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For the past 53 years, the world has been fascinated with the death of John F. Kennedy. Some are labeled conspiracy nuts, while others are called sheep. In 2003,
ABC News released a Gallup poll that found that 68 percent of Americans believe there was a cover-up. With the 99th birthday of JFK having taken place back in late May, we thought we'd explore a few popular theories and shed some light on what they mean.
The CIA planned it.
After Kennedy entered office, he developed quite a distaste for the Central Intelligence Agency. In private, he
said that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." Kennedy especially took umbrage with the CIA's engineering of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the brutal torture and subsequent slaughter of Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. The CIA didn't like that Kennedy didn't like them.
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Interestingly, the head of the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the murder of Patrice Lumumba was Allen Dulles, who was a member of the Warren Commission that pronounced to the public the
single-bullet theory claiming Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. As a renowned JFK conspiracy theorist whose knowledge is sought after by historians, reporters and producers,
Dave Perry put it, "Supposedly, Kennedy was fed up with the shenanigans that the CIA was pulling. He found out the CIA was trying to kill Castro, which is a fact. So the argument is that the CIA felt that Kennedy was going to disband them. And as a result of that, they were the ones that ordered the killing of Kennedy."
As of this day, there are 3,600 documents housed in the U.S. National Archives related to the JFK assassination, 1,100 of which detail the CIA's involvement. These records will be
made public in October 2017...or will they?
A man named Jack Lawrence fired the fatal shot.![jfk conspiracy theories, jfk assassination, jack lawrence]()
If you've seen the
Zapruder film (NSFW), you'll notice that two shots struck Kennedy. One from behind, through the neck, and the other from Kennedy's right, from below (the second shot blew his head up and to the left, suggesting that the bullet came from below and to the right). To the right of the motorcade 15 feet away was a storm drain. Many experts believe that from inside this storm drain came the second fatal blow.
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Jack Lawrence, a 23-year-old ex-marksman, showed up at the local Lincoln-Mercury car dealership 15 minutes after the assassination, sweating, ghostly pale, with brown muck all over his pants. He puked in the toilet. Managers thought his behavior was suspicious, so they called the police. A report was filed, but strangely, it never materialized into evidence. Later, employees found
the car that Lawrence took from the dealership parked behind a wooden fence overlooking Dealey Plaza. Lawrence had ties to some unsavory characters in the Dallas area, namely strip club owner Jack Ruby, but we'll get to him later.
The autopsy was a farce.
John Melvin Liggett was perhaps the country's greatest facial reconstruction surgeon. His work was used to repair the faces of people who died in gruesome incidents so that he could present the bodies to their loved ones in the funeral home where he worked. On November 22, 1963, his services were sorely needed.
On the day of the assassination, Liggett was attending a funeral.
According to his wife, Lois, Liggett excused himself to take a phone call. "John went to the office and came back very shortly and explained to me that the President of the United States had been shot," she said. "He was called to go to Parkland Hospital."
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Liggett called Lois from Parkland Hospital. "I've got a lot of work to do. Don't try to call me, I'll call you as soon as I can." Twenty-four hours later, Liggett came home in a panic, unshaven, disheveled and paranoid. He told the family to pack up their things and hop in the car for a "high-speed journey" to Austin and San Antonio.
While they were staying at a hotel in Corpus Christi, John and Lois were watching TV when they saw Jack Ruby famously shoot Oswald at point-blank range in front of police on live television. Lois, who was interviewed in the documentary "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" said, "The minute he saw that, he looked at me and said everything's OK now. And you could see his face. It was like all the pressure had been taken off of him."
Many believe that Liggett was hired to hide every bit of evidence under facial reconstruction techniques, repairing angles of bullet holes to make it seem like a lone gunman from one location did everything.
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Once Liggett and his family arrived back to Dallas, his life had changed. He moved his family into a giant new house, and threw high-stakes poker games with bigwigs around town. On March 1974, 11 years later, John Melvin Liggett was arrested for murder. He also committed a
string of murders in New Orleans. The man who was once a well-respected mortician and a gentle family man became a psycho overnight.
The man with the black umbrella.![jfk conspiracy theories, jfk assassination, man with black umbrella]()
On a bright, sunny day in Dallas, while everyone was dressed lightly,
one man was dressed in a black raincoat with a black umbrella, standing ominously next to the fatal motorcade ride. Some believe this mysterious man was a signaler of sorts, there to communicate to snipers. So says investigator Josiah Thompson: "The only person under any umbrella in all of Dallas is standing right where the shots come into the limousine. Can anyone come up with a non-sinister explanation for this?" When the motorcade was drawing near, he opened his umbrella as a "go ahead." When the first shot didn't immediately kill Kennedy, he raised it to signal "fire a second round." In Oliver Stone's biopic "JFK," an umbrella man clad in black performs a similar act.
However, in 1978, Louie Steven Witt came forward and claimed to be the man. He testified that he was protesting against Jack Kennedy's support of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's Nazi-appeasement. Many have accepted Witt's claims, though one has to wonder why those signals were so convenient.
Witnesses saw numerous riflemen.![jfk conspiracy theories, jfk assassination, numerous riflemen]()
Civilians Arnold Rowland, Richard Randolph Carr, Lee Bowers, Amos Euins and Mary Moorman were in Dealey Plaza that day. They each claimed to witness shadowy men wielding rifles in the Texas School Book Depository and on the grassy knoll. Strangely, their testimonies were never taken seriously and they are now
buried within the bowels of the internet.
JFK's perfect storm of enemies.
New York Times bestselling author Jim Marrs wrote "Crossfire" in 1989. It was the basis for Oliver Stone's "JFK." In this 600-page tome littered with the nitty-gritty details, he outlines Kennedy's conspirators and their
possible motives:
• Kennedy wanted to take away the oil-depletion allowance, which was the No. 1 tax break for oil industrialists. This obviously incensed Texas oil billionaires, including Clinton Murchison, who hosted a dinner party with powerful men in Dallas the night before the shooting.
• Kennedy hated Lyndon Johnson; Lyndon Johnson hated Kennedy. Kennedy wanted to strip Vice President Johnson from his ticket in 1964 after Johnson's being embroiled in the
Bobby Baker Scandal; at the aforementioned Clinton Murchison dinner party, which Johnson attended, Johnson's mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown said that Johnson
came to her in a rage and said, "After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That's no threat. That's a promise."
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LBJ sharing a wink with a friend while being sworn in, right after his boss was assassinated.
• Kennedy's younger brother, 32-year-old Robert Kennedy, was the attorney general. He was young and ambitious and he wanted to utterly destroy organized crime, which was rampant at the time. This, of course, created mobster enemies. Researchers believe some of the snipers, henchmen of Chicago don Sam Giancana, were members of the mafia.
• Kennedy wanted to rein in power of the Federal Reserve, issuing
Executive Order 11110 only five months before his assassination, making enemies of banksters and powerful politicians.
• Kennedy wanted to completely withdraw from Vietnam by 1965, which might've provoked a feud with international powers profiting from the absence of northern communist influence.
What the hell is Woody Harrelson's dad doing here?![jfk conspiracy theories, jfk assassination, charles voyde harrelson]()
Woody Harrelson came to feature-film prominence after starring in 1993's "Natural Born Killers." Little do many know, his father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, was actually a natural-born killer. He was a hit man. Some researchers believe that he was present on that day in Dallas.
Harrelson confessed to killing Kennedy on May 29, 1979, during a six-hour shootout with police two years after killing U.S. District Judge John Wood in San Antonio. Although he later recanted his confession, blaming cocaine, he offered this piece of
insight from his jail cell: "Do you believe Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy...without any aid from a rogue agency of the U.S. government or at least a portion of that agency? I believe you're very naive if you do."
Charles Harrelson worked as a
bouncer at Jack Ruby's strip club. The man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald and the man who fathered Woody Harrelson were pals.
