THE MAN WHO DIDN’T TALK

And other tales from the new Kennedy assassination files

Saundra Kay Spencer was a technician at the Navy's photographic laboratory in Washington. She developed the JFK autopsy photos on the weekend after Kennedy's death. She kept her oath of secrecy for 34 years. When she spoke to the ARRB in 1997, Spencer displayed the efficiency of a career military woman. She was well prepared with a sharp memory for the details of her involvement in the amazing events of November 22-24, 1963. Her testimony, after reviewing all the JFK autopsy photographs in the National Archives, was unequivocal. "The views [of JFK's body] we produced at the [Naval] Photographic Center are not included [in the current autopsy collection]," she said. "Between those photographs and the ones we did, there had to be some massive cosmetic things done to the President's body."

FBI agent Francis O'Neill was present during the autopsy and took notes. In 1997, he also viewed the photographs. Referring to an autopsy photograph showing the wound in the back of Kennedy's head, O'Neill said, "This looks like it's been doctored in some way. I specifically do not recall those -- I mean, being that clean or that fixed up. To me, it looks like these pictures have been. . . . It would appear to me that there was a -- more of a massive wound. . ." O'Neill emphasized he was not saying the autopsy photographs themselves had been doctored but that the wounds themselves had been cleaned up before the photograph was taken.

James Sibert, another FBI agent present at the autopsy, had a similar reaction to the photos. "I don't recall anything like this at all during the autopsy," he said under oath. "There was much -- well, the wound was more pronounced. And it looks like it could have been reconstructed or something, as compared with what my recollection was."

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What both men were objecting to was the lack of a big hole in the back of JFK's head which would be somewhat indicative of a so-called blowout wound caused by a shot from the front.

The retired FBI agents were especially scathing about the single bullet theory positing that one bullet caused seven non-fatal wounds in Kennedy and [Texas] Governor Connally and emerged largely undamaged on a hospital stretcher.

They took notes on the autopsy as Dr. Humes examined Kennedy's body. Both said the autopsies concluded the bullet that hit Kennedy in his back had not transited his body. But chief pathologist Humes took another view in his autopsy report, writing that the bullet had emerged from Kennedy's throat and gone on to strike Governor Connally. But Humes's credibility is undermined by the ARRB's discovery that he destroyed not only his notes, but also his first draft of the autopsy report without ever revealing its contents or even existence.

Sibert later told a JFK researcher of the single bullet theory: "It's magic, not medicine."

The Single Bullet Theory Revisited

The single bullet theory, of course, was the scenario developed in 1964 by Arlen Specter, a young lawyer on the Warren Commission and now a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Originally, the FBI said that three shots had been fired at Kennedy's motorcade. The first supposedly hit President Kennedy in the back but did not penetrate too deeply. The second, which hit Governor John Connally in the back, exited his chest, punctured his wrist and wound up in his thigh. The third shot hit Kennedy in the head. The Warren Commission staff accepted this three-shot scenario until a staff lawyer, Arlen Specter, began looking frame by frame at the home movie from the crime scene made by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder. Selected frames from the film were published by Life magazine but the movie was not broadcast, not the least because it showed the wounding of President Kennedy by a first shot in the back followed by the wounding of Governor Connally about 1.1 seconds later. It was impossible for Oswald to have fired his Mannlicher-Carcano bolt action rifle twice in 1.1 seconds. The photography from the crime scene indicated a second gunman -- a finding that the entire weight of the federal government from the president to the director of the FBI had already rejected.

Specter solved the problem by arguing that one bullet had caused all the non-fatal wounds to both JFK and Connally. This scenario has been much mocked over the years, though Specter has said, "the single bullet theory has become the single bullet fact."

Specter's theory remains the keystone on which the edifice of Oswald's sole guilt rests. For if one bullet did not cause all of Kennedy's and Connally's wounds, the only explanation of their injuries is that they were caused by two gunmen and some kind of conspiracy.

The latest study of JFK ballistic evidence was conducted by Patrick Grant and Erik Randich and published in 2006 in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Grant, the deputy director of the Forensic Science Center at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, is fond of saying, "Forensic science is the application of technological displays that can narrow the limits of plausible conjecture." Grant and Randich's article raises the very real question of whether the single bullet theory is still within the limits of plausible conjecture.