DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Dr. Earl Rose, the medical
examiner in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in
1963, died Tuesday at an Iowa City retirement community at age 85.
Rose’s
wife, Marilyn, said he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and then
developed dementia. The Des Moines Register first reported Rose’s death.
Kennedy
was shot Nov. 22, 1963, and taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
Minutes after he died, a debate erupted about what do to with the body.
Rose insisted that an autopsy be performed in Texas and stood in a doorway to block
Kennedy’s aides as they removed his coffin.
He
and other Texas officials saw the shooting as a state crime, requiring
an autopsy by Rose’s office. The Secret Service and the first lady
disagreed, and Kennedy’s body was flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital,
where an autopsy was done by pathologists James Humes and Thornton
Boswell.
Conspiracy theorists have used their findings to try to support an array of claims
about plots leading to Kennedy’s death.
Rose believed many of those theories wouldn’t have gained traction if he had been
able to do his job.
"(He
felt) the chain of evidence was lost, for one thing," Marilyn Rose
said. "It would have been helpful if other doctors who had worked on
Kennedy would have been able to put in their expertise. Also the autopsy
that was done was very inadequate."
In a 2003 interview in Iowa
City, Rose told The Associated Press he believed he and his staff should
have done the post-mortem exam.
"We had the routine in place to
do it … it was important for the chain of evidence to remain intact,"
Rose said. "That didn’t happen when the body was taken to Bethesda."
Marilyn
Rose said her husband was not angry over what had happened at the
hospital, but he tried to be firm in insisting the autopsy be done in
Texas.
"He was trying to do his job and follow the law," she said.
"At that point, there was no federal law on the assassinations of
presidents. If the autopsy was done in Texas, it would have followed the
law."
Marilyn Rose said the Secret Service and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy wanted the
body moved.
"You
can understand that because at the point nobody knew who the assassin
was or whether it was a conspiracy and if was there more than one
(shooter). You can kind of understand that and she was not going to
leave Dallas without the body," she said.
The Warren Commission
concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. It found that
Oswald likely had fired three shots, one of which struck Texas Gov. John
Connally after striking Kennedy.
Rose conducted autopsies on J.D
Tippit, the police officer who was killed after the assassination, on
Oswald and on Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Oswald
two days after Kennedy was shot.
Marilyn Rose said her husband began speaking publicly about Kennedy’s assassination
after the 1991 film "JKF" by Oliver Stone.
"As
far as I know, he definitely felt it was a lone gunman and that the
shots came from behind and that there was no second gunman on the grassy
knoll. He felt the trajectory of the bullet was a described — that it
hit Kennedy and then hit Connally," she said.
Rose grew up in
South Dakota and attended medical school at the University of Nebraska.
He moved his wife and six children from Dallas in 1968 to take a
position at the University of Iowa Medical School.
He is survived by his wife, five daughters and 12 grandchildren. His son died in
2005.
Marilyn Rose said a memorial will be held June 11 in Iowa City.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.