Autopsy Fraud Convicts the Military in the JFK Assassination

August 17, 2023 jfk assassination

I recently completed a four-part article setting forth evidence that I contend convicts the CIA beyond a reasonable doubt of having produced an altered, fraudulent copy of the famous Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy and, therefore, convicts the CIA of the assassination itself. The title of my article is “The Evidence that Convicts the CIA of the JFK Assassination.”

The CIA, however, was not the only governmental entity engaged in a criminal cover-up immediately after the assassination. As I have detailed in my books An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, The Kennedy Autopsy, and The Kennedy Autopsy 2, so was the military establishment. That’s because it was the military that conducted a fraudulent autopsy on the president’s body on the evening of the assassination. As I have long maintained, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It necessarily equates to criminal culpability in the assassination itself. There is no way around that.

For example, the military pathologists in the Kennedy autopsy claimed that they had conducted only one brain examination.

Bethesda National Medical Center

During the term of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, however, Jeremy Gunn, the general counsel for the ARRB, and Douglas Horne, the chief analyst for military records for the ARRB, determined that that was a lie. In fact, there had been two brain examinations.

More important, as I detail in my books, the second brain exam could not possibly have involved the president’s brain. It came from someone else’s body.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a better example of autopsy fraud than that.

Timeline

Here’s a short timeline of events:

Friday, November 22, 1963: President Kennedy is assassinated.

Friday, November 22, 1963: A Secret Service team headed by a Secret Service agent named Roy Kellerman, who is sporting a Thompson submachine gun, forcibly prevents the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, from conducting an autopsy on President Kennedy’s body, which was required by state law, and forces its way out of Parkland Hospital with JFK’s body.

Friday evening, November 22, 1963: The military at the Bethesda, Maryland, National Naval Medical Center conducts a fraudulent autopsy on Kennedy’s body and forces military personnel involved in the autopsy to sign written secrecy oaths and threatens them with court martial or criminal prosecution if they ever disclose what they have seen or done.

Saturday, November 23, 1963: LIFE magazine publisher C.D. Jackson, a longtime asset of the CIA, authorizes LIFE‘s purchase of print rights to the film of the assassination from Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder for $50,000. Zapruder delivers his original film to LIFE magazine’s representative Richard Stolley.

Saturday evening, November 23, 1963: The CIA secretly delivers the Zapruder film to its National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C.

Sunday, November 24, 1963: The CIA secretly transports the Zapruder film to its top-secret photographic center named Hawkeyeworks, which is secretly located in the research and development section of Kodak’s national headquarters in Rochester, New York. Using an optical printer, the CIA photograph experts at Hawkeyeworks produce an altered, fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film, which the CIA then transports to NPIC in Washington and falsely claims is the original film. (Note: As I have previously emphasized, there is no evidence that Kodak personnel were involved in the CIA’s criminal conduct with respect to the Zapruder film.)

Monday, November 25, 1963: CIA asset C.D. Jackson authorizes LIFE‘s purchase of all rights, including print rights and film rights, to the Zapruder film for $150,000 — or the equivalent of about $1.4 million in today’s dollars. Jackson later announces that the Zapruder film will be sequestered and never shown to the American people.

It is that double event — the military’s fraudulent autopsy and the CIA’s fraudulent film — that establishes beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal culpability of the national-security establishment in the assassination of President Kennedy.

Fear of the truth

One of the big problems we face in this country is the unwillingness of so many Americans, including even some libertarians, to confront the evil that came to our nation when our governmental structure was changed from a limited-government republic to a national-security state. People simply do not want to believe that this transformation brought a cancer to the American body politic, including the omnipotent dark-side power of assassination, that is rotting our nation from within.

Oh sure, such people are more than willing to acknowledge and criticize such things as federal regulatory abuses, foreign-policy “mistakes,” errors in judgment by U.S. officials, and cost overruns involving such things as $10,000 toilet-seat covers for the military.

But acknowledging the very real evil at the center of the federal government is simply too frightening for these people. And so they bend over backwards to do everything they can to avoid acknowledging and confronting the overwhelming evidence that establishes that the national-security establishment engaged in autopsy fraud and film fraud as part of its cover-up of its assassination of President Kennedy.

Multiple casket entries

As I detail in my three books — An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, The Kennedy Autopsy, and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 — there are several aspects to the autopsy fraud in which the military engaged on the evening of the assassination. I’ve described one of these aspects — the two brain examinations — above. I would invite readers to read my three books to gain a full grasp of all of the aspects of the fraudulent autopsy. Even better, purchase and read Douglas Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, which is the watershed book that establishes fraud in the medical evidence in the Kennedy autopsy. Horne’s relentless commitment to truth is why I dedicated my two books The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story to him.

In this article, I wish to address another aspect of the autopsy fraud — the multiple introductions of the president’s body into the military morgue at the Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of the assassination, which enabled Navy pathologists James J. Humes and J Thornton Boswell to engage in shenanigans with respect to the president’s body prior to the official start of the autopsy.

Roger Boyajian

In the 1990s, the ARRB discovered the existence of a man named Roger Boyajian, who told the ARRB a remarkable story. He said that he had been a Marine sergeant stationed at the Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C., on the weekend of the assassination. He was ordered to the Bethesda military morgue to provide security for the autopsy.

Boyajian told the ARRB that his team carried President Kennedy’s body into the military morgue at 6:35 p.m. Equally important, he had retained an onion-skin copy of his after-action report that he had delivered to his commanding officer immediately after the assassination stating that his team had delivered the president’s body into the morgue at 6:35 p.m., a copy of which he sent to the ARRB.

As an aside, it should be noted that the military never delivered Boyajian’s report to the ARRB, which the JFK Records Act, which was enacted in 1992, required it to do.

Boyajian’s after-action report was written just a few days after the autopsy, which, under the law, makes it extremely credible.

His after-action report, however, is not a stand-alone piece of evidence. Corroborating Boyajian’s report are enlisted men who stated that they carried the president’s body into the morgue in a light “shipping casket” rather than the heavy, ornate, funeral-like casket into which JFK’s body had been placed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas after he was declared dead.

In volume 4, pages 989-992, of his watershed book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (which I highly recommend buying and reading), Douglas Horne has a detailed chart showing that the following men stated that they witnessed the shipping casket in which Kennedy’s body was brought into the morgue: Navy enlisted men Dennis David, Paul O’Connor, Floyd Riebe, Ed Reed, and James Jenkins, as well as Captain John Stover.

Further corroboration comes from several people who stated that when JFK’s body was removed from the shipping casket inside the morgue, it was encased in a body bag, rather than wrapped in the white sheets in which the Parkland Hospital personnel had wrapped the president. Horne’s chart shows the names of the people who stated that they witnessed the president’s body in a body bag: enlisted Navy personnel Paul O’Connor, Floyd Riebe, Jerrol Custer, and Ed Reed, as well as Navy Captain John Stover and John van Hoesen of Gawler’s Funeral Home.

Further corroboration came from a memorandum from Gawler’s Funeral Home that the ARRB discovered that had been kept secret for some 30 years. Gawler’s was the most prestigious funeral home in Washington, D.C. Mrs. Kennedy, the president’s wife, had chosen Gawler’s to do the embalming of the president’s body and handle the funeral arrangements. The Gawler’s memorandum that the ARRB uncovered stated that the president’s body had been brought into the morgue in a shipping casket.

Sam Bird and the Joint Service Casket Team

Boyajian’s report posed a problem. That’s because the official entry time of President Kennedy’s body into the Bethesda military morgue was 8 p.m., not 6:35 p.m. That was established by an after-action report prepared by Army Lt. Sam Bird, the head of the Joint Casket Service Team, whose job it was to carry the president’s body into the morgue. Bird’s report stated that his team carried the president’s body into the morgue at 2000 hours (i.e., 8 p.m.), not in a shipping casket but rather in the heavy, ornate, funeral-like casket into which JFK’s body was placed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.

When I began delving into Sam Bird’s role in the Kennedy autopsy, I discovered a fascinating story about this man’s life — so fascinating, in fact, that I decided to write a long article about him. That article — entitled “The Story of Sam Bird” — will appear in the November issue of FFF’s monthly journal Future of Freedom. I consider it my second-most favorite article I have ever written, and I am confident readers will enjoy it. (Subscribe to Future of Freedom here.) (My most favorite article that I’ve written is “The White Rose: A Lesson in Dissent.”)

Sam Bird was what you would call a ramrod-straight military officer, one who was imbued with a deep sense of integrity, professionalism, and devotion to his troops. A graduate of the Citadel, where he served on the regimental staff as a senior, Bird went on to become an infantry officer, where he became an Airborne Ranger. One of his commanding officers wrote that Bird was definitely General material and should be promoted and advanced ahead of his peers.

Is there any corroboration for Bird’s after-action report in which he stated that his team carried in the president’s body into the morgue?

There is.

In 2016 a member of Bird’s team, Hugh Clark, wrote a book entitled Betrayal: A JFK Honor Guard Speaks, in which he stated that he was member of Bird’s team that carried JFK’s body into the morgue. Clark writes:

At that point in time, Lieutenant Bird must have gotten the word because we went back to the hospital where the navy ambulance was waiting for us. We got out of the truck and we proceeded to remove the bronze casket. We proceeded up the ramp to the back of the hospital. With James Felder in front of me, Tim Cheek to his right, I was behind Felder. Bud Barnum was behind me, and we proceeded to guide the casket out of the ambulance and up to the ramp…. We must have gotten there around 8:00. I wasn’t looking at my watch, I don’t even think I had a watch on, but the official record said it was 8:00. (Emphasis added.)

In 1988, an author named David Lifton published a watershed book about the Kennedy assassination titled Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the process of doing researching for his book, Lifton interviewed various members of Bird’s casket team, who confirmed that they were part of Bird’s team who helped carry the president’s body from a Navy ambulance into the morgue. On page 399 of his book, Lifton writes:

I asked Cheek [who was a member of Bird’s team] whether two FBI men were present when the ambulance was unloaded. “No,” he replied, “there were just the six of us.” I asked this because Sibert and O’Neill [the two FBI agents] reported that they helped with the casket, but made no mention of a casket team. I suspected that the FBI-assisted casket entry and the casket and the casket-team entry might have been separate events.

The Secret Service/FBI entry

What Lifton was referring to is another problem. Two Secret Service agents — Roy Kellerman and William Greer — and two FBI agents — Francis O’Neill and James Sibert — carried the Dallas casket into which Kennedy’s body had been placed at Parkland Hospital into the morgue at 7:17 p.m. Unbeknownst to O’Neill and Sibert, but not to Kellerman and Greer, the casket, however, was empty — that is, it did not contain President Kennedy’s body.

Three casket entries

Thus, the evidence establishes that there were three separate entries that took place at the Bethesda military morgue that Friday evening, November 22, as follows:

The 6:35 p.m. entry — JFK’s body in a shipping casket and body bag.

The 7:17 p.m. entry — (empty) Dallas casket.

The 8 p.m. entry — JFK’s body in the Dallas casket wrapped in white sheets.

(Commander Humes, one of the three military pathologists who engaged in autopsy fraud in the Kennedy autopsy, later tried to conflate these three entries by falsely claiming that JFK’s body was brought into the morgue at 7:35 p.m.)

Is it possible to explain or reconcile these three entries?

One option, of course, is to suggest that one or more of the actors are lying or just mistaken.

Another option is to simply select one of the three accounts and ignore or discount one or both of the other two accounts.

Another option is not to deal with this situation at all and just not think about it.

But actually, there is a very rational explanation for all three events, one that revolves around the autopsy fraud that the military was engaged in.

As I detail in my three books — An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, The Kennedy Autopsy, and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 — the military sneaked President Kennedy’s body into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. to engage in fraudulent shenanigans prior to the official start of the autopsy that were designed to hide the fact that shots had hit Kennedy from the front. The official narrative, of course, was that all shots had come from the rear. (In my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, I explain why the military pathologists were charged with that task.)

Sam Bird was an obstacle

But after sneaking the body into the morgue, military officials still had to figure out how to get the president’s body back into the Dallas casket so that Sam Bird’s Joint Service Casket Team, whose official duty was to carry the president’s body into the morgue, could do so without being aware of the shenanigans that had been taking place.

Why didn’t they just let Bird in on what was going on? Because as readers will see from my upcoming article “The Story of Sam Bird,” Bird was the type of military officer whose deep sense of integrity and professionalism would never have permitted him to participate in the autopsy shenanigans that were being performed on President Kennedy’s body. He would have blown the whistle on them instead. So, what they did was figure out a way to get the body back into the (empty) Dallas casket without Bird and his team realizing what they had done. That’s where Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and William Greer came into play.

Kellerman and Greer

Readers of my recent series “The Evidence that Convicts the CIA of the JFK Assassination,” already know who Kellerman and Greer were. Greer was the Secret Service agent who was driving the limousine in which President Kennedy was riding when he was shot. As I pointed out in part 2 of my series, after the first shot rang out in Dealey Plaza, Greer stepped on the brakes rather than the accelerator, which made it easier to kill Kennedy with the fatal head shot(s).

His partner, Roy Kellerman, was seated next to him in the passenger seat. Rather than jumping over the seat and covering JFK’s body with his own body, as he was supposed to do as a Secret Service agent, Kellerman just sat there like a bump on a log until Kennedy was hit with the fatal gun shot to the head.

Readers of my recent series will also recall that Kellerman, who was sporting a Thompson submachine gun, was in charge of the Secret Service team at Parkland Hospital that forcibly prevented the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, from conducting an autopsy on JFK’s body and then forced their way out of the hospital with the president’s body.

Later that evening, Kellerman and Greer were at the Bethesda military morgue assisting with the fraudulent autopsy. To get the president’s body back into the Dallas casket after the military pathologists had engaged in pre-autopsy shenanigans on it, they got FBI agents O’Neill and Sibert to unwittingly assist them in carrying the (empty) Dallas casket into the morgue at 7:17 p.m. O’Neill and Sibert were then shunted over to a separate part of the facility so that they could not see JFK’s body being put back into the Dallas casket. The Dallas casket, now with the president’s body put back into it, was taken back out to a Navy ambulance, which was then united with Sam Bird’s Joint Service Casket Team, which carried it into the morgue at 8 p.m., with no one on the team, including Sam Bird, aware of what had happened. The official autopsy began at 8:15 p.m.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, since the Dallas casket that Kellerman, Greer, O’Neill, and Sibert carried into the morgue at 7:17 p.m. was empty before the president’s body was re-inserted in it, that necessarily means that the president’s body had already previously been brought into the morgue, which confirms what Sgt. Boyajian and all the other witnesses stated about the president’s body being brought into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. in a shipping casket and enveloped in a body bag. The early entry of the president’s body into the morgue enabled the military pathologists to engage in their fraudulent pre-autopsy shenanigans on President Kennedy’s body.

Finally, it is worth noting the sworn testimony of the third military pathologist in the Kennedy autopsy, Army Col. Pierre Finck, in a criminal prosecution in 1969 in New Orleans brought by District Attorney Jim Garrison against a man named Clay Shaw. Finck testified under oath that he was at home on November 22, 1963, when he received a call from Commander Humes at 8 p.m. inviting him to come to the Bethesda morgue to assist in the autopsy. Finck testified that Humes told him that they already had x-rays of the president’s head. There were no x-rays performed in Dallas. Therefore, since Bird’s team was carrying the president’s body into the morgue at 8 p.m., the only way that Humes could already have x-rays of the president’s head was that the president’s body had already been in the morgue prior to the 8 p.m. entry time of Bird’s Joint Service Casket Team, thereby confirming what Boyajian and all of the witnesses to the shipping casket and body bag had stated.

Conclusion

As I have repeatedly pointed out in my books, articles, and video presentations, there is no innocent explanation for either a fraudulent autopsy or a fraudulent film. Once a person concludes that there was either a fraudulent autopsy or a fraudulent film (or both), one has automatically concluded that the national-security establishment orchestrated and carried out the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There is no way around that.

What we need in America is not a citizenry that buries its head in the sand and pretends that everything is okay with our country. What we need is a critical mass of people with the courage and intestinal fortitude to acknowledge and confront the evil that came with the national-security state governmental structure that was foisted upon our nation, including its dark-side power of assassination, and who have the courage and will to restore our nation’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic. That’s how we get our nation on the road toward liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story by Jacob Hornberger

The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger

The Kennedy Autopsy 2 by Jacob Hornberger

JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.

Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob Hornberger

CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files by Jefferson Morley

Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation by Jefferson Morley

The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State by Jacob Hornberger

Inside the Assassination Records Review Board by Douglas Horne

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass

Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy by David Lifton