A decade-old account from the emergency nurse who treated the late President John F. Kennedy, Phyllis Hall, supports new claims from the former Secret Service Agent who was present during the President’s assassination. The nurse gave multiple interviews, recalling seeing the bullet next to a wounded JFK’s head on the stretcher.
The agent, Paul Landis, now 88, broke his silence in a recent interview to share his side of the story that challenged the “single bullet theory” associated with JFK’s death and insinuated the possibility of more than one shooter. Phyllis also mentioned in her older interviews that she believed multiple culprits were involved.
Landis and Phyllis found the unusual, pristine bullet
Landis claimed to have kept the bullet—likely the one the Warren Commission claims hit JFK and Texas Governor John Conally Jr.—on the stretcher as evidence. From Nurse Phyllis’ account, the bullet was pristine and nothing like she had seen in her years of experience treating bullet wounds.
RELATED: 13 Unanswered Questions From JFK’s Assassination We Still Wonder About Today
“On the cart, halfway between the earlobe and the shoulder, there was a bullet laying almost perpendicular there, but I have not seen a picture of that bullet ever,” she told The Telegraph in 2013. She also described in another interview that the bullet “was pointed at its tip and showed no signs of damage.”
“I remember looking at it – there was no blunting of the bullet or scarring around the shell from where it had been fired,” she added. “I’d had a great deal of experience working with gunshot wounds, but I had never seen anything like this before.”
Worthy of note is the fact that none of the bullets presented as evidence matched the one Phyllis saw; however, her description matches the FBI’s first piece of evidence tagged “C1,” to connote that it was recovered from Conally’s stretcher from his leg wound. “It was about one-and-a-half inches long – nothing like the bullets that were later produced,” the nurse claimed. “It was taken away, but never have I seen it presented in evidence or heard what happened to it. It remains a mystery.”
There could have been other shooters
For fear of harassment and retaliation, Phyllis waited long enough to share her account, which proved there may have been other shooters besides Lee Harvey Oswald. Although she was not assigned to the ER that day, she joined in to help save the late President’s life as she was only visiting a friend in triage.
Per reports from the Warren Commission, the apparent lone shooter, Oswald, fired three shots at the motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building with a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The Commission added that one shot missed the motorcade, and the other was the “magic bullet” that struck both Kennedy and Connally.
Landis’ new account utterly disputed the Commission’s claims; he recalled picking up the pristine bullet and placing it on JFK’s stretcher; however, it may have rolled into Connally’s in transit. There is also a possibility that the hospital staff mistook the stretcher the bullet was recovered from or investigators misreported their account.
Due to Landis’ account, James Robenalt, an attorney and historian working with Landis on his upcoming book release, said the new findings should “re-open the question of a second shooter, if not even more.”
“First, if the “pristine” bullet did not travel through both Kennedy and Connally, somehow ending up on Connally’s stretcher, then it stands to reason that Connally might have actually been hit by a separate bullet, coming from above and to the rear,” James told Vanity Fair last week. He also warned that the new book has no “insight or forensic expertise to hazard any new conclusions” about another shooter.
“Others will have to analyze the evidence in full to see where it now leads,” he said conclusively.