The Head Wounds Revisited

[Daniel Gallup]

A couple of points:

Remember the old sniper's motto: "One shot, one kill." The plotters certainly intended to hit JFK in the back of the head with one bullet (from the Dal-Tex bldg or wherever) to be consistent with a bullet fired from their fake sniper's nest. If that had been successful, they could have done the autopsy right there in Dallas. But because Dealey Plaza turned into a shooting gallery, and you had multiple wounds on multiple victims, including shots from the front, they probably had to decide in a panic to whisk the body off to a military facility and do whatever had to be done. This may have been planned for as a contingency, or maybe not. Just one of many things that went wrong.

Sherry Feister's book describes how the huge blowout (right-front of the head) we see in the Z-film is consistent with a shot from the vicinity of the South Knoll/Triple Underpass. Reading Jackie's testimony, it's clear that she was half out of her mind, and was thinking, "Oh dear, Jack, we need to make your head look better before you get to the hospital." So she probably took the reflected scalp in the right-front (seen in the Z-film) and fitted it back into place. With his thick hair matted with blood, this sounds plausible. She couldn't do anything about the wound extending toward the back where the scalp and bone were missing. This may account for the Parkland witnesses not seeing any damage in the right-front area.

Tracy, here is what Jackie actually told the WC: "I was trying to hold his hair on. But from the front there was nothing. I suppose there must have been, but from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on." If Jackie's recollection is accurate, the damage requiring repair was in the back. Period. The rest is urban legend, based upon the assumption that the Z-film accurately depicts the wounding of the head. But long ago ITEK confirmed that no debris are seen exiting the back of Kennedy's head, and no satisfactory answer exists for this strange phenomenon, not in Sherry's book or anywhere else. What we have at Parkland is an avulsive wound in the back of Kennedy's head, with a great loss of blood and brain and skull in that area -- none of which appears exiting the back of the head on the extant Z-film.