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Why was JFK's original casket dropped to the bottom of the ocean?Answer: It was of no use in the investigation and the family and government did not want it to be an object of curiosity.“It was approximately 1:00 PM when a man called Vernon B. O’Neal of O’Neal’s Funeral Home and asked for the best casket that O’Neal had available. The man on the phone, simultaneously calm and tense, needed the coffin quickly and O’Neal had a slight problem. Of the 18 people who worked at O’Neal’s Funeral Home, 17 of them were out to lunch. After all, it was a beautiful Friday day for November in Texas.”“O’Neal picked out a solid-bronze coffin with white satin lining tagged at a sales price of $3,995 from his storeroom and waited for three more of his employees to return from lunch. The bulky Handley Brittania casket from the Elgin Casket Company weighed over 400 pounds when it was empty and O’Neal certainly couldn’t lift it into his Cadillac hearse by himself. Once he had it loaded, he rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital on the most important delivery of his career.”“Vernon O’Neal was horrified when he saw the condition of the President’s body. Blood was everywhere and a gaping wound exposed brain matter which was seeping out of John F. Kennedy’s head. Not wanting to damage the beautiful and expensive casket that he had picked out for the President, O’Neal and several emergency room nurses went to work. The bottom of the inside of the coffin was lined with a plastic mattress covering and the President’s body was wrapped in a bed sheet. The nurses went even further and spent 20 minutes carefully wrapping President Kennedy’s head in numerous white bed sheets so that blood didn’t seep through and stain the lining of the casket.”“When President Kennedy’s casket was opened at Bethesda, it became readily apparent that the hard work of Vernon O’Neal and the nurses at Parkland Hospital in Dallas to protect the inside of the expensive coffin was unsuccessful. The makeshift bandage which had been carefully wrapped around Kennedy’s head did not prevent seepage after all. Blood soaked through the sheets which made up the “bandage” and the inner lining of Kennedy’s ornate casket was obviously damaged. ““he pathologists who performed John F. Kennedy’s autopsy finished their work shortly after midnight on November 23, 1963. Photographs and drawings were taken of Kennedy’s body during the autopsy, and when the autopsy was finished, morticians from one of the capital’s finest funeral parlors arrived on the scene. A team from Gawler’s Funeral Home entered the autopsy room at Bethesda Naval Hospital to embalm the President and attempt to make him presentable. The casket that brought JFK back to Washington from Dallas would not work. While the casket from O’Neal’s was a beauty from the exterior, the interior was a mess. All of the safeguards attempted by O’Neal and the Parkland nurses in Dallas were not quite enough to protect the inside of the Handley Brittania from the gruesome wound that had killed the President.”“The history of Vernon O’Neal’s casket did not end that night at Bethesda when President Kennedy was transferred to a different coffin. Gawler’s Funeral Home took possession of JFK’s original casket after they placed him in the undamaged casket that their mortuary team had brought to Bethesda Naval Hospital following Kennedy’s autopsy. Whether it was as a morbid souvenir or simply due to confusion about what to do with it, Gawler’s stored JFK’s original coffin in a warehouse in Washington, D.C. In January 1964, less than two months after JFK’s burial, Vernon O’Neal submitted a bill to the federal government for $3,995 for the casket that Secret Service Agent Clint Hill ordered in Dallas and JFK was transported to Washington in.”“The government felt that O’Neal’s bill was “excessive”, particularly since he had merely delivered the casket to Parkland Hospital in Dallas and had not performed any other funeral services such as embalming, chapel services or transportation of mourners. O’Neal lowered the price by $500, but the government still had an issue with the $3,495 price tag. What Vernon O’Neal actually wanted was the casket itself. O’Neal had received offers of $100,000 by parties interested in collecting and displaying the casket as a unique relic of the slain President. For the Kennedy Family — still reeling from the assassination and its aftermath — the last thing they wanted was a spectacle surrounding a bloodstained coffin that JFK had spent just a few hours in. At the family’s urging, the federal government paid O’Neal (he received $3,160 for his services on November 22, 1963) and the General Services Administration took possession of the object in 1965.”“In September 1965, the House of Representatives passed a bill which required the government to preserve any objects related to the Kennedy Assassination which might contain evidentiary value. Several days later, Representative Earle Cabell from Texas sent a letter to Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (who had replaced Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department a year earlier). In his letter, Congressman Cabell suggested that the casket had no value for anyone other than “the morbidly curious”. Since the Kennedy Family “did not see fit to use this particular casket in the ultimate interment of the body”, Cabell felt that it was “surplus” material owned and controlled by the federal government. To shut down those who might be “morbidly curious”, Cabell recommended that the casket “be declared the proper property of the USA and, as such and in keeping with the best interest of the country, be destroyed.”“The Kennedy Family agreed with Congressman Cabell’s sentiments and Attorney General Katzenbach ensured everyone that the casket had no evidentiary value, no good reason for display or storage, and that it was the property that the government had the right to dispose of in whichever way it sought fit. On February 18, 1966, several members of the Air Force picked the casket up from a secure building at the National Archives just a few blocks from the White House. The casket was placed in an Air Force truck and transported to Andrews Air Force Base — the very place that the casket had originally landed in Washington with President Kennedy inside of it less than three years earlier. At Andrews, the Air Force team from the 93rdAir Terminal Squadron loaded the coffin on to a C130 transport plane.”“To dispose of the casket, the Air Force had decided to take it to a place that JFK had once considered being buried: the Atlantic Ocean. Kennedy loved the sea and was said to have considered being buried at sea when he died. Of course, we know that Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery instead, but for many reasons, the Atlantic Ocean was the perfect place for the disposal of the casket that had brought him back to Washington following his assassination.”“The Air Force wanted to ensure the integrity of the casket and not allow it to become a souvenir by someone who happened to come across it floating in the ocean or washing up on the shore. The C130 flew about 100 miles east of Washington, D.C. and descended to about 500 feet above the water. Before taking off, the Air Force had drilled over 40 holes into the casket and filled it with three 80-pound sandbags. It was also secured inside of a wooden crate and sealed shut in a manner so that it wouldn’t break apart upon hitting the water.”“At approximately 10:00 AM, the C130’s tail hatch was opened and the casket was pushed out of the aircraft. Parachutes softened its fall and the coffin began to sink instantly. The airplane circled the drop zone for about 20 minutes to make sure that the coffin didn’t resurface, but they had no reason to worry. The Air Force had chosen an area of the Atlantic that saw very little air or sea traffic, and the casket settled in about 9,000 feet of water. The Kennedy Family was relieved that they no longer had to worry about a bloody casket going on display somewhere for the “morbidly curious”.“Coincidentally, in 1999, President Kennedy’s son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. was killed when the plane he was flying crashed. After his body was recovered and identified, JFK Jr.’s remains were taken out into the Atlantic Ocean — just a few hundred miles from the drop zone of his father’s original casket — and buried at sea.”