Dallas unveils documents on Kennedy shooting
WASHINGTON - Officials in Texas have unveiled a trove of long-hidden memorabilia related to the assassination of president John F. Kennedy which they predict will fan conspiracy theories about the killing.
Dallas County district attorney Craig Watkins Monday showed off a dozen boxes filled with papers and items found inside a courthouse safe, where they had lain for decades.
"Our motto has always been that everything is open. We have nothing to hide. So we're making public everything that we have found in the safe," Watkins said, adding that he had learned about it shortly after taking office in 2007.
"Every DA to my knowledge has been made aware of the contents of that safe and every DA, until this new administration, decided that it wanted to keep it secret for whatever reason," Watkins told a press conference in Dallas.
"We decided that this information was too important to keep secret."
The courthouse overlooks the site where Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, hit by bullets as he passed in an open top car with his wife Jacqueline Kennedy.
The prosecutor said the discovery could fuel new conspiracy theories about the assassination, but one of the most intriguing documents has already been discounted as a likely fraud.
It is a purported tran scri pt of a conversation between Kennedy's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby, the club owner who killed Oswald before he could face trial.
Watkins said he didn't know whether or not the conversation ever took place.
"But what we do know is that it will open up the debate as to whether or not there was a conspiracy to assassinate the president," he said.
In the alleged conversation, the two men discuss a plot to kill Kennedy a month before the popular president's assassination in Dallas, according to US media.
Terri Moore, Watkins' top assistant, was quoted as saying in the Dallas Morning News that she believes the tran scri pt is part of a movie the district attorney at the time of the assassination was working on with producers.
"It's not real. Crooks don't talk like that," she was quoted as saying by the Morning News. "If that tran scri pt is true, then history is changed because Oswald and Ruby were talking about assassinating the president."
The document stash reportedly includes a proposal for a movie about the assassination signed by then-district attorney Henry Wade.
Other discoveries include Oswald's clothing, Ruby's leather holster and brass knuckles that Ruby carried when he killed Oswald.
There are also official records from the trial of Ruby, who saw a verdict against him overturned and died of cancer in 1967 before his second trial could begin.
According to excerpts of the suspect text, published by the newspaper, Oswald discusses a Mafia plot to kill the then attorney general, the president's brother Robert Kennedy.
"There is a way to get rid of him without killing him ... I can shoot his brother," Oswald says in the tran scri pt.
Ruby replies: "But that wouldn't be patriotic."
A commission put together by Kennedy's successor, president Lyndon Johnson, to investigate the assassination found that Oswald shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of a nearby building, and acted alone.
Ruby shot Oswald two days later in an underground garage as police transferred him from one jail to another, an incident captured by television cameras.
The Warren Commission found no connection between Ruby and Oswald.
Its findings have been challenged repeatedly over the years, with some Americans claiming it served as coverup for a conspiracy.
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