Connally Buried, Bullet Pieces Intact
Former Texas Gov. John B. Connally was buried Thursday in Austin after a frantic and unsuccessful effort to get family permission to extract bullet fragments left in his body almost 30 years ago. Hundreds of mourners attended the rites.
FBI officials in Dallas had recommended that an attempt be made to recover the evidence and settle a longstanding controversy about whether Connally was hit by the same bullet that wounded President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, just before Kennedy was killed by another bullet.
The “single bullet” theory was crucial to the Warren Commission’s findings that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed the President and wounded Connally.
Connally’s family and friends were upset and angry over the last-minute hubbub over the bullet fragments, which began Wednesday with requests from Kennedy assassination researchers urging the Justice Department to step in.
The researchers wanted to compare the fragments with the nearly intact bullet the Warren Commission said the pieces came from. The bullet was found on a stretcher at the hospital where the wounded Connally had been taken.
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