A JFK expert has highlighted two pieces of evidence pointing to more than one shooter that were not debunked by last week’s assassination files release.
The documents released by the Trump administration fail to explain how Lee Harvey Oswald was able to strike the moving president in the head from six floors up 80 to 100 yards away, JFK scholar Peter Lucas wrote in the Boston Herald.
They also fail to explain why footage of the killing shows Kennedy’s head snapping backwards as if he had been shot from the front – even though Oswald was to his rear, aiming from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas.
‘There had to be another shooter, possibly firing from the grassy knoll to the right of the Kennedy motorcade,’ Lucas wrote.
‘One of the shots in the film of the assassination has Kennedy’s head going backwards as though shot from the front.’
One of the most popular theories asserts there was a second gunman who fired shots at JFK from a now-iconic ‘grassy knoll’ to the right of his car as it passed by.
No definitive proof of that claim has ever been shared, although sleuths have shared grainy grabs over the year that they’ve suggested shows a second shooter.
Jackie Kennedy can be seen helping a Secret Service agent into her car moments after the November 1963 shooting in Dallas. A now-infamous grassy knoll where a second shooter may have been stationed sits behind her
Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald, pictured, during a jail transfer broadcast live on television
President John F Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy moments before the president was shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963 as his car passed through Dealey Plaza
More than 63,000 pages of records related to the November 1963 assassination of President Kennedy were released Tuesday following an order by President Donald Trump, many without the redactions that had confounded historians for years and helped fuel conspiracy theories.
The US National Archives and Records Administration posted to its website roughly 2,200 files containing the documents.
They included typewritten reports and handwritten notes spanning decades, including details of a top CIA agent who claimed the deep state was responsible, Oswald being a ‘poor shot’ and that Secret Service had been warned Kennedy would be killed in August, three months before the murder.
The JFK assassination files released by the Trump administration gave curious readers more details into Cold War-era covert US operations than any credence to long-circulating conspiracy theories about who killed JFK.
The vast majority of the National Archives’ more than 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
Some were not directly related to the assassination but rather dealt with covert CIA operations, particularly in Cuba.
And nothing in the first documents examined undercut the conclusion that Kennedy assassin Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
U.S. President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, U.S., January 23, 2025.
Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building.
Police arrested 24-year-old Oswald, a former Marine who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.
Ruby died of cancer in jail. Conspiracy theorists say he murdered Oswald to stop the shooter spilling more details about JFK’s assassination.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy.
But critics of the commission still spun a web of alternative theories.
The most common conspiracy theory centers on the CIA either helping organize or turning a blind eye to an assassination plot it knew was underway.
Kennedy had been urged to dismantle the shadowy government organization shortly before his murder over fears it was out-of-control
