Wooster High School teacher has many questions

Wooster teacher compiles questions into a book on JFK's assassination

By LINDA HALL Staff Writer Published:

WOOSTER DISTRICT -- A Wooster High School teacher hasn't closed the book on how the late President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In fact, the questions about the widely accepted circumstances surrounding Kennedy's death are part of a book written by social studies teacher Andy Kiel, whose research led him to disagree with conclusions reached by the Warren Commission's 28 encyclopedic volumes.

Kiel has been seeking the truth through research since college and has compiled it in a section of his book called "J. Edgar Hoover, The Father of the Cold War."

Part of his investigation into Kennedy's assassination focuses on the work of Don Adams, a former Fairlawn police chief who "worked for the FBI for 20 years," Kiel said. In a book called "From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle," Adams, who was responsible for surveillance of right-wing extremists, including Joseph Milteer, reported that on Nov. 9, 1963, barely two weeks before Kennedy was killed, Milteer predicted the assassination and how it would unfold.

Kiel reported that according to Adams, Milteer said, "It's in the works. Kennedy is going to be killed, and they'll pick up somebody within 24 hours to throw people off."

Interestingly, in the "whole two days (Lee Harvey) Oswald was alive (before he was killed by Jack Ruby)," Kiel said, Oswald, charged with killing the president, claimed, "I was a patsy. I didn't kill anyone."

"There are a lot of sides to Oswald people didn't know," said Kiel, whose own belief is "shots were fired (at Kennedy) from the front and the rear. I don't think Oswald fired any of them.

"Even the Warren Commission's own exhibits prove (Oswald) wasn't the sole shooter," Kiel said, although "I personally don't think he fired any of the shots that supposedly came from the sixth floor (of the Texas Book Depository).

"Within a minute or less" from the time of the shooting, Kiel said, Oswald was in "the second floor lunchroom drinking a Coke."

A book called "The Girl on the Stairs" documents the testimony of a woman named Victoria Adams who was on the fourth floor of the building with three other ladies when the shots rang out.

She "high-tailed it down the stairs" after she heard the shots ... and saw nobody (else) come down the stairs," Kiel said, which to him means Oswald was "in the lunchroom all along."

Kiel thinks the Warren Commission was "responsible for rubber stamping (J. Edgar) Hoover's conclusions."

Hoover, according to Kiel, came to a "predetermined conclusion," particularly disputing Hoover's timing in determining who killed Kennedy.

He was shot at 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, Kiel said, and by 2 p.m. Oswald was arrested.

At 3 p.m. Dallas time, Kiel said, Hoover pronounced Oswald as the sole shooter.

Kiel used as exhibits newspaper reports in the wake of the assassination to cast doubt on Hoover's conclusions.

For example, noted on UPI "minute by minute bulletins," he said, was this observation -- "The shots appeared to have come from a grassy knoll near the street the motorcade was moving along."

"Numerous police officers and law enforcement (officials') initial reaction was that shots came from the right front," in other words, "the grassy knoll or overpass."

Also in dispute are reports of entrance and exit wounds.

One report by a doctor at Parkland Hospital in Dallas said a bullet "went into his throat and didn't exit," Kiel said, "making a single bullet theory impossible," as he was hit in the neck and the head.

Kiel not only implicates Hoover in wrong-doing, but also "a couple of Secret Service agents," based in part on a change in security protocol ordered for Dallas, but not Kennedy's other stops on the trip to Texas.

Kiel additionally demonstrates evidence autopsy photos were falsified.

One of the conclusions Kiel has reached is "I do think Kennedy was seen as a Communist appeaser. This was a Cold War hit."

"The Mob, the CIA ... possibly turned against Kennedy," he said.

Kiel said Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared his father's belief JFK's assassination was a conspiracy.

Kiel spoke at the November Coalition on Political Assassinations, its 20th annual conference in Dallas.


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  • Very interesting! As a fellow historian, this may be the most "juicy" US Historical event to investigate. There are literally thousands of aspects to study and it is always fun to follow the pathology leading to conspiracy theories. 

    In a bit of irony, we are facing a government who seems bent on wanting to know everything about us (Drones, NSA Spying) yet here is an event that ocurred 50 years ago and we really have no further information because the government has locked up the critical pieces of information.