Don Curtis, Parkland resident, on JFK assassination: "the posterior part of his head was blown out."

[Karmadillo]

62. Not sure if JFK's autopsy qualifies as

one having calm and measurable circumstances. And why do the autopsy photos seem at odds with the recollections of so many eyewitnesses? And then there are stories like these that just make one wonder what was going on once JFK's body left Dallas:

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/10/243981006/inconsistencies-haunt-official-record-of-kennedys-death

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So Gunn turned to a retired Navy warrant officer, Sandra Spencer, who, according to government records, had processed the autopsy film. She had not been questioned by the Warren Commission.

When Gunn showed her the official photos from the National Archives during her deposition in 1997, she said they were not the pictures she remembered processing.

Spencer, who died about a year ago, was in her 20s when she worked in Washington, D.C., at the Navy's central photo lab. At that time, the lab processed all official White House photographs.

For questioning, she brought with her some pictures she had printed just a few days before Kennedy was murdered. She explained that the lab bought huge quantities of photographic paper, so the markings on the back of the prints she brought would certainly match the autopsy photos she processed. But they didn't, suggesting they were printed at a different time or a different place.

What's more, the official pictures weren't anything like the ones she remembered.

"The prints that we printed did not have the massive head damages that is visible here," she told Gunn. "... The face, the eyes were closed and the face, the mouth was closed, and it was more of a rest position than these show."

The National Archives' photos seemed to be taken in a bright, medical setting. The body was bloody. Spencer said the pictures she had processed seemed to be taken in a darkened room with a flash. She called them "pristine." "There was no blood or opening cavities ... or anything of that nature. It was quite reverent in how they handled it," she said.

Of course, Gunn interviewed Spencer 30 years after the event, and that's a long time to remember every detail. But still, why didn't she recognize any of the official autopsy photos? Why are they on different paper from what she was using at the time? And whatever happened to the pictures she did remember processing?

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/jfk/jfk1110.htm

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The report points to, for instance, the testimonies of former FBI agent Francis X. O'Neill Jr., who was present at the Nov. 22, 1963, autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and of former Navy photographer John T. Stringer, who said he took photos at a supplementary brain examination two or three days later, probably on the morning of Nov. 25.

O'Neill told the board in a 1997 deposition that at the Nov. 22 autopsy "there was not too much of the brain left" when it was taken out of Kennedy's skull and "put in a white jar." He said "more than half of the brain was missing."

Shown the brain photographs deeded to the Archives by the Kennedy family, which were taken sometime after the autopsy, O'Neill said they did not square with what he saw. The "only section of the brain which is missing is this small section over here," O'Neill said of one photograph. "This looks almost like a complete brain."

Stringer said the photos he took at the "supplementary examination" conducted by J. Thornton Boswell and James Humes did not resemble those at the Archives. He said they seemed to be on "a different type of film" from the one he used. He said he also took photographs of "cross sections of the brain" that had been cut out to show the damage. No such photos are in the Archives collection.

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