JFK with Governor Connally at right (Time)

When it comes to celebrities, people love a mystery, especially one that involves a conspiracy.  President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in 1963 while riding in an open-top car before a large crowd.  A bullet went through him and wounded Governor Connally, while a second one slammed into his skull.  Kennedy was rushed to a Dallas hospital, but was then illegally transported to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington.  Unfortunately, as Baden discovered, even a case as significant as this one can be mishandled by untrained people.

In 1977, he was appointed to take charge of the forensic pathology investigation for the congressional Select Committee on Assassinations, and he recruited eight other MEs.  As he looked further into the incident to see what could be determined, he saw what he described as a "forensic disaster."  He contends that if the autopsy procedure had been done correctly, the many conspiracy theories would never have gotten off the ground. Yet as it turned out, Commander James J. Humes, the pathologist who performed it, had never worked on a body with a gunshot wound.  He'd also been instructed not to perform a complete autopsy, but only to find the bullet, which was believed to be still lodged in the body.  In his subsequent reports, his medical descriptions were nonexistent, and he basically referred interested parties to the photos, which were also badly done by an inexperienced photographer.  Humes didn't even turn Kennedy over to look at the wound in the back of his neck, or call the receiving hospital in Dallas to discover that a tracheostomy had been performed, which he'd have found going right through the exit wound in the throat.  He erroneously assumed the bullet had fallen out the same hole it had entered.  He also failed to shave the head wound to see it clearly, and it was photographed through the hair.  In addition, Humes miscalculated the wound's location by an error of four inches. 

After only two hours (a very short time), he prepared the body for embalming.  Then, because his notes were stained with blood, he burned them.  After he found out about the procedure done in Dallas, he rewrote his notes based on what he recalled and what he could figure out.  He ended up including material he himself never saw and failing to track the bullets properly.  Thus his report was filled with errors, which put Baden's team at a serious disadvantage.

They looked at crime scene and autopsy photographs, Kennedy's clothing, autopsy reports, and X rays.  It soon became clear that the people in charge had not realized that there was an important difference between a forensic autopsy and a regular autopsy.  For example, no one had known the difference between an exit and entrance wound, and therefore they could not pinpoint the bullet's origin.  They also couldn't tell how many shots had been fired.

Bullet fragments JFK assassination (AP)

Then Baden realized that Kennedy's brain was missing, along with slides of tissues, so with the help of the bullet holes through the clothing and their experience with exit and entrance wounds, his team managed to piece together the fact that two bullets had entered Kennedy.  One had pierced his throat and gone into Governor Connally.  The other had gone through the back of his head and ended up in the front of the car.  Both had come from behind.

After that, they wrote a two-volume report.  "One of the recommendations we made," says Baden, "was that there should be some national attention paid to improving death investigation in this country.  Part of the problem with that case was that the investigation was poorly done.  The people who did the autopsy were not qualified to do it, and a poor autopsy can be misleading.  Having a hospital pathologist who trained in natural diseases do an autopsy on President Kennedy is like having a general surgeon doing brain surgery.  There are different kinds of expertise, and those doctors made lots of mistakes, such as creating false descriptions for why they couldn't find the bullet.  They said it and they were wrong, and it lives with us even today."