Interestingly, the only way it could only be three shots is in the old-school Lifton theory of Kennedy's back and EOP wounds being created by reconstructive surgery, with the throat and large head wounds being from frontal shots. Then Connally would be a single shot.
Can anybody think of a decent way a Carcano round could have entered near the EOP and exited the top of the head while staying consistent with the official evidence?
There is a more obvious solution.
Your "near the EOP" is a little off, and the bullet entered at what you keep calling "The red splotch".
Then it is perfectly possible.
One round enters the throat, and passes through Kennedy, out his throat, and hits Connally, being slowed gradually by several entrances and exits, until it doesn't have the momentum to flatten itself as CTs seem to assume. (IIRC the Governor was finally convinced of this himself, towards the end of his life, when somebody calculated the speed, and showed the bullet would be tumbling as it hit him, which matched the shape of his scars. If I'm wrong here, somebody will correct me.)
One round hits JFK in the head, at what you have called the "cowlick" or the "red splotch." It punches through a little hair, a little flesh, and a little bone, into the brain. This is like being fired into a bucket of jelly. As the bullet pushes through the brain, it tries to displace the jelly ahead of it. This displacement makes a bow wave, that we call trauma, spreading out, pushing outwards, and pushing back at the bullet. The immense pressure slows the bullet rapidly, ripping splinters and fragments from the bullet.
At the same time the trauma, this pressure wave, is pushing outwards, expanding like a balloon, pressing against the skull. What is left of the bullet might well have left just above the eye, but the trauma forces its way out in a explosion of gore, that throws JFK's head back.
There is no mystery.
There is no second shooter.
The wounds are not reconstructed, or covered up.
Unless there is something amazing in the documents being released today, there was one guy, trying to make three easy shots, and hitting twice.
There was only the grim, horrible, reality of what guns are capable of, which unfortunately has more to do with ballistics than Hollywood.
To be honest, the biggest mystery to me is not how this happened, it is how LBJ failed to pass far, far, tighter gun control in the immediate aftermath, and that is probably only a mystery to me because of cultural differences in both time and geography.
