Word: casketful
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That was puzzling because records indicated that the body had been wrapped in a sheet when it left Dallas. Also peculiar was the odyssey of the bronze casket...
Lifton tracked down all seven members of a military honor guard assigned to meet the coffin at Bethesda. As they watched the motorcade arrive at the front entrance and awaited orders, the gray Navy ambulance carrying the casket sat virtually unattended. Then at 7:05 p.m., Lifton relates, the ambulance suddenly took off at high speed. The honor guard tried to follow in a pickup truck but lost it. Seaman Hubert Clark recalls himself and his mates wondering "where in the hell" the ambulance had gone...
About 7:10 p.m., according to a report filed by two FBI agents, a gray Navy ambulance arrived at the rear loading dock near the hospital's morgue. The agents, James Sibert and Francis O'Neill, helped move the bronze casket from it to the morgue. But at the entrance, they were briefly stopped by the Secret Service; Lifton says the agents were stalled so they would not discover that Kennedy's body was already in the morgue...
...honor guard members finally found the ambulance at the rear loading platform. The bronze casket was back in the vehicle and they helped carry this casket into an anteroom outside the morgue. On this second entrance into the hospital, says Lifton, Kennedy's body was back in the casket. Lifton found several witnesses, including Hospital Corpsman James Metzler, who saw the casket opened in the autopsy room at this time -and now the corpse was wrapped in a sheet, just as it had left Dallas...
...Lifton has this triple entry of caskets (once by the gray casket and twice by the bronze) well documented, he admits to puzzlement at how the body got out of the morgue after its first entry, to rejoin the bronze coffin in which it had left Dallas. The report by the two FBI agents, which was never seen by the Warren Commission staff but had been sent directly to the National Archives, gave Lifton one clue. At one point, they wrote, "all personnel with the exception of medical officers needed in the taking of photographs and X rays were requested...