The Head Wounds Revisited

[David Lifton]

For Donald Rebentisch, a petty officer who was stationed at Bethesda on the night of the autopsy, there was no big secret. Rebentisch was studying dental and medical equipment repair at the hospital at the time. According to Rebentisch, two ambulances carrying two caskets were employed one of them empty and one with the body of Kennedy in a deliberate charade to slip the President's body into Bethesda Naval Hospital. Rebentisch says his commanding officers told him the secrecy was planned to avoid the media and other onlookers. The empty casket was brought in the front door while the casket carrying Kennedy's body was driven in a 1958 Chevrolet hearse to the back of the hospital where medical officials were to perform an autopsy:

Apart from the issue of a casket "brought in the front door" (certainly not what Sibert & O'Neill state), the problem with Rebentisch's version, as I see it, then becomes when the casket with JFK's body was put into the black hearse, Chevrolet or Cadillac or whatever. We have the film of the transfer from Air Force One to the Navy ambulance. Either that casket was already empty, or somewhere along the line it got switched from Jackie & RFK's ambulance to the hearse (which I don't know we have any evidence for). I don't think Rebentisch's statements help clear up exactly how this supposed security measure was effected.

I have no idea if Rebentisch's story is accurate, but it seems credible. If it is the case, why would it not be reasonable to assume the placement of the body in a different casket was cleared by Bobby or someone else in the Kennedy family. In which case it could happened on Air Force I once it had landed at Andrews. I've have been on that plane and there is a door on the left side of he galley where the coffin was kept during it's flight from Dallas, and it could easily have been unloaded from that door, on the far side of the plane, away from the cameras, and helicoptered to Besthesda.

Gordon,

To cut to the chase (and in answer to your question): The casket was already empty at the time AF-1 landed at Andrews Air Force Base. And, as I stated in Best Evidence: an empty casket at the Bethesda front entrance meant an empty casket on take-off from Dallas. Macmillan's top executives were aware of that, and so were the lawyers--so they approved a national advertising campaign which featured a photograph of the casket being offloaded at Andrews with the caption: "The Casket was empty."

I wish I had the time to make detailed replies to many of the other posts on this thread. . .unfortunately, I don't. But let me just make a few comments about Rebentisch. I was in Los Angeles on 1/24/81, about ten days after the official publication date of BEST EVIDENCE (1/13/81)--when the phone rang in my hotel room at the Bonaventure. It was Jerry Morlock, of the Grand Rapids, Michigan, newspaper. He is the journalist who originated the Donald Rebentisch story. After learning what DR had to say, I immediately telephoned Rebentish, in Michigan, and had a detailed conversation with him, recording it on a micro-cassette recorder. My main objective was to get a valid historical record, before he read my book--and in fact I accomplished that. All Rebentisch knew was what he had read in the just-published Time Magazine story about Best Evidence (see January 19, 1981, Time, "Now, a Two-Casket Theory"). Of course, it was very gratifying and exciting to hear that there were 3 people (himself, and two others) who corroborated the fact that there was more than one ambulance that arrived with a casket that night. Recently, I located that microcassette, and sent it to Pat Valentino, who duped it, and then spent hours making a transcript. The audio is excellent and it is loaded with data that corroborates Dennis David's account. When I asked Rebentish what he would have told people a week after the assassination, if the matter had come up in conversation, he replied (and this captures his mis-impression that a casket entered the front of the hospital):

The main thing I would tell them is the fact that "you people were watching television, and you seen a casket go in the front of the Bethesda Naval Hospital [by which I assume he was referring to the arrival of the Naval ambulance carrying Jacqueline Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. ] And I told them "when you were watching that casket, I'd already delivered the casket to the back of the hospital that went to the morgue." I says "you people were not seeing what actually happened." I've been telling people this for 17 years!"

A few weeks later, I was contacted by Canadian Broadcasting Company producer Brian McKenna, who wanted to do a story on Best Evidence. I supplied the footage from my filmed interviews, and then McKenna and I flew to Michigan, and filmed Rebentisch. McKenna then produced and edited a fine 30 minute documentary titled "The Empty Casket" which was broadcast on "The Fifth Estate," the Canadian equivalent of our "60 Minutes." Much of the footage on that program came directly from the material you will find in BEST EVIDENCE: The Research Video, the home video documentary I produced and which was distributed nationally by Warner, in 1989.

As to when the casket was offloaded from Air Force One: that occurred in Dallas, at Love Field, between 2:18 CST when the casket was first placed aboard, and 2:47 PM CST, at the time of takeoff. Bobby Kennedy did not know, or authorize, any removal of his brother's body from the casket--but I have evidence that Lyndon Johnson implied to certain third parties that it was indeed authorized; moreover, RFK certainly did learn about it shortly thereafter--i.e., he was aware of the situation at the time AF-1 landed at Andrews. However, the press coverage concerning my book was misleading: There were no "strangers" on board AF-1 who "stole the body" or any such thing: It was covertly transferred from the coffin--presumably under the color of authority--and removed via a forklift truck on the rear starboard side. This event occurred while the entire Kennedy group was down on the tarmac, and before Jacqueline Kennedy ascended the stairs (as shown in the Stoughton photo). I have more information about this, and will be publishing it. Remember: I interviewed General Chester Clifton on July 15, 1980, when Best Evidence was already in galleys, at his office, in Washington, D.C. It was a completely on-the-record interview, with my SONY TC-800 reel to reel recorder on the desk between us. Clifton was, by that time, aware of the impending publication of Best Evidence (which is why he granted the interview) and we went over every radio transmission that I (then) knew of concerning the body, the coffin, etc.

What I think many people do not understand is that this was a "body-centric" plot from the outset: i.e., it was planned from the outset to shoot the President and then to alter the wounds, to provide the basis for a false autopsy. However, the original plan was derailed when Governor Connally was unexpectedly shot. So a number of things occurred that were not part of the original scenario. Those involved in this affair were improvising, using "national security" as their excuse to do this or that.

But I digress. . . let's get back to Rebentish: What was memorable about my January, 1981 interview was that when Rebentisch related his account, and claimed to know Dennis David, I asked him a key question to verify that: What was Dennis David's wife's name? Just three months before, I had interviewed Dennis David on camera, in Hoopston, Illinois, and met his wife. Rebentish answered the question immediately, and his answer was correct.

DSL
6/17/13; 1:20 AM PDT
Los Angeles, California