Cold Case JFK, airing tonight on PBS at 9 pm, re-explores the JFK assassination with expert testimony and fresh technology. The big takeaway is that firearms experts Lucien and Michael Haag have concluded that the magic bullet — the one that caused seven two wounds in President John Kennedy and five in Governor John Connally, and yet was found on a stretcher in pristine shape — is not a joke. The most ridiculed shooting scenario in the history of modern forensics is scientifically supportable, they’re saying. Bad news for the conspiracy gang, of course, but they’re used to that by now.
The five other experts heard from during this televised inquiry are private investigator Josiah Thompson, medical examiner and forensic neuropathologist Peter Cummings, laser scanning specialist Tony Grissim, PBS newsman Jim Lehrer and historian and leading JFK assassination expert John McAdams.
You want to hear something creepy? Consider an excerpt from an 11.10 story on kbps.org (“Inconsistencies Haunt Official Record Of Kennedy’s Death“) by Marcus Rosenbaum. His main source is T. Jeremy Gunn, who “knows a lot” about the JFK murder from his work during the ’90s for the Assassination Records Review Board.
Gunn spoke “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,” Rosenbaum writes.
“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?”