Here's a straight answer straight from Humes himself on page 102:
http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=788#relPageId=104&tab=page
The whole thing starts on page 95, and a smart person would read the entire thing as it is for the ARRB...but we know who is not a smart person.
They cut the brain out with a saw. They cut the scalp, and sawed away.
On page 109 he discusses the hole in the skull from the 6.5x52mm round. He says the entry was at the scalp wound, and that they didn't have to reconstruct fragments to view the entire hole in the Occipital. They spent 30 to 45 minutes examining the skull and found nothing else unusual.
Don't encourage him.
The problem with that statement of Humes - made 33 years after the fact - is that Humes himself says
he doesn't recall the specifics, and they probably made a normal cut around the top of the skull to open up the head.
And that stumbling response comes only after the very loaded question: "
Where did you cut the bone?" - an absolutely horrible question if you're trying to get Humes best recollection, and not lead him into false recollections.
But there was no cutting of the skull bone necessary, according to the contemporaneous statements (1963-1965).
For example, Finck's testimony in 1965, only 14 months after the assassination, is he was told upon joining the autopsy already in progress the skull was sufficiently shattered only cuts through the scalp were necessary to open up the skull sufficiently to remove the brain because of the extensive fracturing of the skull bones. MicahJava quoted that himself, but didn't understand what Finck was saying:
This is Dr. Finck's earliest recorded description of exactly what happened, in his
1/25/1965-2/1/1965 reports of Kennedy's autopsy to Gen. Blumberg:
"
]I examined the wounds. The scalp of the back of the head showed a small laceration, 15 X 6 mm. Corresponding to this lesion, I found a through-and-through wound of the occipital bone, with a crater visible from the inside of the cranial cavity. This bone wound showed no crater when viewed from outside the skull. On the basis of this pattern of the occipital bone perforation, I stated that the wound in the back of the head was an entrance."
"THE WOUNDS
The scalp of the vertex is lacerated. There is an open comminuted fracture of the cranial vault, many portions of which are missing.
The autopsy had been in progress for thirty minutes when I arrived. Cdr Humes told me that he only had to prolong the lacerations of the scalp before removing the brain. No sawing of the skull was necessary."
Humes testified to the same thing before the Warren Commission in 1964.
Commander HUMES - Our interpretation is, sir, that the missile struck the right occipital region, penetrated through the two tables of the skull, making the characteristic coning on the inner table which I have previously referred to. That one portion of the missile and judging by the size of the defect thus produced, the major portion of the missile, made its exit through this large defect.
A second portion of the missile or multiple second portions were deflected, and traversed a distance as enumerated by this interrupted line, with the major portion of that fragment coming to lodge in the position indicated.
Perhaps some of these minor fragments were dislodged from the major one it traversed this course.
To better examine the situation with regard to the skull, at this time, Boswell and I extended the lacerations of the scalp which were at the margins of this wound, down in the direction of both of the President's ears. At that point, we had even a better appreciation of the extensive damage which had been done to the skull by this injury.
And the autopsy report prepared on the weekend of the assassination doesn't mention a craniotomy or any skull cutting at all.
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/appendix-09.pdf
And you can see in the x-ray Micah Java himself cited how extensively fractured the skull is - and why cutting the scalp alone would reveal enough of the brain to excise it:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11882692&postcount=537
So, according to the earliest statements, no sawing was necessary to remove the brain, and the skull bone fragments adhered to the scalp and revealed the entry wound on the scalp in the back of the head; the entry wound with beveling on the interior of the back of the skull; and the entry wound on the exterior of the skull - once that bone was cut away from the scalp itself - and that the wounds in the scalp and skull corresponded to each other.
Hank
