Douglas Horne Offers Proof of JFK Assassination Coverup

While many people have their theories surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1663, few can claim to have proof that the government has not been fully transparent about the events in Dallas, Texas. Douglas Horne, a former U.S. Naval officer, worked on the staff of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in Washington, D.C. from 1995 to 1998. While working for ARRB, Horne was a key participant in taking the depositions of 10 witnesses and participants of the JFK autopsy in 1963. Horne claims to have seen proof that the official JFK autopsy – and the infamous Zapruder film, which captured the assassination live – were both doctored. Horne speaks with host Alec Baldwin about the formation of the review board, the testimony he witnessed and why he feels the truth continues to be concealed today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from iHeart Radio. For decades, everyone, it seemed,
had a theory on how it really happened. Maybe it
was the Russians or the mob, or the CIA declarations
about the magic bullet, the Grassy Knoll, and the shot

(00:22):
or shots that killed President John F. Kennedy on November
twenty two, nineteen sixty three, in Dallas, Texas. Numerous congressional
committees were formed to investigate the assassination without any real results.
From the Warren Commission in nineteen sixty three, to the
Church Committee in nineteen seventy five, to the US House

(00:45):
of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations in nineteen seventy six,
none of them put to bed the questions surrounding the
government's position that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.
The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of nineteen ninety two
sought to finally establish some answers for the American public.

(01:07):
The Assassination Records Review Board AARRB followed. The independent federal
agency was created to record and release as much information
to the public as possible. My guest today Douglas Horn
worked as chief analyst on the Military Records team for

(01:27):
the AARRB in Washington, d C. He was a key
participant in taking the depositions of ten witnesses to the
JFK autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in nineteen sixty three.
Horn claims to have seen evidence that finally proves what
many have believed all along that the government was engaged

(01:49):
in an extensive conspiracy to cover up the truth of
the JFK assassination. Horn believes there is proof that the
official autopsy and the famous Zapruder film which captured the
events live, were both doctored. I wanted to begin with
how Horn found himself working for the a r RB.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
I was with the Navy in different capacities for twenty years,
ten years on active duty as a surface warfare officer
driving ships, and ten more years as a civil servant
with the Navy.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
And what's the difference, by the way, in terms of duties.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Well, on active duty driving ships around, I was on
three different warships, a frigate and two guided missile cruisers.
You know saying right, standard rudder all engines had full
that kind of thing. And as a civil servant. I
was in a field office providing logistics support for some
anti submarine warfare ships. So that was the same job
every day ashore, you know, with no risk involved, you know,

(02:52):
just going home and sleep at night, but still very
much working for the same Navy, just in one in uniform,
in the second one not in uniform. And so the
way I was steered toward working for the review board
was that was Oliver Stone's movie coming out, of course
in nineteen ninety one, late nineteen ninety one and then

(03:15):
into nineteen ninety two, there was a lot of talk
about his film, and that caused me to reread. One
of the major books in my life was David Lufton's
Best Evidence, which was all about the medical evidence. And
while mister Lufton did not come up with all the answers,
he did draw attention to a major problem, which was

(03:36):
that the wound on the President's head seen at Parkland
Hospital in Dallas, where he was treated, was totally different
from the wounds depicted in the autopsy photographs taken it
Bethesden Naval Hospital. So he was very much concerned about
that dichotomy and what was the reason for all that
and so he shifted the focus from the single bullet theory,

(03:56):
which had been the focus of the critics since the
late sixties, to the head wounds, which I thought was appropriate.
So after Oliver Stones's film comes out and has a
a grand theme of a domestic conspiracy and who might
have been behind that, and I noted at the end
of his film, as did everyone else, that he talked

(04:17):
about how all of the sensitive records of the House
Select Committee on Assassinations from the nineteen seventies were sealed.
We're under sealed for fifty years, which was outrageous since
that was supposed to be a people's committee to explain
to the American people what happened, and yet all their
sensitive records are sealed. So that led to the drafting
of the JFK Records Act by Robert Blakey. Now Robert

(04:40):
Blakey was the Chief Council for the House Select Committee
on Assassinations Chief Council for the HSCA, the second one
after the first one was fired. The first one wanted
to do a real murder investigation.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Well, this is church committee.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
No, this is right after the Church Committee was the HSCA.
Church Committee was not the and the HSCA was formed
in seventy six and then wound up its work in
seventy eight and published its report in nineteen seventy nine.
So anyway, Robert Blake, who had been the second Chief
Council for the HSCA, he drafts this legislation called the

(05:17):
JFK Records Act, and it has bipartisan support in Congress,
primarily by two different mindsets of people. So the mainstream senators,
people like John Glenn and David Boren, who was head
of the Intelligence Committee in the Senate, they supported the
JFK Records Act because they said, we'll show all these

(05:37):
people that think there was a conspiracy in this country
to kill Kennedy and they think there was a cover up,
We'll show them by releasing all the records. We'll let
all the records come out and be put in a
public collection in the archives for public access. And that's
why we support this bill. And then of course there
were many others who supported the bill because they didn't
trust the government and they thought that things were being

(05:57):
withheld that were important and that the American people still
didn't know the true story of what had happened. So
this bill got bipartisan support and it was passed into law.
And so what happened to me was I went to
my first JFK symposium in nineteen ninety three and it
was in Dallas, and what I found out it was electrifying.

(06:19):
There were people on stage for six days, people who
were PhDs in history, mds philosophy majors, and accredited teachers
who were discussing this subject. And then I realized that
this validates all the books I've been reading for years,
since I was a teenager, that there are serious problems
with the evidence in this case.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Right, so you've been focused on this years before.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yes, sir, I remember buying the condensed edition of the
Warren Report in paperback through the weekly reader program in
school I believe it was elementary school and not being
satisfied with it. There were no pictures, there were no
autopsy photographs published. I wasn't satisfied with some parts, that's
what I thought were kind of simplistic. And yes, I
even thought that at the age of fourteen, Yes, I

(07:04):
did so. Then I proceeded to read the other first
generation books Rushed to Judgment by Mark Lane, Accessories after
the Fact by Sylvia Maher six seconds in Dallas.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Robert sam Anson.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
Right, So Robert sam Anson was a big one in
the seventies. They've killed the President, right, That was a
big book. So I went to my first symposium in
nineteen ninety three. It was very well attended. It was
the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Who hosted the event just a profit.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Making group called ASK. It was a for profit symposium organization,
but all of the people that were there were very
highly credentialed and very serious people who had either written
books already or had published papers. And they actually had
people from both sides of the spectrum arguing with each other,
which was great to see that debate on stage, people

(07:52):
debating evidence. So then how did I get hired by
the Review Board is a great story. I went to
another symposium in nineteen ninety four in Washington, DC Research
Symposium and the last speaker at the symposium was Jack Tunheim.
So Jack Tunheim became the head of the Review Board.

(08:12):
The five board members had just been approved by the
US Senate and he had been elected by his peers
to be the chairman of the Review Board. So he
came to speak to us and give his stump speech
about what the mission of the Review Board was, which
was essentially to act as librarians and force their way
into government files, get agencies to cooperate and release records

(08:35):
that had been withheld, records that were either still classified,
or records that the agencies just didn't want released for
some reason. They had parts of them redacted, partially obliterated
with blackouts, you know. So he was asked during his speech,
are you still hiring staff, and he said, yes, we are,
but you cannot have worked for a previous investigation to

(08:57):
work for the Review Board. You cannot have worked for
the Warren Commission or for the House Select Committee in
the seventies, and you must not be a federal employee
at the current time. You must not be a current
federal employee. So I listened to that, I thought, okay.
I wrote out a resume overnight, and I went to
the first public hearing the very next day of the
Review Board. So the Review Board didn't really have a

(09:20):
staff yet. They'd only hired one or two clerical people.
But they had their first public hearing on how do
we define what an assassination record is? We're going to
try to get records released, how do we define an
assassination record? So they had a public hearing at the
Archives and numerous leading lights of the research community showed
up and gave their opinions, and I handed my resume

(09:41):
to David Marwell. At the time, he was the staff director,
David Marwell, and all they had hired at that time were,
you know, like two or three other people. So over
the next six or seven months, from the autumn of
nineteen ninety four until March of nineteen ninety five, I
underwent a gauntlet of telephone interviews. So I was working

(10:03):
back in Hawaii at this time for the Navy and
my civil service job.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
Did they suspend the rule that you couldn't be a
government employee on your behalf?

Speaker 2 (10:11):
No, they didn't suspend the rule. It required me to
make a major sacrifice and to take a big risk.
So after six interviews on the phone, I finally got hired.
But what I had to do was actually resign from
the civil service for a couple of days and then
trust them that they were going to be honorable and

(10:32):
then pick me up. And what that meant was I
did not have return rights to my job in Hawaii.
If you're in the civil service and you transferred to
an overseas job, you have return rights to go back
to your job after two or three years. I did
not have return rights. I literally had to resign from
civil service, and then they picked me up, and I
took a big pay cut, about a thirty two percent

(10:52):
pay cut to go work for this temporary agency in Washington,
and they weren't going to pay for my plane ticket
or my move.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
Did you do that? Why?

Speaker 2 (11:01):
Well, I had become in a good way, I think,
obsessed with the case because I knew that none of
the medical evidence made any sense. It was the medical
evidence in the case was so full of conflicts and
things that didn't agree with each other and people who
had made opposing statements about wounds that I thought, this

(11:24):
isn't right. If we live in the I was always
told as a kid, we live in the greatest country
in the world. My mother and father told me that repeatedly.
My father was an ex marine, he was a Republican,
my mother was a Democrat. So we had an interesting
family with interesting dinner table conversations disagreements. But they'd also
told me we're in the greatest country. And I had

(11:44):
questioned that a few times, is that really true? Do
you guys believe that? And they'd say, yes, of course
it's true, and they would look at me like, why
are you asking us? Well, this was the kind of
reason I was asking them. I don't like being lied to.
I really don't like it. And if we're in a
democracy that's functioning, the government shouldn't lie to the people,

(12:04):
especially about important things. And the two most important questions
I think that people should have on their minds as
far as the government telling them the truth and being
transparent is how do wars begin?

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Number one?

Speaker 2 (12:16):
And number two, how do assassinations happen? So you know,
we had three big assassinations four actually in the nineteen
sixties of people that mattered a lot to the public.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Is your fourth MegaR Evers? Or is it Malcolm X?

Speaker 2 (12:29):
Well, I'm thinking of Malcolm X.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
Got yeah, so there's five as far as that.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
That would be five, that's right, that's right, Jack Kennedy, RFK,
Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. And so
I've never had any patience with government lies. I know
that to some extent, I've learned, as we all do,
as we grow up that all governments lie at one
time or another about different things. The question is how

(12:55):
often do they do that? And do they lie about
the really important things they do? And you believe that
democracy is important and informed electorate is important, you should
do something about it. So I felt the call to action,
and I knew that this effort to get documents released
was the last official body that would exist that was

(13:19):
going to deal with this subject. And it was clear
to me. So in the first place, why did I
know that? Well, I knew that because the Congress, when
they passed the JFK Records Act, they did not have
the guts to empower another investigation. The Review Board was
not officially allowed to reinvestigate. Our job is to find
and locate within the government assassination records and then to

(13:42):
force agencies to release them directly to the archives. And
then if the agencies were not willing to do that,
and they still wanted to withhold some of these records,
then they had to give them to this body called
the Review Board, which was the middleman.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
And that was their mandate.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
That was our mandate, was to find the records and
review the ones that the agency did not want to release.
And the View Board for the first time something called
citizen review. These five board members, working with their staff,
would decide what was going to be released and what wasn't,
and their agencies were going to have to comply, and
the only way they could not comply was to appeal

(14:18):
to the President and then he would make the decision.
So I thought this is worth being a part of
because it's an honorable thing to do to try to
get the rest of these records released, no matter what
they say, no matter what they tell us about the assassination.
And I also had a great interest in the medical evidence,
and I thought, this is my chance, one way or
another to learn more about the part of the case

(14:41):
that intrigues me the most were the conflicts and the
medical evidence, because I mean, a body after someone's been
killed by gunshot is a map of the shooting. Where
did the bullets go in, where did they come out?
And the diagrams of those things tells you from whence
the bullets came. So I knew that one of the
people that had interviewed me, the head of Research and Analysis,

(15:03):
Jeremy Gunn, was also the general counsel.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
For the Review Board.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
He was double headed and he had an intense interest
in the medical evidence as well, and that became apparent
during my interview. So we clicked on that score. And
you know, he had to fill out four teams of people,
a military records team, which is what I was hired
to work on, an FBI records team, a CIA records team,
and the fourth one was Secret Service and all other agencies.

(15:30):
So officially they hired me because they needed another person
on the military records team and they still had a
vacancy there, and they also wanted to hire one person
on the staff, just one who was widely read in
the literature of the assassination, the literature by the critics,
and so that I would know where to go and

(15:51):
what book to find leads on where to find records.
It was that simple on the surface. Beneath the surface,
it was Jeremy Gunn someone of a like mind to
assist him with looking into the medical and medicals. And
the reason is you might ask, well, how can you
look into that if you weren't allowed to reinvestigate. Well,

(16:12):
this was a special case. It's a great story. Congressman
Stokes from Ohio, from Cleveland, as it turned out, was
still in office at the time, and he met with
the five board members as they were going through their
process of being confirmed by the Senate, and he told
them at the time that no one was satisfied with

(16:34):
the findings of the House elect Committee on Assassinations with
regard to the medical evidence, no one was really satisfied,
and that he encouraged them to do all they could
to quote clarify the record unquote in that area. And
so the board members had a kind of an informal
mandate from the former chairman of the HSCA Chairman Stokes,

(16:56):
to do some let's call it quasi reinvestigation. Other words,
the Review Board was never going to be allowed to
publish findings of fact or conclusions. But what we were
allowed to do was take depositions and conduct witness interviews.
So a deposition being a sworn witness interview with a
court recorder, you know, making a record of it verbatim record,

(17:18):
or disconduct unsworn interviews where we would write an interview
report afterwards, and we can deposit those in the JFK
records collection. So the American people have can have access
to these depositions and interviews later and make up their
own minds. That was the whole idea, was that the
American people could study the records placed in the JFK
Records collection and make up their own minds about what

(17:41):
had happened. That's all the Congress had stomach for. They
did not have the stomach to empower a new investigation.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
So, just for clarity's sake, you're in Washington. The board
is in Washington. You relocate to Washington. This is formed
by a Senate committee.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Oh no, the Senate approved the board members who had
been appointed.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
Who formed the board?

Speaker 2 (18:02):
Who formed the board, Well, the JFK Records Act had
baked into it the template of how these people were selected.
So one of the people was selected by the American
Bar Association, and that was Jack Tunheim, who shortly afterwards,
after he accepted his appointment, he was then given a
federal judgeship and accepted it. So he's a federal judge

(18:23):
at the time I go to work there.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
But the formation of the board is embedded in the
Act itself.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
Oh, it's embedded in the Act. So the Act established
the requirement to locate and declassified records. It established the
structure of the board, and so two of the board
members were appointed by American historical societies, the unions as
it were for college history professors.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
Yeah, a lot of academics.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Here, academics, and one was an archivist, and one was
appointed by the White House. So that was another historian,
Henry Grafts. So Henry graft is an historian. Bill Joyce
was an archivist. Kermit Hall and Anna Nelson were historians,
and then Jack Dunheim was a federal judge.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
The board is embedded in the act itself. How many
people on the staff would you say?

Speaker 2 (19:04):
There were about twenty five people on the staff roughly
when we were fully staffed up, and most of them
were analysts like myself, and some were clerical, but most
were analysts. So on the Military Records Team, I had
three major areas of interest which Jeremy Gunn, my boss,
my big boss, supported and concurred with. So the first

(19:27):
one was finding records in the government on Cuba and
Vietnam policy, and that was the function of the Military
Records Team. The second area of interest was the medical
evidence and the reason I got to do that as
a military team member was it was a military autopsy,
but as the Naval hospital, so that falls under the
military team. That's the big unofficial reason why Jeremy hired

(19:49):
me was I had an interest and a knowledge of
that area. And the third area of interest which was
developed as time went along was the Suppruter film, which
we can get into later.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
Get into that. So my question, then, my last question
before we dig into the main media, is when you
do depositions of ten people? Are you doing this completely
on your own? Are there lawyers with you? Do you
do with a staff of people do conduct the depositions?

Speaker 2 (20:14):
Here's how it went. The person in charge of all
ten autopsy deponents, all ten depositions of autopsy participants and
witnesses was Jeremy Gunn. He was our general counsel. He
was the only one allowed to ask questions and talk
to the witness during the deposition. So he started out
with a small group of three people I think, helping

(20:36):
him develop exhibits and do research for him before the depositions,
and that was whittled down to one person and that
was me. So I was his primary and then sole
research assistant in preparing for each deposition. So I attended
each deposition with Jeremy. I sat right next to him.
I was allowed to pass him notes. I was expected
to hand him the exhibit when he needed it, hand

(20:58):
him the correct exhibit, constructive suggestions if he was forgetting
an important question, or write him notes. But he was
the only one allowed to speak to the witnesses.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
You were there to assist him. Can you mention at
least a couple of the people you'd deposed.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Sure, all three autopsy pathologists at Bethesdenel Hospital, which was
doctor Humes in the Navy, doctor Boswell in the Navy,
and then an Army pathologist, doctor Fink, who arrived late
after the autopsy started and assisted the other two pathologists.
So they were still alive, and they reluctantly participated only

(21:34):
because we subpoened them and they didn't call our bluff
and they decided to reluctantly show up. They weren't looking
forward to it, but they showed up.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Well. Was their demeanor when they were being deposed.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
And their demeanor very different. Humes was a domineering, arrogant person,
full of bluster. When he couldn't bully you into backing
off from a question, he gave you a flippant answer.
And there were four or five times during his deposition
when I thought he was going to get up and
walk out.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
How dare you subpoena me?

Speaker 2 (22:03):
And how dare you ask me those questions? Doctor Boswell
was very laconic, calm measured in his responses, and totally
unlike Humes in personality. He was not combative and he
was not arrogant. Doctor Fink played the game of I'm
an old man, I can't remember anything. Fortunately, in two
or three important instances he did remember and gave us

(22:24):
to honest answers, which we can get into, but he
played I'm a forgetful old man as a cop out.
Boswell gave us much more information than either of the
other two, and for the first time we had split
up the pathologists and done them on different days. They
weren't in the room at the same time, so we
got Boswell contradicting Humes on a number of occasions which

(22:46):
had never happened before, which was very important. So two
of the other important opponents were the two FBI agents
who were present at the autopsy, Cybert and O'Neil. They
had been interviewed briefly by Arlen Spector, one of the
Warren Commision staff attorneys who later became a senator. And
he didn't get along with them. They didn't get along

(23:06):
with him, and he decided he was not going to
take their depositions. And even the report they wrote about
what they witnessed at the autopsy was deep sixth and
it wasn't published by the Warren Commission. It was in
the archives, but the Warren Commission didn't publish it or
deal with it.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Well.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
They maintained that that yes, they heard hum say that
there were only two shots that hit the president, and
they were both from behind, but that the back wound
was so low that it couldn't possibly have gone through
his neck, and that it did not exit the body anywhere,
and so the government didn't like that, and the Warren
Commission didn't like that. So that's why they were ignored.

(23:43):
So that the House Committee had interviewed them. The House
staff had interviewed them each one time, and they wrote
little interview reports, and then those reports were among the
records that were sealed for fifty years, which was nonsense.
And so we read their interview reports and all the
other House Select Committee interview reports in nineteen ninety three
when they were opened up by the JFKA Records Act

(24:05):
in ninety three, they became publicly available. So we had
reviewed all of these medical witness interviews from the HSCA,
and we decided, oh, we need to depose these FBI agents.
The government hasn't taken their their statements under oath yet,
so we did and they were very forthcoming and very
willing to cooperate.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
Well before we dive into Bethesda and autopsys. So for
I wanted to just ask you, in American history in
the last several decades, I can't think of a greater
example of this kind of gamesmanship where the American public,
and particularly that small section of it that has a
burning curiosity about the truth of this matter. I mean,

(24:46):
I was five years old when Kennedy was killed, but
I've been obsessed with it since I was, Like you said,
since I think I picked up They've killed the President
on a little turning book display in a seven to
eleven on the South Shove of Long Island where I
grew up, and there was Oswald's autopsy photograph his naked
body on a slab.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
And yet there are no autopsy photos of the president,
which was the subject of the book, which was really
strange when you think about.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
It, right, right, but nothing compares in our lifetimes in
my mind, to this treatment of the Warren Commission material.
Every decade, we're going to roll out this stuff, We're
going to give you all the information. We're gonna have
the Presidential Release Act or whatever the hell it is.
Who cares? And even recently with Trump when he was

(25:31):
in office, it was like, well, here it is again,
We're going to roll out all the stuff and lay
bare all the secrets and all the truths about Kennedy's assassination.
And then nah, maybe not. Who do you think or
who do you know? Because of all this work you've
done with records, Who do you think really controls this information?
And who do you and therefore is suppressing it from

(25:51):
being I'm assuming he's not the President's who controls this
information and refuses to release it.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
It's my understanding that of those records which are still withheld,
almost every single one is a CIA record, and it's
that agency comes up. They come up with the last
minute every time there's a you know, let's back up
just a second here. So the last of the Review
Board records that had been withheld for a number of

(26:19):
years were supposed to have been released in the year
twenty seventeen, no matter what. So before that there was
a staggered sequence of releases withholding names or withholding some
sources and methods and things like that if they were
considered sensitive. And in the year twenty seventeen, everything was

(26:40):
supposed to be released and it wasn't. So we got
a false alarm under Trump and then false alarms under Biden,
where each time it was the CIA primarily they came
up and said, oh, not so fast, mister President. We
object to the release of these remaining records, a few
thousand records because we think it will damage national security.
Just nonsense. This many years later.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Jfk assassination expert Douglas Horn. If you enjoy conversations with
those with the inside track on how our government actually works,
check out my episode with Michael Wolfe, author of Fire
and Fury, Inside the Trump White House.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
Not to be too high falutin, but I try to
make a distinction between being a journalist and being a writer.
I'm interested in, you know, why people do things, how
they got to be who they are, how they talk,
how they roll, and maybe in the end, the big
difference I see between myself and everybody else is It's
just me. I don't work for a company on the page.

(27:46):
You just get me, and you can be assured of
that it's not something else, It's not some other committee.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
To hear more of my conversation with Michael Wolf, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Douglas
Horn tells us why and how Kennedy's autopsy photos were falsified.

(28:20):
I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing.
John F. Kennedy was shot while riding in the presidential
motorcade through Dealey Plaza. The thirty fifth president of the
United States, was taken to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas
and pronounced dead. I wanted ARRB chief analyst Douglas Horn

(28:44):
to walk us through the events that followed.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
So he shot at twelve thirty. They arrived at the
hospital about twelve thirty eight. He's pronounced dead at one o'clock.
He actually flatlined a few minutes before that, but he
was officially pronounced dead at one o'clock. A funeral home
rings an ornate display coffin, very heavy bronze coffin, and
he's put in that, and he's taken on board Air

(29:08):
Force one at love Field at two fourteen pm, and
then Jackie goes on board at two eighteen pm. And
then the judge arrives at two thirty pm to swear
hi men, to swear in LBJ, which many people have
said was not necessary. But he wanted the public relations
value of that photograph, and so he got it.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
He got what he wanted.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
The plane takes off at two forty seven Central time,
it lands, it's about a two hour and thirteen minute trip.
So it lands at Andrews Air Force Base south of Washington,
d C. At six o'clock pm Local time, six o'clock
pm Eastern Standard time. And that's where the story gets strange.
And I'm just going to relay some simple facts, timeline

(29:53):
facts to your audience and hopefully it'll attract some attention
and they'll stay tuned here because this is the heart
of the story. The Secret Service in radio conversations, which
we have recordings of. Much of the conversations, part of
them has been edited and remain edited. But the Secret
Service decided that the autopsy is going to be at

(30:14):
Bethesda Naval Hospital and that the body would go by helicopter.
That was what they decided on the radio telling the airplane.
The people on the airplane wanted the autopsy at Walter
Reed Army Hospital, and they wanted it to go buy
a car, but the Secret Service said, no, we're going
to do it at Bethesda and the Navy, and we're
going to fly it by helicopter. So here's what happens.

(30:37):
The plane comes to a stop at six oh four PM.
A light gray Navy ambulance pulls up next to the airplane.
Now that was a cardiac ambulance. It was not a hearse.
It was sent because there was a rumor that Lyndon
Johnson had another heart attack like he had in the
nineteen fifties. That was why that was sent there. So anyway,
Jackie sees the gray ambulance and she says, we'll go

(30:58):
in that. And nobody was going to contradict her in
those circumstances. So the casket that the President was placed
in Dallas, the heavy bronze casket was loaded somewhat unceremoniously
by Secret Service agents and part of the military honor guard.
They're both kind of fighting over who's going to handle

(31:19):
the casket. It's put into the cardiac ambulance because Jackie said,
we'll go in that, and that drives away at about
ten minutes after six. Is she in the car, Yes,
she's in the car with Robert Kennedy and the President's
military physician Berkeley, and the two Secret Service agents who
were in the death car in Dallas. They're in there.

(31:40):
Agent Greer's driving. He drove the limousine in Dallas and
he drove this cardiac ambulance. He kicked the driver out
and he took over Gweer and who Greer and Kellerman
and Roy Kellerman was in the right front seat of
the limousine in Dallas, and he's in the right front
seat of this like gray ambulance. So they all drive
out and that car.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
This is very now.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
That car does not arrive at Bethesda Naval Hospital until
six fifty five pm, five minutes to seven. That's recorded
by Secret Service agents in the reports and by the newspapermen.
So that's a fact. You can't ignore that fact. But
here's here's the problem. There was a Marine Corps sergeant
named Boyagiin and Sergeant Boyagin was there to provide physical

(32:23):
security with his marines from the Marine barracks for the autopsy,
and he wrote a report just a few days later,
the day after the funeral. Funeral's on Monday, the twenty
fifth November. He writes a report the next day, and
he says the president's casket arrived at six thirty five PM.
Six thirty five, that's twenty minutes before the motorcade arrives

(32:44):
out front from Andrews. And not only that, it's in
the wrong car and it's in the wrong kind of casket.
So other people who were present on the loading dock
noted that the car that delivered the President at six
thirty five PM was a black hearse, something that a
funeral home would own, in this case Gawler's funeral home.

(33:06):
They did the embalming on the President, so it's their car.
And the casket taken off at six thirty five is
not this ornate bronze viewing casket that was used in Dallas.
It's a cheap aluminum metal shipping casket that you would
use to ship bodies on airplanes and trains with. So
we have the new time marker, the real time marker

(33:29):
of six thirty five PM when JFK really arrives at Bethesda,
and we have other witnesses, very reliable witnesses, Navy Petty
Officer Dennis David and others that'd say, yes, it's arrived
in a blackhearse and we unloaded the casket. It was
a cheap gray metal box. It was not a fancy
viewing asport casket. Yeah right, it was a transport ca
So the real question is and so let's give the

(33:51):
audience to the other time marker. The honor guard is
separate and distinct from the security guard. So the security
guards at the morgue or Sergeant Boyagian's team of Marines
from the Marine barracks, they're people wearing the same uniform
and they're carrying guns, and that's their jobs to provide
physical security. The honor Guard are people that assembled at

(34:13):
Andrews Air Force Base. There are people from all the
different military services plus the Coastguard. They're in dress uniforms,
they're wearing white gloves, and they do not have guns
and their jobs to serve as pall bearers an honor guard.
So they carry the Dallas casket, the bronze expensive casket,
and at eight o'clock PM, much later, not until eight

(34:35):
o'clock PM, and the official autopsy starts shortly after eight
o'clock PM, and in fact, the FBI agent's recorded in
their report that the first incision was at eight to fifteen.
So we've got some problems here.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
So what happened? You've got my heart pounding here. It's
like a shell game. Which casket is JFK's body in?

Speaker 2 (34:55):
It is a shell game, and it's an intentional shell game.
It's a cover up on the fly. So here's that's
what happens. The president's body really did arrive at six
thirty five PM in the black curse, in the cheap
metal shipping casket, the transport casket, and that's recorded by
a gawler's funeral home document where they say, receive a
metal shipping casket, you know from Dallas, Texas. Okay, So

(35:19):
when a person from a funeral home runs shipping casket,
that means something to them. It's not an ornate viewing coffin.
It's a shipping casket. So the question is what happened
to his body between six thirty five when it really
arrived and eight o'clock PM when the honor guard takes
in the bronze casket. What happens for those it's almost

(35:39):
ninety minutes. It's an eighty five minute period. What's happening
to his body. I'll cut to the chase and give
you the big picture now, because I think it's important
that people have that in their minds, and then we
can go back and tie up any loose ends if
you'd like after. But here's what really happened. The President
arrived with the same wounds he had on his head
in Della Texas. A big blowout in the right rear

(36:02):
of his head, about the size of a baseball or
a human fist, in the right rear of his head,
not in the top of his head, and not on
the right side of his head, in the right rear
of his head. That's the blowout that's missing bone and scalp.
A flap, Well, there was more than just a flap with.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
That chunk of bone that was flapped over that stayed
correct intact, that flap that they closed.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Well, no, that's not true. That's the story that the
government's been wanting to tell.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
And that's a bogus picture. Okay, thank god you're here
to tell me.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
For example, the reason we know it's a bogus picture
is Agent Clint Hill, the Secret Service. Most people have
heard his name. He rode on the back of the car,
the limousine on the way to the hospital. He jumped
onto the JFK's limousine and shielded the President and first
Lady for seven or eight minutes on the way to Parkland.
And he wrote a report a week later, and he

(36:53):
testified the following spring, and he said the same thing
each time, that the right rear of the President's head
was missing, and that a piece of bone with hair
on it was lying in the back seat. So it's
very clear from him and from the Dallas doctor's treatment notes,
the treatment notes they made the day that the President died,

(37:14):
that there is a large area of missing bone and
scalp in the right rear.

Speaker 1 (37:19):
The uniformity among all the staff at Barklay.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Yes, Yes, uniformity. And so when the President was taken
out of his shipping casket and first examined, he had
the same wound on his head, the same noticeable large
exit wound in the right rear of the head, because
exit wounds are big and entrance wounds are small, that
he had in Dallas. The trouble is over an hour

(37:44):
and a half later at the official autopsy after eight
o'clock in front of a large audience of over thirty
three people. And this is a teaching hospital, so you've
got a bleachers there, three rows of bleachers, very large
audience there. The wounds look totally different after eight o'clock
at night. The entire top of the head is gone.

(38:05):
All the bone on the top of his head has
been removed. There's nothing but shredded scalp on the top.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
Of his head.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
The rear of his head is also still gone, but
you can't tell that from the photographs those have been
that's been cleverly disguised. So most of the autopsy photographs
that show the top of the head missing gone, which
is not what anybody saw on Dallas. The back of
the head is obscured in those photographs. It's lying in
a metal head brace. So he's lying on his back

(38:34):
on an examination table. You can't see the back of
his head because his head is supported in a metal
stirrup or head brace, so all you can see is
the right side, which is rather gory looking, flapped out,
big temporal bone flap flapped out, and the top of
the head missing like what. So I'm telling you that
that's what was going on between the early arrival of

(38:57):
the president's body and they started the autopsy. His wounds
were expanded to gain access to his brain and remove
all the metal that could be found from his brain.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
In that ninety minute window. Oh yes, well, I want
to put a finer point on this for the audience.
And in that ninety minute window, which is not accounted
for specifically, I mean it is as far as you're
concern But in that ninety minute window, obviously we have
some of the most purposeful cosmetic surgery ever performed in
history to make it look like he was shot from behind.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
Correct, I will disagree with that. So here's the deal.
What was done to him was not only profane and
highly illegal obstruction of justice. At the very least, it
was just like opening up a can. Okay, nothing was
put back together. This is where Lyfton went astray in
his book Best Evidence. There was no reconstructive surgery to

(39:51):
put back together what these conspirators had opened up to
get access to evidence. He was presented that way to
the audience after eight o'clock as well. This is the
way he arrived. This is what the bullet did. It
blew off part of the back of his head and
the entire top of his head and part of the
right side of his head. It blew it all away,

(40:11):
and so the audience was disbelieving of this. There this
audience was were medical staff the hospital, They were heads
of department and other physicians, and so they were aghast
at this macabre scene that they saw. After eight o'clock,
some of the people you deposed, the House Committee interviewed

(40:32):
some of these people in the audience, and what we
have over the years is there were two Navy cormen
who were present assisting the three pathologists all night long.
The two Navy cormen were Paul O'Connor and James Jenkins.
And so what they told the House Committee and what

(40:53):
they've told researchers over the years after the gag order
was lifted in the seventies, was that the audience was
hostile in disbelieving that a bullet, one bullet could have
caused all this cranial damage. And it's even worse than that.
Alec Jim Jenkins, this corman I just mentioned, witnessed after
eight o'clock. He witnessed the brain of the president literally

(41:14):
fell out of his cranium into the hands of doctor Humes,
and doctor Humes said, quote unquote, the damn thing's fallen
out in my hands, quote unquote. That just doesn't happen, Alex.
I mean, your brain is connected to your spinal cord
and there are other structures connecting the brain to the
bottom of your cranium, and.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
It fell out because it had been previously removed to
pull out all the metal out of his brain, that's right.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
And so what was done between six point thirty five
and eight o'clock was somebody sanitized the crime scene by
removing evidence, removing entrance wounds from the front where they
could up cover up, removing as much bullet as you
could from the brain, in which if you do that,
if you remove all the bullet fragments from the brain,
then you can control the narrative later with planet bullets,

(42:02):
which is what they did. So, Yeah, that brain had
been removed earlier. And Jim Jenkins is still alive, and
he insists today that it had to have been removed
earlier that evening because a brain just doesn't fall out
of your cranium like that, and his job is to
infuse the brain. So the brain was put upside down
in a sling, in a bucket of fromaldehyde, and it

(42:23):
was his job to infuse the arteries. You know, the
carotid arteries go up through your neck into your brain.
And so the brain that had been removed was put
upside down in a bucket in a sling, and it
was Jenkins's job to infuse the arteries with fromaldehyde from
a big container on top of a cabinet. And he
had a very hard time infusing formaldehyde into the brain

(42:47):
because he said the arteries had been cut earlier and
were retracting all by themselves. They were shrinking and shriveling
up and retracting, and he says, that's proof that the
brain was removed earlier that night. He says, also the
brain stem had been severed on the left and the
right with two surgical cuts. It was not torn, two

(43:07):
surgical cuts that were on different planes, on different levels.
So he noticed all this when he was infusing the brain.
So that's evidence to him that the brain was removed
earlier that evening. So Humes and Boswell are engaged in
a charade after eight o'clock. You have to understand this.
The audience expresses disbelief that this damage could all have

(43:27):
been caused by one bullet. And at that point, Humes says,
and the FBI agents recorded this that that's why the
Warrant Commission didn't want to publish their report. They said,
he said that it was apparent that surgery had been
performed on the top of the head. Humes said that,
and they recorded what he said. Now, I think he panicked,
is what happened. He panicked because Jim Jenkins recalls doctor

(43:51):
Boswell Humes's colligue saying to the people in the gallery.
There were flag officers, generals and admirals in the gallery,
and they saying to them, whe is there surgery performed
and died? Yeah? Boss says that, yeah, yeah. And so
here's the problem. Boswell created this famous sketch from the autopsy,
which is the damage to the top of the president's head.

(44:13):
And if you look at that sketch today, you'll see
that it's only the top of the head. So when
he makes the sketch, the President's lying on his back
on the examination table. He's sketching the damage to the
top of the head, and what he sketches is totally
unlike anything seen at Parkland Hospital. He sketches the entire
the bone and the entire top of the head missing,

(44:34):
and he writes the dimensions of this area ten by
seventeen centimeters missing. So he was asked by the House
Committee and then by the Review Board under oath, what
do these notations mean? You drew a dotted line around
the top of the head ten by seventeen missing. He said,
this is the area that was totally devoid of bone,
and so he would he's representing in his sketch and

(44:56):
for posterity that this was all removed by the assass
bullet blown out. And of course we went down to Dallas,
Jeremy Gunn and I. We interviewed three people who saw
the president's body while he was being treated, who were
not interviewed by the Worn Commission, and we asked, Nurse
Bell and doctor Crenshaw, did you see any damage to

(45:18):
the top of the President's head? And they looked at
us like we were crazy, and they said no. Then
they used that tone of voice, they said no. They
were astonished that we would ask. They said, the top
of his head to all appearances, appeared to be intact.
They said there was no bone sticking out, and the
hair appeared to be intact. There was blood everywhere. There

(45:38):
was a lot of blood. And so what Boswell is doing,
I think, is making a sketch before eight o'clock PM
of the damage incurred by this post mortem surgery to
sanitize the crime scene. And he's representing it as damage
from the assassin's bullet. And it's a con job, to
be honest with you. So if you marry up his

(46:00):
sketch with the two Grizzly autopsy photos that show the
top of the head missing, they more or less match.
And yet so here's what we did, which was really fascinating.
We knew we had a two dimensional diagram made by
Boswell of just the top of the head and the
bone missing from the top of the head. And I
had suggested to Jeremy Gunn I said, we need to

(46:21):
present him with a skull model. I said, I know
where to get one. I can build one that's anatomically correct.
It's got all the sutures in it, where the bones
really are and everything. We can ask him to turn
that two dimensional sketch into a three dimensional sketch so
that we can find out was there any bone missing
in the back. And so we did that, and doctor
Boswell marked on the skull model and it's in the archives.

(46:43):
You can see it today if you make an appointment
and go look at it. That not only according to him,
is the bone missing in the top of the head
and on the right side of the head, but it's
all missing in the right rear also, in other words,
the place where the Dallas doctors said it was gone
in the right rear. It's also missing there, but also
in the top and the right side. So he was

(47:04):
honest about that much. At least, he was honest about
the fact that all the bone was missing in the
right rear, whereas doctor Humes wasn't. He lied and said,
oh no, that was all that was all intact. It
was fractured, but it was all intact. None of it
was missing. And then a week later, under oath, Boswell
contradicts him and tells us the truth that, oh no,
that was missing too.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
Assassination Records Review Board Chief analyst Douglas Horn. If you're
enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to
follow here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or
wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Douglas
Horn shares the timeline for developing the Zappruder film and

(47:51):
what he believes happened that led to it being doctored.
I'm ALC. Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Douglas Horn believes that a cover up of the JFK
assassination began almost instantaneously. Horn collected data and evidence that

(48:17):
he claims can prove that the conspiracy stretched from Washington,
d C. And Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland to Parkland
Hospital in Dallas.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
Well, there's one man on the ground in Dallas. It's
really important to understand this. Who's an honest broker in
all this? So the county coroner, Earl Rose, Doctor Earl Rose, said,
this is a murderer in Dallas County and we have
to do an autopsy. It's the law in the state
of Texas. And you're not leaving with the body. And
he says, we're going to do an autopsy in Texas

(48:49):
and that's at this point. At this point JFK's body
had been he had long been declared dead at one o'clock.
This is shortly before two pm. He's in this bronze
ornate casket, the casket sealed. It's on a church truck,
a vehicle with wheels. They can go up and down
like an a accordion. The lift scissors lyft and they're
wheeling it out. So the widow is there and the

(49:11):
Secret Service is moving this thing, and one of the
funeral home people, Aubrey Reich, he's there, and so there's
this profane exchange of shouting and pushing between members of
the Secret Service who insist on removing the body and
taking it to Washington, and this honest County corner Earl Rose.
He says, no, we're going to comply with the law
and do an autopsy in Texas. And so they were

(49:33):
bound and determined that there was not going to be
an autopsy in Texas. And so, you know, they brandished
their weapons, They pulled aside their coats and showed their pistols,
and one of them even had a submachine gun. And
so he was actually picked up and slammed against the wall. Eventually,
and one of the doctors and attendants who witnessed this
said in a recorded interview in the eighties, he said,

(49:57):
they told doctor Rose, if you don't get out of
the way, we will run you over with the casket.
So this is a very heavy, four hundred plus pounds
bronze casket when it was empty with a body inside.
We're going to run you over with a casket. And
all of this unseemly behavior is occurring in front of
the poor widow. It's really really macabre and disturbing.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
You don't mind if we use your dead husband's body
as a battering ram to knock these people out of
the way so we can go come in our cover
up of your husband's death. But what's interesting to me,
forget about who they are for the time being. That's
always the quandary. But there's people on the ground in Dallas,
and there's people in Bethesda awaiting them, and we're switching coffins,

(50:40):
and we're switching cars, and we're doing this and that,
and we're having bodies arrive ninety minutes, you know, unaccounted
for until later on it's accounted for, but arriving and
then doing their work, you know, their cover up work,
fumes and so forth. Now the other aspect I want
to talk to you about, which is even more we're

(51:00):
kind of devastating us. As most people know, the most
vital piece of this whole thing is the Zapruder Film.
For most Americans, it's a movie taken by Abraham Zapruder.
I think he's a dressmaker. Correct, he's in the clothing business.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
That's right, he's a dressmaker. And he has a shop
in the dal Text building, which is right across the street,
right across Houston Street from the book depositor.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
And now I want you to take us through Supruder's there.
He's got a camera in his hand. He's filming what happens.
It's a horror movie because the thing that always never
ceases to be so ghastly to me is here. This
man was the president of the United States back in
the time when I think that meant something to most people.
And they blow the top of his head off, the
back of his head off, right in front of his wife.

(51:44):
But I want you to take us through a timeline
of Supruders. There he's filming the event. Where does that
film go in a timeline after that?

Speaker 2 (51:52):
Okay, the timeline, the real timeline is very firmly established now.
And part of the work was done by the review
board staff, by me and Jeremy, and part of it
was done years later by independent researchers. But here's what
really happened. Zapruter. A couple of cops showed up at
his office. They're in Deely Pleasant and wanted to film,

(52:12):
and they had shotguns, and his secretary wouldn't give it
to him, and he wouldn't give it to him, and
so a secret service guy showed up and he says, well,
I'll stay with you. Let's get it developed. And so
everybody goes together to the local TV station. Zapruter does
a brief interview, and the reason they went there was
he mistakenly thought they might develop it for him. Well,

(52:34):
they didn't have the capability. This is a special codochrome
two daylight film. There's only four code act plants that
can develop this in the entire country, and one of
them is in Dallas. But the TV station can't do it.
They can only do black and white newsreel film. So
he does a little interview there and then the people
he's with, numerous people, they take him over to the

(52:55):
Kodeac plant. So the original film shot in his camera
Bell and Howe movie camera is developed in the Kodak
plant in Dallas that afternoon, and it's a double eight film,
and it's a double eight means that you've got a
piece of film. I'll keep it real simple here, sixteen
milimeters wide. Double eight means you got one strip on

(53:18):
one side, side A, that's eight milimeters wide, one strip
on the other side that's another eight milimeters wide, Side
A and side B, and they're upside down and backwards
from each other. So when you shoot your twenty five
feet of side A, which he had already done at
home with a home movie, you've got to flip the
film around in the camera. The take up reil becomes

(53:40):
the new supply reel, and vice versa. And so the
assassination was on side B, it was on the other
side of the film. And so what they have developed
is a double eight film that's still sixteen milimeters wide,
it's got images upside down and backwards, and it's not
yet slit down the middle. So they look at it
quickly in a sixteen milimeter projector to make sure it's

(54:00):
good images, very good images, crystal clear. So he says, okay,
I want three copies of this today, and they said, oh,
if you want copies, we're not going to slit this
film down the middle. Yet, because normally what they do
is they slid a film down the middle, and then
you've got instead of one sixteen millimeter wide double eight
film that's twenty five feet long, you would have two
eight millimeter films a total of fifty feet long after

(54:22):
they splice them together. So they said, okay, we're not
going to slit these yet. We're going to give you
three rolls of a film that you can use as
duplicating film. We're going to send you over to another
lab where you can have this copied on what we
call a contact printer. They said, we don't have a
contact printer. We're a developing lab. We're Kodak. We just
develop movies. So you go over to the Jamison lab.

(54:44):
We'll call them and tell them you're coming. And I said,
that's what he did, and he handed them his camera,
original film still sixteen milimeters wide, and the three rolls
of duplicating film, and they ran off three identical copies
for him on a contact printer, and then he took
those three copies and the original back over to Kodak,

(55:06):
and then Kodak had to also develop the three copies.
So once they did, and once Kodak determined that the
three copies were pretty good contact print copies. They were
a little bit soft, but they were pretty darn good copies,
and of course the original was needle sharp. Then they
slid all four down to eight millimeters in width so
they could be shown on an eight milimeter home projector.

(55:26):
So here's what happens. Later in the day, he goes
downtown to see Forest Sorels, who's the Secret Service agent
that took into the Kodak plant in the first place. Well,
Sorels left and he's now busy with the interrogations of
this fellow named Oswald. And so Sorels says, don't bother me,
I'm busy. I don't have time for your film. He says,
why don't you take it? Go downtown to my office,

(55:49):
and if you want to share a couple of your copies,
give him to Agent Max Phillips. So the recruiter before
he goes home Friday night, he goes downtown. He gives
two of his three copies to Agent Max Phillips of
the Secret Service, and he keeps with him the camera
original and one of the copies. So of the two

(56:09):
copies he gave the Secret Service that night, they flew
one to Washington, d C. To the head of the
Secret Service overnight on an airplane and then arrived before
dawn the next day. That's fine, that makes sense to me.
The other copy that the Secret Service had in Dallas,
they loaned to the FBI. The next day, they loaned
it to the local FBI. The FBI flew at the
Washington and it was at FBI headquarters starting Sunday, right

(56:33):
after midnight early am Sunday. So then what Zappruter has
in his possession the next morning, which is what's important. Saturday,
November twenty third, he has the camera original eight millimeter
and he has one of his eight milimeter copies remaining.
He meets with Dick Stolly of Life magazine, the West
Coast editor who had flown out to Dallas to do

(56:54):
this negotiation. Stolly offers him some money and Zupruter just
smiles at him. It wasn't enough, So finally Stally says, okay,
the maximum I'm allowed to offer you is fifty thousand.
So the first of two contracts was cut that day
for fifty thousand dollars. The Pruter agreed to do this.

(57:15):
He would only loan the original film, loan it for
a week to time Life, and then all they would
be able to do make stills was make still copies
of individual frames, still still picture rights, not motion picture rights,
still picture rights, and after a week they would return
the original to him and he could do whatever he

(57:37):
wanted with it, then sell it as a movie, and
he would then give him his remaining copy give it
to them after a week. So that's the deal that's
cut on Saturday. I'm going to tell you about the
new deal that was cut on Monday, and then I'll
tell you why that was necessary. On Monday, there's a
new contract cut by Life magazine, and it's bizarre because
it's not to their benefit. It's toz the pruter's benefit.

(58:00):
So now the total amount of the sale goes up
from fifty thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand total.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
A lot of money back then, Yeah, that's a.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
Lot of money. And what they wanted was physical custody
of all three copies and of the original and motion
picture rights.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
When they want the rights to the film, they want.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
All the rights to the film, not just still picture
all the motion picture rights and physical custody of the
original forever, and of all three copies forever, and that's
the new deal cut on Monday. And of course so
Zapruter said, yeah, sure. So it's what happened in between.
That's really the fascinating heart of this Sapruder film mystery.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
Douglas Horn, This is but one of hundreds of episodes
from Here's the Thing. To hear more great conversations from experts, artists,
and political insiders, head to our archives at Here's the
Thing dot org. When we return, Douglas Horn share the

(59:00):
accounts of eyewitness testimony on the ground in Dallas and
how they dispute what was reportedly captured in the Supruter film.

(59:21):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
Douglas Horne spent years collecting documents and witness testimony involved
in the jfk assassination. One of the puzzle pieces he
worked on was what happened to the Supruter film? After
Life Magazine initially purchased the rights to it for one

(59:42):
week's time.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
So here's what we know today. This story for years
based on the memoirs of one Life Magazine person, Loud
and Wainwright based on his memoirs written many years later.
The official story was that, well, the film which Stolly.
You know, he bought the original Saturday, just to borrow
it for a week. He put it on an airplane

(01:00:06):
to Chicago on Saturday. He didn't go with it, but
he put it on an airplane to Chicago. And that's
the part that remains unchallenged today. That's the fact. What
happened to it after it got to Chicago is not
what Loud and Wainwright and the mainstream or a research
community has maintained. It did not stay in Chicago all weekend,
as has been claimed for years. Here's what really happened.

(01:00:30):
Two Secret Service agents or people who said they were
Secret Service, intercepted the film in Chicago at some point,
either at the airport or at the time Life Publishing plant.
I'm going to assume it's at the time Life Publishing
plant probably. Those two agents show up with the original
Suppruiter film in Washington, d C. At ten o'clock PM

(01:00:50):
on Saturday night. The same day, ten o'clock pm. They
had not seen the film yet, so they're couriering it.
They're bringing it from wherever they came from. But Obviously
they came from Chicago because that's where it was sent
by Dick Stalley. Who did they deliver it to. They
deliver it to the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, which

(01:01:11):
is abbreviated Inpick. So the job of Enpick that night
was to make briefing boards. And simply put, briefing boards
are stiff panels with blowups from individual frames, just still
picture blow ups of individual frames. Paste it onto the
briefing board so you can brief government officials on what
does the film show what happened? So the Secret Service

(01:01:31):
agents tell Brigioni what prints they want. He had to
go out and buy an eight milimeter projector in the
dark at night, because you know it's an eight milimeter film.
They didn't have an eight milimeter projector. They view it
several times. They then make the selections the Secret Service,
these are the ones we want. They leave town with
a film at three am Sunday. He doesn't know where
they're going. We know now where they went. They went

(01:01:54):
to Kodak headquarters, to the Research and Development Lab Worldwide
Research and Development Live.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
For Kodak in Rochester, Hawkeye.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
In Rochester, YEP. Hawkeye Works and so how do we
know this. We know this because the film was brought
back to the End Pick in Washington, d C. The
next night, twenty four hours later. It's brought back there
by a different Secret Service agent who says his name
is quote unquote Bill Smith, obviously a pseudonym, because we
determined there was no Bill Smith working for Secret Service

(01:02:25):
on the review board we determined it. He brings it
back to Endpick to a different work crew. Dino Brugioni
and his high level confederates were not called in the
next night, a different work crew was called in. Bill
Smith tells them, this film just came from Hawkeye Works
in Rochester, which was the code name for this the
classified portion of this film lab the classified portion used

(01:02:50):
by the CIA. And he lied. Then he said, well,
this was donated by a patriotic American who didn't want
to make any money, so he donated it to the government,
and the original film was developed at Rochester at Hawkeye Works,
and we want you guys to make briefing boards of it.
So he told two big whoppers, two lies. So what
you've got going on here is that I've concluded with

(01:03:13):
a very high level of assurance that this film was
crudely altered over about a twelve hour period on Sunday,
November twenty fourth at Hawkeye.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
Works to depict what, to depict what.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
Yeah, that's the important thing. Primarily to blackout with very
crude blackouts, which are supposed to look like shadows, but
they don't. They just look like blackouts like ink. To
black out the huge exit wound in the right rear
of the head that was seen at Parkland Hospital. And
the reason this had to be done was the people
in charge of this cover up, they already knew that

(01:03:46):
the photos of the back of JFK's head, few of
the few photos of the back of his head from
the autopsy, were going to show no damage to the
back of the head. They were going to be doctored,
and they have been. They don't reference.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
The film is then to be Doctor two.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
So the film has to be Doctor to match what
we're doing with the autopsy photos of the back of
the head. So they had to match. So the only
reason I'm just telling you right now the end pick
let's cut to the chase. They had the world's best
in larger and they were the place to make the
briefing boards and the only reason to send the film
to Hawkeye Works in the first place is if you're

(01:04:20):
going to alter the film. And so the reason you're
making a second set of briefing boards on Sunday night
is you're making briefing boards from a sanitized, altered film
which blacks out the huge exit wound in the right
rear of the head. And so some people in Hollywood
who are good friends of mine, Sidney Wilkinson and Tom Whitehead,

(01:04:40):
Sidney purchased a film from the National Archives, a copy,
a thirty five millimeter copy, a dupe negative of the
so called original film in the archives. Sidney Wilkinson and
her husband, Her husband is Tom Whitehead. They're a team
and he's a Hollywood video editor and she's been involved
with him and.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
The guys that are in the dock that I saw.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
Yes, she buy he was a thirty five millimeters dupe
negative of the so called original film in two thousand
and eight because she's intrigued by these rumors that the
film may have been altered and she didn't know what
to think about all these arguments in different books. So
her husband, he has the film scan. Six case scans
were state of the art at the time, almost above
state of the art. So when the movie's Ten Commandments

(01:05:19):
and ben hur were restored, you know they were four K,
so six K was even a higher level of resolution
than that. At the time. He used the best scanner
you could get, a six K scanner. Every frame was scanned,
and later he made two K scans, which are a
high definition like you're HDTV, So he had high resolution
scans of the frames, and he discovers these crude black

(01:05:41):
patches over the back of the head. The worst one
is framed three seventeen, the most egregious, but also frames
three twenty one and three twenty three are particularly bad,
and so they clearly show artwork animation blacking out the
back of the head. And obviously the artist wanted it
to look like a shadow, but shadows on human hair

(01:06:01):
don't have straight lines like the state of Ohio.

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):
And it's not consistent with Connolly either.

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
Right, not consistent at all with Connolly in frame three
to seventeen. So the evidence is out there. Other researchers
have bought films from the archives, copies of this so
called original film, and they see the same defects, the
same artifacts in the film. So this was a rough job.
The alteration. I figured after they got about three hours

(01:06:27):
to take it to Hawkeye Works, about three hours to
get it back to Washington for more briefing board Sunday night.
In between those two travel events, they had about twelve
hours to alter the film. And we even know how
they did it now. I mean, there's a textbook. The
first textbook ever published on special effects techniques was by
Professor Raymond Fielding The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography in

(01:06:49):
nineteen sixty five, and he describes the two effects techniques,
the only two techniques available in nineteen sixty five, which
is a traveling matt which is very complicated involves many
passes through a camera, and aerial imaging, which is very simple.
It involves one pass through a camera. So it's clear
that an aerial optical printer, an aerial optical printer, a

(01:07:11):
modified Oxbury optical printer with an animation stand attached, was
used to alter this film. And then you just simply
you draw whatever artwork you want on a clear acetate cell,
you put it on the animation stand and rephotograph the
frame that you've altered in a process camera, and then
you create a new film by rephotographing the frames. You

(01:07:33):
want a rephotograph, rephotograph all the frames, and that way
you can optically edit the film and take out things
you don't want to be in the film, like the
exe debris traveling to the left rear in Dailly Plaza.
You don't see that in the film. There were plenty
of people that saw it that day, and Sappruter's partner Schwartz,
saw it in the film. He watched that film copy

(01:07:53):
that they retained fifteen times that weekend and he saw
debris traveling to the well.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
They also talk about how the cloud, the red or
pinkish cloud of mist, the atomized bone, brain fluid, all
this crap blood that comes shooting out of his skull
in the supprudor that we know doesn't match what happened
because it's all confined to a certain area. Whereas eyewitnesses
have testified who were there on the site, not examining

(01:08:22):
films of testify there was a corona covering his entire
circumference of his head.

Speaker 2 (01:08:28):
That's right. Especially the Willis family, they've been interviewed on film.
I'm sure you've seen it. They just testify to the
red corona and the large cloud of debris traveling up
and back. And then the other person who saw a
very different pattern of debris that we don't see in
the film today was Dino Brigioni, who did the first
briefing board event, and he saw a massive verticalsure, a

(01:08:51):
vertical head explosion that went three or four feet into
the air, which is not in the film today.

Speaker 1 (01:08:57):
Let me see this as we were running out of time.
One of the things that was always so disturbing to
me and shocking to me was this ultimately, I mean,
if your government black ops people that are doing this
kind of thing, how do you get everybody to shut up?
How do you get hundreds of people involved in some

(01:09:20):
small or not so small component of this, What do
you tell them? This has always been the searing mystery
to me.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
There's an answer to that. One is to compartmentalize the
different audiences so they don't even talk to each other.
Of course, So that's what happened with a multiple cast assassination. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
they didn't. There was a compartmentalized operation, this cast at
shell Game, so they didn't even become aware of each
other until the late seventies, after the Congress. The Department

(01:09:49):
of Defense lifted the gag order at the request of
the HSCA, but the main technique used was intimidation and fear.
So all the Navy personnel involved in the autopsy had
to sign what we call a letter of silence. That's
what we call They were threats that you will be
court martialed. If you even discuss the events that you
witnessed at the autopsy, you will be court martialed.

Speaker 1 (01:10:10):
So the other thing I was told is that people
introduced was that if you tell the truth of what
you're experiencing here. They didn't tell this to everybody, they
didn't have to, just the fear alone that you're going
to be have some kind of consequences, few legally or otherwise.
But the idea that they told some of the more
significant players that the Russians did this, all right, and

(01:10:33):
if you say anything, we need to make sure that
everything is such that it's a single guy who's alone nut,
because if you say it's a conspiracy, it's more than
one person. It's the Russians and we're gonna have World
War three? Do you want World War III? Do you
want the atomic bomb? Death? Using the atomic bomb? Reference
from back then. Do you want the atom bomb death

(01:10:55):
of forty million Americans in a single day to be
on your shoulders, your mouth shut because the Russians did
this to Kennedy.

Speaker 2 (01:11:03):
That's exactly I believe firmly I've concluded. That's exactly what
the autopsy pathologist, Humes and Boswell were told. Is that
we know there was a conspiracy in Dallas. We know
there was a crossfire, and they told these doctors the
Communists did it. We know they did it. And so
it's your job to remove evidence and not report any

(01:11:24):
shots from the front when at the autopsy you're only
going to report shots from behind loan government and so yeah,
and so this is what would have been used on
others later who maybe expressed discomfiture or who wanted to
speak out, is that no, this is on patriotic You're
you're endangering the country. We could have forty million deaths.
That's what Lyndon Johnson told people when he got people

(01:11:47):
to sit on the Warrant Commission who didn't want to.
So all I can all I want to lead with
your audience is the final conclusion today that I have
with great certainty after talking to a lot of medical
experts is that there was one head shot from behind,
but it was not from the book depository. It was
from down low, almost horizontal, probably from the Dalte's building.

(01:12:07):
There were two head shots from the front Alex. Two
from the front. One entered the right temple just right
in front of the ear, in the hair, right in
front of the ear, where nobody at Parkland saw the
entry wound. And the other shot from the front was
very high in the forehead above the corner of the
right eye, very high in the forehead, and that would
have been hidden by the President's bangs at Parkland had

(01:12:29):
long hair in the front, so they didn't see that.
So all they saw was a big exit wound in
the back. But there were two head shots from the front,
one from behind. That means conspiracy period. And this evidence
is embedded in the Skullx rays. So I've got a
YouTube movie coming out in a month or two. I've
already recorded the thing. It's in post production now, but

(01:12:52):
explaining the Skullex rays and how to interpret them, and
all these great geniuses who examined these for years were
obviously not willing to tell the whole truth. They were
hiding the other half of the story, which is we
also had two shots from the front. The evidence in
the skulls rays of two entry wounds in the front,
one high in the forehead and one just close to

(01:13:13):
the right ear, just barely above the right ear, is
as obvious as the news on your face. And for
the Clark panel in nineteen sixty eight and for the
House Select Committee forensic panel to not identify these means
that it was they were willfully blind.

Speaker 1 (01:13:30):
And we didn't even talk them. By the way, how
the frames that they took out with the car slowed down.
Do you believe we remove those images as well?

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
I believe that a very brief car stop was removed,
and there were too many witnesses to it. And all
the witnesses to it were the people close to the car.
I mean they should know. The four motorcycle cops to
the left and right rear of the car said the
car stopped briefly. The witnesses to the left and right
of the car said it stopped briefly, and a lot

(01:13:58):
of other people did. And so I think the pruter
actually filmed the movie at three times the normal frame rate.
He had a switch he could operate on his camera
called slow motion, which meant it instead of filming at
sixteen frames per second, he could film at forty eight
frames per second and all he had to do is
push down on the switch. And I think that if
he filmed this movie with three times the normal frames,

(01:14:21):
it would have been easy to remove a brief car
stop without a jump cut, and which is what you
have in the film. You don't see a massive jump cut,
but you do see the car slowing a little bit,
and they had to. And I think that's how you
can remove EXITD debris frames, remove the EXITD debris frames
which indicate shots came from the front, and remove this
brief car stop which probably contained the car stopping and

(01:14:44):
evidence of different head hits, you know, happening at a
different time. Remove all that without it showing up as
a jump cut, because he really filmed the event, I
think at forty eight frames per second, not sixteen.

Speaker 1 (01:14:56):
You are a person who's made the pursuit of the
truth of this matter such an important part of your life,
and you've had such great success with it. Kennedy's assassination
in sixty three was the beginning of the end for
this country. It was my great pleasure to speak with you.
I'm very grateful to hear and thank you, sir, thank you,
thank you very much. My thanks to Douglas Horn. This

(01:15:20):
episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoban.
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Daniel Gingrich. Here's the Thing is recorded at CDM Studios
in New York. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is
brought to you by iHeart Radio