Reclaiming History (193 page)

Dr. Petty: “Yes, of course.”

“Would you explain to the jury how you arrived at this conclusion?”

“This bullet is a full, metal-jacketed military [type] bullet, designed to pass through[i.e., without fragmenting] the soft tissue of an individual, exactly as it did in President Kennedy’s instance. It then contacted bone only in two areas. First, the rib in Connally, and second the wrist bone in Connally. In neither instance did it penetrate the rib or the wrist bone.” He went on to add that the bullet could “easily” have traveled the course it did “without [sustaining] great deformity. I’ve seen that many times.”

Question: “You have seen a bullet causing the damage that was caused to the president’s body and Governor Connally’s body and not having any more damage than that bullet on the screen, is that correct?”

“Yes, of course.” Petty added that no metal fragments were found in Governor Connally’s chest, further evidence that the bullet had only struck a glancing blow to the governor’s fifth rib.
²⁷

The first metal fragments found along the supposed path of the bullet were discovered in the governor’s wrist, and, in Petty’s opinion, this was the place where the bullet became deformed.
²⁸

A
mong the experiments carried out for the Warren Commission was one in which a test bullet was fired into the wrist bone of a human cadaver, the result being that the nose of the bullet was damaged more than the base of the bullet that hit Connally’s fifth rib and wrist bone,
²⁹
as Commission critics like Mark Lane
³⁰
and Dr. Cyril Wecht
³¹
are fond of pointing out. The problem is that shooting a bullet at full muzzle velocity directly into a wrist sheds little light on what might happen to a bullet striking a wrist at a little over half its original velocity. Dr. John Lattimer, who himself conducted tests with the Carcano bullet, told author Gerald Posner that “the Warren Commission did not conduct the proper experiments. They fired a 6.5 mm [bullet] traveling at over 2,000 feet per second
directly
into a wrist bone. Of course you are going to get deformation of the bullet when it strikes a hard object at
full
speed.”
³²

The HSCA’s physical scientist and wound ballistics expert, Larry Sturdivan, who took part in the Warren Commission tests conducted by the Army’s Wound Ballistics Branch at the Edgewood Arsenal laboratories in Maryland in April and May of 1964, pointed out to the committee that the relatively intact state of Commission Exhibit No. 399 was “direct proof that the bullet that struck Governor Connally’s wrist was not at high velocity.” If it had been, he said, it would have been more deformed than it was.
³³
*

Sturdivan explained how the bullet that hit the wrist would have lost velocity and energy as it was successively slowed in its flight. He said the original velocity at the muzzle varied from 2,000 to 2,200 feet per second. In the distance it traveled before striking the president, it would have slowed to about 1,800 feet per second—fast enough to traverse the soft tissue of the body, with very little loss of velocity. By the time the tumbling bullet (the tumbling accounting for almost all the damage being to its base) struck the governor, it would have been traveling, he said, at about “1,700 feet per second or a little less.” Sturdivan calculated that the loss of velocity of the bullet on its passage through the governor’s chest (where it hit a rib) resulted in its exiting the governor’s chest and striking his wrist bone at “somewhere between 1,100 and 1,300 feet per second.” That was sufficiently fast to break the bone (any velocity above 700 feet per second would do that), but not fast enough to shatter the bullet. Sturdivan also reckoned that the bullet in this case would have been slowed to about 700 feet per second or less by the time it struck the governor’s thigh, too slow to penetrate very deeply.
³⁴
†
Sturdivan concluded that a bullet like Commission Exhibit No. 399 was “quite capable” of passing through Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies, striking the tissue and bone that it did, and end up in the same condition that Commission Exhibit No. 399 is presently in.
³⁵

There is a frequently overlooked reason (briefly alluded to earlier) why the stretcher bullet did not have more damage than it did. It was a military-type bullet, the very type expected to cause great damage to what it strikes but minimum damage to the bullet itself (unless, of course, it hits the hardest of bone head-on). “There is nothing here that is unusual or spectacular or unexpected,” Dr. Petty told the committee. “This is the behavior of a full
metal
jacketed bullet, a bullet covered in all areas except the base by means of the firm, hard, tough, not easy to deform jacket.”
³⁶

T
he allegedly “mysterious” circumstances surrounding the discovery of Commission Exhibit No. 399 on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital gave rise to one of the main issues the conspiracy theorists have seized on in the Kennedy assassination—that the facts surrounding the bullet’s discovery could only add up to one thing: the bullet was planted by the real conspirators who killed Kennedy to frame Oswald. But do they?

The movements and handling of President Kennedy’s stretcher negates the possibility that the bullet could have originated from the president’s stretcher. We know President Kennedy remained on his stretcher in Trauma Room One until the arrival of the casket at 1:40 p.m.
³⁷
After his body was placed into the casket, the stretcher was stripped and wheeled across the hall into Trauma Room Two, where, by all accounts, it remained until after the presidential party left the hospital at 2:00 p.m.—roughly forty minutes after Darrell Tomlinson discovered the bullet in a completely different part of the emergency room area.
³⁸
After ruling out the president’s stretcher as the source of the bullet, the Warren Commission concluded that the bullet had come from the stretcher carrying Governor Connally.
³⁹

But conspiracy theorists maintain that the finding of the bullet on Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital, not in more normal places such as inside the presidential limousine, or somewhere in Dealey Plaza, somehow is too convenient and smacks of a planting of the bullet. And if it was planted, we’re talking conspiracy. They point out that even if the stretcher bullet was conclusively proved to have been fired in Oswald’s rifle, this does not, perforce, mean that it was fired in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination.

To buttress that which is already obvious (except to conspiracy theorists)—that the stretcher bullet was the bullet that struck Kennedy and Connally, and that the bullet fragments that were removed from Connally’s right wrist must have come from this bullet—we turn to the HSCA and the passionate, dogged determination of two scientists, Drs. John Nichols and Vincent Guinn, who spent fourteen years in their quest to trace the source of the stretcher bullet.

On the day after the assassination, FBI special agent John F. Gallagher examined some of the bullet fragments recovered during the Kennedy assassination investigation using emission spectrography, a process in which a tiny part of a bullet fragment is burned and the resulting spectrum of light is analyzed to determine its elemental composition. The test was unable to determine more than the fact that the lead portion of all the fragments (which included those recovered from the limousine, the president’s brain, and Connally’s wrist) were “similar in metallic composition.”
⁴⁰
It could not distinguish how much of any given “trace element” (such as copper, silver, antimony, aluminum, manganese, sodium, and chlorine) was present in any fragment, nor, more importantly, which bullet each fragment had come from.
⁴¹

In May 1964, Gallagher used a scientific technique—neutron activation analysis (NAA)—to more precisely identify the fragments. NAA had been around since the 1930s and by the early 1960s was a fairly common process in a number of industries (though not in firearms and ballistic examinations), but had never been used by the FBI.
*
Gallagher went down to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a major nuclear facility where scientists were working with NAA. Two of the Oak Ridge people showed him how to handle the equipment and calculate the results, and over the course of several days there they worked together, Gallagher making and recording his own measurements. Unfortunately, the men at the nuclear facility, who were highly conversant in NAA, had never performed any forensic work. Likewise, Gallagher, who was a highly qualified forensic expert, had never worked with NAA.
⁴²

On July 8, 1964, J. Edgar Hoover wrote to Warren Commission chief counsel J. Lee Rankin to inform him of the disappointing results of Gallagher’s efforts. “While minor variations in composition were found by this method,” Hoover wrote, “these were not considered sufficient to permit positively differentiating among the larger bullet fragments and thus positively determining from which of the larger bullet fragments any given small lead fragment may have come.”
⁴³

There the matter rested. But when early critics learned that spectrographic tests had been performed (they were mentioned in the testimony of FBI firearms expert Robert Frazier), but the specific results were not reported by the Warren Commission, they speculated that the Commission may have suppressed the results because they disproved the single-bullet theory.
⁴⁴
Unaware that NAA tests had also been performed, critics began screaming that the Commission didn’t submit the fragments to the superior NAA tests because the FBI was afraid that the fragments in Connally’s arm wouldn’t match the stretcher bullet.
⁴⁵

Dr. Nichols, a pathologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center with an abiding interest in the assassination, tried for a number of years to convince FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and later his successor, Clarence Kelly, to release the bullet fragments for independent NAA tests. He also enlisted the aid of Dr. Vincent Guinn, a professor of chemistry at the University of California’s Irvine campus and a twenty-year veteran of NAA, who agreed that such an examination might well produce new information about the assassination. Neither of them, however, were originally successful in convincing the FBI to release the fragments for analysis.

Finally, in September of 1977, the HSCA succeeded with the FBI where Nichols and Guinn had not, and gave Dr. Guinn a chance to develop his own data from the remaining fragments in the FBI’s custody to determine if the stretcher bullet matched up in the concentration of its metallic elements with bullet fragments found in the presidential limousine and those removed from Connally’s wrist.
⁴⁶
†
By the time Dr. Guinn, who had a PhD in chemistry from Harvard University, performed his NAA tests on the Kennedy assassination evidence at his Triga Mark I nuclear reactor at the University of California at Irvine, he had served as an expert witness on NAA in approximately fifty trials, had examined 165 different types of bullets, and had published fifty-three articles on forensic NAA. His research on NAA was supported by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) as well as the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration of the U.S. Department of Justice.
⁴⁷
Throughout his career, he had applied NAA techniques to many other kinds of materials involved in criminal cases—gunshot residues, glass, paint, paper, cloth, oil, greases, and many others.
⁴⁸
He first analyzed general Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition in 1973 after Dr. Nichols offered him samples for NAA testing,
⁴⁹
and discovered a peculiarity of this ammunition that turned out to have great significance for the fragments in the Kennedy case.

Dr. Guinn found that when it came to most manufactured rounds of ammunition, NAA could not detect any differences in metallic composition between bullets of the same production lot (a lot consisting of several batches or melts of lead)—they were essentially carbon copies of each other. However, Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition was very “unusual” in that the bullets seemed to have very little uniformity within a production lot. Bullets (which consist of 98 to 99 percent lead, the rest being trace elements) from a single box of twenty cartridges from the same lot varied widely in their composition, particularly with respect to the
most important
(for NAA purposes) of the three major trace elements, antimony, which manufacturers add to harden the bullet. (The other two most common elements are silver and copper.) In fact, the Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition made by Western Cartridge varied so much that individual bullets from a single box of ammunition could be identified and distinguished from each other, and hence are ideal for NAA since the possibility of a mere coincidence when you find a match is substantially reduced.
⁵⁰

In performing NAA on bullets, a sample of bullet lead—which can be extremely small—is first cleaned to remove any contamination by dust, moisture, or salt from handling or perspiration, and then put into a small vial, which in turn is placed in a small nuclear reactor,
*
where it is bombarded with neutrons until it becomes radioactive. The emissions given off by the sample as the radioactivity decays are then recorded, in Guinn’s case by a “high-resolution germanium” detector or counter, an instrument that is a great deal more sensitive and sophisticated than the relatively crude Geiger counter featured so prominently in movies made at the dawn of the atomic age.
⁵¹
Since various elements form different radioisotopes, the counter not only distinguishes them in the sample material, but also is capable of measuring their relative quantities with extraordinary precision.

Ten different bullet samples were given to Dr. Guinn to analyze, each with an identifying Warren Commission exhibit number or an FBI “Q” number (“Q” for “questioned item”). Three of these were not suitable for testing,
⁵²
and the examination of two others added only basic, supportive knowledge to the case.