Yes, Connor discounted it, said it wasn't a match. It took looking at photos of Casani to nail it down and actually it was the injuries reported in his RAF file that confirmed it.
Not quite as it was reported. First, the photo was said to be in the Warner Bros archive - repeatedly, including by Lee Unkrich, the doyen of Shining research - and my multiple attempts to find it failed. That was because it never existed... It had been said by the woman who did the retouching, so you'd expect her to know, but in fact, she didn't. Murray Close didn't take the photo, he took the photo of Jack Nicholson, so no reason at first to assume he knew. It's also difficult to contact such people - he's now a very successful photographer - and it took emails, messages to his instagram, his website, to get a reply to something I'm sure he thought was 45 year old trivia.