contact |  news |  backgrounds |  search |  home
Interesting Facts Strange and Unexplained Mysteries and Secrets
Mysteries & Secrets - John F. Kennedy

Conspiracy or Lone Assassin?
The president had been warned about going to Dallas, since it was known that he had many influential adversaries in the ultraconservative city. John F. Kennedy But John F. Kennedy brushed aside the objections. It was important that he mend his political fences in Texas and seek support from such powerful figures as Governor John Connally for his unannounced bid for reelection the next year. Upon their arrival at Dallas's Love Field, the president and his wife, Jacqueline, joined Governor and Mrs. Connally in the rear of an open car, the second vehicle in a motorcade into the city, where he was to deliver a luncheon address.

As people lining the streets cheered, Nellie Connally turned to the president and exclaimed, "You sure can't say Dallas doesn't love you." At 12:30 P.M. the motorcade slowed to make a right and then a left turn before it would pass through a triple underpass to the freeway that led to the destination. An agent in the first car said to the driver, "Five more minutes and we'll have him there." In a rear car the president's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, remarked, "Just think - we've come through all of Dallas and there hasn't been a single demonstration." A local woman laughed; "We're not so bad," she said. A reporter in the press car, misreading the sign on the rust-colored brick building that loomed ahead, asked "What the hell is a Book Repository?" Standing between the book depository and the underpass along the motorcade route, a man named Abraham Zapruder aimed his movie camera at the presidential car. Another bystander, Charles Brend, held his five year old son aloft to wave at the president. Seeing him, Kennedy smiled and waved back.

Actual Footage of that memorable day. Suddenly shots rang out. A bullet passed through the president's neck and on through Governor Connally's back, chest, right wrist, and left thigh. Kennedy clutched his throat; Connally, his lap full of blood, slumped onto his wife in their seats to the front. Hearing the governor scream, Mrs. Kennedy turned anxiously toward the president, as a second bullet tore off the top of his head.

Four Days

The assassination of the 35th president of the United States on November 22, 1963, stunned the nation and the world. For much of that Friday and the next three days, millions around the globe sat transfixed before their television sets as the remaining scenes of the unimaginable tragedy were enacted.

Within minutes Lee Harvey Oswald leaves the Texas School Book Depository, where he had fired the two shots from a corner window on the sixth floor. At 1:15 P.M. Oswald shoots Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit, who had stopped him for questioning. Eyewitnesses call the police and direct them to the movie theater where Oswald had sought to hide. Arrested for killing Tippit and then accused of assassinating Kennedy, Oswald proclaims his innocence of the second charge, he is being made to take the blame for the real culprits, Oswald says.

At 12:38 P.M. Case Number 24740, a white male suffering from a gunshot wound, is admitted to Parkland Memorial Hospital, to which the presidential car had sped. A priest is called to the emergency room, but at two o'clock doctors pronounce John F. Kennedy dead. Over the objections of local authorities, Secret Service agents place the body in a coffin and transport it to Love Field. Within an hour, Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as president by Judge Sarah T. Hughes. Standing at his side aboard Air Force One, the presidential airplane, is Jacqueline Kennedy in her blood spattered pink suit. That evening the presidential party arrives back in Washington, D.C., where an autopsy is performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

On Saturday, November 23, Mrs. Kennedy picks out a grave site for her husband at Arlington National Cemetery; the state funeral is scheduled for Monday. In Dallas, Oswald is questioned about the slaying for three hours.

At the request of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Oswald is to be transferred from Dallas police headquarters to the sheriff's office on Sunday. As the transfer is taking place, shortly before noon, a Dallas nightclub operator named Jack Ruby steps from a crowd of reporters covering the event and shoots Oswald, in full view of a national television audience. He acted spontaneously, Ruby confessed, out of anger over the president's death and the wish to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the agony of an Oswald trial in Dallas.

By 9 A.M. Monday morning, November 25, a quarter million mourners have passed by the catafalque holding Kennedy's body in the U.S. Capitol, Mrs. Kennedy had asked for the building to be kept open all night to accommodate the crowds. Following a funeral service at St. Matthew's Cathedral presided over by Cardinal Cushing of Boston and attended by many of the world's leaders, Kennedy is buried at Arlington. Mrs. Kennedy lights an eternal flame at his grave.

Oswald's view shot.

Doubt About the Official Explanation

On the very morning of his death President Kennedy made an uncanny prediction to his adviser Kenneth O'Donnell. "If anyone wants to shoot a president," he said, "it's not a very difficult job. All one has to do is get on a high building with a telescopic rifle, and there is nothing anybody can do." And this is exactly how the assassination came to be described in the report of the Warren Commission, named for its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren. Presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964, the report had 26 volumes of documentation. The conclusion: John F. Kennedy was killed by the fanatic loner, Lee Harvey Oswald.

But even as the Warren Commission was conducting its exhaustive investigation, doubts were being raised. Oswald had not acted alone, sorne were saying, but was merely the "hit man" of an international assassination team. Behind the killer was Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, or possibly the Soviet Union's secret police. Others claimed that it was a matter of an internal power play; agents of the FBI or CIA were responsible. And, perhaps most persistent of all, there was the tale that Kennedy had been targeted by the Mafia.

Missing Evidence

Reexamining the evidence between 1976 and 1978, a House of Representatives committee charged that the autopsy performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital the day following Kennedy's assassination had not been conducted in accordance with professional standards. One of the participating doctors complained at the time that they were not allowed to lay open the track of the two bullets through the president's body because of the objections of "a high-ranking personality," presumably a military figure. Not being able to establish the trajectory of the bullets, the autopsy could not determine the angle of the shots - that is, if they both came from the window in the Texas School Book Depository or if, possibly, one had come from another direction.

The preserved brain and other autopsy materials were given to Kennedy's secretary. When these were deposited with the National Archives in 1966, the brain was found to be missing. Had evidence been suppressed?

How Many Shots?

The 2 assassin theory. The Warren Commission had concluded that Kennedy had been hit by two bullets, both coming from above and behind him, which was consistent with the official story of Oswald as lone assassin. The conclusion was based on an analysis of the film taken by Zapruder and on drawings made by criminal pathologists.

Late in the 1970's another piece of evidence was reexamined: the tape recorder of a Dallas policeman providing a motorcycle escort for the presidential motorcade on November 22. Due to a technical defect, the recorder had been left on during the ride from Love Field. For years it had been gathering dust with the other evidence because, apart from some faint rustling, it seemed to contain no identifiable noises.

The House committee asked acoustic experts to study the tape with state of the art computer techniques. Finding noises that sounded like gunshots, the experts went to Dallas and fired guns at the assassination spot on an autumn morning in 1978. Matching new recordings to the 15 year old tape, they were able, with a probability bordering on certainty, to isolate four distinct shots. Moreover, they claimed to be able to determine from which directions the shots had come. Three had indeed been fired from the Texas School Book Depository window where Oswald stood. (Three spent cartridges were found at the window; presumably one of Oswald's shots went astray.) The fourth shot, however, had been fired at close range from in front and to the right of the presidential car. Someone else, standing on a grassy knoll overlooking the parade route, had also been aiming for the president.

The second assassin's view shot. The Warren Commission had ignored or chosen to discount the testimony of witnesses who reported hearing a fourth shot. Other witnesses claimed to have seen a puff of gunsmoke coming from the knoll and men with FBI identification on their cars leaving a nearby parking lot, though the FBI said that no men had been stationed there that day. Three people had tried to catch a man running from the parking lot, but he got away.

The Zapruder film shows the president's head sinking forward, presumably after the first bullet from the rear passed through his neck. But then his entire head snaps back in a reaction that would have been consistent with a fatal bullet striking from the front and blowing away half his head as it exited to the rear. Weighing all the evidence, the House committee concluded in 1979 that Kennedy "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy." Who were the conspirators? The report did not say.

Man Between Two Worlds

Despite all that has been written about him since the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald remains an enigma, a shadowy figure whose motives for the terrible crime have never been fully explained. "It is possible to believe almost anything about him," one scholar has said, "and damned near impossible to know what's true."

A school dropout at age 16, Oswald joined the U.S. Marine Corps on October 24, 1956, six days after his 17th birthday. Following training as a radar technician, he was assigned to Atsugi Air Base outside Tokyo, Japan, the base from which were launched the U-2 photoreconnaissance flights over the U.S.S.R. Oswald had few friends and spent much of his spare time reading - in particular books about Marxism - and studying Russian. Soon, a fellow Marine later testified, he was saying that "communism was the best system in the world." Before being transferred back to the United States late in 1958, Oswald had been court martialed twice, once for possessing an unauthorized private weapon and later for addressing "provoking words" to a sergeant. According to one of his officers, Oswald was "a little bit nuts on foreign affairs" and became an enthusiastic supporter of Fidel Castro, who seized power in Cuba in January 1959.

On September 11, 1959, Oswald received an early release from the Marine Corps in order to support his dependent mother. However, after giving her $100, he booked passage on a ship bound from New Orleans to Le Havre, France, and subsequently made his way across Europe to Moscow. On October 31 he appeared at the U.S. embassy there to renounce his American citizenship, saying that he was a Marxist, had applied for Soviet citizenship, and was offering the Soviets information he had acquired as a radar technician. Seven months later the Soviets shot down a U-2 aircraft. When pilot Francis Gary Powers admitted that his was a CIA photoreconnaissance mission, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev angrily broke off his summit meeting with President Eisenhower in Paris.

Oswald remained in the Soviet Union for two and a half years, acquiring a Russian wife but gradually becoming disillusioned with life in a Marxist state. On June 1, 1962, Oswald, his wife, Marina, and their infant daughter, June, were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. He had never received Soviet citizenship and denied having given secret information to the Russians. The U.S. Department of State overruled the Immigration and Naturalization Service to readmit Oswald, noting that "it was in the best interests of the United States to have Mr. Oswald depart from the Soviet Union as soon as possible." Was the ex-Marine's initial defection planned by the CIA; had the Soviets failed to rise to the bait of a double agent? Some questions were never asked in the official investigation of the assassination; others remained unanswered.

Fair Play for Cuba

After working at odd jobs in Fort Worth and Dallas, Oswald moved his family to New Orleans in the spring of 1963. But before leaving Texas, he purchased by mail a rifle with a telescopic sight. With it, according to the Warren Commission, he attempted to assassinate retired Major General Edwin A. Walker, an ultraconservative spokesman who was urging President Kennedy to send troops to oust Castro.

In New Orleans, Oswald set himself up as what the Warren Commission called "the imaginary president of the nonexistent chapter" of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization. The address he listed for the chapter, curiously enough, was a building that housed the offices of a retired FBI agent, Guy Bannister, who was said to be the coordinator of several militant anti Castro groups. Despite the fact that Oswald was twice arrested in August 1963 for run-ins with anti Castro Cuban exiles, he and Bannister appeared to be on friendly terms.

Apparently as disillusioned with his return to the United States as he had been by his attempted defection to the Soviet Union, Oswald went to Mexico City in September. There he unsuccessfully tried to get a transit visa to Cuba en route to the U.S.S.R. Returning to Dallas, Oswald went to work at the Texas School Book Depository in mid October. On Tuesday, November 19, he could have read a newspaper report of a speech in Miami in which President Kennedy "all but invited the Cuban people overthrow Fidel Castro's communist regime and promised prompt U.S. aid if they do." The itinerary for the president's visit to Dallas that Friday was also published; the motorcade would pass directly in front of the building where Oswald worked.

Kennedy Versus the Mafia

Oswald at the moment of being shot. If Oswald was acting for either the Soviet secret police or for Fidel Castro, why was an escape route after the assassination denied him? Or was the visitor to Mexico a look alike, sent by the real conspirators to link Oswald falsely to Cuba and the Soviet Union? This is a theory of the most recent advocates of a conspiracy to kill the president. The conspirators? The Mafia.

Both JFK and his brother Robert F. Kennedy were highly visible opponents of organized crime in the United States. In 1957 Senator Kennedy had sat on the Senate Rackets Committee that exposed the mob. As chief counsel to the committee, Robert Kennedy led interrogations that left witnesses squirming in their chairs. When his brother appointed him attorney general in 1961, Robert Kennedy launched a Justice Department war against crime. One of his targets was Carlos Marcello, Mafia boss of New Orleans, who was deported to Guatemala.

Secretly returning to the United States, Marcello plotted revenge. "You know what they say in Sicily," he said to a friend in August 1962; "if you want to kill a dog, you don't cut off the tail, you cut off the head." The way to immobilize Robert Kennedy was to eliminate his brother, the president. "Kennedy's not going to make it to the [1964] election," a Florida mobster told an FBI informer that same month; "he's going to be hit." By the spring of 1963 an associate of Marcello's was saying that there was a price on the president's head.

The Mafia had another reason for opposition to Kennedy: he was not acting quickly enough to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. Upon seizing power, Castro had thrown out the Mafia, which was making profits estimated at more than $110 million annually from drugs, gambling, and prostitution in Havana. The mobsters desperately wanted that lucrative business back and were dismayed when Kennedy failed to give adequate support to the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 had ended when the Soviets backed down; yet the American triumph had not weakened Castro. Despite his tough talk in Miami, the president showed little support for anti-Castro exiles in the United States and had discouraged independent raids on Cuba.

Proponents of a Mafia conspiracy have attempted to establish links between the mob and both Oswald and Jack Ruby. They fail to explain why professional gangsters would have turned to such an unlikely assassin as Oswald or such an improbable hit man as Ruby. Oswald had help, the American writer Steve Rivele claimed late in 1988, as the 25th anniversary of the assassination was bringing renewed interest in the tragedy. Rivele named three Corsicans hired by the New Orleans Mafia for the job. Unfortunately for Rivele's credibility, all three had apparently ironclad alibis for November 22, 1963: one was recovering from an eye operation, the second was serving in the French navy, the third was in a Marseilles prison.

Was Kennedy the Target?

Yet another theory was advanced at the time of the 25th anniversary: Oswald had been aiming at Governor John Connally. As a result of his defection to Russia, Oswald's honorable discharge from the Marine Corps was downgraded to "undesirable" only a notch above dishonorable. Realizing that this could block employment when he returned to the United States, Oswald wrote to Connally, then secretary of the Navy, from the Soviet Union asking for a reversal of the action. He was politely brushed off. In her third and final appearance before the Warren Commission, Marina Oswald expressed an opinion that the president was not her husband's target, saying that "he perhaps was shooting at Governor Connally ...on account of his discharge from the Marines."

By the time that Mrs. Oswald volunteered this information the Warren Commission had apparently already reached its own conclusions and did not include her testimony in its report.

In a New York Times/CBS poll taken shortly before the 25th anniversary of the assassination, 66 percent of Americans queried believed in a conspiracy; 61 percent said that there had been "official cover up to keep the public from learning the truth about the assassination." Yet, 46 percent of those polled felt that it was then too late to establish the truth; 59 percent opposed further investigations.

"It does not seem likely that these mysteries will ever be solved," remarked Representative Louis Stokes, who had headed the House committee a decade earlier. "I think it's more likely than not that we'll never know."

"Gettin' A Kick Out Of Truth"

About Dealey Plaza

by Mike Regan







































Representative Ford: "You actually saw the car lurch forward did you?" James Jarman: "Yes sir" Representative Ford: "That is a distinct impression?" James Jarman: "Yes" Representative Ford: "And you followed it as it turned from Main onto Huston and followed it as it turned from Huston onto Elm?" James Jarman: "Right, sir". Representative Ford: "Had your eye on the car all the time?" James Jarman: "Yes, sir" Representative Ford: "Where did you think the sound of the first shot come from? Do you have a distinct impression of that?" James Jarman: "Well, it sounded at first it had come from below. That is what I thought." Representative Ford:"As you looked out the window and you were looking at the President's car?" James Jarman: "Yes, sir" Representative Ford: "Did you have a distinct impression as to whether the sound came from your left or came from your right?" James Jarman: "I am sure it came from the left." Representative Ford: "But your first reaction, that it was from below?" James Jarman: "Yes, sir." Representative Ford: "When the second shot came, do you have any different recollection?" James Jarman: "Well, they all sounded just about the same." Representative Ford: "You distinctly recall three shots?" James Jarman: "Yes, sir." Representative Ford: "And at what point did you get up from where you were on your knees in the window?" James Jarman: "When the motorcar picked up speed." Representative Ford: "Was this after you thought was the third shot?" James Jarman: "The third shot; yes." Representative Ford: "Have you ever been in trouble with the police or did you ever have any disciplinary troubles in the army?" James Jarman: "No, sir."







Warren Commission Testimony 
Roy S. Truly - Depository Superintendant Vol.#7-Pg.380, 591 
Warren Caster - Employee Vol.#7-Pg,386 
Arnold Rowland - Eyewitness Vol.#2-Pg.165 
Amos Lee Euins - Eyewitness Vol.#2-Pg.201
Bonnie Williams - Possible Co-Conspirator Vol.#3-161
Harold Norman - Co-Conspirator Vol.#3-Pg.186
James Jarman, Jr. - Assassin Vol.#3-Pg.198
James R. Underwood - Witness Vol.#6-Pg.167, 170
Stenographer - GOD BLESS HER


To all:


Sincere regards,

Mike Regan






/s/ James Earl Jarman, Jr.


/s/ Patsy Collins

Notary Public, Dallas County, Texas


Shots From The West...???











Sincere regards,

Mike Regan
Submitted on Tuesday, July 17, 2001 at 04:27:07 (CDT)

News Contact Sky Pictures
Back to Top