F.B.I. Special Agent & Bethesda Autopsy Witness FRANK O'NEILL

[Don Roberdeau]

Good Day.... An article appeared 20MAR07 about F.B.I. Special Agent & Bethesda autopsy witness FRANCIS XAVIER O'NEILL, Jr., and his 2007 book....

http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.ph...n_jfk_s_autopsy

<QUOTE>

Is this the final word on John Kennedy's assassination?

Greg O’Brien BREWSTER, Mass.

IN A MODEST HOME on a Cape Cod country lane, with a front window insulated with weather stripping to conserve heat and a frayed American flag out front waving in the stiff March breeze, sits a man who lives with a history that haunts the world. Francis Xavier O’Neill Jr., a retired FBI agent, one of two agents who oversaw the grisly autopsy of John F. Kennedy 44 years ago, is surrounded by a lifetime of memorabilia, including photographs, medals and official reports, worthy of a museum. He is one of the last surviving members of the preliminary criminal investigation-team that probed the Kennedy assassination.

Recently released 8-millimeter film footage, previously unseen in public, of Kennedy’s fateful motorcade in Dallas, taken less than 90 seconds before the deadly shots were fired, has further agitated conspiracy theorists and has jolted our collective memories. “The footage is sure to be new fodder for conspiracy buffs who have long maintained Kennedy was the victim of a sinister plot orchestrated by shadowy elements in either the government, the ‘military-industrial complex,’ the Mafia, or communist Cuba,” Reuters reported.

More than four decades after this national trauma, eyewitnesses to the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination and its aftermath are disappearing like dew under the Texas sun. At 83, Frank O’Neill is still a beacon of enlightenment. While he maintains that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, O’Neill is critical of some of the initial investigation and autopsy assumptions.

As a 39-year-old agent then assigned to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, O’Neill was directed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to meet Air Force One carrying Kennedy’s body back from Dallas, and “to stay with the body of the president, no matter where it was taken, not to let it out of my sight, and to obtain any evidence of the murder that might be in the body . . . I was to take whatever action that was necessary and deemed appropriate under the circumstances,” O’Neill writes in a manuscript to be published later this year, an autobiography tentatively entitled A Fox Among Wolves. The Providence Journal has obtained a copy of the manuscript.

FBI Agent James W. Sibert, now retired, was assigned to assist O’Neill, who had spoken with Kennedy on several occasions. After Air Force One landed at Andrews and slowly taxied up the tarmac, O’Neill, Sibert and others with high-security clearance greeted the plane, and watched solemnly as Kennedy’s casket was carried to a waiting gray Navy ambulance for the trip to Bethesda Naval Hospital, in Maryland, where the autopsy was performed.

Inside the autopsy room, O’Neill and Sibert assisted Secret Service Agents Roy Kellerman and Bill Greer in lifting Kennedy’s naked body from the bronze casket to the autopsy table. Greer had chauffeured the president’s limousine through Dealey Plaza; Kellerman had been in the front seat next to him. Kennedy’s body, O’Neill writes in a chilling, matter-of-fact tone “was wrapped in a sheet, with another bloody sheet wrapped around his head. The body was lying on a plastic-type covering to prevent, one would assume, the inside of the casket from being irrevocably soiled from blood dripping from the body. Kennedy’s hands were clenched, his eyes opened and his mouth in a grimace.”

O’Neill and others in the autopsy room were stunned when they saw Kennedy’s deep head wound above his right ear “almost the circumference of a grapefruit.” Chief pathologist Dr. James J. Humes, a central figure in the Warren Commission investigation of the assassination, supervised the autopsy; also in the room were attending surgeons and government officials. O’Neill and Sibert stood next to the autopsy table and “were the only two people representing any agency that could be considered a disinterested (neutral) party,” writes O’Neill, a World War II paratrooper, recipient of the Bronze Star, former New York City police officer, retired lawyer, former Connecticut state legislator and former justice of the peace. “The Navy doctors were concerned with the immediate event at hand. The Secret Service was most concerned since their most important assignment lay dead on the table.”

X-rays, viewed by Humes, O’Neill, Sibert and others, revealed dozens of bone splinters and several bullet fragments. Two of the fragments were retrieved, and later matched to an M-1 rifle linked to Lee Harvey Oswald. “Parts of the brain were still there, but not much,” writes O’Neill. “It would seem that no one could survive such an injury.” Three shots were fired, investigators say — the first sounding like a firecracker that entered the upper right rear of Kennedy’s back.

O’Neill in his official report said agent Kellerman, now deceased, told him that Kennedy cried out, “My God, I’ve been hit, get me to a hospital!” The second bullet hit Texas Gov. John Connally, sitting in a jump seat behind Kellerman. The third was the fatal wound to Kennedy. O’Neill said recently in an interview that Kellerman insisted, when pressed how he knew it was Kennedy’s voice, “I was with the man for three years, and know his voice like I know my own. And he was the only man in the back seat of the car that day who spoke with a Boston accent.”

While conspiracy theorists will debate the assassination for generations, O’Neill’s observations are jarring and soul-searching.

“Looking back on the day’s events, I kept thinking of Kellerman and Greer,” he writes. “They both had the president’s blood and brain tissue on their clothes, and it was very evident that they were physically shaken, although still under control. . . . Roy [Kellerman] had been the agent who had directed the security of the president on the Texas trip. That night at Bethesda he told me he cautioned Kennedy that morning not to be so open with the crowds for security reasons. Kennedy told him that if someone wanted to kill him all they would have to do was use a scope rifle from a high building. Roy had tears in his eyes when he told me.”

Greg O’Brien, a freelance writer and editor living on Cape Cod, is an occasional contributor. He is now editing Francis X. O’Neill Jr.’s manuscript on the Kennedy autopsy and O’Neill’s life in the FBI and other branches of government service. He writes two blogs for Cape Cod TODAY and this Op-Ed appeared in the Providence Journal on Tuesday, March 20, 2007.

<END QUOTE>

Best Regards in Research,

Don

Don Roberdeau

U.S.S. John F. Kennedy, CV-67, "Big John," Plank Walker

Sooner, or later, The Truth emerges Clearly

ROSEMARY WILLIS 2nd Headsnap; Westward, Ultrafast, & Towards the "Grassy Knoll"

Dealey Plaza Professionally-surveyed Map Detailing Victims locations, Witnesses, Photographers, Suspected trajectories, Evidentiary artifacts, etc

4 Principles

T ogether

E veryone

A chieves

M ore

"Drehm seemed to think the shots came from in FRONT OF or BESIDE the President." (my EMPHASIS)

----CHARLES F. BREHM, a combat gunfire experienced, United States Army Ranger, World War II, D-day veteran, & very close Dealey Plaza attack witness, quoted only minutes after the attack, and while he is still standing within Dealey Plaza (11-22-63 "Dallas Times Herald," fifth & final daily edition)

[Thomas H. Purvis]

Good Day.... An article appeared 20MAR07 about F.B.I. Special Agent & Bethesda autopsy witness FRANCIS XAVIER O'NEILL, Jr., and his 2007 book....

http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.ph...n_jfk_s_autopsy

<QUOTE>

Is this the final word on John Kennedy's assassination?

Greg O’Brien BREWSTER, Mass.

IN A MODEST HOME on a Cape Cod country lane, with a front window insulated with weather stripping to conserve heat and a frayed American flag out front waving in the stiff March breeze, sits a man who lives with a history that haunts the world. Francis Xavier O’Neill Jr., a retired FBI agent, one of two agents who oversaw the grisly autopsy of John F. Kennedy 44 years ago, is surrounded by a lifetime of memorabilia, including photographs, medals and official reports, worthy of a museum. He is one of the last surviving members of the preliminary criminal investigation-team that probed the Kennedy assassination.

Recently released 8-millimeter film footage, previously unseen in public, of Kennedy’s fateful motorcade in Dallas, taken less than 90 seconds before the deadly shots were fired, has further agitated conspiracy theorists and has jolted our collective memories. “The footage is sure to be new fodder for conspiracy buffs who have long maintained Kennedy was the victim of a sinister plot orchestrated by shadowy elements in either the government, the ‘military-industrial complex,’ the Mafia, or communist Cuba,” Reuters reported.

More than four decades after this national trauma, eyewitnesses to the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination and its aftermath are disappearing like dew under the Texas sun. At 83, Frank O’Neill is still a beacon of enlightenment. While he maintains that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, O’Neill is critical of some of the initial investigation and autopsy assumptions.

As a 39-year-old agent then assigned to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, O’Neill was directed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to meet Air Force One carrying Kennedy’s body back from Dallas, and “to stay with the body of the president, no matter where it was taken, not to let it out of my sight, and to obtain any evidence of the murder that might be in the body . . . I was to take whatever action that was necessary and deemed appropriate under the circumstances,” O’Neill writes in a manuscript to be published later this year, an autobiography tentatively entitled A Fox Among Wolves. The Providence Journal has obtained a copy of the manuscript.

FBI Agent James W. Sibert, now retired, was assigned to assist O’Neill, who had spoken with Kennedy on several occasions. After Air Force One landed at Andrews and slowly taxied up the tarmac, O’Neill, Sibert and others with high-security clearance greeted the plane, and watched solemnly as Kennedy’s casket was carried to a waiting gray Navy ambulance for the trip to Bethesda Naval Hospital, in Maryland, where the autopsy was performed.

Inside the autopsy room, O’Neill and Sibert assisted Secret Service Agents Roy Kellerman and Bill Greer in lifting Kennedy’s naked body from the bronze casket to the autopsy table. Greer had chauffeured the president’s limousine through Dealey Plaza; Kellerman had been in the front seat next to him. Kennedy’s body, O’Neill writes in a chilling, matter-of-fact tone “was wrapped in a sheet, with another bloody sheet wrapped around his head. The body was lying on a plastic-type covering to prevent, one would assume, the inside of the casket from being irrevocably soiled from blood dripping from the body. Kennedy’s hands were clenched, his eyes opened and his mouth in a grimace.”

O’Neill and others in the autopsy room were stunned when they saw Kennedy’s deep head wound above his right ear “almost the circumference of a grapefruit.” Chief pathologist Dr. James J. Humes, a central figure in the Warren Commission investigation of the assassination, supervised the autopsy; also in the room were attending surgeons and government officials. O’Neill and Sibert stood next to the autopsy table and “were the only two people representing any agency that could be considered a disinterested (neutral) party,” writes O’Neill, a World War II paratrooper, recipient of the Bronze Star, former New York City police officer, retired lawyer, former Connecticut state legislator and former justice of the peace. “The Navy doctors were concerned with the immediate event at hand. The Secret Service was most concerned since their most important assignment lay dead on the table.”

X-rays, viewed by Humes, O’Neill, Sibert and others, revealed dozens of bone splinters and several bullet fragments. Two of the fragments were retrieved, and later matched to an M-1 rifle linked to Lee Harvey Oswald. “Parts of the brain were still there, but not much,” writes O’Neill. “It would seem that no one could survive such an injury.” Three shots were fired, investigators say — the first sounding like a firecracker that entered the upper right rear of Kennedy’s back.

O’Neill in his official report said agent Kellerman, now deceased, told him that Kennedy cried out, “My God, I’ve been hit, get me to a hospital!” The second bullet hit Texas Gov. John Connally, sitting in a jump seat behind Kellerman. The third was the fatal wound to Kennedy. O’Neill said recently in an interview that Kellerman insisted, when pressed how he knew it was Kennedy’s voice, “I was with the man for three years, and know his voice like I know my own. And he was the only man in the back seat of the car that day who spoke with a Boston accent.”

While conspiracy theorists will debate the assassination for generations, O’Neill’s observations are jarring and soul-searching.

“Looking back on the day’s events, I kept thinking of Kellerman and Greer,” he writes. “They both had the president’s blood and brain tissue on their clothes, and it was very evident that they were physically shaken, although still under control. . . . Roy [Kellerman] had been the agent who had directed the security of the president on the Texas trip. That night at Bethesda he told me he cautioned Kennedy that morning not to be so open with the crowds for security reasons. Kennedy told him that if someone wanted to kill him all they would have to do was use a scope rifle from a high building. Roy had tears in his eyes when he told me.”

Greg O’Brien, a freelance writer and editor living on Cape Cod, is an occasional contributor. He is now editing Francis X. O’Neill Jr.’s manuscript on the Kennedy autopsy and O’Neill’s life in the FBI and other branches of government service. He writes two blogs for Cape Cod TODAY and this Op-Ed appeared in the Providence Journal on Tuesday, March 20, 2007.

<END QUOTE>

Best Regards in Research,

Don

Don Roberdeau

U.S.S. John F. Kennedy, CV-67, "Big John," Plank Walker

Sooner, or later, The Truth emerges Clearly

ROSEMARY WILLIS 2nd Headsnap; Westward, Ultrafast, & Towards the "Grassy Knoll"

Dealey Plaza Professionally-surveyed Map Detailing Victims locations, Witnesses, Photographers, Suspected trajectories, Evidentiary artifacts, etc

4 Principles

T ogether

E veryone

A chieves

M ore

"Drehm seemed to think the shots came from in FRONT OF or BESIDE the President." (my EMPHASIS)

----CHARLES F. BREHM, a combat gunfire experienced, United States Army Ranger, World War II, D-day veteran, & very close Dealey Plaza attack witness, quoted only minutes after the attack, and while he is still standing within Dealey Plaza (11-22-63 "Dallas Times Herald," fifth & final daily edition)

Well!

Since few, if any, have bothered to verify the factual information which Agent O'Neill long ago reported, I would have my doubts that any new information or facts would be met with a new look at what he has always acurately reported.

[Myra Bronstein]

What a crock.

It was pointless for the two FBI agents to watch over the President's corpse since the chain of evidence was already broken.

The bronze casket was empty as it flew back to Bethesda on AF1. The body was removed from the casket while AF1 was on the ground with LBJ being sworn in, after he insisted that Jackie stand by him so the casket was unattended and the body moved to AF2.

The casket went to Bethesda; the body went to Walter Reed where the surgery was done to hide evidence of a shot from the front.

Tears in Killerman's eyes? Puh-leeze. As we know here the coup had SS complicity.

Note how he blamed the victim: Kennedy let people shoot him? BS! The SS job is to protect the prez no matter what he supposedly says. And Kennedy was first shot in the throat so could NOT have spoken. Lying sack...

[Pat Speer]

What a crock.

It was pointless for the two FBI agents to watch over the President's corpse since the chain of evidence was already broken.

The bronze casket was empty as it flew back to Bethesda on AF1. The body was removed from the casket while AF1 was on the ground with LBJ being sworn in, after he insisted that Jackie stand by him so the casket was unattended and the body moved to AF2.

The casket went to Bethesda; the body went to Walter Reed where the surgery was done to hide evidence of a shot from the front.

Tears in Killerman's eyes? Puh-leeze. As we know here the coup had SS complicity.

Note how he blamed the victim: Kennedy let people shoot him? BS! The SS job is to protect the prez no matter what he supposedly says. And Kennedy was first shot in the throat so could NOT have spoken. Lying sack...

Myra, you should read Kellerman's and Greer's testimony before you judge them. IF they'd been part of a conspiracy why would they testify to hearing a "flurry of shots" or to hearing the last two shots "almost simultaneously?" They both knew that the last two shots came in too fast for them both to have been fired by Oswald, and put this on the RECORD. And they weren't alone. A number of other SS agents reported the shots in a manner inconsistent with Oswald acting alone.

When you consider how almost every aspect of the country--from the Presidency to the FBI to TV Guide--was quick to blame it on Oswald, it's easy to see how men like Kellerman and Greer kept their doubts to themselves. Sibert and O'Neill felt quite sure the single bullet theory was bs, yet failed to mention this publicly for years afterwards.

The failure of the Warren Commission to get at the truth represents a failure of almost every aspect of the country, and not just the failure of a few bad guys in the Secret Service and/or military. This country was made up largely of bureaucratic ass-kissers and cowards. And still is.

FWIW, not all of us "know" the "coup" had SS complicity. If so, why did Johnsen and Rowley refuse to sign off on the bona fides of CE 399? I suspect things aren't as clear-cut as you've come to believe.

[Charles Drago]

Secret Service complicity would have been -- I accept that it was in fact -- multi-tiered, with some agents aware only of a benign security stripping test and others -- very few -- knowledgeable of what really would go down.

See Vince Palamara's "The Third Alternative" for the best data base. That title, by the way, was given to Vince by George Michael Evica in response to the former's presentation of the either/or position being articulated again on these cyber pages.

Peter Dale Scott's multi-phase assassination theory supports this analysis.

"If only I had seen it," Kellerman is reported to have said remorsefully to Mrs. Kennedy. "Seen" what? Material objects and events -- people, weapons, the first hits in the back seat -- in the Plaza? Or "seen" as in "realized" that the test of which he had been made aware was a set-up?

By the way, I've written a letter to the editors of the Providence Journal in which I point out the M-1 error --among other, shall we say, problematic aspects of the news story.

Charles

[Wim Dankbaar]

O’Neill in his official report said agent Kellerman, now deceased, told him that Kennedy cried out, “My God, I’ve been hit, get me to a hospital!” The second bullet hit Texas Gov. John Connally, sitting in a jump seat behind Kellerman. The third was the fatal wound to Kennedy. O’Neill said recently in an interview that Kellerman insisted, when pressed how he knew it was Kennedy’s voice, “I was with the man for three years, and know his voice like I know my own. And he was the only man in the back seat of the car that day who spoke with a Boston accent.”

From: http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.ph...n_jfk_s_autopsy

Hence another clue JFK was NOT shot in the throat and Jimmy is correct in assuming the throat wound was an exiting fragment from his exploding bullet. .

Wim

By the way, Kellerman and Greer were in no way involved in the plans to kill JFK.