Is Lee Harvey Oswald Innocent?

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By Juliet Bonnay

Updated: 30 November 2019

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it. ~ Adolf Hitler

“Is Lee Harvey Oswald innocent?” is not a question people would ask after he was named as Kennedy’s assassin within hours of a much loved president’s death. While people were in shock over this unspeakable tragedy, this ‘official story’ was relentlessly repeated by the media until it became a form of brainwashing designed to silence such questions. This was the ‘BIG LIE’ repeated and repeated – even in the face of inconvenient eye-witness accounts that proved otherwise.

The ‘truth’ became a ‘lie’ and the ‘lie’ became a ‘truth’, repeated ad infinitum. People who told a different story were conveniently disposed of – a trend that finally caught my attention after the Twin Towers collapsed.

If Oswald was indeed a ‘lone nut’ assassin who killed President Kennedy, why was there any need for a cover-up, strongly indicated in the following note by J. Edgar Hoover to White House aid Walter Jenkins?

The thing I am concerned about, and so is Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin. ~ J. Edgar Hoover (FBI) to White House aide Walter Jenkins, November 24, 1963

Wow…”convince the public”? “real assassin”? Why? Did the ‘official story’ have some holes they needed to fill? Too many people had heard a shot from the grassy knoll and looked up in time to see a puff of smoke under the trees, indicating the presence of a second gunman. Of around 400 people lining both sides of Elm Street, the Warren Commission took testimony from 259.

Ninety were asked where they thought the shots came from. Fifty-eight said ‘the grassy knoll’. All fifty-eight were dismissed on the grounds that their recollections were mistaken. ~ JFK Assassin Caught On Camera

Then on 25 November 1963, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote in a memo to President Johnson’s assistant Bill Moyers:

“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he had no confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”

In this post, and the ones that flow from it, I will attempt to cut through the confusing jumble of ‘movie sets’ within ‘movie sets’, the tangled weave of actors invisibly transported between them using secret entrances and exits, and the false mirrors that distort the truth in front of them. I will reveal much of what remains hidden underneath such treachery, and why it is imperative that we know the truth of what happened on 22 November 1963. For instance, what did Jack Ruby mean when he told Earl Warren and Gerry Ford that “a whole new form of government” was about to occur? [1] But first, it may be helpful to know a little about why I am writing this post, and that I come to this unsolved mystery from a different perspective.

I was living in Australia and had just turned fifteen at the time President Kennedy was assassinated. I still vividly remember the state of dazed shock we were in that the popular president of America could be killed in such a traumatic way. In my world view only a crazy “lone nut” toting a rickety old Italian rifle could be capable of such an insane act. This was not something a sane person would ever dream of doing. Right?

Needless to say, I swallowed the ‘official story’ whole that Oswald was “a lone nut” and had assassinated President Kennedy. It was beyond my comprehension that the government would lie, or the media reporting on such an unbelievable and shocking act would lie. What I couldn’t swallow so easily, however, was the excuse Jack Ruby gave that he had shot Oswald to spare Jackie Kennedy going through the tortures of a trial, had Oswald lived. Really?

How many of us would have thought at the time, “Hang on a minute, if Oswald was a ‘lone nut’ why would someone kill him? Was it to stop him talking? And if Ruby killed him to shut him up, what might he have said that Ruby didn’t want anyone to know? And then if Ruby knew something about Oswald killing the president, and why, would Oswald still be a ‘lone’ nut?” We could also ask, “Was Jack Ruby implicated in some other way in President Kennedy’s murder?”

I didn’t ask such questions at the time. The busyness of life – study, dating, marriage, raising a family – consumed my whole attention, so I didn’t think too much more about the untimely death of a president. There was nothing I could do about it anyway. Much later in life I moved to New Zealand to take up a teaching position after some years of travel. More time slipped by until, early in 2013 one of the country’s best known broadcasting personalities, Paul Holmes, died of cancer. At his funeral his son quoted what former stand-up comedian Bill Hicks had said about life being “just a ride,” (below) which is relevant here because I discovered during my hours of research that we were ‘taken for a ride’ the moment Lee Harvey Oswald was declared the ‘lone nut’ assassin and denied a trial to prove his innocence when he was shot and killed by Jacob Rubinstein, aka Jack Ruby.

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, “Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.

Intrigued by this quote, I wanted to know more about Bill Hicks and searched for him on the Internet. I discovered that he had talked frequently about the Kennedy assassination, as if to wake people up that things were not as they seemed. One story he told that I remembered vividly, although I can no longer find it, went something like this:

I have this mental image that every time a new president is elected, and after he’s sworn in on the White House lawn, he’s taken down into the White House basement…and he’s shown the film…the real film, of what happened that day at Dealey Plaza.

Dealey Plaza? I was about to discover that this was where President Kennedy was assassinated. After watching the Bill Hicks video below, I just had to find out more about what happened that fateful day.

For hours, days, months, and years I searched wherever my intuition and curiosity led me. Sometimes I stumbled on new leads while searching for something else. Exploring those leads lead me into the realm of disbelief, and I had to step back for awhile and let the dust settle from my collapsed world view. When I regained enough courage to override my fear, I pushed on. I will understand if you don’t want to know what I found because, quite frankly, it shocked me to the core. So saying, let’s ease into this gently.

The first thing that seriously concerned me was that many witnesses met sudden, untimely, and even tragic deaths – often around the time they were required to give evidence before the Warren Commission, or the House Select Committee on Assassinations between 1976-1978.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The first person to write about these deaths was William Penn Jones, Jr. He was a journalist who owned, and was editor of, the Midlothian Mirror, which was the only newspaper to cover the Ruby trial. After he read the Warren Commission’s findings he realized something was seriously amiss and began his own two-year investigation into the Kennedy assassination. In a video-recorded interview with Mark Lane (no longer available on the internet), Mr Jones mentioned witnesses who went into hiding, others he could not find, and some who were told not to talk about the assassination. For instance, he could not find Earleen Roberts after she testified before the Warren Commission. She had run the rooming house where Oswald was living under the name O.H. Lee.

Roberts informed the Warren Commission that just after Oswald entered the rooming house on November 22, at approximately one p.m., a police car drove up to the house at 1026 North Beckley and parked outside. The following was recorded in the Warren Commission Report, Vol. VI, pp 443, 444:

Q. Where was it parked?
Roberts: It was parked in the front of the house…
Q. Did this police car stop directly in front of your house?
Roberts: Yes – it stopped directly in front of my house…
Q. Where was Oswald when this happened?
Roberts: In his room…
Q. Were there two uniformed policemen in the car?
Roberts: Oh, yes.
Q. And one of the officers sounded the horn?
Roberts: Just a kind of ‘tit tit’ – twice.

Mark Lane commented that the Commission did not satisfactorily explain why a police car stopped in front of Oswald’s dwelling or why the policemen sounded the horn twice and then drove away just before he came out. Jones followed up to find out what happened to Earlene Roberts, which appears in an article, Disappearing Witnesses, he wrote for the January 1984 edition of The Rebel:

After testifying in Dallas in April 1964, Mrs. Roberts was subjected to intensive police harassment. They visited her at all hours of the day and night. Earlene complained of being “worried to death” by the police. She died on January 9, 1966 in Parkland Hospital (the hospital where President Kennedy was taken). Police said she suffered a heart attack in her home. No autopsy was performed. 

Richard Belzer and David Wayne also became curious about the number of witness deaths and wrote a book, Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination published in 2013, covering the deaths of fifty people. In it they noted:

There were over seventy unnatural deaths out of approximately 1,400 witnesses during a fourteen-year period.

Note that: The correct odds of that occurring are 1-in-715 million trillion trillion.

That’s not our opinion; that’s the mathematical reality. ~ Richard Belzer and David Wayne, ‘Hit List’, 2013, p. 279

Why would so many witnesses die if Oswald was really a ‘lone nut’? I had to get to the bottom of this after reading about the numerous suicides and unnatural deaths that occurred before the 9/11 Commission interviews. What didn’t the Warren Commission want people to know? I certainly learned what they wanted people to believe:

1. That there was only one assassin (a lone nut).
2. Only three shots were fired.
3. All shots were fired from the ‘sniper’s nest’ on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, using a Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
4. Two bullets hit President Kennedy from behind: one went through his back, came out his throat and went on to hit Governor Connally in three places (known as the magic bullet), and the other hit the back of his head and came out at his right temple.

What caught my attention next was the controversy over the Altgen’s photo, cropped below with a photo of Oswald at the police station on the right.

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Some people pointed out that the man on the Texas School Book Depository entrance steps, known as ‘doorman’, is Lee Harvey Oswald (inside the red square). ‘Doorman’ appears to have reacted to something and is trying to see what is happening, judging by the way he is leaning with his left shoulder angling down and his left arm across his body as if holding onto something for support.

There is controversy over whether the photograph was altered to make it appear that Oswald is co-worker Billy Lovelady (for example, the receding hairline). But on closer inspection, to me the shirts ‘doorman’ is wearing confirm that ‘doorman’ is indeed Oswald. The over and under shirts hang identically on the body of ‘doorman’ when compared to the photograph at right and below after Oswald was arrested. The over shirt looks like it is linen with a distinct weave and lapel. Note also how loose-fitting it is (apparently Oswald had lost some weight prior to the assassination), and that some of the buttons were undone. Notice in the photograph below, that the old white t-shirt Oswald wore underneath it is clearly visible with its stretched neck that made it look like a v-neck from a distance. In fact, Oswald had a habit of pulling at the front of his tee shirts, which is obvious in this photo as the neck is stretched.

But let me return for a moment to one of those ‘untimely witness deaths’: that of Billy Lovelady, who died of a fatal first heart attack at the young age of 41 – shortly after he testified for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Of relevance here, the CIA does possess a weapon capable of shooting an undetectable poisonous dart to simulate a heart attack in its victim. This is just something to consider in the spate of witness deaths around this time

But why would they want Lovelady dead? With so many people writing about ‘doorman’ being Oswald, maybe it was too much of a stretch to turn Oswald into Lovelady after all, and they needed to ‘disappear’ him. At least it would end awkward questions that Lovelady might provide the ‘wrong’ answers to, as is indicated below.

Billy Lovelady was apparently recorded as saying that he wore a long sleeved plaid shirt on November 22, but in the FBI Mugshots above he was wearing a short-sleeved, red-and-white-striped sport shirt. He explained that he was unaware that for these mugshots he had to wear the same shirt he was wearing on November 22. In fact, the truth of the matter is that Lovelady did wear a red and white striped shirt on November 22, 1963, as he stated for the Warren Commission (see below underlined).

Notice that Lovelady’s tee-shirt has a round, firm neck that covers his collarbone, which Oswald’s does not. Also, he routinely buttoned his shirts higher and didn’t wear them like Oswald wore his shirt on November 22. The FBI asked him to pose for several shots, finally getting him to wear a plaid shirt, and always directing him to wear his shirt unbuttoned halfway down the front.

The reasoning behind getting Lovelady to wear a plaid shirt was because the shirt worn by “doorman” formed a checkered effect when magnified in the original Altgen’s photo because of pixel degeneration. On the left below is Billy Lovelady with the shirt the FBI asked him to wear.

Below, the sleeves on each shirt are magnified at the same ratio. Note that the pixels degenerate on Oswald’s shirt to form a boxlike pattern, whereas there is no pixel distortion on Lovelady’s shirt. Judyth Vary Baker gives a detailed account of this at the end of Jim Fetzer’s article: JFK: Judyth Vary Baker cements Oswald in the Doorway.

Also take into account that Lovelady was heavier and about 3 inches shorter than Oswald. In the FBI mug shots, an attempt is made to make Lovelady’s face look narrower than it is by using more contrast and dark shading around the hairline, his right temple, and around the outline of his face, as below.

While it is not my aim to convince you or otherwise about Oswald’s shirt (you can find more comparisons here and a very detailed account here) it is a starting point to begin to question the ‘official story’. Clearly, Lovelady is not ‘doorman’, as the FBI would like you to believe. This is what lawyer Mark Lane had to say about the FBI’s investigation in his article, Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief:

Most disquieting of all…is that the FBI, once wedded to a conclusion conceived before investigation, might be motivated to discover evidence which supports that conclusion. Within a few hours after Oswald was arrested the Dallas police, with the FBI at its side, announced the very same verdict now reinforced by the latest FBI discoveries. Under such circumstances, we fear that evidence tending to prove Oswald innocent might be discarded and evidence proving him guilty might be developed out of proportion or even created.

Clearly the FBI’s attempt to turn Lovelady into ‘doorman’ is a blatant example of their attempt to create a distorted picture of events, and discard any inconvenient truths. Several witnesses saw Oswald just before and after President Kennedy’s motorcade turned into Elm Street, and he was nowhere near the sixth floor. Oswald was as he stated in front of reporters at the police station: “I’m just a patsy.”

And just as the FBI turned ‘doorman’ into Lovelady, so too did they turn the Mauser rifle the police found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, and proudly displayed as the ‘murder weapon’, into an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that Oswald supposedly ordered through the post, leaving a paper trail that would incriminate him. The following video shows how the rifle was found, and is narrated by witness Roger Craig who was a Deputy Sheriff at the time of the assassination. Immediately following the video is an affidavit signed by Seymour Weitzman, who was one of the officers present when the Mauser was found.

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A glimmer of truth came at last when I found the following Walter Cronkite interview of Lyndon Johnson at his ranch in 1969, where he admitted that “others” may have been involved in President Kennedy’s assassination.

Walter Cronkite asked Johnson then whether he was satisfied there was no international conspiracy in the assassination.

Lyndon Johnson replied, “I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever been completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections… Well I have not fully discounted…

Mr Johnson went on to talk about the job the Warren Commission members did, and their merits, and ended saying this:

I think they were competent and did the best they could. But I don’t think that they, or me, or anyone else is always absolutely sure of every…ah thing that might have motivated Oswald…or uh others…that uh…could have been involved.

This segment was deleted from the original broadcast of the interview at Mr Johnson’s request on the grounds of “national security.”

When Lyndon Johnson took over Kennedy’s presidency, the fear of communism spread like a fast growing cancer, finally extinguishing the hope for peace when he took America into the Vietnam War. Johnson even came to Australia to take our young men into the war as well, fooling us into believing a manufactured lie about the spread of communism. To this day I still remember the haunting slogan of his visit: “All the way with LBJ.” Who was this war benefiting I now ask. Was it the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned Americans about when he stepped down from his presidency? It now seems extremely suspicious to me that in less than a week of taking office, Kennedy’s decision to withdraw the troops from Vietnam was reversed.

Kennedy researcher, John Judge, fills us in on the exact day Kennedy’s plan to pull out of Vietnam was scrapped (in the video below beginning at 5:07). His mother worked at the Pentagon and her job was to project overall national drafts’ call figures five years in advance. She was told the new figures she would be dealing with on the Monday directly following JFK’s assassination. Exclaiming that the figures could not be right, she was told that “the war in Vietnam would last for 10 years and that 57,000 Americans would die, and to figure that in.”

Judge also reveals in the video the following at 6:33:

I also talked to SAC bomber pilots, Strategic Air Command bomber pilots who had the responsibility nuclear and emergency response who were in the air on regular shifts, 24 hours a day. These were in the air over Wright Patterson Airforce Base when they heard the news that Kennedy had been shot. They ran to open lockers that contain a cryptographed code book that allows them to tell whether the president is calling them and to take orders that go all the way out to failsafe and nuclear war. There was not a pilot in the air that hour, over Wright Patt anyway – and I would contend this is the case everywhere else, nor is it isolated – that had a code book in that locker.

We know from Pierre Salinger’s book there was no code book aboard Air Force 2, bringing the entire cabinet back from important meetings that changed the course in Vietnam in the next few days. They were in the air and had no way to communicate with the White House or the president. There’s nobody that can touch those books besides the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest levels of defense intelligence, and at every level of my work, the Office of Navy Intelligence is who rears its head on the mechanic level, the defense industrial security command.

This is the background of Oswald, and Guy Banister and Jack Ruby when we go into them. And whatever is in the record will merely back that up. The physical evidence is already in front of us, so we know that one lone nut with an old gun that lost the war for the Italians in WWII, which couldn’t even shoot a bullet to line up with its own scope, didn’t do the damage in Dallas. But Kennedy wasn’t all that was killed that day, democracy died.”

That something had occurred within the highest echelons of power within the U.S., was backed up by the son of Pentagon insider, Colonel Christensen, who at that time was stationed to the Deputy Director of Plans. The son recalls (in the video below) that his father arrived home late and was visibly upset on the evening of Kennedy’s assassination. This is a transcript of what he recalled after his father arrived home:

2:54 : On the evening of November 22, he arrived home late and visibly upset. I noted this because it was the first time I had ever seen my father so agitated. As the assassination was the topic of discussion at the dinner table, and we were talking about Oswald as the assassin, he listened shortly and then injected into the talk and corrected the family about who killed President Kennedy. He said that President Kennedy was assassinated by a military coup.

I recall responding, “That couldn’t be. Everybody knew it was Oswald because it was on T.V. news all day long since President Kennedy had been shot.” He reiterated that it was a military coup that killed President Kennedy, and added that he knew it because all secure communication lines in the Pentagon had been shut down the very second President Kennedy was assassinated and remained down for some hours, and no secure communications could be received or made out, but that calls could be made on non-secure lines. He added that only one person in the U.S. had the power to shut down secure communications in the Pentagon.

I recall asking if the boss at the Air Force, the General, could have made an order to have secure communications shut down or his bosses, and he asserted that no generals or military commanders had such power to shut down all secure communications of the Pentagon. He stated again, only one person in the United States had the power to shut down secure communications at the Pentagon, and that was the president. The discussion continued for a bit and my father was adamant about the military coup as a source of President Kennedy’s assassination.

Having watched the T.V. all that afternoon in school, as everybody froze in place at school and our classroom was riveted to the television, when my father revealed to us that evening about the military coup, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t understand military coups much either. I was twelve at the time. I did mark the conversation. It was the most unusual conversation at that point in my life.

More information about this video is available here.

A follow-up article I published on 28 October 2021 continues to explore the Oswald story:

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Reference

1. Belzer, Richard, and Wayne, David (2013) Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination, Skyhorse Publishing, Delaware, p. 42

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Videos on President Kennedy’s Assassination

J Gary Shaw Assassination of JFK & COVERUP JFK Conspiracy Part 1

Gary Shaw – Assassination of JFK & COVERUP – JFK Conspiracy – Part 2 (1988)

Earthcam view from the “sniper’s perch” on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository

In cooperation with The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, EarthCam has positioned a webcam in the southeast window on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. This is the site where an assassin is alleged to have fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Governor John Connally as the presidential motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas Police Department

At the 43 second mark, Jack Ruby is clearly visible in centre frame. In this video Oswald clearly says, “I’m just a patsy” (3:12) and “I emphatically deny these charges” (4:47).

JFK – The Dallas Tapes – Original Oswald Footage

This video is similar to the one above but contains footage other than at the Dallas Police Department. The scene where Jack Ruby shoots Lee Oswald is at the 6:03 mark.

Oliver Stone on 50th Anniversary of JFK Assassination

Oliver Stone discusses the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, which was chronicled in his blockbuster film, “JFK.”

The Men Who Killed Kennedy: Part 4 The Patsy

The Men Who Killed Kennedy is a video documentary series by Nigel Turner that originally aired in 1988 in England with two one-hour segments about the John F. Kennedy assassination. The United States corporation, Arts & Entertainment Company, purchased the rights to the original two segments. Three one-hour segments were added in 1991. A sixth segment was added in 1995. Finally, three additional hourly segments were added by the History Channel in November 2003. The ninth segment, titled “The Guilty Men”, directly implicated Lyndon B. Johnson. Within days, Johnson’s widow, Lady Bird Johnson, more of his surviving associates, ex-President Jimmy Carter, and the lone, living Warren Commission commissioner and ex-President Gerald R. Ford immediately complained to the History Channel. They subsequently threatened legal action against Arts & Entertainment Company, owner of the History Channel. “The Guilty Men” segment was completely withdrawn by the History Channel. Also during the series, French prisoner Christian David named Lucien Sarti as one of three French criminals hired to carry out the assassination of Kennedy, when he was interviewed by author Anthony Summers. This claim is one of the most strongly investigated theories presented on the show.

The Men Who Killed Kennedy – Part 8 – The Love Affair (2003)

Judyth Vary Baker reveals her love affair with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans in 1963 in the hope of proving his innocence. Startling new information is learned about Lee, including the purpose of his trip to Mexico a few months before President Kennedy’s assassination, and that he tried unsuccessfully to change the course of events that were leading to Kennedy’s death.

Ms Baker has written a book about her affair with Lee Oswald entitled Me and Lee. More information can be found on her website.

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