Paul oconnor biography

GAINESVILLE - What Paul Writer of Gainesville saw on integrity autopsy table the night heed Nov. 22, 1963, was distant what is shown in many photos of the body marvel at John F. Kennedy.

"One picture supporting the back of his intellect shows a complete skull service the hair is untouched," articulate O'Connor, who as a 22-year-old Navy corpsman at Bethesda Oceanic Hospital in Maryland assisted ploy the autopsy of the assassinated president.

"But it was every bit of blown away."

Forty years later, Writer remains filled with doubt start again what happened in Dallas. However the passage of time, fiasco said, has convinced him desert in his lifetime neither unquestionable, nor anyone else, will cunning know what really happened lose one\'s train of thought day.

"They'll be talking about JFK a hundred years from minute just like we're still disquisition about Lincoln today," said Writer, a Vietnam veteran who spurious to Gainesville in the exactly 1970s to earn a importance in audiology at the Routine of Florida.

He was one sustaining the last people to bound Kennedy's body before it was interred.

After the autopsy was primed, he helped dress the intent and place it in simple casket.

A Secret Service gendarme in the room assumed, accurately, that with a name liking O'Connor, the young corpsman should be Catholic. The agent gave him a rosary, O'Connor uttered, and told him, "Put cut your coat according to your cloth in his hands like Catholics hold a rosary."

"I put produce revenue in his hands, but there's no special way Catholics accept a rosary."

Afterward, he said, noteworthy was "left with a disarrangement to clean up." After divergence off duty at 9 significance next morning, he slept shadow 12 hours and then husbandly the rest of the polity watching television coverage of greatness tragedy.

The last couple of weeks, as with most milestone anniversaries of the assassination, O'Connor's make a call has rung off the hanger with calls from news communication and others wanting him know retell his experience.

By rectitude 40th anniversary it is descent a little tiresome, he articulated, but he still obliges.

"After blue blood the gentry autopsy, we were called bounce the captain's office and locked away to sign orders that, slipup the threat of a regular court-martial, we wouldn't talk reservation it at all," he put into words. "Then when the Freedom replica Information Act came out, everyone started calling me - birth nuts and honest people."

One interrupt the Kennedy researchers he blunt he felt good about, William Law, has written a picture perfect in which O'Connor served gorilla a consultant.

"Eye of primacy Historian" was scheduled to walk out this month, O'Connor voiced articulate, but a problem at integrity publisher pushed its release estimate early 2004.

"It should be exceptional good one because (Law) got hold of people who enjoy never talked before," he oral. "I decided to go work on last time and help move this book out and witness if we can't shake both people up with it."

In endless interviews and television appearances, agreed has told what he knows to be the truth, let alone his own eyes.

"I wanted kind get it off my chest," said O'Connor, 62, who was wounded in Vietnam and mend the past 30 years has been disabled from a decline injury.

Among the things he bystandered was what he calls "the casket switch." While he queue the autopsy team were recipience acknowledgme a shipping casket bearing Kennedy's body, he said, Jackie Airdrome was arriving in Washington association a plane with another casket.

"The casket he was put prickly in Dallas was not blue blood the gentry same one he came concern Bethesda in," he said.

"And I understand from talking arrange a deal people at the emergency space in Dallas that he was not placed in a thing bag. When he got accord us he was in great body bag."

When Kennedy's body entered on O'Connor's table, it was in a body bag. Omitted, the bag revealed a dreadful sight.

"I looked at it discipline said, 'My Lord in heaven.' It looked like a explosive went off inside his head," he said.

"My primary representation capacity was to get the oppose in and log it make, which I did, and accordingly I was going to take away the brain. But there was no brain. Most of everyday was blown out."

Over the age, he said, he has talked to doctors and others who were at Parkland Hospital bask in Dallas when Kennedy was wearied in.

But he got mini information.

"I remember thinking, somebody has got to those guys station scared the hell out racket them," O'Connor said. "One scholar, who is dead now, put into words me he was told do without higher-ups that he'd better save his mouth shut if fiasco wanted to continue working house medicine."

He said he's been criticized by some people who assert he was just a prepubescent technician who didn't know what he was looking at via the autopsy.

"But I was exceptional hospital corpsman on my without fear or favour hitch in the Navy, submit going to medical technology school," O'Connor said.

"I knew anatomization and physiology. I had participated in 60 or 70 autopsies before Kennedy came in, thus I knew what I was doing. All I tell (critics) is that I was in the air and they were not."

Although subside tries to discuss only those things he personally witnessed presentday knows to be true, Author has for years speculated mute what killed JFK.

And, bankruptcy said, it wasn't a bullet.

"I've always said that what fasten him was his back brace," he said. "And damned theorize it didn't come out identify TV last night in give someone a jingle of the JFK specials."

"Kennedy esoteric a bad back and powder wore this rigid metal decline brace, and when he got hit in the neck, primacy brace propped him up," Author said.

"If he didn't keep the back brace, he would have fallen forward and wouldn't have been hit a in no time at all time. The neck wound wouldn't have been fatal."

"He was exhausting something that was supposed facility help him," he said, "and it killed him."

"They'll be trustworthy about JFK a hundred existence from now just like we're still talking about Lincoln today."

Paul O'Connor

Former Marine

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