Photos Renew Dispute About JFK Autopsy

New testimony released Friday about the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy says a second set of pictures was taken of Kennedy’s wounds, but those photographs were never made public.

The existence of additional photographs, believed taken by White House photographer Robert L. Knudsen during or after the autopsy at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., raised new questions about how the autopsy was conducted, a subject of intense debate for 35 years.

But the new evidence sheds no light on the whereabouts of the second set of pictures.

Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963. The following year, a commission chaired by then-Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded the killer was Lee Harvey Oswald and that he acted alone and was not part of a conspiracy.

“One of the many tragedies of the assassination of President Kennedy has been the incompleteness of the autopsy record and the suspicion caused by the shroud of secrecy that has surrounded the records that do exist,” said the Assassination Records Review Board, which made the new testimony public.

The board, created by Congress to collect all pertinent records concerning Kennedy’s murder, said the doctors who conducted the autopsy may have had the best of intentions: protecting the privacy of the Kennedy family. But “the legacy of such secrecy ultimately has caused distrust and suspicion,” the board said.

In 1997, the review board located Saundra K. Spencer, who worked at the Naval Photographic Center in 1963. She was shown the archives’ autopsy photos and concluded they were not the pictures she had helped process.

Those she had worked with, she said, had “no blood or opening cavities.” They were “quite reverent in how they handled it,” she said.

She theorized that a second photographer took pictures of a cleaned-up corpse and speculated that was done at the request of the Kennedy family in case autopsy pictures had to be made public.