CE 399 and the Landis bullet

Connally was wheeled to a second-floor operating room. An attendant put the empty stretcher in an elevator. Darrell Tomlinson, the hospital’s senior engineer, took it off on the ground floor and put it beside another stretcher. A few minutes later he bumped one of them against the wall and a bullet rolled out. [1]

Asked whether he was sure which stretcher it was, Tomlinson said: “I can’t be positive, just to be perfectly honest about it, I can’t be positive, because I really didn’t pay that much attention to it.” [2]

The Commission concluded the bullet came from Connally’s stretcher. Its reason was that Kennedy never left his own stretcher, which was taken to a different room. [1]

Paul Landis, then 28 and assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, rode in the follow-up car. In The Final Witness, published in 2023, he says that at Parkland he saw a fully intact bullet on the back of the rear seat where Mrs. Kennedy had been sitting, picked it up, and left it on the president’s stretcher in the emergency room so it would go with the body. [1][2][4]

If he is right, CE 399 may not have come out of Connally at all. One researcher who helped Landis argued this could reopen whether one bullet hit both men. [1][5]

His written statement from November 1963 does not mention a bullet. In it he says his reaction at the head shot was that it came from “somewhere towards the front, right-hand side of the road.” He was never questioned by the Warren Commission. [3]

Landis has said repeatedly that he still believes one shooter fired three shots. “I think the Warren Commission got that right,” he told GBH in 2023. [2]