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Originally Posted by Texan
If she fell backwards or forwards and her head turned to the side, that could have caused a fracture to the side of the head, but even though the events of that night must have been horrific it wasn't the exorcist, and the head will only turn so far to one side or the other, which seems would limit the length of the fracture to her skull.
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I think one of the reasons the skull fracture is so long is where it is. From the pictures on
autopsy picture of the skull on this website, it looks like the skull was fractured near the suture. If you look at an illustration of a child's skull, you will see the lines dividing the different parts of the skull, called sutures, where the different bones of the skull grow together.
Until about age 12 years, those sutures are not totally closed in order to accomidate growth of the brain and the bones that make up the skull. Because the sutures are not fused together, that is a weak point of the skull. It looks like the fracture pretty much follows a suture line.
This is a
website that has a good illustration of the skull of a child, pointing out the different structures/bones. I'm not sure if the link will open to the home page for the skeleton or to the skull page - if it's the home page, just click on the "skull" link.
The illustration is obviously of the left side of the skull, but JB's skull was fractured on the R side. And, you can also see that the skull in the autopsy picture is not in the position it would be in life, but is put in a way that it will sit on the table for the picture (so you can't really judge how high 'up' on the skull the fracture is).
Comparing the illustration to the photograph, the fracture is a fairly straight line from the bottom of the frontal bone along the parietal bone just above where the temporal bone joins the parietal bone. Where a part of the parietal bone forms a little rectangle shaped area below the joint, the fracture doesn't follow that line, but goes pretty much in a straight line to the occipital bone. The bone fragment is in the posteroparietal (back part of the parietal area), so it's at the side back of the skull.The areas that were fractured on JB's skull are the lateral areas of the parietal and frontal bone. The fracture continues to the occipital bone (at the rear of the head), from lateral to just past midline.