It’s been about a month since the Trump administration released the last of the government documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, some 80,000 pages, and yet the government and the news media are still in denial over the origin of “Lee Harvey Oswald’s third and final shot,” a.k.a. “the fatal bullet.”

This is the same bullet, according to a 25-year investigation by Howard Donahue, a noted ballistics expert, for which there is convincing evidence to show — if not prove — there was no way it could have ever come from Oswald’s rifle, an Italian-made, World War I era, bolt-action, single-shot Mannlicher-Carcano. This type of weapon uses a large heavy bullet wrapped in a full metal jacket designed to pierce right through all human matter like a gamma ray leaving small entrance and exit wounds.

“The fatal bullet,” meanwhile, that hit the back of the president’s head behaved like a bullet with a thin metal jacket by the way it exploded on impact. If they don’t explode then they’re liable to tumble around inside the victim’s body causing massive internal damage before leaving a gaping exit wound. This is the type of ammo the military uses with its Colt M-16s and their civilian counterparts, the popular AR-15s used by the Secret Service. The evidence even shows the trajectory of the bullet and hence the location of the shooter.

Donahue went out on a lonely limb in 1992 with the publication of “Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK” by Bonar Menninger. His theory states that Oswald got off only two shots. The first one hit the pavement. The second one did what the Warren Report says it did. It went straight through Kennedy’s neck, then in and out of Texas Governor John Connally, causing seven wounds in all.

According to Donahue’s theory, at about this time, Agent George Hickey of the Secret Service stood up on the back seat of the chase car immediately behind the president’s. He held onto an AR-15 while doing this with the safety switch flipped over from “SAFE” to “FIRE.” The driver then stomped on the gas pedal causing Agent Hickey to lose his balance and squeeze the trigger just as the barrel happened to be pointed at the president’s head.

Donahue, who died in 1999, described himself as a patriot and a political conservative. He at first supported the findings of the Warren Report, the official inquiry headed up by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The report concluded that Oswald had acted alone and fired all three shots. While Donahue at first accepted this as true, he thought the report could make its case a lot stronger through greater use of ballistic evidence under his guidance. The Warren Commission wasn’t interested in hiring him as a special counsel, so in 1967 he launched his own investigation.

While conspiracy theorists focused on possible connections between Fidel Castro, the CIA and the Sicilian Mafia, Donahue focused on bullet wounds, shell fragments and trajectories. The more evidence he dug up, the more he realized the Warren Report had gotten it wrong.

Assuming for the moment that Donahue had gotten it right, then that could explain some very strange activity that took place with the president’s body between Parkland Memorial and Bethesda Naval Hospital where the official autopsy was performed late in the evening the same day as the shooting.

In the 1980 book “Best Evidence,” author David S. Lifton tells of what may be the most startling piece of evidence brought up in the 1964 Warren Commission hearings, and yet it was never reported nor discussed in public.

Commander James Humes, the lead surgeon who supervised the official autopsy, explained this evidence with hardly a word of plain English. Instead he spoke in strict “Medicalese” in such a way that nobody caught the fact that he had just told them that the president’s body had been tampered with prior to its arrival at Bethesda Naval. To be specific, the president’s brain had been removed and then put back.

If Donahue’s theory is correct, then the Secret Service was on the brink of a colossal international embarrassment. The coffin would most likely be stashed near the back of Air Force 1 with a Secret Service detail back there with it. Would it seem terribly shocking to learn that maybe the Secret Service had tried to take advantage of some “alone time” with the body by making a desperate effort to clean up the crime scene?

Head X-rays taken at Bethesda indicated the presence of a large number of microscopic shell fragments that were too small to be identified, but there was also one piece that was plenty large enough to be tested and positively identified to prove what type of weapon had fired it. Donahue petitioned the government for permission to test the fragment, but the government always refused.

Agent Hickey refused to be interviewed. Instead, he sued for libel but was told he’d waited too long. He sued again when the paperback edition came out and accepted an undisclosed settlement out of court.

By and large, the federal government along with the news media have done little but scoff at Donahue’s theory, which begs the question, “Then why not let somebody test the shell fragment?”

While Donahue may have died in 1999, his theory lives on. In a 2013 story on the 50th anniversary of the assassination, NBC News described it as “one theory that has gained traction in recent years.”

“It’s not sexy. It’s not rife with intrigue,” Menninger says. “But for that reason, in my mind, it’s extremely compelling — because it’s the only theory that hews tightly to the available evidence.”

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Steve Lester lives in Lake Placid.