Antonin Scalia’s death isn’t much of a puzzle. He was 79 years old and had heart disease. It’s no stretch to conclude he died in his sleep. But some people like to play detective, and the way news of his death spilled from West Texas was bound to fuel conspiracy theories.
It’s reminiscent of the circumstances surrounding another infamous Texas death — John F. Kennedy’s assassination in an open car in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Soon after President Kennedy was declared dead in Parkland Hospital’s emergency room, a hearse from the Oneal Funeral Home pulled up to the ambulance bay. Two reporters, Charles Roberts of Newsweek and Hugh Sidey of Time magazine, chatted up its driver. It turned out he was Vernon Oneal, the funeral home’s proprietor.
“They expect me to take this body out to the airport and put it aboard a plane,” Oneal told the reporters. “And I can’t take the body out to the airport because I don’t have a certificate or a permit.”
In 1963, no federal law covered the assassination of a president. Whoever killed Kennedy would be tried under Texas state law. And Texas law made Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas County medical examiner, responsible for performing an autopsy on Kennedy’s body.
Rose made clear to Kennedy’s entourage that he would not shirk this duty. But Kennedy’s people felt the autopsy could wait.
“My friend, this is the body of the president of the United States, and we are going to take it back to Washington,” said Roy Kellerman, the chief Secret Service agent on the scene.
“No, that’s not the way things are,” Rose said. According to William Manchester’s book “The Death of a President,” Rose wagged his finger at the agent. “When there’s a homicide, we must have an autopsy,” he said.
The Presidio County judge ruled on Scalia’s death without seeing his body. After checking with the sheriff and Scalia’s doctor, she concluded he died of natural causes.
“He is the president. He is going with us,” Kellerman said.
“The body stays,” Rose said.
Kenneth O’Donnell, a Kennedy aide, asked Rose to make an exception for the president.
“It’s just another homicide case as far as I’m concerned,” Rose answered.
The dispute nearly got physical. By some accounts, Kellerman brandished his gun. Rose lost, because Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade didn’t want to bother enforcing the autopsy law. The maximum punishment for removing Kennedy’s body without an autopsy was a $100 fine. Wade decided it was a minor offense compared to the murder of a president. He also didn’t think that having the autopsy performed in Washington would matter when he tried Kennedy’s killer.
Another Parkland doctor signed the papers allowing Oneal’s hearse to take Kennedy’s body to Love Field. There Kennedy’s coffin was loaded aboard Air Force One.
Kennedy’s autopsy was performed that night at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington. Conspiracy theorists have griped about it for decades. Photographs and other documents from the autopsy are still secret, and there are complaints that the Kennedy family had too much influence on its conduct.
In an unpublished memoir, Rose called the Navy autopsy “incomplete and unsatisfactory,” and said it “contributed significantly to the conspiracy theories.” Rose thought he would have done better. His autopsy “would have been free of any perceptions of outside influence,” he said in a 1992 interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Not everyone agrees. Dr. Charles Baxter, the chief emergency room doctor at Parkland, told author Gerald Posner he didn’t want Rose to conduct the autopsy. “I’m sure he would have missed some points that have since come up,” Baxter said.
But Rose was one Dallas official who insisted on doing his job to the letter of the law and the full extent of his professional obligation. Maybe letting him examine Kennedy’s body would have kept Parkland doctors from giving a confused press conference minutes after Kennedy’s death was announced. Their misstatements about wounds in Kennedy’s neck led conspiracy theorists to say Kennedy was shot from front and behind.
The doctors soon corrected their mistake — Kennedy was only shot from behind. But the conspiracy theories have lived on for five decades, even though none has disproved the Warren Commission’s conclusion that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Scalia’s death also came with misstatements and a failure to investigate. Conspiracy theorists wrongly interpreted the resort owner’s statement that he found Scalia dead in bed with a pillow “over” his head as a hint he was smothered. But the resort owner actually meant the pillow was between Scalia’s head and the headboard, not over his face.
Even worse, the Presidio County judge ruled on Scalia’s death without seeing his body. After checking with the sheriff and Scalia’s doctor, she concluded he died of natural causes. She was no more precise than that, leaving the impression her investigation was not thorough.
The confused statements and abbreviated investigation opened gaps in the story that conspiracy theorists will widen for years to come. One, radio host Michael Savage, said the federal government is “corrupt enough” to have killed Scalia and that his death “stinks to high heaven.” Savage and his ilk won’t be stopped now.
History shows Earl Rose was right to demand high standards in the investigation of a top government official’s death. Texans should have learned his lesson.
Bill Sanderson’s book about UPI reporter Merriman Smith’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination, “Bulletins From Dallas,” will be published by Skyhorse in November.