Remembering Cyril Wecht:

The Great Dissenter on the JFK Case Pt. 1

Cyril Wecht passed away on May 13, 2024 at the age of 93. To say he had a distinguished career in the field of forensic pathology is an understatement. He was a past president of both the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American College of Legal Medicine. He served as first, the coroner of Allegheny County (Pittsburgh area) and then the Medical Examiner of the county. He was educated as both a doctor and lawyer, holding an MD from the University of Pittsburgh and a JD from the University of Maryland (both1962).

He joined the Air Force and served at the Air Force Hospital at Maxwell Air Force base in Alabama, rising to captain in the medical corps.  (At a  much later JFK conference, he once noted how shocked he was at segregation in the south, which even limited days and hours when African-Americans could visit public parks.) After he left the service, he did a research fellowship in forensic pathology at the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s office. He left there as a forensic  pathologist and he joined the staff of Leech Farm Veterans Administration hospital in Pittsburgh. Shortly after that he joined the staff of St. Francis Hospital and he became Deputy Coroner of Allegheny County in 1965. This began an over 20 year career in that office.

On the day of the JFK murder he was in LA visiting with friend and colleague Dr. Thomas Noguchi. Noguchi’s secretary came in and told them that President Kennedy had been shot. The two pathologists ran to a restaurant to watch the coverage.  Wecht was particularly struck by the testimony of the Newmans—Bill and Gayle-who were standing in front and to the right of JFK in the car.  They both said they heard shots coming from behind them. That testimony stuck with the young pathologist.

By late 1964, Wecht had become an assistant DA and medical advisor in the Allegheny County DA’s office.  He was the acting chief of the lab and pathology services at two local hospitals. All this while being an instructor in legal medicine at Pitt and doing visiting seminars both in the USA and abroad. Then, in September, the Warren Report came out. Wecht was surprised at how little space was given to the autopsy of either Kennedy, or the medical examination of the wounded Governor John Connally, riding in front of JFK. In addition to that lack, there were no autopsy pictures, or X rays. When Wecht read the autopsy report, he was shocked. Not just at its conclusion, which disagreed with the Newmans, by stating that Kennedy was killed due to two shots from behind him; but also by its brevity and overall shoddiness. It was only six pages long. Yet the manual of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for autopsy protocol was 79 pages. And all three pathologists were in the military. Yet neither wound into Kennedy was dissected for purposes of trajectory analysis. Something which is pretty much standard procedure in a homicide by gunshot wound case. The young pathologist was startled by the excuse for not sectioning the brain: “In the interest of preserving the specimen, coronal sections are not made.”  In Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited, Wecht exclaimed “To preserve the specimen in the interests of whom? To place on Jackie Kennedy’s mantelpiece?”

This 6 page document, plus the even shorter supplemental, were in the Warren Commission Report. The young doctor had to wait two more months for the accompanying 26 volumes of testimony and evidence to be published. When it was, he went to the Carnegie Library, the nearest location, to begin reading the volumes. He discovered that not only were the hearings closed, but no agenda of witnesses was ever given out in advance. In other words—in what would be almost unimaginable today-- the Commission worked in a veritable blackout. He also noted that the commissioners themselves came and went, as this was noted in the volumes.  Wecht, an attorney, was again surprised. It would be like a judge or members of the jury leaving the court room for a stroll and then returning.

He also noted the influence of a young Philadelphia lawyer named Arlen Specter. He did so since Specter seemed to be most responsible for the medical testimony.  As Cyril put it:

…his questioning of witnesses would fall short of the kind of competent inquiries I would have liked. It was maddening to read transcripts where Specter failed to nail down basic information of probative value.  At first, I couldn’t figure out if he were simple-minded, or purposely avoiding opening doors that could lead to inconvenient testimony,  As I read on, I determined it was the latter option. He knew exactly what he was doing to negate the process of finding the truth. (Wecht and Dawna Kaufmann, The JFK Assassination Dissected, p.139)

Quite naturally, he was particularly stunned at the softball treatment Specter afforded the three pathologists: James Humes, Thornton Boswell and Pierre Finck.

It turned out that neither Humes nor Boswell were practicing forensic pathologists. But Specter never asked Humes why he was  chosen as the lead autopsist on the assassinated president. He never even asked why he did not look at the photographs before he wrote his report.  Wecht was further taken aback when he noted that Specter’s examination of Boswell was even more namby pamby  than with Humes. And further that Specter had all three doctors in the room as he examined them. Since Wecht spent time in the DA’s office he knew this was a definite violation of legal practice, since it gives the witnesses the opportunity to match up their stories.

It was while reading Finck’s testimony that Wecht discovered what became the sine qua non of the Warren Report: Specter’s invention of the Single Bullet Theory. Wecht’s reaction was one of disbelief because this one bullet actually smashed two bones in Connally’s body after entering and exiting Kennedy. Yet it emerged virtually intact. As he later wrote about Specter:

And for the rest of his career, he would adopt the single-bullet theory as his favorite theme in defending the Warren Commission Report and its conclusions.  All logic and reason were stubbornly discarded as he embraced the implausible and held on for dear life. (Ibid, p. 142)

Wecht spent a year reading the volumes. At work, he made no secret of his questions about the quality of the inquiry.  As a result he was invited to speak on a panel for the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention scheduled for February of 1966. He did not suspect that this would be a turning point in his life. But it was.

The convention was held at the Drake Hotel in Chicago on February 25^th. Since it was snowing heavily, people stayed indoors. As he later wrote, when he gave his address he got a standing ovation and was treated like royalty the rest of the week. But back then, he was still conservative in his judgment. So he qualified his conclusion by saying that although he had a surfeit of questions, there was not sufficient evidence  to completely reject the report. Many years later, in a private conversation with this writer, the doctor said that Pierre Finck was there. He told Cyril, “You can’t believe what it was like. It was awful. I wish I could tell you about it.”

When word spread about this lecture Mark Lane got in contact with Cyril.  Lane told the doctor that he was appalled by the way the press had jumped on Oswald, who was then killed while in the arms of the police; and how DA Henry Wade then pronounced the dead man guilty when he never even had a lawyer. He also told Wecht something that very much impacted him. Mark said that from his appearances before the Commission he was convinced that they had come to their conclusions—Oswald alone  as the killer of Kennedy and patrolman J. D. Tippit, and Jack Ruby the sole killer of Oswald—already, well before the inquiry was completed.

A second prominent critic also got in contact with him: Sylvia Meagher.  He visited her  in Greenwich Village.  She told Wecht she was horrified that there was no subject index to the Warren Commission volumes, so she created one in 1966. She was also shocked at how many inconsistencies and misrepresentations there were in the evidence.  This to her was proof of not just incompetence but of duplicity and prejudice. She felt Oswald was framed and that Kennedy was likely murdered by a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles. She also told the pathologist that the investigation was so bad that she would not be surprised if the autopsy photographs and x-rays had been falsified. (ibid, p. 153) 

For that time period, 1966-67, this was a truly explosive declaration from a writer who was known for going only so far as the evidence would take her. Because today, with the work of people like Dr. David Mantik and Dr. Michael Cheeser, what she predicted seems to be the case e. g. the white patch on the back of the x rays, the 6.5 mm fragment that the pathologists did not see the night of the autopsy, and the sworn testimony to the Assassination Records Review Board by official photographer John Stringer that he did not take the pictures of Kennedy’s brain housed in the National Archives.

By this time, the end of 1966, Wecht had decided not to opt for a legal career and to continue with forensic pathology.  He worked at St. Clair Memorial Hospital and taught classes at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. It was while there that Josiah Thompson got in contact with him. Thompson was working on a JFK article for Life, and he wanted Cyril to go up to New York to watch the Zapruder film, which the doctor had not seen yet. Wecht was all too eager to see the film. But not only did he do that, he was shown the 486 blown up frames that make up the film. He watched the film multiple times and had it stopped and rolled back upon request.

Wecht now understood why Specter invented the Single Bullet Theory.  As he expressed so eloquently in JFK Revisited, the interim between when Kennedy was first hit, and when Connally was hit was simply too short, about 1.5 seconds.  As the FBI calculated, it took 2.3 seconds to recycle the rifle. He concluded that this is why the Commission did what it did. He was correct on this.  In a very belated revelation made by Edward Epstein in his book Assume Nothing, Specter told Epstein that he concluded that either the Commission went with the Single Bullet Theory or they had to start searching for a second assassin.

The other giveaway in the film was that in frame 230, Connally was holding his Stetson hat in his right hand while Kennedy was grimacing in pain. But according to the Single Bullet Theory, at this point, the Magic Bullet “had already shattered his wrist and severed the radial nerve.” (Wecht and Kaufmann, p. 157) So how could Connally be holding his hat so nonchalantly?

Wecht concluded that Specter’s theory was beyond absurd. It was outrageous.