The Moving Head Wounds

If Kennedy was shot in the head from behind, why did the Parkland Hospital doctors all describe a large gaping wound in the rear of his head? They were mistaken, according to the Warren Commission, which relied on an autopsy report description of a "largely irregular defect" and a drawing which showed the large wound to be on the right side of the head. The autopsy report also firmly placed a small entrance wound low in the back of the head, just above and to the right of the external occipital protuberance.

The two differing descriptions turned into three when in 1968 an independent panel of experts reviewed the autopsy photos and X-rays, and declared that the entrance wound had been mis-measured at autopsy by about 4 inches! According to the Clark Panel, the entry was up in the cowlick.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations convened a nine-member panel of experts in the late 1970s which concurred with the Clark Panel on the location of the head wounds (while disputing other Clark Panel findings). The HSCA also for the first time interviewed many of those present at the autopsy who had witnessed the wounds, and elicited drawings from several of them. The HSCA then declared that "All of those interviewed who attended the autopsy corroborated the general location of the wounds as depicted in the [autopsy] photographs; none had differing accounts." The interviews themselves were not published.

When the HSCA's witness interviews and drawings were released in the early 1990s, they told a dramatically different story. Many of the autopsy witnesses had described a large rear head wound; in some accounts the wound also extended into the right side. The Assassination Records Review Board conducted its own interviews with a similar result.

Was Kennedy shot from the front, from the grassy knoll or some other location? The "hard" evidence of the autopsy photographs and X-rays is still used to buttress the theory that all shots came from behind, but these are incomplete and the authenticity of some of them has been called into question. And what about the Zapruder film, which does not appear to show any rearward damage to Kennedy's head? One thing is certain - the official accounts have consistently declared that the shots came from behind, while continually changing the actual findings which support that idea.