Julian Dorey Podcast - 😱 [VIDEO] - JFK Disturbing Aftermath: Forensics Expert Exposes BOTCHED Coverup | Joseph Scott Morgan • 170

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Joseph Scott Morgan is a Forensics Expert, Author, TV personality & JFK Investigator. His book, “Blood Beneath My Feet” is considered by many the greatest forensics memoir ever written. EPISODE LINKS: - Get 15% OFF MudWTR (PROMO CODE: “JULIAN”): https://mudwtr.com/julian  - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://legacy.23point5.com/creator/Julian-Dorey-9826?tab=Featured  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/9wSYsgvK  - SUBSCRIBE to Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  JOSEPH LINKS: - BUY Joseph’s Book: https://amzn.to/3Ob3Upt  - Joseph’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoScottForensic  - Joseph’s Podcast: https://rb.gy/jje7qb  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Laying foundation of JFK Assassination History 4:16 - Zapruder Film 12:04 - The Word Conspiracy & JFK 14:05 - The 1st Autopsy of All Time: Julius Caesar 26:16 - JFK’s Autopsy; Dr. Rose & Dallas Trauma Room 36:34 - JFK Crime Scene Response; Conspiracy or Stupidity? 43:24 - The timing of the shots; JFK pronounced dead 49:44 - Governor Connally & Post Assassination Security Breakdown 53:44 - Jackie Kennedy requests JFK moved 59:04 - Lee Harvey Oswald Timeline post Assassination 1:09:41 - Dr. McClelland’s first JFK Autopsy Claim; President’s remains 1:15:39 - First shots fired; JFK Forensics Experts weren’t experts 1:21:18 - White House Bypasses Walter Reed; JFK Brain removed before autopsy 1:29:08 - Oliver Stone’s Curtis LeMay JFK Autopsy Story 1:38:06 - Why was Secret Service in charge of JFK Investigation? 1:43:53 - JFK Autopsy length; How forensics is supposed to work 1:53:55 - Humes & Roswell 1:58:40 - All US Presidents who were assassinated in history 2:05:55 - JFK Organs in the neck were not removed in autopsy 2:10:59 - Did Lee Harvey Oswald fire shots at JFK? 2:17:35 - The JFK Magic Bullet Theory 2:24:34 - JFK Highway route to hospital 2:34:02 - Anatomical Theory behind JFK’s Assassination; Brain Autopsy Explained 2:47:15 - Dr. Hume burned JFK Autopsy notes 2:51:56 - Secret Service cleaned JFK car immediately after assassination 2:57:59 - Justice Scalia Death Declaration 3:02:55 - JFK car reused 3:06:05 - JSM more explanation on JFK CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edit by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Uppbeat.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 170 - Joseph Scott Morgan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earl Rose was that one person in that horrible moment that said, this is wrong, and what happens? Hand goes to the weapon, pushes him against the wall, said, this is the way it's going to be. And he even tells them that this is in violation of Texas state statute. Right. Tells them that, makes them aware of it. He was well aware of the law.

He knew that it was wrong. And when they walked out of those doors with the president's body at that moment, Tom, you know, I think about Dr. Rose watching them kind of vanish with the president's body, thinking, what the hell's going to happen? Well, let me tell you what happened. Joseph Scott Morgan, I have been looking forward to this podcast for a while now, sir. I'm geeking out this morning. We're going JFK. It's the 60th.

Let's go. You came prepared. Look at this. I did come prepared. What can I say? The material in the assassination, pertaining to the assassination, is so dense. And the problem is this. When you're talking about dense investigative information in a case like this where there's so much speculation, you don't know what to believe.

You don't know what to believe. You don't know what to believe. You don't know what's valid because even things that are supposed to be valid sometimes prove to be invalid when you're talking about trusted sources. And sometimes, you know, you get to studying this stuff and it leaves you, I don't know, there's not a better way to say it, kind of swimmy headed. I think you're kind of chasing your tail all the way around. You don't know what's real. But what we do know is that we have a very public assassination of a president. And that's where it starts, particularly from my world,

which is the medical legal world, as a death investigator, you know, kind of looking at what you have to consider from an evidentiary standpoint. There's all kinds of speculations that have run their course over the years about what's there, what's missing, what should have been done, and woulda, coulda, shoulda. in time and then trying to separate what you believe is fact versus, well, I'm not going to say fiction, but speculative at best. Yeah. I mean, this is one of those things that it seems like the more time passes, you would think moves to history a little bit and you kind of move on with life, which obviously we have, but the more time passes, the more unsettling it gets. It does because you, you know, to say that memories fade is an understatement when it comes to death investigation. They're going to fade. There's and people die. Witnesses die. Things get lost in the shuffle. And that's that is certainly problematic. And that that's happened over the course of the years since November of 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was killed. It would be fantastic, I think, on one level, if we could travel back in time and get a do-over, get a mulligan, if you would.

But that's not going to happen. So, you know, like I was saying, all that we have, and no pun intended, is all that remains of that life that had been lived. And it ended very quickly and horribly in Dealey Plaza that day. And the weird thing about it is that it happened, as it turned out, for the whole world to see. And that's what was quite striking about that event, that with the limited technology that they had back then, that you had this one guy that was standing there with a camera that he would probably take on vacation and film the Grand Canyon with. And it was a celebration for him. I'm talking about Zapruder.

Because the president was coming to town. That's a big deal. It's a big deal for me, man. The president shows up. I want to go. I want to preserve that moment, those images. And he just happened to be in that spot at that moment in time. Right spot, right time.

Yeah, for people who have never seen that video, it'll get demonetized if I show it on here. But you can go right to YouTube, type in zapruder film hd it is the film you've probably seen at some point in your life when they show this of the car coming down and bop bop and everything right after that but it's crazy how the world lines up and and a guy like he even kept most of his steadiness following the shot basically all the way through. Yeah, he did. And years since then, as I worked as a death investigator of the years, there were any number of times where I would have people that would film their own deaths. I had several people that would film their own suicides over the years. And you would have to go back and watch these things and the reason i'm saying that is the fact that the old adage about the camera not

blinking and the fact that he was able to capture that moment time where he is still tracking as the limo is moving down the road like this. He never stops. And the fact that he was – it's almost like he didn't necessarily have an awareness of what was going on. He had tunnel vision, and why wouldn't he? He was the president of the United States. It was the first lady who I think that even Kennedy said a few times when they would go to these – to know, to dinners and whatnot. I know that you're not here for me. You're here to see my lovely wife.

Hey, guys, I need your help with three quick things. And if you're watching me on Spotify video right now, you can see this timer to my right. It is going to be fast. Number one, if you are not already following the show, please hit that follow button on Spotify or whatever audio platform you're on. Number two, if you're on Spotify right now on our show's homepage in the description, you will see a link to our Spotify podcast clips channel. That's right. We are posting clips from this podcast every single day on there. There is a whole library to go over there and follow. And finally, number three, if you are

on Spotify or Apple, please leave a five-star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. Now let's get to the episode. And, and, you know, I, you know, people, people from back then, you know, they, they had this air of celebrity about them that I don't think that people had ever seen in the white house. It was a, it was a different time. People were dazzled by that. We're kind of numb to it nowadays. I think beginning of TV. I mean, I mean, that was probably the number one thing. I mean, part of the reason he was able to pull off that upset victory, besides the mafia stuffing a lot of boxes in Dallas and Chicago, was he had the first televised debate against Nixon on TV. And this was where no one was really trained for TV, and he was a natural. He was a smooth operator, man.

And it's symbolic because you look at it, this is one of the first iconic images really caught in color and in that way that we've ever had. Even like his trip in Texas for the two days he was there before he got killed, you know, with the cameras actually following and capturing what's going on and you just think about like the symbolism of it them is like that power couple i mean you were in the old studio you might remember on the wall i had i had on on the far wall all the old school stuff that were examples of things in pop culture and they were in black and white and the bottom was in color and it was the modern day and on the color one for one of the six panels i had jay-z and beyonce as like your pop culture power couple right but i had kennedy and his wife as the old school version of it because they were

the first like it thing and you look at that day you know man the central casting was all there i mean her wearing the pink chanel and she dressed in nine. But I mean, have you ever seen something more like horrifyingly perfect when it comes to just this, this, the most gruesome event in American history? And yet the it's almost like the the stage was set in a scary way across the board, including the people who obviously weren't in on it. Yeah, precisely. And going back to the color of that dress contrasted with the backdrop of kind of the beautiful blue sky. It was a crisp day. But then you reflect back and you think about they had asked her after she had been through this horror, allegedly what she responded with. They asked her, they said, do you want to change? And she said, no, I want them to see what they've done to my husband.

Yes. And that pink contrast. And when you're in the morgue, for instance, and you see there are certain moments in time where you're looking at a specimen in front of you, something that you've removed that has evidentiary value and it's super saturated in blood. And there are these blue drapes that we use in the morgue and you lay things down on them. And when you snap a shot of that, it's meant to be quite reflective and you can pick up on all of the contrasting nuances of the specimen that you're taking the photo of. She was that backdrop for that. And,

you know, we never got a real, there's that classic image of her on Air Force One where Johnson's being sworn in, she's standing there in that dress. And that moment in time, it transitioned from Kennedy to Johnson. And a real turning point for the country that we've never – it defined us, I think, going forward from then because we were very Eisenhower, leave it to Beaver kind of world where it was, we thought that there was something better,

that you were absent. And this is a post-World War II generation that had gone through the horrors of war, but there was kind of this hope. And then all of a sudden, buddy, it just, whew, after that, it just kind of began to go downhill. I think with our perception, we became much more cynical and we've continued to be cynical. And I think a lot of this can be traced back to that moment, Tom. Absolutely. And then you look at what happened in the sixties, the Beatles flew across here, what, like four months later or something like

that. And then you have the whole hippie era of Vietnam obviously kicked off. That's a little part of the conspiracy here too. I mean, it's interesting. It is. It's exactly like you said. It's like turning the page. It is. And I'm glad you mentioned this word conspiracy because that's, and I think that people have kind of looked at this,

these two words that have entered our lexicon since that period of time. They're saying, many say that it was the Kennedy assassination that brought this idea of there being a conspiracy theory or conspiracy theorist. Well, used as a pejorative term. Yeah, yeah. And for many years it had, it certainly has been. Now, I think that many people as, you know, more information and data has been, you know, kind of leaked or seeped out over the years. Some people are having second thoughts about, well, maybe it wasn't as they have said that it was, that it wasn't as, I don't know, that the truth was that what we were seeing was not necessarily what was truly going on. And I think that that's part of the darkness of it. But reflectively, before you

asked me to come up and talk about this topic. And thank you for having me back. It means the world to me. Oh, thank you for being here. Your conversation with me was one of my favorites. I spent some time thinking about what I would say to you. And now I'm speaking to you as a forensic scientist and a professor, not so much as an old death investigator that had baggage that stands out for me is actually involving the first autopsy that we have a record of that was recorded. And, of course, that's the autopsy of Julius Caesar going back all those years.

And there are many parallels here, I think. And if we go down the rabbit hole relative to how some people might say in society, our betters that are behind these conspiracies that could have the ability to engineer something at this scale. Many people have held on to this idea that many of those people are rooted with a background where they would have been afforded educations, where they could have studied the classics over the years. There would have been an awareness of Julius Caesar, and even beyond the idea of what Shakespeare had put forth, you know, et tu, Brute? Didn't he get marked like right outside Piazza Navona?

Yeah, it was up on the portico. And, of course, he was set upon by senators. And it was done in a public arena for everyone to see within the Senate at that point in time. And his personal physician actually did the autopsy and recorded it, which is pretty amazing to me when you think back. I think it was 44, what was it, 44 AD when he died. Was it 44 AD? I can't recall off the top of my head. I want to make sure that I have that right.

44 BC, wow. So 44 BC. We lost Caesar and Jesus like real fast. Yeah, I know. This preceded Christ. But, you know, following that kind of train of thought, um, you've got this man who was beloved by the people that, that was perception. You know, he had made reforms, uh, within Rome. Um, Senate wasn't happy about it. Uh, those that are in power

are not happy about it. Um, and he's, not happy about it. And he's an interesting character, to say the very least. But when he was set upon by these people within this arena, and it was demonstrated for everyone that was present, you know, there were a collection of servants, slaves, not to mention sitting senators that were in this environment, it was done as a demonstration of that he's evil, we're going to put an end to him. And in documenting the autopsy, he went over Caesar's body with a fine-tooth comb. For this time, it's quite amazing because he documented all of these injuries. I think that it was a total of 26 stab wounds. They really went after his face. They tried to mutilate his groin. He was attacked in this area. It was almost an emasculation type of thing.

Did they start in the back though? Well, yeah. And that's where we get this term backstabbing. And interestingly enough, the injury that he sustained just below his left scapula is probably the one that actually killed him. So his left shoulder blade. And when it entered his body, what the physician opined was that he clipped the lung, and he may, it's real and clear, he may have clipped the aorta, which is the major vessel coming off of the heart. And so Caesar didn't die immediately. He laid there, and it is said, and this was written probably 200 years after the fact by a historian, that he pulled his toga up over do this, thought that it was going to be received in this manner in which people would be elated and joyful. That he's gone. That he's gone.

Yeah, absolutely. But he did something interesting. And this is one of those moments in time where our history that we're in right now kind of intersects with that moment in time from a forensic standpoint. After the physician did the autopsy on Caesar's remains, he went back and created a wax effigy. It was the first time that you ever have a multidimensional rendering of a human being in order to demonstrate injuries. And the record shows from back then that they placed it on, and it's written this way, that they placed it on a spinning mechanical device. In other words, they could spin it around for the whole crowd to see.

And he displayed all of these injuries on Caesar's body. And they had his toga there, blood saturated. And the crowd is said to have gasped and cried that they couldn't bear the sight of this any longer. And it was demonstrative of what had happened. And guess where he did this display? A place called the Forum. And guess what the root of what we do in my field is? Forensics. And it originates from that term.

No shit. Yeah. So it's in – to present something in a forensic environment, you have – it's a place where you go to debate. You take science. You take it to court. You open up for debate in that environment. You discuss. People are on trial. You present the to court. You open up for debate in that environment. You discuss. People are on trial.

You present the scientific evidence. And that's what the word forensic is rooted in. It comes from the form, the ability to speak. I never knew that. That's wild. And so it's a pretty amazing thing. But here's what I was thinking. If you go down the rabbit hole with all the conspiratorial stuff,

these people that would have had the ability to create some kind of wide-ranging conspiracy, they would have been aware, perhaps, of what happened in Rome following Caesar's death. The JFK people, you're saying. Yeah. And what happened in Rome. It was one of the most bloody conflicts that they ever had. They had all-out civil war, and it went on for a long time. And you think the people who planned JFK would have properly studied this?

Well, they would have at least— Because that seems like that would be the opposite. They would have at least had an awareness. They knew that if that were the case, they would know that they couldn't go out and make a big deal out of it. They're not going to make the same mistakes that the senators would have made back then, assuming that everybody would want this, because if they did, all hell would rain down. So if that's the way that people want to think, if you continue that line of logic moving out like that, you begin to think, hmm, I wonder if that's why all these things have been hidden. Because if you truly knew what had happened, perhaps, there would be so much there would be a calling for blood I think if people knew and that that's the way I was thinking about it now whether or not

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promo code julian j-u-l-i-a-n at checkout to get 15 off your own mud water today and by the way they're gonna throw in a free frother as well. Everybody wins. Now let's get back to the show. I think that the arrogance, obviously you have to be arrogant to try to take out like the leader of the free world, the leader of your country, leader of anything. But the arrogance after the fact and immediately after the fact

in the complete inattention to some of the most basic details that you if it's a ton of people in on this conspiracy they're supposed to be smart in the government that you'd think they would have buttoned up a little better the the arrogance there is never lost on me because you know when i we you have the timeline i noticed in the front of noticed in the front of this in the front of this thick binder right here of all this research you've done over the years so i'm gonna have you go through that in a minute to set the stage but when you look at all the all the almost like comical things that happened in the moments and hours right after this thing

we are talking about a dead united states president who was not afforded some of the most basic or his family i should say because he's gone was not afforded some of the most basic rights of i guess like chain of possession of the body and actual what happened here in the autopsies rather than like a plotted out autopsy with certain people who shouldn't even be in the room running it like the the mess that this was is stunning to me and it makes the whole i mean you you're just talking about like the conspiracy angle there and and how that term got used we know that that's a term that was pushed into the lexicon it had been around i believe but it was pushed into the lexicon after this because anyone who would dare question this, which anyone with half a brain who looked at it should have, you wanted to – the people in charge wanted to make sure that they were kind of labeled so that they were kind of cast off and people didn't ask questions about this. And yet here we are, and we still don't even have all these documents released and people know what happened in a lot of ways, maybe not exactly, but they have an idea

of what may have been the greater move here. And yet we still technically don't have answers 60 years later. Blows my mind. Well, yeah. And the idea you use the term pejorative a few moments ago. And yeah, I mean, they want to label somebody as a nut job. And that's been going on for years and years. And automatically, the intent, obviously, is to shut people up, you know, because they're going to drag you off to the loony bin or discredit you or even worse, ruin your life in some way. And so, yeah, that's the way that for many people, I think, that were involved in all of this is kind of how it was framed out. But, you know, President Kennedy, when we begin to discuss or think about how his remains were treated, more consideration is given in the death of a prisoner. I was going to say a crackhead.

Yeah, then was given to the president of the United States. Because, yeah, he was a father to his children. He was a husband to his wife. But he was our president. He was our president, elected by the people. And the fact that, and there's so many examples of how dismissive the people in charge were relative to the remains. And, you know, and let me kind of back up back to this idea of a prisoner. Let's just say, for instance, if someone dies in custody, and I've participated in a number of autopsies involving in-custody deaths, I've actually participated in the

autopsy of individuals that have have a known cause of death is so extensive, everything ranging from full body x-rays to a dissection that if I went into it right now, I don't think that most people would believe that we do this in the morgue, where you're not just opening the body. Well, first off, you're not just doing an external examination on the body and photographing the body very thoroughly. But you're also doing not just an internal examination anteriorly, which means opening the chest and opening the head. You literally flip the person over and you open their back. You cut down the backs of their arms. You open up the palms of their hands. You cut down the

backs of their legs. Do you know, do you even dissect the soles of their feet? And that's to see if they've been injured in any way at the hands of those individuals that are in charge. How do they put this back together? Generally, you don't. You allow the mortician to do it. But that's something that is common practice for a prisoner. But yet, the Kennedy autopsy was not even a complete autopsy. No. It was what's referred to as a limited dissection, which in and of itself is striking because it is at its root. John F. Kennedy's death was a homicide. When you distill it down, it's as basic as it gets.

We've got five manners of death, homicide, suicide, accidental, natural, and undetermined. You don't have a sixth choice. It's a homicide. That's simply what it was. And up until, I don't know, I guess it was a year, two years after the president was assassinated, was murdered in public. There was no law in the books that made it illegal to kill a president. What?

Yeah, at the federal level. And so Congress enacted a law, I think it was in 65. But hold on. Someone murdering another human being, because regardless of his title, he's an American citizen. There was not something that went specifically to the president of the United States occupying that spot at the federal level. That didn't happen until 1965. That's why it's so important to understand contextually what happened in Dallas, Texas that day. This was a homicide of an individual who occupied the space within Dallas County, Texas, in the city of Dallas. It was a

homicide. I don't know how many other homicides they had that week, but I tell you this, if they had, they would have been taken to the morgue. They would have been taken to the autopsy suite. And a truly board-certified forensic pathologist would have done their autopsy, and his name was Dr. Earl Rose. And he would have done that autopsy. Highly qualified, highly respected, but not in the case of Kennedy. Was he the guy who on, and this has been shown in movies and stuff, I believe this was actually something that happened, who was like, you can't take

that body. State of Texas law says it must remain here. And they're like, fuck you. And they took the body on the plane. That was him? Yeah. And I'll give you one better than that. Okay. Dr. Rose was officed just outside the trauma room.

Oh, so he's like there when his body. At Parkland. Oh, my God. He had an office there. And it's fascinating. He's actually a pretty fascinating character. He was the first person that truly was a medical examiner for Dallas. He had kind of come in and established himself in that role, which is fascinating to me that he would be present. He was officed there or had a space there.

And so when everything happened, he he was actually pronounced dead, he being our president, you know, Dr. Rose was Johnny on the spot. He understood the complexity of this case because he's a forensic pathologist. This is bread and butter. This is what he has been trained to do, Julian. And he's physically there. Just consider this for a moment, all right, if you will. There is no, I can't think of any major hospital in the United States right now, I might be wrong, where you have a representative of your local medical legal community that is actually officed just outside of the primary trauma center for that metropolitan area. I mean, where they're physically in the structure. He's there.

Yeah, that's crazy. He's right there. And that's why I think that when he saw what was happening, his mind is going into overdrive at this point in time because it's not just that the body is being touched by all of these people that have no business putting their hands on the remains, but he's thinking about considerations like clothing. Where's the clothing? What did they do to the clothing? Was the clothing actually, did they take a great big pair of scissors and run down the trousers and cut the jacket off and cut the shirt off? And did they just take it and kind of bundle it up or wad it up and throw it in the trash

bin right there? Because he's thinking about that. He knows that there's potential for evidence to be contained in all of that. And he's seeing this being played out before him. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that he comes across, or what people have said, kind of a mild-mannered guy. He's from the upper Midwest. I think he's actually from Iowa originally.

But imagine this. You're witnessing all of this. This is what you do for a living. And you have the president's body who, at that moment in time, as cold as it sounds, is the biggest piece of evidence you have in this homicide case. It's literally about to be wheeled out of the door to be removed from your control. And you're the one. He's thinking, well, I've got to sign this death certificate because it would fall to him.

This is a homicide. This is not something that the president's personal physician would sign, even though he did sign one, which is one of the biggest loads of garbage in this whole thing. They had two death certificates that were generated. This falls to the medical legal authority to actually render a death certificate and sign it after an examination has been facilitated. And just at a basic bureaucratic standpoint, a health department will not process a death certificate that is signed by a private physician that is trauma related okay so i don't care if you've been in the hospital for and this is the way it works now if you've been in the hospital for um i don't know for a gunshot wound

and you've been in a coma for however many months and you die, that's still a coroner case. It doesn't matter. And in this sense, this is an acute event that you're talking about here. This just happened. You can still smell the blood in the treatment room, but yet here the body is going down the hallway. I understand why he would want to try to stop them. But from what has been stated over the years, I've heard people say everything from he was shouted at to he was pushed against the wall with their hands on their weapons. I don't know about you. I know that you've really interviewed some pretty intense people over the years, special operations people. I think that even for them in this situation, if you're faced with the full fury of law enforcement authorities, specifically the Secret Service, are you going to be big enough to stand up to them and say, no, we're talking about a physician. This guy is like a scientist. And he said that he finally just let them go because he didn't want to create any more of

a disturbance. I guess maybe he thought, well, maybe the DA is going to hop in here. They got this under control. Yeah. They're going to interdict this thing. But the next thing you know, they're off to Love Field. And they're flying out, man. Heading out. So when you, here's a good question to ask. When you go to, you laid out what would happen if you got a prisoner's body or something, but let's paint a homicide.

Yeah, sure. Something similar. Because you work directly in the coroner's office with the coroner in the autopsy room, doing these with them, and you were at the scene before. Right. So you get to the scene of the crime. The body is there. It hasn't been touched. It's got the chalk around it, you know, the detectives or whatever.

In this case, he was taken in the hospital. So let's stay with the crime scene one, though. You get to the scene of the crime. What are all the steps that happen before that body is in the coroner's hands in the autopsy room? Are you talking about in a general sense or are you talking about in the JFK sense? In a general sense. In a general sense, first off, if you're talking about the scene and the scene alone, the scene is completely locked down and secured. And there is a barrier that's put up.

Either it is a literal barrier or it's tape. You're going to post security around the perimeter of it once you've established where this thing is. And it's locked down for as long as I, by God, want it locked down. Who's responsible for when they finally do take it, physically putting the body into the body bag? Yeah, that's going to be either the ME or the coroner representative. And yeah, and I've worked in both systems.

So in many states, I think that some people don't have an awareness of this. If there is a dead body at the scene, and it's going to vary from state to state, but I've trained coroners all over the United States. If there is a deceased at the scene, the coroner is actually in control of the scene. Now, you don't make a big deal out of it because you don't want to go toe-to-toe with the cops over anything. You try to get along because you're with people, you're with these people all the time. But most of the time, the police will say to the coroner or the medical examiner, have you got everything you need at this point, doc? Do you have everything under control?

And it's at that point in time that you'll come to an agreement as to whether or not the body is going to be removed from the scene at that moment in time. And you have to take very specific steps in order to facilitate that. For one, you don't want to bespoil anything that's laying about the scene. Remove it from the context of the scene if there's more to be processed there. So it's at that point in time that you take control of the body. The body is then removed from the scene and it's taken back to whatever the medical legal facility is, whether it's at a local funeral home, which in rural areas, that's what happens because sometimes funeral directors are the local coroner. I know. Exactly right. Or if you're talking about in the case of Jersey.

We got a few of those. No. Here you have a medical examiner system. That's what I meant. We got a few of those. You've got you have a medical examiner system. That's what I meant, we got a few of those. You've got a state medical examiner's office, and that's where the body would go. And you have all of the processing that's going to take place with that body. And many times the police will come to the morgue and aid in the processing of that body, photography for their purposes, collection of certain types of evidence, whether it's trace evidence or perhaps a projectile that's been removed from the body.

So you have this kind of coexistence with law enforcement and medical legal. We try to get along as best we can. And we've updated that, obviously, since this has happened back in the early 60s. But I would imagine, the way I've understood in the past, correct me if I'm wrong, the system of checks and balances there was already well in place for your regular homicide back then. Yes, it was. And I have very little patience with people that, specifically to JFK, and I've heard other people say this, I have very little patience with them when they say things, well, they weren't as sophisticated as we are now relative. Let me tell you something about sophistication. This is the same generation that was five years away from putting a man on the moon,

or five, six, five years away from putting a man on the moon. Mm-hmm. Or five, six. Yeah, yeah, five years. Five years away from putting a man on the moon. Let me repeat that. So the leader of the free world is murdered in daylight like this, and you can't handle the situation any better than it has been handled. It was a complete and total failure. You've only got a few choices here. Either you're incompetent, you don't care, or there's something more sinister going on.

And so that's the way I've kind of always viewed this because we wouldn't, I got to tell you, if remains were treated like the president's remains were treated, put it in today's context, you'd be out in your ear. You'd be on the unemployment line. As a matter of fact, some people might be questioned by the district attorney because it almost gets over into a criminal act. It all depends on if there's intent there to mask something or to try to cover something up. And there are cases that happen like that, I'm not going to say every day, but with some frequency. But you have these little demonstrations throughout this entire

timeline with the president's body and how the remains were treated, how they were examined, that it was just a mass failure all the way along. So you have to ask yourself that question. Was everybody involved in this set of circumstances? Many people will say, let's look at it this way. Many people will say, and I think that it's more salacious to say this, was everybody in on the conspiracy? I like to ask, was everybody in on the stupidity? Because that's what it comes down to, because you have a lot of ignorance going on here.

And maybe ignorance isn't the right word, because that implies you haven't been taught. These people have been taught, and they have an understanding, at least at a base level, that evidence has value, that bodies have value, that we've got to go out and secure the scene. But you've got people running around like it's, I don't know, Keystone Cops. It's nonsense. Well, can we start with that timeline I alluded to a little bit ago? Yeah, sure. Because you have it written down minute to minute. you had been working with a major network on investigating the scene for a big special on the 60th anniversary,

which you did. You did the whole thing. We're not going to say what network, and we're not going to say what other people were involved. But due to some other people outside of the network, it looks like that is not going to air. So we are essentially getting the exclusive here today on the work you did with this. I'm very happy to see that. But for people out there who – I mean, everyone's familiar with the case, obviously. But there's all kinds of moving details in this.

For people out there, can we just bring this scene to life right now and then we'll start dissecting and go through what you found? Yeah, sure. So you're asking me for a dramatic reading? Whatever floats your boat. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, let's kind of start off with – we're not going to go back as far as arriving at Love Field and all these sorts of things. But let's just go through kind of the sequencing when we begin to think about, you know, November 22nd, 1963. And it literally picks up at about 1229 p.m.

That's when they believe the first shot was fired. And then at 1230 p.m., and this is per the record, that the second and third shots were fired. At 1235 p.m., the presidential limo arrives at the hospital, which was Parkland, and JFK is brought into the trauma room. Quick question on that. I mean, he had his head blown off on TV. Yet they always say, like, he wasn't declared dead for – you're going to get to that in the timeline. No, no, no. Please go ahead.

But how did – wasn't he dead in the car? Yeah, I was having this discussion with my – actually my wife the other day. She was saying, was it the president? The president was gone when they can at heroic measures. You're talking about the president of the United States. And listen, the people at Parkland that were in that trauma center, they were vested. They wanted him to live. Yeah.

And they had not lost hope. There was nothing sinister about the actions that they took. They did what you would expect at that particular time. Um, any, any trauma room to do as a matter of fact, they went so far as to, and this, you know, this goes to a, uh, another topic here. They, you know, Parkland's a teaching hospital. Many people forget that. So it's, you've got residents that are there and you've got these really esteemed professorial types that are there that are teaching young doctors. So when the president arrived there,

you know, the balloon goes up unit wide at this place. So if they need. And this is at 1235. Yeah. Yeah. So he he rolled through the door at 1235. But in that time, between the time he arrived and the time he was pronounced dead, there were a number of people that kind of materialized in the treatment area. And I think it's important to understand that you had neurosurgeons that were there that had come down, you know, because they're thinking about, are we, you know, are we going to get him?

Is there any way we're going to be able to save him? Does he have like some kind of agonal respiration where his chest is rising and falling? We think about the primal brain controlling our ability to respire and our heart beating. Was he doing that unassisted? If there's a chance, we've got to get a neurosurgical consult. So they want these people in there as well. So you've got to get a neuro consult, a neurosurgical consult. So they want these people in there as well. So you've got eyes on. You've got the emergency room physicians. You've got the nursing staff that's working feverishly. They're probably doing chest compressions.

They're running what's called a code. They're trying to bring him back. And then you have these other medical professionals that are in there, and they're seeing things you're talking about neurosurgeons that are there in that environment they're seeing anatomical landmarks they're seeing his exposed brain according to many of them all the while and they're processing this and for that, they take a snapshot in their brain, in their mind's eye, they take a snapshot of what they're seeing. Because for them, in this moment in time,

it's not that, oh my God, this is the President of the United States. It's, how do I break this down professionally? And what's the plan of attack here to try to salvage this man's life? Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah, I think that for a lot of these folks that, you know, they have the ability to kind of disconnect on one level. I mean, once you've got blood on you at that point in time, I think, and, you know, you're doing the examination and people are working feverishly, it's a patient at that point in time. He's a patient at that point in time. And now the person running the code would probably have an awareness. They would know that it's the president, but the code didn't last a long time. You know, it was, let's see, he was actually pronounced dead. He

rolled through the door at 335. 1235? I'm sorry, at 1235. And he was pronounced dead at 1235. 1235? I'm sorry, 1235. And he was pronounced dead at 1257. So that's not a lot of elapsed time. You know, the ride where they go under the viaduct and they've got their foot on the floor, the Secret Service limo driver. Straight shot there. They roll right into the ambulance bay. They pull in, you know, they pull directly in like you're parking your car if no one's ever seen the images there. And that's another thing I'd have to make a comment on here.

But, yeah. Also, I'm just remembering, you have Governor Connolly in the car too, who's been hit with bullets. He has been hit. So they justnolly in the car too, who's been hit with bullets. He has been hit. So they just leave him in the car for a minute? No, no. They would have extricated him as well. He's going to go to a separate trauma room because he's – look.

He's got like the janitor in there working on him? No, he's the governor. And he has got significant injuries that are potentially life-threatening. You know, he's blown out one of his ribs as a result of this. It's clipped a lung at this point in time. Magic bullet did it. Yeah, and we'll get into that soon. But, yeah, I mean, this man's, you know, and he's not a young guy. And so the older you get, obviously, the more trauma you sustain,

there's a higher probability, you know, that you're going to, you know, take the leap off the mortal coil here. So they're having to do heroics with him not to the same level as somebody with an open gunshot wound to the head. But still, they would have thrown resources at him. And as you can imagine, it's totally chaos, you know, and it's very chaotic. And I've often wondered about this with Governor Conley. Obviously, the Secret Service is there protecting the president, okay?

And I've often wondered what type of security did Governor Conley have at that moment in time? Did he have Texas Rangers that took care of him? Or was it state police? Where were they? Were they around this area? And my mind always goes to the corner of the medical examiner because I'm thinking when this is going on with Dr. Rose, Earl Rose later on, I'm thinking, were there state police officers there that were part of a team that was assigned to Governor Conley? Or had they said, well, we've got the Secret Service today. You boys go grab a cup of coffee.

We're not going to be in need of your services. And I can't imagine that, but maybe that's what happened. Because I've always thought, why didn't they step in and interdict the situation? Of course, they're focused on the governor's personal security. They probably wouldn't even have had an awareness that people are about to take the president's body to Love Field and they're going to depart as soon as they possibly can. And don't forget this. Vice President Johnson's entourage soon came in as well. He's with Lady Bird. They show up and he's got this, you know, they talk

about his power, you know, that he's kind of flushed at power. He's ash and white, you know, and he's going in there. Because at that moment in time, they've stated that they didn't know what was happening, that people in the immediate circle, they thought that, you know, Johnson might be killed. And it's my understanding they had to remove him through a separate exit in the hospital because they were worried for his personal safety. You're talking about the next president. So they have to get him back to Love Field as well. He was in the room where they were working on him?

I don't know that. I know that he was removed down the hallway at some point in time. And the big thing I've always heard about him specifically was that they were very concerned that some great harm could come to him, and they wanted to prevent that. And they, I think that they wanted to go wheels up as soon as they could at Love Field. Um, which again, you know, I don't know how that necessarily plays into the decision that they made with the president's remains. Oh, we're, well, we're all heading back. So let's take the president's remains with us. Um, which was amazing, uh, to me, um, and a decision that was – I know I'm getting away from the timeline, but I think it's very important to understand this. It's my fault. I'm going to bring it back.

No, no, no. Several questions are kind of asked the first time of Jackie Kennedy at this moment in time. She is saying that she wants his body removed from Dallas. And I know why she would. Okay, I completely understand. All right. She probably wants him to be with her.

She wants to get him out of there, but let's just put it in modern context. If, if this was one of our loved ones and, uh, and I've dealt with a lot of homicides over the years where families don't want us to take bodies, it's a conversation you have to have. Yes. They fail to have that conversation. Either that, or the more sinister thing is, you probably don't want to do this here. We probably want to go ahead and get him back to Washington, ma'am. Oh, okay. You know-

Yeah, like she's going to know the chain of commands at that point, you know? Not only that, but grieving people, particularly when they're in this kind of shocky state, can be more easily manipulated than anybody out there. They're like little lambs. And they're shocked, first off, and many times they don't know what to do. I've actually dealt with families after I've notified them over the years where they go into a state of almost catatonia. You know, you can't get them to respond, you know, like this. So she, you know, she's probably going to be amenable to anything that they want. And, you know, when you see that still image of her when Johnson's being sworn in, she's got that thousand-yard stare, man.

You know, as well she should have. Did you see that movie in 2016, Jackie? I did not. Natalie Portman? No, I did not. Dude, Natalie Portman nailed that. No kidding. I mean, it's about the week – the day and week following his death. And that's just a movie obviously it's a

dramatization but you know when you hear the accounts of what she was like and and exactly what you just said a thousand yard stare and you know like like you're also saying she's in grieving you know this is this is a it's not just the president it's her husband you know like that's natalie portman fucking nailed that i mean it's like scary how good it was. Well, I know that she looked like her. I saw the still images from the movie. She did kind of look like her a little bit. Yeah, she did.

And one other thing about Jackie also from – and this is very cold, but this is reality. You're talking about a homicide investigation. She's an essential witness. A very intimate witness because they've made a lot over what

some of the last words that were exchanged with the president prior to him being shot. And I think that it came from the First Lady of Texas and she made some kind of remark. You can't say they don't love you here in Dallas or whatever it was in Texas or whatever that remark was. And it was a second later and the world explodes. What was the conversation between him and his wife like. And going back to if we were working this as a homicide, as traumatized as people are that go through this, that are eyewitnesses to events,

guess what? I'd be taking a statement from his wife. Anybody would. You would want to separate her out. I know this is a tough time, but did he say anything to you prior to this? Um, you know, she's, she's, I think that, you know, people, you know, she, she had views on things. She's not some stepper wife that's there. You know, she is actually a real person that had real feelings about her husband. They would have had conversations that were out of earshot had he said anything to you at that point in time. And I'm not interested in what the Secret Service or the FBI's interpretation of that is. I want to know what would a Dallas homicide detective

have elicited from her at that moment, Tom, if they were able to interview her specifically while it was fresh, not after her memory begins to get layered over a period of time. Again, going back to this idea that if this was appropriately worked from Jump Street, it might have a different outcome. Yeah, I have so many questions on that. We're going to come back to it, though, because my dumb ass keeps on interrupting you with questions with this timeline.

But I want to go through the timeline because, people, we we are going to come back we're going to break down the actual scene later yeah we're going to go through the magic bullet bullshit and all that you also are a new orleans kid yeah and this case has central tenants in new orleans you know a lot about that so we're going to we're going to get through a lot today people but i just want to make sure you get through this we left off at 12 50 said he. He got there at 12.35. He was shot at 12.29, first shot. Second shot, 12.30. Departs down the highway by 12.35. He's at the hospital. They triage him. They triage Governor Connolly somewhere in there, probably with the janitor, like I said. And then 12 1257, he's declared dead in the room. Now what?

Yeah. So if you jump ahead just under an hour after the president is pronounced dead, Lee Harvey Oswald is found in the theater. That was like at 1.40 p.m. So he's found in the theater watching a movie, and there's a tussle with him. He's got a weapon on him. He pulls the weapon out, and the police begin to beat his ass there in the theater seats.

And he bears evidence of that when you see those images of him back at the – and he makes some comments, some offhanded comment. Yeah, a police officer did this to me, you know. A little Texas cop, a little school beat down there, huh? Well, you have to understand what they were looking for him for. It wasn't necessarily, it had nothing to do with the president at that moment in time. He was alleged to have killed one of their own. That's right. Yeah. So he was, you know, Officer Tibbetts.

We'll look it up. Yeah. Go ahead. You know, had been shot down after he sees a guy that's fitting the suspect's description on the side of the road in this kind of residential area. And Lee Harvey Oswald at that moment in time produces this pistol. It was a revolver,.38 caliber revolver. And he winds up just riddling the police officer with bullets, and then he bolts after that period of time.

Now, the description had gone out, and if I'm not mistaken, it was a neighbor that had witnessed this they wind up calling in to say that you've got a police officer that's down out here and so that's when the the search starts for lee rv oswald real quick to all my discord people out there the julian dory discord is officially live i put the link down in the description below so go hit that join the community and say what's up there's all kinds of features in there and I look forward to hearing from you guys. Let's get it popping. And when you look at Oliver Stone's investigations of this over the years, and I believe if I'm remembering correctly, he even had some sort of portrayal

of this in the movie JFK from 91. But some of the guys who have worked with him as well, if I'm remembering this correctly as well, there is an argument there that because of the line of shot of the quote-unquote witnesses of who saw oswald shoot the cop that it may not have been oswald doing that we do yeah i've heard that had impersonators of him but yeah i've heard i've heard that as well you know and i think that that even goes back to the appearance of, I think people talk about the appearance of Oswald, who's supposed to be Oswald in Mexico City at the consulate down there. So you've had those types of things that have been running wild all of these years as well. I think in Stone's movie, if I'm not mistaken, I think he actually portrays Oswald as shooting the officer. He's got the character. He's played by Gary Oldman.

And there's points of view. There's perspectives on everything that you have. If you've got somebody sitting on the front porch that's doing something, maybe somebody that's looking out the window, you don't know what their accounts are going to be based upon everything from a screen in between them, a closed window, their ability to see. Are they wearing glasses or not wearing glasses? Are they drinking? There's any number of things, daylight, lighting, those sorts of things. And are they scared? You know, if you hear gunshots, I'm being older now. I'm not going to stick my head out of the window.

I'm diving for cover. I value my life too much at this point in time. But, you know, when you're peeping over, you know, are you seeing, what exactly are you seeing? Do you actually get a good look at this person? So, yeah, yeah, you know, when you're peeping over, you know, are you seeing, what exactly are you seeing? Do you actually get a good look at this person? So, yeah, yeah, you know, so you've got this officer that is bleeding out, that's dead in the street right there. And they're looking for this guy. Well, he's seen running into the theater. He sits down and, you know, call goes out.

They found him there. And that's when, you know, call goes out. They found him there. And that's when, you know, they rush in, they grab him. 1240. Yeah. No, we're at 140 at this point in time. Yeah, 140. I'm sorry. He died at 1257.

That's right. At 2 p.m. At 2 p.m. Mark this time. That's when the argument occurs over the body in the emergency room. So the president has been pronounced dead at 1257. Now, you would have, after the pronouncement, last rites would have been administered. There was a priest that showed up to do last rites.

Do we know who that priest was? Not off the top of my head. Are you sure he was a priest that showed up to do last rites. President's wife. Do we know who that priest was? Not off the top of my head. Are you sure he was a priest? I kind of ask these. I have no idea. Make me stop. I'm sorry. Keep going.

I don't know. Can we get the diocese on the phone and have them get back to the records? I can't help myself. But yeah, I mean, you can't, you know, no stone can remain unturned. So the priest is administering last rites. You have an opportunity for whoever in the entourage is going to take a look at the body. Now, did Jackie go in and view his body at that moment in time? Did she see his body?

Did she spend time with the body at that moment in time? That's kind of a common practice and was a common practice back then. I've been in a position where when we have a complicated homicide, and again, this is very cold, we don't allow families anywhere near the body after that. Even after pronouncement, we try to get the body out of the facility as soon as possible because the body is your central point of evidence at that point in time. So how much time was she allowed to spend in there? Did she spend time there with the body? So that brings us all the way up to 2 p.m.

They've got the president's body on a gurney at this point in time, and they want to get the body out of the door. I think they'd already casketed the body as well in one of these transportation caskets. So that would have been acquired, and that's like – it looks almost like a steel casket or almost like aircraft aluminum that these things are in. They used them for the troops for years and years. I think that they still do. So his body would have been casketed. It would have been removed from that location and taken to Love Field.

Body arrives. There's an argument, and this is kind of interesting. There's an argument over the body that occurs at 2 p.m. So at 2.07, the body leaves the hospital. It arrives at Love Field at 2.38. That's the air hangar. Yeah, yeah. And still to this day, that's the main airport in Dallas.

All right, Love Field. What time did it arrive again, you said? Body is – well, it doesn't say precisely when the body arrives, but the body is being loaded at 238. So this is happening quick. 31 minutes between leaving and loading. Yeah. And, you know, this would give you the impression that you have somebody that is making very specific decisions at this moment in time, that everything is being coordinated along the way. They want to get his body loaded up and get out of there immediately. Oh, and by the way, you got to get President Johnson, his entourage on there. And you also have to find this judge that's going to swear him in on the plane.

And let's don't forget the first lady. She's got to be on there with her staff. So everybody's being quickly kind of corralled and placed onto the airplane at this point in time. And they're going wheels up as soon as they can. And while they're in the air, Lee Harvey Oswald is actually going through his first interrogation. That's at three. So he's three on the dot, three on the dot. Yeah.

And he's, he has been found at one 40. So they've hooked him up already. They drug him out of the theater. And there's a couple of famous images that they captured of him being brought out of the theater. He's drug along, he's placed into a squad, and they escort him down to the jail at this point in time. And when three o'clock rolls around, they're interrogating him at that point in time. And it's also at this point in time where they do the first

paraffin test on Lee Harvey Oswald. The first what? Paraffin test. This is a test that used to be administered using warm wax on the hands to try to do, to lift for gunshot residue. And they actually did paraffin test on his face as well. So it's an application of warm wax. It's taken and placed on there and any kind of particulate matter that is associated with any of the products of gunshot residue. We've got barium, antimony and lead. That's what you're looking for. It's going to be taken, and that's going to be tested. They're going to take it off of his face.

Well, why? Well, do they already know or do they suspect, and I think that they did, that he was the shooter? Not of the officer, but he's the shooter in uh the school book depository well why would you do his face well because he's leaning into the rifle like this and as he engages you're going to have particulate gunshot residue that's going to place itself on his face at that moment in time. So that's when that first occurs. And it's claimed that that test came back positive. Claimed?

Yeah, that's what they've said. We'll come back to that. 4.30 p.m., there's this infamous presser that's given with this Dr. McClelland who states, the cause of death was due to a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound to the left temple. Now, let's just think about that just for a second. When we began to think about what exactly a gunshot wound to the left temple means, he's identifying this as a point of injury or insult at that point in time to the left temple. Why does he make that statement at that moment in time?

I don't know. But that's what he is putting forth to everybody. And that's the first news that anybody really hears about specific anatomical location. I guess it's Eastern time now. We're going to 6 p.m. Air Force One arrives in Maryland. So they've touched down at Andrews at this point in time. And they're going to head to the hospital with a casket. Where was the casket during the flight? It was in the hold down below. It was down below. Yeah. And there was a Secret Service agent with the body, from what I understand. It's a pressurized area.

There was somebody down there with the body. Do we know who that was? It was one of the Secret Service agents. I don't know this person's name off the top of my head. Interesting. Okay. So this is also critical and something that I think that people need to be made aware of. And it's a critical factor that plays into this that we're going to have to come back to when when they go to Bethesda Bethesda is a naval hospital it is claimed that the president's wife wanted to go to Bethesda a naval hospital because he was a Navy man.

He was PT boat captain. He had been in the Navy. Navy had claimed him as their own. He had a lot of pride in that, so that's where she wanted to go. The problem arises here with the fact of who is on staff at Bethesda. And you're looking at two forensic, rephrasing, you're looking at two hospital pathologists that are at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and they come into play big time in this particular case because they have no experience with forensic autopsies, period.

They've never done a single one in their entire existence. They're hospital pathologists. And hospital pathologists are great if you need to get a gangrenous leg examined that's been amputated. Take a look at a placenta after birth, a tumor that needs to be examined, or if you need your labs checked out because they manage the laboratory as well. But they're not forensic scientists. They have not been trained in this area. But that's where the president's remains go.

And it was her choice to do this where again an opportunity has been missed because remember back in Dallas who do we have there that was in the trauma center that was office there well that's Dr. Rose he was there forensic pathologist that's the first one that they bypassed. So here they go. They're going to Bethesda Naval Medical Center, and the president's body is going to be taken there. It's offloaded, kept there, and it's going to fall to these two pathologists to do the autopsy. And it's essential to understand this. These two individuals are active duty members of U.S. military, and they fall under the direct chain of command of those that are in authority relative to particularly those that are associated with the president,

the president's personal physician, who is also a naval doctor. And he's going to be in the autopsy room with the president, which is an interesting little fact along the road here. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.

So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart.0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Back to 4.30 p.m., we've got McClelland making this comment about the left temple. Air Force One has arrived in Maryland. They go to the hospital. At six. At six. Then at seven, Jackie and RFK

enter Bethesda Naval Hospital. RFK signs an order for the president's autopsy, and the autopsy is performed. Now, let me be very specific. The autopsy starts at about 730 or 735, okay, that evening. So first shots were fired at 1229. You've already got him rolling into the autopsy suite at 7 p.m. Eastern where the autopsy is going to be performed, and that's a pretty quick turnaround. What's the disadvantage there? I don't, well, what's the disadvantage is that with moving at such a quick rate, you are not, or maybe there was not, maybe there was not an interest, I don't know, in bringing all of available resources at your disposal to bear

and to wait, to have every person that you could there in that location to assist with the assessment. And I'm not talking about military types. There are a dime a dozen, particularly around D.C. They're everywhere, and everybody wants to be in charge. What I'm talking about are board-certified forensic pathologists. You had Dr. Russell Fisher that was down the road in Baltimore, highly respected, renowned forensic pathologist right down the road. You had Dr. Werner Spitz that was in Detroit, hour away by plane. He could have been there. You had Dr. Milton Halpern from Chief Medical Examiner's Office of City of New York that was roughly an hour away, if that, from Bethesda that could have been brought in just at a snap of a finger.

These were some of the most eminent forensic pathology scholars in the world. These practitioners had no peer. But yet, it's at that moment in time that they decided to trust these two hospital pathologists with arguably the biggest crime that has ever been committed in U.S. history. To do the examination of the central piece of evidence, the body of the president of the United States. They were going to be tasked with this. Was RFK aware of the fact that it was them doing this and their lack of qualifications? I don't know what level of awareness he would have had of, okay, I'll put it to you this way. I don't know what level of awareness that Robert F. Kennedy would have had of board certifications and all that sort of thing as it applies to forensic pathology.

Forensic pathology as a practice where it was recognized board certified practice, the first one, I think, and I'm probably going to misspeak this, had occurred, the first person was certified like in the late 50s or maybe 1960. So it was in its infancy. But again, you had people like Werner Spitz. You had people like Milton Halpern. And he's considered to be, he's considered to be, if we had, okay, in forensic pathology, if we had a Mount Rushmore, his face would be on it. And he's right up the road. And Russell Fisher, okay, in forensic pathology, if we had a Mount Rushmore, his face would be on it. And he's right up the road.

And Russell Fisher, too, who actually, along with Werner Spitz, wrote the definitive text in forensic pathology. Spitz and Fisher. I've referenced it my last time I was here. They were within reach. They could have been there. Because these guys, imagine how many homicides come through NYC. Imagine how many homicides come through Baltimore. How many come through Detroit, Chicago, all of these other places where it is daily,

every single day where these people are doing assessments on gunshot wounds. I understand that it's chaotic, obviously. Everyone's in shock. The fucking president just got marked on TV. But, like, where's the chief of staff? Where's the secretary in the office? Where's, like, there are so many people, even back then, obviously, around the United States president every day who are – they're all devastated. We're all devastated when this is happening.

But there's not someone who can be like, all right, asking the question, who's also some insane incompetence that obviously sinister people didn't fully account for and they got lucky with. And this seems to be one of them, one of the many. Well, if you like that one, let me give you another one. All right. Go ahead. If I could make you any more glum over this whole thing. Right down the road at Walter Reed Hospital, it's an army hospital. Okay.

Indwell is what's referred to as the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Okay. Says it all in the name, doesn't it? And it is the place from which trauma, as a matter of fact, wound ballistics have been studied there for years and years. And there's a character that

plays into all of this that is essential in understanding this narrative. Because by virtue of the fact that they allowed the Kennedy family in this traumatized state to make the decision that they were going to go to Bethesda, they bypassed Walter Reed. If they'd gone to Walter Reed, they would have had not only the full depth and breadth of forensic knowledge there, as it applies just simply to the examination of firearms trauma, they would have had a board-certified forensic pathologist right there as well with all of the assets of the federal government at their disposal.

And for whatever reason, they decided not to do this. But they had some awareness that they were in over their heads. What makes you say that? Well, after they had started the autopsy, let me back up. The two doctors at Bethesda whose names were Humes and Boswell, they were U.S. Navy folks, okay? Humes is a ranking officer. He's in charge of the autopsy.

Again, these are hospital pathologists. Need to get a tumor examined? He's your man. There is another gentleman who is actually located at AFIP. His last name is Fink all right he's a physician he is an imminent forensic pathologist now granted he has not friends he has not practiced forensic pathology in two years but he is a forensic pathologist. He's at AFIP. All right. They call him prior to starting the autopsy, and they say, we need you to get down here to assist us with,

I'm sure he's already heard about it. You know, it's on the news. It's in all the papers. Yeah, we got a random murder today. Yeah. We need you to get over here. So he's got to come up from Walter Reed and get to Bethesda. He's aware. He transports up there. But before he gets there only have they already started the autopsy, they've removed the president's brain at this point in time before Fink ever walks through the door. And I can imagine, you know, this is just me.

It's like, well, what the hell did you call me for? You know, you realize this is my area of expertise. Well, his true area of expertise is the study of wound ballistics. You know, all of these studies that were done where they were firing weapons into animals that the Army did, you know, because they're trying to judge the effectiveness of certain small arms that they might be using. Also trying to understand injuries that are occurring on the battlefield. And the Army has a long history of studying their weapons to try to understand their effective nature. And there has to be somebody that does this, okay? And he's in that sphere, okay? But he's better than the tumor guy, okay, or the tumor guys. He understands something about forensic pathology. He's board certified.

And he sure as hell understands gunshot pathology. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that the critical injury that the president has sustained is to his head. But yet you can't hold off long enough to wait until the guy that knows what's going on shows up in order to assist. And not just assist, but just to examine, to get put in there to sense. The room they were in, though, there's a ton of people in that room. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard estimates. I heard one estimate. I don't know that this is valid. I've heard one estimate up to 38. Then I've heard 33. Then I've heard 28. And the number varies, depending upon, you know, but there were a copious number of people that were in this place. And that tells me having worked with forensic pathologists for,

you know, for a goodly portion of my adult life, the one thing that I know, and you will never convince me otherwise, is that the forensic pathologist, if you were in the autopsy suite, it is their world. It is nobody else's.

I've actually worked with a forensic pathologist that was covered in blood, took his surgical gloves off, and was about to beat a police officer's ass in the autopsy suite. Love that. Good guy. Well, because he was being disrespected by the police officer that was there, and the cop threatened this physician. Well, it's his environment. He's making the decisions here. And that's generally how they're viewed.

But not in this case. You had all manner of military officials that were there. Lord only knows who else may have been occupying that space. You had Secret Service. Two FBI agents who became critical later because of what they witnessed and what they saw were there. They were representatives. So you have all of these individuals, and it's kind of in this kind of classic configuration where I think all of us have seen a surgical – what they refer to as a surgical theater where you've got people that are sitting like in a balcony and looking down. Remember the show The Nick? Yeah, yeah. Clive – is it Clive Owen? Is that his name? Yeah, yeah. Clive, is it Clive Owen?

Is that his name? Yeah, it was. I think it was Clive Owen. Actually, I was thinking about the episode of Seinfeld where the junior goes into the body. That's a surgical theater. So anyway, you have this environment, and these are more like, they're set up more like grandstands,

and you've got three rows of these things that are there so that people can watch. And it's meant as a location for students to come in and observe an anatomical dissection so that they can glean. Because, you know, at Bethesda, they've got medical students that are running through various training that are there, and you might have a group. If they have an interesting case, the pathologist will do the autopsy, and they can see what the pathologist is doing, and he might bring over a bit of tissue for them to talk about the anatomical description. These are my findings, this sort of thing, and go back to doing the autopsy.

Not in this case. This is a floor show. You know, you've got – I was wondering if they were serving drinks or something. You know, cigarette gals walking around. Oh, my God. Are they all in there ripping bogues like it's Mad Men? Absolutely. Come on.

During this time. Come on. Yeah, one guy claims – Like ash butts on the fucking president's like open – come on. Yeah. You know, there's one story, I think, in Stone's documentary where he talks about Curtis LeMay was physically there and smoking a cigar. And the autopsy assistant, Humes tells the autopsy assistant, what the hell is that smell? You know, tell them to put that damn thing out. He walks over to Curtis LeMay.

It's a victory cigar. And LeMay blows a smoke in his face. Yeah. So, yeah, that would have been going on. But it's the pathologist's world. And what that tells me is this, is that if this kind of behavior is allowed, then that means the pathologists are not in charge.

And I think that that's the bottom line, that they're not dictating what should take place in this environment. And that's scary because this is, it's not simply an autopsy. It is probably one of the most complicated physical examinations from a forensic standpoint that could take place. Because, first off, you're talking about gunfire that has taken place at a distance. So ranges are going to be indeterminate, which means you're not going to have like a deposition of gunpowder and all those sorts of things where we try to determine, you know, from the muzzle distance from the end of the muzzle to whatever's deposited on clothing or injuries and all that sort of thing. You're not going to have any of that

that's present. So you're really going to have to put your thinking cap on when you're assessing even the slightest injury that may be presenting before you on the president's remains. And to have this kind of distraction at this moment in time, because you can just imagine, just think about the scene at this moment in time, because you've got people talking to one another. You've got people getting up and moving around. There might be people that get up out of the stands, walk over there to look, to see what's happening. You've got, and not to mention the technicians

that are there. You've got photographers that are walking around. You've got a deaner that's there, the autopsy assistant. You've got these two physicians. Then Fink shows up. He's there. So you've got all of these players that are entering onto the stage in this environment. And there's no closed circuit TV? No, none whatsoever. And they want to see because they're there for that reason. They want to see. They want to bear witness to it.

Now, what their motivations are individually, I have no idea. I mean, why would a four-star general need to be present at the president's autopsy. What would be the purpose of that? Curtis LeMay is at the middle. We've talked about this in other podcasts. I had Stuart Wexler in here recently. I have like four theories that I bat around. Just to reiterate, what are those four?

Okay. Pentagon, broadly speaking, anti-Castro, much more localized organized crime that could go to some of the people surrounding an organized crime like Bonanno, and the coup in Dallas scores Annie Lafitte plot. What if it's a mix? That's why this case is so crazy, because it can be. Because the Pentagon had a close relationship with Otto Scorsese, according to Gannis. Specifically, Lemnitzer, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he came up again, like, because obviously, like, he was heavily involved in the Defense Department. He was a high-up military guy, and you look at what his history is with some other things.

You know, this is a guy at the middle of some of the ufo stuff he's in the middle of this kennedy and the historians around the case who look at this and look at it more like danny jones had on john newman who's like probably the most renowned historian at this point on the case in existence and he he said, quite simply, it's a coup d'etat. And LeMay is a guy they look at with this, and the irony of him being in that actual fucking room blowing smoke into people's face with a cigar. I mean, you heard me say it's a victory cigar, potentially.

Yeah, I think a question I would pose to anybody that was there, let me give you some context here. First off, let me ask you this, Julian. Have you ever been to an autopsy? No. Okay. All right. I wasn't planning on it. Well, I've taken several friends to autopsies over the years. As a matter of fact, here's a little aside. One of the first dates I had with my wife, I took her to an autopsy. You told me that on the last podcast. No, you didn't. I'm sorry. You did not tell me that. You told me that it was one of the first dates you told her what you did. You took her to an autopsy? Yeah, I did. Yeah, I sure did. I took her physically, and she's a science person,

so she was fascinated by this. I was assisting in private autopsies at the time, and she wanted to be there. And she found it intriguing. Got her all gowned out and everything. Stick a finger in there? No, no. I think I did allow her to hold a brain and a heart, though, after it had been removed. And she was fascinated by it, truly. However, I took my little brother, I think when he was 18 years old.

He was dying to go to an autopsy. And got him all gowned out, took him to the autopsy. And as soon as I'd opened the head and got the striker saw out, which is that high-pitched sounding saw, and I placed it to the skull, and it makes that high-pitched sound that, eee, and bone dust is flying everywhere. I was working with the forensic pathologist there, and she was from Great Britain. I'll never forget it. And she points with – she's got this long sectioning knife that looks like a big butcher knife in her hand. And she says, oh oh dear, your brother. And he's laying on the floor.

I've had cops pass out at autopsies. You know, all of these sorts of things. And as hilarious as that is, as funny as it is, I have to ask myself this question. How many other autopsies had any of these people ever been to? And why do you select this particular autopsy to attend? Also, this is a homicide case. Again, I bring us back to that.

We have to keep that in focus. This is a homicide. How do you rationalize if you're in control of this environment, allowing anyone that is not directly involved in this case to be there? Because if you're looking to prosecute somebody, this is an investigation. Would you allow this individual to step inside the tape? Would you allow them to go to the crime lab and watch while you're processing evidence there? Would you be there? Would you allow them to watch you lift fiber evidence? But it's also not just that, too. If he's going to have, if that person,

in this case, they're thinking, it's Lee Harvey Oswald, if he's going to have a defense attorney who can point to mistakes that were made in the handling of evidence after the case, they can, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but from other cases I've heard about. Go ahead with your train of thought. I'm going to validate you here. They can pick apart things as tampering with evidence. The evidence that you would glean in a case like this is not worth the gunpowder to blow it to hell. You would be laughed out of a court if any defense attorney worth their salt would be aware of the presence of anybody in this environment other than those that are directly involved in the investigation and keep in mind here, and this is a very sinister thing as well, Lee Harvey Oswald is still alive at this point in time. Yes.

You had two FBI agents that were there. Trust me. They know what the score is. They know that this is a criminal investigation. They're there taking notes. You've also got Dr. Fink that's there. Okay. Dr. Fink is a forensic pathologist. He's got experience with criminal cases.

And so he certainly knows. Now, I don't give much credence, particularly in this. I don't view. I've got to be really careful what I say here. I have a lot of respect for people that are in the Secret Service, but they are not forensics people in the sense that they're going to be processing a crime scene like this that's involving physical evidence regarding a homicide. Now, they're fine investigators, particularly when it comes to currency and those sorts of issues. And they understand basic, basic issues when it comes to chain of custody, preservation of evidence, all those sorts of things. But for me, just the fact that you have all of these people in this autopsy suite while the president United States is being pro sected is might be might might approach I can't say that it's

sacrilegious all right and because this is not a religious matter but it is arguably one of the most disrespectful things that happened all along the way not to mention you're running foul of the law. If you have an understanding of the law, you have an understanding of presentation of evidence in court. Why would you run the risk of contaminating everything that you're trying to glean at this autopsy that is going to be presented in court? Unless. You're in on it.

I don't know. It, it, it baffles the mind as far as I'm concerned. Um, um, you know, you've got a bunch of cigar chompers that are sitting there and doing whatever it is that they do. Um, I don't understand what their purpose is. I mean, what are you going to do? You're going to go out and, uh, have a cup of coffee and, uh, talk about, uh, what the president's heart look like. Is that what you're going to do? Uh, you know, precious memories here, uh, is that, is that, is that the purpose of this? And, uh, it only takes a few people that are sophisticated enough to validate that something happened. Okay? I don't disagree with you.

I'm looking at it in the chaos of the moment. And I think it's totally insane how this was handled by the people who are in charge who are supposed to know this. But it's probably some combination of the historical part of the moment, the shock of the moment, and I mean there's sinister nature as well. But for some of the other people in there, the tragedy porn that comes with that, that you see in your business all the time when you're breaking this stuff down. You and I talked about it on the last podcast. We've talked about it off podcast. You have such a respect and reverence for the fact that when you're talking about these cases, you talking about lives lost and families and people in the middle and that's because you're a good guy and this was your life and like you have an understanding of that and yet unfortunately

sometimes when people get really into this true crime stuff these days it's because they're like fans of the whole thing and they can't fucking help themselves and so in this situation some of those same human elements of like oh my god the president's having an autopsy happening and I can go in. They're not necessarily thinking about the trauma of what they're going to see, I would imagine, in that moment. They're the people who have a chance at a front row seat at something that, you know, their great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandkids are going to talk about. And I think they just walk the fuck in if they're allowed to. I'm just guessing. Don't know.

You're talking about a military facility. Yes. And these people have stars on their shoulders. And here's one more thing that's kind of very sad about this. The ink wasn't even dry on the piece of paper that Robert Kennedy signed while his brother's widow stood at his side. They are probably still in the building as they put the cold steel to President Kennedy's body at that point in time. And here you have this gallery of people that have shown up. And, you know, I know that out of respect, his remains were met upon landing at Andrews.

You know, that's what you do, you know. So what are we going to do now? Are we all going to convoy over to Bethesda? We're going to pile in and go into the autopsy suite. Um, and we're going to sit here with the same expectancy as if you're a father waiting for a child to be born. No, that's an insult to that. No, you're there for either to gloat or because it's a gore show. Maybe the people that are there, like the FBI agents, they have to be there because they're documenting.

They are literally documenting an investigation. They're there documenting history. You've got the photographers that are there snapping images and this sort of thing at the direction of the doctors who don't know what they're doing. It's such an imperfect storm. I mean, it truly is. Yeah, it really is imperfect storms a generous way of putting that i'll say for sure but i think we're almost like at the end of that timeline with this right like so they do the like how long did that take that autopsy

till about midnight 11 midnight so they're working on them for is that a normal length or would you expect longer? If you're dealing with competent people, it all depends on, it's like anything else in life. How do you utilize your time? be spent painstakingly being pain being painstakingly thorough um you know it's these guys didn't even examine the clothing you know which is is a real problem for me because with any kind of forensic autopsy um you have to take the totality of the circumstances and the totality of the evidence that you have. And, you know, let's face it, clothing is a big thing here because that comes into play relative to some of the comments that have been made relative to this defect that's in the president's neck. How does that play in to the tracheostomy site? Also, how does it play in as

far as wound ballistics? There have been some people that have stated that the injury that is on the neck, which again, let me back up because I'm just assuming everybody has all of this stuff contained in their brain like I do. I'll bear that burden for everybody. But you have something that's called shoring, S-H-O-R-E, I-N-G, S-H-O-R-I-N-G, shoring, which is where you have a gunshot wound where something is an element like, for instance, if you're against a wall and you're shot and the bullet passes through your body and attempts to exit rearward, your back is shored against the wall. So it's going to dictate the nature of how that injury is going to appear at autopsy. And one of the things that kind of came out relative to President Kennedy's injury, this tracheostomy site,

is that the collar, as you can see in all the images, you know, where he's arriving in Dallas and that sort of thing. His collar is tightly buttoned. He's wearing a tie. And so it would approximate this area where the projectile may have passed through if this is an exit right here. And it's going to change the appearance of the defect in the neck, the anterior neck. So with that said, because they utilize this site in the trachea, which is our windpipe. Everybody will just kind of put your – go south of your Adam's apple right in this area. Cartilaginous body. They use that as a spot. It was fortuitous for them, for the ER staff.

They use that as a spot to initiate the tracheostomy, where they could put a breathing tube into the president's neck. Folks might say, wow, that's really horrible that they would do that. No, it's not. If you're in life-saving mode, you're not thinking about forensic science at that point in time. If it was me, I hope that they wouldn't be thinking about forensic science. But I've seen this done in any number of steps as well,

in any number, I'm sorry, of other cases. For instance, if you have a gunshot wound in the chest and an individual is shot, let's say, for instance, a round passes through their intercostal space, which is kind of anybody who's ever worked out, and you've pulled an intercostal muscle in your ribs. It's one of the most painful things in the world. It's the rib meat, if you will. Well, I've seen projectile defects that pass through this intercostal space, and they're used for chest tubes.

They just go into the defect, the defect created by the projectile, they cut open, and then they stick a tube into the chest. What does this do? Well, the chest is filling up with blood, so they've got to empty that pleural space out of blood, because if not, the lungs can't, you know, I'm sorry, guys, give me a second. I'm really tired. You need some more coffee? Yeah, I probably do, but let me finish this thought. I'm sorry. The lungs can't inflate properly, so you have to release that pressure. They saw this location in the neck in that way.

They already had a defect. There's no reason to take a scalpel and open up another location. You have to establish an airway to get oxygen into the lungs so that the president at least has some kind of remote chance of surviving. And so this wound was compromised. Now, I've kind of gone a long way around the barn there to make the simple point. It's that kind of analysis that kind of, when you get into that kind of granular area from a forensic science standpoint, where you want to take your time and you want to have as many eyes on these insults to the body that are trained to really assess what's going on as opposed to the other side, where are you taking so much time because you don't know what you're doing and you're trying to figure things out. And this is kind of evidenced where, you know,

we're thinking about injuries to the skull and all these sorts of things where you're looking for internal versus external beveling, which is where if folks that are watching and listening will think about this. If you've ever seen a BB or a rock that passes through a piece of glass. OK. Let's say we take a rock, or let's make it a bit more efficient here. Let's say we fire a BB gun through a window pane. OK.

The exterior of the window where the projectile passes through the pane is going to be very smooth and will only have that hole that passes through the glass. However, on the inside of the glass, you're going to have what's called beveling. So that portion, those bits of glass that populate that area on the other side of the entrance defect, it's going to blow out. And it almost looks like a divot like in golf or something where it's kind of concave. Well, that's one of the ways, particularly with bony structures and forensic pathology,

we try to determine directionality of bullets. So let's just say, for instance, an individual is shot in the back of the head. Well, the round passing, and we're not talking about, let's keep it very simple, we're not talking about where heads actually come apart. It's a close range thing where you got gas injuries. We're just talking about at a distance. You have a round that passes through the back of a skull. Well, the exterior defect, okay, will be, it'll have a circular defect, perhaps maybe slightly irregular. And then the end, that's the external table of the skull, but the interior table of the skull will be blown out. You'll, you'll have this little, uh, uh,

divoted kind of area that they refer to as beveling. That's internal beveling. Now, let's say that this is a through and through gunshot wound. It enters in the back, so smooth on the outside here, right? Passes through the internal table of the skull, bevels internally, and then it passes through the front of the skull. So on the interior surface of the skull, on the anterior aspect, the front, let's say the forehead, it's going to be smooth. Externally, it'll bevel. And so that requires, on the part of the technician, the forensic pathologist,

a certain amount of scientific sophistication to figure that out. Sounds rather simple, but when you're trying to determine the angle at which this came in, you can have all kinds of little unanticipated things that might happen relative to directionality. You have to determine, say, for instance, if in many cases, if a round passed through, say an intermediate target, like a painted glass or another person, it's going to change the configuration of the round itself. The bullet might become deformed. Matter of fact, it might deform upon making initial contact here and the dynamics of the exterior injury or the exiting injury might look very atypical because the bullet has already passed through one bony surface. Bullet becomes fragmented or compromised in some way structurally.

Well, the bullet's deformed. It's going to have kind of a deformed defect on the outside. So there's all of these factors that you have to incorporate into your thinking as a forensic scientist in this very high-pressure environment, particularly when you're talking about the examination of a sitting president of the United States, and now you're doing it in front of an audience. A lot you can miss. A lot, yeah.

It's the devil, I know, it's wrote, devil's in the details. Pardon me. When you see the monumental task that these men were put in the position to undertake, part of you really feels sorry for them. Because let's understand, yeah, these guys are officers in the United States Navy, but they are troops. They have people they answer to. And, yeah, a captain is certainly a high rank in the Navy, somebody to be respected, but you ain't no admiral. You're not a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

You're a colonel. I mean, rephrasing, you're a captain in the Navy, a colonel in the mean, rephrasing, you're a captain in the Navy, colonel in the Army, same rank. And by God, you will do what you're being told to do. And so, you know, you look at them and they become, suddenly they become these kind of sympathetic characters in this whole thing. Depending on who it is, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine, you know, both Humes and Boswell, they get up, I don't know, that morning, that Friday morning. Can you remind people who they are?

Yeah, yeah. So Humes is actually the ranking officer, and he's the hospital pathologist. Boswell is also his colleague and a serving naval officer. He's a pathologist as well. And the point I was going to make, you get up that morning and, you know, you've read your paper, you've had your coffee, you hop in your car, you drive over to Bethesda, you walk in the room. Maybe in the paper you saw that the president was going to be in Dallas that day.

Okay, well, he's everywhere all the time. You don't give it a second thought. What you are thinking about are the surgical samples you're going to have to examine that day. Okay, well, he's everywhere all the time. Give it a second thought. What you are thinking about are the surgical samples you're going to have to examine that day. You're sitting at a microscope. You're dissecting a tumor. You're making adjustments in the laboratory. All these sorts of things that happen in the course of your daily work. Did you wake up that morning thinking that you were going to be doing an autopsy on the President of the United States that night? Probably not. Just imagine.

Yeah. So there's no way that anyone could ever convince me if you were gaming this in any way, if you were gaming this out in any way, that, yeah, we've identified these two guys to be the fall guys in this case. We'll say that they were, you know, just doing what they were told, or we'll say that they were inept. And, you know, let's face it, they were not sufficient to the task that was put in front of them. But I don't know too many people that would have been other than a board-certified forensic pathologist that had a lot of experience in this world.

And another character kind of enters into the stage here. You remember how I talked about at Walter Reed Army Hospital where the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was housed? Well, remember how I said that Dr. Fink had been contacted. He's in charge of wound ballistics for AFIP. Dr. Fink has a boss too. And he's, this guy is the head of AFIP and he is also a forensic pathologist. Well, he served, he was there, he's the first director of this thing, all right? He's there. Now, you talk about chain of command, you talk about all of these little things you have to think about in the military. This guy is Colonel Ed Johnson. He's a physician, forensic pathologist. Where in the hell was he in all of this? Because he's at Walter Reed.

He's the one that makes the calls relative to forensic pathology in the military. AFIP actually, actually stands for armed forces Institute of pathology. So at this organization, you've got representatives from the Navy, the air force and the Army that are there. They're all physicians, and they handle everything pathology-wise worldwide for the U.S. services, and that includes forensic pathology. Now, nowadays, they have what's referred to as the, I'm going to get this wrong,

but it's the Armed Forces Medical Examiner Service or Medical Examiner's Office. It didn't exist then. So the AFIP occupied that space with a section that was called forensic pathology. And they were kind of the de facto medical examiner for the military. And we can't forget our history here either. And this is, I don't know if anybody knows this, but every president that was assassinated, let's think about them, was Lincoln, okay, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy. Well, Lincoln, when his autopsy was performed, the individuals that were involved in that examination did a limited dissection on President Lincoln. It was head only. They didn't open him up completely.

This is in 1865. By the way, if anyone has never been to the Ford Theater, I recommend you go. Were you there that night? No. I might look like it, but I wasn't. Selling peanuts. Fascinating to see Booth's boot, see the weapon, all of that sort of thing. Great trip.

So he was autopsied by military physicians. His examination was conducted by them. Garfield, famously, who lingered. Was that 84? Yeah. 84? Yes. As a matter of fact, it was at a time where Alexander Graham Bell got involved in it and

actually used the first rudimentary form of x-ray in order to try to locate the ball. He was shot at a train station, I think, actually, in Jersey. In Jersey, not Long Branch, 1881, September 19th. Long Branch is probably about 35 if I'm driving from here. No kidding. Chris Olave's driving. It's probably a half hour.

Oh, Lord. Let's not go there. Sorry. Broken-hearted Saints fan here. No kidding. Crystal Lobby's driving. It's probably a half hour. Oh, Lord. Let's not go there. Sorry. Broken-hearted Saints fan here. Anyway. With Garfield, he lingered in tremendous pain. But guess what?

They did his autopsy. It was a complete autopsy. As a matter of fact, I think it's being held by AFIP. I'm not sure. They took out a goodly portion of his spine. They still have it. No shit. Yeah.

Yeah. Isn't that cool? He got buried, like, all wrinkled. Well, you got to remember General Sickles, Dan Sickles. He would famously, he lost his leg in one engagement, and it was amputated. And he kept his leg and donated it to the Smithsonian, I think, or maybe it was the Armed Forces Museum. I'm not sure. And he used to go visit his leg.

So that was kind of an interesting little aside. But then we go to McKinley. And McKinley, again, Garfield, his autopsy was performed by military physicians, Army physicians. McKinley, when he was shot in Buffalo, he suffered greatly as well. But he was also thoroughly autopsied. Now, you're talking about these two presidents, one in the 1880s. McKinley was in 1901, I think. I think that's right.

Some, you know, 62 years after McKinley, President Kennedy is assassinated. In the world, mind you, that we're entering into, space age. Just let this sink in for a second. You've got this homicide case. and according to what I understand, the widow is dictating what kind of autopsy is going to be performed. Yeah, I'd heard, yeah. And there's something in the morgue that we refer to, and not many people have heard this term. It's called tongue to testicles. And what that means is that

when we're going to do an autopsy, obviously we're going to remove the brain. This is for full autopsy. And we do full autopsies in almost every homicide that occurs I can't think of any case that I've been involved in our homicide where we didn't do a full autopsy um that means that everything comes out and literally with a male you go from the tongue to the testicles it all comes out one at a time it all depends there's two different methodologies uh you have what's referred to as on block, which means that you go, when you've seen the classic Y incision that's made into a body that's being autopsied, starts at the apex of both shoulders, goes down, meets in the middle, goes all the way down to the groin.

We open the body up, take out the chest plate, and then you reflect the chest up so that it's literally over the face. You go up along the trachea and you remove what are referred to as the organs of the neck. You know, we've got the trachea. We've got a lot of vasculature that's running through here. All the way up to the tongue, through the floor of the mouth. We take it out. And when you do on block, um, which means in one big section, um, you trim out following down the spine, pulling on the tongue as you go down and you remove all the way down to the, um,

to the sigmoid colon, um, actually to the rectum and rectum, and then press the testicles up, remove them out, and everything is laid out. That's on block. What does that look like if it's all on? Because you know what I picture. I picture like a sack of skin sitting there, nothing else. No. I know it's not like that.

You're talking about the remains of the. Yeah. Yeah, and coarsely, this is very coarse. I actually had a forensic pathologist that used to say this. It really made my skin crawl. And it takes a lot to make my skin crawl. But he would say, as he's walking out the door to go do autopsies, he'd say, let's go make human canoes. What?

Oh, my God. Yeah, I know. But no, the body isn't just a sack. It's a shell. And because, you know, you have the framework of the ribs that are there and it's there, but it's just an open gaping space at this point. Now, that's on block. Many times pathologists will do this so that they can really look at all of the organ systems in their totality. They can kind of flip it over and get a posterior view, see everything, because you've gone right down the spinal column where you can examine, you know, the backside of the aorta and all these other landmarks along the way. Then you have organ-by-organ examinations. And in a complex gunshot wound case like this,

you would do organ by organ. But remember what I said about the widow dictating, only a partial autopsy be done. Julian, this is where we really come to a point where it's very troubling. Because though an examination of the neck was performed, the organs of the neck in JFK's case were not removed. So the trachea remained in place. Now, what do we know about the trachea?

Well, the trachea is the place where the round allegedly exited or or depending on how you look at it, entered. And that was at the beginning of the film when he goes like this with his neck, first shot. It's like this. It's a neuroreflex where you do like this. I've seen people that have actually hung themselves. Remember how I was saying that they videotape themselves sometimes? You'll see hanging victims that will do this, like this.

Their thumbs will extend. You see that. There's a lot of people that videotape themselves doing autoerotic stuff. Anyway, it's a neuromuscular response. This is critical. We're trying to track the wound yeah and then you you compare say for instance one of the big bones of contention in the case is placement of this defect that's in the back the first report came out that you know when you first see those those images from the more, I remember the first time I ever saw the autopsy images, you know, with JFK and, you know, you're, you're looking, you know, the first time you see

this. And I think when I saw them, um, I can't remember if I was already working on the field or not, but I wanted to be able to just like anybody else to be able to appreciate, you know, the gunfire-related stuff, any kind of insults that were there. And there's this little defect that is right at, and the way they placed it was right at T4. T4 is your fourth thoracic vertebra. It is the fourth thoracic vertebra. Now, they had said that it may have clipped the transverse prostheses, which if you look at a vertebral body, it's got these little horns that kind of stick out.

It's on the right side. And then it passes through the president's body. And, of course, you've got this defect in the throat right here where they're saying that it's exiting out of. It's essential that if you're trying to track the wound, one of the ways we track wounds is to follow the path of the projectile and the hemorrhage that's left behind. He was still alive, okay? So he would have hemorrhaged in this area. When that shot comes in. Yeah, in the minutes immediately following that he would have been hemorrhaging through there um or seconds rather real quick just before i forget because i

promise it's like 15 minutes ago chris do you mind real fast can you run down that same place and just grab him a coffee because that's i forgot to ground up those beans that's my bad thanks bro anyway i'm sorry joseph we going to get you your coffee, keep you awake. Oh, no. I apologize. You seem very awake out here. I don't know what you're talking about, but I want to make sure you have it in case you feel like you need it. There's never a bad time for coffee. There's never a bad time for it. A little mud water, too. Mud water is good for you. Oh, boy. Good stuff. Anyway, you were talking about the fourth thoracic vertebrae. Yeah. And so when we're tracking these wounds in the morgue, the forensic pathologists, one of the things they're trying to determine is the angle at which a round comes in. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to

kind of follow the path of what we believe is the kind of cavitated area, the space that the projectile has left behind. And we track that with hemorrhage. Not to mention there's a void there because as the projectile is traveling through the body, it's tearing up tissue along the way. So you can see evidence of that as well. If you have not removed the organs of the neck, okay, there's no way that you can fully appreciate the extent of the trauma, what areas have been impacted.

And there's certainly no way that you can, I don't think, accurately understand the trajectory. And trajectory in this case is essential to trying to understand. You know, when you think about this shot that Oswald had taken from the schoolbook depository. Do you think he fired that shot? I have to ask that. I think that there is a high probability that he might have. For me, it wasn't – having been up there, it seemed like a shot that you would not think that he would, it was not the most advantageous. And a lot of people have made,

made hay over the fact that there was foliage there, you know, obscuring his view, his line of sight. Whereas when they're coming up Elm, I think it's Elm. When they're coming up Elm, he's got,

he's got this view where you've got a you've you've got the static shot for a while and there's there's no change in elevation there you're you know they're kind of remaining constant yes but when you go to the to the plaza by the way the places you know when you're a kid and you you hear about it and you see pictures of it, you think it's going to be a lot bigger. It's not big. To me, it wasn't a big, big, big space. It just wasn't. But what is significant is that if you – where the president's motorcade made the turn, if you were to take a baseball and place it where they made the turn and just let go of it. And that center lane, the ball would just roll.

It's got that much of a pitch on the hill. And so the president is not just moving away, but they're moving, they're declining as they're going. So this is going to require a significant adjustment with arguably a fairly inadequate weapon, I think a very powerful weapon, 6.5 millimeter Carcano round. And it was actually the weapon of choice by the Italian army during World War II. And I think actually going back to, I think Carcano actually was first manufactured, if I'm not mistaken, in the very late 1800s. It's a bolt action, uh, weapon that's, I think it's got an, uh, an eight round, a six round internal magazine, which means you have

to use a stripper clip to get it down in there. Um, so, you know, it was a cheap weapon. Uh, he ordered it, you know, out of the back of a magazine, you know, from this place in Chicago. Um, there's been questions about what he actually ordered and what he actually received. Um, and the reason that's important is the one that he ordered, apparently the barrel is shorter. It's more of a, I'm not going to say it's an assault weapon, you know, like you would think, you know, like an M4 platform or something that our troopers would use, but it's a shorter barreled weapon, the longer barrel. And there was like a, uh, a four, four and a half inch, uh, difference, I think in the length of the barrel when, um, the ballistics, uh, expert, uh, measuredistics expert measured it compared to what he had

originally ordered under the name of Heidel. That's going to facilitate more accuracy, you know, the length of the barrel. Maybe I'm not going to say it would be a sniper weapon, but it might be something that would lend itself to more accuracy. So I think that that's certainly something to be explored. I do know this, is that that Carcano round, the 6.5 millimeter round, it stays, and this is kind of interesting, it stays supersonic out to maybe 1,400 yards. Supersonic? Yeah, it's going above the speed of sound as it travels out to roughly, I think it's 1,400 yards.

308 that was in use at that particular time, say like a 7.62, it loses supersonic velocity at about 900 yards. So this is a very powerful weapon. I mean, if you were... It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about no sugar added neutral refreshingly simple if you were fortunate enough to get rounds on target, it would do a lot of destruction, do a lot of destruction.

So I think that that's certainly something to account for. But do I think that that shot is possible from the window? Yeah, I think that it's certainly possible. It's definitely possible. Yeah, it is. But when you go to the plaza down there and you're taking a look at this whole thing and you're thinking about, you know, I think the Warren report said that there were three shots that were fired. You've got one that goes wild. It strikes a curb, I think, and it injures a bystander. And then you've got the round in the neck where the president famously

raises his arms like this. And then once they emerge from behind that street sign, his head comes apart. And you're thinking about what that looks like and the nature of the movement of the impact and that kind of transfer of that inertial energy at that moment of contact. And you can't, I don't care how hard you try, you can't get past that image of the president as ghastly as it is. You can't get past that image of the president's head coming apart. Completely.

On the right aspect of his head. And it's easily appreciated in the Zapruder film. But also this transfer of energy where you have his head famously, as people have said, back into the left. And he essentially winds up over toward the position of Jackie as he is laying like this. Head is kind of opened up. It almost appears to me that based upon that movement, that shot originated from forward and to the right um and you know i i don't know that i could buy um buy a shot emerging again uh from that location uh above him where it generates that kind of movement on his body yeah i i don't see that that that that could be possible

so the theory that we hinted at earlier that that that that could be possible so the theory that we hinted at earlier i think that they came up with was the magic bullet and in the movie jfk where they recount the garrison trial in new orleans which maybe we'll get to some of that in a little bit but they probably that's probably one of the greatest visuals i've ever seen for explaining the magic bullet and they reenacted apparently what happened at the trial a few years later when this was the only public trial that ever happened related to anything around JFK. had his legal team sit in chairs like they were in the car and then he pulled out you know a replica of the gun or something and traced exactly what the magic bullet that arlen specter came up with for the warren commission what it would have had to do and essentially if i could give you the cliff notes if you're watching me on youtube or on Spotify video right now, the bullet had to go like this.

But, but, but, but, but, but, but through two different human bodies and end up like I think by the time it got to Connolly through all the waves of Kennedy, it had to go like in Connolly's, I want to say his side like that. A round out front into his wrist and down into his hip. Into his thigh. I mean, it is the most offensive. Arlen Specter should have been thrown in jail for the stupidity of that theory. It's intellectually insulting. Right. So given the fact that that couldn't have happened, would you agree that it's impossible that all the shots came from behind? Yes.

Yeah, there's no way. And here's the other thing. You know, we were talking about the energy of this weapon and energy with every impact. um, uh, any kind of intermediate target, you're not going to have the same, um, you're not going to have the same amount of energy that bleeds off really quickly. Now you're talking about a round that creates seven, seven, seven, seven bullet holes, um, that, you know, it's really hard to kind of understand that and really make sense of it. I've got to give props real quick here relative to this dramatic turn that took place in JFK. And that's to props go to Dr. Cyril Wecht because he was actually on set.

That's the Pittsburgh guy? Yeah. Yeah. Allegheny County. And, of course, when it came down to the – he was on one of the commissions. He was the only dissenting view among the pathologists who, interestingly enough, I had mentioned Dr. Russell Fisher, Michael Bodden were two other. Legendary Bodden, baby. They concurred that it was Oswald, and Dr. Wecht said that it wasn't.

But Dr. Wecht actually gave Stone the idea for this demonstration, this crazy magic bullet. Look, Dr. Wecht is not the person that called this crazy magic bullet. And look, Dr. Wecht is not the person that called this the magic bullet. This, as you rightly mentioned, issued forth from the gaping mouth of Arlen Specter. And how this man became a ballistics expert is beyond me. I don't understand that. I don't know. I know that he was a prosecutor. I don't know how much time he ever spent either in a ballistics lab or working in a morgue. I don't know. I'd like to see a CV. He was young when this happened. He was very young. Yeah, he was when he ascended into this position. And of course, his career was made after that. But it was something that I think that the American public was willing to buy into explain this thing that has done such great harm to the American psyche at this point in time.

But, you know, you've got people that are out there in the scientific community, and they're looking at this, and they're thinking, this defies all logic. Just from a physical science standpoint, you know, how are you going to make sense of this? How would you go about explaining this to anybody and have them buy into it? And we're just talking about the path of the bullet. You know, you get into things like the ballistics of this weapon. How efficient is this weapon? It doesn't have the smoothest action. You know, you think about cycling three rounds through the scene, which is a bolt action weapon. So the reason, bolt action weapons are fantastic, particularly if you're going hunting. You know, single shot, you want to take down a deer, all right? But one of the things we came to understand, particularly during World War I, was that when our troops used the 1901 Springfield, as they were actuating the bolt, they had to reacquire the target. That's why in World War II, we went to the Garand, which was a semi-automatic weapon. And you don't have to go through so many machinations

in order to reacquire the target through your sight picture. You essentially can pull the trigger. If you can keep that center post on your target, you've got a high likelihood you're going to do a lot of damage. And we come to modern day, we went through the M14, which is kind of a variation of the M1 Grand. Again, semi-automatic could be fired, fully automatic. And then today where we wound up with the M16 slash M4 platform that we have today.

And those are semi-automatic. Some are in full auto mode. But at any rate, i'm chasing rabbits here um the fact that you would be in this environment in a as they have termed it in the past a sniper's nest and you're having to recycle this this crappy italian weapon and then reacquire a moving target through a a uh a less than top-end scope. Foliage in the way. Yeah, with foliage in the way. And, you know, I don't see.

And also, I'm really curious, you know, as the vehicle is moving away, is moving downrange away from the depository, you really wonder how much speed was it gathering at that point in time as it's going downhill. Remember, I gave you the example of the baseball running down the middle of the lanes. And you think about this vehicle moving away. The limo driver, the Secret Service agent that was operating the vehicle, you know, I guess he's tapping the brake. It didn't look like this was a hand-waving moment for the president. It looks like they were egressing even prior to that. You know, he was

acknowledging, but the thing is, it's not like he's going through like a crowded area. Have you ever seen that classic image where he's sitting up on the rear of a car and he's like waving at everybody? It's not that kind of event. They're going from point A to point B. When they get under that tunnel after he was shot and they get under the tunnel, they're on a highway now. So this road is turning into a highway. Yes, it is. It's very convenient because one of the things I always wondered is I'm like you got the president in a major United States City mm-hmm and there's not that many people out there we've all seen the videos of that of the two days of that trip I mean I can roll I had him in the intro for

for Stu Wexler's and in some of the mid roles and Stu Wexler's intro for for stew wexler's and in some of the mid-rolls and stew wexler's intro for his episode you see crowds and crime i mean like not even standing room only people on top of each other like sardines and then you look at the grassy knoll and there's you know a mother and father with a kid right here you know there's a few guys over here as a pruder's got a wide open shot of of the image it's not like there's two people out there. I don't know a number, but there's some people, but there's not hundreds. And it's because it's, I guess, because it's at the end of the loop and it's like, okay, he's leaving now. Right. This is not a parade route. Okay. This is not something, this is facilitating him getting from point A to point B. And people

would have been aware of his route. It was well known at that point in time. It was public. And look, everybody wants to have a view of the president. You know, most people do. They want to be able to see him. It's a moment in time that they're going to remember kids miss school in order to do this, in time. But then you've got the grassy knoll, which again, I stood there at that fence, which is something that I've always been fascinated by thinking about what kind of view would I have if I were standing here armed with a weapon? And I'm not, even though I was in the Army National Guard, went through basic training and all that stuff. I barely qualified. I was not a very good shot. I was in the intel. And so there's a reason I was not in the infantry. You seem like a good shot.

I'm not. I'm really not. I wouldn't cross you at 1 a.m. at night trying to rob you. I've got bad eyes. So I've always had to rely on what little intellect I have. But at any rate, but with that said, I was thinking, wow, even with a non-scoped weapon,

I could, with an iron sight, I might could make this shot. If I'm looking down there from that position, because you're able to kind of track all the way along and you've got any number of points along this way to pull the trigger and initiate that gunfire. And if you're in a resting position

on the other side of that fence, that's, you know, that has these kind of V cutouts on the top, it's a perfect spot in order to rest a weapon. Um, I think the big question is, you know, would someone have heard the report of that rifle? Because when you see the video many times, you'll see people running toward the grassy knoll. You'll see them running up the hill. I've seen a couple of images of that, and I'm thinking, okay, if somebody was firing from there, would it be your natural inclination to run up the hill toward that sound? But you're in this kind of canyon of buildings. And I'm really curious, you know, when you hear that crack that goes off, if you're in an area that is kind of this man-made canyon,

how can you make sense of where the sound is coming from? Is it deceiving in any way? Were they running for their lives or were they running because they thought that they saw something? Hard to make sense of it. But that seems like it would be a primary location for consideration when you think about the injury that he appears to have sustained at that moment in time when he emerges from behind that sun i don't know like i i try to put myself in the shoes of being in a traumatic event like that but it's impossible because your senses i mean you dealt with this your whole career with eyewitnesses and stuff your senses are so off because not only are you in shock in the moment like oh my god i can't believe this can't believe this is happening. Not only is it happening so fast.

I mean, these shots are getting fired. I forget the exact number of seconds, but it's not long in between all three shots. But you also then afterwards, once all the adrenaline leaves your body an hour later or whatever, you've played this over so many times in your head that it could change. And it does. Data shows that eyewitness testimony changes not because they're lying lying but because they start to see things that maybe didn't happen so especially when you're dealing with not hundreds of and hundreds of people standing on this particular spot of there and they all scatter right away yes it gets real hard i just if you if you look at where the grassy knoll is and i'm sure throughout this episode i

will have been putting some images in the corners when you hear whooshes and stuff that means an image is there but you know if you look at the position of where it is and you know that there were people who were sitting you know on the grass by where the sidewalk is and you know that where that fence is there were people standing. I have trouble believing that there wasn't somebody there who saw things and in the chaos was whisked away and said, you didn't see shit. Yeah, I've thought about that. And particularly what was on the other side of the fence, it was the infamous train yard. We've heard about that. And there were cars that were back there. Here's the thing.

If you're utilizing it, let's just say that you're a really decent marksman, okay, and you were positioned right there. Even with an iron sight weapon, that means you don't have a scoped weapon like the one that Oswald had up in the sniper's nest, for lack of a better term. You only have very few seconds to draw a sight picture where you've got that post on the end of the weapon and you're drawing a bead on your target. A person really proficient with shoulder-fired arms could make that shot. And then you wouldn't even have to eject the casing. If it's a bolt-action weapon, if you're not using semi-automatic,

you're not going to leave spent brass behind. If you're that good, if you're that good, you simply fire the weapon, slowly walk away, get in a vehicle, and you're that good, you simply fire the weapon, slowly walk away, get in a vehicle and you leave. And no one's the wiser. You've taken the weapon away. You've taken, there's no spent brass to collect. Maybe there's footprints, but there were footprints everywhere. There was discarded cigarette butts. Well, hell, everybody in the world smoked back then. My parents smoked. You know, you'd sit in a cloud of smoke there in the, uh, in the car, as you're going down the road, everybody smoked. So to find, to find, um, you know, to find any kind of cigarette butts laying around as an indication that people were standing there, it's not a, it's not a good, good sign of anything necessarily. But it would have been a different gun from the side than up in the

repository. Cause the repository was a full load i forget the full term for it but you've explained it already and if the bullets the bullets end up in one of two places they either get lodged in the body somewhere or they go through and they're somewhere on the ground yes now there was one i should mention there was one that was found beneath kennedy's body which i think was the actual quote-unquote magic bullet that was found right there like on the gurney hours later like oh look we found it it was definitely placed there it was in perfect condition so that's a bullet but like the very first thing should be you would have different

you would have different bullets going into him and I would think that there has to be one at the scene that clearly never got found. Perhaps there would be. And also I think another thing to understand here is that any kind of metal fragments that you're trying to – that you're locating, and you can see kind of radiographic evidence of this when you're looking at what's called the lateral view of the president's x-rays. You'll see what we refer to as a lead storm, where you've got these components of this lead trail that kind of, you know, appears here as it's passing from front to rear. And some have opined that this is evidence of movement as it begins to kind of spread out in a funnel-like shape, as it's losing that inertial energy and the round begins to disintegrate. What happened to the body of the rest of that weapon? Let me restate that. What happened to the rest of that round?

I've often wondered if this shot that was facilitated on the president, if it was more of a lateral shot where it may have entered here and traveled front to rear, slightly from above to below, and you have these accounts of people in the emergency room and even the two FBI agents that were at the autopsy talking about how they could see brain matter extruding from the back of the president's head. Because you have, from an anatomical standpoint, you've got the cerebrum, and you've got both a left and right hemisphere. And they're made up of what are referred to as sulci and gyri. So when you see these images at Halloween and whatnot, and people have a brain, and it's got those kind of curvy, swiggly lines like that,

those are sulci and gyri, and you've got two hemispheres. It's very distinctive. But down below the brain, you have what's referred to as a cerebellum. It's a different component, and it has two hemispheres as well. That's distinctly different in appearance. It almost looks like it doesn't have sulci and gyri. It's got these linear components. They're very – and they run, if you think about it, running east and west.

They look like contour lines that you would see on a map. Distinctly different. And to a person, these, remember how we talked about earlier, I talked about the neurosurgeons. Yes. Think they know anything about brains? Yeah, I think they know a thing or 10. We bit. They saw cerebellum, you know, extruding from the back of the president's head. And so they're there. This is their business.

This is what they do, right? And so one of the amazing things about this, and there's other people. I'm not a Kennedy expert by any means. I think some people would argue that. No, no, no, I'm really not. But, no, I'm just thinking here, you know, other people have commented on this. Julian, when they weighed the president's brain, it weighed 1,500 grams. And it's supposed to weigh? About 1,300.

You ever seen that image when he emerges from behind the sun? What happens to his head? Oh, yeah. It disintegrates. It freaking disintegrates, man. Yeah. Uh,

so if you're trying to sell me, not you, universal you, if you're trying to sell me on the idea that they had a completely intact brain and he's, you know, if you're saying that it's a 1500 gram brain-gram brain for the president, the percentile that he's in is really up there. I think one of the FBI agents actually said there was a significant amount of his brain missing. So how do we account for this? How do we make sense of this?

And of course, you begin to, people talk about the brain disappearing, and it has. I mean, no one knows what happened to it. But the physicians in the autopsy report, allude to the fact that they're setting, they're going to fix the brain. Not fix it, but they're going to... Reconstruct it? No, they're going to examine it later. Let me tell you, let me kind of tell you how this works, all right? Because a lot of people don't understand what we do. I'm not, keep going.

All right. I wasn't following. What we do with brains in the autopsy room. So brains are kind of like, let's see if I was trying to give you, they're a little bit more tense than jello, okay, a little bit more. So just imagine if you've got a, uh, you make a mold of jello and, um, you're going to take a butcher knife and you're going to slice it. All right. Dependent upon the firmness of it, it's not going to work out real well. The edges are not going to be real neat. It's going to be, it'll gum up on your knife and that sort of thing. So what do we need to do in order to get the brain so that it's to a firmness that is sufficient for us to dissect it and examine it?

Well, what we do is we take a big bucket. Okay, you fill it up with formalin, which is a type of formaldehyde that we use to preserve tissues with, either in the morgue at the medical examiner's office or at the morgue or the hospital if they're taking tumor sections. You allow it to fix. Now, how do you do that? Well, you take the brain and you flip it over, okay, so that the brain is literally upside down. It's inverted, all right? And there are some little anatomical structures around here, some little vessels, and you've got the optic nerves that are coming off.

You take a piece of string, and it's generally the same string that we use to sew the body back up with, and you pull it through these little structures, okay? You've got a bucket. It's about two thirds full of formalin. You gently set the brain down in to the formalin and then you take tape and you tape off the strings on the outside of the bucket and you shut the lid on the bucket, set the bucket aside for, I don't know, you can do it for a week, two weeks, three weeks, or whenever you get to it. And by the time you get back to it, the brain has almost achieved or probably has achieved the same firmness

that a liver has. And it makes it much – What kind of firmness? I mean, I haven't touched a liver recently. Your mom didn't make you eat liver when you were little? What kind of firmness are you talking? It's not as firm as a basketball. Oh, shit.

People eat that? Yeah, no kidding. What the hell do you guys do down south? You're in Jersey now. Well, I got to tell you, I didn't do it by my own choice. I was compelled, and a lot of people in my generation were compelled, regardless of geography. Builds strong muscles or it's iron rich, they thought. It would neutrify the blood.

And what we do in the morgue relative to these brains is you do what's referred to as serial sectioning. Now, you do this with every solid organ. So if it's the heart, lungs, the liver certainly, the kidneys. Imagine you've got a beautiful, fresh-baked loaf of bread, okay? You take your bread knife, right? You start, and how are you going to do it? Well, better than sliced bread, right? You start and how are you going to do it? Well, better than sliced bread, right? You slice like this. Okay. So that if, let's just say,

for instance, you did have that loaf of sliced bread. Once you serial section, this thing all the way through this solid piece of bread, you can now take those sections and flip through it almost like a book. Okay. And what you're doing, what the pathologist is doing is they're looking literally for any kind of pathology that occupies those little spaces. All right. So once they find if there's some kind of anomaly there, whether it's a tumor, maybe they're thinking that the person has a stroke or whatever it is, they can take a section of the brain. Okay. And then they'll place it into a cassette and these little cassettes are, uh, these little plastic vented cassettes and they're dropped into formalin, uh, formalin, and they're allowed to fix along with all of the other tissue, um, that we've acquired at autopsy, the heart,

liver, lungs, uh, kidneys, spleen, pancreas, uh, sections of the bowel. We'll take sections of the spine, spinal cord, testicles, ovaries, uh, uterus, everything. You get a little section of that. And then what do you do with that? Well, you, you send them to a histologist and the histologist fixes them on slides. This is standard. This is standard in any kind of autopsy. And then we can place those on a microscope and look at the anatomy through the scope. How long has this been the process approximately? I don't know.

Like were they doing this shit in the 50s? Oh, yeah. Microscopy has gone on for years. My math is coming back in from the original opening of this part of the conversation where I asked you four and a half hours, give or take, like, how is that for an autopsy? And you're like, it's fast. No, no, no. No, listen. Let me be very specific here.

When you asked me about the length of an autopsy, I've been involved in autopsies that took 45 minutes. Okay. To do all this shit? No, because not everything is done in every one of these autopsies. If you've got, let's just say, for instance, you've got something that is a mass of trauma. So it's a single perceived self-inflicted gunshot wound of the head. The pathologist is going to make their way through that pretty quickly. Now, that's just the autopsy itself. We're not talking about the x-rays that happened prior to that, the examination of clothing, all the photography, and there's tons of photography that take place. But when you're talking about an involved homicide

with multiple gunshot wounds where you have to be very exacting and yes there would be an awareness of pressure this is not like being back in in the emergency room remember when I was talking about you know you lose it's just a patient at that point time you're trying to save them there's an awareness on the part of the pathologist so you're gonna take your time in trying to examine every jot and tittle, as it were, of all of any of the landmarks, any of the trauma, any of the adjunct findings. It can go on forever and ever. If you're talking about a case that involves fiber evidence or it's a, a rape,

for instance, a sexual assault case, you're trimming nails, you're doing nail scrapings, you're doing rape kits, all this. So every, every case is going to be a little bit different.

But when you're talking about an examination of the president, the United States, it, it would behoove you to really take your time and be, be set up and listen. And here's the big thing. It's not, it is about what you're doing at that moment, Tom, but it's what you're going to have to do afterwards. You're going to have to stand and deliver. You're going to have to explain why you did this, this, this, and this. And for some reason, there seemed to be a lack of

awareness of that. Because if that were the case, again, I bring it back to this, you would have had a board-certified forensic pathologist, probably two or three, that would have been there in order to make note of everything that was happening and they would question one another. Now why are you doing this? And that's the thing about forensic pathologists, they love to argue with one another and that's good. It's good in an academic sense and a scientific sense because you're keeping one another in

check. Can you explain why you're doing this? What's your rationale for doing this? Are you going to make note of this? And of course, the truest thing that you're ever going to see that will emerge of an autopsy are going to be the pathologist notes. Everything that they're doing. And many times, and this is how I actually started out in the morgue, working in the morgue. I worked as a scribe. And so this is my first taste of being in the morgue, working in the morgue. I worked as a scribe. And so this is my first taste of being in a morgue.

So I would sit dressed out in a scrub suit, and the pathologist would give me organ weights, and I'd write them down, had a form that was like this. But when it came to their measurements, and generally with gunshot wounds, you've got tons of measurements because you have to measure from various anatomical landmarks. Like if you're trying to center and give a specific location of an insult to a body, you almost want to triangulate it. Like from the apex of the right shoulder, let's say it's mid-sternum, you're going to do it from the sternoclavicular notch that's right here to here,

from the apex of the shoulder to here, maybe from the pubis to here. That way I've got it triangulated. I can go back and at any point in time say that's where that gunshot wound was or the defect was. We don't have that kind of detail in this autopsy report. As a matter of fact, going back to notes, Dr. Humes burned his autopsy notes. He burned them? Yeah. Did he say why he did that? According to what he stated, they were covered with the president's blood. That's right.

I saw that in Oliver Stone's documentary. So he burned them because they were covered with the president's blood, and yet he's a guy whose life has been that I ever made scene notes in is subject to be subpoenaed. Everything. It's not just like when, let's say I go out to a scene. After I've worked a case, I've examined a body at a scene. I go back and I type up an official report. It's on the letterhead. It's got the case number.

Everything's very neat. You can see any of these online matter of fact you ever want to see a great forensic uh scene report from a corner investigator look up robin williams death investigation it's one of the most fantastic reports you'll ever see in your life oh yeah one of those thorough i don't know uh maybe because of the celebrity involved i have no idea but i know that investigator did a fantastic job yeah Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, what makes you think, what about that report really, like, stood out to you? Because it went into such great detail with everything that was in that environment. Now, a lot of that stuff's redacted, but you can just tell kind of the rattle and hum of how it's written. That investigator that wrote that report has still got his notes.

Yeah. Okay. And as a matter of fact, you can be subject to penalty if you get rid of your notes. Certainly police officers can because defense has a right to be able to read your notes because these are kind of spontaneous comments that you're making. Some people think that it's the of spontaneous comments that you're making some people think that it's the the best representation of what you're seeing at that moment time because you're writing it down as you're you know it's kind of translating from what you're visualizing

here what's coming out of the end of that pen okay yes isn't this like part of HIPAA like you're like like the the other side of it maybe I have the wrong one because I'm not a doctor, but like you are literally – the patient has a right. The family of the patient or the estate has a right to view medical records. of that sort of thing was back then. But it's just good practice. And, you know, the rationale that he gave was that he didn't want it to become some kind of morbid curiosity. I think that that's the least of your concerns when it comes to the murder of a president. Yeah, that's on video, too. God damn, this case is a mess it's so it's it's just so crazy how many holes exist in it to this day and it's and part of it is because there is the veil of secrecy it's over it i mean you know we've been jumping around on this because your your analysis today has been unbelievable just on all the anatomical parts of this and and how this goes but also the

fact that you've been there as a guy who's a huge part of your job was quite literally being on the scenes of these things and putting together what happened and why. Like the detectives are doing that, but you're assisting them with where the blood goes, what this could have meant, like how this, why this could have gone down as a result of where things are. And like today, obviously obviously that crime scene got cleaned up and it's not there but we have video to review of it happening and we and you can go back to that

spot and move around the angles and see okay if that bullet came there then it had to come from there or whatever or if the head goes like that that means the bullets come oh am i standing on the spot where that one comes from and yet we're still at a point where technically the, the public, the government's public opinion of this assassination technically still is the Warren commission report. Yeah. And that that's to say that it's a real shame is, is an understatement. And I, I just wanted to, um, you know, who wants to look this up, they can. But I wanted to kind of show you what, in my mind at least, sums the whole thing up to me.

There's an image here, and it's quite tragic. Can you see this? It's quite tragic. I'll hold it up to the screen here as well. Go ahead. We'll put this in the corner screen. We'll get a picture of it too. That's actually an image of a secret service agent with a metal bucket outside of the limo, cleaning the interior up of the vehicle, washing it down. And what's really interesting- When is this? That's at Parkland. Like a few hours later.

Well, you say few. I think it was very quick because they loaded the car up and sent it back. It went back separate from the president's body. I think like the equivalent of an Air Force cargo plane took it back. It may have been a C-130. I'm not really sure. But that kind of sums everything up right there. And what's really interesting, Julian, is when you take a look at that image, there is a Dallas policeman, and he appears to be a motor cop. He's standing there watching this happen before him as the Secret Service agent cleans up the interior of the car.

And it's almost as if he's either standing there in disbelief. There's several police officers around there, and there's even one turned out. And I find this fascinating. It's almost like they've set up a perimeter to facilitate the cleaning of the vehicle instead of the preservation of the evidence. And they're completely cleaning this thing up. And one other thing that you can see clearly demonstrated in this image is that the bubble top has been put back on in this image. Remember, he's riding along in it and it's not there. And, you know, according to lore, you know, the president wanted the thing off so that he could make contact.

Dallas was a critical area. Texas was a critical area for the campaign. He wanted to, you know, he didn't want to be seen as something that's, you know, that's off an untouchable person. But, you know, you see this and you think, well, the dynamics of that event are what happened. This is the essence of the interior that is left behind, those remnants that are left behind, whether it was bone fragments, blood, distribution of blood, brain matter. We'll put this one in the corner of the screen as well, image I'm looking at right now. Anywhere in there.

And I think you've got a – there are some flowers there perhaps that Jackie had left behind. That's prior to it being cleaned. This is in a dark room right here? I'm not really sure the context of it. But you can obviously see what appears to be blood at least. Because I'm just saying it the image you just showed me of them cleaning not long after outside yeah this now it's black and white and from above this does not appear to be illuminated i don't know if it's a

shitty camera from 1963 but you know but when you you think about the environment uh and what we saw evidenced in the zapruder film, the dynamics of that head wound. There's a reason why we study the dynamics of blood now. Some people say for good. Some people say for bad. Some people don't think that it's actual science. I think that it certainly has a lot of utility. But you can appreciate the devastation that goes on in here.

And certainly, and here's another thing that is compromised within this environment. If you begin to put elbow grease to it and water and a steel bucket to collect everything that you're doing, you begin to think about, well, what are you removing from this environment? Are you removing a projectile? Is there some bone fragment that's in there? Is there a fragment of a bullet that is in there? Because no one has had an opportunity to closely examine this vehicle at this point in time. I'm reminded of several cases in my past. I think probably even if you think about, for instance, the Coburger case out in Idaho with the murdered college students, you think about that case, well, they've got his car. And can you imagine what they've done to his car? That car has been disassembled by the FBI. Every inch of it has been gone through, documented either. Well, it's been documented probably from a sketch standpoint, notes, certainly photography, maybe even alternative lighting. All those things that have come into play documenting that physical space that they and I saw Abraham Lincoln's rocker that he was seated in. History took place in that location.

I'm not saying this should be taken out and memorialized, this seat, which is horror, took place in. But this is part of our history. And for that moment in time, they didn't, for whatever reason, see a need to preserve it for whatever reason. And I think that that's a very sad commentary. If we're going to talk about the incompetence of the chain of command afterwards, the blatant seeming organized cover-up as well that is happening simultaneously with some of the. Because I hear you say that, and then a few minutes before you're showing me a picture of some asshole cleaning out with a bucket. Yeah.

And it's like, what part of you thinks that, forget that it's a crime scene. Forget that. That's common sense right there. Hold what you're saying for a second this is a law enforcement officer doing this too okay go ahead i just wanted to literally yeah yeah with a law and so okay even if the secret service guy isn't on a

homicide case all the time because he's secret service right there's cops standing right there who are on this every single day right and they're letting this, like, I know people are stupid. I know there's dumb people out there. The chances of there being this many dumb people, it just, it's not possible. Yeah, and to get a collection of them in one concentric area at one time. God damn it, Texas. At such a cataclysmic moment. Yeah, if you want to hear another good one, I wrote an article a few years ago or was asked to comment when Justice Scalia died out in Texas.

Did he not die? No, no, no. I'm not picking on Texas here because I've got to tell you, one of the finest forensic institutions in the nation is located in Dallas. It's the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Science. And they handle all of the autopsies for the city of Dallas and all of that area. But you might not know this little piece of history about Texas. Texas traditionally does not have corners um and still in the rural areas it works this way the justice of the peace is uh is actually

the corner or the de facto corner yeah yeah so when justice scalia died um out at the he was out at that hunting lodge like doug doug shooting or something out in the west texas yeah um you know justice scalia had you know he had some physical issues yeah he was fat heart heart problems and all that sort of thing yeah uh did you know that um justice scalia was actually pronounced dead over the phone. Come on. I'll never forget it because the Justice of the Peace, her name was actually Cinderella. That'll always stick in my brain. And her excuse or rationale for not having pronounced in person it was too far away.

And I'm thinking, so you've got arguably, let's face it, what is it that they say? Presidents come and go. Justices remain forever. And so you've got this man that actually passes away. And, yeah, he had U.S. Marshal security and all that sort of thing, and I'm sure that it was a natural death. But you look at that and you think, okay, so he's not going to be examined by anyone? And I think a private physician – No need. No need. Don't worry.

So, yeah, I found that kind of interesting, at least tangentially, to our discussion today that happened out in West Texas. And, yeah, I'll never forget that. When I was asked to comment on that years ago, I was surprised to say the very least, because that's kind of what I used to do, create curriculum for coroners and train coroners. And one of the things we used to train everybody to do is that you go out to scenes and you examine bodies and the county's paying for your gas. They probably give you a car. It doesn't take too much to go out and snap a couple of pictures and do an examination. And because, you know, the thing about it is as soon as you don't, you will be

populated by a group of people with tinfoil hats. And those questions, if they're not asked at that moment in time, they'll always be nipping at your heels. And even if you do go through all of the steps, they'll still be nipping at your heels. But why create more grief in your life? Go out and document it at that point in time. So that brings us back to, among a myriad of things, just the limo itself. Um, when you think about how little care was taken with this, you know, and from today's perspective, um, that car first off would have been locked down immediately at Parkland.

It would have been removed some way from that location. You would have had this thing taken somewhere so that it could be thoroughly examined under perfect lighting conditions, photographed. If there are any projectile holes in the vehicle, you've seen us do trajectory rods and lasers and all that stuff. That would all be done. Anything that was noted in the course of that examination, you would have to be able to document it and try to explain it or try to make sense of it. And it would be, of course, up to a jury to make heads or tails of it as it applies to physical evidence in a future trial. But we'll never have that opportunity, will we? Because it wasn't done.

It wasn't done. That car actually was sent away. It was stripped. I think that it was utilized in the future after it had been retooled. Wait, it was used again? Come on. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think that it was completely broken down, repainted, refurnished, refurbished, and it was put back into service, if I'm not mistaken. For who?

Maybe Johnson. I have no idea. I've never heard that before. Just when you think it can't get worse, it does. Yeah, there were, there was actually a defect in the windshield as well. And they saved the windshield. Again, back to my, my comment on the, you know, passing through an intermediate target. What created the defect in the windshield? I don't know. You know, internal versus external beveling. Do we have a good explanation for that? Where is that windshield today?

You know, you can go on and on and on with all of the potholes that this thing, or let's not say potholes, that's an insult to potholes, landmines, that this thing is populated by over and over and over again. You see evidence of this throughout. And again, it brings us back to this construct of, you know, are you intentionally doing this or are you just this blatantly incompetent? I don't know that there are any other choices. Well, we've been jumping around a bunch today, which is fine because the analysis has been incredible. And like it's impossible not to with this case because there's something that comes up every single step, something out of place. But going back to the scene, like you gave a pretty amazing breakdown of from the school schoolbook repository and that bullet and and the the actual pathway the car and stuff and we've at least touched on the grass you know you talked about the train yard right there and how easy it would be to get a shot off hide the bullet all that with the with the three shots total though

all right guys that takes us to the end of this part of my sit down with joseph scott morgan we do have another hour and change left. I've learned the hard way before that when I put out content that's too long, the algorithm does not send it anywhere. And I'm really doing a disservice to guests because they don't get as much reach as they possibly could. So I'd love to put this all out as one, but I couldn't.

So you will be getting the last part over the next couple of days. Thank you for your patience with that. Hope you've enjoyed so far. Make sure you hit that subscribe button and smash that notification bell so that you find out exactly when it drops and hit that like button on the video as well. See you guys soon.