There were several defects in the FBI investigation of the case. The shooting of the cadaver’s wrists was one of their mistakes. Their tests produced dented noses on the bullets and round holes in the wrists, because the bullets weren’t fired through anything before they hit the wrists, therefore they did not tumble before they hit the wrists. There were round holes in the cadaver’s wrists, but Connally’s wrist didn’t have a round hole in it. It had a long crack/break in it, but no round hole, and the bullet that did it didn’t have a dented nose. That’s because the bullet hit his wrist traveling sideways.

What caused that particular FBI error was J. Edgar Hoover’s desire for the FBI to issue a “Final Report” on its investigation by mid-December of 1963. This caused the FBI agents to rush several of their tests. The FBI was given only 3 weeks to completely investigate the full case and issue their Final Report, which is just not enough time.

I imagine that later many FBI guys noticed that the X-rays of the cadaver’s wrists did not match the X-rays of Connally’s wrists, and they probably realized why, but they couldn’t say anything about it to the press.

Researchers didn’t learn that the Kennedy/Connally bullet had tumbled before hitting Connally’s wrist until Dr. John Lattimer wrote a medical article about it, nearly 10 years after the assassination.

It’s an odd fact of life, but I’ve seen it in other cases too. A mistake can be made by some law enforcement agency, and that goes into the official record. The mistake might be corrected a few weeks later by the cops or the feds, but by then it’s too late to amend the official record, and the individual law enforcement guys can’t talk about it to the media because of restrictions their bosses place on them. The bosses don’t like to ever admit their department made some kind of mistake. So the errors can be reported in the media for years, until some independent researcher comes along and publishes an article that corrects the error. But in the meantime, the original error has generated a number of “conspiracy” stories that have been read by a lot of members of the general public. So a simple error in the beginning, can become part of the Great Conspiracy Myth for decades. It’s like the way some of the autopsy errors have been repeated over and over again for the past 40 years and have become part of the Great Conspiracy Myth.

The first major mistake with the autopsy was that it should have been conducted in Dallas by Dallas doctors. The body should have never been removed from Dallas until after a full professional autopsy, performed by doctors who had conducted many other gunshot-wound autopsies.