JFK, RFK and MLK: The conspiracies behind each assassination that continue to enthrall amateur sleuths
Mobsters, a mysterious man with an umbrella, Ted Cruz’s dad — and aliens.
Conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F Kennedy on that fateful day on November 22, 1963, have swirled for decades. But experts agree that the imminent release of the long-awaited JFK files, along with unreleased documents about the killings of Robert F Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, is unlikely to quell the paranoia surrounding any of their murders.
President Donald Trump’s deadline for officials to submit a plan for the release of the files is this weekend, according to the executive order he issued 43 days ago.
“That’s a big one, huh?” Trump said as he signed the order in January. “A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades.”
While conspiracy theories have implicated 214 individuals and 44 organizations in John Kennedy’s murder over the years, doubts also remain over the killings of RFK and King after their families remain unconvinced the true culprits were convicted.
As the deadline for the release of the files looms, The Independent revisits some of the outlandish and more compelling theories out there:
Positioning himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, former marine Lee Harvey Oswald fired multiple shots that killed Kennedy.
Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Oswald during a prison transfer, killing him.
One year after the assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson assembled and tasked the Warren Commission to investigate. The commission, along with the FBI and other governmental probes, concluded that Oswald acted alone. The theory was widely accepted.
Things started to unravel when a Select Committee on Assassinations argued in 1979 that there was a “high probability” that two gunmen fired at Kennedy, with one of them being situated on an area known as the “grassy knoll.”
Kennedy’s own nephew, RFK Jr, himself a keen conspiracy theorist, has said that he believes there was more than one man behind his uncle’s murder.
The theory that a second shooter was situated on the knoll was disproved by several technical recreations, including by the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded: “Reliable acoustic data do not support a conclusion that there was a second gunman.”
Within the multiple gunmen theory came another about a mysterious figure holding a black umbrella on the day of the assassination. Curious, as the sun was shining that day. There was speculation that the umbrella contained a dart gun which was shot into Kennedy’s neck, giving his fellow assassins time to kill him while he was immobilized. In Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film JFK, the umbrella man featured sends signals to the other assassins.
The umbrella in question was exhibit 405 in the House committee’s probe in 1978, where its owner, Dallas life insurance salesman Louie Steven Witt, revealed its true purpose — to heckle Kennedy.
