The AARC presents a new series of lectures commemorating and honoring the legacy of President Kennedy, the inspirational meaning of his term of office, and the consequences of his assassination sixty-one years ago.
In the words of the distinguished British scholar Malcolm Blunt, “Jesus Christ, what we lost when we lost that man.”
The Spirit of Justice and the Kennedy Assassination
(a story in three parts)
By Pat Speer
Part I: Looking Through the Eyes of Henry Fonda
Imagine if you will that we are looking through the eyes of Henry Fonda—in an imaginary sequel to 12 Angry Men, a 1957 courtroom drama. This sequel is built upon the real facts of a real case–the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But poetic license has been taken so that the accused—who was murdered before trial–can actually have a trial, of sorts…
We are sitting in the jury room, awaiting the beginning of today’s proceedings. The prosecution has presented its case, the defense has countered with some witnesses of its own, and today is the day the defendant will take the stand.
The prosecution has made the claim that this young man, who proclaims his innocence, was the killer of a prominent man, after firing a rifle from the sixth floor of a building at this man while he was traveling down the street below in a convertible.
It has presented evidence for this claim, which the defense has questioned. As the prosecution claims this young man acted on his own, moreover, it has presented additional evidence designed to support that only one shooter fired upon this prominent man, and that this young man was that shooter.
But their case is tattered at the edges.
Just yesterday, in the last testimony to be taken before the defendant finally has his day, the defense revealed that the prosecution had hired some of the best shooters in the world to re-enact the supposed shooting feat of this young man, who was once a decent shooter but hadn’t practiced in months, and were unable to do so…
So now, we sit here, the spirit of justice, in the form of Henry Fonda in an imaginary sequel to Twelve Angry Men, reviewing the case in our mind, and the whole thing unravels. The case, not our mind.
Over the few first days of the trial we were told that the rifle used to kill this prominent man was found in a building overlooking the crime scene where the suspect was alone on his lunch break, but on a different floor from where he was last seen before his lunch break. And were told as well that this rifle belonged to the suspect, and that his palm print had been found on this rifle, along with fibers from the shirt he was wearing when arrested. And, then, having set the scene, the prosecution called upon a witness who’d been standing on the street below the window from which the rifle was believed to have been fired, and this witness identified the suspect as the man who fired this rifle, or one just like it, from that sixth-floor window.
Now, if it was left at that, we the jury could quickly come back with a guilty verdict, and be home in time for dinner.
But it wasn’t left at that.
The defense brought out that the witness–the only witness to see the shooter who was willing to ID the suspect–had refused to ID the suspect before having an FBI agent pay a visit to his home, and that even then he said he felt certain that the man he saw was not wearing the shirt the suspect had been wearing when arrested an hour later.
Now this last bit was surprising, seeing as the prosecution had just claimed fibers from this shirt—the one the witness claimed the suspect had not been wearing—were found on the rifle found at the crime scene.
What once looked like a simple case was not really all that simple.
We review every bit of evidence presented by the prosecution, in an attempt to tie this young man to the shooting, and find problems with most every one.
To start with, neither the rifle nor a package the size of the rifle was observed in the suspect’s possession on the morning of the shooting by the man who drove him to work.
While this man said there was a package in the suspect’s hand that morning, and an empty package was purported to have been found in the building by the sniper’s window, this only made the case against the defendant more problematic, as the evidence linking this package to the suspect was, well, suspect.
We recall. The policemen testifying as to the discovery of the rifle and this package offered differing stories as to where the package was discovered, and the first responders on the scene, including the chief of detectives, had no recollection of its resting on the floor where it was purported to have been discovered a short time later.
Something is just wrong. Not only did the man who drove the suspect to work insist the paper package he’d seen in the suspect’s possession was much too small to have held the rifle found in the building, even if it was broken down, he claimed it was not even the right kind of paper, and had passed a lie detector while doing so.
And it gets worse. This man claimed the suspect had told him the package contained curtain rods, that he had retrieved from the garage of a family with whom his wife had been staying. And this man’s sister claimed she also saw this package, and that it was as her brother said—that it was the size of a packet of curtain rods, and far too small to have held the rifle. Now, the prosecution had tried to push the possibility it was a rifle and not curtain rods by questioning the woman with whom the suspect’s wife had been staying and asking her if she had given him some curtain rods, to which she said no. But on cross-examination she admitted she’d thought there’d been a package of curtain rods in her garage, but was unable to find one after the shooting.
And it gets worse. When asked if the suspect had needed curtain rods for the room he’d been renting, the suspect’s landlady admitted that the curtain rods were damaged when she inspected the room on the night of the shooting, but had assumed that this damage came as a result of over-eager police officers during their search of the room. But, gee, the prosecution had failed to present an officer who would admit such a thing.
So this part of the case was confusing. The prosecution needed to show that the defendant had brought the rifle to work that morning, but the evidence for this was weak, at best. To tie the package found in the building, which was purported to bear the suspect’s prints, and to have been used by the suspect to transport the rifle into the building, the prosecution had brought in an FBI expert on paper who claimed the bag had been constructed from paper available in the warehouse where he worked—in the building from which the shots had been fired. But the defense had dragged out from this expert as well that the paper had come from the roll in use on the day of the shooting–that had only been in use for a few days—and then reminded us that the man who drove the suspect to the house where his wife had been staying on the night before the shooting had claimed the suspect had had no such paper in his possession on the ride home, and hadn’t been home for more than a week.
So which makes more sense? That the suspect stole this paper from work with no one noticing, and transported it on his body to the house where his wife was staying with no one noticing, and used it to create a package or bag to hold his rifle, in the garage of a small house shared with a number of others, with no one noticing, and then returned to work with this package containing a rifle the next morning…to have the only people to see him with this package the next morning say it looked like a package of curtain rods?
Or that this package contained curtain rods?
And the empty package found in the building was not empty at all, but filled with big big problems for the prosecution’s case?
The prosecution acknowledged, after all, that, although virtually twice as large as the package described by the man who drove the suspect to work, the package found in the building was still too small to have held the rifle, unless it had been broken down. And to try to overcome this the prosecution had an FBI expert testify as to the ease with which one could break down, and then re-assemble, the rifle, with a dime, which they considered necessary seeing as no screwdriver was found on the suspect or anywhere near the sniper’s window. But the defense had countered this with the undisputed fact that a rifle which had been assembled in such a manner would be unlikely to fire with the accuracy required for this crime, within minutes of its assembly, and without any practice shots and adjustments. And the FBI then admitted they’d performed no tests to see if the rifle could in fact fire accurately after being assembled with a dime.
And as we sit here, replaying this embarrassment, we see that there were a number of such mis-steps by the prosecution.
Incredibly, they presented a witness claiming he saw the suspect upstairs, near the sniper’s window, 35 minutes before the shooting. But this was self-defeating, as the defense was able to bring out that the prosecution’s witness had a criminal history, and had changed his story multiple times, and that a police report had been written claiming this man would change his story for money.
So why was he put on the stand?
Oh yeah. The suspect had claimed he was in a break room at the time of the shooting, and the prosecution was trying to suggest this was a lie, even though the defense had a witness lined up to say he saw him in this break room 30 minutes before the shooting. So it would seem they were trying to pit the testimony of this convicted felon, who’d changed his story multiple times, against the story of both the defendant and this credible witness.
But this witness wasn’t the only witness whose statements supported that the suspect had visited the break room.
The suspect had claimed to see two co-workers as he sat alone in that break room twenty minutes or so after speaking to the man who said he saw him in the break room, and these co-workers, while not recalling his presence in the break room, had nevertheless confirmed they’d walked past the break room when he said he saw them. Well, as the defense had correctly pointed out, if the suspect had been lying about being in the room, how would he have known to claim he was in a room where no one else was, and how would he have known those two co-workers had passed by the room?
It seems likely he was telling the truth.
Within two minutes of the shooting, a policeman had observed the suspect buying a coke from a coke machine in another room of the building. This room was four floors away from the presumed location of the shooter. This policeman had testified to the suspect’s being calm and collected and giving no signs of being someone in a race for his life. And this, even though the prosecution had claimed he’d just raced downstairs from a location four floors above and on the opposite side of the building. The defense had called witnesses, moreover, who’d claimed to be on the stairs at this time, and had not seen the suspect on the stairs, nor heard him race down the stairs. Even more problematic, the policeman had admitted that as he ran up the stairs an elevator from an upper floor had come down. The prosecution claimed the passenger in this elevator was a co-worker of the suspect’s, but this co-worker, whose statements were erratic, at best, said he didn’t go upstairs after lunch until after the time of the shooting.
The prosecution claimed he was wrong about this, of course. And had presented as proof that the co-worker had claimed he’d heard shots from above after he’d gone back upstairs, and was standing on the fifth floor. But the co-worker disputed this, and insisted he’d heard but one sound from directly above. And when the defense followed up, it was able to point out that the co-worker was standing by the elevator shaft on the west side of the building, and the sounds of the shots would have come in from the open window on the east side of the building, which was directly below the open window from which the shots were supposedly fired. And then proposed that the sound heard by the co-worker was not a shot at all, but the sound of the roof hatch being slammed as the policeman returned from his inspection of the roof.
In the end, we were confused as to just what this co-worker heard and just where he was at the moment of the shooting. But the prosecution’s claims of his whereabouts reeked of desperation. In order to have him as the occupant of the elevator that had descended as the policeman ran up the stairs, they had necessitated his standing right by this elevator as the suspect had ran down the stairs from the floor above—and well, this was a problem, seeing as it was not an enclosed stairwell, and the suspect would have to have run out from the stairs coming down from above, and then cross the floor within a few yards of this co-worker—before proceeding on down staircase after staircase to where he was spotted by the policeman moments later.
We recall the testimony of the three men who’d been having lunch on the fifth floor, and realize its significance. They were standing with their backs turned towards the elevator, and a lot of open warehouse floor behind them. But they had not heard or noticed either of the men supposedly on the floor behind them—the co-worker at work or the suspect running down the stairs from above and crossing the floor right past him.
And the thought occurs now that they didn’t notice these men because the co-worker did not come up until after the time of the shooting, precisely as he’d claimed, and the suspect had not run downstairs. He was downstairs during the shooting, precisely as he claimed. And some unknown person or persons had descended in the elevator as the policeman ran up the stairs, and had exited the building before it was sealed off.
The prosecution’s claims just don’t add up. While it had made much ado about the suspect’s palmprint being found on the rifle, the defense had been able to elicit testimony proving the FBI initially claimed the suspect’s print was not on the rifle, and only changed their opinion after being presented with a supposed lift from the rifle by the local police…days after the arrest of the suspect, and the supposed transfer of all pertinent evidence to the FBI. It was as if they got a do-over.
The case reeks of desperation, and smells to high hell.
In an attempt to cut off claims by the defense that the shooting could not have been the work of one man, the prosecution had presented experts who claimed they’d re-constructed the shooting. Well, the defense, upon cross-examination, had been able to elicit testimony from these experts that their re-construction proved the only way the defendant could be guilty of killing this prominent man all by his lonesome was to fire three shots rapid fire, and have one of these shots not just strike the man in the back but have the bullet exit from his throat and wound the other prominent man riding in front of him. Well, this was surprising seeing as the doctors testifying for the prosecution had testified to examining the body of the deceased, and to finding no passage of a bullet in the body from the back wound to the presumed exit on his throat.
We don’t know what actually happened, and we may never know, short the unlikely event the suspect confesses when he testifies today, but we know that the prosecution’s theory of the crime is not a reasonable explanation for what has happened.
As the victim was not an ordinary man, but someone with a multitude of enemies, a number of whom possessed the ability to hire a team of shooters and frame an oddball like the suspect—we realize that, in good conscience, we cannot condemn this man to death for the murder of the prominent man.
So now we’re sitting here, in the deliberation room, and thinking that the once slight room for doubt we had about the defendant’s guilt has grown to be the size of a room. The deliberation room, in which we sit.
The Spirit of Justice looking through the eyes of Henry Fonda can see this. Heck, Henry Fonda, in his current state, can see this. It’s as clear a case of reasonable doubt as one can find.
Reasonable doubt, after all, does not require proof the defendant did not commit the crime, it merely requires that enough questions remain about the defendant’s guilt that a guilty verdict—a claim the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—is unjustified.
So here we are: looking through the eyes of Henry Fonda, in an imaginary sequel to Twelve Angry Men, prepared to hear the suspect’s testimony, and barring any bombshells, embark upon a point by point discussion of the case with our fellow jurors…to show them there are substantial doubts the suspect fired the weapon, or even had the ability to shoot the weapon with the degree of skill required to do what he is purported to have done.
Only when we come out of our flashback on the trial, filmed in glorious black and white, of course, we witness the following…
Four members of the jury are yelling—actually yelling—that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. They totally accept that the suspect shot the victim without an identifiable motive. They totally accept that the eyewitness was right about the suspect but wrong about the shirt. They totally accept that a high-velocity bullet somehow traversed the body from back to front without leaving a discernible pathway. And they totally accept that the suspect somehow managed to perform a shooting feat which experts had been unable to replicate.
And they think the concerns raised by their fellow jurors over the ever-changing stories and inconsistent pieces of evidence presented by the prosecution is nit-picking, and Anti-American.
They don’t care what the suspect has to say. They don’t like the defendant. They want him to pay. And they want to go home.
And so we rise, and clear our throat, and prepare to use Henry Fonda’s voice to convince these irate jurors to save all their arguments for after the trial. And think to ourselves that we will then go through the case point by point, and show them that the prosecution has failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and that a verdict of not guilty is appropriate.
But then shots ring out.
The suspect, while en route to the courthouse from his jail cell, and surrounded by dozens of local police, some of whom look suspiciously like Tom Robinson’s guards in To Kill a Mockingbird, has been killed by a local strip club owner–who claims he did it for the public good.
We are skeptical, because if there’s anything we know about strip club owners, it’s that they’re not really concerned with the public good.
We begin to discuss this with our fellow jurors, but are rushed from the deliberation room, and told to go home.
Part II: Looking Through the Eyes of Jack Klugman
Imagine if you will that we are the Spirit of Justice looking through the eyes of Jack Klugman, in a hypothetical episode of Quincy M.E., an American TV show that ran from 1976 to 1983. In this episode we have been hired as a consultant to a convicted murderer in a third world country. We’ve been able to show that the victim’s wounds were inconsistent with a bullet trajectory proposed at the trial, and that the location of a back wound presented to the jury on a diagram depicting the shooting, had been inaccurate, and had been placed in a location which implicated the defendant. The defense counsel’s submission of our analysis before an appeals court has been met with approval, and the defendant has received a second trial.
Now here we are, at the second trial, preparing to take the stand. The prosecution has admitted their prior mistake regarding the back wound, and has presented a new theory of the shooting, in which the back wound is now in its supposedly proper location. But they are admitting to a second mistake as well, and are claiming that the head wound entrance was also placed in an incorrect location at the original trial, and that that is why the victim’s wounds were inconsistent with the bullet trajectory proposed at that original trial. They are essentially telling the jury “Trust us. We got it right this time.”
But we have done our homework. And have found that the trajectory still doesn’t work, as it requires a bullet’s traveling through the spine of the murder victim on a straight trajectory before entering the back of a second victim, crashing through his rib cage, smashing through his wrist, and imbedding itself in his leg. And we have discovered that the wound ballistics expert hired by the prosecution has made some desperate claims to make his case, such as that a bullet will lose substantially more velocity traveling through an inch of back tissue than it will through four inches of a neck, and that a skull will explode from the temporary cavity created by the passage of the bullets used in this killing while they travel through the skull…at a distance many times greater than the distance attributed to such injuries in previous studies of this ammunition.
And we have performed some investigations of our own. And have found that the wounds described in the autopsy reports to the scalp, skull, dura, and brain are not only inconsistent with the bullet trajectory proposed by the prosecution, but consistent with a bullet heading on an alternative trajectory, one in which the bullet strikes the top of the head at a shallow angle, and leaves an enormous wound of both entrance and exit.
And we have discovered numerous other pieces of evidence to support such a scenario. The emergency room physician who pronounced the death of the victim had had experience with such wounds, and had said on the day of the shooting, in a press conference, that the victim’s large head wound appeared to be a wound of this nature, a tangential wound of both entrance and exit.
And that’s not the worst of it. While researching tangential wounds we discovered that the prosecution’s own consultants have written textbooks in which they describe a large gaping wound as symptomatic of such an entrance, and not of an exit, and knew full well this clashed with their conclusion in this case, and had thereby added a footnote to their report in which they claimed they presumed the doctors citing the missing scalp in this instance were all mistaken.
But, hold it right there. They attributed the mistake to one doctor, when they almost certainly knew his observation of missing scalp was backed up by numerous doctors–essentially everyone who saw the wound in the emergency room and autopsy room.
And we are prepared to explain to a jury the relevance of these mistakes regarding the medical evidence—that the prosecution’s experts have mis-represented two separate head wounds as one head wound—which serves to support the scenario provided these hired guns of medicine by the prosecution, which knew full well that two head wounds would necessitate the presence of a second shooter.
And we have even more to tell the jury, to help them see what has happened. The prosecution has presented a trajectory expert who claims he’s aligned the wounds of the victims at the time of the shooting and determined the likely location of the shooter—which is of course the presumed location of the defendant.
But we have uncovered a problem here as well. The new and improved location provided by the prosecution for the entrance on the victim’s head—a location that had been moved because it was inconsistent with the damage to the victim’s brain (and a location, btw, at odds with the statements of everyone to see this entrance) is towards the top of the back of the head, at the same level of the proposed exit location on the front of the head. And this has forced this trajectory expert to propose that at the time of the head shot the victim was leaning forward at the same angle as the bullet was travelling from a sixth-floor window. Okay. But the medical experts had, as we recall, corrected the error of the previous trial and had acknowledged the back wound to be on the back, at a slightly lower location on the body than the proposed exit on the throat. Well, this forced the trajectory expert to propose that the victim leaned forward at an even sharper angle when this shot was fired.
So here’s the problem, which we shall soon share with the jury. There are films of the shooting which show the victim sitting up at the time of the shot supposedly traveling from back to throat, on a supposedly slightly upwards trajectory, and then, seconds later, leaning sharply forwards and being shot through the head, on a purported flat trajectory through the head.
Well, this makes no sense. The prosecution has proposed that a bullet fired from six floors up through a person sitting erect in a seat has traveled through his body on a slightly upwards trajectory, and that a second bullet fired from this same location but a few seconds later after the victim’s head had slumped forwards had traveled through his head on a flat trajectory.
The shots as proposed could not have come from the same location. But the trajectory expert has claimed that his re-creations of the shooting using protractors and dolls have demonstrated just that.
This is two plus two equals five kinda stuff. The films of the shooting prove the prosecution’s expert is spewing nonsense, which the defense plans to use to unravel the entire case against the defendant.
But then word arrives that the defendant has been stricken with cancer—a fast-moving kind—and the trial has been postponed. And then, a few weeks later, that the defendant has died, and oh well, Jack Klugman as Quincy is sent home to America, where thank God, trials of this nature would never ever happen.
Part III: Looking Through the Eyes of an Audience Member at a JFK Conference
Imagine if you will that we are the Spirit of Justice looking through the eyes of John Q. Public, and have decided to attend a research conference on the killing of President John F. Kennedy, to see if any progress has been made since we last looked at it through the eyes of Jack Klugman.
We take a seat at the back of the conference room, and witness the following…
A series of speakers on the problematic medical evidence who fail to discuss the official reports of the autopsy, other than to claim they were faked to suggest the defendant’s sole guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Well, this is odd. We know from our work on Quincy that the evidence actually suggests the opposite.
The next speaker is strangely certain of himself. He says things such as that we “know” there was a bullet entrance on the victim’s forehead, and that we “know” this even though no one actually viewing the body had said they saw this, because, well, uh, a man whose family later declared he had dementia at the time had said a person had once shown him a photo showing such a hole, and even though this person—the one who’d supposedly shown him this picture—had once described seeing photos not currently in the official record, but had said nothing about the photo this demented man claimed he’d shown him. And yes, even though the very person claiming this man to be an all-important witness for this bullet hole that went unobserved by all the credible witnesses, had admitted that this demented man had told him numerous similar stories which he believed were, uh, the ramblings of a demented person.
This speaker then proceeds to tell us that the supposedly fake autopsy report was not so much a faked report, as a reasonably accurate report on the body of the President after it had been altered by the autopsy doctors—and never mind that their assistant was on stage with an earlier speaker and had just said this did not happen. This speaker says that the assistant who was in the autopsy room is not to be trusted on this because well, he apparently has forgotten that he was locked out of the room for ninety minutes. And oh yeah, never mind as well that the x-ray tech who’d said he saw the doctors cut on the body said they did this after the x-rays had been taken. This speaker states as a fact that the x-ray tech saw them do this before the x-rays were taken, and that that is why the x-rays depict a wound where the speaker just can’t believe a wound was actually located.
We get up and leave the room, but come back an hour later to see if the next speaker is any more convincing.
Nope, this speaker claims a long-dead police officer whose son once tried to auction off his father’s diary—that turned out to be a fake–fired the last of three shots fired upon the President from in front of the President, and this leads someone to shout out from the crowd that this couldn’t be because it had actually been a teen-aged mafia assassin, who’d confessed to the killing on YouTube.
And this leads someone from the audience to stand up and explain that he feels certain it was a secret service agent who’d fired the final shot from the front, from right there in the car, which apparently no one noticed.
And this leads yet another member of the audience to jump up and say “No, no, no.” The Secret Service agent who’d killed the President with the final shot had fired from the follow-up car, which apparently no one noticed.
And this leads yet another frustrated Sherlock to stand up and yell that they are all wrong because no shots came from behind, period, and that the accused assassin was not even in the building from which the shots were fired, when the shots were fired, because he was really outside on the front steps, where he was captured in a famous photo taken during the shooting. He holds up the photo, and then explains that the reason this figure looks like an employee of the building is because a secret CIA photo lab took the original photo from its photographer within minutes of the shooting, and added the face of this employee onto the body of the accused.
And this provokes yet another outcry, this one from someone who assures this last man that the accused assassin isn’t even visible in that photo, but then adds that he is visible in some news footage taken moments later.
He then passes around photo-copies of a blurry image taken from this news footage. It shows a figure at the back of the crowd which he claims is a man, but others in the audience think is a woman, holding what he claims is a Coke bottle, but which others in the audience think looks like a coffee cup.
We attend the talk of one last speaker.
This speaker claims, as fact, that the killing of Kennedy was part of a series of killings orchestrated by an evil government agency, that has similarly faked moon landings, and school shootings, and stolen an election from a billionaire businessman whose primary policy proposals are cutting the taxes on billionaires such as himself, and using the military to round up his perceived enemies.
We had come to this conference with hopes of hearing new developments in the case, but were instead fed dubious theories by people who see the evidence through the eyes of the people who’d misled them, and conclude from this that the evidence must be fake…who then cast into that black empty cauldron their own recipe for batshit bouillabaisse. Instead of History 101: we were fed a JFK Assassination Horror Story stew of slimy spooks and ghastly ghouls, peppered with zombie lies, and heated by voodoo science.
Seeing this, The Spirit of Justice looking through the eyes of an ordinary man at a JFK conference decides to flee this nightmare, deserts the body of our everyman, and dissipates back into the ether.
For Cyril
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