A week of stories from the Boston Globe's Washington bureau
National
International
Washington, D.C.
|
|
|
  
|
|
The existence of additional photographs raised new questions about how the autopsy was conducted, a subject of intense debate for 35 years.
But the new evidence, made public by the Assassination Records Review Board, sheds no light on the whereabouts of the second set of pictures. The photographs are believed taken by White House photographer Robert L. Knudsen during or after the autopsy at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963. The following year, a commission headed by then-Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that the killer was Lee Harvey Oswald and that he acted alone and was not part of a conspiracy. That conclusion has been challenged since.
The review board, created by Congress to collect all pertinent records concerning Kennedy's murder, said the doctors who conducted the autopsy may have had good intentions - protecting the privacy of the Kennedy family. But ''the legacy of such secrecy ultimately has caused distrust and suspicion,'' the board said.
One set of autopsy photographs, now at the National Archives, has been known to exist for years, and some of the pictures have been widely published.
In 1997, the review board located Saundra K. Spencer, who worked at the Naval Photographic Center in 1963. She was shown the archives' autopsy photos and concluded they were not the pictures she had helped process.
Those she had worked with, she said, had ''no blood or opening cavities.'' They were ''quite reverent in how they handled it,'' she said.
This story ran on page A04 of the Boston Globe on 08/01/98.
| ||||||||||
|
|
||
|
|
 Extending our newspaper services to the web |
of The Globe Online |
|
ASHINGTON - New testimony released yesterday about the autopsy done on the body of John F. Kennedy says a second set of pictures was taken of Kennedy's wounds - ones never made public. 
