Ghosts of Dallas

On January 25, 1967, two men squared off to debate an issue that had become an increasingly hot one, in the fractured and paranoid atmosphere of late 1960s America. Who killed President Kennedy? Had there or had there not been a conspiracy behind his murder? The two participants in this long-ago debate are now dead. But the tactics that one of them used that day to drown out the truth, and to flood the zone with demagoguery and lie...

On January 21, 1969, at the criminal district court building in NO, proceedings finally got underway in the case of the State of Louisiana versus Clay L. Shaw. For almost two years now, Garrison had been loudly telling the world that he’d solved the Kennedy case. He had repeatedly promised that the proof would be delivered, when the time came. Well, the time had finally come. Garrison’s chance to put up or shut up had officially ar...

In April 1967, researchers working for the New Orleans DA Jim Garrison found a suspicious entry in the address book of Clay Shaw, the man Garrison had charged with having conspired to murder President John F. Kennedy. The entry was for a man named Lee Odom; the address Shaw had scrawled down for this Odom character was PO Box 19106, Dallas, Texas. According to Jim Garrison, the late Lee Harvey Oswald had once scrawled the same PO B...

How do you make a case when you have no real case to make? It’s a question that all conspiracy theorists face. Jim Garrison faced it in March 1967, when he opted to stage a public pre-trial hearing in the Clay Shaw case. Garrison would now have to produce some evidence, fast, to show why he believed that Shaw had conspired in the murder of President Kennedy. So how did Garrison make his case? By injecting witnesses with truth serum...

On March 1, 1967, the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested a local civic leader named Clay Shaw, and charged him with having conspired to murder President John F. Kennedy. To Garrison, it didn’t matter that there was no serious evidence to support that extremely serious charge. He set about simply manufacturing a case out of thin air, using a series of increasingly desperate measures, including coercion of witnesses,...

To this day, the late New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw remains the only person ever to have been criminally prosecuted in connection with the murder of JFK. His trial began in New Orleans in January, 1969. On March 1st, a jury found him Not Guilty in just 54 minutes, but Shaw's life and reputation were destroyed by his very public prosecution. How was it that an entirely innocent man came to be prosecuted for conspiring to murder ...

Sylvia Odio's claim that she encountered Lee Harvey Oswald in late September of 1963 was compelling - so compelling that we have almost no choice but to believe it, unless we can find rock-solid evidence proving that Oswald couldn't have been at her apartment when she claimed he was. The Warren Commission believed that there was rock-solid evidence to that effect. It concluded that the man at Odio's apartment couldn't possibly have...

One night in late September of 1963, two months before the Kennedy assassination, three mysterious men paid a visit to the Dallas apartment of Sylvia Odio, a Cuban-American woman who was active in anti-Castro politics. One of these men was introduced to her as Leon Oswald - and when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after the assassination, Sylvia Odio instantly recognized him as the man who had come to her apartment. But why had the ...

Within a few years of its appearance in 1964, the Warren Report had become a joke, a punchline. And the funniest thing about it, according to the critics, was the Single-Bullet Theory: the idea that a single bullet fired by Oswald had gone through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally. The conspiracy theorists had a name for this bullet. They called it the Magic Bullet, because they believed that no bullet in the real w...

On the afternoon of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Abraham Zapruder shot the most famous home movie ever made. Was the proof of a JFK conspiracy concealed somewhere in the Zapruder film's 486 frames? After watching the film over and over, one young investigator became sure that he'd stumbled on the secret of Kennedy's murder. Oswald couldn't possibly have acted alone. There had to have been a second gunman. The proof of it was ri...

When John F. Kennedy arrived in the Emergency Room of Parkland Memorial Hospital at 12:40 on the afternoon of his assassination, he had two visible wounds on his body. One of them was a small neat hole in the center of his throat. "It looked like an entrance wound," one of the surgeons who treated him told the press later that afternoon. Asked which direction the bullet had come from, he said: "It appeared to be coming at him." Two...

A week after the Kennedy assassination, President Lyndon Johnson established the Warren Commission, a blue-ribbon Presidential Commission that aimed to get to the bottom of the crime. Right from the start, the Commission found itself fighting a losing battle on two fronts. On one side of it were the early conspiracy theorists, led by the opportunistic New York lawyer Mark Lane. On the other side was the FBI, led by the devious and ...

In light of what we know about Jack Ruby's movements on the morning of November 24, 1963, is it remotely plausible that he was involved in ANY kind of conspiracy to murder Oswald? If not, why he do it? What was the state of Ruby's mental health at the time he shot Oswald? Given the clear evidence that Ruby became a "grossly delusional" man while serving his sentence for murdering Oswald, is it possible that his mental decline had a...

Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead in police custody on the morning of November 24, 1963, less than 48 hours after the assassination of President Kennedy. Oswald's murder was broadcast live on TV; around 80 million eyewitnesses saw it happen. The killer was a 52-year-old Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby. Who was Ruby? Why did he shoot Oswald? Ruby is the Wild Card in the Kennedy assassination story. Maybe he's the single best ca...

“His basic desire was to get to Cuba by any means, and all the rest of it was window dressing for that purpose.” That was how Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife Marina described the five turbulent months that she and husband spent living in New Orleans between April and September of 1963. How strong, exactly, was Oswald’s desire to get to Cuba? When Marina said he was ready to get there “by any means”, what did she mean? Was there anything O...