Part 4 of Deposition of James J. Humes

MR. GUNN: we can go back on the record.

BY MR. GUNN:

Q. Dr. Humes, I'd like to ask you some questions now about records that were created during the course of the autopsy and at any point through the time that the autopsy protocol was completed. First, did you yourself take any notes during the autopsy?
A. Yes, I took some. And—yes. That's the answer to your question.

Q. How many pages of notes did you take, approximately?
A. Oh, I can't tell you now. Maybe two or three.

Q. Did you see anyone else taking notes during the autopsy?
A. Dr. Boswell.

Q. Do you recall anyone else having written anything?
A. No.

Q. Specifically, do you remember Dr. Finck having written any notes?
A. No, I do not. I don't say he didn't, but I don't recall that he did.

Q. Were autopsies tape-recorded at Bethesda in your experience?
A. Intermittently. We didn't record any of the session on this case.

Q. On the case of President Kennedy?
A. No.

Q. Was the decision made not to record the autopsy?
A. I don't think any real thought was given to it, to tell you the truth.

Q. Do you know how frequently autopsies were recorded?
A. No, I don't. We were just getting into the business of doing that. It's awkward to have equipment around the autopsy table and so forth, and we were really just starting to experiment with foot controls, devices, and so forth and so on. And so not often.

Q. Were there any minutes taken of the autopsy?
A. I don't know what you mean by minutes, but other than the notes that I or Dr. Boswell made, I don't believe there were any such, no.

Q. There wasn't any person responsible for—
A. No.

Q. —taking down minutes of the autopsy?
A. No.

Q. What other kinds of records were typically created in the course of an autopsy? For example, would there be any log that would have recorded the receipt of the body?
A. Yes.

Q. With that example in mind, what other written records were created that would relate to the autopsy of President Kennedy?
A. That's about it. Everybody that came into the morgue was logged in and logged out when they left, and who picked it up, you know, the funeral home, most usually.

Q. Were there logs for photos or X-rays?
A. No. Not in the morgue, no.

Q. Were there any kinds of logs or record— keeping of what kinds of tests or sections were made?
A. Well, not really. You know, we made sections of most of the organs and put them in cassettes and turned them over to the technical people, and they processed them from there.

Q. Is there any record-keeping process that's used to help identify which tests have been sent where and when they've been returned?
A. Well, we didn't send many things anywhere, so far as that goes. I don't believe so, no. We had a very elaborate laboratory. We had very little need to send anything anywhere.

Q. But would there be any paper that would keep track of where things were even within the laboratory at Bethesda?
A. Well, every—talking about autopsies, every autopsy was identified by a number, and every cassette that contained tissue specimens was labeled with that autopsy number. And there was a log in the histology laboratory that kept a record of all those things, sure.

Q. Would there be other similar logs for radiology or toxicology?
A. Toxicology was part of our lab, and yes, it would be. I can't speak for radiology. I'm sure they kept very good records of where their films were. Their biggest problem is people taking out films and failing to bring them back and so forth. It's a chronic problem in radiology departments around the world.

Q. At the time in the ordinary course when you would prepare an autopsy protocol—and I'm not speaking now of President Kennedy—would you receive written reports back that analyzed the results of any examinations that had been performed?
A. Yeah. Again, let me tell you that for most of the latter part of my career, I didn't personally do these kinds of things. The younger doctors did them under our supervision, and then they would write a report, and then we would critique the report with them and so forth. The name of one of the staff pathologists would be on the final report, but 99 percent of the effort was done by other people than the person who actually signed the report.

Q. How would those records be filed or kept in the ordinary course? I mean, for example, would there be a folder with the autopsy number on it with the serology report and the histology report—
A. Right.

Q. —and other things—
A. Well, what you would do, you see, it was rare cases that you had to do toxicology at the autopsy room. The hospital was not a forensic science center. So we would abstract—most of the patients that we autopsied died as a result of illness while they were hospitalized. So the person who did the autopsy would make what's called a clinical summary. He would abstract from the person's clinical record how long he was in the hospital, what was the main problem, what were the complications, what were the results of significant laboratory tests. And we used to try and teach them to have a diarrhea of thought and a constipation of words. That was one of my phrases that all my residents used to always kid about. Excess words were not helpful. That's what we—and the final report, different people do it—I worked in a hospital in Detroit for 19 years. There we bound in a book by year every autopsy protocol. We weren't doing that at Bethesda when I was there. We'd just keep them in files, you know. There's all kind of ways different people devise to keep records.

Q. What other kinds of records would you expect to find in a typical Bethesda autopsy protocol from 1963? If you pulled out a folder, what records would you expect to find in it?
A. The autopsy report, period, and this other information would be included. You wouldn't have other—you wouldn't have copies of the tests that were done, for instance. That would have been abstracted and included in one final document.

Q. What would be done with the results of the tests if they're not kept in the folder?
A. They'd go in the patient's file, in the clinical file.

Q. Do you know whether there was any other sort of file for President Kennedy at Bethesda?
A. Not that I'm aware of.

Q. Now, I'm thinking back from memory and I may be wrong on this, but maybe you can help with this. Was President Kennedy ever treated at Bethesda while he was alive?
A. I'm not sure. I just don't know.

Q. Do you know whether if he was treated there when he was alive, as well as while President, would any of the records from his autopsy conceivably have been sent to his patient file?
A. No. I don't believe so. Those records were all—you know where they are. They weren't sent anywhere, because they were all sent to the White House, within three days. Nothing was retained.

Q. Well, were there any histology reports at all that you ever physically held in your hand from President Kennedy's autopsy?
A. The ones that are recorded in that supplemental autopsy report.

Q. There are references to that, but I'm now referring to any documents themselves. Did you ever see any documents?
A. No. I mean, we dictated them, and then the results were put in the file—in the supplementary report.

Q. What were you looking at at the time that you made the dictation of the results?
A. The microscopic slides for the various-

Q. The slide tissue cells?
A. Oh, sure. All of which we turned over to the Secret Service. I presume they're in the Archives some place. I never saw them again.

Q. Could you explain or describe briefly the process that you went through in drafting the autopsy protocol? So explain the number of drafts that you wrote, for example.
A. The decision was made somebody had to take responsibility to write it. We couldn't do it as a troika. So I took the notes home with me, these, I presume, and the notes that I had made, some of which I had made were stained with the President's blood. I wrote a little bit about this in that AMA article.
    Around that time, we had in the government what was called the People to People Program, and the Navy Medical Department's part of that was to bring medical officers from foreign countries to the United States to teach them how the Navy Medical Department functions with the Marine Corps, with the submarines and so forth. These people would be in Washington for 10 weeks. Five weeks they would visit activities in the metropolitan Washington area, and five weeks they would go on field trips. They would go to New London, Connecticut. They'd go to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. They'd go to Pensacola, Florida, all kind-of places, Great Lakes Naval Training Center. 1 occasionally was asked to be an escort for these people. There'd be 18 to 20, 25 doctors from foreign countries. Sometimes we had Greeks and Turks at the same time, for instance. They weren't always the greatest plans in the world, I tell you. But you would escort these guys around. You'd get them on airplanes. You'd get them in buses. It was a real—it was real interesting. On one trip, we took them to Pittsburgh to show them industrial medicine at steel mills and the medical department of a steel mill. We took them to Detroit and took them to the Ford Motor Company so they could see how the medical department of a large car company functioned. While there this particular trip, we took them to Greenfield Village. I don't know if any of you have been to Greenfield Village. It's a very fascinating place where Henry Ford acquired all sorts of buildings and structures from around the United States, and in Europe, to some extent, and had them physically moved to Detroit. For instance, Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory was totally taken apart and brought to Greenfield Village, including the trash pile that was in the back yard.
    Also in Greenfield Village, there is an old Illinois courthouse where Lincoln used to preside when he was circuit-riding judge. And in that courthouse was a chair that was alleged to be the chair in which Lincoln sat when he was assassinated in Ford's Theater. And the docent, in describing this chair, proudly spoke that here on the back of the chair is the stain of the President's blood. The bullet went through his head. I thought this was the most macabre thing I ever saw in my life. It just made a terrible impression on me.
    And when I noticed that these bloodstains were on this document that I had prepared, I said nobody's going to ever get these documents. I'm not going to keep them, and nobody else is ever going to get them.
    So I copied them—and you probably have a copy in my longhand of what I wrote. It's made from the original. And I then burned the original notes in the fireplace of my family room to prevent them from ever falling into the hands of what I consider inappropriate people. And there's been a lot of flack about this, that they're all part of a big conspiracy that I did this because I was involved in I don't know what I was involved. Ludicrous. That is what I did.

Q. When you made reference to the notes that you copied out, were you referring to the document that's marked Exhibit 2, or is that something different?
A. Now, this is the product of—yeah. It's the product of those notes.

Q. The question would be whether there were notes that you copied down as one document and then you used the notes in order to draft the document that's in your hand.
A. The only thing that was retained was this.

Q. Exhibit 2?
A. Right.

Q. Now, I presume that the notes that you took during the autopsy did not resemble in any way the document that you have in your hand now, Exhibit 2.
A. Well, they did, yes. I mean, I didn't dream this up out of whole cloth.

Q. Certainly I understand the content, but I'm just referring to the text that is written in Exhibit 2 tracks reasonably closely the language of the final report. And what I'm interested in is what the two to three pages of notes looked like.
A. I can't recall. I mean, I—they would have been my shorthand version of what you're looking at here, basically, in my own shorthand manner, whatever it may have been.

Q. You would agree, I assume, that the document you're holding in your hand, Exhibit 2, is a basically completed autopsy protocol that tracks the language of the final autopsy protocol that's Exhibit 1?
A. Yes.

Q. And I assume that the notes that you made while you were at Bethesda during the autopsy were not written in sentence and paragraph form.
A. No. They were shorthand.

Q. So what kinds of things, then, were written on it? Measurements?
A. Measurements, yeah, sure. Primarily measurements. That's where these measurements came from.

Q. So when you drafted—well, first, was there any other draft of the autopsy protocol other than the one that you're holding in your hand now-
A. No.

Q. —Exhibit 2?
A. No. There was not.

Q. So when you wrote down the information- well, when you were drafting what is now Exhibit 2, would it be fair to say that you had in your hand two or three pages, approximately—
A. Right.

Q. —of handwritten notes—
A. And I converted the shorthand information there to that document.

Q. When you say "that document," you're referring to Exhibit 2?
A. Yes, exactly.

Q. Was there any information that was contained on the handwritten notes that was not included in the document that's now Exhibit 2—
A. I don't believe so.

Q. Did you ever make a copy that—a copy of the notes that contained the same information as was on the original handwritten notes that was in any form other than the form that appears in Exhibit 2?
A. No.

Q. Have you ever observed that the document now marked Exhibit 1 in the original appears to have bloodstains on it as well?
A. Yes, I do notice it now. These were J's. I'm sure I gave these back to J. I presume I did. 1 don't know where they came from.

Q. Did you ever have any concern about the President's blood being on the document that's now marked Exhibit 1?
A. I can't recall, to tell you the truth.

Q. Do you see any inconsistency at all between destroying some handwritten notes that contained blood on them but preserving other handwritten notes that also had blood on them?
A. Well, only that the others were of my own making. I didn't—wouldn't have the habit of destroying something someone else prepared. The only difference that I can conceive of. I don't know where these went. I don't know if they went back to J or where they went. I have no idea. I certainly didn't keep them. I kept nothing, as a matter of fact.

Q. I'd like to show you the testimony that you offered before the Warren Commission. This is in Exhibit 11 to this deposition. I'd like you to take a look at pages 372 to the top of 373, and then I'll ask you a question.
A. All right.

Q. I'll read that into that record while you're reading it yourself. Mr. Specter asked the question: "And what do those consist of?" The question is referring to some notes. "Answer: In privacy of my own home, early in the morning of Sunday, November 24, 1 made a draft of this report, which I later revised and of which this represents the revision. That draft I personally burned in the fireplace of my recreation room." Do you see Mr. Specter's question and your answer?
A. Yes.

Q. Does that help refresh your recollection of what was burned in your home?
A. Whatever I had, as far as I know, that was burned was everything exclusive of the finished draft that you have as Exhibit—whatever it is.

Q. My question will go to the issue of whether it was a draft of the report that was burned or whether it was—
A. I think it was—

Q. —handwritten notes—
A. It was handwritten notes and the first draft that was burned.

Q. Do you mean to use the expression handwritten notes as being the equivalent of draft of the report?
A. I don't know. Again, it's a hair-splitting affair that I can't understand. Everything that I personally prepared until I got to the status of the handwritten document that later was transcribed was destroyed. You can call it anything you want, whether it was the notes or what, I don't know. But whatever I had, I didn't want anything else to remain, period. This business, I don't know when J act that back or what.

Q. When you say "this business," you're referring to Exhibit 1?
A. Exhibit 1, right.

Q. Dr. Humes, let me show you part of your testimony to the HSCA.

Question by Mr. Cornwell- I'll read this into the record. It's from page 330, and it is Exhibit 21 to this deposition.

"Mr. Cornwell: And you finally began to write the autopsy report at what time?"
"Dr. Humes: It was decided that three people couldn't write the report simultaneously, so I assumed the responsibility for writing the report, which I began about 11 o'clock in the evening of Saturday November 23rd, having wrestled with it for four or five, six hours in the afternoon, and worked on it until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning of Sunday, the 24th.
"Mr. Cornwell: Did you have any notes or records at that point as to the exact location of the—"
"Dr. Humes: I had the draft notes which we had prepared in the autopsy room, which I copied."

Now, again, the question would be: Did you copy the notes so that you would have a version of the notes without the blood on them but still notes rather than a draft report?
A. Yes, precisely. Yes. And from that I made a first draft, and then I destroyed the first draft and the notes.

Q. So there were, then, two sorts of documents that were burned: one, the draft notes, and, two, a draft report?
A. Right.

Q. Is that correct?
A. That's right. So that the only thing remaining was the one that you have.

Q. Why did you burn the draft report as opposed to the draft notes?
A. I don't recall. I don't know. There was no reason—see, we're splitting hairs here, and I'll tell you, it's getting to me a little bit, as you may be able to detect. The only thing I wanted to finish to hand over to whomever, in this case Admiral Burkley, was my completed version. So I burned everything else. Now, why I didn't burn the thing that J wrote, I have no way of knowing. But whether it was a draft or whether it was the notes or what, I don't know. There was nothing left when I got finished with it, in any event, but the thing that you now have, period.

Q. Well, the concern, of course, is if there is a record related to the autopsy that is destroyed, we're interested in finding out what the exact circumstances—
A. I've told you what the circumstances were. I used it only as an aide-memoire to do what I was doing and then destroyed it. Is that hard to understand?

Q. When I first asked the question, you explained that the reason that you had destroyed it was that it had the blood of the President on it.
A. Right.

Q. The draft report, of course, would not have had the blood of—
A. Well, it may have had errors in spelling or I don't know what was the matter with it, or whether I even ever did that. I don't know. I can't recall. I absolutely can't recall, and I apologize for that. But that's the way the cookie crumbles. I didn't want anything to remain that some squirrel would grab on and make whatever use that they might. Now, whether you felt that was reasonable or not, I don't know. But it doesn't make any difference because that was my decision and mine alone. Nobody else's.

Q. Did you talk to anyone about your decision to—
A. No, absolutely not. No. It was my own materials. Why—I don't feel a need to talk to anybody about it.

Q. Did the original notes that you created have any information with respect to the estimated angle in which the bullet struck the President?
A. Nothing different than what's in the final version.

Q. Did the original notes that you took identify the location of the posterior thorax entrance wound with respect to which of the vertebra of the President the wound was closest to?
A. No. The measurements were taken from bony landmarks. As I recall, one was a mastoid process, the bottom of the—behind the ear, and the other was a midline of the vertebral column, not how many vertebrae down it was. So the up-and-down measurement would be the distance from the mastoid process down.

Q. When you recorded it a being from the right mastoid process, was it your understanding that the right mastoid process was a fixed body landmark?
A. Oh, sure. It doesn't move around in most people. You're really in trouble if it does.

Q. Well, is it a fixed landmark, fixed body landmark with respect to the thoracic cavity?
A. It's fixed with regard to respect anything you want it respected to.

Q. Well, if your head turns to the right or to the left, does the mastoid process distance vary with relationship to—
A. Well, maybe a millimeter or two. Not significantly. Are we getting into a big debate as to whether I did anything properly here or not? It's not a debate I want to get involved in.

Q. I'd like to show you a document that's marked Exhibit 6, which appears on its face to be a death certificate for President John F. Kennedy, signed by George Gregory Burkley on November 23, 1963?
A. Right. Never saw it before.

Q. You've never seen Exhibit 6 before?
A. No, sir.

Q. I'd like to draw your attention to the first sentence of text on the second page and ask if you would read that, please.

[Pause.]

THE WITNESS: He's sort of mixing his metaphors. He's mixing the wounds up in here, but I presume when he says the wound was shattering type, it's the wound of the skull.

BY MR. GUNN:

Q. You're welcome to read as much as you would prefer.
A. Whatever.

Q. It's just I have a question for you on the first sentence only.
A. Okay.

Q. You see that Dr. Burkley identifies the posterior back at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra. Do you see that?
A. Yes.

Q. Was that correct?
A. I don't know. I didn't measure from which vertebra it was. It's sometimes hard to decide which vertebra, to tell you the truth, by palpation. Maybe you can do it accurately because the first and second—did I say the third? Oh, he says third thoracic. I think that's much lower than it actually was. I think it's much lower than it actually—you have seven cervical vertebrae. don't know. I mean, he's got a right to say anything he wants, but I never saw it before, and I don't have an opinion about it.

Q. Did you ever discuss which vertebra—
A. I never discussed anything about it with George Burkley, period, or anybody else. 1 mean, with all due respect, you seem to have come to me from left field. You know, I just—they're not things of which I'm aware. The measurements I made, as far as I'm concerned, were accurate. You could debate whether they were wise choices to be made or not, but they were accurate.

Q. When did you sign the autopsy protocol that is now marked Exhibit 3?
A. Late Sunday afternoon.

Q. Where was it that you signed it?
A. In Admiral Galloway's office. His personal—it was decided his secretary was an appropriate person to—she normally wouldn't do this work for me at all because I had my own people. But I guess he fell that it was—she was a good person to do it. That's all. It didn't make a difference to me who did it. It was a mechanical chore, as far as I was concerned.

Q. Who else was in the office at the time that you signed the protocol?
A. Pierre and J.

Q. And they were the only two others there?
A. Mm-hmm.

Q. Was anyone in the room immediately next to where you were?
A. Admiral Galloway was in and out that afternoon. I don't know if he was there or not at that-point, to tell you the truth.

Q. Was he waiting for you to sign the document, or you were just in his office?
A. I can't tell you what he was doing there. When we were working on it, we made some minor changes in it. He came in and told us that Ruby shot Oswald, which was the shock of the day, of course. And I don't know how long he stayed, to tell you the truth. I don't know if he was there when I left or not.

Q. Did anyone at any point, other than Drs. Finck and Boswell, make any suggestions to you about the content of the autopsy report?
A. It seems to me that Admiral Galloway made some comments, but I don't recall precisely what they were, because he was there while we were doing it.

Q. Did he ask you to make any changes in the autopsy protocol?
A. I don't think so.

Q. Did he ask you to make any changes that would be of any substantive importance?

A. Certainly not. I think he made a suggestion—and it wasn't a bad one—to insert the word "presumably" a couple of times, because they were presumptions. We didn't know who shot who or anything about it, you know. But our conclusions were that this was probably the entrance wound, this was probably the exit wound. I think he thought—he said it would be wise to use that verbiage, and I didn't have any problem. That's the only suggestion I recall he made.

Q. After you signed the autopsy protocol, what did you do with it physically yourself?

A. Physically, got a staff car and carried it to the White House.

Q. How many did you take to the White House?

A. I think the original and six, it says. I mean, I don't keep that number in my mind, but whatever it was.

Q. Original and a few copies?

A. Leaving one in Admiral Galloway's office, which was subsequently taken there.

Q. Okay. And was there more than one signed original?

A. No.

Q. Was there any draft protocol that you had written prior to that time that had been signed?

A. Nothing other than what you have.

Q. So the one we have is the only signed protocol?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. After you signed the protocol and delivered it to Admiral Burkley in the White House, what was the next thing that you did that had connection with the autopsy or supplemental reports of the—

A. I presume when we got the micro slides processed, which was, I don't know, Monday or Tuesday, or some day at the beginning of the week. Reviewing those and writing the report that was the supplementary report.

Q. Earlier in the deposition today, you mad reference to a sectioning of the brain, if I understood correctly, that took place one or two days afterwards.

A. Yeah.

Q. Did that happen within one or two days after?

A. Yes. Shortly after. I can't tell you what day now.

Q. If Dr. Boswell and Mr. Stringer said that it took place two or two to three days afterwards, would that make sense to you?
A. I have no—yeah, could well be.

Q. What did you do in the course of the examination of the brain that took place shortly after?
A. We took photographs of the separated—now we have the brain in a pail, and removed it from there, took photographs from both above and below, and took these representative sections that we mentioned there.

Q. Was the brain fixed by that time?
A. Yes. Pretty well fixed.

Q. Approximately how much time did you spend on that examination of the brain?
A. Oh, I don't know. I would say an hour or two, something like that.

Q. Where did that examination take place?
A. In the laboratory, the main laboratories of the hospital, medical school.

Q. Are you able to connect in time the difference in time between the time that you delivered the autopsy protocol to Admiral Burkley and the time that you examined the brain?
A. I just said earlier it took, you know—I don' t know—a couple of days, two or three days. don't know exactly how long.

Q. Was that a couple of days after the November 22nd autopsy?
A. A couple of days after Sunday, after they were delivered. I don't know. In that week some day. I don't really know. It didn't seem to be important to me at the time, and still doesn't, quite candidly.

Q. You suggested earlier that—and this is also true that it also appears in the JAMA article —that Dr. Burkley suggested to you that the Kennedy family wanted to inter the brain with the President.
A. He wasn't suggesting. He told me flat out that the decision has been made and that Robert Kennedy was their emissary and he was going to take the brain and deliver it to Robert Kennedy.

Q. Did you ask or wonder how they would be able to inter the brain if the President had already been buried?
A. No. I didn't worry about it one way or the other. I would presume that they could devise a method of doing that without too much difficulty, however.

Q. I'll show you a document that I believe you have seen before, earlier in the deposition, No. 19, which is a memorandum by Andy Purdy to the file dated August 17, 1977, which contains his notes from interviewing Dr. Burkley. I'd like you to take a look at the paragraph in the center of page 5.
    Let me read it for the record, and then I'd like to get your response to it. Within the paragraph, Mr. Purdy, reporting on his conversation with Dr. Burkley, says, "Says he"—referring to Dr. Burkley—"was responsible for saving the brain after it was fixed in formalin. Burkley decided to keep the brain rather than put it back in the body, as Dr. Humes wanted to do." Is that accurate?
A. That's absolutely false. I don't know where he got these ideas. I never put a brain back in a body in my life. Hundreds and hundreds of autopsies that I've done, and I certainly wouldn't put this one back in the body. It's ridiculous. And he had nothing to do with it. Not a thing. God, that really—I can't believe some of this stuff. George is a fine man. I have great respect for him as a physician. But this must have spun his wheels or something. I don't know what happened, but he—this absolutely did not happen. 1 wouldn't dream of it.
    It's just annoying as the devil—forgive me, but it is. And I say, I've never seen this document before. Just as well, because I'd just have been annoyed for longer if I had. It makes no sense.

Q. At the time the interview was conducted, the House Select Committee on Assassinations was attempting to determine the location of the President's brain, and there was evidence that Admiral Burkley had been in possession of the brain at one point.
A. Yes

Q. And so they were pursuing that question with him, and so the context is they are trying to find out where it is.
A. They're not going to find any help from me. I handed it to George Burkley, and that was the end of that.

Q. In this statement, he does not make reference to wanting to inter it with the body of the President.
A. All I can tell you is that's what he told me. Now, whether that was true or not, I have no way of knowing. That's what he told me, and I'm reporting it factually, period. It didn't bother me one way or the other. It seemed to me that that was perfectly appropriate. And how they were going to do it, you know, that was no big problem, I don't think.
    And there's a mention in that thing of two bullets. I don't know what he's talking about. I mean, it's—makes no sense. The whole thing makes no sense. This was what, '77 you say?

Q. Yes.
A. That was then 14 years after the event. I don't know how old George was at that point. I'm not sure.

Q. After the examination of the brain and the review of the sections, what was the next thing that you did in preparation for the supplementary autopsy report?
A. I presume I examined the sections of the various organs that we had had caused then to be made.

Q. Do you have a recollection as to approximately how long after the autopsy that was done?
A. It was just two or three days. The technicians worked very assiduously and got them to us relatively quickly. What's the date on the delivery of the supplementary report?

Q. There's no date originally on the report. It's not dated. There's a handwritten date that's written elsewhere on it. What's your best recollection as to when the supplementary—
A. Before the end of the week, I would guess.

Q. So if the assassination was on the 22nd, on a Friday, does that mean approximately—and I understand we're dealing approximately here—
A. By the end of the following week, the 29th, or whatever, the 30th.

Q. Did you personally deliver to Admiral Burkley the brain?
A. Yes.

Q. Did you receive a receipt for that?
A. If I did, I no longer have it. I don't recall, quite candidly. I do not have it. I've been through all the papers that I have. I do not have it. So I can't tell you whether I did or didn't.

Q. We have not been able to locate any receipt of that sort through all of the records. Do you have any idea where a copy of that receipt might be?
A. I don't think there ever was one. I don't think there ever was one.

Q. In addition to the brain and the sections, was there any other biological matter that was given to Dr. Burkley—
A. No.

Q. —by you?
A. No. Well, the blocks, the paraffin blocks from which the sections were made, yeah.

Q. Did you deliver those to Admiral Burkley in the White House, or did he come-
A. No, I think he came out. I did not take them to the White House. That I do know.

Q. Do you have a recollection of the approximate timing of when he came out to pick up those?
A. I can't recall. I don't know when.

Q. Do you know whether it was before or after the supplementary report was completed?
A. Oh, it had to be after that, but I don't recall when.

Q. What we would like to do at this point is bring in some of the autopsy photos, and I'd like to ask you some questions about those.
A. Sure.

MR. GUNN: We'll take a short break.

[Recess].

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