At the moment the first shot was fired on Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, a motorcycle cop named Marrion Baker, recognizing the sound of a rifle shot from on high, looked up toward the Book Depository and saw some pigeons take flight from the building. While other authorities were engulfed in confusion, looking first at the grassy knoll, Baker sped over to the Depository, ran inside, and demanded to know where the elevator was. The building manager, Roy Truly, led him to the elevator, but it appeared to be unresponsive. Truly afterward came to believe that Oswald had purposely left the elevator’s grate open so that it could not be called back down. If this is the case, then it was poor planning. While it meant that authorities could not take the elevator to investigate his sniper’s perch, it also meant they would have to take the very same stairs that he was taking. After firing his three shots, Oswald exited his sniper’s nest between the stacks of books, rushed to the staircase, ditched the rifle, and began his descent. However, as he approached the second floor, he heard the sound of other footsteps on the stairs below and exited toward the nearby lunchroom. That was when Officer Baker, who had given up on the elevator and taken the stairs, saw him “hurrying” off, and called out for him to stop, which Oswald did. Officer Baker, presuming that the presidential assassin must not be an employee at the Depository but rather someone who had gained entrance to the building for the sole purpose of taking a sniper position in its upper windows, asked the building manager with him if he recognized Oswald. Roy Truly answered that indeed, Oswald was an employee, and Baker let him go. This left Oswald in a perfect position to establish the alibi he would later provide police—that he had been in a lunchroom at the time of the shooting. He bought a soda pop from the machine, and lingered momentarily. If he had remained in the building, it certainly would lend some weight to the notion that he had been framed and knew nothing about the assassination, provided one ignores the physical evidence on the 6th floor and the witness testimony that shows his premeditation and planning of the murder. However, he did not stay in the building. Instead, he fled, and his flight is further strong evidence of his guilt. After buying his Coke, he walked through the second floor offices toward a different staircase, and he was seen by another Depository employee as he passed near her desk. She said something about the President being shot, and he mumbled an indistinct reply. She found the encounter “strange.” Then he went down the front stairs and out the front doors of the Depository, which had not yet been locked down as only three minutes had passed since the fatal head shot and chaos still reigned on the Plaza. Later, when the police had the building locked down, they gathered all of its employees for questioning, and Oswald was the only one missing. And even later that day, when giving his alibi, he gave the lame excuse that he had immediately left, without checking with his boss, because he assumed work would be canceled for the day because of the assassination. Outside, his movements indicate not the leisurely trip home of a man unexpectedly given a half day off, but rather a man trying to get away from the scene of a crime. He would normally have waited for a bus on Dealey Plaza, but on this day, he walked resolutely east on Elm, away from all the commotion, in the opposite direction from his boarding house. Ten blocks away, he ran up to the door of a bus in transit and pounded on it to get it to stop and let him on. On the bus, unnoticed by Oswald, happened to be one of his former landladies, who later described him as looking “like a maniac” when he boarded the bus. Sirens increased, and traffic kept the bus from continuing on, and Oswald suddenly rose and demanded a bus transfer, exiting the bus and walking to the station two blocks away. However, instead of boarding another bus at the station with his transfer, he instead hopped into a taxi cab, something he later admitted himself that he had never done before, a further indication that he was in panicked flight. Also telling is that he directed the taxi driver to take him not directly to his boarding house, but some blocks away from it. After walking the remaining distance to his room, he entered, and a couple minutes later, he left again. A housekeeper who saw him said he was “in a hurry” and “all but running.” Though it was warm, he left with a jacket on, because he was carrying his revolver in the waist of his pants.

In this final installment of the series, I want to tell Oswald’s story to the end, which means also telling Jack Ruby’s story, but I also want to address some of the larger logical flaws of conspiracy claims generally, as well as the difficulties inherent in refuting them. Many conspiracy proponents will not even attempt to exonerate Oswald, since the evidence of his involvement is so overwhelming. But there are those who will try to assert that he was a complete patsy. As one of my sources, JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy by John McAdams, observes, one can talk until one is blue in the face about Oswald’s psychological and ideological predisposition toward political violence—as I have in this series—and all it does is help make the case that Oswald would have been a perfect patsy, since he was just the sort of person one would expect to take a shot at the President, and therefore the perfect person to frame for it. Those conspiracists who attempt to find corroboration for Oswald’s alibi—besides requiring their audience to disregard witness statements about Oswald smuggling his rifle into the building, to doubt physical evidence that the rifle found was Oswald’s and that he had been in the improvised sniper’s nest, and to disbelieve testimony that placed Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination—rely instead on outlier witness statements that are easily discredited. For example, the secretary of the Depository’s vice-president, Carolyn Arnold, claimed she had seen Oswald in a booth in the second-floor lunchroom at 12:15pm. Never mind the fact that Oswald’s actual alibi claimed he had been eating in the first-floor lunchroom and had only gone to the second-floor lunchroom to buy a soda. The fact is that numerous workers who were in both lunchrooms have stated that Oswald was not present in either location, and Ms. Arnold never started saying she had seen him there until 15 years afterward, when a conspiracist author questioned her. In statements to the FBI not long after the assassination, she said she wasn’t sure whether she might have seen him fleetingly in a hallway, and then that she certainly had not seen him. We see this time and time again. Conspiracy speculators get a witness alone in a room and somehow, magically, get them to remember entirely different details years after the fact. Others claim that Oswald could not have been in the stairwell immediately after the shots were fired, before Officer Baker saw him rushing toward the second-floor lunchroom, because those critical witnesses who had been in the fifth floor window below his sniper’s nest, Junior Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and Harold Norman, had afterward taken the stairs themselves and not encountered him. However, according to those men’s testimony, they remained upstairs for ten to fifteen minutes. Other employees who said they had been in the staircase following the shooting also can be confirmed not to have been in there until several minutes after Oswald would have taken them and then ducked out upon hearing Officer Baker’s footsteps approaching from below. But more than any of these refutable claims, Oswald’s shocking actions after leaving his boarding room with his revolver prove beyond any doubt that he was no innocent on that day.

The soda machine from which Oswald bought a Coke following the assassination in the Book Depository’s second floor lunch room.

The armed Oswald waited at a bus stop, but seeing no buses, he got impatient and started walking. He still had the bus transfer, and after walking about a mile, he was only a few blocks from catching a bus that would have connected him to a Greyhound headed for Mexico. We can’t know for sure that that was where he was headed, though, because he never made it. A Dallas police officer in a patrol car, J.D. Tippit, saw Oswald walking hurriedly and, probably recognizing that he matched the description of the assassin being broadcast to all police units based on witness statements, he pulled over and stopped him. Police had done this numerous times elsewhere in Dallas that day as the manhunt for the gunman unfolded. Numerous witnesses saw what happened next. Oswald said something to the officer, and Tippit got out of the vehicle and came around toward him. That’s when Oswald brandished his revolver, shot Tippit dead, leaving four slugs in his body, and fled down the street, emptying his spent shells as he ran. The witnesses to this murder include a woman waiting nearby for a bus, two women in their nearby home who came to the front door upon hearing the shots, and a cab driver parked nearby eating his lunch. All picked Oswald out of a lineup that day. A man driving a pickup only about fifteen feet away saw the entire thing, and though he was not brought in for a lineup—a failure of the police that conspiracists claim means he could not identify Oswald—he later, with high certainty, identified Oswald as the shooter from photographs. Numerous further witnesses saw Oswald fleeing the scene as he ran past some used car lots, and identified him in lineups and from photographs. As he ran through a gas station, he even dropped his jacket, which his boardinghouse’s housekeeper identified as the one he had left wearing, and which Marina identified as one of the only jackets he owned. Moreover, the shells he emptied were recovered and later matched ballistically to his revolver, to the exclusion of all other weapons. One of the slugs recovered from Tippit was also matched conclusively to his weapon, which would be on his person when he was apprehended not long later. The evidence in the Tippit murder case was just as clear and conclusive as that that of the assassination case, but of course, conspiracists still find reason to speculate. They ignore the wealth of witness and ballistic evidence, instead investigating Tippit’s personal relationships and suggesting he was actually murdered by someone else in retaliation for a torrid affair he was having. Or they suggest Tippit was part of the conspiracy—since conspiracies can apparently be as massive as one needs them to be, so why not?—insinuating that he may have been there to aid Oswald’s getaway but then turned on him, or that he may have been sent to kill the patsy but Oswald got the drop on him. When conspiracist writers find Oswald’s murder of Tippit too problematic, they sometime just gloss over it, mentioning it only in passing, and presenting it as an unresolved murder that can’t be conclusively tied to Oswald. As you can see, though, that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

Still fleeing from the scene of the Tippit murder, Oswald entered a shoe store. Sirens were in the air, and the shoe store manager saw Oswald enter the lobby of his store, looking scared, and staring out at the street. After some squad cars passed by, the manager watched Oswald walk back outside, look toward where the police had gone, and then head the opposite direction. He felt Oswald was acting very suspiciously, and since he had been listening to the radio broadcasting reports about the assassination, he began to suspect it could be the assassin. He followed Oswald, who ran toward the nearby entrance to the Texas Theater, and when the clerk in the box office wasn’t looking, walked inside without paying. The shoe store manager spoke to the ticket clerk, making her aware that a man had just gone in without paying and voicing his suspicions that the man was running from the police. After ensuring that the exits were secure, they called Dallas police, who arrived shortly, entered the theater, and as officers with shotguns fanned out, they raised the lights. When the officer walking up the aisle scrutinizing the filmgoers came to Oswald, he told him to stand. Oswald stood, raised his hands, shouted, “Well it's all over now,” threw a punch into the policeman’s face, pulled out his revolver, and pulled the trigger. Thankfully, it failed to fire. Oswald was subdued, handcuffed, and taken to a patrol car. The police found his ID on him as well as his false ID with the name Alek Hidell, the one he had made himself. “Which one are you?” they asked him, and he smirked, replying, “You figure it out.” At the station, Oswald was interrogated on and off for twelve hours over the course of about 45 hours, during which he lied about everything, saying he had no knowledge of the name Hidell, even though he had a fake ID with that name on him, claiming the Marines had never given him an undesirable discharge, that he’d never lived at the address where he’d taken photos with the rifle, that he’d never handed out leaflets for Fair Play for Cuba, and that he’d never been to Mexico. Conspiracists who want to believe the alibi he gave during those interrogations just tend to gloss over all the other lies he told, or they suggest that nothing in the interrogation can be trusted, claiming it is highly suspicious that the police did not record any of their questioning of Oswald. In fact, there is nothing suspicious about this at all if you investigate the practices of the Dallas police in 1963. At the time, an early version of Miranda rights was state law in Texas, and according this law, any statements made during interrogations had to be produced in writing and signed by the person being questioned before they could be used in court. So their questioning of Oswald was purely for informational purposes, since even if he confessed on tape, they would have had to get him to sign a confession before they could use it. Because this law effectively made the recording of interrogations pointless, from their view, the Dallas police did not even have a tape recorder at the time. But regardless, the record of Oswald’s statements during his interrogation have been corroborated by more that twenty-five detectives, district attorneys, Secret Service Agents, and FBI agents who participated. Hell, some postal inspectors were even present, questioning him about his use of post office boxes, and confirmed the statements made during interrogations. So I suppose this vast conspiracy implicates even the U.S. Postal Service, if we’re to believe a veil of secrecy was kept over his interrogations as part of the plot.

The murder scene of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Image courtesy University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

The Dallas police were somewhat overwhelmed by the press during the weekend they had Oswald in custody. At one point, over three hundred journalists had gathered on the third floor, making it nearly impassable with all their equipment and wires. The police were walking a tightrope between ensuring security and granting press access to the biggest story in history. When it came time to transfer Oswald, they weren’t sure how to manage it. At first they wanted to use an armored car, but the two cars that they acquired were either too small for Oswald and his guards, or too tall to pass through the ramp to the basement from which they intended to depart. Eventually, they settled on using the armored trucks as decoys and simply hustling him out in an unmarked car. They cleared the basement of everyone but about 30 members of the press, and posted a guard at the top of the ramp, but just before Oswald was brought out, the guard at the ramp left his post to direct traffic as one of the decoy vehicles departed, giving the opportunity for someone to descend the ramp from the street and blend in with the press unnoticed. Oswald was brought down the stairs and out before the bright lights of the reporters, and then a man pushed through the crowd and fired a pistol into Oswald’s abdomen. The shot was fatal, and the act of vigilantism would forever ensure the common belief that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and that the conspirators had sent someone to silence Oswald. The shooter was a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, and entire books have been written just focused on him and his supposed involvement with a conspiracy. Conspiracists will claim he knew Oswald, that he had been on Dealey Plaza during the assassination, that he had ties to the mafia. To place the endcap on this entire story, and to evaluate the claims about Oswald’s murder, we must know who Jack Ruby was, why he was there, and why he did what he did.

Jack Ruby’s birth name was Jacob Rubenstein, born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Chicago. Like Oswald, he was of below average intelligence according to IQ tests and his educational attainments—he only ever finished the 6th grade. Also like Oswald, he may have suffered some psychological disturbance, some of which can be traced back to his parents. His father beat his mother and was frequently arrested on assault and disorderly conduct charges. After their separation, his mother beat him regularly. Eventually, she was deemed unfit, and Ruby was placed in foster care. She would later be committed to a mental institution. Whether inherited from his father or instilled in him by years of abuse at the hands of his mother, Ruby developed a problematic temper and violent tendencies, earning a reputation as a street fighter in his youth. In his twenties, after a few years in California working menial odd jobs, he returned to Chicago, where he found work through a friend as a union organizer. Many conspiracists suggest this shows he was involved with the mafia, but in fact, when he had been working for the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union there, it had been legitimate. Later, the local mafia did take over the union, at which point Ruby lost his job with them. After that, he went into business for himself, selling novelty items like plaques, keychains, salt and pepper shakers, bottle openers, etc. He was never successful, and after serving in the Army Air Force in World War II, he ended up moving to Dallas, where his sister Eva ran a nightclub. For the talkative Ruby, who loved to be in the middle of the action and make acquaintance with anyone he came across, it was the perfect industry, and he threw himself into it. Some conspiracists believe he was a mafia front man, bringing the Chicago mob’s business interests to Dallas, but in truth, he was never solvent. By 1963, he was running two nightclubs with his sister, but over the years he had been involved with six and lost money on all of them. FBI investigators who were intimately familiar with all aspects of organized crime in Chicago actually questioned informants after the assassination, both low level and high ranking, and none even knew who Ruby was. Some Dallas mafia figures sometimes attended his clubs and knew Ruby, but so did a great many police officers. In fact, one Dallas mafia figure actually visited Ruby in jail after his murder of Oswald, which actually seems to prove that the Dallas mafia had nothing to do with Oswald’s murder, as a mafia leader would not go and visit one of his hitmen in jail after they were caught. Finally, some of Ruby’s business dealings prove he had no ties to the mafia. During the years leading up to the assassination, he was having problems with a stripper’s union, the AGVA, which was itself involved with the mafia. So the clearest link between him and the mafia puts him at odds with them. Finally, those who knew Ruby best insist that the mafia would never have wanted anything to do with him because he was a snitch, always ingratiating himself with the Dallas police, inviting them to his clubs, and running his mouth in conversations with them.

A young Jack Ruby in his Army Air Force Uniform. Image tweeted by TheSixthFloorMuseum

Understanding the aspect of Ruby’s character that drove him to befriend police officers is important to understanding why he was there at the police station, likely having walked down the ramp just as the officer posted there had left it unguarded. After he shot Oswald, he said, “I am Jack Ruby. You all know me,” and it was true. Most did know him. In fact, he had been in and out of the police station over and over since Oswald’s capture, drawn to the center of this historic moment and trying to make himself useful to those who were present, whether they be policemen or reporters. Again, like Oswald, he seemed to relish any attention. For years he would loiter around police stations and newspaper offices, offering help to these professionals and inviting them to his clubs for free drinks. Many thought him a “kook,” a “creep,” or a “psycho,” while others viewed him as a colorful character, which seems to be how he viewed himself as well. In addition to his efforts to befriend police officers by offering information about petty crime, he frequently gave tips to newspapers, and their description of him gives a clear sense of his activities: “He is just a guy that calls on the telephone, and he knows everybody in town,” according to a newsman who took his tips. There is some sense that he actually thought, in his simple way, that he was an amateur reporter. That is certainly one of the ways that he gained entrance to the police station during the weekend that Oswald was being interrogated, and according to those who observed his activity in the station, he was just being his awkwardly amiable self, inviting people to his club, attempting to help people where he could, and chatting with people about his hatred for the “lousy Commie” who had murdered his President. Those who knew him afterward described his tendency to seek publicity and be attracted to centers of important activity. “He was a known goer to events,” said Seth Kantor, a member of the press corps who saw Ruby on the day of the assassination hanging around Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy had been taken, and thought it was “perfectly normal to see Jack Ruby standing there.” Another reporter who knew Ruby told a researcher, “If there was one Ruby trait that stands out, it is that he had to be where the action was. He was like horseshit, all over the place.” This perfectly describes his activity between the assassination and his murder of Oswald. After learning of the assassination, and by all accounts being severely shocked and dismayed about it, it appears he may have driven directly to Parkland Hospital, and later that evening, on two separate occasions, he managed to get onto the third floor of police headquarters, even standing outside the room where Oswald was being questioned and at one point trying to enter but being stopped by police. The next day, Saturday afternoon, he was again seen wandering around among the press and police, handing out passes to his nightclub. To many, this appears to be a concerted effort to infiltrate the police department. But most there knew him, and he was introducing himself to those who didn’t. And it simply makes no sense for Ruby to have been part of a longstanding plot to kill the President’s assassin, or the patsy taking the blame for it, since if Oswald’s capture had gone any differently, if he had been arrested by state troopers or the FBI or anyone but the Dallas police, Ruby would not have been to able to get so close to him. Also, if Ruby had been tasked with murdering Oswald and intended to do so despite his own certain capture, he had an opportunity to do so on the night of the assassination, when Oswald was led past him, passing just a couple feet away from him. It appears, based on a lump in his jacket visible in photos of him that day, that he was likely carrying his pistol the entire time. Ruby later denied carrying his pistol and also denied his frequent presence within the police station that weekend, but witnesses and photographs refute him, and he was probably lying because he intended to fight the charge of premeditation in court, and all this seems to show he was stalking Oswald. But was he?

On the morning of Oswald’s transfer, Ruby was at a nearby Western Union office, wiring money to one of his dancers. The clerk who helped him did not believe he seemed in a hurry. In fact, he could have had no idea when Oswald was to be transferred because it had been delayed by some further interrogation and because Oswald had asked to change his clothes at the last minute. When he walked over to the police station afterward and made his way down the unguarded ramp toward the press gathered there, according to him, the opportunity just kind of presented itself to him. In his own words, it would have had to have been “the most perfect conspiracy in the history of the world” to work as precisely as it did. Conspiracists claim that such coincidence is impossible. They point to discredited witness statements claiming Ruby knew Oswald, or placing him at Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, even though numerous witnesses have sworn that Ruby was in a newspaper office placing an ad for his nightclubs when the assassination occurred. Whether or not it was a premeditated or an spontaneous act, his true motives are clear. Witness after witness describe his terrible dismay and grief at having learned of Kennedy’s assassination. During his visits to Parkland and the police station, it was all he could talk about. He was openly crying throughout the weekend, despite reportedly not being the type of person to cry in public. Between his visits to the police station, he was at his nightclub, which he decided to close indefinitely, despite his dire financial situation, out of respect for the President and his family, and his employees said that he was inconsolable and incoherent in his anger and depression. His sister, who he sat and watched news reports with on Friday between visits to the police station, said he was crying so hard he was “sick to his stomach.” She described him as “a broken man,” and quoted him as saying, “I never felt so bad in my life, even when Ma and Pa died…. Someone tore my heart out.” In numerous conversations that weekend, people spoke about how someone ought to take Oswald out, and it has further been stated that Ruby was highly suggestible. After killing Oswald, when police asked why he had done it, he said, “Well, you guys couldn’t do it. Someone had to do it.” And finally, his sister further described his great sadness upon reading a newspaper article that said the First Lady may have to return to Dallas to attend Oswald’s trial. Many statements by Ruby suggest he thought he would be treated as a hero, and felt persecuted when he was afterward not released from jail and instead tried for murder. So was there premeditation? Had he been hanging around the police station hoping to take Oswald out? Or did all these feelings and motivations just overwhelm him in that moment when he saw Oswald, and his well-established temper flared when, according to what Ruby’s brother Earl claimed Ruby told him, “there was a smirk on his face, and he thought, Why you little s.o.b.” Regardless of what the truth may be about premeditation, what seems apparent is that it was a classic case of vigilantism.

One of many images capturing Ruby’s murder of Oswald taken. Via Dallas Morning News

Even if we were to disregard the evidence that Ruby had no connections to the mafia, to Oswald, or to a larger conspiracy, simple logic tells us that there was little point in sending someone to silence Oswald. By the time Oswald was killed, he had already been interrogated for 12 hours. He’d had plenty of time to spill the beans on any conspiracy about which he might have had knowledge. Likewise, the many claims about those with special knowledge being silenced by murder squads just doesn’t hold up. Conspiracists claim there are more than a hundred suspicious deaths related to the assassination. More than half of these died of natural causes, and more than half also died more than ten years later, which gives them ages to have divulged anything they might have known. It’s the same problem with the idea that George de Mohrenshchildt was silenced in the 1970s, a decade and a half after he testified before the Warren Commission. Of those supposedly mysterious deaths that occurred within a year of the assassination, some were even convinced of Oswald’s guilt, which makes it seem like there was no reason to silence them, and many had very minor connections to the case. There is the further problem of selectivity. For example, one witness of Oswald’s murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit would be shot dead by an intruder in his home a few months later. The claims that this was an act of a conspiracy to silence a witness begs the question why this one witness was brutally murdered while a dozen others who saw the same thing were allowed to live. Furthermore, we must ask why none of the plethora of witnesses on Dealey Plaza are included on this list of witnesses that had to be silenced, while many of them are simply journalists who afterward published about the case. This just illustrates the central problem with most conspiracy speculation: the refusal to acknowledge coincidence. My source JFK Assassination Logic by John McAdams highlights numerous logical problems with conspiracist thinking just like this. Conspiracy speculators rely on cherry-picked, outlier testimony that is demonstrably less credible than other witness claims, they engage in the creation of false memory in leading interviews with witnesses years after the fact, they mislead readers by presenting evidence stripped of important context, and they present an argument that suggests most evidence points to conspiracy, when if that were the case, official investigations would have come to far different conclusions. Finally, they demand that believers suspend disbelief in the face of truly odds-defying scenarios. Simply put, large-scale conspiracies are not plausible. As McAdams demonstrates, even if the odds are extremely low that one member of a given conspiracy might betray the rest and reveal the plot publicly, for any number of reasons, the more people involved in the conspiracy, the higher the probability it will be revealed to the world. Conspiracists like to point to real, genuine conspiracies in their efforts to demonstrate that their claims hold water, but any conspiracy that really occurred stands as evidence against the believability of their claims, since all such genuine conspiracies have been uncovered by whistleblowers and journalists.

After the release of the first part of this series, I was accused of playing down the events surrounding the JFK assassination, of taking a “nothing to see here” point of view. This from conspiracy believers, perhaps unsurprisingly, began to think that I myself have something to hide, that I am engaging in cover-up. I’d like to conclude this series by addressing this. Of course I’m not saying there is “nothing to see here.” This is the longest series I have ever produced on one topic for this podcast. There is a ton to see here. I’m saying that what there is to see here is far different from what many have been led to believe. And far from suggesting that the Dallas police and the FBI have done nothing to contribute to this confusion, they have given the public real reason to be suspicious of them. For example, the night after the assassination, while Oswald was being questioned and Jack Ruby was slapping backs around police headquarters, an assistant district attorney leaked to the press that they intended to indict Oswald for killing Kennedy “in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.” Later, he invented another story to anonymously provide the press, that Oswald was an FBI informant. In explanation, the attorney, Bill Alexander, explained that he “never much liked the federals” and put out the phony stories to keep them occupied. It’s things just like this that have led to many thinking massive conspiracy is more likely than any mundane explanation, and distrusting authorities who insist the opposite. Then there is the FBI, who appear to have genuinely engaged in a cover-up after Oswald’s capture. Before the assassination, the FBI agent tasked with looking into Oswald after he turned back up on their radar had gone to the Paines’ house and spoken to Marina. Oswald had been so upset, continuing to believe the FBI was hounding him, that he went to the FBI office in Dallas and left a note for the agent (whose name he misspelled) demanding he leave his wife alone. After Oswald death, this note was destroyed. According to the FBI, this was because there was no need to keep it if Oswald could no longer be tried in court, having been killed. In truth, though, this appears to have been a genuine cover-up. Far from a wide-reaching conspiracy, though, the simpler explanation is that Dallas special agent-in-charge J. Gordon Shanklin ordered the note’s destruction just to cover his own butt. J. Edgar Hoover was already certain that Oswald was guilty, and it appeared there would be no need of the evidence, so the only purpose it might serve would be to indict Shanklin and his office as having dropped the ball and not recognized Oswald as the threat he was. So am I convinced law enforcement never acted improperly or was never negligent in this case? Absolutely not. But for all the reasons I’ve given over the course of this series, a massive conspiracy to murder the President is simply not supportable. Of course, it makes a great story, though, and when told by a competent, if unscrupulous, storyteller, it can even convince someone who knows better. That is the case with Marina, Oswald’s wife, who knew her husband better than anyone, and whose testimony demonstrates so clearly that Oswald was a desperate and disturbed individual acting alone. Today, the 80-year-old Marina, despite everything she knows about his temperament, his attempt on Walker’s life, and his behavior the last time she saw him, believes that her husband was innocent, because “[t]here are just too many things,” things conspiracist writers have told her and convinced her are true. In the 1980s, in fact, some conspiracist writers convinced her to approve of Oswald’s exhumation in an attempt to prove that a KGB impersonator had been buried in Oswald’s place. Unsurprisingly, forensic pathologists confirmed using medical and dental records that the remains in his grave were indeed that of Marina’s husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Four: The Vigilante

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