Were JFK's wounds altered before the autopsy?

    Everyone familiar with the JFK assassination knows that David Lifton proposed in his 1980 best-seller Best Evidence that JFK's wounds were surgically altered between Dallas and Bethesda to make it appear that he had been shot only from the rear when in fact he had been shot only from the front. But did you know that Lifton was not the first to publish this theory? Yes, you read that right. Fred T. Newcomb and Perry Adams, from California, actually beat Lifton twice, first in their 1974 book-length manuscript Murder from Within, and then in their formal 1975 article "Did Someone Alter the Medical Evidence?", which was published in the September/October 1975 issue of Skeptic magazine (Special Issue No. 9). You don't know about Newcomb and Adams's article mostly because David Lifton didn't tell you anything about it in Best Evidence. Why didn't Lifton acknowledge that he was the second to publish the idea of body alteration? He will have to answer for himself, but the answer seems obvious to anyone who considers economics and reputation.
    Admittedly, Newcombe and Perry don't lay out a detailed story in this short article, but they offer all the essential ingredients—differences between wounds as observed by doctors at Parkland and at Bethesda, both sets of doctors observing correctly, desire on someone's part to make the wounds appear to have been caused by shots from the rear rather than by the actual shots from the front, and the body's being intercepted and altered somewhere between Parkland and Bethesda. This is essentially Lifton's scenario but without the detail.
    So we have Newcomb and Adams publishing an early, rough wound-alteration scenario and then David Lifton publishing an elaborated version five years later. Who should get the credit here? Although parts of the story remain murky, we know that Lifton was working on this topic for a long time, but that he and Newcomb were friends and associates for part of that time. Did they develop the idea of body alteration simultaneously and independently, did Lifton do most or all of it, or were they truly working together on it for at least part of that time? Although we will probably never know the full story, I would hazard the guess that Lifton did at least most of the work If so, he would have major grounds for complaining about Newcomb and Adams's publishing his ideas in this article in Skeptic. Another strange chapter in the history of JFK critics.
    However you choose to view it, here is Newcomb and Adams's full article from Skeptic. Enjoy!