There’s a long piece about it in Vanity Fair that’s behind a paywall.
Cliffs:
Secret Service agent Paul Landis, now 88, stood on the right rear running board of the Secret Service follow-up car, code-named “Halfback,” in the president’s motorcade.
After the shooting, once they got to Parkland Hospital, Landis claims he spotted a largely intact bullet resting on the top of the back of the seat. He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital. Then, upon entering Trauma Room No. 1 (at that stage, he was the only nonmedical person in the room besides Mrs. Kennedy, and both stayed for only a short period), he insists, he placed the bullet on a white cotton blanket on the president’s stretcher.
He left the Secret Service months after the assassination, never telling anyone what he’d found and done.
The bullet subsequently found on the stretcher was later determined to be a copper-jacketed, 6.5-millimeter bullet that matched the rifling of the Mannlicher-Carcano that had been abandoned on the sixth floor of the depository.
Landis’s discovery of the bullet on top of the rear seat, if true, comports with the initial finding: that the bullet had lodged superficially in the president’s back before being dislodged by the final blast to his head. It also explains the “pristine” nature of the bullet.
And so the problem started: The Warren Commission could not explain what happened to the bullet if it exited through the front of Kennedy’s neck. Howard Willens described the Warren Commission staff’s internal debate: “There was one basic question that now seems very simple,” he wrote. “Where did the bullet go after it exited the president’s neck?”
Paul Landis, in effect, answers that question: It ended up in a crevice on top of the back seat. It seems unlikely that the bullet traversed the president’s body and exited through the front of his neck.
Maybe the bullet entered the president’s back only superficially; these WW II–vintage bullets, after all, were notoriously undercharged with gunpowder. If this were the case, it might have indeed fallen out when he was violently struck with the final shot; when Mrs. Kennedy, at one point, pushed him down onto the seat; or when she clambered onto the trunk, the bullet falling off of her and onto the top of the back seat.
It certainly raises the stakes that another shooter might have been involved.
First, if the “pristine” bullet did not travel through both Kennedy and Connally, somehow ending up on Connally’s stretcher, then it stands to reason that Connally might have actually been hit by a separate bullet, coming from above and to the rear. The FBI recreation suggests that Oswald would not have had enough time to get off two separate shots so quickly as to hit Connally after wounding the president in the back. A second shooter must be considered.
Cliffs:
Secret Service agent Paul Landis, now 88, stood on the right rear running board of the Secret Service follow-up car, code-named “Halfback,” in the president’s motorcade.
After the shooting, once they got to Parkland Hospital, Landis claims he spotted a largely intact bullet resting on the top of the back of the seat. He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital. Then, upon entering Trauma Room No. 1 (at that stage, he was the only nonmedical person in the room besides Mrs. Kennedy, and both stayed for only a short period), he insists, he placed the bullet on a white cotton blanket on the president’s stretcher.
He left the Secret Service months after the assassination, never telling anyone what he’d found and done.
The bullet subsequently found on the stretcher was later determined to be a copper-jacketed, 6.5-millimeter bullet that matched the rifling of the Mannlicher-Carcano that had been abandoned on the sixth floor of the depository.
Landis’s discovery of the bullet on top of the rear seat, if true, comports with the initial finding: that the bullet had lodged superficially in the president’s back before being dislodged by the final blast to his head. It also explains the “pristine” nature of the bullet.
And so the problem started: The Warren Commission could not explain what happened to the bullet if it exited through the front of Kennedy’s neck. Howard Willens described the Warren Commission staff’s internal debate: “There was one basic question that now seems very simple,” he wrote. “Where did the bullet go after it exited the president’s neck?”
Paul Landis, in effect, answers that question: It ended up in a crevice on top of the back seat. It seems unlikely that the bullet traversed the president’s body and exited through the front of his neck.
Maybe the bullet entered the president’s back only superficially; these WW II–vintage bullets, after all, were notoriously undercharged with gunpowder. If this were the case, it might have indeed fallen out when he was violently struck with the final shot; when Mrs. Kennedy, at one point, pushed him down onto the seat; or when she clambered onto the trunk, the bullet falling off of her and onto the top of the back seat.
It certainly raises the stakes that another shooter might have been involved.
First, if the “pristine” bullet did not travel through both Kennedy and Connally, somehow ending up on Connally’s stretcher, then it stands to reason that Connally might have actually been hit by a separate bullet, coming from above and to the rear. The FBI recreation suggests that Oswald would not have had enough time to get off two separate shots so quickly as to hit Connally after wounding the president in the back. A second shooter must be considered.
