Casket that carried JFK was sunk in Atlantic

WASHINGTON (AP) - A bronze casket used to carry President Kennedy's body from Dallas to Washington is in a watery grave - 9,000 feet down in the Atlantic Ocean, according to assassination documents.

Materials to be released Tuesday at the National Archives will show that in early 1965 the casket was dropped from a military plane into an area where unstable and outdated weapons and ammunition are dumped, Kermit Hall, a member of the now-defunct Assassination Records Review Board, told The Associated Press.

``The documents that will be released show it was dropped off the Maryland-Delaware border in 9,000 feet of water,'' Hall said Friday night. ``There's actually a map in the documents that pinpoints the coordinates where it was dropped.''

The revelation - on the eve of what would have been President Kennedy's 82nd birthday today - that the casket was sunk resolves a lingering mystery about its whereabouts. But it also fuels speculation among assassination researchers that it was discarded to hide foul play.

``The coffin is evidence just like the body is evidence,'' said David Lifton, who wrote a book about medical evidence in the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination. ``You don't destroy evidence.''

What happened to the bronze casket has been a lingering question over the past three decades. Last year a document released by the archives showed that a General Services Administration truck picked up the coffin on March 19, 1964.

In its effort to ferret assassination-related documents and information from various government agencies, the review panel asked the GSA where the casket was. The agency said in the summer of 1998 that it didn't know.

The documents from GSA and the Justice and Defense departments being released next week, however, describe the disposition in detail, Hall said.

``Essentially what was going on was an effort to make sure the casket didn't turn into a historic relic for the marketplace,'' he said.

Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in a mahogany coffin that had been purchased in Washington to replace the bronze one, which was missing a handle and had been damaged.

In September 1965, former Texas Rep. Earle Cabell wrote to then-Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach recommending that the bronze casket be discarded so it could never become a relic.

``It is an extremely handsome, expensive, all-bronze, silk-lined casket, and fortunately, and properly,was paid for by the General Services Administration, and presently is in the possession of GSA,'' Cabell wrote.

``This item has ... value for the morbidly curious. And I believe that I am correct in stating that this morbid curiosity is that which we all seek to stop.''

Katzenbach said in an interview Friday that he doesn't recall details about the disposition of the casket. If anyone had asked him if it should be disposed of, ``I'd have said that's a good idea,'' he said.

Lifton thinks there might have been a darker motive.

In conducting his research, Lifton talked with witnesses who said Kennedy's body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in a gray metal shipping casket, not the bronze one obtained in Dallas. That the bronze casket was dumped in the ocean - after the Warren Commission issued its report in 1964 - makes him wonder what clues it might have yielded to investigators.

``If it had been an ongoing murder investigation, this would be obstruction of justice,'' Lifton said.

Douglas Horne, who was the chief analyst for military records at the congressionally created review board, speculated that the bronze casket was destroyed to end the two-coffin controversy.

``I think the way to get rid of the problem is you get rid of the casket. You throw it out of an airplane,'' said Horne. "Then it's just a bunch of stories."