Digging Up Lee Harvey Oswald
Conspiracy theories raged that JFK's killer had been misidentified. I got to exhume Oswald’s decomposing body, detach his skull from his spine, and find out who he really was.
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Image courtesy Dallas Police Department
Dallas, Texas. November 24, 1963. Ninety minutes after the world watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin lay dead on a bloody operating table at Parkland Hospital, mere steps from the room where President Kennedy had been pronounced dead two days earlier.
Ruby’s .38-caliber bullet entered Oswald’s lower chest just below his left nipple and lodged in a noticeable lump under the skin on the right side of his back. It pierced nearly every major organ and blood vessel in his abdominal cavity – stomach, spleen, liver, aorta, diaphragm, renal vein, a kidney, and the inferior vena cava, a major vein that carries deoxygenated blood from the lower extremities back to the heart. Oswald bled out very quickly through a dozen or more holes. Trauma surgeons poured fifteen pints of blood into him and manually squeezed his faltering heart to revive it, but it simply stopped for good at 1:07 p.m. local time.
Dallas County Medical Examiner …
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