BY DAVID SHOEMAKER
Magazine Editor
Forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht alleged that there were at least two shooters in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that the U.S. government was involved with the murder.
Wecht, a Pittsburgh native and former Allegheny County Coroner, spoke in the auditorium on Nov. 14, in a talk sponsored by the Whitehall Library. The occasion was to mark the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death on Nov. 22, 1963.Wecht began by saying that “the more people are aware of what can be done (about assassination), the less likely it will be taken upon by other groups.”
Wecht set the scene for the audience, explaining what politics was like in 1963 and what the U.S. public thought about Kennedy. He then explained what he called the flaws of the Warren Commission report on the assassination, based on his own medical experience.
Wecht said that the government appointed two military pathologists to examine President Kennedy’s body, but they had never done an autopsy before in their lives.
He then said the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory, which he dubs the “magic bullet theory,” was inadequate. From there, Wecht maintained that one bullet could not have zigzagged around to make seven wounds between the president and Texas Gov. John Connally, who was sitting directly in front of the president.
“Before you even touch upon the (political atmosphere at the time), you can see that there were two shooters,” Wecht said.
Wecht’s claim to fame could be the fact that he was the first non-government official to view tissue samples from Kennedy’s body after it went under government control in October 1966. Wecht then alledged in a 1972 New York Times interview that the President’s brain, which should have been in the government’s possession, had gone missing.
“The brain was never examined, because you can tell from the hemorrhaging exactly where the bullets came through (the body),” Wecht said. This, he maintains, would have proven that the bullets could not have come from one shooter standing in a single spot.
Wecht said that he believed that certain forces in the government performed a coup d’état because they “couldn’t beat (Kennedy) at the polls,” and they feared a probable five more years with him that would have changed the American political system.
