Tag: FORENSIC EVIDENCE

In the Courtroom with Robert Wagner

by David W. Mantik, MD, PhD

February 18, 2018
Revised August 27, 2018

NOTE: This is my second review of Wagner’s 2016 book; the first was dated December 4, 2017.1

My first review, and Wagner’s response to it, can be found at my website: http://themantikview.com/pdf/Wagner_Response_1.pdf2

“German judges, very respectable people, who rolled the dice before sentencing, issued sentences 50% longer when the dice showed a high number, without being conscious of it.”

~ The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2010), Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“If logic and reason, the hard, cold products of the mind, can be relied upon to deliver justice or produce the truth, how is it that these brain-heavy judges rarely agree? Five-to-four decisions are the rule, not the exception. Nearly half of the court must be unjust and wrong nearly half of the time. Each decision, whether the majority or minority, exudes logic and reason like the obfuscating ink from a jellyfish, and in language as opaque. The minority could have as easily become the decision of the court. At once we realize that logic, no matter how pretty and neat, that reason, no matter how seemingly profound and deep, does not necessarily produce truth, much less justice. Logic and reason often become but tools used by those in power to deliver their load of injustice to the people. And ultimate truth, if, indeed, it exists, is rarely recognizable in the endless rows of long words that crowd page after page of most judicial regurgitations.” 

~ How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), Gerry Spence

“There is no such thing as justice—in or out of court.”

~ Clarence Darrow3

“Initially, Admiral Burkley said that they had caught Oswald and that they needed the bullet to complete the case and we were told initially that’s what we should do, is to find the bullet.”

~ J. Thornton Boswell, Testimony before the HSCA Medical Panel (9/16/1977)4

In my first review, twenty specific Wagner statements were taken to task. This second review raises more fundamental questions about Wagner’s overall approach, discusses a host of specific JFK issues, cites Wagner’s many logical fallacies, and (again) lists many corrupted evidence items. Wagner’s response to my first review is addressed in the text below. The plan is to also post his response to this second review at my website.

I shall first describe fundamental flaws in Wagner’s model (the legal system), and then explicitly address Henry Wade’s personal travesties in the Texas justice system. Wade was the District Attorney who would have prosecuted Oswald. I then summarize my personal encounters with the legal system—they are consistent with Darrow’s opening quote (above). We begin with a real case.

Incompetent prosecutors and judges in the courtroom

The Innocent Man (2006) by John Grisham relates a case in which Pontotoc County District Attorney Bill Peterson was woefully ignorant of science and was eventually voted (by the Bennett Law Firm) one of “The 10 Worst US Prosecutors of 2007.”I have written a detailed critique of this egregious miscarriage of justice.5 Grisham describes the hostile and foolish mission of the Ada (city), Oklahoma Police Department and Attorney Peterson to solve a murder case at all costs. Peterson and the police used forced “dream” confessions, untrustworthy witnesses, and hair evidence to convict Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz. The Innocence Project aided Williamson’s attorney, Mark Barrett, in exposing the prosecution’s far-fetched case. Frank H. Seay, a US District Court judge, ordered a retrial. After eleven years on death row, Williamson and Fritz were exonerated by DNA evidence and released on April 15, 1999. According to Wikipedia, Williamson was the 78th inmate released from death row since 1973.

Science in the courtroom

Based on DNA evidence, the work of the Innocence Project has led to freedom for 351 wrongfully convicted persons and the discovery of 150 real perpetrators. The Innocence Project was established after a landmark study, which found that incorrect identification by eyewitnesses was a factor in over 70% of wrongful convictions. The original Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld (of O. J. Simpson fame), as part of the Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York City.

Reversals on appeal

How can we decide whether the courts serve justice and truth? Well, we can ask a simple question: What happens during appeals? Here is a startling statistic: The Supreme Court reversed about 70 percent of the cases it took during 2010-15. Among cases it reviewed from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, it reversed about 79 percent. The reversal rate for defendant appellants (typically the so-called guilty party) was 40 percent, compared to 20 percent for plaintiff appellants. So, given this shocking rate of reversal, we can immediately question the legitimacy of Wagner’s model for discovering Truth.

Since Wagner is concerned about Texas courts, we shall ask this: How well is Texas doing now? According to a new study, appeals court judges in Texas have become increasingly hostile to jury verdicts in civil cases, especially when the jurors rule in favor of plaintiffs.6 The report, which examined a full year of decisions during 2010-11 by the state’s 14 courts of appeals, found that these judges reversed more than one-third of all civil jury verdicts, and that they are more likely to overturn jury verdicts that favor plaintiffs than verdicts that favor defendants.

The Texas courts of appeals also reversed 50 percent of the jury verdicts that favor plaintiffs in consumer fraud and general tort cases, but the judges overturned only 11 percent of the jury verdicts that favored defendants. This study was titled “Reasons for Reversal in the Texas Courts of Appeal.”

Death sentences in Texas

In the past year, the Texas Supreme Court heard three appeals from inmates on death row, and in each case the prosecutors and the lower courts suffered stinging reversals.7

But what about Henry Wade, the man who would have prosecuted Oswald? We also know this answer, thanks to Mary Mapes:8 “When Henry Wade Executed an Innocent Man,” in D Magazine (May 2016).9 The legendary Dallas DA ran a conviction machine that was results-oriented (i.e., not truth oriented).10 In 1954, he persuaded a jury to send Tommy Lee Walker to the electric chair just three months after his arrest. But a new look at the case uncovered one of the worst injustices in Dallas history.

Then there are the 19 convictions obtained by Wade that were later overturned. Oswald might well have been #20.11 Here is a quotation from the Associated Press.12

DALLAS — As district attorney of Dallas for an unprecedented 36 years, Henry Wade was the embodiment of Texas justice. A strapping 6-footer with a square jaw and a half-chewed cigar clamped between his teeth, The Chief, as he was known, prosecuted Jack Ruby. He was the Wade in Roe v. Wade. And he compiled a conviction rate so impressive that defense attorneys ruefully called themselves the 7 Percent Club.13

But now, seven years after Wade’s death, The Chief’s legacy is taking a beating.

Nineteen convictions — three for murder and the rest involving rape or burglary — won by Wade and two successors who trained under him have been overturned after DNA evidence exonerated the defendants. About 250 more cases [in Texas] are under review [emphasis added].

No other county in America — and almost no state, for that matter — has freed more innocent people from prison in recent years than Dallas County, where Wade was DA from 1951 through 1986.

Current District Attorney Craig Watkins, who in 2006 became the first black elected chief prosecutor in any Texas county, said that more wrongly convicted people will go free.

“There was a cowboy kind of mentality and the reality is that kind of approach is archaic, racist, elitist and arrogant,” said Watkins, who is 40 and never worked for Wade or met him ….

The new DA and other Wade detractors say the cases won under Wade were riddled with shoddy investigations, evidence was ignored, and defense lawyers were kept in the dark. They note that the promotion system under Wade rewarded prosecutors for high conviction rates [emphasis added].

“Now in hindsight, we’re finding lots of places where detectives in those cases, they kind of trimmed the corners to just get the case done,” said Michelle Moore, a Dallas County public defender and president of the Innocence Project of Texas. “Whether that’s the fault of the detectives or the DA’s, I don’t know.”
John Stickels, a University of Texas at Arlington criminology professor and a director of the Innocence Project of Texas, blames a culture of “win at all costs.”

“When someone was arrested, it was assumed they were guilty,” he said. “I think prosecutors and investigators basically ignored all evidence to the contrary [emphasis added]14 and decided they were going to convict these guys.”15

And this same Henry Wade, in Wagner’s model for Truth, would have prosecuted Oswald.16

About majority decisions

Wagner routinely decides an issue via majority vote.17 But as a scientist I am dumbfounded—and horrified—at the fantasy of the American Physical Society voting on whether the 2012 Higgs particle was the real thing—or merely a masquerade. In this nightmare, whatever happens to objective data?

But can we trust the majority to be right? In Indonesia the majority would vote for Islam, but in America, Christianity would win hands down. So, who is right? How does a majority vote help us here?

Of course, the most notorious case of science on trial occurred on April 12, 1633. For espousing “heresy,” physicist Galileo Galilei was found guilty by a majority vote under the reign of Pope Urban VIII. The Catholic hierarchy finally cleared Galileo on October 30, 1992. (This date is not a joke.) The red-hot issue now though is whether his chief inquisitor, Father Vincenzo Maculano da Firenzuola, should be tried (in absentia) for “heresy.” The Church has yet to address this issue.

Papal infallibility

Ironically enough, this was another majority decision! Infallibility was formally defined in 1870, but bishops Aloisio Riccio and Edward Fitzgerald dissented. Before 1870, belief in papal infallibility was not a requirement for Catholic faith. Here is a painting to commemorate papal infallibility, following the definition of 1870 (Voorschoten, 1870).

Right to left: Pope Pius IX, Christ, and Thomas Aquinas

Following the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) a few Catholic dissenters arose among some Germans, Austrians and Swiss. This resulted in the formation of communities in schism with Rome, so they became known as the Old Catholic Churches. The dogma of papal infallibility is rejected by Eastern Orthodoxy. The Church of England and its sister churches also reject papal infallibility—so unanimity is surely lacking. Even a few contemporary Catholics, such as Hans Küng (author of Infallible? An Inquiry) and historian Garry Wills (author of Papal Sin) deny papal infallibility. Küng has been sanctioned by the Church, but Wills has escaped (so far).

American history

During reconstruction, and for decades afterwards, southern juries excluded persons of color, yet these jury verdicts of murder (typically against black men) stood unchallenged—and unappealed. This was also rule by majority, just as Wagner prefers.18

During the Vietnam War, LBJ’s “Wise Men” persistently voted (essentially unanimously) to continue the war. Meanwhile, even the protestors on the streets knew better.19 This illustrates the logical fallacy of deferring to so-called authorities, a trait often displayed by Wagner.

Can we trust the courtroom? Some personal experiences

Wagner overtly admits that his model for discovering Truth is the courtroom.20 So, Wagner and I are immediately at loggerheads. My model is distinctly not the courtroom. Rather, it is science—which is very different indeed. In this review I examine where such a courtroom approach might take us, especially in Texas, but first some personal comments.

I have served several times as an expert witness—both in physics and in medicine. I have seen my mother win a modest sum in a malpractice case (against her radiation oncologist), in which expert witnesses testified on both sides. I have been a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against a subcontractor—in which my general contractor sided with me—but I still lost the case. I have protested two traffic tickets. In the first one, I presented my phone bill, which proved that I had not used my cell phone. Such hard evidence did not matter to the judge; I still had to pay the fine. I eventually won the second case (with a generous refund from the state of California), but only after the Appellate Court recognized the lower court’s frivolous decision. That appeal should never have been necessary, and I am still trying to get my well-deserved DMV refund. With the legal aid of Bill Simpich, I have assisted my son in a suit against his landlord, which ended in a draw.21 Based on personal experience, I can say—without a moment’s thought—that justice is oddly rare in the halls of justice. Too often, basic common sense—and even truth—are deliberately excluded. Just ask any attorney what they learned about truth and justice from their philosophy courses while in law school. They will respond with blank gazes. Instead, they are primed to advocate for the views of individuals and diverse interest groups within the context of the legal system.

Junk science in the courtroom

In my acerbic, online critique of John McAdams, I have summarized the (dishonest) use of fingerprints in the courtroom, with special emphasis on its abuse in the Oswald matter.22 Very recently we have learned even more about junk science in the courtroom: forensic scientists have often overstated the strength of evidence from tire tracks, fingerprints, bullet marks, and bite marks.23 This is the very same evidence that Wagner so desperately wants us to accept. It is indeed noteworthy that some of this information became known while he was writing his book, but some was even known well before that. Why did he fail to inform his readers of these remarkable new developments? And John McAdams committed the same fallacy in his book.

To illustrate the issue about bullet grooves (which Wagner heavily relies upon in the Oswald case), consider this. In 2000, Richard Green was shot and wounded in his neighborhood south of Boston. About a year later, police found a loaded pistol in the yard of a nearby house. A detective with the Boston Police Department fired the gun multiple times in a lab and compared the minute grooves and scratches with the casings at the crime scene. They matched, he said at a pretrial hearing, “ … to the exclusion of every other firearm in the world.” So how could the detective be so certain that the shots hadn’t been fired from another gun? 

The short answer, if you ask any statistician, is that he couldn’t. There was an unknown chance that a different gun could cause a similar pattern. But for decades, forensic examiners have claimed in court that close, but not identical, ballistic markings conclusively link evidence to a suspect—and judges and juries have (gullibly) trusted their so-called expertise. Examiners have made similar statements for other pattern-type evidence, e.g., fingerprints, shoeprints, tire tracks, and bite marks.24

In 2009 a committee at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that such claims were ill-founded. “No forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.” In other words, judges and juries have sent (many) people to prison (and some to their deaths) based on bogus science.25 And this is the kind of evidence that Wagner wants us to accept.

My conclusions, on the other hand, rarely rely on majority votes. Rather, actual data are preferred, such as optical density data. And if I say that an issue has been (essentially) decided, as I do in my first review of Wagner, then that conclusion is not based upon a majority vote, but rather on fundamental scientific data. (Wagner seems unaware of this distinction, or perhaps is unable or unwilling to grasp it.) A good example, of course, is the 6.5 mm (fake) object on JFK’s frontal X-ray. It matters not a whit what so-called experts say—especially since they routinely evade the actual data. But I do care about genuine experts, such as Kodak physicists.26 For example, the phrase “optical density” does not even appear in Wagner’s book. Despite this, Wagner quickly disposes of this OD data, which was taken directly from the extant X-rays at the Archives.27 Furthermore, in Wagner’s comments about my work, this distinction (i.e., majority vote vs. scientific data) persistently eludes him. Now, because neurologist Michael Chesser, MD, has validated so many of my OD data,28 we should soon be able to separate believers in science from the post-modernists. So far, Wagner has been very careful not to comment on Chesser’s observations.

What about Wagner’s scenario for his own Marvelous Bullet?

He is jubilant about rejecting the Magic Bullet of the Warren Commission (WC), but then instead proposes an even more marvelous (and hitherto unknown) trajectory of his own.29 (Ironically, by doing so he leaves the notion of a majority vote in the closet—his is, after all, a highly iconoclastic speculation.) He suggests that a bullet struck JFK’s back, then somehow (no cause is stated) was deflected upward, exited the throat, flew over the windshield, struck the curb, after which some particle found its way to Tague’s face, but then that bullet got lost. There are some problems with this:

1. The pathologists, via probing, found only a superficial wound in the back. James Jenkins watched this probe as it indented the pleura—but did not penetrate the pleura.30
2. The pathologists found no pneumothorax, i.e., the lung was not deflated by external air due to penetrating trauma of the lung.
3. X-rays showed no pertinent damage to vertebrae or ribs.
4. The WC printed photographs31 that showed the remarkable penetrating power of Western bullets fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano. These bullets were fired through 72.5 cm (29 inches) of gelatin blocks. The bullets passed through 1.5 blocks (22 inches) in a straight line, before the trajectory curved. So, in view of this remarkable stability, especially without striking either lung or bone, how exactly was Wagner’s Marvelous Bullet deflected to the throat? Did the thymus gland deflect it?
5. No copper was discovered on the curb. So, where did the copper jacket go? The only reasonable possibility is that the copper was left inside of JFK’s chest or throat. Unfortunately for Wagner, the X-rays show no copper (or any other metal).

But perhaps, in view of Wagner’s (likely limited) science background we should not be surprised by his indifference to these issues.

Then there is Josiah Thompson’s alternate proposal (made in 1967 in Six Seconds in Dallas, and possibly no longer supported by him): the curb was struck by a fragment from the headshot. Wagner initially considers this option, but then ultimately rejects it (or maybe not—as Wagner seems ambivalent32), but without ever offering a detailed analysis. There are good reasons to reject it:

1. This is the same bullet that (purportedly) deposited the 6.5 mm cross section on the back of JFK’s head.
2. The nose and tail of this same bullet were found inside the limousine—meaning that these two (large) fragments did not fly far.33
3. On the other hand, if a (separate) metal fragment struck the curb, it first had to fly through JFK’s head, zoom over the windshield, and alight on the curb. But we know that smaller fragments (which this must have been) do not travel very far through tissue, so why would that 6.5 mm “fragment” stop abruptly (at the back of JFK’s head), while this smaller Tague “fragment” flew through JFK’s brain—and well beyond?
4. This same bullet (in this madcap scenario) must have produced the metal fragment trail across the top of the head. If that bullet entered at the cowlick site—as selected by the HSCA34—then it likely exited through the forehead! (After all, that trail intersects JFK’s forehead on the lateral X-ray.) But any rational WC loyalist would give up at this point—these loyalists see no forehead wound.
5. Since no copper was found on the curb, the entire copper jacket must have been left inside of JFK’s head—or inside the limousine. But none was found in the limousine, and none is visible on the X-rays.

Wagner’s basic premise.35

As he argues for Oswald’s guilt, he is indeed a clone of Vincent Bugliosi.36 After “proving” Oswald’s guilt, Wagner (like Bugliosi) then uses this conclusion to insist on many other items:

1. Oswald carried a package into the book depository.
2. The wrapping paper fit the disassembled weapon.
3. Handwriting analysis (more junk science) proved that Oswald ordered the weapon.
4. Marina confirmed that Oswald owned a rifle (even though she never saw a scope).
5. Oswald killed Tippit.
6. Oswald shot at General Walker.
7. The palm print (more junk science) belonged to Oswald.

By taking this approach, Wagner’s house rests on very thin reeds indeed. Should only a few of his initial premises (of Oswald’s guilt) be refuted, his house would promptly collapse. Moreover, we know that much of the Oswald evidence is corrupted (although this is mostly overlooked by Wagner). So, if the reader can first accept Oswald’s guilt, then the remainder of Wagner’s book may appear conceivable. On the other hand, many readers will promptly be derailed by this approach—of overt circular reasoning.

Wagner’s Grand Pronouncements

The initial statements (at each number) are direct quotations from Wagner’s book. For each, my response follows.

1. It is clear, however, that this record can be properly arranged in such a way that reconciliation occurs, so certain truths can be stipulated to by reasonable minds.

   RESPONSE: This is the lawyers’ approach. For this JFK case, on the other hand, I am only concerned with the truth, but never with reconciliation. Reconciliation is strongly recommended for social and political causes, e.g., racial injustice in South Africa. But it is grossly inappropriate for science.

2. Oswald had visited the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City.

   RESPONSE: It is quite unclear how Wagner decided so effortlessly that these Mexican appearances were the genuine article. Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that an imposter had played a role: “We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape [sent by the CIA] do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there.”37 According to Mark Lane (who had interviewed Marina), she was incredulous when FBI agents told her that Lee had been in Mexico from September 26 until October 3, 1963. She added that she had been in contact with Lee during that entire period.38 Moreover, a recent record release (too recent for Wagner’s book) states that the CIA had two informants inside the Cuban embassy. Each one told the CIA that neither had seen Oswald there during any of his supposed visits.39 Even if some of these appearances were by an authentic Oswald, most likely not all were—and that alone reveals fingerprints of an intelligence operation. It implies that Oswald was being framed as a patsy.

3. It [Bugliosi’s book] is a well-done and impressive work, and I think for the most part, it’s right on the mark ….

   RESPONSE: It is merely a lawyer’s brief, with science mostly omitted. Many critical reviews besides mine40 concur with this conclusion. Bugliosi’s knowledge base (outside of politics and the law) was unmasked in my critical review41 of his Divinity of Doubt. His mistakes there are legion.

4. Pure chance placed Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) in perfect position to kill the president …. Mrs. Paine made a phone call on Oswald’s behalf.

   RESPONSE: Marina said the reason she was advised by the Secret Service to stay away from Ruth Paine was that “she was sympathizing with the CIA.” Ruth Paine was asked more questions by the WC than anyone else. She failed to advise Oswald that he could have had a better job than the TSBD. Allen Dulles was a close friend of Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth Forbes Paine. Michael Paine worked for Bell Helicopter, where his stepfather had designed the first commercial helicopter. The Minox camera (a spy camera not available to the public) found in the Paine garage belonged to either Lee Oswald or to Michael Paine, so one of them must have had ties to American spies. On October 23, 1964, Hoover wrote the WC: “Making … such documents [about the Paines] available to the public could cause serious repercussions to the Commission.” Another potential scapegoat (see below), Thomas Arthur Vallee (most patsies have three names), also had a job that placed him directly above a presidential motorcade. What is the probability that two potential scapegoats were both positioned randomly above such a route?42

5. Oswald hid the rifle because he knew it was easily traceable to him.

   RESPONSE: See my first review—most likely he knew nothing about the weapon. Imputing motive here demonstrates the logical fallacy of the argument from motives.

6. If innocent, why would he immediately flee the depository to his room, collect a pistol, “go to the movies,” and then at the theater draw the pistol on arresting officers?

   RESPONSE: Possibly because he quickly realized that he had been set up? By this time, Oswald was likely merely trying to survive the day. He got his weapon from his room, but started walking five blocks south, probably to ascertain that he was not walking into a trap.

7. WC members took the position on the fifth floor and could easily hear shell casings drop to the floor directly above them. This fact alone confirms that shots were fired from the sixth-floor window and that no planting … occurred.

   RESPONSE: Here we see another logical fallacy. Without a visual sighting, Wagner cannot possibly know whether the shells were dropped by conspirators or by Oswald. And hearing such shells surely can tell us nothing about planting of evidence.

8. There is little question that Oswald killed Tippit.

   RESPONSE: So, in a few short sentences, Wagner dispenses with Joe McBride’s entire 674-page tome, Into the Nightmare (2013), which focuses on the Tippit murder. As expected, this book is not listed in Wagner’s “Selected Bibliography.” (If only McBride had known he could have saved himself years of hard labor.) On the other hand, WC counsel David Belin wrote: “The Rosetta Stone to the solution of President Kennedy’s murder is the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit.”43 If so, perhaps McBride was right, after all, to focus so intently on this case. After 674 pages, McBride does not accept Oswald as Tippit’s murderer. On the other hand, after a few sentences, Wagner finds Oswald guilty.

9. … strong circumstantial evidence supports HSCA medical panel report findings that the Kennedy assassination research community has largely ignored.44

   RESPONSE: On the contrary—I have focused squarely on their findings; so also has my colleague, Gary Aguilar, MD. The panel’s conclusions, of course, were critically based on a single autopsy photograph, in which the panel placed the wound at the “red spot,” the same one that none of the pathologists saw! Furthermore, the camera/lens combination (which was located by the HSCA) did not match the photographs.45 Even worse, the panel was not told about this lack of provenance! The HSCA also claimed that all the Bethesda witnesses confirmed an intact back of the head. Only via the Assassination Records Review Board (in the 1990s) did we learn that this was a complete fabrication. On the contrary, these witnesses, via their words and their diagrams, reported a large posterior hole in the skull. Of course, based on my observations at the Archives (of JFK’s back), we also now know that at least one autopsy photograph must be a copy. But if one is a copy, the door is opened wide to more copies, especially that astounding photograph of the intact back of JFK’s head.

10. … there is absolutely no corresponding explanation of what happened to that bullet upon its entering President Kennedy’s throat if it was fired from the front.

    RESPONSE: This is clearly false, as Wagner should have known from my work. Long ago, I proposed a glass shard from the windshield as the cause of the throat wound, and I offered several lines of evidence for this, including the perforations of JFK’s right cheek. The recently reported (additional) bullet in the limousine (i.e., described in the Dr. John Young document) may represent the windshield bullet. Furthermore, other bullet holes were seen in the presidential limousine (my roommate’s father is one source for these reports).

11. … the bullet fragments later recovered from the presidential limousine were indisputably tied to Oswald’s rifle ….

    RESPONSE: This conclusion was based on the junk science of bullet grooves (discussed above). And now there is Dr. John Young’s bullet, found in the back of the limousine, whose grooves are unknown. (This Young document became public after Wagner’s book was published.) I have already cited Floyd Boring, who could not even initially recall finding these very same bullet fragments!

12. The theory that a bullet was planted at Parkland Hospital is thus a highly interesting bit of intrigue but falls apart rather quickly ….

    RESPONSE: Of course, that bullet could have entered the scene well after Parkland, so this is another logical fallacy. See the brilliant analysis by John Hunt46 (of two bullets at the FBI that night), and also note the distinguished detective work of Thompson and Aguilar on the (sharp-tipped) bullet that Darrell Tomlinson found at Parkland.47 Wagner does not even cite Hunt’s work, and he simply refuses to accept the research results of Thompson and Aguilar. As expected, Hunt’s and Tomlinson’s names appear nowhere in Wagner’s book.

13. There is no reasonable doubt that Oswald [alone] fired a rifle from the depository’s sixth-floor window.

    RESPONSE: If so, then why do American polls still strongly suspect a conspiracy? If Oswald acted alone, why then are his tax returns still being withheld for “national security reasons”? And, why did Gerald R. Ford, my fellow Michigan alumnus and fellow resident of Rancho Mirage,48 tell the former French president (Valery Giscard D’Estaing) in 1976 that “It wasn’t a lone assassin. It was a plot. We knew for sure that it was a plot. But we didn’t find who was behind it.”49 Even Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry became a vocal doubter of the single-gunman theory: “We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody’s yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand.”50

    “We’ve never, we’ve never been able to prove that, but just in my mind and by the direction of his blood and brain from the president from one of the shots, it would just seem that it would have to [have] been fired from the front rather than behind,”51

14. There is simply no reasonable evidence of Dealey Plaza assassins other than Oswald.52

    RESPONSE: So why did Admiral George Burkley, MD, refuse to admit that there had been only one shooter?53 Furthermore, Wagner initially admitted that he had overlooked my e-book, JFK’s Head Wounds, which contains a rather long discussion of frontal head shots. And what about that second arrest (of an Oswald doppelgänger) at the Texas Theatre? (See more discussion below.) During the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), Noel Twyman discovered a receipt for a 7.65 Mauser shell recovered from Dealey Plaza. And, of course, the first reported weapon in the depository was a 7.65 Mauser.54 Or was Oswald so skilled that he fired two weapons that day? Then, in 1975, a maintenance worker found a spent (and rather old) 30.06 shell casing on the roof of the Dallas County Records Building, facing Dealey Plaza. It appeared to have been used as a sabot slug, which can be used to fit smaller bullets into larger shells (e.g., a 6.5 mm bullet inside a 30.06 shell). Of course, we now also have Dr. Chesser’s recent observations of tiny metal fragments just inside the forehead bone (on the extant JFK X-rays)—surely Oswald did not fire that bullet. In corroboration of this forehead wound, Tom Robinson saw a tiny wound at precisely this site, as did Quentin Schwinn in a possible missing autopsy photograph.55 Immediately after the assassination, Robert Knudsen and Joe O’Donnell also saw such a hole in photographs. In view of these many extant clues, we would expect Wagner to be more circumspect about claiming “no reasonable evidence” of assassins other than Oswald.

15. … most [doctors] have differing recollections and opinions on the critically important question of Kennedy’s head wounds.

    RESPONSE: This is surely false. Gary Aguilar, MD, and Robert Groden have convincingly shown the remarkable agreement among Parkland witnesses about the large posterior hole. And many Bethesda witnesses concur with these Parkland witnesses. My e-book lists up to eight Bethesda physicians who recalled a large posterior defect. And the recent documentary “The Parkland Doctors” (which Wagner viewed at the same time I did), provides overwhelming evidence that these doctors are still bewildered by that autopsy photograph (of the intact back of JFK’s head). For Wagner to claim that doctors had differing recollections about the wounds is disinformation, at the very least.

16. … there can be no definitive account such that common ground can be found for all reasonable people.

    RESPONSE: Hmm, isn’t this the opposite of #1?

17. Oswald had attempted to kill Major General Edwin Walker.

    RESPONSE: This is the logical fallacy of the a priori argument. In fact, the Walker ballistics evidence is very much in doubt. Walker himself claimed repeatedly that CE-573, the bullet fragment supposedly retrieved from the scene of the shooting, was not the fragment he had held in his hand and examined.56 Furthermore, how could Oswald miss such an easy shot, but then be so precise with much more difficult shots on November 22?57 Was he trying to miss on purpose, so as to create his own legend? Or had he practiced in the interim (between these two events)? Most likely, he had not. Between May 8, 1959, and November 22, 1963, despite diligent efforts by the FBI, no evidence was ever unearthed to show that Oswald fired a weapon during those 1,600+ days (which is even longer than US involvement in WW II).58 Moreover, Marine Colonel Allison Folsom,59 testifying before the WC, characterized Oswald (while he was in the Marines and using a Marine-issued M-1) as “a rather poor shot.”

18. Oswald meticulously planned his act as much as he could in the few days available …. Oswald also planned his escape.

    RESPONSE: Here Wagner displays his ESP (as he often does). Since I have no ESP, it is difficult to critique this. Perhaps someone who has such ESP talents can do so.

19. As of early November 1963, Oswald did not intend to kill the president.

    RESPONSE: How does Wagner know something that no one else knows? Did he conduct a séance—or is this just more supernatural ESP? Or does Wagner mean to suggest that Oswald killed JFK by accident? In any case, did Oswald misguidedly divulge to a fair number of individuals, well in advance, that he was planning this escapade?60 This eccentric throng includes John Martino, Silvia Odio, Joseph Milteer, Richard Case Nagell, Rose Cherami (prostitute), Adele Edisen (PhD in physiology from the University of Chicago61), and others.

20. … Oswald hid in a theater until he was apprehended ….

    RESPONSE: Wagner fails to tell us about the second person (an Oswald doppelgänger), who was also captured by the police, and led out the rear door of the Texas Theatre—in handcuffs!62 This is the logical fallacy of availability, i.e., the use of easily available information, while ignoring other critical evidence. Furthermore, Oswald migrated from person to person while in the theatre, as if trying to reach his contact. Many would say that, rather than hiding, he made himself painfully obvious. James Douglass reports the following details, based on his personal interviews. Butch Burroughs saw Oswald’s arrest, but then saw a second arrest of an Oswald lookalike “three or four minutes later.” The latter was taken out the rear door, while Oswald was taken out the front door. Bernard Haire stood outside the rear door, and saw the double come out. In 1987, he was finally shocked to learn that Oswald had gone out the front door; before that, he had always thought that he had seen Oswald at the rear door. According to the Dallas Police Department’s official report (on J. D. Tippit), “Suspect was later arrested in the balcony of the Texas Theater at 231 W. Jefferson.”63 Furthermore, police detective L. D. Stringfellow also reported to Captain W. P. Gannaway: “Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the balcony of the Texas Theater.”64 Of course, the official version is that Oswald was arrested in the orchestra, not in the balcony.

21. A fatal flaw overlooked by assassination researchers who promote the patsy theory is that framing a patsy requires that the patsy have no plausible or solid alibi.

    RESPONSE: Surely Wagner knows about the Chicago (patsy) plot against JFK.65 But a search of Wagner’s book fails to find “Chicago.” If other patsy plots existed against JFK, why is it so difficult to believe in yet one more?66 Furthermore, given the lies often told by many witnesses while under government duress (e.g., Kenny O’Donnell, Malcolm Perry, Sam Kinney67), and the FBI’s pastime of materially altering witness statements, why would Oswald even need an alibi?

22. I have nothing to add to the question of Oswald’s motivation.

    RESPONSE: Did Wagner fail to read Oswald’s speech (July 1963) at the Jesuit House of Studies at Spring Hill College near Mobile, Alabama? In this rather private setting, where he presumably shared his real opinions, Oswald has little good to say about communism or communists, whom he describes as “a pitiful bunch.”68

23. The Walker incident obviously revealed a murderous mindset (further on display with the Tippit slaying) ….

    RESPONSE: This is more ESP; see prior comments about Walker and Tippit, which come close to exonerating Oswald of both murders. This is the logical fallacy of the a priori argument.

24. … there is no evidence of this third bullet.

    RESPONSE: My (University of Michigan) medical school roommate recently visited us. He reminded me that his father had worked at the Ford plant, where JFK’s limousine had been delivered shortly after the event. His father reported that several bullet holes were found in the limousine. Furthermore, we now have the newly discovered report of navy Dr. John Young: another bullet was found in the back of the limousine.69 In Wagner’s response to my first review, he admits that this could be the missing bullet. And what about the recollections of Sheriff Roger Craig: “One .45 mm slug was found on the south side of Elm Street, outside on the grass. It was lying amongst … part of the hair, and blood, and bone matter.”70 As expected, “Craig” does not appear in Wagner’s book.

25. If the entire case against Oswald boils down to proving each and every facet of the case beyond a reasonable doubt, I have to acquit.

    RESPONSE: So be it.

26. No evidence of any bullets not fired from Oswald’s rifle was located in the body of Kennedy or Connally, or in the limousine.

    RESPONSE: Well, what about Dr. Chesser’s recent observation of a hole in JFK’s forehead (on the X-ray at the Archives)? And what about Dr. Young’s bullet? What about the Belmont (FBI) memo (also missing from Wagner’s book) of a bullet found behind the ear?71 What about Tom Robinson’s report (to the ARRB) of about 10 bullet fragments removed from JFK’s head?72 What about Dennis David’s typed memo about four bullet fragments? What about that transparent plastic bag of bone and bullet fragments that James Jenkins saw lying next to JFK’s head during the autopsy? You will not learn any of this from Wagner. Neither Dennis David nor James Jenkins appears in the book,73 and Robinson’s account (of bullet fragments) is also missing. Wagner tried to use an argument from silence (i.e., absent evidence) but instead fell victim to the logical fallacy of the argument from silence (the fallacy that if sources are silent then that offers good proof of absent evidence).

27. The question of an assassination conspiracy can be conclusively settled by determining whether three shots or more than three shots were fired, assuming that Oswald himself fired three shots.

    RESPONSE: What? —the first step is to assume that Oswald fired three shots? Some might suspect circular reasoning here.

28. Wagner quotes Clint Hill: “I jumped from the follow-up car and ran toward the Presidential automobile. I heard a second firecracker type noise but it had a different sound … I saw the President slump more toward his left.”

    RESPONSE: Although Wagner seems oblivious to this paradox, it is a real zinger for him. Hill speaks loudly and clearly: he hears (and sees) JFK hit by a bullet well after Z-313.74 Unfortunately for Wagner, by this time Oswald has long since shot his wad (of three bullets). Yet Wagner (and Hill, too) overlooks this major paradox. My e-book includes an extensive review of the arguments for a shot well after Z-313. This includes documents, sketches and data tables—contained in the WC files! Many eyewitnesses also corroborate such a scenario. Wagner ignores all these ancient data sources.

29. Wagner quotes David Powers: “ … there was a third shot which took off the top of the President’s head.”

    RESPONSE: Like virtually all the Dealey Plaza witnesses, Powers saw no head snap! Tip O’Neill added his own striking comments, which strongly suggest conspiracy.75 For what actually occurred, listen to James Altgens,76 who saw JFK struck while he was sitting erect! This is clearly not JFK’s orientation at Z-313. This issue is extensively discussed in my e-book. Furthermore, many witnesses saw JFK struck well after Z-313. (See footnote 75 in my e-book.)

30. The president was struck in the head at frame 312.

    RESPONSE: No shot at Z-312—from the front or from the back—is consistent with the bullet trail on the X-rays. I have explored this issue, with detailed images in my Nalli critique. So far Wagner seems not to have grasped the spatial concepts in this argument.77

31. Josiah Thompson refers to Milton Helpern, a prominent New York City pathologist, who said that if he were permitted to see the X-rays, he “would look for traces of metal indicating the presence of another head wound.” Wagner adds this: There is simply no evidence of a bullet entry wound to the front portion of the president’s head.

    RESPONSE: Of course, there was another head wound—an entry at the hairline, above JFK’s right orbit. This is discussed in detail in my e-book (which Wagner initially had not read). More importantly though, Mike Chesser, MD, has recently discovered precisely what Helpern had suggested: many tiny metal fragments just inside JFK’s forehead bone. Wagner was in the audience at Oswald’s Mock Trial in Houston in November 2017, when Chesser presented his findings. What Wagner thought about this amazing discovery (made directly on the extant X-rays at the Archives) remains a mystery.

32. Wagner quotes the HSCA: “It is the firm conclusion of the panel members … there is no bullet perforation of entrance any place on the skull other than the single one in the cowlick area.”

    RESPONSE: This conclusion, of course, was based on autopsy photographs that had no legal provenance. Even worse, the panel members did not know this.78 Of course, we now also know that the HSCA lied about what the Bethesda witnesses saw, i.e., in fact they reported a large posterior hole in the skull, like the Parkland wound.79 Wagner never tells his readers about the abysmal provenance of the autopsy photographs. This is the logical fallacy of deliberate ignorance. Furthermore, Chesser has noted a hole in the forehead bone, consistent with the tiny metal fragments that he saw.

33. Thus, by all appearances, Agent Frazier had possession of the pristine bullet before there was an opportunity for the FBI to fire Oswald’s rifle to recover a bullet to illicitly substitute for the alleged pointed-tip bullet.

    RESPONSE: This is merely a straw man argument—and it is unintentionally hilarious. Wagner has committed another logical fallacy—he merely assumes that the cover-up had no planning (because he is overly focused on Oswald). On the contrary, perhaps this bullet substitution was an original back-up plan, i.e., the bullet had already been prepared, so that no last-minute antics were required.

34. There is no reasonable conclusion other than that Kennedy’s back wound—and the throat wound were the result of the same bullet.

    RESPONSE: First, many professional observers recalled that the back wound was far too low to exit the throat. Second, this is true poverty of imagination and illustrates the logical fallacy of the either-or argument (the false dilemma). As I have already suggested, the throat wound may have been caused by a glass shard from the windshield. The evidence of a penetrating hole in the windshield derives not only from four reliable Parkland witnesses (and one Secret Service witness), but also from the Ford Motor Company supervisor, George Whittaker, who received the windshield.80 Of course, neither “Whitaker” nor “Whittaker” appears in Wagner’s book. The back wound, of course, was likely caused by shrapnel from the street. Several WC witnesses reported that something had struck the street.81 Furthermore, clothing on JFK’s back—but not his front—tested positive (via low energy X-rays) for metal.

35. If the X-rays were faked, how could they have been faked?

    RESPONSE: Wagner obviously failed to review my online JFK Lancer lecture (2009).82 These are indeed JFK’s X-rays, but they have been critically altered at precisely known sites. This omission by Wagner (again) demonstrates the logical fallacy of deliberate ignorance.

36. As Dr. McDonnel explained to the HSCA, this almost inconceivable feat could not have occurred; the president’s head X-rays are authentic.

    RESPONSE: That is mostly true; the JFK X-rays are, after all, only altered at specific sites—but it is far from an inconceivable process, as I have shown. Unfortunately, McDonnel (who worked in downtown Los Angeles, only miles from me) died shortly before I entered the case, or we would have had a most interesting discussion about optical densitometry, which he never mentioned (and likely never considered). He was, after all, not a medical physicist. The argument invoked here by Wagner is the logical fallacy of the argument from incredulity (rejecting an argument merely because it initially appears incredible).

37. There is no reasonable basis to claim that Zapruder was demonstrating the location of an entry wound.

    RESPONSE: Elsewhere Wagner seems to side with the HSCA, which concluded that the posterior bullet exited through the top of the skull. But here, paradoxically, Wagner seems to imply that a bullet exited through JFK’s temple. He can’t have it both ways. More importantly though, many, many witnesses reported an entry wound in the right temple. (See Headshot #3 in my e-book.) As expected, Wagner ignores these witnesses.

38. The doctors [up to nine altogether] said they saw cerebellum tissue, which the autopsy photographs and X-rays indicate would have been impossible.

    RESPONSE: Wagner should view Figure 34A in my e-book. Even John Ebersole, the official autopsy radiologist (who does not appear in Wagner’s book), disagrees here with Wagner. Ebersole told me83 that he saw the posterior hole in the skull; he would also have agreed about seeing cerebellum, but Wagner ignores him. Wagner does not even disclose that Ebersole saw the posterior defect. This is the logical fallacy of the a priori argument (beginning with a false premise to reach a wrong conclusion).

39. We know that the president’s body was not altered prior to the autopsy.

    RESPONSE: In that case, it is incumbent on Wagner to explain the astounding evidence for three different casket entries.84 Of course, he fails to do this. This is the logical fallacy of the a priori argument again (assuming a false premise to reach a conclusion). Wagner would have had a very interesting discussion about wound alteration with Robert Knudsen. According to Popular Photography (August 1977), Knudsen photographed the autopsy. He was deposed by the HSCA in 1978, and the ARRB later interviewed his family. His son Bob reported that his father told him that “hair had been drawn in” on one photograph to conceal a missing portion of the top-back of JFK’s head. Knudsen’s wife added that her husband saw wounds [in photographs] that did not represent what he had seen. Knudsen’s name does not appear in Wagner’s book.

40. The autopsy doctors never wavered in confirming the authenticity of that photograph.

    RESPONSE: Well, not exactly. None of them recognized the “red spot” near the cowlick area.85 And they all placed the posterior entry wound far inferior to the red spot (where the photograph showed no wound) so how exactly does that authenticate the photograph? Furthermore, Humes (for the ARRB) oriented the mystery F8 photograph so that the large skull defect was located posteriorly. Consistent with that, even if the photograph (of the back of the head) shows intact scalp, that does not mean that the bone was intact. In fact, it is far more likely that both scalp and bone were absent. Wagner persistently evades this issue as well.86

41. Boswell testified [a better word would be “speculated,” since he made this claim to the ARRB on February 26, 1996—about 32 years after the event] that the scalp was pulled forward to demonstrate the entry wound.

    RESPONSE: What entry wound is he citing? Surely not the “red spot.” But there is no other wound in the photograph! And why would anyone manipulate the scalp so that it obscured the critical missing tissue? Furthermore, it is absurd to believe that Boswell could have done that so seamlessly as to leave absolutely no trace of the large defect. Finally, we know that Boswell later elevated the back wound to please his interrogators—so how do we know that this odd statement (about pulling the scalp) is not just another sycophantic obeisance—made 32 years later? When asked if there was any scalp remaining in the right rear of the head behind the ear, Jan Gail Rudnicki (Boswell’s assistant) said, “That was gone.”87 He had previously told Mark Flanagan (05/02/1978) of the HSCA that the “back-right quadrant of the head was missing.”88

42. Indeed, reliance on whatever Humes and Boswell said or represented through the years—after the night of the autopsy … is nothing short of perilous. [This statement appears in Wagner’s response to my first review.]

    RESPONSE: This is a stunning reversal for Wagner (who otherwise accepts their statements). It is totally inconsistent with Boswell’s speculation about pulling the scalp over the wound! It also negates Bowell’s subsequent elevation of the back wound. In Wagner’s reply to my initial review, he also admits that Humes and Boswell succumbed to political pressure. So why should we believe that Boswell was not again under political pressure—when he speculated about pulling the scalp over the large defect?

43. … for many the HSCA’s expert panel was wrong.

    RESPONSE: No, they were merely misled. That is quite another matter. Wagner has just committed another logical fallacy (the false dilemma). The photographs, whose provenance was never established, had been altered to cover the posterior hole—as shown by stereo viewing at the Archives. Robert Groden (the photographic consultant for the HSCA) and I have both observed this in the photographs of the back of JFK’s head—at the Archives. Given Groden’s magnificent collection of photographs it is stunning that his name is also absent from Wagner’s book.

44. … the three pathologists … were unaware of … a gunshot wound in Kennedy’s throat.

    RESPONSE: That is surely false. My good (now deceased) friend, Robert Livingston spoke to Humes on the telephone well before the autopsy—and specifically emphasized this fact. (Livingston testified to this—under oath—for the JAMA lawsuit brought by Dr. Charles Crenshaw.) In a telephone call with me, John Ebersole (the autopsy radiologist) stated that they knew about the throat wound during the autopsy—based on a telephone call with Dallas. In addition, a rather long list of evidence contradicts this disgraceful misstatement. (See footnote 101 in my e-book.) This can only be feigned ignorance by Wagner. Furthermore, Boswell himself admitted that they knew about a bullet-related wound to the throat (i.e., not just the tracheostomy).89 But it is even worse than that for Wagner. Richard Lipsey recalled that, during the autopsy, the pathologists speculated that a fragment had exited from the throat. This makes absolutely no sense unless they were aware of a throat wound. Furthermore, in a WC Executive Session,90 J. Lee Rankin (General Counsel for the WC) stated: “We have an explanation there in the autopsy [report] that probably a fragment came out the front of the neck …. ” What more needs to be said?

45. Pathologists … were the only medically trained witnesses to examine the president’s body ….

    RESPONSE: This is clearly false. Wagner, as usual, has forgotten the official radiologist, John Ebersole, who told me, despite being the only physician responsible for reading the X-rays, that he saw a large hole at the back of JFK’s head. This can only be more deliberate ignorance by Wagner.

46. Down in the morgue, the president’s casket was opened, and the autopsy began around eight p.m.

    RESPONSE: This is an astounding statement, which overlooks much contrary evidence that the casket first arrived at about 6:35 PM. Does Wagner not believe Custer and Reed that they were en route to the radiology suite on the fourth floor (to develop X-rays) when they saw Jackie Kennedy enter the lobby around 7 PM? (I interviewed Custer in person and on the telephone multiple times.) Does Wagner not believe Pierre Finck, who recalled that he arrived after X-rays had already been taken—or that Humes had called Finck at 8 PM and told him that they already had skull X-rays (and had viewed them)?91 And if Wagner accepts only one casket entry, which one is it? And then, how does he explain away the other two? Finally, he must account for Humes’s admission to the ARRB that the body arrived at about 6:45 PM.

47. In total, O’Neill and Sibert’s 302 report lists twenty-six people in the autopsy room at some point during the night.

    RESPONSE: And none of them saw the 6.5 mm object on the X-rays? In his response to my first review, Wagner admits that Larry Sturdivan and I have been correct—that the 6.5 mm object was not a bullet fragment. However, he still argues that it was on the X-ray that night (as an artifact), but that none of these 26 witnesses saw it. This is sheer nonsense. Even my 5 and 7-year old children promptly identified it. I have already noted that John Ebersole, the official radiologist, abruptly curtailed our conversation as soon I asked him about this forgery.

48. After he found the fragment, Harper took it to his uncle, who happened to be a medical doctor ….

    RESPONSE: Dr. Harper was not merely a doctor—he was a pathologist. Furthermore, he—and two other professional pathologists—confirmed that this Harper bone derived from the occiput, exactly where the large posterior hole existed. Of course, Wagner is reluctant to tell us what these pathologists concluded. I have spoken to one of them (Noteboom), who confirmed his initial findings. My e-book is focused mostly on this critical Harper fragment. For Wagner to minimize Dr. Harper’s role (and then also to omit the other two pathologists), in such a central issue, can only have been deliberate. None of these three pathologists (Harper, Cairns, and Noteboom) is cited in Wagner’s book.

49. They made paper cutouts and fit four pieces together … such that one of the three fragments … was shown to have adjoined the Harper fragment.

    RESPONSE: Only three pieces (officially) arrived late in the autopsy. The Harper fragment was not present, but the large triangular piece (sometimes called “delta”) was present. However, it is pure inspired nonsense that these pieces fit together. Read my e-book (with images) about what an incredible misfit this proved to be.92

50. Like so many aspects of this case, that four-inch error is more than a minor matter.

    RESPONSE: Of course, it was not a mere error—it was a deliberate obfuscation. Even my 5 and 7-year-old children would not have missed this. It is simply not conceivable that three trained pathologists would—simultaneously—make such a shameful error on an issue that is manifestly obvious on immediate inspection. At this point, Wagner has left the universe I know.

51. The autopsy doctors simply never entertained the notion that an exit wound had been obscured by a tracheostomy.

    RESPONSE: So, why did Boswell tell the HSCA that they did know about the throat wound at the autopsy?93 And was my friend Robert Livingston lying when he recalled (under oath during the JAMA lawsuit) that he had told Humes about the throat wound? Was Ebersole senile when he told me about phone calls with Dallas during the autopsy? And was J. Lee Rankin fantasizing during the WC Executive Session when he noted a throat wound in the autopsy report? Furthermore, we now know that Malcolm Perry lied to the WC—he had seen an entrance wound, as recently reported by his colleague, Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD, of the University of Washington.94 In fact, Perry had previously told Robert Artwohl, MD, the same story.95 We also know that nurse Audrey Bell, a close colleague of Dr. Perry, reported her conversations with him to the ARRB.96 He had complained on Saturday morning, November 23, that he had had phone calls all night to persuade him to change his statement about the throat entry wound. Perry even initially recalled that he had spoken to Bethesda on Friday, November 22!97 Also see my first Wagner review for threats made to Perry.

52. … the burning of the notes was nothing nefarious.

    RESPONSE: This is more mind reading by Wagner—how would he know what Humes was thinking? On the other hand, Douglas Horne has shown that three different versions of the autopsy report once existed, likely done on different dates. This is not nefarious? And, if not, why was this information deliberately kept hidden?98

53. The FBI Director, Hoover, was interested in solving the crime.

    RESPONSE: Nothing, but nothing, could be more preposterous than this statement. Many agents afterward confessed that Hoover had only one goal—which was to indict Oswald. Furthermore, Nicholas Katzenbach issued a prompt statement (within hours of the murder) to Bill Moyers: “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.” Did Hoover fail to notice this?

54. … the facts indicate that the Humes autopsy report was not fabricated after the fact.

    RESPONSE: So, why the three different (and secret) versions—with at least one written well after that weekend? Of course, Wagner does not tell us any of this.

55. The brain was not properly examined and sectioned.

    RESPONSE: That is not what John Stringer said about the brain autopsy he attended; he recalled sections!99 And what about that report of a section of JFK’s brain at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology?100

56. … most of the seven members of the commission had full-time jobs.

    RESPONSE: This is all too reminiscent of the government’s investigation of the Challenger disaster. Perhaps solely due to the fearless and private efforts of physicist Richard Feynman, the culprit O-ring was exposed—on national television, no less. Feynman’s account of his detective adventures while in government land goes far to explain what happens when lawyers lead the charge. Feymann’s behavior was many standard deviations outside the usual government pattern—and that explains why the WC and the HSCA both failed so disastrously. It should always have been science, not consensus, but with layers of lawyers perpetually hovering about, the only target they could see was consensus.101 To really nail this to the church door though, think about this: Feynman—often proclaimed as the successor to Einstein—literally had to rewrite his own addendum (for the Challenger report) zillions of times before government officials found it acceptable.102 (And we know that Feynman can write just fine.) That is all you really need to know about government investigations. Naturally, the 9/11 Commission displayed the same mind-numbing mischief many times over. One thing is certain: the next government investigation (independent of political party) will surely repeat this process, which is happening even as I write. It will always be consensus—and so Wagner will always get his wish.

57. … how could any conspirator assume that the crime could be made to look like it was the responsibility of just one shooter … ?

    RESPONSE: Here we have another logical fallacy: how does Wagner know what the goals of the conspirators were? What if they wanted the world to know that it was a conspiracy (as some have claimed)—in order to serve as a lesson to future American leaders? Their goals may well have been very different from those imagined for them—by the WC, or by researchers, or even by the media. This is simply more mind reading by Wagner. Imputing motives in this case demonstrates the logical fallacy of the argument from motives.

58. … the medical evidence is not subject to error …

    RESPONSE: This is a truly bizarre statement, especially since Wagner admits that Boswell “corrected” his placement of the back wound (he elevated it—years afterwards, as if his memory had improved). If Wagner here refers to the photographs and X-rays (he doesn’t say), then that would be false—because both were subject to alteration in that era, which is another matter entirely. But Wagner evades the evidence for alteration, in which case his job becomes rather trivial. Here we see (again) the logical fallacy of the a priori argument, along with echoes of the false dilemma fallacy.

59. No, a government-wide conspiracy was not responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination.

    RESPONSE: “Hoover knew that Nagell knew the CIA was planning to kill Kennedy in Washington around the end of the month. Nagell said he had secretly taped a meeting he attended in late August 1963 with three other low-level participants in the plot to kill Kennedy. He identified the three voices on the tape beside his own as those of Oswald, Angel, and ‘Arcacha’—very likely Sergio Arcacha Smith.”103

    “We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have given the order to assassinate President Kennedy. That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is obvious. The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it.”104

    “We know the CIA was involved, and the Mafia. We all know that.” ~ Richard Goodwin, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.105

60. We should remember that even after half a century, there is still no hard evidence of a conspiracy.106

    RESPONSE: Well, if we take that tack, then there is still no hard evidence of Oswald’s guilt either. More to the point though, here is how Gregory Henkelmann, MD (a physics major and practicing radiation oncologist for 30 years) reviewed my e-book: “Dr. Mantik’s optical density analysis is the single most important piece of scientific evidence in the JFK assassination. Unlike other evidence, optical density data are as ‘theory free’ as possible, as this data deals only with physical measurements. To reject alteration of the JFK skull X-rays is to reject basic physics and radiology” [emphasis added]. Since Wagner had not read my e-book he also missed this crisp summation. Moreover, if optical density (obtained directly from the extant JFK X-rays at the Archives) is not “hard evidence” then what is?107

Conclusions

Although Wagner relies heavily on many of the following evidence items, they should never be admitted into the courtroom.108 Their provenance is highly questionable—or else they manifest outright corruption:

1. Autopsy photographs
2. Autopsy X-rays
3. Oswald items (including the weapon and the Magic Bullet)
4. Palm prints on the Mannlicher-Carcano109
5. The Zapruder film110

For many critics of the lone gunman theory (it is, after all, only a theory), the question of Oswald’s guilt is not primary. Most of us suspect instead that US intelligence was involved (with or without Oswald), so that is why we care about this case. That also explains why Wagner’s book is anathema to many knowledgeable researchers, i.e., they loathe his (probably naive) role as the currently fashionable Exculpator-in-Chief for the wayward American intelligence services of the 1960s.111

ADDENDUM 1: Eighty persons and/or items missing from Wagner’s book112

1. James Jesus Angleton
2. John Armstrong
3. Guy Bannister
4. Belmont memo
5. Russ Baker (M. L. was located)
6. Richard Bissell
7. Malcolm Blunt
8. Abraham Bolden
9. Floyd Boring
10. Walt Brown, PhD
11. Michael Chesser, MD
12. Chicago (plot)
13. John Costella, PhD
14. Roger Craig
15. Milicent Cranor
16. Charles Crenshaw, MD
17. Dennis David
18. James DiEugenio
19. James Douglass
20. John Ebersole, MD
21. Fabian Escalante
22. Sam Giancana
23. Robert Groden
24. Larry Hancock
25. Drs. Harper, Cairns, and Noteboom
26. William King Harvey (i.e., not the medical scientist)
27. Richard Helms
28. Gerry Patrick Hemming
29. E. Howard Hunt
30. John Hunt
31. James Jenkins (Dr. M. T. Jenkins was located)
32. George Joannides
33. Robert Knudsen
34. Edward Lansdale
35. Meyer Lansky
36. William Law
37. Robert Livingston, MD
38. JM/WAVE
39. Joe McBride
40. Joan Mellen
41. Minox camera
42. Mary Moorman
43. David Sanchez Morales
44. Jefferson Morley
45. Marie Muchmore
46. Richard Case Nagell
47. Fred Newcomb
48. Bill Newman (John was located)
49. Orville Nix
50. Yuri Nosenko
51. Paul O’Connor
52. Joe O’Donnell (Kenny was located)
53. Bardwell Odum
54. Optical Density (OD)
55. Michael Paine (Ruth was located)
56. Vincent Palamara
57. Lisa Pease
58. Gary Powers (Dave was located)
59. Fletcher Prouty
60. Johnny Roselli
61. Dick Russell (Richard Russell, Jr., is also absent)
62. Quentin Schwinn
63. Peter Dale Scott
64. Theodore Shockley
65. Bill Simpich
66. Wayne Smith
67. Larry Sneed
68. Pat Speer
69. John Stringer
70. Larry Sturdivan
71. David Talbot
72. Tampa (plot)
73. Don Thomas
74. Darrell Tomlinson
75. Noel Twyman
76. Thomas Arthur Vallee
77. Jack White
78. George Whittaker
79. O. P. Wright
80. David Wrone

ADDENDUM 2: More about that hole in the windshield …

On August 3, 2018 at 7:44 PM, Vince Palamara said:

JFK Secret Service Agent Joe Paolella, who passed away in 2017, admits that he saw a bullet hole in the windshield of President Kennedy’s bloody limousine the night of the assassination AND that Gerald Blaine [Secret Service agent] omitted this from his book, The Kennedy Detail!!! Author William Law is coming out with the book they were working on—Paolella thought there was a conspiracy, questioned Oswald’s abilities, and was no fan of Blaine’s book.

Paolella’s video interview is here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/25116-jfk-secret-service-agent-hole-in-windshield-of-limo/?page=2

And here are the Altgens photographs:

NOTES

1 Also see Martin Hay’s brilliant and caustic review at the “Kennedys and King” website: https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/robert-a-wagner-the-assassination-of-jfk-perspectives-half-a-century-later. It is unique for me to write a second review, but too much remained unsaid after the first review. Wagner’s book clearly required more attention, especially since his profound mistakes are so often duplicated by the unenlightened mainstream media.

2 With deepest appreciation to Bernard Wilds, who maintains the website from the UK.

3 Associated Press, “Law is ‘Horrible,’ says Darrow, 79,” New York Times, April 19, 1936.

4 7HSCA263; this is volume 7, page 263 of the report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

5 Now in my personal files.

6 https://www.dallasnews.com/business/business/2012/04/30/texas-appellate-courts-often-reverse-civil-jury-verdicts-study-finds.

7 “Death Sentences in Texas Cases Try Supreme Court’s Patience,” by Adam Liptak and Ralph Blumenthal in The Dallas Morning News, December 5, 2004: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/us/death-sentences-in-texas-cases-try-supreme-courts-patience.html.

8 Mapes broke the Abu Ghraib prison story (which won a Peabody Award) and the story of Strom Thurmond’s unacknowledged biracial daughter. In 2005, she was fired from CBS (Dan Rather was later fired, too) for her role in essentially proving the misadventures of the junior George Bush while he was (occasionally) in the National Guard.

9 https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2016/may/henry-wade-executed-innocent-man/. “There is no way to know the exact wrongful conviction error rate. But several studies put the lower estimate in the 2%-5% range. In Texas, that could mean hundreds of wrongful convictions each year” (https://www.innocencetexas.org/the-problem/). We can only imagine the rate under Henry Wade.

10 Wade had obviously forgotten (or more likely had never learned) the Canons of Professional Ethics, Canon 5 (1908): “The primary duty of the lawyer engaged in public prosecution is not to convict, but to see that justice is done.”

11 Or maybe not! “Preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting.” ~ Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade (6 PM, November 22, 1963).

12 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25917791/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/after-dallas-das-death-convictions-undone/.

13 In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of the Four,” Sherlock Holmes describes his cocaine injection as “a seven-per-cent solution.” So, are these (frequently losing) defense attorneys hinting at cocaine use here? Or: defense lawyers in combat against Wade achieved one of the lowest acquittal rates in the country—was this about 7%?

14 Government commissions on the JFK case often used this same tactic—of ignoring contrary evidence. Wagner makes a great spectacle of claiming to correct this error, but inevitably he falls victim as well.

15 From the movie, The Thin Blue Line (1988, Errol Morris): “Prosecutors in Dallas have said for years—any prosecutor can convict a guilty man. It takes a great prosecutor to convict an innocent man.” Henry Wade was District Attorney when Randall Dale Adams, the subject of this documentary film, was (wrongfully) convicted in the murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer. Adams, who received no compensation (as often happens in these cases), died of a brain tumor on October 30, 2010, nine years after the death of Wade. Due to the taxpayer-supported efforts of Wade, Adams had spent twelve (unnecessary) years in prison. Despite this (and other atrocities), the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center was named in Wade’s honor; wronged victims were not consulted about this. Mother Nature ruled differently, however; in 2000, she gave Parkinson’s disease to Wade. Incidentally, one of Wade’s convictions was Jack Ruby; as expected though, the appeals court also threw this one out, but Ruby died before a new trial could be held.

16 Including his three years as assistant district attorney, he asked for death sentences 30 times, and got them in 29.

17 “The father of liberalism: Against the tyranny of the majority. John Stuart Mill’s warning still resonates today,” The Economist, August 4, 2018 (https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2018/08/04/against-the-tyranny-of-the-majority). Mill favored wide exposure to ideas (contrary to today’s extremes on the right and on the left), supported the vote for women, and espoused free trade, but worried that individual freedom could become more restricted under mass democracy than under the ancient despotic regimes. Mill famously referred to this as “the tyranny of the majority.”

18 For a more recent example, read Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) by Bryan Stevenson. In 1983, a 23-year-old Harvard Law School student encounters a black man (who is innocent) on death row in Georgia.

19 I have written a long critique of In Retrospect (1995) by Robert McNamara. In this astonishing confessional, he essentially admits that JFK would not have gone to war in Vietnam.

20 For the Warren Commission (WC), J. Lee Rankin (the general counsel) chose twelve lawyers to lead the investigation—but no MDs, no PhDs, no engineers, and no scientists were considered worthy.

21 Despite persistent appeals to his landlord, orally and in print, about the nightlong ruckuses of his overhead neighbors (often just before long and critical trips for medical school interviews), the revelry persisted. Ultimately, sleeping became impossible—especially after physical threats from these neighbors—so my son moved out before his lease had expired. As a result, his landlord sued him. That is called justice in America.

22 https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/mcadams-john-jfk-assassination-logic-how-to-think-about-claims-of-conspiracy-1. Regarding fingerprints, for Frontline in 1993, Vincent Scalese (the HSCA fingerprint expert) offered the perfect example of misleading testimony, when he used the word, “definitely”: “ … we’re able for the first time to actually say that these are definitely [sic] the fingerprints of Lee Harvey Oswald and that they are on the rifle. There is no doubt about it.” To make matters even worse, John McAdams’s oxymoronically titled book endorses this view even though, given the state of the literature in 2011, he should have known better: JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy, p. 161, note 27.

23 “Reversing the legacy of junk science in the courtroom,” by Kelly Servick, March 7, 2016: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/reversing-legacy-junk-science-courtroom.

24 Just this week (August 23, 2018) I observed a supposed expert on a forensic television program touting his ability to identify a criminal based on his shoeprints. In fact, he had no idea of the total universe of possible footprints. Worse yet, he was oblivious to this critical fact.

25 “When somebody tells you, ‘I think this is a match or not a match,’ they ought to tell you an estimate of the statistical uncertainty about it.” ~ Constantine Gatsonis, Brown University statistician. We have seen this scenario before; for the HSCA, Robert Blakey once declared that neutron activation analysis was the “linchpin” of the ballistic evidence against Oswald. Unfortunately for Blakey, that evidence is no longer even permitted in the courtroom.

26 Wagner seems to cite Randy Robertson, MD, as an expert on optical density (OD). Robertson has, however, never published anything (for the lay public—or for the peer reviewed literature) about optical density, so Wagner has thereby committed a logical fallacy (citing an opinion as authoritative). The expert opinion he should seek is from physicists at Kodak. I have discussed my (fruitful) encounters with them in Assassination Science (1998), edited by James Fetzer. Another authority he could consult (but has not cited) is Michael Chesser, MD, who spoke at the 2015 JFK Lancer Conference, well before the 2016 publication of Wagner’s book. He has corroborated my OD data on the extant JFK X-rays (while at the Archives), but Robertson has never taken even one OD measurement—despite many opportunities to do so. Furthermore, one would not expect a diagnostic radiologist to be an expert in optical density analysis; such expertise would more likely characterize a medical physicist. As obvious proof of this, none of the very many diagnostic radiologists for the government ever raised the possibility of optical density measurements (or even considered it)—and no medical physicist was ever consulted. Robertson clearly wants no part of optical density data either.

27 Wagner, chapter 9.

28 http://assassinationofjfk.net/category/by-dr-michael-chesser/.

29 Wagner, chapter 5.

30 John Stringer, the autopsy photographer, watched as Humes jabbed his finger into the back wound, but could not advance it very far (ARRB Testimony of July 16, 1996, pp. 191-192). James Sibert (FBI) also specifically recalled that pathologist Pierre Finck palpated the deep end of this wound and likewise could find no exit.

31 Warren Report (2004) p. 421. See Commission Exhibit 844 (https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/pdf/WH17_CE_844.pdf).

32 This is the logical fallacy of “Equivocation.” Here is another curiosity from Wagner: “I wish there was [sic] more to sink our teeth into to definitively answer this important question.” Nonetheless, Wagner concludes that, one way or another, only Oswald could have caused Tague’s injury.

33 Oddly enough, the man who found these critical fragments in the limousine (Secret Service Agent Floyd Boring) could not recall doing so! See Douglas Horne’s personal interview with Boring (Inside the ARRB, Volume IV, p. 1097). Horne also recounts that Boring found a skull fragment in the follow-up car, but then the next day, Boring’s memory had improved—he then recalled that he had instead found the fragment in the presidential limousine! Since Wagner relies heavily on these two limousine fragments, it is striking that Boring’s name does not appear in his book. According to my Kindle, “boring” occurs in the phrase “ … that Oswald was surely no boring nine-to-fiver.” Likewise, Vincent Palamara, renowned Secret Service historian, is absent from Wagner’s book. And, regarding Oswald’s less than boring career, Paul Bleau shows that Oswald had either plausible, probable, or definite intelligence links to at least 64 individuals. Does that seem like more than average? See https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/oswald-s-intelligence-connections-how-richard-schweiker-clashes-with-fake-history. Senator Richard Schweiker (The Village Voice, 1975) had stated: “We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”

34 This was the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-1979).

35 Wagner repeats his mantra so often that he might well be accused of the logical fallacy of confirmation bias.

36 Bugliosi adores the a priori logical fallacy, i.e., beginning with a false premise to reach a wrong conclusion. Here is an example: “Because we know that Oswald was the sole gunman, we know that that there were no frontal shots.” Wagner often follows his example. Bugliosi and Wagner both present ponderous, tendentious prosecutor’s briefs. Where data is fundamentally irrefutable (e.g., OD data and Chesser’s observations) they typically ignore or trivialize it. After all, in the face of such data, no honest approach would suffice. Bugliosi is the example par excellence: he evaded nearly all my critical observations, even though he promised his readers that he would never duck serious issues. Wagner does the same with the 6.5 mm object on the AP X-ray; he is simply unable to face the issue head on.

37 https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/11/13/jfk-files-new-light-oswald-mexico-city/. Rex Bradford notes that this portion of the tape has been erased, although LBJ’s conversations before and after this are still intact. Also see JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (2008) by James W. Douglass, chapter 2. Many students of the case regard this book as foundational for understanding the historical origins of the assassination—just as The Federalist Papers provide the backdrop for the founding of the US republic. Oddly enough, considering its central role, the book does not appear in Wagner’s “Selective Biography.” As I wrote this, Douglass’s book had 730 reviews while Wagner’s had 4 (counting mine). Douglass’s book was endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; Wagner’s was not.

38 See footnote 686 in the book by James W. Douglass, who did not begin his twelve-year journey (of writing his book) as a believer in conspiracy. According to Wikipedia, he is a theologian and Catholic worker; he was formerly a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii.

39 https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/max-holland-says-enough.

40 https://www.assassinationscience.com/v5n1mantik.pdf.

41 http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2011/07/doubts-about-bugliosis-divinity-of.html and http://www.assassinationscience.com/DoubtReview.pdf.

42 For more on (multiple) patsies in this case, see “The Three Plots to Kill JFK,” by Paul Bleau: https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-three-failed-plots-to-kill-jfk-the-historians-guide-on-how-to-research-his-assassination. His detailed table of patsy comparisons is particularly impressive.

43 November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury (1973), David W. Belin, p. 466.

44 Preface, Wagner’s book. He repeats this argument so often that it might be called the logical fallacy of “The Big Lie Technique.”

45 https://history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong_1a.htm.

46 http://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/mystery.html.

47 https://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/EvenMoreMagical.htm and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ1ecDXbkRs. WC Exhibit 2011 (a memo) asserts that both Darrell Tomlinson and O. P. Wright told Agent Bardwell Odum that the bullet “appears to be the same one” they found on the day of the assassination, but that neither could “positively identify” it. On the other hand, Odum told Aguilar, “I didn’t show it to anybody at Parkland. I didn’t have a bullet …. I don’t think I ever saw it even.” Nonetheless, the WC relied on Exhibit 2011, so … case closed.

48 http://jfkfacts.org/president-ford-spoke-jfk-plot-says-former-french-president/. I asked Ford to autograph his Oswald book for me, which he promptly did, reminding me (while he signed with his left hand) that he was the last surviving member of the WC. Perhaps I got lucky—he did not seem to recognize me.

49 https://www.facebook.com/killjfk/posts/586489194733140.

50 Dallas Morning News, November 6, 1969, Tom Johnson. Curry’s interview is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImNhmLcrXi0.

51 https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/declassified-jfk-documents-show-show-feud-between-fbi-and-dallas-police-10015830.

52 Even LBJ was quoted: “I never believed that Oswald acted alone …. ” He added that the government “had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/lbj-oswald-wasnt-alone/309486/. Despite Wagner’s protests, my essay (“The Medical Evidence Decoded”) in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000, edited by James Fetzer) includes a long list of well-informed individuals who have believed in conspiracy. Does Wagner truly know more than each one of these individuals?

53 George Burkley’s attorney, William F. Illig, told Richard A. Sprague (1977) “ … that he has information in the Kennedy assassination indicating that others besides Oswald must have participated”: https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/numbered_files/box_23/180-10086-10295/html/180-10086-10295_0002a.htm.

54 Reclaiming Parkland (2013), James DiEugenio, p. 92.

55 This image (a reconstruction) appears in my e-book.

56 For his correspondence, see Justice Department Criminal Division File 62–117290–1473.

57 http://22november1963.org.uk/lee-oswald-speech-in-alabama.

58 As a more current example, Tiger Woods has now gone 1700+ days without a major tournament win.

59 Frazier, R.A.: Testimony of Robert A. Frazier before the Warren Commission (http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/frazr1.htm).

60 https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Foreknowledge_of_the_Assassination.html.

61 Dr. Edisen’s strange encounter occurred in April 1963, seven months before November. See A Secret Order: Investigating the High Strangeness and Synchronicity in the JFK Assassination (2013), H. P. Albarelli, chapter 3.

62 https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/TwoLHOs.html#fn444; especially see footnote 444.

63 Dallas Police Department Homicide Report on J. D. Tippit, November 22, 1963. See With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J. D. Tippit (2013), Dale K. Myers, p. 447.

64 Letter from Detective L. D. Stringfellow to Captain W. P. Gannaway, November 23, 1963, Dallas City Archives. See Harvey and Lee (2003), John Armstrong, p. 871.

65 http://22november1963.org.uk/jfk-assassination-plot-chicago.

66 The patsy was to be Thomas Arthur Vallee: http://22november1963.org.uk/jfk-assassination-plot-chicago. “Vallee” does not appear in Wagner’s book, but Vallee (like Oswald) had served at U-2 bases in Japan as well as in other covert operations in Asia. Both of their U-2 bases were prime recruitment stations for the CIA. Both men had recent intelligence connections with anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Both had relocated in the late summer and fall, and each potential scapegoat found a new job in a building overlooking an upcoming presidential motorcade route—near a dogleg turn. The registration for the New York license plate on Vallee’s car (a 1962 Ford Falcon) at the time of his arrest was classified—restricted to U.S. intelligence agencies. In January 1995, the Secret Service promptly and deliberately destroyed all records of the Chicago plot to kill JFK—even though the ARRB had previously requested access. (See chapter 5 in the book by Jim Douglass.) This was not a random act of record destruction—as duly noted by the ARRB in their final report.

67 Gary Loucks, a former marine, first met Sam A. Kinney [Secret Service agent and driver of the follow-up limousine], in October of 1980 when he moved next door to him in Palm Springs, FL. Sam stated that he had “no doubt that a shot came from the grassy knoll and it did happen just as many witnesses described.” He said, “I saw it (the smoke) and heard it (the sound of the shot).” See https://www.intellihub.com/jfk-ss-agents-deathbed-confession/.

68 http://22november1963.org.uk/lee-oswald-speech-in-alabama.

69 https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/10/06/navy-doctor-bullet-found-jfks-limousine-never-reported/.

70 Inside the ARRB, Douglas Horne (2009), Volume IV, p. 1107.

71 http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2013/08/out-of-the-past-the-belmont-memo/.

72 https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/pdf/md180.pdf.

73 James Jenkins will publish his own book in October 2018: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shoulder-History-James-Curtis-Jenkins/dp/1634242114/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1534799047&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=Standing+at+the+cold+shoulder+of+History.

74 http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2011/01/whos-telling-truth-clint-hill-or.html and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYpY8zI_wwA. In this video, Hill clearly describes such a late shot. Z-343 is when the FBI said that Clint Hill first placed his hand on the limousine—30 frames (nearly two seconds) after Z-313. According to the FBI, his foot did not reach the bumper until Z-368; both feet reached at Z-381.

75 From Man of the House, Tip O’Neill (1987), p. 178: “I was never one of those people who had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission’s report on the president’s death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination. I was surprised to hear O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence.”

“That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” I said.

“You’re right,” he replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So, I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.”

76 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNQeEClGSDc. (Begin viewing Altgens at about 4:22 minutes.) Of course, neither witnesses in Dealey Plaza, nor early viewers of the Zapruder film, reported a head snap. Altgens was hardly alone in not seeing this dramatic event. Moreover, many, many witnesses reported that JFK was erect when hit. (See Assassination Science, p. 285, for my 1998 compilation.) The head snap only appears in later versions of the film.

77 Before completing this second review, my critique of Nicholas Nalli appeared here: https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-omissions-and-miscalculations-of-nicholas-nalli. Figure 10 (composed by David Josephs) contains a composite image that emasculates the WC verdict of one shot to the skull. Perhaps Wagner will grasp the overt paradox when he views this. My Nalli review was a chief cause for the delay of this second review, although during that time interval I also saw way too many cancer patients.

78 Even worse, the HSCA panel employed no experts on forged X-rays and only rather few experts on forged photographs. Unfortunately, in 1963 (the pre-digital era) there were no experts on X-ray forgery (and few experts on photographic forgery)—especially in human forensic cases. On the other hand, if Rembrandt paintings had been in doubt (or forensic documents, for that matter), the HSCA could have located many forgery experts. For example, of Rembrandt’s supposed original 600 paintings, only 300 are now considered authentic. Even today as I write, my online search fails to identify forensic classes on detection of X-ray forgery, e.g., search on “forgery of X-rays.” So, when my critics complain that I have no forensic experience in identifying forged X-rays, who exactly do they cite instead? Surely not diagnostic radiologists, who have no training (or experience) with such forgeries. In fact, some years ago, when a patient X-ray in a trauma case was questioned as a possible forgery, Cyril Wecht asked me to visit Nebraska to view it. Surely, he would have asked someone well known in the field of X-ray forgery detection, but clearly no such experts exist. (That X-ray turned out to be authentic.)

79 http://www.assassinationweb.com/ag6.htm.

80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShWMSkNwNug. Evalea Glanges, MD (once the Chairperson of the Department of Surgery at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas) can be seen in the DVD, The Men Who Killed Kennedy (2003). In this live interview, she describes a through-and-through bullet hole in the windshield. In this same DVD, my friend, Bob Livingston, MD, also describes his telephone conversation (about the throat wound) with James Humes. The actual hole in the windshield can be seen in this same DVD: go to “The Smoking Guns” episode, between times 14:02 and 14:04. This consists of 84 video frames. The hole is best seen with a high definition screen, via frame by frame advance. This cannot be appreciated via YouTube. Douglas Horne comments here: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/06/douglas-p-horne/photographic-evidence-of-bullet-hole-in-jfk-limousine-windshield-hiding-in-plain-sight/.

For those who still doubt, I have cited the recollections of the father of my University of Michigan Medical School roommate, i.e., JFK’s limousine indeed did go to the Ford plant (where George Whittaker worked, and where he might well have seen it). For an introduction to the windshield issue, see “The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963,” by Douglas Weldon, JD, in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), p. 129ff. Finally, if glass shards did not cause the tiny holes in JFK’s right cheek, then some other explanation must be forthcoming. What will it be?

81 Warren Report, p. 116 and 7H508. The latter is Volume 7, p. 508 of the accompanying WC volumes. Altogether about five witnesses recalled that something struck the street. One final comment about the windshield: my friend Robert Livingston, MD, while director of two NIH agencies (in Bethesda, MD) heard stories about multiple windshields being ordered—when only one replacement windshield was actually needed.

82 https://www.assassinationscience.com/JFK_Skull_X-rays.htm. For a correction, see http://assassinationofjfk.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Correction-David-Mantik.pdf. My presentation for the Mock Trial is here: https://statick2k-5f2f.kxcdn.com/images/pdf/david-mantik-houston-2017.pdf. I discuss the three major clues to alteration of the JFK skull X-rays (typically overlooked by government investigators): The White Patch, the 6.5 mm object, and the T-shaped inscription.

83 Wagner admits to speaking to no witnesses.

84 There were three mutually exclusive casket entries—with different actors at different times. Furthermore, a Coast Guard corpsman made contemporaneous notes about a wild goose chase (several times around the hospital).

85 James Humes said, “I don’t know what that [red spot] is. It could be to me clotted blood. I don’t, I just don’t know what it is, but it certainly was not a wound of entrance” (7HSCA254).

86 Of course, according to J. Thornton Boswell, the occipital bone was not intact under this scalp. See Boswell’s diagrams for the HSCA. John Hunt’s high-resolution photographs (of Boswell’s drawings on a skull) appear in my e-book (Figure 8B). So, the issue then reduces to a simple question: Which is more important for assessing damage from a bullet—the scalp or the bone? Supporters of the lone gunman, such as Wagner, persistently evade this question. In fact, of course, scalp was also missing—photographic alteration merely covered this defect, but it could not erase Boswell’s recollection of missing bone—nor the absence of right occipital bone on the X-rays.

87 High Treason II (1989), Harrison Livingstone, p. 207.

88 HSCA rec # 180-10105-10397, agency file number # 014461, p.2.

89 Inside the ARRB, Douglas Horne, Volume III, Chapter 11.

90 Whitewash IV: The Top Secret Warren Commission Transcript of the JFK Assassination (reissued 2013), Harold Weisberg. Also see Inside the ARRB, Douglas Horne, Volume III, p. 865. This is also available at the Mary Farrell website (search on Inside the ARRB: Appendices).

91 See my e-book, JFK’s Head Wounds.

92 Ibid.

93 https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=601#relPageId=1&tab=page. Also see Horne’s (confirmatory) comments in the next footnote. Boswell also confirmed their suspicion of a bullet exit via the throat wound in his ARRB testimony. Richard Lipsey, who was at the autopsy, recalled a three-shot scenario (discussed by the pathologists during the autopsy), with a bullet exiting through the throat. So, almost certainly, the pathologists were aware of the throat wound at the autopsy, although they were embarrassed to admit this.

94 https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/donald-w-miller-jr-md/jfk-thought-control-and-thought-crimes/.

95 Gary Aguilar reports: “On 2-14-92 an emergency room physician in Baltimore, Robert Artwohl, M.D., told an interesting tale in a ‘Prodigy’ on-line post: Dr. Artwohl said that he had had a private conversation with Dr. Perry in 1986 …. speaking with Dr. Perry that night, one physician to another in [sic] Dr Perry stated he firmly believed the wound to be an entrance wound.” See https://kennedysandking.com/obituaries/malcolm-perry-md-falls-into-the-kennedy-vortex.

96 For a wonderful summary of the medical evidence, with sources, as compiled by Rex Bradford, see https://www.history-matters.com/medcoverup.htm.

97 https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0194b.htm

98 Inside the Assassinations Review Board (2009), Douglas Horne, Volume III, Chapter 11, “Three Autopsy Reports—a Botched Coverup.”

99 http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/stringer.htm, p. 150. Finck, on the other hand, recalled no sections, which is consistent with two different brain examinations (on two different dates). In his report to General Blumberg, he specifically stated that no sections had been taken. In yet one more bizarre event, Finck complained privately that his autopsy notes had disappeared (forever) immediately afterwards. In a private conversation with Cyril Wecht, he clearly suggested that events that night were a bit surreal—the implication was that all was not quite standard operating procedure. He was, however, not forthcoming about precisely what he meant. Stringer also noted that the (extant) brain autopsy film was not the brand he had used; this is also consistent with two different brain examinations.

100 http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/pdf/md260.pdf.

101 Recall those silicone breast implants and the Dow Corning bankruptcy—which was facilitated by our “justice” system. Dow Corning ended up in bankruptcy for nine years, ending in June 2004. Eventually, several independent reviews (fortunately not managed by lawyers) showed that silicone breast implants do not cause breast cancers—or any identifiable systemic diseases. This scientific result led to a great loss of income for these lawyers.

102 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7byb/the-challenger-disasters-minority-report. See What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988) by Richard Feynman, who wrote from the perspective of science and engineering, while the Rogers Commission wanted a (much more favorable) political conclusion. William P. Rogers, the chairman, concluded that Feynman, for telling the truth, had become “a real pain in the ass.”

103 Richard Case Nagell had been a US counterintelligence officer from 1955 to 1959. Oswald’s path converged with Nagell’s in Tokyo, where both worked in an operation code named “Hidell.” In 1963, Nagell worked with Soviet intelligence in Mexico City. (See chapter 4 in the book by Jim Douglass.) On October 31, 1995, the ARRB mailed Nagell a letter from Washington, DC, seeking access to documents about the JFK conspiracy. The very next day (November 1, 1995) Nagell was found dead in the bathroom of his Los Angeles house. For more about Nagell (and his remarkable parallels with Oswald), see The Man Who Knew Too Much (1992), by Dick Russell (i.e., not Richard Russell, Jr., the WC member).

104 Douglass (2008), Chapter 4.

105 Brothers (2007) by David Talbot, p. 303.

106 Major Ralph P. Ganis has just published The Skorzeny Papers: Evidence for the Plot to Kill JFK (2018), in which he identifies Otto Skorzeny as the long-mysterious CIA operative QJ/WIN. The latter was identified by the top-secret CIA Inspector General’s Report as the “principle asset” in the CIA’s assassination program ZR/RIFLE. Skorzeny was Hitler’s Chief of Special Forces; in that role, he often consulted directly with Hitler. At Hitler’s request, he led the famous rescue of Mussolini after “Il Duce” was deposed. After the war, he offered his services to the US. President Eisenhower was so impressed that he kept Skorzeny’s photograph on his White House desk. Ganis reports: “William Harvey and James Angleton [both counterintelligence experts] wove Otto Skorzeny into their tangled web …. ” Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy (both WC members) helped Skorzeny establish his secret network. Ganis also shows that the OAS assassin, Jean Rene Souetre (most likely the leader of the nearly successful assassination of DeGaulle), worked as one of Skorzeny’s trainers. (Since his earliest days in the Senate, JFK was publicly and passionately in favor of Algerian independence, which made him a natural enemy of the OAS.) In March-April 1963, Souetre met with E. Howard Hunt in Madrid, which was Skorzeny’s home base. In April-May 1963, Souetre probably met with Gen. Edwin Walker in Dallas. According to a May 1963 memo from CIA Deputy Director for Plans (Richard Helms), Souetre approached the CIA as the OAS “coordinator of external affairs.” It has been reported that Souetre met with William King Harvey at Plantation Key, Florida some months before JFK was killed. Credible sources suggest that Souetre trained that summer with Alpha 66, in which Antonio Veciana and David Phillips were both active. Finally, Souetre was apparently in Dallas during the main event and (per a dentist, Dr. Lawrence Alderson) was promptly deported by the FBI via private plane to Canada or Mexico. Ganis also demonstrates that the person who met with Thomas Eli Davis (who often used the alias “Oswald”) a few weeks before November 22 was Skorzeny’s business partner. And the man who assisted Davis’s escape from a North African prison was QJ/WIN (i.e., quite possibly Skorzeny himself). For a brief biography of Davis (and his gun-running connection to Jack Ruby) see http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdavis.htm. For a judge’s recent refusal to release CIA records on Souetre, see https://www.courthousenews.com/cia-need-not-release-files-on-kennedy-assassinations/.

107 For the history of optical density as a science, see Appendix 10 in my review of John McAdams: https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/mcadams-john-jfk-assassination-logic-how-to-think-about-claims-of-conspiracy-1

108 “Most JFK Medical Evidence Would Not Be Admissible at Trial,” by Douglas P. Horne: http://assassinationofjfk.net/most-jfk-medical-evidence-would-not-be-admissible-at-trial-doug-horne/.

109 When the FBI asked Dallas Police Lt. J. C. Day to sign a statement about finding this palm print (on the Mannlicher-Carcano), he refused to do so (26H289). Day would not even claim that this palm print dated to November 22, 1963. In fact, he labeled it an “old dry print” that “had been on the gun several weeks or months” (26H831 and Conspiracy (1980), Anthony Summers, p. 54). No matter, Wagner relies heavily on this print. So did Vincent Scalese.

110 Among the throng of suspicions about an altered Zapruder film, audio interviews from 1971 by Fred Newcomb (with four motorcycle men near JFK during the motorcade) report specific events no longer seen in the extant film: http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2015/09/jfk-escort-officers-speak-fred-newcomb.html. Also see Murder from Within: Lyndon Johnson’s Plot Against President Kennedy (originally 1974), by Fred Newcomb.

111 That the CIA was indeed ill-disciplined, reckless, and habitually ineffective is documented extensively in Legacy of Ashes (2008) by Timothy Weiner. Also see Secrecy and Democracy (1985) by Stansfield Turner, former CIA director (under Jimmy Carter). The case of Oswald’s would-be acquitter, Yuri Nosenko, as well as Nosenko’s amoral and enigmatic accuser, James Jesus Angleton, are highlighted by Turner. Despite Angleton’s unrelenting and ruthless punishment of Nosenko (three years of solitary confinement), in the end Nosenko was formally acknowledged to be a genuine defector, and was released (with financial compensation) from the CIA. Despite Angleton’s suspicions, Nosenko always claimed that the Soviets never tried to recruit Oswald.

112 This is based on my Kindle searches. Wagner’s book contains a reading list and footnotes, but no index.

Like many other students of the Kennedy case, I had never heard of the 2016 book The Assassination of JFK: Perspectives Half A Century Later until author Robert A. Wagner appeared as an advisor to the prosecution at the CAPA-organized mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald last November. Having now read the book I can safely say that, despite the modest praise it received from Kirkus Reviews, it does not represent any kind of lost gem.

When approaching a book like this one, which proffers a lone nut solution to the assassination, one of the first questions I am compelled to consider is whether or not it provides an honest, even-handed presentation. Throughout his book Wagner does go to some effort to appear objective. Yet this stance is hard to reconcile with the tendentious and insupportable declaration he makes in the book’s preface that “There is no reasonable doubt that Oswald fired a rifle from the depository’s sixth-floor window.” (p. 16) It’s hard to imagine that Wagner could have made a more ridiculous statement. In reality there has been nothing but reasonable doubt that Oswald pulled the trigger ever since the Warren Commission issued its report in 1964. The overwhelming majority of intelligent, freethinking individuals who have studied this case are aware that there is not a single piece of evidence against Oswald that can withstand scrutiny and Wagner clearly understands this fact too. To avoid having to defend it, he writes, “If the entire case against Oswald boils down to proving each facet of the case beyond a reasonable doubt, I have to acquit.” (p. 60)

So instead of breaking the case down or examining individual pieces of evidence in detail―something which would be disastrous for his position―Wagner suggests it is much more beneficial to view the evidence from a “contextual perspective” of his own making. He then introduces the notion of a “filter through which any aspect of the case should be evaluated” which, he writes, “… involves laying out the key facts related to Oswald’s actions that no one seriously disputes.” (p. 61) From there Wagner treats readers to a list of 24 items he calls “stipulated facts” that he wants his readers to believe point strongly to Oswald’s guilt. The problem with these stipulated facts is that they are, in some cases, no such thing and, in others, entirely stripped of their own important context.

Take for example item number 1: “On the morning of the assassination of the president, Oswald went to work but left behind his wedding ring and virtually all of his cash for [his wife] Marina to find.” (Wagner, p. 62) While this may indeed be true, and may appear to suggest that Oswald had something untoward planned that day, Wagner is withholding some very important details from his readers that paint Oswald’s actions in a very different light. Namely that the Oswald marriage had been on the rocks for quite some time before that morning. The pair had actually been separated for about two months, with Lee living in a rooming house in Dallas and Marina staying at the home of Ruth Paine in Irving. On the evening before the assassination, Lee turned up at the Paine home unannounced to apologize for an argument he and Marina had had over the phone the previous Sunday, but she gave him the cold shoulder. He begged her repeatedly to come live with him in an apartment in Dallas but she refused. The notoriously miserly Oswald even tried appealing to his wife’s materialistic side by offering to buy her a washing machine but still she would not budge. In the end he went to bed alone; hurt and angry. (Warren Report, p. 421, hereafter abbreviated as WR.) Viewing Oswald’s decision to leave behind his wedding ring and cash―along with an instruction to buy shoes for his daughter, June―in this context, I’m sure most readers will agree it likely had more to do with his marital difficulties than any imminent plan to assassinate the President.

A similar example is item number 10 on Wagner’s list that states that “Marina Oswald confirmed her husband owned a rifle.” This again is technically accurate. Yet Marina also gave information that cast doubt on the claim that the rifle her husband owned was in fact the Mannlicher-Carcano allegedly found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. According to the Warren Commission, when the Carcano in question was shipped by Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago it already had the telescopic sight attached. Yet Marina told the Commission that when she first saw her husband’s rifle in their Neely Street apartment, “it did not have a scope on it.” (WC Vol. 1, p.13. henceforth abbreviated as 1H13) In fact she told the Secret Service a little over a week after the assassination that “until she saw the rifle with a scope on TV the other day she did not know that rifles with scopes existed.” (CD 344, p. 24)

Ownership of the Carcano is of course an important issue. More crucial, however, is the question of possession. One genuine stipulated fact that Wagner elected not to divulge is that Oswald did not have possession of the Carcano for at least two months preceding the assassination and absolutely no one can vouch for its whereabouts during that time. Perhaps more importantly, there exists no proof whatsoever that Oswald handled the weapon on the day of the assassination.

Wagner’s list includes the claim that Oswald’s palm print was found on the Carcano. To suggest that this belongs on a list of facts that are not in dispute is, at best, risible. The release of formally classified internal memoranda has shown that even the Warren Commission queried whether the print in question was “a legitimate latent palm impression removed from the rifle barrel or whether it was obtained from some other source …” When the rifle was sent to the FBI laboratory on the evening of the assassination the Bureau experts saw not even a trace of a palm print. A few days later, after Oswald was murdered in the basement of police headquarters, Dallas Police Lieutenant J.C. Day suddenly came forward claiming he had lifted the print before the rifle had been passed on to the FBI. He’d just forgotten to tell anyone, including Vince Drain, the FBI agent whom he gave the rifle to that evening. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 109) Yet when the FBI asked Day to make a signed written statement about finding the print he declined to do so. (26H829) To call this a suspicious set of circumstances would be a serious understatement. [Intriguingly, even Day would not claim that the palm print placed the Mannlicher-Carcano in Oswald’s hands on November 22, 1963. In fact, he labeled it an “old dry print” that “had been on the gun several weeks or months.” (26H831; Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 54)]

Wagner also attempts to pass off as a stipulated fact the hotly contested claim that shell casings fired from Oswald’s revolver were found at the scene of the murder of police officer J.D. Tippit. It is utterly inconceivable that Wagner could be unaware of the controversy surrounding those shells, which goes right back to the first generation critics of the Warren Report. For example, Mark Lane pointed out numerous problems with them in his bestselling 1966 book Rush to Judgment (a book which is listed in Wagner’s bibliography). To begin with, the shells do not match the bullets recovered from Tippit’s body. As Lane writes, “… three of the four bullets removed from Tippit’s body were manufactured by Winchester-Western, while just two of the shells found at the scene were manufactured by that company, and although only one Remington-Peters bullet was taken from Tippit’s body, two shells of that manufacture were found at the scene.” (Lane, p. 200)

Two of these shells were allegedly found at the scene by eyewitness Domingo Benavides and handed over to Dallas police officer J.M. Poe who, in accordance with correct procedure, should have marked them with his initials. Yet, as Lane notes, when he was shown the shells from Oswald’s revolver during his Warren Commission testimony, Poe “was unable to find his initials on them …” Additionally, “[Sergeant W.E.] Barnes, the police laboratory representative [who was the next officer to handle the shells], was also unable to find his initials …” As for the other two shells, these were “purportedly found by Barbara Davis and Virginia R. Davis, neither of whom could identify either of them when asked to.” (Lane, p. 198) Needless to say, the mismatching of bullets and shells and the lack of a proper chain of evidence has led critics to raise the possibility that the real shells were switched for ones fired from Oswald’s pistol. This notion is seemingly supported by a Dallas police radio broadcast made from the scene of the crime that noted, “The shell at the scene indicates that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38 rather than a pistol.” (17H417) Whether the critics are correct or not, there is little doubt that if Oswald had lived to face trial his defense attorney would have raised these very issues and argued that the Tippit ballistics should be thrown out for lack of proof. And if the presiding judge followed the rules of evidence correctly this is most likely what would have happened.

Not only does Wagner’s list of “stipulated facts” feature numerous contestable assertions like the ones above; it also includes claims that have no bearing whatsoever on Oswald’s guilt in the Kennedy murder. One item on the list is related to the unproven allegation that Oswald took a shot at General Edwin Walker some seven months before the assassination. Five more are concerned entirely with Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald, which has absolutely nothing do with whether or not Oswald was at the sixth floor window with a rifle. (In fact, one can effectively argue the contrary: Ruby shot Oswald because the conspirators were afraid that he would reveal how he was framed.) I can only assume these were included in an attempt to pad out a rather pathetic inventory.

There is much more that could be said about Wagner’s supposed stipulated facts, but it’s not necessary. Just from the examples above it should be apparent that it is little more than a grouping of factoids, irrelevancies and things presented without proper context. It would be a simple matter to do as Wagner does, cobble together 24 carefully selected claims with no frame of reference and hold them up as a “filter through which any aspect of the case should be evaluated,” but it would be just as worthless as what Wagner presents. At the end of the day the available evidence simply does not prove that Oswald pulled the trigger.

II

The issue of Oswald’s guilt will no doubt be debated forever. Wagner believes it is a “threshold question” in determining the existence of a conspiracy. It isn’t. If the forensic evidence demonstrates that there was more than one gunman in Dealey Plaza, then it makes little difference whether or not Oswald was one of them. It is for this very reason that I personally stopped being overly concerned with Oswald’s role some time ago. There is, in fact, an overwhelming body of evidence comprised of eyewitness, photographic, medical and acoustical evidence that points very clearly to multiple shooters. And despite his best efforts, Wagner simply cannot make this body of evidence go away.

The author provides very little meaningful discussion of the medical evidence as it relates to Kennedy’s crucial head wounds. What little he does offer is largely confined to the age-old and entirely fruitless argument about the location of the largest defect in JFK’s skull. This particular debate has been raging for over five decades among those who incorrectly believe the large, explosive wound was one of exit and therefore its location tells us something about the direction in which the bullet was travelling. It doesn’t. As ballistics expert Larry Sturdivan explained in his book The JFK Myths, “… whether the explosion was more to the side or back is completely irrelevant” because it was not caused by an exiting bullet but by “… the internal pressure generated by its passage …” (Sturdivan, p. 171) Sturdivan noted that a similar type of explosion would have occurred whichever direction the bullet had travelled and was able to provide stills from filmed experiments proving his point. (As Milicent Cranor has pointed out, Dr. Vincent Di Maio, a prominent authority on wound ballistics, has also demonstrated this important medical point.)

Having helped propagate the myth that the location of the skull defect is crucial to understanding the direction from which the fatal bullet came, Wagner goes on to suggest that “It is simply impossible for people to still believe that President Kennedy was shot from the front …” (Wagner, p. 284) This he derives from the report of the “distinguished medical panel” convened by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s that concluded that JFK was shot only from the rear. Wagner writes of having “great respect for the opinions of qualified people who have expertise that I do not have … Far be it from me to take issue with their findings,” (pp. 9-10) Later he adds the claim that “No credible forensic pathologist who has ever viewed these materials has said differently.” (p. 284)

Not only is this false―one of the panel’s own members is a former President of the American Academy of Forensic Science who vehemently disagrees with the majority findings to this day―it is quite plainly nothing more than an appeal to authority. Wagner is essentially using the credentials of the panel members as proof of their analysis and arguing that only a similarly qualified individual can prove them wrong. Which is nonsense. As was proven with the media’s promotion of the credentials of the members of the Warren Commission to indicate that their conclusions simply had to be correct.

The collective credentials of neither the panel nor those of its critics matter anywhere near as much as what the panel itself claimed and what the evidence actually shows. Because the truth is, no matter how many distinguished individuals suggest otherwise, the medical evidence never has supported the notion of a single Carcano bullet striking the head from the rear. To understand this fact, it is instructive to take a look at how the evidence has been misrepresented and manipulated by the government and its chosen experts over the last five decades.

Kennedy’s autopsy surgeons reported finding a through-and-through entrance hole low down in the right rear of the skull, a trail of metallic fragments in the brain, and a massive bony defect encompassing almost the entire right side of the head. Lead pathologist Dr. James J. Humes explained in his Warren Commission testimony that he had been unable to find a point of exit on the skull itself because “We did not have the bone.” (2H353) However, a late-arriving bone fragment contained a beveled notch that the doctors interpreted to be a portion of the exit wound. (Ibid 254) From this Humes and his colleagues concluded that a bullet had entered the back of the skull 2.5 cm to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance [EOP], fragmented extensively, and exited somewhere on the right side. The diagram to the left was prepared by a Navy artist under the direction of Dr. Humes.

One of the Rydberg diagrams, prepared under the direction of Dr. Humes

This was the official version of Kennedy’s head wound for several years before Attorney General Ramsey Clark got his hands on the galley proofs to Josiah Thompson’s groundbreaking book Six Seconds in Dallas. Thompson used the available evidence to make a case for two shots striking the head almost simultaneously; one from the rear and one from the right front. Clark was apparently sufficiently disturbed by what he read that he asked Maryland Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Russell Fisher to convene a panel that would, in Fisher’s words, “refute some of the junk that was in [Thompson’s] book.” From all appearances, Fisher was someone who could be relied upon to reach the “right” conclusion. As Jim DiEugenio explained in his excellent book Reclaiming Parkland, Fisher was once asked to review the mysterious death of CIA officer John Paisley, whose body was found floating in Chesapeake Bay. DiEugenio writes:

Understandably, the original coroner who saw the body said he was murdered because he was shot through the head, had indications of rope burns on his neck, and was weighted down with two diving belts when the body was recovered. As one commentator observed, “Strapping on two sets of diving belts, jumping off the boat with a gun in hand, and then shooting yourself in the water is, to be charitable, a weird way to commit suicide.” Further, the fatal head wound was through the left side of the brain. Yet, Paisley was right-handed. Finally, no blood, brain tissue, weapon, or expended cartridge was found on board Paisley’s boat. Did he take all of this with him when he jumped overboard? None of this was a problem for Fisher. He ruled the case a suicide. (DiEugenio, pp. 126-127)

When Fisher and his colleagues on the “Clark Panel” came to view Kennedy’s post-mortem skull X-rays, they encountered a sizeable problem. The bullet fragments that Dr. Humes said traversed a line from the entrance wound in the occiput to just above the right eye were actually located several inches higher, near the very top of the skull. This discovery confirmed rather than refuted Thompson’s two-shot scenario because a bullet entering near the EOP simply could not leave fragments along a path several inches above the one it took. Therefore, the fragments clearly indicated that two separate missiles had struck the head, just as Thompson had argued. Unperturbed, the Clark Panel found a creative solution to their dilemma: they moved the entrance wound four inches up the back of the head!

I only wish I was making this up.

Fisher and his colleagues essentially suggested that the autopsy doctors were so thoroughly inept that they were unable to tell the top from the bottom of the skull. Never mind the fact that the pathologists had the actual body in front of them or that there were at least four independent witnesses―Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, FBI Agent Francis O’Neil, Richard Lipsey (aide to U.S. Army General Wehle), and Bethesda photographer John Stringer―who also recalled seeing the entrance wound low down in the back of the skull. And never mind that the X-rays show a clear defect with radiating fractures right where the autopsy doctors placed the wound. None of this matters because the Clark panel said it could see a “hole in profile” 10 cm higher up. Wrap your head around that oxymoron if you can.

In 1975, another “independent” panel of experts reviewed the autopsy materials, this time on behalf of the Rockefeller Commission, whose Executive Director was none other than former Warren Commission lawyer David Belin. The membership of the medical panel left little doubt about its loyalties or the pre-ordained nature of its conclusions. Dr. Werner Spitz and Dr. Richard Lindenberg were both close professional associates of Dr. Russell Fisher, having worked under him at the Maryland State Medical Examiner’s Office. Dr. Fred Hodges worked alongside Clark Panel radiologist Russell Morgan MD at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. Pathologist Lt. Col. Robert R. McMeeken was a colleague of one of Kennedy’s autopsy surgeons, Dr. Pierre Finck, at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. And Dr. Alfred Olivier had previously served as the ballistics expert for the Warren Commission.

Renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht was quite rightly very critical of the make-up of the Rockefeller panel. As he stated in a telephone conversation with Rockefeller Commission Senior Counsel Robert Olsen, given their strong ties to the government and especially to Dr. Russell Fisher, “it was wholly unrealistic to expect that anybody on this panel would express views different from those expressed by the Ramsey Clark Panel in 1968 …” (Olsen, memo to file, April 19, 1975) Later, in a public press release, Dr. Wecht—alongside Professor of Criminalistics, Herbert MacDonell, and President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Dr. Robert Joling—charged that the Commission had “set up a panel of governmental sycophants to defend the Warren Report.” Which makes perfect sense since former Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford was the president who appointed the Rockefeller Commission.

Fisher’s influence extended past the Rockefeller panel to the HSCA. As researcher Pat Speer pointed out, six of the HSCA’s nine forensic experts had enjoyed a professional relationship with Fisher. For example, the panel included Rockefeller alumnus Dr. Werner Spitz who, as previously noted, had worked under Fisher at the Maryland State Medical Examiner’s Office. The same was true of Dr. Charles Petty, who had worked in Fisher’s office for nine years. The Chairman of the HSCA panel, Dr. Michael Baden, had himself contributed to the Spitz and Fisher book, Medicolegal Investigation of Death. Hardly surprising, then, that the panel went along with Fisher’s elevated, revised, and therefore more lone-nut-friendly in-shoot location.

The HSCA panel did not go so far as to say it could see a “hole in profile” on the X-rays, making reference instead to a “sharp disruption of the normal smooth contour of the skull … with suggested beveling …” (7HSCA107) It did, however, claim that a red spot, seen high up in the “cowlick” area in the autopsy photographs of the back of the head, represented the actual wound of entrance. Yet when the panel tried to impress this interpretation on the autopsy surgeons, it was flatly disputed. Referring to the “red spot”, Dr. Humes told the panel members, “I don’t know what that is … I can assure you that as we reflected the scalp to get to this point, there was no defect corresponding to this in the skull at any point. I don’t know what that is. It could be to me clotted blood. I don’t, I just don’t know what it is, but it certainly was not any wound of entrance.” (7HSCA254) But Humes’ pleas fell on deaf ears. Baden and his colleagues were not about to go against Fisher and they were not about to admit that the rear entrance wound and the location of bullet fragments could not be reconciled with a single bullet.

The lengths to which the HSCA panel were willing to go to push the higher entrance wound location were revealed in 2003 by a then newly declassified document Dr. Randy Robertson presented at a JFK conference in Pittsburgh. The HSCA had not published the autopsy photographs of the back of the head and instead utilized a lifelike drawing of the photo prepared by professional medical illustrator Ida Dox. The immediately obvious difference between the photo and Dox’s drawing is that in the drawing the “red spot” has been greatly accentuated to look more like a bullet wound. This, as Robertson revealed, was done at Dr. Baden’s direction. Robertson discovered a note from Baden to Dox that said “Ida, you can do much better.” Attached to the note was a picture of a typical entrance wound from Spitz and Fisher’s Medicolegal Investigation of Death. In other words, Baden was actually instructing her to make the “red spot” look more like an entrance wound than it really did in the photographs. (DiEugenio, p. 157)

To recap, Kennedy’s autopsy surgeons said that a trail of bullet fragments traversed a line from an entrance wound near the EOP to a presumed exit site on the right side. Whether this was a deliberate lie or a mistake made because Dr. Humes did not have access to the X-rays when he wrote his report is not known. Regardless, the rear entrance wound and the trail of fragments above are not connected and, therefore, almost certainly were caused by separate missiles. When the Clark Panel—which was specifically tasked with refuting conspiracy arguments—discovered this discrepancy, it attempted to diminish the problem by moving the in-shoot four inches up the skull. The Rockefeller experts played along and the HSCA panel furthered the deception by hiring a medical illustrator to create a fallacious depiction of the back of Kennedy’s head. And these are the actions of the “distinguished” professionals in whom Wagner wants his readers to put their faith.

It should be noted at this point that even if one decides that, for some unfathomable reason, the three autopsy doctors and four independent eyewitnesses all shared the same delusion—that the appearance of a defect with radiating fractures at the very location specified in the autopsy report is mere coincidence, and that the Clark Panel was right about the entrance wound being 10 cm higher—this still does not adequately explain the bullet fragments. The reasons are twofold: firstly, even the proposed higher entrance location lies around 5 cm below the rear end of the fragment trail. And secondly, the number, size, and distribution of those fragments are wholly inconsistent with a Carcano bullet entering the head from behind.

The bullets fired by “Oswald’s” Mannlicher-Carcano rifle were full metal jacket, military ammunition. The behavior of such bullets has been long understood. The well-regarded textbook Gunshot Wounds by Vincent Di Maio notes that “the presence of small fragments of metal along the wound track virtually rules out full metal-jacketed ammunition.” (Di Maio p. 334) Carcano bullets in particular were put to the test at Edgewood Arsenal in 1964 on behalf of the Warren Commission. There, wound ballistics experts took 10 rehydrated human skulls, filled them with a ballistic gelatin to simulate the brain and coated the outside with a soft tissue substitute. A rifleman then fired from a distance of 90 yards (the distance from the book depository to JFK at the time of the head shot) into the approximate entry site specified in the autopsy report. These experiments were filmed and the resultant skulls were X-rayed.

The X-rays of these test skulls showed precisely how Carcano bullets behave when striking a human head. As expected, there was no “lead snowstorm” effect as seen on President Kennedy’s post mortem X-rays. The Carcano bullets deposited only a few small fragments along the lower portion of the skull and this did not occur until after the jackets had ruptured, about midway through the cranium. This pattern is nothing like the trail of dozens of tiny, sometimes dust-like fragments running almost horizontally from one end to the other near the very top of JFK’s skull. Clearly, then, this trail of metallic debris was not left behind by full-metal-jacket Carcano ammunition.

Not only does the presence of these fragments tell us that the skull was struck by a second, non-Carcano bullet; the pattern of their distribution gives us a clue as to the direction of travel. When a bullet strikes bone and disintegrates into fragments, the smaller, dust-like particles are found closer to the entry point and the larger ones are found closer to the exit. This is because, as Sturdivan noted in his HSCA testimony, “A very small fragment has very high drag in tissue” (1HSCA401), whereas fragments with greater mass have greater momentum, enabling them to travel further. What we see in JFK’s autopsy X-ray is that the smaller particles are located near the right temple and the larger ones are found near the upper, right rear of the skull. Therefore, the bullet appears to have been heading front to back.

Further evidence of a double headshot was supplied by Joseph N. Riley Ph.D, a neuroscientist specializing in neuroanatomy and experimental neuropathology. Dr. Riley pointed out that one important issue not sufficiently addressed by the HSCA was that there were two separate and distinct areas of damage to the President’s brain, in the cortical and subcortical regions, and “no evidence of continuity” between the two. “An entrance wound located in the posteromedial parietal area [as proposed by the Clark and HSCA panels] … cannot account for the subcortical damage. An entrance wound in the occipital region, as determined by the autopsy prosectors, may account for the subcortical damage but cannot account for the dorsolateral cortical damage.” As Dr. Riley concluded, “The cortical and subcortical wounds are anatomically distinct and could not have been produced by a single bullet. The fundamental conclusion is inescapable: John Kennedy’s head wounds could not have been caused by one bullet.” (Riley, “The Head Wounds of John F. Kennedy: One Bullet Cannot Account for the Injuries”, The Third Decade, Volume 9, Number 3)

III

The “great respect” Wagner has for those who possess expertise he himself lacks, apparently doesn’t extend as far as the acoustics experts utilized by the HSCA. After extensive experimentation and analysis, these experts concluded that a Dallas police dictabelt recording from the day of the assassination proved that a gunshot had been fired from the grassy knoll. Although the two independent teams of scientists with whom the committee consulted were among the most highly recommended and respected acoustical experts in the United States at that time, Wagner has no problem dismissing their conclusions with little more than a wave of the hand. He writes of how their findings were “challenged almost immediately”, adding that a study commissioned in 2013 by author Larry J. Sabato “completes the debunking of the HSCA’s acoustic evidence.” (Wagner, p. 101) In point of fact, Sabato’s study does no such thing. Before explaining why, let us do what Wagner dares not do: let us discuss the facts that led the HSCA’s experts to their conclusions.

On November 22, 1963, the Dallas police utilized two radio channels. Channel 1 was for routine communications and channel 2 was for the police escort of the presidential motorcade. These transmissions were recorded at police headquarters; channel 1 by a Dictaphone belt recorder and channel 2 by a Gray Audograph disc recorder. In 1978, when the Cambridge, Massachusetts firm of Bolt, Baranek and Newman studied the recordings, it discovered that Ch-2 was not in use at the time the shots were fired. However, for approximately 5 1⁄2 minutes between 12:28 PM and 12:33 PM, the Ch-1 recording was dominated by the sound of a motorcycle motor, owing to the fact that the microphone on a patrolman’s radio had become stuck in the “On” position. BBN realized that, if the motorcycle had been part of the presidential escort, then the gunshots might very well have been captured over the open microphone and deposited in the background of the Ch-1 recording.

The acoustics experts isolated a ten second sequence of the recording that occurred two minutes into the motorcycle segment—at approximately 12:30 PM—and contained six high amplitude sound impulses that it determined could have represented the muzzle blast of a rifle and its succeeding echoes. On-site testing was then conducted in Dealey Plaza with 36 microphones being placed along the parade route on Houston and Elm Streets. Test shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository and the Grassy Knoll and recorded at each of the microphones. These test recordings were subsequently compared to the suspect impulses on the dictabelt, at which point it was discovered that five of the impulses matched the unique echo patterns of rifle shots fired in Dealey Plaza. The fourth in sequence matched a shot fired from the Grassy Knoll. (8HSCA101)

Whilst it would seemingly be possible for some type of random stray noise pattern to closely match one of the test shots, the odds of that happening in all five cases would have to be extremely remote. Fortunately, there was an aspect to BBN’s results that put any such possibility to rest. Namely, what leading expert on the acoustics evidence Dr. Donald Thomas calls the “order in the data.”

There are 125 different ways to sequence five events. If the impulses on the dictabelt were not truly gunfire recorded by a motorcycle travelling in the Presidential motorcade, and instead represented some form of random static, then the matches to the test data could have fallen in any one of 125 different random sequences. However, the matches were not random. They fell 1-2-3-4-5, which is the only correct order for a microphone travelling north on Houston Street and West on Elm Street:

This map depicts the key microphone locations in Dealey Plaza used by the HSCA. A shot at Zapruder frame 175 could not have been fired by Oswald due to the obstruction of an oak tree. (Thompson p. 35) The 5 and 1/2 minute segment during which impulses occur was between 12:28 and 12:34, owing to dispatcher’s notations.

Not only was the order of the matches correct, the spacing of the matching microphones was a remarkable fit with the time between the suspect impulses on the dictabelt recording. The first three impulses were clustered together, falling approximately 1.7 and 1.1 seconds apart. This was followed by a space of 4.8 seconds before the final two impulses arrived very close together, 0.7 seconds apart. The matching microphone locations exhibited the exact same pattern. The first three matches occurred at microphones that were grouped at 18 ft increments on Houston Street. There was then a 78 ft gap before the last two matches occurred at two consecutive microphones on Elm Street:

And it wasn’t just the order and spacing that matched. The distance from the first matching microphone to the last was 143 feet and the time between the first and last suspect impulse on the tape was 8.3 seconds. In order for the motorcycle with the stuck microphone to cover 143 feet in 8.3 seconds it would need to be travelling at a speed of approximately 11.7 mph, which fully corresponds with the FBI’s conclusion that the Presidential limousine was averaging 11.3 mph on Elm Street. (Warren Report, p. 49)

Armed with the above, the HSCA asked its photographic consultant, Robert Groden, to search the archival footage of the motorcade to see if he could find the motorcycle with the stuck microphone.

There is, unfortunately, no known film or photograph that shows the acoustically required positions during the assassination. However, Groden was able to find one officer, H.B. McClain, who was in the right positions shortly before and after the shooting so that he could have been responsible for recording the shots. When McClain was called to testify before the committee he confirmed Groden’s analysis by stating that the microphone on his bike did indeed have a tendency to get stuck in the open position. (5HSCA637)

It is apparent that in at least three ways the evidence validates the hypothesis that the sounds on the dictabelt were gunshots captured by a motorcycle in the presidential motorcade, travelling north on Houston Street and west on Elm. When the HSCA and its acoustic experts saw the above correlations, they had every reason to believe they had found the shots that killed Kennedy on the Ch-1 recording, because these sorts of correlations do not occur by chance; not in the real world. The odds against it are astronomical.

And there’s more.

One of the most important witnesses to the assassination was railroad worker S.M. Holland who had been standing with several others on the railroad overpass when he heard what he thought sounded like three shots from the area of the book depository and one from the knoll. Concurrent with the shot from the knoll, Holland saw a puff of white smoke drift out from under the trees. Holland and two others who saw the smoke were so sure a shot had come from behind the fence that, as soon as Kennedy’s limousine disappeared under the overpass, they ran to the very spot from which the smoke appeared to have come. It took them a couple of minutes to reach the area and, not surprisingly, they found nothing more than footprints and a muddy bumper, as if someone had stood on it to see over the fence.

In 1966, Josiah Thompson interviewed Holland for his book, Six Second in Dallas. Thompson had been studying the famous Polaroid taken by Mary Moorman that showed the area of the grassy knoll around the time of the fatal headshot. Wanting to see if “the hypothesis of a shot from the stockade fence” could be “validated by the Moorman picture”, he compared it to another photograph taken from her position some time later. What he discovered was that an “anomalous shape” appeared along the fence line in Moorman’s photograph that was not present in the comparison picture. Thompson took Holland “to the assassination site and asked him to stand in the position where he found the curious footprints and saw the smoke.” Taking himself back to Moorman’s position, Thompson saw that, remarkably, Holland’s head “appeared in the exact position defined by the shape” in the Polaroid. (Thompson, p. 127)

What does this have to do with the acoustics evidence? Well, a little over a decade after Thompson interviewed Holland, the HSCA asked Professor Mark Weiss of Queens College, New York, and his associate Ernest Aschkenasy, to refine BBN’s analysis of the Grassy Knoll shot. Asked to pin down the location of the gunman, Weiss and Aschkenasy’s analysis pointed to a spot behind the fence, approximately 8 feet left of the corner. This just so happens to be the very same spot in which Holland had stood in 1966 and in which the anomalous shape appears in Moorman’s picture. (8HSCA29) Which means there is agreement between the dictabelt recording, the eyewitness observations, and the Moorman photograph.

Yet further confirmation of the validity of the acoustics evidence comes from its remarkable synchronization with the Zapruder film. Although there is clearly a degree of subjectivity to interpreting the film, there is a general consensus that Kennedy was probably first struck whilst hidden from Zapruder’s view by the Stemmons Freeway sign, and Governor Connally was hit very shortly after reappearing from behind it. If we align the grassy knoll shot with the explosion of Kennedy’s head at frame 313, then the preceding shots perfectly fit this hypothesis. The third shot in sequence falls at approximately frame 224, just three frames after Connally reappears, and the second shot lands at approximately frame 208, just as Kennedy’s head disappears behind the sign. If there is an exit from Connally’s chest at Z frame 224, then the Zapruder film features the exact same 4.8 second gap between shots as is found on the dictabelt.

Wagner has nothing to say about any of this. Instead, as previously noted, he cites a study performed on behalf of Larry Sabato by the Connecticut-based firm, Sonalysts, claiming their report “completes the debunking” of the acoustics evidence. Yet, just like Wagner, Sabato and Sonalysts also make no mention of the above. How one can debunk something without even addressing it is difficult to comprehend. Regardless, Sonalysts claimed that their own analysis of the motorcycle noise showed that its speed was inconsistent with a motorcycle travelling in the motorcade. Their data shows that the bike with the stuck microphone was travelling slowly for only around 40 seconds and was going fast or fluctuating the rest of the time. In order for this to concur with the HSCA analysis, the motorcycle needed to be going slowly whilst in Dealey Plaza. Sonalysts argues, however, that the assassination occurred one minute earlier, when the motor noise was fast and loud.

But this conclusion is not derived from any original research by Sonalysts. It is instead based on a 1982 report commissioned by the National Research Council, which suggested that an instance of “crosstalk” on the Ch-1 and Ch-2 recordings proved that the impulses on the dictabelt were not coincident with the time of the assassination. Yet the NRC report was shown to be in error by Dr. Thomas in a 2001 paper published in the British forensic journal Science & Justice. Dr. Thomas pointed out that the NRC panel had overlooked a second instance of cross-talk, the “Bellah broadcast”, and that using that particular simulcast to synchronize the transmissions placed the impulses “at the exact instant that John F. Kennedy was assassinated”.

If, as Dr. Thomas suggests, we use the Bellah cross-talk as the tie-point between the recordings, then the Sonalysts study of the motorcycle noise actually fits perfectly with the HSCA analysis and all five impulses fall within the 40 second interval in which the motor sounds indicates the bike was moving slowly. The Bellah broadcast occurs on Ch-1 concurrent with a drop in motorcycle noise by approximately 75 decibels, two seconds before the first shot. Furthermore, Sonalysts reported hearing multiple motorcycles just before the motor noise increased. This fits well with a series of photographs showing McClain travelling slowly on Elm Street approximately 28 seconds after the head shot, passing the parked motorcycle of officer Bobby Hargis. Officer J.W. Courson, who had been riding around 100 feet behind McClain, catches up to him very quickly thereafter and the pair speed off together out of the plaza. The motorcycle noise identified by Sonalysts is, then, supportive of the acoustic data.

Wagner quotes Sabato as reporting that his experts found “other clusters of impulses” on the dictabelt that were “very similar” to those identified as gunfire by BBN and Weiss & Aschkenasy. (Wagner, p. 102) Those who have studied BBN’s report will realize that Sabato and Sonalysts are blowing smoke. BBN inspected the entire recording looking for potential gunshots based on waveform and used several a priori criteria to identify the gunfire. Firstly, the waveforms were required to include 10 impulses louder than the motorcycle motor. Secondly, the length of the impulses had to be 1/5 to 1⁄2 a second. Thirdly, there had to be at least three shots. And finally, they had to occur within a timespan of no less than 4 1⁄2 seconds and no greater than 15 seconds. BBN discovered and reported other isolated solitary waveforms and long duration waveforms. But there was only one place on the entire recording in which all of BBN’s criteria were met and that was the segment containing five impulses that subsequently matched the precise echo patterns of gunshots fired in Dealey Plaza.

Wagner and his lone nut cohorts may not like it but over the course of 40 years the analysis of the Dallas police dictabelt by the HSCA’s experts has survived several challenges and stands to this day as scientific evidence of multiple gunmen in Dealey Plaza. Those like Wagner who continue to ignore the order in the acoustic data, as well as the dictabelt’s remarkable concordance with the eyewitness and photographic record, rely on authors like Sabato and their faulty and lazy technical data.

IV

The one way in which Wagner’s book sets itself apart from virtually every other lone gunman tome is unusual. The author rejects the single bullet theory. What makes this even more odd is that Wagner admits that he is an admirer of the late Vincent Bugliosi and his book Reclaiming History, which upheld the Magic Bullet. In fact, it could be said that the primary theme of the book is that not only is the SBT provably wrong, but that for the last nearly five and a half decades writers and researchers on both sides of the debate have been wrong to stipulate that the SBT is integral to the lone gunman hypothesis. But rejecting the SBT whilst maintaining that Oswald acted entirely alone leaves Wagner with some insurmountable problems.

To begin with, Wagner cannot convincingly account for the magic bullet itself, CE399. The author insists that there was no conspiracy to frame Oswald before or after the fact; therefore he is forced to contend that CE399 is a legitimate piece of assassination evidence and that it was responsible for all of Governor Connally’s wounds. (p. 122) I dare say this is something most sensible researchers are unlikely to take very seriously given that the totality of the evidence argues persuasively against it.

Wagner appears to accept the Warren Commission’s assertion that the virtually pristine bullet was found by senior hospital engineer, Darrell Tomlinson, when it rolled off of a stretcher that had previously been occupied by Governor Connally. Yet this conclusion was not one Tomlinson himself fully endorsed. After Connally had been rushed into the trauma room and transferred to the operating table his stretcher was placed on the elevator. Tomlinson then took it to the ground floor and placed it next to another gurney. A few minutes later, he bumped one of the two stretchers against the wall and a bullet rolled onto the floor. Tomlinson made it clear in his testimony before the Commission that he did not know which of the two stretchers the bullet rolled off from. And when Arlen Specter attempted to push him into identifying it as Connally’s, Tomlinson responded, “I’m going to tell you all I can, and I’m not going to tell you something I can’t lay down and sleep at night with either.” (6H134) One thing Tomlinson did note was that the stretcher the bullet came from contained one or two bloody, rolled up sheets, “a few surgical instruments … and a sterile pack or so.” (6H131) This appears to eliminate Connally’s stretcher because Tomlinson testified that, when he wheeled it off of the elevator, it contained only sheets and “a white covering on the pad.” (6H129) This is corroborated by the testimony of Parkland Nurse Jane Wester, who explained that after Connally was placed on the operating table she personally removed all but the sheets from his stretcher. (6H122-3)

The finest critical review of this central issue is still contained in Josiah Thompson’s 1967 volume, Six Seconds in Dallas. After analyzing testimony and then including pictures, witness sketches, emergency room rosters, and concluding with a map, Thompson makes a compelling case that CE 399 was found on the stretcher of a young boy named Ronald Fuller. (pp. 154-65)

Not only does the evidence suggest that Tomlinson’s bullet came from a stretcher unrelated to the care of Governor Connally, it also indicates that he found an entirely different bullet from CE399. As Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson detailed in their groundbreaking essay, The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?, both Tomlinson and O.P. Wright—the Parkland Personnel Director who took charge of the bullet and passed it along to the Secret Service—were unable to identify CE 399 as the bullet they found. In fact, Wright told Thompson in an interview in 1966 that, unlike the round-nosed Carcano round, the bullet found at Parkland had a “pointed tip”. He even made a point of showing Thompson a pointed tip, .30 caliber round from his own desk drawer that he insisted more closely resembled the one that had rolled off the stretcher. (Thompson, p. 175)

On top of this, the next two men to handle the bullet, Secret Service Agent Richard Johnsen and Secret Service Chief James Rowley, were also unable to identify CE399. And as if that weren’t enough, the fifth link in the bullet’s chain of possession, FBI Agent Elmer Todd, recalled marking it with his initials before handing it over to Robert Frazier at FBI HQ. But as scrupulous JFK researcher John Hunt has established, Todd’s initials are nowhere to be found on CE399. What’s more, Hunt pointed out that Frazier had marked the time he received CE399 on his November 22 laboratory worksheet as “7:30 PM.” But Todd had also written the time he received the bullet on the envelope that contained it as “8:50 PM.” (see Hunt’s online essay, Phantom Identification of the Magic Bullet: E.L. Todd and CE399).

How could Frazier receive a bullet from Todd at FBI HQ one hour and 20 minutes before Todd was handed the same bullet at the White House by Chief Rowley? Something is most definitely wrong with this picture. Based on the above, it appears that there were actually two separate bullets in Washington that day—CE399 and the pointed-tip missile found at Parkland Hospital—and that one was used to pin the blame for Kennedy’s assassination squarely on Lee Oswald’s shoulders while the other was made to disappear.

Wagner reveals in a footnote that he is at least aware of Aguilar and Thompson’s essay and the implication that the pointed tip round was substituted for CE399, so he tries to nullify the problem. He argues that because Frazier told the Commission he had received CE399 on November 22, 1963, but the rifle wasn’t in Washington until the following day, there was no “opportunity for the FBI to fire Oswald’s rifle to recover a bullet to illicitly substitute for the alleged pointed-tip bullet.” (Wagner, fn. p. 191) Of course, since Aguilar and Thompson never argued that the Bureau was responsible for firing the pristine bullet, this is little more than a straw man argument. Even so, the fact that Frazier said he received CE399 on November 22 does not actually make it so. Whatever Frazier claimed, the fact remains that, as demonstrated above, the bullet lacks anything even remotely resembling a proper chain of custody. When CE399 allegedly appeared in Frazier’s laboratory at 7:30 pm on November 22, 1963, it appears to have come from nowhere.

Questions of provenance aside, the condition of the magic bullet is simply not compatible with Governor Connally’s wounds. The bullet (or bullets) that struck Connally entered his back, destroyed 10 cm of his fifth rib, punctured his right lung, smashed through his right wrist, and punctured his left thigh, depositing fragments in the wrist and thigh along the way. Common sense would dictate that any missile responsible for all of those injuries would be significantly mutilated. Yet as Wagner himself writes, “The only discernible damage to the pristine bullet was some distortion at its base …” (p. 118) He quotes Michael Baden as stating that it would be “very difficult” to take a hammer and flatten the base of CE399 to the degree that it is and from that concludes that “the distortion of the bullet’s base was probably not caused merely by the bullet being fired out of the rifle.” (p. 119) But Baden’s musings and the inference Wagner draws from them are largely irrelevant. In the mid-1980s, author Henry Hurt test-fired a Carcano bullet into water and published pictures of the result in his mostly worthwhile book, Reasonable Doubt. Hurt’s bullet looked incredibly similar to CE399, flattened base end and all.

I am sure most people would struggle to accept the notion that a bullet which broke two bones and pierced several layers of skin and flesh is going to end up looking almost indistinguishable from a bullet fired solely into water. And since Wagner lists Hurt’s book in his bibliography, but doesn’t mention the test bullet, I’m guessing he recognizes the absurdity of the claim also.

The author also fails to mention the fact that the ballistics experts at Edgewood Arsenal, who performed the previously mentioned skull experiments on behalf of the Warren commission, also attempted to replicate the wounds suffered by Governor Connally. Seen in the picture below, CE853 is a bullet that was fired through the rib of a goat. It is severely flattened with its lead core extruding from its base. CE856 was fired through the wrist of a human cadaver and it exhibits the “mushrooming” effect typical of a bullet that has struck bone. Each of these bullets has broken only one of the two bones attributed to CE399 which, as you can see, looks virginal by comparison.

The Edgewood test bullets show us exactly what happens to Carcano bullets when they strike bone and readily demonstrate the absurdity of suggesting that CE399 was responsible for all of Connally’s wounds.

It is also important to mention that Connally’s wrist surgeon, Dr. Charles F. Gregory, explained in his Warren Commission testimony that the amount of cloth and debris carried into the wrist indicated it had been struck by “an irregular missile”. In his second appearance before the Commission, Dr. Gregory expanded on this point, noting “that dorsal branch of the radial nerve, a sensory nerve in the immediate vicinity was partially transected together with one tendon leading to the thumb, which was totally transected.” This, he said, “is more in keeping with an irregular surface which would tend to catch and tear a structure rather than push it aside.” (4H124) Wagner writes that Gregory conceded it was “possible” for CE399 to have produced Connally’s wrist wound if it had entered backward. (Wagner, p. 118) This is true, but it’s also apparent that Dr. Gregory did not consider the idea very likely. In fact, later in his testimony he noted that the two mangled bullet fragments found on the floor of the limousine were more likely the type of missile “that could conceivably have produced the injury which the Governor incurred in the wrist.” (p. 128)

V

Wagner may stumble badly trying to account for CE399, but it is in trying to create a halfway plausible single shooter scenario without the SBT that he falls flat on his face. The author writes of how researchers have “fixated” on the SBT for five decades and have, as a result, “blindly herded around the dogma” that the SBT is “required to sustain the lone-gunman explanation for the assassination …” This, he assures readers, is not the case, and “the evidence … carefully considered, demonstrates quite the opposite.” But if Wagner actually produces any such “evidence” in his book, then somehow, I managed to miss it.

Warren Commission lawyer Norman Redlich once remarked to author Edward Epstein that “To say that they [President Kennedy and Governor Connally] were hit by separate bullets, is synonymous with saying that there were two assassins.” (Epstein, Inquest, p. 38) Redlich’s colleagues on the Commission’s staff all understood this to be the case, which is precisely why Arlen Specter dreamed up the theory in the first place. As previously noted, the Zapruder film shows that Kennedy’s first clear reaction to his non-fatal wounds begins as he reappears from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, around frame 225. Connally’s most obvious reaction occurs a little over 10 frames later when his right shoulder drops dramatically and his cheeks puff, giving the impression of someone who has had the wind knocked out of him. Connally’s doctors believed that he was probably struck around frame 236 (5H114, 128) and it was established that he was no longer in a position to receive a shot from the “sniper’s nest” after frame 240. (5H170)

An FBI re-enactment in Dealey Plaza showed that a gunman on the sixth floor would have had his view of the limousine blocked by the foliage of an oak tree between frames 166 and 210. Based on this, the Commission reasoned that Kennedy was probably not struck before frame 210 “since it is unlikely that the assassin would deliberately have shot at him with a view obstructed by the oak tree when he was about to have a clear opportunity.” (WR, p. 98) If Kennedy was struck at or after frame 210, then there were no more than 30 frames between that shot and the one that hit Connally. This created a problem for the Commission because Oswald’s rifle could not be fired that quickly. Examination of the sixth floor Carcano had established that the time required to fire a shot, work the bolt, and squeeze off another round was a minimum of 2.3 seconds or the equivalent of 42 Zapruder frames. (3H407)

And this wasn’t the only impediment to the Commission’s predetermined lone gunman conclusion. If the first shot was fired at frame 210 and the last was fired at 313, that gave Oswald only 5.6 seconds in which to fire three rounds and score three hits—something even the Commission’s top marksmen were unable to accomplish in the allotted time; even though they cheated: they fired at stationary targets from thirty feet up, not sixty feet. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 108)

Perhaps more importantly, the evidence strongly suggested that one or more shots had missed the limousine and its occupants altogether. At least two witnesses, Royce Skelton and Virginia Baker, recalled seeing a bullet hit the street in front of the President’s car (WR, p. 116, 7H508). Additionally, bystander James Tague, who was standing near the triple underpass on the south side of Main Street, received an injury to his face after a missile struck the curb near his feet. (WR, p.116)

In the end, the Commission staff realized that the only way out of this box—without admitting to more than one gunman—was to suggest that Kennedy and Connally were both hit by the same bullet. Although the Warren Report stated that it was “not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally” (WR, p. 19), virtually everyone who has a firm grasp of the facts and circumstances outlined above agrees that the Commission was blowing smoke; the SBT is absolutely integral to the lone gunman hypothesis.

What, then, does Wagner offer in order to overturn this long-stipulated fact? How does he reconcile the evidence with a single shooter, three-shot/three-hit scenario? Well, if you can believe it, Wagner proposes that Oswald went against common sense and fired his first shot at frame 160, milliseconds before his view was about to be obscured by a tree. This is not an uncommon supposition among lone nut theorists who want to give Oswald more time to fire three shots. The difference is that the majority of those folks propose that this first shot was the one that missed, whereas Wagner suggests this first bullet actually struck President Kennedy. That’s right, according to Wagner, when we see JFK in the Zapruder film, still waving and smiling at bystanders as he disappears behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, a bullet has already entered his back, grazed the transverse process of his first thoracic vertebra (likely inducing spinal shock), and ripped its way through his trachea. He just didn’t know it yet.

Needless to say, Wagner has nothing of substance to advance in support of this silliness. He quotes Dr. Baden as stating that he and his colleagues on the HSCA pathology panel “have all had experience in which persons have been seriously injured and not known they were injured for a few minutes.” (Wagner, p. 54) And he makes reference to a viewing of the Zapruder film held by the Commission’s staff for its medical and ballistics experts in which the possibility of a delayed reaction by “as much as two seconds” was discussed and considered possible, if not likely. (p. 239) And that’s it. That is all Wagner can provide; an appeal to authority that does not reconcile itself with Kennedy’s specific wounds or his reactions as seen in the Zapruder film.

What we see in the film is that immediately after JFK reappears from behind the sign, he exhibits what is almost certainly an involuntary reaction. The Commission wrote that “When President Kennedy again came fully into view in the Zapruder film at frame 225, he seemed to be reacting to his neck wound by raising his hands to his throat.” (WR, p. 98) This myth that the President clutched at his throat has unfortunately persisted ever since, despite the fact that the film shows no such thing. In reality, Kennedy’s hands appear to ball up into fists and rise up in front of his face, while his elbows fly outwards and upwards above his shoulders, to the level of his ears.

I invite the reader to place his or her hands to their own throat and notice how the elbows naturally stay down and rest against the torso. The pose which JFK adopts in the film is nothing like this. His reaction is awkward and unnatural and is best explained as a result of spinal trauma.

The HSCA medical panel reported that Kennedy’s post mortem X-rays showed what appeared to be a fracture of the transverse process of the first thoracic vertebra, which, Dr. Baden testified, “could have been caused by the bullet striking it directly or by the force of the cavity created by the bullet passing near to it.” (1HSCA305) As Dr. Thomas has reported, the medical literature is clear that blunt trauma to the vertebra can be transmitted to the spinal cord and that the effects of such injuries are immediate. (Thomas, Hear No Evil, p. 315) It should be readily apparent, then, that the notion that President Kennedy continued smiling and waving to bystanders for 3.5 seconds before exhibiting any obvious reaction to his spinal cord injury is simply not worthy of consideration.

What’s more, in his attempt to push a three shot/three hit scenario, Wagner fails to even mention the witnesses who saw a bullet hit the street, let alone adequately account for the wounding of James Tague. The best that he can come up with is to reference the suggestion made by Josiah Thompson in Six Seconds in Dallas that the curb may have been struck by a fragment from the head shot. But with all due respect to my friend Tink Thompson, this always was the weak point of his reconstruction. The nose and tail of the bullet, which entered the back of Kennedy’s head, were both found on the floor of the limousine. To accept Thompson’s postulate, we must believe that, after the bullet exited the right side of Kennedy’s head, a small fragment from its middle somehow made it 270 feet to his front left and had enough velocity remaining to cause very visible damage to the curb. That such a thing is even possible has never been established. And, quite frankly, it strains credulity. (Thompson, p. 232)

A missed shot has always been the explanation which best fits the evidence; that is precisely why it has gained wide acceptance. But the problem with this is that there was no copper found on the curb beneath Tague where the projectile hit before ricocheting upward. (DiEugenio, p. 135) This lack of copper, from a supposed copper-jacketed bullet, has led writers like Gerald Posner and Bugliosi to embrace increasingly wild scenarios to account for the completely stripped off outer coating.

Recognizing this fact, and being faced with the very short interval between the wounding of Kennedy and Connally, is why the Commission’s staff knew it needed the SBT. Without the Magic Bullet there had to be at least four shots and a second gunman. In fact, the missed shot together with the two shots to JFK’s head, the one to his upper back, and the one to Governor Connally, gives us a total of five shots. Which—in a prime example of how the forensic evidence in this case, properly interpreted, fits together remarkably well—is the very same number as found on the Dallas police dictabelt recording.

VI

Ultimately, The Assassination of JFK: Perspectives Half A Century Later offers little to justify its existence. In fairness, Wagner does spend considerable time supplying details which invalidate the Single Bullet Theory, and some might argue that this information makes the book worthwhile. However, it is my opinion that the author has nothing to say on the SBT that has not been said before, and better, by authors and researchers who were not hampered by his insistence that Oswald acted alone. Ironically, although the main purpose of the book is seemingly to argue that the SBT is not vital to the lone gunman theory, Wagner ends up demonstrating the opposite. His suggestion that Kennedy was struck by a bullet 3.5 seconds before exhibiting a clear reaction is dubious on its face and completely untenable when taking into account the true nature of the President’s injuries.

Wagner’s own musings on the assassination consistently fail to convince because the facts are simply not on his side. It is for that reason that he has little choice but to carefully select the details and expert opinions that suit his arguments, while frequently utilizing straw man arguments, appeals to authority, and circular reasoning to deal with those he cannot ignore. His use of such tactics stands in stark contrast to his stated intention to “offer all sides of analysis for each significant point and not to advocate only those facts that support my conclusions.” (p. 13) One simply cannot make a claim, like the acoustics evidence has been debunked, without even mentioning the order in the data and then still claim objectivity.

In what is perhaps the most exasperating of Wagner’s methods, he imagines he is somehow privy to the thoughts and plans of Lee Harvey Oswald: “Oswald could imagine the firing line he would negotiate as the limousine continued on Elm Street … he visualized the movement of the President’s limousine from the vantage point of the sixth floor … Oswald would have known that by choosing a firing path that followed the motorcade as it went past the building, he would have to negotiate the canopy of an oak tree … Oswald also planned his escape … He wanted to elude capture or worse … He knew he was trading his life for the President’s, a trade he was willing to make. The worst outcome he could imagine would be to trade his life for a failed assassination.” (pp. 23-25) Needless to say, neither Wagner nor anyone else could possibly know whether any one of these thoughts ever entered Oswald’s head. Yet that doesn’t stop him from presenting these imaginings as if there was no doubt about it.

This review has, of necessity, focused quite heavily on what Wagner left out of his book. This was unavoidable because omission of relevant and/or contradictory fact is undoubtedly one of the author’s greatest sins. And make no mistake, Wagner simply cannot claim to be unaware of the controversy surrounding issues like the palm print on the rifle or the shells allegedly found at the Tippit murder scene because they are discussed at length in books he himself references. Nonetheless, he presents what suits his theory as if it is established fact and keeps the troublesome details to himself.

It is for these reasons, and many more, that I can think of no one to whom I would recommend The Assassination of JFK: Perspectives Half A Century Later. It is a sad reality that there have been well over a thousand books written about the Kennedy assassination, and surprisingly few of them have been genuinely worthwhile. There is a long list of books about which it can be rightly said they have added nothing to our understanding of JFK’s murder because their authors placed their conclusions first and then twisted, warped, and distorted the details to fit. Wagner’s book undoubtedly belongs on that list.