Thursday, November 21, 2013
It’s been 50 years since the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Still, for Dr. Werner Spitz, nothing has changed about that day or the autopsy evidence he reviewed years later for the Rockefeller Commission and House Select Committee on Assassinations.
On the day JFK was slain, Spitz was a passenger on a ship headed from Germany to New York City along with his young wife and child. Also in tow, carrying all of their worldly possessions, were 13 wooden crates. As with many of the passengers on the ship, the prospect of living in America had Spitz feeling excited and hopeful. That was until the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963.
“On that day there was a dark mood on the ship,” said Spitz.
Rumor had it President Kennedy was shot and people were congregating in groups to discuss and deliberate. “I was part of one of these groups on the top deck where somebody had a shortwave radio. I was able to capture what was going on in the broadcast out of the states. Of course, at the beginning he was shot, and little by little it became obvious that he was not only shot but that he was dead.”
How did it happen?
Where did it happen?
Where did it happen?
Who killed him?
These are the kind of questions Spitz and fellow passengers mulled over into the night and around the New York harbor the following day. Little did Spitz know - as an aspiring young forensic pathologist - that years later he would be called upon to answer some of these very questions.
In 1975, President Gerald Ford created the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency and other American intelligence agencies. This followed a report by the New York Times that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens during the 1960s.
Because Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was chairman, it was also referred to as the Rockefeller Commission. In addition, the commission studied issues relating to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Shortly after that, the House Select Committee on Assassinations undertook reinvestigations of the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Spitz, who later served for decades as the Macomb County medical examiner, was asked to work with both the Rockefeller Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He viewed the autopsy materials as an adviser to the Rockefeller Commission and was part of the HSCA’s panel of experts that re-examined much of the evidence compiled two decades earlier by the Warren Commission, which concluded gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on that day in Dallas. Under particular scrutiny were the president’s body movements as the three shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, specifically the JFK head snap seen in the Zapruder film first shown on television in 1975. The Zapruder film is the home movie taken by businessman Abraham Zapruder capturing the assassination as it happened.
As one of the experts on the HCSA panel, Spitz joined a team that included one other forensic pathologist, a neuropathologist (one who studies the pathology of the brain and nervous system), a radiologist, and a ballistics expert.
Born in Stargard, Germany (now part of Poland), the son of Siegfried and Anna, Spitz seemed destined for forensic pathology. While other kids his age were spending their summer hiking the grounds of castles in Bavaria, Spitz was working in the pathology department at the hospital where his parents were employed. In 1953, he graduated from Hebrew University Medical School in Jerusalem. While working at the coroner’s office in Jerusalem, Spitz saw only one homicide. Then he moved to Baltimore and saw 400 within his first year as deputy medical examiner. “I said to myself, ‘Well, this is why I’m here,’” Spitz said.
Why was he chosen by the commission?
In 1972, he moved to Detroit where he worked as chief medical examiner for Wayne County and years later for Macomb County. Considered by many to be a pioneer in forensic pathology, Spitz also taught at Wayne State University and the University of Windsor and stills runs a private consulting practice in St. Clair Shores. By the time he got the call from Washington, the number of autopsies he had performed was in the thousands - investigating everything from assisted suicides and domestic violence cases to drowning and homicides, many of them having to do with bullet wounds of the head and the body.
It’s this experience Spitz took to Washington.
At the National Archives, where all of the evidence secured in the case was held, Spitz found himself reliving history, one piece of evidence at a time.
He was given access to everything they had. This included X-rays, the President’s back brace, his clothes, including his shirt and necktie (which helped him determine the bullet wound to the neck was an exit wound) and the Navy’s original autopsy reports. These were filed by Dr. James J. Humes, who was on staff at Bethesda Naval Hospital at the time of the shooting. Soon after doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas pronounced the president dead, the Secret Service and other personnel proceeded to transport the body from Texas to Washington. While in flight, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy requested the autopsy be done at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md., since the President had served in the Navy.
While working on the case, Spitz received access to Zapruder’s 26-second color film and photos of JFK’s wounds. The family had requested the photos not be shown for 50 years.
Spitz could see why.
“They were so explicit they made my hair stand on end,” he said, in a previous report. “You could see every pore in his skin.”
“They were so explicit they made my hair stand on end,” he said, in a previous report. “You could see every pore in his skin.”
After close review of all the evidence, Spitz and members of his panel filed a report, confirming what Humes concluded at the time of the assassination: One projectile entered the back of the president and exited in the front of the neck; one projectile entered in the rear of the skull and exited the front. One dissenter later argued against that JFK was not shot solely by Oswald from a window of the Texas School Book Depository.
It was partly as a result of him that the final report stated that “the committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
Spitz reported his findings to the commission. A large box holding all of his notes and data was secured as property of the National Archives. Then the doctor tracked down Humes.
“He was working right here in Detroit,” Spitz said.
After retiring from the Navy, Humes became the chief pathologist and director of laboratories at St. John Hospital in Detroit. “So I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you shave the skin around the bullet wound in the head? What happened to the President’s brain? Where are your notes from the autopsy?”
One of the gravest errors made during the president’s autopsy, in Spitz’s opinion, was that the back of the head was never shaved. It left speculation and innuendo regarding the exact location of the wound. “Jackie was upstairs in the hospital and sent down an order not to cut any hair,” Spitz was told. Those orders were passed on to Humes who, as a military man, followed them.
“I wouldn’t have asked,” Spitz said. “I would’ve just done it.”
Spitz can appear curt, be it the seriousness of his work or his strong European accent. However, given the opportunity to share his thoughts, one encounters a Yoda-like character with a sense of warmth and compassion.
“You have to understand -- though an excellent pathologist he (Humes) was not a forensic pathologist. And there’s a huge difference,” he explained. “However, in those days, that was not recognized.”
Spitz said Humes broke down during their discussion, clearly upset by what took place. As Spitz said, it was a different time.
Humes told Spitz he burned his notes from the autopsy because they were covered with Kennedy’s blood. As for the brain, he had no idea what happened to it. Rumor has it a member of the Kennedy family may know its whereabouts, but again that’s just a theory.
Spitz said it could be something as simple as it was lost in the craziness of the moment or misplaced among the other brains in the morgue. Also simple to explain, Spitz added, was JFK’s “rearward jerk” after the fatal shot. That brief movement had convinced skeptics that the fatal shot had not come from Oswald’s perch behind the limousine.
Spitz said it took a moment for the driver to comprehend the tragedy that was unfolding and when he did, he accelerated, sending what was at that point a lifeless body backwards.
During his 60 years as a forensic pathologist Spitz, now 87, has offered expert testimony in many famous cases: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Preppy Murder Trial in New York, the California Night Stalker case, and the wrongful death lawsuit against O.J. Simpson. In all cases, famous or not, Spitz said the bottom line comes from what you have to work with at the start.
“This was not a complicated case,” Spitz said of the Kennedy assassination.
It became complicated because of people and political circumstances.
“I don’t really know who pulled the trigger,” Spitz said. “All I can tell you is what I see - whether this person pulled the trigger or that person pulled the trigger. No forensic pathologist will ever determine that because ... we don’t determine who’s guilty. There are other people who determine that. We determine what we see.”
Was there a conspiracy? Is there evidence of that?
Maybe.
Five decades after President JFK was fatally shot and long after official inquiries ended, thousands of pages of investigative documents remain withheld from public view. The contents of these files are partially known and conspiracy buffs are not the only ones seeking to open them for a closer look.
“If there was a conspiracy, it was not one where he was in a crossfire,” Spitz said.
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You can watch a video interview with Spitz by The Macomb Daily's David Dalton here.
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