It should be noted that the three empty shells found in the sniper’s nest don’t necessarily prove that three shots were fired from that location, even though common sense dictates that this must be the case. Science can only prove that the three cartridge cases were fired in and ejected from Oswald’s rifle at some point prior to their discovery. It does, however, support and is consistent with all the other evidence—including earwitnesses—that three shots were indeed fired from the Book Depository.
The principal evidence connecting the bullets that struck Kennedy with Oswald’s rifle, and therefore establishing the identity of the assassin, are two bullet fragments that were found in the presidential limousine on the night of the assassination.† As anyone who has ever watched an episode of a TV detective show knows, guns fire bullets that can be matched to the weapons that fired them. Gun barrels, even those manufactured in the same factory on the same day and drilled by the same machine—even two successive barrels—have unique markings, called striations, that distinguish one barrel from the other, the individual markings being different. That’s because the drilling and cutting tools used in the manufacturing process leave behind a microscopically rough surface that is unique to each barrel and that engraves its imprint on all bullets subsequently fired through the barrel. As time goes by, normal wear and tear, cleaning, and corrosion add even more points of unique detail to the gun barrel, which are also engraved onto the surface of subsequently fired bullets. All of these markings compose the “signature” or fingerprint of the gun and can be used by firearms experts to determine whether bullet or bullet fragments recovered at a crime scene were fired in a particular weapon to the exclusion of all other weapons in the world.13
In addition to the striations on the inner surface of the barrel (known in firearms identification parlance as “microscopic [or individual] characteristics”), weapons also have “rifling [or “general” or “class”] characteristics,” which, although not unique to each weapon, can, together with the diameter of the bore, aid a firearms identification expert in determining whether a bullet was fired from a particular gun. “Rifling” is the manufacturing process by which spiral grooves are cut into the inner surface of the barrel of a gun from end to end. The raised portions of the surface remaining from the process (the ridges between the grooves) are called lands. The purpose of the grooves is to impart to the bullet passing through the barrel a rotating or spinning motion that, like a tossed football as it passes through space, gives it stability and keeps it true to its intended course. The number of lands and grooves, which are imprinted on the bullet as it passes through the barrel, and the direction (left or right) of the spin or twist, are additional characteristics that help to identify a gun as the murder weapon. The science of firearms identification* is precise, exacting, and conclusive.
One of the two large fragments recovered from the front seating compartment of the president’s limousine (on the driver’s seat just to the right of the driver) and designated by the Warren Commission as Commission Exhibit No. 567, consisted of a piece of the copper metal jacket of a bullet with part of its lead core still attached to it. It weighed 44.6 grains (a tenth of an ounce), less than a third of the weight of an intact 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano bullet. FBI firearms expert Robert A. Frazier, who examined the fragment at the bureau’s Washington lab on the morning of November 23, and independent expert Joseph D. Nicol, superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation for the state of Illinois, found that the sides of the bullet fragment contained sufficiently distinctive barrel markings for the firearms experts to compare them, under a comparison microscope (two separate microscopes mounted side by side), with the markings on bullets test-fired from Oswald’s Carcano. The experts identified the bullet fragment as having been fired in Oswald’s rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons.14 In 1978, a panel of five firearms experts from the HSCA came to the same conclusion.15
The second fragment, found on the floor to the right side of the driver’s seat in the president’s limousine and designated by the Commission as Commission Exhibit No. 569, weighed less than half as much as the first, 21 grains (about an eighth of a whole bullet), and came from the base of a bullet. This was evident because the cannelure, a groove that rings a bullet near its base, was clearly visible. The fragment consisted entirely of the metal jacket, with no part of the lead core remaining. In spite of the heavy mutilation caused by the bullet striking a hard object, about a third of the surface area was sufficiently intact to show, under a comparison microscope, markings identical to those of test bullets fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano—again, to the exclusion of all other weapons.16 The HSCA firearms panel came to the same conclusion.17
So we know that Oswald’s Carcano was the weapon that murdered the president.
The experts were unable to determine whether the two fragments (Commission Exhibit Nos. 567 and 569) were parts of one bullet or came from two separate bullets, since they did not fit together, nor was the combined weight of the two fragments more than a whole bullet (which would have indicated two bullets).18
There has been very little controversy about the identification of these bullet fragments, but the same can hardly be said for the nearly intact bullet found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital on the afternoon of the assassination, designated as Warren Commission Exhibit No. 399, the notorious “magic” bullet. After a comparison, by microscope, with markings on test bullets fired from Oswald’s rifle, FBI firearms expert Robert Frazier (and later, independent expert Joseph Nicol) concluded that the bullet* had been fired from Oswald’s rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons in the world.19 The HSCA firearms panel came to the same conclusion.20 The Warren Commission would eventually decree the bullet to be the cornerstone of its single-bullet theory, concluding not only that it had been fired from Oswald’s rifle, but that it had passed through the president’s body and caused all the wounds to Governor Connally—shattering one of his ribs, breaking a right wrist bone, and puncturing his left thigh.21
Ever since the release of the Warren Report, critics have had a field day with Commission Exhibit No. 399, dubbed the “pristine bullet” or “magic bullet” in assassination literature largely because it remained substantially intact after passing, as the Warren Commission maintained, through Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies.
Though it has become an accepted part of the lore of the assassination that the stretcher bullet was pristine (defined as something in “its original condition”), that is, completely undamaged, remarkably, the only authority for this statement is one single photograph of the bullet published in the Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits.22 Yet, it is almost impossible to see how damaged the bullet really is from this single-view photograph that does not show the base of the bullet. That left the critics free to burn the image of a pristine bullet into the consciousness of America without fear of their lie being exposed by accurate photographs. In 1978, the public got its first good look at the so-called pristine bullet during the televised hearings of the HSCA. Later published as part of the committee’s exhibits, the HSCA photographs depict the bullet from four views (not just one)—two sides, one frontal, and one base.23 The base view (see photo section) shows the base of the bullet badly smashed into an ovoid shape.† It is also evident that lead is slightly extruding from the base, like toothpaste from a tube.‡ Indeed, a portion of the lead is missing, causing the bullet to weigh less, 158.6 grains, than in its original state, 161 grains.24 So much for the pristine bullet. But the myth has long survived the public hearings (which few watched) right up to the present day.
Dr. Michael Baden, the medical examiner who headed the forensic pathology panel for the HSCA, scoffed at the notion that the bullet was pristine, labeling it an inaccurate media description. “It is like being a little bit pregnant—it is either pristine or it is not pristine,” he told the committee. “This is a damaged bullet…not a pristine bullet. This is a bullet that is deformed. It would be very
hard to take a hammer and flatten it to the degree that this is flattened.”25
He went on to explain that the bullet, in its course through the president and the governor, “did not strike much that would cause it to be damaged.” It passed through soft tissue on its course through the president’s body. The first hard structure it hit was the governor’s fifth rib, but it was a glancing blow to what Dr. Baden called “a very thin bone.” The only impact likely to have caused damage of any significance to the bullet was on the lower part of the forearm. His panel of experts felt that striking the radius there probably caused some flattening of the bullet, but they were not particularly surprised that the bullet was not more deformed. The radius in the wrist, unlike the bones of the skull or spine, is not very hard—it could damage some bullets but not others.26
At the trial in London, Dr. Charles Petty, chief medical examiner for Dallas County and a member of the HSCA forensic pathology panel, gave even stronger testimony. With a photo of the stretcher bullet on the screen, I asked, “Could this bullet have ended up in this relatively pristine condition if it had entered the president’s back, exited his throat, then entered Governor Connally’s back…and taken the path through Governor Connally’s body you have just described?”
Dr. Petty: “Yes, of course.”
“Would you explain to the jury how you arrived at this conclusion?”
“This bullet is a full, metal-jacketed military [type] bullet, designed to pass through[i.e., without fragmenting] the soft tissue of an individual, exactly as it did in President Kennedy’s instance. It then contacted bone only in two areas. First, the rib in Connally, and second the wrist bone in Connally. In neither instance did it penetrate the rib or the wrist bone.” He went on to add that the bullet could “easily” have traveled the course it did “without [sustaining] great deformity. I’ve seen that many times.”
Question: “You have seen a bullet causing the damage that was caused to the president’s body and Governor Connally’s body and not having any more damage than that bullet on the screen, is that correct?”
“Yes, of course.” Petty added that no metal fragments were found in Governor Connally’s chest, further evidence that the bullet had only struck a glancing blow to the governor’s fifth rib.27
The first metal fragments found along the supposed path of the bullet were discovered in the governor’s wrist, and, in Petty’s opinion, this was the place where the bullet became deformed.28
Among the experiments carried out for the Warren Commission was one in which a test bullet was fired into the wrist bone of a human cadaver, the result being that the nose of the bullet was damaged more than the base of the bullet that hit Connally’s fifth rib and wrist bone,29 as Commission critics like Mark Lane30 and Dr. Cyril Wecht31 are fond of pointing out. The problem is that shooting a bullet at full muzzle velocity directly into a wrist sheds little light on what might happen to a bullet striking a wrist at a little over half its original velocity. Dr. John Lattimer, who himself conducted tests with the Carcano bullet, told author Gerald Posner that “the Warren Commission did not conduct the proper experiments. They fired a 6.5 mm [bullet] traveling at over 2,000 feet per second directly into a wrist bone. Of course you are going to get deformation of the bullet when it strikes a hard object at full speed.”32
The HSCA’s physical scientist and wound ballistics expert, Larry Sturdivan, who took part in the Warren Commission tests conducted by the Army’s Wound Ballistics Branch at the Edgewood Arsenal laboratories in Maryland in April and May of 1964, pointed out to the committee that the relatively intact state of Commission Exhibit No. 399 was “direct proof that the bullet that struck Governor Connally’s wrist was not at high velocity.” If it had been, he said, it would have been more deformed than it was.33*
Sturdivan explained how the bullet that hit the wrist would have lost velocity and energy as it was successively slowed in its flight. He said the original velocity at the muzzle varied from 2,000 to 2,200 feet per second. In the distance it traveled before striking the president, it would have slowed to about 1,800 feet per second—fast enough to traverse the soft tissue of the body, with very little loss of velocity. By the time the tumbling bullet (the tumbling accounting for almost all the damage being to its base) struck the governor, it would have been traveling, he said, at about “1,700 feet per second or a little less.” Sturdivan calculated that the loss of velocity of the bullet on its passage through the governor’s chest (where it hit a rib) resulted in its exiting the governor’s chest and striking his wrist bone at “somewhere between 1,100 and 1,300 feet per second.” That was sufficiently fast to break the bone (any velocity above 700 feet per second would do that), but not fast enough to shatter the bullet. Sturdivan also reckoned that the bullet in this case would have been slowed to about 700 feet per second or less by the time it struck the governor’s thigh, too slow to penetrate very deeply.34† Sturdivan concluded that a bullet like Commission Exhibit No. 399 was “quite capable” of passing through Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies, striking the tissue and bone that it did, and end up in the same condition that Commission Exhibit No. 399 is presently in.35
There is a frequently overlooked reason (briefly alluded to earlier) why the stretcher bullet did not have more damage than it did. It was a military-type bullet, the very type expected to cause great damage to what it strikes but minimum damage to the bullet itself (unless, of course, it hits the hardest of bone head-on). “There is nothing here that is unusual or spectacular or unexpected,” Dr. Petty told the committee. “This is the behavior of a full metal jacketed bullet, a bullet covered in all areas except the base by means of the firm, hard, tough, not easy to deform jacket.”36
The allegedly “mysterious” circumstances surrounding the discovery of Commission Exhibit No. 399 on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital gave rise to one of the main issues the conspiracy theorists have seized on in the Kennedy assassination—that the facts surrounding the bullet’s discovery could only add up to one thing: the bullet was planted by the real conspirators who killed Kennedy to frame Oswald. But do they?
The movements and handling of President Kennedy’s stretcher negates the possibility that the bullet could have originated from the president’s stretcher. We know President Kennedy remained on his stretcher in Trauma Room One until the arrival of the casket at 1:40 p.m.37 After his body was placed into the casket, the stretcher was stripped and wheeled across the hall into Trauma Room Two, where, by all accounts, it remained until after the presidential party left the hospital at 2:00 p.m.—roughly forty minutes after Darrell Tomlinson discovered the bullet in a completely different part of the emergency room area.38 After ruling out the president’s stretcher as the source of the bullet, the Warren Commission concluded that the bullet had come from the stretcher carrying Governor Connally.39
But conspiracy theorists maintain that the finding of the bullet on Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital, not in more normal places such as inside the presidential limousine, or somewhere in Dealey Plaza, somehow is too convenient and smacks of a planting of the bullet. And if it was planted, we’re talking conspiracy. They point out that even if the stretcher bullet was conclusively proved to have been fired in Oswald’s rifle, this does not, perforce, mean that it was fired in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination.
To buttress that which is already obvious (except to conspiracy theorists)—that the stretcher bullet was the bullet that struck Kennedy and Connally, and that the bullet fragments that were removed from Connally’s right wrist must have come from this bullet—we turn to the HSCA and the passionate, dogged determination of two scientists, Drs. John Nichols and Vincent Guinn, who spent fourteen years in their quest to trace the source of the stretcher bullet.
On the day after the assassination, FBI special agent John F. Gallagher examined some of the bullet fragments recovered during the Kennedy assassination investigation using emission spectrography, a process in which a tiny part of a bullet fragment
is burned and the resulting spectrum of light is analyzed to determine its elemental composition. The test was unable to determine more than the fact that the lead portion of all the fragments (which included those recovered from the limousine, the president’s brain, and Connally’s wrist) were “similar in metallic composition.”40 It could not distinguish how much of any given “trace element” (such as copper, silver, antimony, aluminum, manganese, sodium, and chlorine) was present in any fragment, nor, more importantly, which bullet each fragment had come from.41
In May 1964, Gallagher used a scientific technique—neutron activation analysis (NAA)—to more precisely identify the fragments. NAA had been around since the 1930s and by the early 1960s was a fairly common process in a number of industries (though not in firearms and ballistic examinations), but had never been used by the FBI.* Gallagher went down to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a major nuclear facility where scientists were working with NAA. Two of the Oak Ridge people showed him how to handle the equipment and calculate the results, and over the course of several days there they worked together, Gallagher making and recording his own measurements. Unfortunately, the men at the nuclear facility, who were highly conversant in NAA, had never performed any forensic work. Likewise, Gallagher, who was a highly qualified forensic expert, had never worked with NAA.42
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