Single-bullet theory

[28] It was from this re-creation, and the testimony of the agent in the sniper's nest, that the Commission verified the theory to its satisfaction, as the governor was in a direct line to be struck by any bullet fired between frames 207 and 235 to 240[29] which exited the president's throat.

[39][40] The Dallas Morning News reporter Mary Woodward described hearing three shots as she stood in front of the Texas School Book Depository.

[50] These do not necessarily correspond with bullet wounds, since Kennedy was struck with his arm raised in the air, and multiple photos taken of the President during the motorcade show that his jacket was bunched in the rear below his collar.

This 8 mm film, which was taken approximately 90 seconds before the shooting, clearly shows that President Kennedy's suit coat was bunched up around the neckline around the time of the assassination.

[54] The concluding page of the Bethesda autopsy report[55] states: "The other missile [referring to the body-penetrating bullet] entered the right superior posterior thorax above the scapula, and traversed the soft tissues of the supra-scapular and the supra-clavicular portions of the base of the right side of the neck.

This report does note that the doctor (Commander Humes) at the time said that he was unable to locate an "outlet" for the wound in Kennedy's shoulder (not his back).

At the time of the autopsy, toward the end of the procedure, initial probing of the shoulder wound suggested the bullet entered the base of Kennedy's neck at a 45 to 60 degree angle.

The Commission concluded that this angle was consistent with the bullet making the observed paths through the President's upper body and striking Governor Connally in the right armpit.

Later tests show that such bullets survive intact when fired into solid wood and multiple layers of skin and ballistic gel, as well.

To render his animation, Myers took photographs, home footage, blueprints and plans, and attempted to use them to create an accurate computer reenactment of the assassination.

His work was assessed by Z-Axis, who have been involved in producing computer-generated animations of events, processes and concepts for major litigation in the United States and Europe.

[79] Myers's animation found that the bullet wounds were consistent with JFK's and Governor Connally's positions at the time of shooting, and that by following the bullet's trajectory backwards it could be found to have originated from a narrow cone including only a few windows of the sixth floor of the School Book Depository, one of which was the sniper's nest of boxes from which the rifle barrel had been seen protruding by witnesses.

[80] Surgeon John Lattimer has argued that the jacket bulged out because of the "hail of rib fragments and soft tissue" as the bullet tumbled in Connally's body.

[82] Their re-enactment of the assassination using current forensics and materials found that a single bullet almost exactly duplicated the path of travel specified in the single-bullet theory.

[82] Warren Commission documents released after the publication of its report revealed that the FBI had arranged for bullet CE 399 and the various fragments found in the car and in Governor Connally's wounds to be examined using neutron activation analysis (NAA).

Ken Rahn of the University of Rhode Island,[86] a chemist and meteorologist who has a long-standing interest in the Kennedy Assassination, maintains that the NAA data excludes a "three bullet hit" and proves the single-bullet theory actually occurred.

Contradicting this conclusion, in an article published in July 2006 in the Journal of Forensic Sciences by Erik Randich and Patrick M Grant,[88] the authors took a significantly different view of the NAA data and the metallurgical profile of the Carcano ammunition.

The authors found errors in the analysis by Guinn: Thus, elevated concentrations of antimony and copper at crystallographic grain boundaries, the widely varying sizes of grains in MC bullet lead, and the 5–60 mg bullet samples analyzed for assassination intelligence effectively resulted in operational sampling error for the analyses.

This deficiency was not considered in the original data interpretation and resulted in an invalid conclusion in favor of the single-bullet theory of the assassination.Randich and Grant concluded: The end-result of these metallurgical considerations is that, from the antimony concentrations measured by VPG [Vincent P. Guinn] in the specimens from the JFK assassination, there is no justification for concluding that two, and only two, bullets were represented by the evidence.The conclusion of Randich and Grant had been advanced earlier by Arthur Snyder of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory in a paper written in 2001.

[89] In August 2006 Ken Rahn wrote a response critical of the Randich/Grant paper on his website[90] claiming that Randich and Grant did not analyse the data correctly: Both sections of the article failed to make their case.

The metallurgical section contained a huge gap in its logic (proposing an explanation but failing to support it quantitatively), and predicted at least two features of the elemental data that were the opposite of that actually observed.

The statistical section started well, but stumbled when it confused heterogeneity with analytical uncertainty and when it used confidence intervals instead of difference in means to assess the separation of the two groups of crime-scene fragments.

The validity of CBLA was discredited in a 2002 paper ("A Metallurgical Review of the Interpretation of Compositional Bullet Lead Analysis" (2002), 127 Forensic Science International, 174–191)[92] co-authored by Randich and by former FBI Chief Metallurgist, William Tobin.

[95] The NAS report on CBLA, and its relevance to the Guinn's analysis of bullet lead in the JFK assassination, is the subject of comment by Randich and Grant in their 2006 paper at page 719.

According to one popular version of the single-bullet theory (promoted by Gerald Posner in his book, Case Closed), the interval between frame 223 and 224 is the time the same projectile passes through both Kennedy and Connally's body.

believe the puffing out of Connally's cheeks is simply physics at work, as the bullet collapses one of his lungs, forcing air into his mouth.

[100] The premise that a collapsed lung would cause Connally's cheeks to puff out is dismissed by Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the HSCA.

Perhaps the most outspoken critic of the single-bullet theory has been pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, who, as a member of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he explained why, in his view, the left-to-right trajectory from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository through Kennedy's neck could not possibly intersect with Connally's right armpit.

According to the analysis done by the HSCA, the horizontal angle from the 6th floor window of the Texas School Book Depository to the limousine at frame 190 or so was about 13 degrees, right to left.

[110] NASA Engineer Thomas Canning provided an analysis of the photograph taken by Hugh Betzner from the rear of the limousine a moment prior to the first shot.