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Roy Johnson
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Posted: 14 December 2014 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | 1  

On the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination I mentioned a book (MORTAL ERROR: THE SHOT THAT KILLED JFK by Bonar Menninger). on the boards and said I'd read and review it. I know nobody remembers, but I didn't want to not keep my word, even on something so trivial. So, here goes.

I bought this book a while ago, but only read it in the past few months. It's of some interest as the investigator, Howard Donahue, was originally hired to support the Warren Commission findings for a men's adventure magazine. He otherwise had no  apparent agenda or pet theory he wanted to put forth. He didn't start with a convoluted idea of the Mafia working the the Reptillians and Dr Doom to kill the President. He just followed the evidence. He just applied ballistics and basic math which lead to his conclusions. He ended up disputing the Warren Commission findings.

Basically, his findings are as laid out here:
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20 Files/D%20Disk/Donahue%20Howard/Item%2006.pdf

His conclusions are briefly these:

Three shots were fired.

The first, by Oswald, missed JFK and struck either the asphalt road or concrete curb, kicking up debris (shrapnel) that struck JFK in the back of the head, causing him to exclaim that he was hit. I misremembered this as the point where JFK reflexively raise his arms to his neck area, however Donahue notes it occurring at the neck shot (#2). An article in a late 19th Century medical journal describes a neuromuscular reflex that causes the elbows to fly up and out after severed spinal trauma that is consistent with Kennedy.

The second shot, by Oswald, was the so-called Magic Bullet, that the Warren Commission claimed passed through the President and Governor Connally. Based on the positioning of the bodies (i.e. that Connally was sitting in a 'booster seat' located about 6 inches inward to the car centreline than JFK and  a bit lower), one bullet followed an essentially straight line path, not the Oliver Stone changing direction in mid air. The argument that the bullet was 'pristine'  was refuted as it can be seen to be squished at the bottom end. As a metal jacketed bullet, it is specifically designed to pass through people.

The part that comes as the kicker is Donahue's assessment of the source of the third bullet - the sickening headshot of the Zapruder film. For this, he uses some basic angle calculations and the position of entrance wound and 'exit' wound (there isn't really an exit wound, as a chunk of skull was blown out), he back tracks the source to be down low and from the left of the President. In his view, that indicated the last shot came from the Secret Service car immediately behind JFK's. Specifically he names a SS agent as picking up the AR-15 rifle after the 1st shot, looking around with the rifle raised, then when the car sped up, accidentally firing it and hitting the President.

His findings were first published in the above newspaper article. Then nothing. Nobody seemed to care and people forgot about it.

Author Bonar Menninger wrote a book about Donahue's research, his quest to testify at a government subcommittee on the assassination, and so on. it was published in 1992.

The book itself is very interesting and well written, Donahue's ideas are well presented and relatively easy to follow. I was reading on a Kindle, which is not quite as good as a hard copy would be for quickly flipping between text pages and diagrams/figures that show the angles he's talking about.

As to the validity of his work -- I'm not qualified to say; but I will. One thing that bothered me repeatedly throughout the book was the constant lack of any mention of uncertainty in his work. There is a brief section towards the end that speaks briefly of it, but not much comes of it. Given that people are estimating positions (of cars, of bodies, of entrance and exit wounds, etc.), at the end of the day I'm guessing (see, I'm _guessing_) that the position of say entrance/exit wounds can be off by +-10cm or more. If you vary the location of an entrance wound and an exit wound by 10 cm around say the centre of JFK's skull, it greatly changes the angles of bullet's paths. He frequently talks of measurements as though they are not subject to any uncertainty. I can't get behind that.

His data on the second shot (the magic bullet) that validates the concept is very well done. The explanation of the orientation of Connally and his position in the booster seat is exemplary - worthy of Holmes, I'd say ;-)

The problems with the work are, in my mind, variations of the uncertainty mentioned above.

For example, the head shot. Developing a trajectory is dependent upon certain basic pieces of information: the location of the entrance wound on the president's skull and it's position in space relative to Dealey Plaza, the 'exit wound' which doesn't really exist as a hole indicating where a bullet came out only as a large skull fragment blown out by the force of the shock wave propagating though the brain, etc.

The entrance wound in the head was placed in the autopsy as being about the middle of the back of the head, specifically slightly above and to the right of the external occipital protuberance; about the top of the spine at the middle of the head. Donahue based his original ballistics on that. He took the large defect on the right side of JFK's head and arbitrarily placed the would-be exit wound in the middle of that (I think, going by memory). To him, that excluded the possibility of Oswald as the shooter, as the angle was way too low. Also, the autopsy report notes the size of the entrance wound as 6 mm in diameter, which is smaller than the 6.5 mm bullet from Oswald's rifle. (To the Americans reading this, a single millimetre (mm) is about 0.04 inches). To me, a 0.5 mm difference is well within the margin of error someone would make in what was, by all accounts, a hurried and circus-like autopsy. You try measuring something to 0.5 mm tolerance without a large magnifying glass and see how you do. Oh, and the autopsy doctor's were only allowed to view the x-rays once and not at the time they wrote their report.

Anyway, in 1968, the US Attorney General ordered an appraisal of the autopsy work. Their report placed the head wound about 100 mm (4 inches) above the autopsy location. Donahue chose to use that location in his assessment.

Based on those items, Donahue concludes that the bullet had to come from the back left, i.e. SS car.

What's the problem with that? Well, I cite the uncertainty above. In addition, would the bullet actually follow a straight in and out path?

According to some forensic dudes on the NOVA special, the answer is not necessarily. In tests done by at the US Army biophysical lab using the Carcano rifle ammo (6.5 mm), they didn't follow a straight path. Once the bullet starts tumbling through the brain it can yaw upwards.

For the Magic Bullet, in the NOVA special on the assassination they test fire the Carcano bullet through 36 inches (900 mm) of pine board (which is what Mythbusters determined was a good equivalent to human bone when they first rebuilt Buster). The bullet marginally deformed, but otherwise looked as 'pristine' as the magic bullet. So, it's possible to fire a metal jacketed bullet through 2 people and have it looked relatively unaffected. The bullet also yaws upon exiting the test JFK and leaves an oblong entrance wound on the target representing Connally, which is consistent with what was found. So, the magic bullet, well, isn't magic, it's a perfectly normal bullet. Elementary.

Donahue has a problem with the idea of the same metal jacketed bullet striking the skull and leaving some of the metal in the skull and then become frangible and blow out the skull. So, can the same kind of bullet that can pass through 3 ft of wood be shattered by a skull? Well, the same NOVA special cites tests completed  which show the bullet jacket being stripped away by impact with the skull. Damned experimental evidence getting in the way of armchair theorizing.

So - is Donahue correct in concluding that an accidental firing of an AR-15 rifle by a Secret Service agent resulted in the explosive head shot? Well - I want to run the angles, but I think that the tests show that the Carcano bullets did the damage.

I haven't look at the timing of the shots or the angles (in fact, I haven't written anything down except this rambling nonsense), but maybe I will for kicks.

I've still to read the Appendices.

For a cogent refutation of conspiracy theories, I recommend Gerald Posner's CASE CLOSED.



Edited by Roy Johnson on 14 December 2014 at 9:11pm
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John Byrne
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Posted: 14 December 2014 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | 2  

For a cogent refutation of conspiracy theories, I recommend Gerald Posner's CASE CLOSED.

•••

Ditto. Three shots, one shooter. Oswald. Done.

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Matthew Chartrand
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Posted: 14 December 2014 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | 3  


 I read this book a number of years ago, pretty interesting. One of the more "plausible" conspiracy theories. 

  Did Posner's  book address this theory?
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Roy Johnson
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Posted: 14 December 2014 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | 4  

Posner only mentions Donahue's observations on the 'pristine' bullet not being pristine, not his theory; at least according to the index. He doesn't mention Hickey (the Secret Service agent Donahue concludes accidentally fired the AR-15 at JFK) at all.

Edited by Roy Johnson on 14 December 2014 at 9:39pm
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Shaun Barry
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Posted: 14 December 2014 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | 5  


This Kennedy assassination video, hosted by Peter Jennings (in 2003, shortly before he died), and suggesting quite convincingly that Oswald was the lone shooter, was all I ever needed to see again on the subject:

The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy

It's 90 minutes, but well worth anybody's time.



Edited by Shaun Barry on 14 December 2014 at 10:44pm
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Doug Centers
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Posted: 14 December 2014 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | 6  

"For a cogent refutation of conspiracy theories, I recommend Gerald Posner's CASE CLOSED."

...

No need for me to read that, as far as I'm concerned the "case has been closed" for some years now. This was one mans quest to be "relevant".

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John Byrne
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Posted: 15 December 2014 at 3:12am | IP Logged | 7  

The only "alternate" reading of that day that ever made any sense to me was that Oswald's actual target was Gov. Connelly. Apparently, he'd signed Oswald's dishonorable discharge papers, and some suggested Lee Harvey was out for revenge.

It sort of works, in the context of Oswald waiting for the car to turn the corner and be moving away, when, if Kennedy was the target, it would have been easier to take the shots when the car was approaching. But if Connelly was the target, he would not have been in the clear (windshield in the way) until the car turned.

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Roy Johnson
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Posted: 15 December 2014 at 6:56am | IP Logged | 8  

It's not difficult to see (or understand) why conspiracy theories have proliferated over the years.

I'm no researcher, but I do recall from high school history class learning about the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources of information.

The problem with this "case" is, as a lay person, having an idea of which "source" is being used by anyone in their argument. "The head wound was located here" says someone; "no it was here" says someone else. Who the hell do you believe - one is citing the autopsy, the other the committee that said it was 4 inches higher.

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Mike Devlin
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Posted: 15 December 2014 at 6:59am | IP Logged | 9  

"For a cogent refutation of conspiracy theories, I recommend Gerald Posner's CASE CLOSED."
...

Count me in as a big fan of Gerald Posner`s tome.
A great piece of skeptical writing, IMO. Very enjoyable to see GP demolish
conspiracy theories as he goes. Pointing out in the text and footnotes, how unlikely
or impossible and unsupported by evidence ,the various theories are.

And now 20 years have passed, there`s still no hard evidence for ANY
of the conspiracy theories. Oswald working for the mob, for intelligence
agencies. Being a patsy etc

Speaking of the "theory" that George Hickey, the secret service man, killed JFK by accident...

"...there are few theories that are worse..."
"...dismissible on its face ,because of photographic evidence, that shows it`s not possible,
but still, that hasn`t stopped it from making the rounds."- Gerald Posner

Those quotes comes from an excellent and long interview with Gerald Posner,
from November 2013, which I listened to at the time, last year.
The MP3 is available at this website...

Strange Frequencies Radio

Well worth a listen! The Gerald Posner interview starts at 51:55
and the discussion of the "accidental assasination" begins
at 1:12:33.

While we`re at it, another good 2013 interview with Mr.Posner can be found
in Episode 435 of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast...

SGU




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Vinny Valenti
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Posted: 15 December 2014 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | 10  

"Ditto. Three shots, one shooter. Oswald. Done."

---

I think the 9/11 conspiracy nuts have shown us that there
could have been a live camera focused on Oswald firing the
the 3 shots from the window of the Texas School Book
Depository, and there STILL would be people denying that
Oswald was the shooter, or that he acted alone.
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John Bodin
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Posted: 15 December 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | 11  

Not so much a conspiracy, but I've always found the enigmatic "Babushka Lady" in the various JFK shooting pictures to be interesting, given that they were never able to discern WHO she was:

Link:  "The Babushka Lady"

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Jesus Garcia
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Posted: 15 December 2014 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | 12  

I haven't explored the material and so have to go by impressions: the only element that would make me disbelieve the single-shooter theory would the apparent FBI's inability to reproduce Oswald's "feat" as sniper with an identical weapon, under identical environmental conditions ...

... unless this as been debunked as well.

If not, then ...
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