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26/10/2006 MSPA 261006/06
 
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Defence Media Release

 

MEDIA BRIEFING

 

REMAINS OF ‘UNKNOWN SAILOR’ LOCATED ON CHRISTMAS ISLAND

 

R1 THEATRETTE, THURSDAY 26 OCTOBER 2006

 

 

Item: Report on the search, excavation and repatriation of the remains of the unknown sailor, thought to be a crew member from the HMAS Sydney (II).

speakers: Captain Jim Parsons, excavation team leader, Australian Navy; Commander Matthew BLENKIN, forensic dentist, Australian Navy; Jo Button, Strategic communications advisor, Australian Navy

 

 

JO BUTTON:               Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming. My name is Jo Button and I'm the strategic communications advisor to Navy.

                                      I'm just going to give you a brief outline of the presentation this afternoon, and also define the format for this media opportunity.

                                      We have two team leaders, sorry, two members of the Navy-led expedition team here with us this afternoon. The team leader Captain Jim Parsons on my right, he will deliver a statement outlining the journey of the unknown sailor from Christmas Island. It will cover the search of the gravesite and also the excavation and repatriation of the remains back to Australia.

                                      Then we'll hand over to Commander Matt Blenkin, behind me, one of the team's forensic dentists, who will deliver a statement outlining the process for analysing and identifying, attempting to identify the remains.

                                      It should be emphasised that no conclusive findings from the analysis and identification process are available today, will be released today, because they’re simply not available.

                                      The analysis and identification process has only just commenced and it's expected to take at least eight weeks, and that excludes DNA recovery, if that's even possible.

                                      So I request that you allow these people to carry out that work over the next eight weeks and more will be released as it comes to hand.

                                      It should also be emphasised that there has been some misinformation in the public domain about the unknown sailor from Christmas Island, and hopefully in this media opportunity this afternoon we'll address that.

                                      It was reported in the Minister's media release that was issued last Tuesday, 17 October, that there is an object lodged in the skull of the remains that appears to be a bullet. Confirmation of this object though, can only be achieved by conducting detailed analysis, which is commencing tomorrow, Friday, 27 October.

                                      If you have any questions I just request that you hold them until the end. We do have a question and answer session following Matt's presentation, and we do have microphones available. So I do ask just one question at a time and please use one of the microphones available.

                                      We do have a slide show going on behind us this afternoon and there are CDs containing all of those images that are available after this presentation. There are also copies of the release and there is also an Australian War Memorial release going out this afternoon, today as well, that you can get copies of afterwards.

                                      I will now hand over to Captain Jim Parsons, the team leader.

JIM PARSONS:           Good afternoon. On 19 November 1941 an action took place between HMAS Sydney and the German raider, Kormoran. As a result of that action both ships sank.

                                      On 6 February 1942, a Carley raft was seen floating in Flying Fish Cove off Christmas Island. That raft was recovered and it contained a body. That body was later interred in the Old European Cemetery on Christmas Island.

                                      The loss of Sydney has always been a mysterious and controversial matter. As a result, the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade conducted an investigation in 1998/1999. They recommended that the Department of Defence attempt to locate the grave of the unknown sailor on Christmas Island by sending a small team to the island and should the gravesite be accurately located, the Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government issue an order for the exhumation of the remains for the purposes of identification.

                                      As a result, Navy attempted to locate the grave in 2001 which an initial reconnaissance team which included a resident from the Island from the 1950s who believed he could remember the grave location. This was followed by a full-scale excavation a short time later, and that was not successful.

                                      The current project started in early 2006. It mainly started again as the result of lobbying by interested parties, and the fact that some new evidence came to light that people had not fully understood in the past.

                                      The evidence mainly revolves around this photograph. The photograph itself doesn't mean a lot. What you had to do was talk to the person who took the photograph and realise the implications of the photograph that he took.

                                      This photograph was taken by a man called Brian O'Shannassy; Brian worked on Christmas Island in the 1950s and he was taken up and shown the gravesite by a man called Jack Pettigrew who was present during the recovery of the body from the Carley raft and at the time of its burial. When Brian saw it you could still see the outline of the grave.

                                      He took this photograph to remind himself of where the gravesite was. He believed it was over here. Now I ask you to just remember the shape of that tombstone there because it will become important as we talk through the issue. So this photograph had to be linked with Brian O'Shannassy's evidence.

                                      The Navy then conducted an interview with Brian and also with a Mr Say Kit Foo. Say Kit Foo was born on the Island in 1936, grew up there and lived there through the '50s. He lived in the service quarters in the general manager's house, which is adjacent to the cemetery. The cemetery became his playground and he became very familiar with it.

                                      Both of these people during their interviews indicated a position on the map where they believed the gravesite to be, and these positions were very close to one another.

                                      The headstone I talked about is here, so we're in fact looking at a picture that's turned upside down. The reason is that that's north to the top and all survey maps are done like that.

                                      Brian's photograph was taken from this position here, and the two of them indicated this area down here as the most probable area for the grave.

                                      This is the more complex map. The orientation is exactly the same. There's the tombstone at the end, that's the position where Brian took the photograph and that's the position where they believe it to be. The blue area is a ground penetrating radar search that was done a few years beforehand with no result; the red area is where the Navy expedition in 2001 took place.

                                      The interviews with Say Kit Foo and Brian O'Shannassy established that there was sufficient evidence for us to warrant a new search. I started work as the team leader of this expedition in July 2006 with a task of planning the expedition to investigate the evidence, and to form a team with the appropriate skills to conduct the excavation.

                                      The team consisted of myself, an archaeologist, a forensic anthropologist and two forensic dentists, Matt being one of them. The plan was developed based upon the area indicated by Say Kit Foo and Brian O'Shannassy.

                                      Preparations included consultation with the Department of Environment and Heritage, because the cemetery is heritage listed. And also having an exhumation order issued by the Minister for Local Government, Territories and Roads.

                                      At this point it was decided to include Brian O'Shannassy as he was a direct link with the gravesite and could provide the last piece of evidence as to the gravesite.

                                      When we got there this is what we found; that's the significant headstone on the end. The area in Brian's photograph is the area along here, and that's the area where we commenced our excavation.

                                      That gives you an idea of what the cemetery is like, that's starting from near the entrance and the area we were just looking at is up on the top of the rise here. I guess it's worthwhile noting the slope here and it's an absolutely unique location for any form of cemetery.

                                      This is a close-up of the area where we're going to search, and again note the slope down here, and the area over the back there; it was about a 45 degree slope that goes right down to the waterfront.

                                      This is how we conducted the search; we expected the grave to be lengthwise, that's the end grave I keep on pointing out. And so we laid out a search pattern with a one and a half metre gap between trenches, the idea being that if we missed a gravesite at one end of the trench, you'd pick them up with the next one.

                                      We started at the centre of the search area and worked initially towards the end, this is the far end of the cemetery, and we finished up with six of those trenches, which covered an area nearly 30 metres long. We found nothing.

                                      At this point we thought, perhaps there's something smaller we expected in between. So we went back and narrowed the gaps between and followed a couple of leads where we thought there was something that didn't look quite right. Again we found nothing.

                                      So it was back to square one. Brian O'Shannassy, I might add, was a bit baffled at this stage. So what we did was go back to square one here and have a look at what this photograph might be representing. Now Brian thought it was there, but why would you stand on a grave back here on the left hand side of it to take a photograph on the right?

                                      So in looking at it and knowing that we'd fully searched the area which had been identified by the two of them and found nothing, it had to be somewhere else, it had to be somewhere within this photograph.

                                      Eventually I decided that this area here has got to be the centre of the photograph. So therefore we decided to excavate the position there.

                                      Now that end grave was not there in 1942 when the sailor was buried, so in fact this grave here would have been the end of the cemetery. So it would seem logical for the grave to be just beyond that.

                                      This is the point where we've just started to excavate the new area, which is the point here, and again there's the distinctive headstone. There's the six trenches we'd done and I can't tell you what it was like working there, it was incredibly hot, it was incredibly humid and the ground was – to say it's hard is probably an understatement. All of this was done by hand as there was absolutely no ability to get any form of mechanised equipment up there at all.

                                      It wasn't long before we realised that we might be in an area where we might find something. Notice the step down here? What we found having removed the overburden, if you like, was that this end, and this is the uphill end of this trench, and that blue bit is the trace of the far grave. Once we removed this we found that this area here was rock hard like everything else. The area along from there though, was not quite so rock hard. In other words, if you put the crowbar into it, it went in about an inch here and it went in about two inches over there.

                                      So it started to look as it someone might have been there before. So we kept digging down and then Eureka, this area down here the crowbar went in, pulled back out again, it went in a bit deeper than we'd expected it to, it came out with a trace of wood on the end of it. At that stage the crowbar was put aside and we went in with the more gentle tools and commenced to take this out using small trowels and so on.

                                      Within a couple of hours we found more evidence of the wood and some nails, which probably were coffin nails. We packed up and went to lunch at that stage and came back again, all revitalised and ready to go and kept on digging, and some hours later found the first trace of the fact that it was a grave, and that was a tiny little bone from the ankle.

                                      At this stage we sealed this up, covered it over with something solid because we knew there was something there. This trench is something you could not work in, it was too small. So we had to enlarge it, and this edge went right across to there, it went out this way and it was made longer.

                                      This is actually after we'd recovered the body, that's that end grave, you can see how far we moved down there. And this hole at this stage was about 2.2 metres deep, it was about 2.5 metres long and about two metres wide. We estimate about 10 tonnes of dirt came out of there, again by hand.

                                      Now from there it was a case of uncovering the remains as carefully as we could, bearing in mind that they were very, very fragile, and then recovering them, packing them up ready for shipment back to Australia. And that was done in a RAAF aircraft.

                                      On arrival they were taken direct to the Shellshear Museum, which is part of the Department of Anatomy in the University of Sydney.

                                      Now what makes us think we've got the right guy? The Standing Committee that I mentioned earlier on concluded on the balance of probability that the body in the Carley float found off the shore of Christmas Island in 1942 were most likely that from HMAS Sydney. Therefore our task is to try and link what we've found with the recovery of the Carley raft in 1942.

                                      What we've got is a very odd burial. First of all we found an unmarked grave in a cemetery full of marked graves, so that's got to indicate something.

                                      Secondly, it's very close to being in the position where we expected it to be. What we've also got is a very odd shaped coffin. History tells us that they built a coffin around the remains. This would indicate there was something a little different.

                                      What we've got is a coffin that is only 1.4 metre long and it's nearly 0.8 metre wide; a very odd size. And the position of the body in this is also unusual.

                                      All of that leads us to the conclusion that we are probably dealing with a person that was recovered from the Carley raft in 1942.

                                      Yes, there's one other point that I missed, with the recovering of the remains, there were a couple of things we found. One was press-studs - certainly what appears to be press-studs. They're badly corroded, but that's what they look like.

                                      Again, history tells us that the sailor when he was recovered was wearing blue overalls, bleached white by the sun, with press-studs down the front. Again, another piece of evidence that suggests it's the right person.

                                      The other thing we found were some brass eyelets, which have got us puzzled a little bit. This is the foot of the grave here. That's actually the outline of the coffin that you see at the end there.

                                      Down at the end here, which is the foot, there were four or five of these quite big brass eyelets. That may or may not be associated with a piece of canvas or something like that that might have been used to remove the remains around during the recovery process.

                                      These are all part of the artefacts that we handed over to the Australian War Memorial earlier this week for analysis because it appears that both the eyelets and the press-studs have some minute traces of material still jammed between where they're pressed together and we're hopeful that we might be able to analyse something out of that.

                                      Again I refer to the media release from the Australian War Memorial that's available to you all, all after that. All right then. Thank you Matt.

MATTHEW BLENKIN:          Thanks Sir. Okay. Now with the remains safely housed at the Shellshear Museum, we commenced the examination and analysis of the remains, which is expected as Jo said, to take a couple of months at least.

                                      What I'd like to do now is take you through a little bit of what's actually involved in that examination and analysis process because there's a lot to it.

                                      There's actually quite a number of examinations that are going on at the same time, most of them in parallel. There's the dental analysis, the anthropological analysis, the pathological analysis, the ballistics, including metallurgy, a DNA analysis and there's the work being done by the War Memorial on the artefacts that we found in the grave.

                                      The whole idea of this process is to hopefully -- the reason we're examining the remains is to hopefully identify them as we're directed to do by the Senate Standing Committee.

                                      So I'll take you through each of these processes and just let you know exactly what's involved. Firstly, with the dental analysis, we basically -- we take a look at the remains, we look at the fillings and the missing teeth, the teeth that are there and we document them, photograph them and x-ray them.

                                      Then we try and compare what we have found in the remains to the dental records of the sailors that were on the ship at the time, looking for a match. In that way it's a bit like looking at fingerprints, in that you're trying to find matches in the patterns between what you find on the body and what you've got on the record.

                                      So you're really trying to look for, what we call points of concordance. Is the body missing this tooth, is this sailor missing this tooth. Has he got fillings in this tooth, this tooth and this one? Are they the same there?

                                      There's some quite distinctive dental work, so we're actually hoping that that will allow us to positively identify - we'll get a match. We're hoping that we're getting a match with these records.

                                      If we can't get a match, what we may be able to do is narrow down the field and get to a point where we can say, well we haven't got a definite, it's this guy, but what we may be able to say is he's one of 20 men.

                                      That's probably, you know, so that's where we're headed. The only problem that we've got with the records of the ships' sailors - the dental records held on ship, were that when the ship sank all the dental records went down with it, which was handy, really - it's quite annoying.

                                      What we did manage to recover though were the dental records that were taken on entry into the navy, when these guys went through recruiting centres they were given a medical and dental examination.

                                      We managed to get some of those, but we only managed to get about half the ship's company's records. So we're a bit limited, probably by about half, as far as being able to compare to the entire ship's company.

                                      But we're going to work with what we've got and it does take a lot of time and we're slowly, myself and the other forensic dentist, Lieutenant Lane, are slowly and as the Captain said, painstakingly, comparing what we've found in the body to the dental records one at a time, one at a time.

                                      So that's going to take a little while. Another stage, which is actually happening in parallel to this, is the anthropological analysis. Now what that will give us is what we call a biological profile - the gender, age, race and height of the remains of the person.

                                      Now, as I said earlier, we may not be able to positively identify them from the dental records, we may just narrow the field. The biological profile may help narrow the field down even more.

                                      So where the dental evidence has given us, for example, a group of 20 or 30, once we take into account the height and the age of the person, that may half that number.

                                      So we're getting narrower and narrower and slowly working down towards the point where we can hopefully identify who this person was.

                                      At the same time, the forensic pathologist is also examining the remains. Now he's looking for signs of trauma, which obviously the metal fragment in the head is a good example, but he's going to look at the rest of the skeleton to see if there's any other signs of trauma anywhere else on the skeleton at all.

                                      He'll also be looking for signs of previous disease and any other signs of trauma, such as broken bones when he was a kid that may have healed up. We can still see those on the bones. That's in the service records sometimes, in the medical history and again that helps narrow the search down. It helps exclude people or include them in our list of possible identities.

                                      Now the ballistics guy, the actual ballistics expert is, in his day job, works for the New South Wales Police Force and what he's going to do is basically determine the nature of that object that's lodged in the skull.

                                      If it, you know, determine if it is a bullet or if it is shrapnel. At this stage, while it appears to be a bullet, we can't be 100 per cent sure because it's only an interim finding, it was only from a very cursory examination.

                                      So his job is basically to determine the nature of it. If it is a bullet, what sort of weapon did it come from? He's got access to a number of different weapons from both sides of the conflict and to the rounds in those weapons.

                                      So he'll do some test firings and compare the object to those bullets fired from those weapons to see if it matches, or to see if he can narrow down exactly what we're looking at.

                                      He'll also get a metallurgical analysis undertaken and that will help also to determine the type of object. So if it is a bullet, what was it made up of, where did it come from, what were its origins?

                                      If it's shrapnel, also you know, where did the shrapnel come from and what was it made from? What's it shrapnel of? So all these little pieces of the puzzle are slowing coming together over time.

                                      There's the work being done by the War Memorial to look at the buttons. Ideally we'd love them to say, yeah they're the buttons from a boiler suit, from this period, but we've got to wait and see. We don't know, but hopefully they will be able to help us again with that information.

                                      The final step, if we need it, if we can't get a positive identification from the dental records and the biological profile, is DNA analysis. The reason we leave this to last is that when you extract DNA from bones, you're actually destroying the bones to do it.

                                      And we really want to complete the thorough examination of those bones before we go crunching them up to try and get DNA out of them. There's a problem with, I guess expectations of what the DNA can give us and I'd like to blame CSI for that.

                                      It's because it's actually given a lot of people, not just the general public, but the judiciary, juries, a range of people have unrealistic expectationS of what DNA can provide.

                                      It doesn't happen overnight; in fact it doesn't happen in that 40 minutes between ad breaks. It takes quite a lot of time and it's very, very technical and it's not just some new beaut little machine you can plug a piece of bone into and get a profile out of.

                                      The chance of getting DNA from these bones is very low. DNA degrades slowly over time, but the one thing that really degrades DNA badly and renders it useless as far as identification goes is water.

                                      Now these bones have been in the ground in Christmas Island for over 60 years. Christmas Island gets over two metres of water a year. That's a lot of water flowing straight through these bones. You saw what it did to the... I don't know if you've seen any of the stills of the coffin wood we had left. There was one or two pieces about this big.

                                      That's all that was left and it was mostly due to the water washing through that dissolved that away. It does the same to DNA. So we're not... Well we will try and get DNA from the bones if we need to. We don't hold high hopes for it. So as far as the results go, preliminary analysis that was undertaken in the field have indicated that he was a relatively young Caucasian male, relatively tall for his … for that time.

                                      He has a number of distinctive dental characteristics, which include a number of fillings and some missing teeth, which are currently being compared to the existing dental records and the object in the skull appears to be a low velocity object and if it is a bullet, it looks like it's come from a small calibre weapon and it's unlikely to have come from a high velocity, large calibre military weapon such as a machine gun.

                                      But still early days and we are moving on with that process. Like I said, the ballistics expert starts his work in earnest tomorrow. In the interim, what we've actually done is we've taken moulds of the object in place, because it's quite old and corroded and very fragile and the last thing we want to do is, once it's removed, have it crumble apart and lose any trace of what it originally looked like.

                                      So the casts have been made of the object and the next step is to actually remove it and start looking at what it is.

                                      Finally, I just want to re-emphasise that in an undertaking of this type where we're looking at historic remains, the likelihood of identifying him positively is actually quite low. Thank you very much.

JO BUTTON:               We will now hand over for questions. We invite questions from the floor.

REPORTER:                Just can you tell us a little bit about the state of the remains? Is there a complete skeleton or is it basically just gone and the main bones left?

MATTHEW BLENKIN:          Yes. We're actually pleasantly surprised to actually recover a complete skeleton. Originally, after the first dig, we were a little concerned, back in 2000, that maybe the soil content was such that the bones would dissolve away as the wood did. Some analysis was actually done on the soil and it actually showed a PH that was conducive to preserving the bones and as it turns out, we actually did manage to recover an entire skeleton.

REPORTER:                Geof Parry from the Seven Network. The discovery or the possible discovery of a bullet in the skull was considered to be somewhat of a surprise I understand. Does that only go towards fuelling some of the conspiracy theories or the theories about, you know, the possible involvement of Japanese submarine and does it go to settling anything or does it only go to fuelling those conspiracies further? Or those theories?

JIM PARSONS:           I don't think we can draw any conclusions yet on this. Yes, it will fuel some of the theorists out there that believe these things, but I think what we've got to do is wait until the analysis of this is complete and find out what we really have. Yes, it was a surprise. I was quite stunned. But I think it's too early to draw conclusions from that yet.

REPORTER:                Patrick Walters from The Australian. What about facial reconstruction? Will you be attempting to do something in that area?

MATTHEW BLENKIN:          I guess it is a possibility. There's no reason why we couldn't. It's something that the police have used in the past. If all other avenues of identification are fruitless, I guess that's a decision that will be made later on. I wouldn't rule out those other avenues of identification first though.

REPORTER:                The actual dental records you're working from on enlistment, I presume they're just words written on a page? They're not X-rays or anything as useful as that?

MATTHEW BLENKIN:          That's a great question. With contemporary cases, Coronial cases, disaster victim identification, like the Bali bombings, that sort of thing, what we actually do for identification is look at X-rays. We look at images of the teeth and we try and look for patterns... as I said, points of concordance between the X-rays of the body and the X-rays of the patient and try and match them up and you're actually looking for specific shapes of the fillings, the roots of the teeth, the pulp chambers, the structure of the bone around the teeth itself.

                                      All of which is usually very distinctive. The problem with the written records, as Max has actually pointed out, is that it's a bit like trying to do a fingerprint comparison based on a written description of the fingerprint. So the best … what we're probably hoping for I guess, looking at this, while you can... With a fingerprint comparison, if it was to be written and described rather than drawn, you could say, yes it sounds exactly like that but I couldn't 100 per cent guarantee that that's a match.

                                      It sounds like it, but I can't promise anything. It's the same with these dental records. We are looking at a written description of what existed in the mouth and from that point of view, I can't 100 per cent say, yes this is the guy. But what I can say is that there's no one else on the ship that matches except this guy. So in that way, because we're talking about a limited field of people, we can exclude others.

                                      And so, whilst I may not be able to get an exact match, what I can do is say, it's definitely not this one, this one or this one. And so, in that way we kind of... I don't know. It limits the ability to provide a perfect match. It does actually still provide us with plenty of scope to narrow the search down.

REPORTER:                Gerard McManus from The Herald Sun. Why do you think the Navy resisted so long and fought tooth and nail to approach this expedition?

JIM PARSONS:           I'm not sure that's a question I can answer. I think it was a case of, we had to have real concrete evidence to mount something like this again. Theories were not good enough and it wasn't until the association between Brian O'Shannassy's photograph and his own evidence came along that we really had something we could pin it down to.

                                      Now you've seen the area we searched there. That took 14 days of digging and you've got to have a fairly specific location in order to have any hope of succeeding. And I think that's the reason why it didn't happen until such time as we had the firm evidence.

MATTHEW BLENKIN:          I can support that. After digging for 14 days back in 2001, in a place where the body wasn't, it's really not something you want to do unless you've got a lot of evidence pin pointing the location.

REPORTER:                But this is years and years of blocking and I mean, you don't even give acknowledgement to the one person who pushed for this to happen. Is there any reason why you haven't talked about that today?

JIM PARSONS:           No there's no reason at all. I assume the person you are talking about is Ted McGowan, who raised a lot of these issues in public. I did talk about the lobbying of interested parties and he was certainly one of them and Glenys McDonald was another.

JO BUTTON:               We'll move onto the next question thank you.

REPORTER:                Geof Parry from Seven Network again and this is, I suppose, by way of a query. I understand that you have some video of your operation up at Christmas Island. Is that correct?

JIM PARSONS:           We have a small amount yes, which will become available fairly shortly Geoff.

REPORTER:                Why has Navy being denying, for a number of days, the existence of that video?

JO BUTTON:               That’s not correct.

REPORTER:                It is correct, because you told the defence media centre that no video existed and I was wondering why and it's not the first time. In fact, you've told them twice.

JO BUTTON:               The video taken on Christmas Island was purely for forensic and historical purposes. We're still investigating the quality of that.

REPORTER:                No, you denied its existence and I was just wondering why that is?

JO BUTTON:               Two more questions from the floor?

REPORTER:                Sorry, I didn't get an answer. Is there no answer?

JO BUTTON:               I just don't think there's any truth to that. There's certainly videos that will be made available this afternoon.

REPORTER:                Which wasn't going to be made available this morning because its existence was denied.

JO BUTTON:               Quick, yep, at the back, thankyou.

REPORTER:                So, to the team leader, just based on what you've discovered, what degree of probability would you say this sailor or this person who was buried, was actually from the Sydney? What sort of level of probability would you put on it?

JIM PARSONS:           I think you're bringing in some issues there where I can't draw a conclusion from, but the Defence Standing Committee drew the conclusion that on the balance of probability it was a sailor from HMAS Sydney. I think we have to accept that. What I have, is a strong belief that the person that we have recovered is the person that was recovered from the Carley raft in February 1942. I think the link is already made between that and the other part.

REPORTER:                Just, is there any possibility that the sailor could be a German?

JIM PARSONS:           It's not impossible and it would be interesting to theorise how he got into the Carley raft, but it's certainly not implausible. And this will be part of the process that we go through.

JO BUTTON:               Last one, thank you.

REPORTER:                This bullet wound, did it actually penetrate the skull and if so, would it have been immediately fatal or not long afterwards?

MATT BLENKIN:         It did penetrate the skull and with it being lodged at the exit wound, it would have been immediately fatal, yes.

JO BUTTON:               Thank you ladies and gentlemen; that will be all.

*          *          End          *          *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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