DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Anyone who could possibly take seriously the illustration below is a person who apparently doesn't have a clue as to where the entry wound was located in JFK's upper back. The wound is way, way too low in that diagram. And to rely SOLELY on the hole in JFK's shirt is just silly beyond all belief. The authenticated-as-unaltered [7 HSCA 41] autopsy photo is obviously the BEST evidence to rely on with respect to the true location of JFK's upper-back wound.
Not to mention the other deliberate distortions and gross errors that are contained within the joke of a diagram below -- e.g., the downward angle to Kennedy's back wound is too steep; the diagram shows Kennedy and Connally sitting at the exact same height in the car; and it looks to me like the exit wound in JFK's neck is a tad bit too high too....
And this illustration is yet another example of how certain conspiracists will play fast and loose with the facts in the JFK case.
Dr. Cyril Wecht, for one, is particularly fond of the above-linked incredibly deceptive and flat-out-wrong diagram. Wecht even utilized that hunk-of-junk chart during his testimony at the 1986 mock trial of Lee Oswald in London [see video below].
What Dr. Wecht decided to do was to invent a make-believe gunman in another window of the Texas School Book Depository Building on Elm Street.
Wecht said in 1986 that his "own analysis" of the shooting and the trajectories indicated that the shot that passed through President Kennedy's upper back and neck had originated from a floor in the Depository that was much lower than Lee Oswald's sixth-floor sniper's perch, with Wecht choosing (apparently out of thin air) the SECOND floor on the WEST side of the TSBD Building.
That type of pure speculation about the location of a phantom gunman in the TSBD, of course, meant that Dr. Wecht was now free to utilize the chart above, which shows an absurdly askew lateral (right-to-left) angle for the bullet that went through JFK's back/neck.
And, of course, via this magical feat of pretending there was a gunman on the WEST end of the SECOND floor of the TSBD, Wecht can then also pretend that the bullet (which EVEN HE AGREES went clean through Kennedy's body without stopping and without changing directions) could avoid striking Governor Connally or anything else in the limousine.
"The inescapable fact that unless a bullet--especially one fired from a high-speed weapon, reasonably high-speed, approximately 2,000 feet per second muzzle velocity--unless it strikes something of firm substance, such as bone or something else, that that bullet will travel in a straight line." -- Dr. Cyril H. Wecht [1 HSCA 342]
Dr. Wecht didn't repeat his theory about a second-floor TSBD assassin during his June 2007 radio debate with Vincent Bugliosi, but the Pittsburgh pathologist was still advocating (as of 2007) the notion that the bullet that passed through JFK could have easily missed Connally and "gone on out over the left side of the car".
I like Dr. Wecht. I think he's fun to listen to, especially when he gets fired up in his anti-SBT rhetoric and starts talking about how the Warren Commission's test bullets should have mimicked the appearance of CE399, even though none of those tests bullets in question attempted to duplicate the complete multi-victim flight path of the SBT bullet. But, Dr. Wecht acts as though CE399 should have ended up as badly mangled as test bullet CE856. ~shrug~
But the kind of sleight-of-hand that Dr. Wecht has done with the evidence and the angles and the SBT bullet, via his utilization of this crazy diagram, is just plain old misinformation and distortion, and in my opinion deserves nothing but ridicule.
Plus, that diagram also misrepresents the location of JFK's upper-back wound too. The wound as depicted in this chart is way too far to the RIGHT on Kennedy's back. And the reason for placing the wound too far to the right on JFK's back is fairly obvious too -- it's because if the wound was placed in the proper location (i.e., more toward the center of JFK's back), it would then mean that the bullet exiting Kennedy's throat would have probably hit Nellie Connally, given the wildly exaggerated right-to-left lateral angle that Dr. Wecht endorses in the diagram.
David Von Pein
August 30, 2010
