Do we need to know the height of the rear
head wound?
Revised June 2001
Just as with JFK's back wound, students of the assassination argue
incessantly about the height of the entrance wound at the rear of his head. One
group accepts that it is just above and to
the right of the EOP, as reported by the three autopsy physicians and reproduced
in the Warren Report. Another group claims
that it is four inches higher, near the cowlick. They follow the reports of the
HSCA and the Clark Panel, and Dr. John K. Lattimer's book Kennedy and Lincoln. Each group claims photographic evidence for its position.
Interestingly, each group also contains conspiracists and nonconspiracists.
As with the back wound, neither group is budging about the
height of the head wound. Even though I have recently been persuaded that the
high position is probably the correct one and that the autopsy physicians
probably made a mistake,
I became curious about whether this seemingly intractable problem could be worked around,
that is, whether the height didn't really matter in getting to the right answer
about the assassination. Here is the chain of logic that I constructed, which shows that the
height of the entrance wound is not essential to understanding the
assassination.