Parkland Nurse Adds Corroboration to Secret Service Man's JFK Story

Phyllis Hall said a decade ago she saw a pristine bullet on president's stretcher

Phyllis Hall, nurse at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.

I said one weakness of the sensational JFK story told by Secret Service man Paul Landis was that it was difficult to corroborate. Boy, was I wrong.

Landis has rattled the conventional wisdom about JFK’s assassination with a new memoir (reported in the New York Times) claiming he found a near pristine bullet in the limousine where President John F. Kennedy was slain, and that he put it on JFK’s stretcher as doctors unsuccessfully sought to save the president’s life.

Such furtive actions would be hard to corroborate, I surmised foolishly.

The Daily Mail corroborates and advances Landis’s bombshell revelation by citing the account of a nurse who told a very similar story 10 years ago to British reporters.

Multiple interviews given by nurse Phyllis J. Hall a decade ago appear to back up former Secret Service agent Paul Landis's claim, after she described seeing a bullet sitting on the mortally wounded president's stretcher next to his head. 

Landis, 88, broke his silence in an interview on Saturday, nearly six decades after Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, to share a claim that upends the infamous 'magic bullet' theory and raises the possibility of multiple shooters.

The Daily Mail, based in London, is one of the few news organization that has devoted significant staff time and resources to JFK assassination coverage over the years. Indeed, the British tabloid’s coverage of the JFK assassination story often has been superior to that of the Washington Post and New York Times. This scoop proves the point.

‘There was no blunting’

Hall was there when mortally wounded Kennedy was wheeled in on a stretcher.

'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 almost 10 years ago. 

Separately, she told the Sunday Mirror: 'I could see a bullet lodged between his ear and his shoulder. It 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.

'I'd had a great deal of experience working with gunshot wounds but I had never seen anything like this before.

'It was about one-and-a-half inches long – nothing like the bullets that were later produced.

'It was taken away but never have I seen it presented in evidence or heard what happened to it. It remains a mystery.'

Hall’s description of the mystery bullet nearly perfectly matches the first piece of evidence in Kennedy’s assassination, logged by the FBI under the tag number C1 — the bullet supposedly recovered from Texas Governor John Connally's stretcher after falling from a wound in his leg.

Landis’s story has changed dramatically over the years, which he blames on post-traumatic stress disorder. Anti-conspiracy theorist Gerald Posner has an accounting of Landis’s statements here.

Hall’s account, given 10 years ago, seems to constitute independent confirmation of his story, which, as the DM says, undercuts the single bullet theory and points to the possibility of additional gunmen.

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From the Heath Memo, to The CIA Man Who Read Oswald’s Mail, to the repentant Secret Service agent, the JFK assassination story is evolving rapidly in 2023.

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