The following is a nonverbatim transcript of a talk I gave at the annual PorcFest festival in Lancaster, New Hampshire, in June 2024.
In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board discovered the existence of a woman named Saundra Spencer, who told a remarkable story to the ARRB. On the weekend of the assassination of President Kennedy, Spencer was a chief petty officer with the U.S. Navy stationed in the Navy’s photographic lab in Washington, D.C., where her primary duty entailed developing social photographs of the president and his family. The general counsel for the ARRB, Jeremy Gunn, later stated that of all the witnesses to appear before the ARRB, Saundra Spencer was the most credible.
Spencer told the ARRB that on the weekend of the assassination, she had been asked, on a top-secret, classified basis, to develop autopsy photographs of the president’s body. Gunn showed her the autopsy photographs in the official record that showed the back of President Kennedy’s head to be intact. He asked her if these were the photographs she developed that weekend. She carefully examined the photographs and said, no, that the autopsy photographs that she developed showed a big hole in the back of President Kennedy’s head. If Spencer’s testimony was true and accurate, that could mean only one thing: The government’s autopsy photographs showing the back of JFK’s head to be intact were fraudulent.
Spencer was not alone
What is significant is that Spencer’s testimony matched what the doctors who had treated Kennedy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas had stated immediately after the assassination. For example, consider the statements of Dr. Robert McClelland, one of JFK’s treating physicians. For the rest of his life, McClelland steadfastly maintained that Kennedy had a hole in the back of his head that was approximately 5 inches in diameter. McClelland went on to become a renowned surgeon at Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, one of the best hospitals in the country. He served as a professor at Southwestern and ultimately retired as a professor emeritus. He created and was the first editor of Selected Readings in General Surgery, which is published by the American College of Surgeons.
McClelland wasn’t the only witness to the massive exit wound in the back of JFK’s head. There was also Dr. James Carrico, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, nurses Audrey Bell and Diana Bowron, newsman Roy Stamps, Secret Service agent Clint Hill, and many others. In fact, when Jeremy Gunn showed the official-back-of-the head photographs to two FBI agents who were present at the president’s military autopsy at Bethesda National Medical Center, both of them stated that the photos incorrectly depicted the back of JFK’s head to be intact. One of them even stated that the official photographs appeared to be “doctored.”
There is a new documentary entitled JFK: The Dallas Doctors Speak, which I highly recommend watching. It features some of the Dallas doctors in Trauma Room One stating that JFK had a massive hole in the back of his head.
That massive hole in the back of Kennedy’s head was significant for two reasons. First, it meant that Kennedy had been shot in the head by a gunshot that came from his front. That was problematic for the official version of the assassination, which held that all shots had come from the president’s rear.
Second, it meant that the official autopsy photographs were fraudulent. Why is that important? Because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. Once it is established that the military establishment, which conducted the autopsy on President Kennedy’s body, engaged in autopsy fraud, it is “case closed” on who orchestrated the assassination.
Why the military conspiracy?
A question naturally arises: Why was the U.S. military conducting the autopsy on the president’s body? After all, this is not a military nation, or at least it’s not supposed to be. Moreover, assassinating a U.S. president was not a federal crime at that time. Therefore, no part of the federal government had jurisdiction over the crime.
Immediately after President Kennedy was declared dead, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, announced that he was going to conduct an autopsy on the president’s body, as required by state law. Immediately, a team of Secret Service agents, led by an agent named Roy Kellerman, who was sporting a Thompson submachine gun, went into action, declaring that they would not permit Rose to conduct the autopsy. Rose stood his ground. The other Secret Service agents pulled back their coats and brandished their guns. One of them picked up Rose, carted him to a nearby wall, and wagged his finger in his face.
Screaming, yelling, and issuing a stream of profanities, Kellerman’s team forced their way out of Parkland with the president’s body, which had been put into a heavy ornate casket and then into the back of a funeral-home vehicle, and transported it to Dallas Love Field, where the new president, Lyndon Johnson, was waiting for it. The casket was loaded onto Air Force One and flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where it was delivered into the hands of the military. It’s worth noting that there were lots of competent civilian forensics pathologists and facilities in the Washington, D.C., area who could have performed the autopsy.
The ARRB also discovered the existence of a man named Roger Boyajian, who told the ARRB a remarkable story. He said that on the evening of the assassination, he had been placed in charge of a security detail at the Bethesda morgue. He stated that a lightweight shipping casket had been brought into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. He had kept a copy of his After Action Report that confirmed what he later told the ARRB. A team of Navy soldiers stated that after they carried the shipping casket into the morgue, President Kennedy’s body was taken out of it and encased in a rubberized body bag.
Those statements presented problems for the U.S. military. That’s because the president’s body had been wrapped in sheets at Parkland, not encased in a body bag. Moreover, at Dallas, the president’s body had been placed in a heavy, ornate, bronze funeral-type casket, not a lightweight shipping casket. Finally, the official entry time of the Dallas casket with the president’s body inside was 8 p.m., not 6:35 p.m., when a team of soldiers named the Joint Service Casket Team carried it into the morgue.
Why two caskets?
The ARRB also discovered the existence of a memorandum from Gawler’s Funeral Home that had been created soon after the assassination. It confirmed that the president’s body had been brought into the morgue in a shipping casket.
One of the x-ray technicians saw Mrs. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy entering the front of the facility immediately after arriving from Andrews Air Force Base. The technician knew that the heavy, ornate casket that was in the Navy vehicle that was still out front of the facility had to be empty because x-rays were already being performed on Kennedy’s head in the morgue.
In a criminal trial in New Orleans in the late 1960s, Dr. Pierre Finck testified that he received a telephone call at precisely 8 p.m. from Dr. James Humes, one of the three pathologists who conducted the autopsy. During that conversation, Humes told Finck that they already had x-rays of the president’s head. Since the official entry time into the morgue was 8 p.m., the only way they could have already had x-rays of the president’s head is if it had been brought into the morgue at an earlier time — that is, 6:35 p.m.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, when military personnel are sneaking a president’s body into a morgue almost an hour-and-a-half before the official entry time, it can be safely assumed that they are up to no good.
There was one big problem, however, with the notion that the back-of-the-head photographs of the military were fraudulent. That problem was Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder’s film of the assassination, which he had taken while standing on a pedestal in Dealey Plaza, where the assassination occurred.
Zapruder’s film showed Kennedy’s head to be intact after he received the fatal gunshot to the head, which matched the military’s back-of-the-head autopsy photographs. Assassination researchers who believed that all those witnesses who established that there was a massive hole in the back of JFK’s head were convinced, therefore, that the Zapruder film had to have been altered to hide the massive hole in the back of JFK’s head.
However, the only ones who could have done that were people in Hollywood, but there was never any evidence that surfaced indicating that the film had been shipped to Hollywood. Instead, the evidence was that the film had been shipped to Chicago to a publishing plant of LIFE magazine, which had purchased the film from Zapruder on Saturday afternoon, the day after the assassination.
Who altered the Zapruder film?
In the late 2000s, the world’s most renowned photography analyst, a former CIA official named Dino Brugioni, disclosed that the Zapruder film had been brought
by two Secret Service agents on Saturday night to the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C., where Brugioni and his team carefully examined it several times and made blow-ups of selected frames and posted them on briefing boards.
The film was then taken to a top-secret CIA film facility that was located in Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, where they could do anything with film that Hollywood could do. While there is no evidence that Kodak participated in the operation, the CIA film experts, using a state-of-the-art copier known as an aerial optical printer, made a 16mm-wide altered copy of the 8mm Zapruder film and then brought it back to NPIC on Sunday night, where, unbeknownst to Brugioni, an entirely different CIA team made blow-ups of selected frames and posted them on briefing boards. It is that altered copy that became the new original Zapruder film. It is worth mentioning that an 8mm-wide film cannot be converted into a 16mm-wide film except by making a copy of it.
Brugioni was later shown a copy of the extant Zapruder film. In a video interview that can be seen online, he stated unequivocally that the extant film was not the film he saw on the Saturday night after the assassination. He said that the most striking part of the film, which he and his team watched several times, was the brain and blood tissue that shot straight up in the air and that covered several frames of film. The extant film shows only one frame for the gunshot to the head and shows no brain and blood tissue shooting up into the air.
In my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, I present statements by experienced Hollywood film experts establishing that the extant Zapruder film is an altered copy, which includes the “black patch” that the CIA film experts in Rochester painted onto the back of JFK’s head to hide the massive exit-sized hole in the back of the president’s head. I also recommend my book The Kennedy Autopsy, which is a synopsis of what I consider to be the very best book on the Kennedy assassination, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board by Douglas Horne. For the best introduction to the Kennedy assassination, I recommend the excellent book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass.
This article was published in the September 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.