Time seemed to stop. The president slumped forward, and the nation would never be the same. From that fateful moment to the autopsy and funeral that followed, see some of the most powerful JFK assassination pictures below, then go deeper inside the story of that tragic day.
autopsy pictures of rfk
The official John F. Kennedy autopsy showed that the president had been shot twice, once in the head and once in the back. In these photos, JFK's body is just a mere shell of the young, charismatic president that had captivated the nation.
After seeing these photos of the JFK assassination and autopsy, learn a little about what's inside the secret Kennedy assassination files released by the U.S. government. Then, have a look at some of the most incredible John F. Kennedy photos ever taken.
Interestingly, Kennedy's autopsy contradicted the reports of witnesses in a number of ways and is the primary source of many ongoing conspiracy theories about the assassination. All three shots were from behind Kennedy, and the fatal shot was fired with the muzzle of the gun nearly touching Kennedy's head. Since Sirhan Sirhan approached Kennedy head-on and was reportedly stopped more than a foot away from Kennedy, this has sometimes been seen as the strongest evidence that there was a second shooter that day, as some witnesses have claimed.
In this article, the authors "review the eyewitness reports of the mechanism of injury, the care rendered for 3 hours prior to the emergency craniotomy, the clinical course, and, ultimately, the autopsy." The discussion of autopsy findings is supplemented by an artist's depiction of the extent of Senator Kennedy's head injury.
-- How could Sirhan have killed Kennedy when he was standing in front of him when he fired his weapon, while the autopsy report shows the fatal point-blank shot entered RFK's skull behind his right ear?
RFK, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's autopsy report, was hit three times. One bullet grazed his forehead, another penetrated his neck, and the third entered behind the right ear and smashed through his skull.
The path of the fatal bullet, according to the autopsy report, traveled through the \"skin of [the] right mastoid region\" and continued through the \"right mastoid, petrous portion of right temporal bone, right temporal lobe, right cerebellum, and brain stem.\"
It is NARA policy to make evidentiary objects available for viewing only when a researcher's needs cannot be met by a review of pictures, reproductions, or descriptions of the object and when production of the original will not cause damage or harm to the original. We will be glad to consider your request to see the physical evidence if you will: (1) Identify which specific exhibit or exhibits you wish to see. A general request to see all of the physical exhibits is not sufficient. (2) Indicate which of the photographs, drawings, measurements and descriptions of the exhibit and any other documentation relating to it you have examined. (3) Indicate briefly why the documentation available on the exhibit does not satisfy your research objectives and how those objectives might be met by observation of the original exhibits. We will not consider any request unless the researcher has examined the digitized preservation photographs of the "Exhibits and Other Evidence from the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Warren Commission), 1959-1964" that are available through the National Archives Catalog.
Any photographs that have been published in books throughout the years were not obtained from NARA. The autopsy photographs and X-rays of President Kennedy were donated to the National Archives by the Kennedy family by an agreement dated October 29, 1966. This agreement limits access to such materials to: (1) persons authorized to act for a Committee of Congress, a Presidential Commission, or any other official agency of the Federal government having authority to investigate matters relating to the assassination of President Kennedy and to (2) recognized experts in the field of pathology or related areas of science and technology whose applications are approved by the Kennedy family representatives, Nicole Seligman and Kevin Baine .
A presidential jet was sent by President Johnson to fly the body to New York. Kennedy's widow, Ethel, three of their 10 children and 71 friends and staff planned to accompany the body on a flight late in the day after authorities complete an intensive autopsy on the body.
The departure from Los Angeles was postponed from morning to 1 p.m. EDT while doctors performed an autopsy on the body. The autopsy, to formally establish the cause of death, was required before the body could be removed from Los Angeles County.Advertisement
When Gunn pored over the material, what stuck out most for him was the medical evidence, like what he learned in his 1996 deposition of James Joseph Humes. Humes, who died three years later, was one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on Kennedy's body.
For one thing, Humes told Gunn that the autopsy was not performed strictly by the book; some procedures were left out, such as removing and weighing all the organs. Then, Humes made an eye-opening revelation.
"Dr. Humes admitted that the supposedly original handwritten version of the autopsy that is in the National Archives is in fact not the original version," Gunn says. He says Humes had never said that publicly before, even to the Warren Commission.
In the deposition, Humes explained that when he took the material home after the autopsy was completed, he began thinking about how he had once seen the bloodstained chair Abraham Lincoln had been sitting in when he was shot.
Then Gunn showed Humes another document from the autopsy, a two-page document Gunn had marked as Exhibit No. 1. It, too, had blood stains, but Humes had not destroyed it. Why? Humes said it was because the document had been prepared by another doctor at the autopsy.
After that, Gunn turned to the official autopsy photographs, the ones that are kept in the National Archives. Humes had never handled them before; the Warren Commission had never shown them to him. In fact, when Humes testified before the Warren Commission, he complained that the artist who drew the schematics he was using for his testimony was not allowed to see the photos.
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.
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?
For the Warren Commission, transparency had its own difficulties. "There are serious problems with the forensics evidence, with the ballistics evidence, with the autopsy evidence," Gunn says. "And, in my opinion, if they had said that openly, it would have not put the issue to rest."
a frontal impact at Z313 is physically ruled out. Of course, the validity of statement (34) does not rule out conjectured missed shots (although no physical evidence was ever recovered for any such shots), nor does it pinpoint the exact origin of the shot that hit (e.g., the TSBD as opposed to another nearby building). But the modeling study (and underlying dynamics and conservation laws) presented in this paper, in corroboration of the autopsy findings [25], do imply that President Kennedy was not hit by a hypothesized gunshot from the front. The conclusion is an important one given that the hypothesized existence of a shooter in front of the limousine (viz., on the Grassy Knoll) has been the primary physical foundation for virtually all conspiracy conjectures to date on the topic.13 As a parting note, while the simple one-dimensional physical models presented in this paper were derived for application to a special case study (viz., the Kennedy Assassination), the underlying physical principles provide an approximate quantitative description of the interaction between a high-speed projectile (slowed by an intervening atmosphere) and a heterogenous body comprised of bone and visco-elastic tissue (viz., the human head), and may also form a basic conceptual basis for understanding the wounding mechanisms involved in such interactions. 2ff7e9595c
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