Reply #166: Then can you (or anyone) tell me why...

[Sapphocrat]

...Jackie was climbing over the back of the trunk to retrieve pieces of the President's skull and brain matter?

I'm not looking for a fight. I really want to know how JFK's brains got splattered all over the trunk of the limo if the head shot came from behind.

I am not a physics major, nor am I a ballistics or forensics expert; I'm just one hell of a shooter, who's fired more longarms (and pistols) than most people will ever see in their lives. And while I've never blown a rifle slug through a skull (human or otherwise), in my experience with everything from watermelons to televisions to discarded motorcycle helmets, the "debris" flies out the back of the target, away from the shooter -- regardless of distance.

Try it with a .30-.30, .30-06, or even a piddly little .22 long. Heck, try it with handguns. Try it with a lousy BB gun. I have.

Oh, one more thing about rifle slugs: I've never retrieved a spent slug that wasn't flattened or distorted considerably more than that pretty little piece of lead they keep telling us is The Bullet, no matter how "soft" the target. Something has to stop the bullet, be it bone or auto frame -- and when it is stopped dead-on, it flattens. And if it grazes something before it is stopped, it is misshapen, and then flattened.

And I've fired a lot of rounds in my time. And picked up plenty. (You think ammo is cheap? You're smart to retrieve the lead as well as the casings, for reloading.)

No, I was never in the military, but yes, I'm certain I could get off three shots from a bolt-action in five and a half seconds, and I could probably hit a target at 200 yards twice, if not three times (if you don't take trees, moving targets, or general nervousness into consideration). But I have no issue with Oswald's marksmanship or nerve. I just don't believe all the shots came from behind the motorcade -- and Jackie's sprint across the back of the car has much (but not all) to do with my doubt of the "offical" story.

By the way, here's a short article that should interest everyone involved in this debate, written by a Texas Monthly reporter who also once believed in the lone-guman theory:

Looking again at the evidence, I'm convinced that the fatal head shot came from the direction of the grassy knoll. More than two dozen doctors and nurses who worked on the president at Parkland Hospital remember that the back of the president's head was blown away. That sounds like an exit wound, not an entrance wound. In the Zapruder film you can see clearly a shot striking the right front of the president's head and driving him back. Motorcycle cops, Secret Service agents, even Jacqueline Kennedy were positive about the rear head wound. One of the most haunting images was of Mrs. Kennedy climbing onto the trunk of the limousine to retrieve parts of her husband's skull and brains, which she tried to push back into place.

The Warren Commission and later the HSCA decided that the eyewitnesses were mistaken, because their recollections conflicted with the official autopsy photographs and x-rays. What neither of these investigative bodies told us was that the official photographs also conflicted with each other. X-rays show the whole right side of the president's face—including the eye socket—blasted away, but in autopsy photographs the president's face is unmarked. Nobody has ever explained this amazing contradiction, though G. Robert Blakey, the counsel for the HSCA, tried. "Damage could have been done to the skull without ripping the face off," Blakey reassured me.

Two years ago, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kennedy's murder, Dr. Robert McClelland and two other doctors who worked on the president at Parkland were permitted to examine this evidence for the first time at the National Archives, where it has been locked away from a prying public. What they saw left them incredulous. In testimony before the Warren Commission all three had described a massive hole in the back of the president's head—one of McClelland's most vivid memories was of looking into Kennedy's skull cavity—and now, a quarter of a century later, official photographs showed the back of the head so pristine that the president might have been in a barber chair waiting for a trim. McClelland, a professor of surgery at Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said, "I don't understand it, unless there has been some attempt to cover up the nature of the wounds." Blakey also had an explanation for this. "The doctors are just wrong, that's all," he said.

And do take note of the mention of the Ruby-Oswald connection ("I phoned Beverly not long ago and asked if she remembered. "Sure do," she said. Ruby introduced him as 'my friend Lee from the CIA.'").