of the Warren Commissions' interpretation of their nature and significance.  As outlandish as such a macabre proposition might appear, it is one that, had the case gone to trial,might have been effectively raised by an astute defense anxious to block the introduction of the photographs as evidence. In any event, the onus of establishing the authenticity of these photographs would have rested with the prosecution.

 (quote off)

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

CBS could do a special on the medical evidence, and use the back wound photo to prove the WC's depiction of the wounding was a hoax, and that a former Senator and a former Chief Justice were behind this hoax, and Cliff would fill the forum with complaints about them using a back photo that doesn't show a face, and an autopsy protocol written in the wrong way, to distract and distract and distract and distract and distract from the truth presented by CBS. 

I prefer the truth Gaeton Fonzi presented on that day in the summer of ‘66 when the clothing evidence gave Arlen Specter a nervous breakdown.

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

I mean anything--anything--but admit the truth. That the official evidence--the autopsy protocol, autopsy photos, x-rays, and photographic evidence, proves a conspiracy, that was then lied about. Nope can't have that. 

No, we can’t have multiple violations of autopsy protocol no matter what Pat Speer thinks it proves.

Edited May 13, 2023 by Cliff Varnell

[Pat Speer]

OK, Cliff. We both have better things to do. But I saw that you implied the autopsy photos might not be admitted into a court of law because Baden et all lied about them to get themselves off the hook for their own lying about them, etc. 

This is one of your favorite talking points and it is absolute nonsense. Do the reading. To get admitted into evidence, those who took the photo or those present when it was taken need only say they took the photo and/or that it accurately represents what they remember. Bingo. It's been done numerous times. The photos have been entered into evidence. And would be entered into evidence without problem should a legal proceeding arise in the future. 

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

OK, Cliff. We both have better things to do. But I saw that you implied the autopsy photos might not be admitted into a court of law because Baden et all lied about them to get themselves off the hook for their own lying about them, etc. 

The HSCA Photographic Panel said they might not be admitted.

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

This is one of your favorite talking points and it is absolute nonsense.

Excuse me?  My favorite talking point is the clothing evidence, which you pretend doesn’t exist.

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

 

Do the reading. To get admitted into evidence, those who took the photo or those present when it was taken need only say they took the photo and/or that it accurately represents what they remember. Bingo. It's been done numerous times.

The clothing evidence outweighs all of that, corroborated by 15 eye witnesses.

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

 

 

The photos have been entered into evidence. And would be entered into evidence without problem should a legal proceeding arise in the future. 

That’s not what the HSCA photo experts said.

So, Pat, show us how you bunch many inches of fabric above the top of the back without pushing up on the jacket collar.

Edited May 13, 2023 by Cliff Varnell

[Charles Blackmon]

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

Oh yeah, I forgot. In Cliff's world, the back wound photo--perhaps the single most damning piece of evidence ever made public by the government, as it proves the WC as a whole, and Specter and Warren in particular, as knowing perpetrators of a fraud against the American people (seeing as it proves the Rydberg drawings presented to the public and then re-presented to the public as accurate depictions of the President's wounds were a hoax) is itself a hoax. 

 

For the benefit of us lurkers who aren't as well versed in the autopsy, is this the image of which you speak? It actually looks like a rendering of a photo by I. Dox.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said: