Joel
Grant responds to Milicent Cranor's comments of 14 November 1999
(Received 15 November 1999)
Ms.
Cranor's response is primarily a mixture of ad hominem (e.g. trying
to impugn Dr. Baden's credentials), irrelevancy and misunderstanding.
For example, her example of a "shored entrance
wound" has nothing to do with any wounds suffered by JFK. It involves a
person being shot while pressing against a door. But a bullet going through a
door can have its flight altered and almost certainly will cause pieces of the
door to enter the victim's body thereby altering the wound. Tight clothing can
and does shore exit wounds and tight clothing, in the area of JFK's shirt
collar, is the only possible shoring material relevant to this case.
She misunderstands my comments about the possibility of the
bullet falling out of JFK's back. I only mentioned it so as to avoid the
accusation of not mentioning this as a possibility that has been raised by
multiple gunman advocates such as Josiah Thompson in his book Six Seconds in
Dallas.
The bottom line remains: all of the physical evidence such
as the clothing and the autopsy photos and X-rays prove beyond any possible
doubt that the wound in JFK's back was an entrance wound. No significant portion
of a bullet was found in JFK's torso. Therefore the bullet exited. The only
possible exit site was JFK's throat, through the wound observed (but not closely
examined; they did not wipe the blood from the margins, for example) at Parkland
Memorial Hospital. The one forensic pathologist and two clinical pathologists
who examined JFK's body at Bethesda came to this conclusion. Something like
fourteen forensic pathologists who have studied the autopsy documentation have
come to the same conclusion.
If Ms. Cranor, who is not a forensic pathologist and has
not studied the original materials, believes that cherry-picking gunshot wound
literature in hopes of a way out carries more weight, she is quite welcome to
that view.