In September 1977, when the HSCA forensic pathology panel showed Dr. Humes a photo displaying what they believed was the actual entrance hole on the back of the head, the small oval shape in the cowlick, Dr. Humes, who’d led the autopsy of President Kennedy and had repeatedly asserted that the hole was near the President’s hairline, responded “I don’t know what that is. Number one, I can assure you that as we reflected the scalp to get to this point, there was no defect corresponding to this in the skull at any point. I don’t know what that is. It could be to me clotted blood…it certainly was not any wound of entrance.”
Well, this was not what the panel wanted to hear.
In 1996 HSCA counsel Andy Purdy told the ARRB that after Humes made his comments about the panel's presumed bullet hole being nothing but "clotted blood," Dr. Charles Petty took Humes outside and yelled at him. And this wasn't just Purdy's fantasy. In a 2-20-2000 meeting with researchers, Dr. Michael Baden not only confirmed Purdy's story, but built upon it. He re-constructed Petty's words to Humes for dramatic effect, and had Petty call Humes a "God-damned jackass."
This is most intriguing. Was Humes a "jackass," to Petty's eye, because he'd been unwilling to admit he'd made a horrendous mistake, and had placed the entrance wound on Kennedy's skull four inches from its actual location, on the wrong bone? Or was Humes a "jackass," to Petty's eye, because his refusal to acknowledge this supposed mistake was sure to open doors neither Petty nor Humes wanted opened--namely, that there had been a government-ordered cover-up of the medical evidence? That Petty's instincts were to obfuscate is supported, moreover, by a 1993 letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In this letter, Petty defended Humes, and even claimed "There were no bullet defects other than those described by Humes in his report." Hmmm... Petty had either forgotten that he'd previously claimed Humes had made one of the biggest blunders in medico-legal history, or had thought this information better left unsaid in a trade mag sure to be read by his fellow pathologists.
In any event, Humes' problems extended way beyond his being yelled at by Petty. His subsequent problems would, in fact, make those problems look--eegads--petty in comparison. In his 1998 book Real Answers, HSCA Counsel Gary Cornwell admits that, as a result of Humes' failure to agree with the new and improved entrance location, he was all set to treat Humes as a hostile witness and aggressively question him about the problems with the autopsy during his September 1978 testimony before the committee. (Cornwell believed that Humes, "in an apparent attempt to cover up his own mistakes" had "not told the truth" to the Warren Commission, and that he--Cornwell--could "prove it".) Cornwell then explains that his plans were thwarted after the "committee's doctor" (most probably Dr. Baden, but possibly a reference to Petty) went behind his back, and warned Humes of Cornwell's plans, essentially telling Humes that if Humes agreed to pretend the entrance wound was in the cowlick he could survive Cornwell's questioning with his reputation intact.
Baden's (or Petty's) plan was successful. A year after Dr. Humes called the supposed entrance in the cowlick "clotted blood" he testified that he had been mistaken and that he now thought it was the entrance wound described in the autopsy report.
