If you’ve been enjoying this podcast, you may want to check out my newly launched home at Substack. I’ll be using that platform to write about things other than the Kennedy assassination – although it won’t surprise me if I sometimes end up touching on the JFK case there too, if the need arises. Subscription is free, so don’t be afraid to hit the subscribe button. And if you check out my archive there – which is also free – you may be surprised to find that I do have a few other interests besides the JFK case ... Also, stay subscribed to this podcast feed for more announcements and episodes in the future. With Donald Trump in the White House, the story of American conspiracy theory goes on … and you never know when the Ghosts of Dallas will raise their heads again, giving me more material for future episodes. For the moment, stay subscribed to this feed, and do please go to my Substack and hit “Subscribe”.

The JFK assassination is back in the news. A House Declassification Task Force is unsealing all the remaining classified files about the assassination, in keeping with a promise made on the campaign trail by Donald Trump. "It's been 60 years," Trump said. "Time for the American people to know the TRUTH." What is it about this case that has made Donald Trump, of all people, suddenly become interested in the concepts of truth and transparency? And what kind of truths will the declassification of these files deliver?  Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus

On January 25, 1967, two men squared off to debate an issue that had become an increasingly hot one, in the fractured and paranoid atmosphere of late 1960s America. Who killed President Kennedy? Had there or had there not been a conspiracy behind his murder? The two participants in this long-ago debate are now dead. But the tactics that one of them used that day to drown out the truth, and to flood the zone with demagoguery and lies, live on today, in the dangerous conspiratorial style of Donald J. Trump … Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus

On February 27, 1969, the defence in the matter of the State of Louisiana versus Clay L. Shaw called its final witness to the stand. The witness was Clay Shaw himself. Under questioning from his own attorney, Shaw didn’t say anything all that startling or unexpected. What was surprising was happened next … Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus

On January 21, 1969, at the criminal district court building in NO, proceedings finally got underway in the case of the State of Louisiana versus Clay L. Shaw. For almost two years now, Garrison had been loudly telling the world that he’d solved the Kennedy case. He had repeatedly promised that the proof would be delivered, when the time came. Well, the time had finally come. Garrison’s chance to put up or shut up had officially arrived. And if he didn’t put up, he really was going to look like one of history’s all-time greatest frauds and tools … Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus

In April 1967, researchers working for the New Orleans DA Jim Garrison found a suspicious entry in the address book of Clay Shaw, the man Garrison had charged with having conspired to murder President John F. Kennedy. The entry was for a man named Lee Odom; the address Shaw had scrawled down for this Odom character was PO Box 19106, Dallas, Texas. According to Jim Garrison, the late Lee Harvey Oswald had once scrawled the same PO Box number in his notebook. Also according to Garrison, Post Office Box 19106 did not really exist in Dallas, and never had. It was “a non-existent or fictional number.” This meant that the number had to be some kind of code. And Garrison publicly claimed to have cracked the code. He announced that the number in the notebooks was an encrypted version of Jack Ruby’s unlisted telephone number: WH1-5601. The telephone code was the smoking gun. Not only did it link Clay Shaw with Lee Harvey Oswald. It also linked both men with Jack Ruby … Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net

How do you make a case when you have no real case to make? It’s a question that all conspiracy theorists face. Jim Garrison faced it in March 1967, when he opted to stage a public pre-trial hearing in the Clay Shaw case. Garrison would now have to produce some evidence, fast, to show why he believed that Shaw had conspired in the murder of President Kennedy. So how did Garrison make his case? By injecting witnesses with truth serum and hypnotizing them. By offering bribes and issuing threats of violence. By springing convicts from prison in exchange for lurid anti-Shaw testimony. “He’s an unmitigated liar and a psychopathic paranoid,” said one of Garrison’s former aides, after quitting from his investigation in disgust. And the Jolly Green Giant was just getting warmed up … Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net 

On March 1, 1967, the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested a local civic leader named Clay Shaw, and charged him with having conspired to murder President John F. Kennedy. To Garrison, it didn’t matter that there was no serious evidence to support that extremely serious charge. He set about simply manufacturing a case out of thin air, using a series of increasingly desperate measures, including coercion of witnesses, bribery, extortion, forgery, and threats of physical violence. When Garrison arrested Clay Shaw, he crossed the Rubicon. There was no turning back. He had nowhere to go except deeper and deeper into the almost incredible clusterf**k that he had set in motion. And unfortunately, the man who was going to pay for Garrison’s act of madness wasn’t Garrison himself. It was Clay Shaw, the man who suddenly found himself starring in a Kafka novel, accused of committing a crime that he’d had absolutely nothing to do with … Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net

To this day, the late New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw remains the only person ever to have been criminally prosecuted in connection with the murder of JFK. His trial began in New Orleans in January, 1969. On March 1st, a jury found him Not Guilty in just 54 minutes, but Shaw's life and reputation were destroyed by his very public prosecution. How was it that an entirely innocent man came to be prosecuted for conspiring to murder the President of the United States? The answer has nothing to do with Shaw, and everything to do with the warped mind of the man who prosecuted him: the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Garrison was drunk on conspiracy theory; when the early conspiratorial books about the case came out, he fell disastrously under the spell. And before he tried to pin Kennedy's murder on Clay Shaw, he tried to pin it on another innocent man: the eccentric, wig-wearing David W. Ferrie ...  Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net  

Sylvia Odio's claim that she encountered Lee Harvey Oswald in late September of 1963 was compelling - so compelling that we have almost no choice but to believe it, unless we can find rock-solid evidence proving that Oswald couldn't have been at her apartment when she claimed he was. The Warren Commission believed that there was rock-solid evidence to that effect. It concluded that the man at Odio's apartment couldn't possibly have been Oswald. But how rock-solid, really, were the Warren Commission's reasons for believing that? And if we find that those reasons were not as impressive as the Commission thought - if we find that the real Oswald could indeed have been present at Sylvia Odio's apartment that night - then what the hell did his presence there mean? And who were the two men in his company? Clearly, they were not who they claimed to be. So who were they? Was it possible that they were agents of the Castro regime? And if they were, did Oswald know that? The more you look at the Odio incident, the more you see why it has been called "the strongest human evidence of conspiracy."  Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Please consider supporting the show. Donations can be made at: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus     

One night in late September of 1963, two months before the Kennedy assassination, three mysterious men paid a visit to the Dallas apartment of Sylvia Odio, a Cuban-American woman who was active in anti-Castro politics. One of these men was introduced to her as Leon Oswald - and when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after the assassination, Sylvia Odio instantly recognized him as the man who had come to her apartment. But why had the "Oswald" who visited Sylvia Odio portrayed himself as a bitter enemy of the Castro regime, when the real Oswald was a big-time fan of Castro's? Who were the two men he was with? And why had this "Oswald" told one of those men that it would be an excellent idea to shoot President Kennedy? Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Please consider supporting the show. Donations can be made at: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus     

Within a few years of its appearance in 1964, the Warren Report had become a joke, a punchline. And the funniest thing about it, according to the critics, was the Single-Bullet Theory: the idea that a single bullet fired by Oswald had gone through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally. The conspiracy theorists had a name for this bullet. They called it the Magic Bullet, because they believed that no bullet in the real world could possibly have behaved the way the Warren Commission said this bullet had behaved. If the conspiracy theorists were right to believe that, then the whole Warren Report was a fiction. If on the other hand the Warren Commission was right about the single bullet, that would tell us something important about conspiracy theory. It would tell us that the conspiratorial worldview is too limited and one-dimensional, and that it fails to grasp how rich and surprising the world can sometimes be. If a single bullet did go through both Kennedy and Connally, then reality itself is more magical than conspiracy theorists are capable of imagining … Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus    

On the afternoon of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Abraham Zapruder shot the most famous home movie ever made. Was the proof of a JFK conspiracy concealed somewhere in the Zapruder film's 486 frames? After watching the film over and over, one young investigator became sure that he'd stumbled on the secret of Kennedy's murder. Oswald couldn't possibly have acted alone. There had to have been a second gunman. The proof of it was right there on film ...  Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus  

When John F. Kennedy arrived in the Emergency Room of Parkland Memorial Hospital at 12:40 on the afternoon of his assassination, he had two visible wounds on his body. One of them was a small neat hole in the center of his throat. "It looked like an entrance wound," one of the surgeons who treated him told the press later that afternoon. Asked which direction the bullet had come from, he said: "It appeared to be coming at him." Two more of the emergency surgeons shared that view. But hadn't Kennedy been shot from behind, by Oswald, hunched over in his perch on the 6th floor of the Book Depository? If the throat wound was an entrance wound, the official story about the assassination was in deep trouble. As one reporter wrote at the time, "The question that suggests itself is, how could the President have been shot in the front from the back?"       Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus  

A week after the Kennedy assassination, President Lyndon Johnson established the Warren Commission, a blue-ribbon Presidential Commission that aimed to get to the bottom of the crime. Right from the start, the Commission found itself fighting a losing battle on two fronts. On one side of it were the early conspiracy theorists, led by the opportunistic New York lawyer Mark Lane. On the other side was the FBI, led by the devious and relentless J. Edgar Hoover ... Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus  

In light of what we know about Jack Ruby's movements on the morning of November 24, 1963, is it remotely plausible that he was involved in ANY kind of conspiracy to murder Oswald? If not, why he do it? What was the state of Ruby's mental health at the time he shot Oswald? Given the clear evidence that Ruby became a "grossly delusional" man while serving his sentence for murdering Oswald, is it possible that his mental decline had already begun at the time of the Kennedy assassination? Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus  

Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead in police custody on the morning of November 24, 1963, less than 48 hours after the assassination of President Kennedy. Oswald's murder was broadcast live on TV; around 80 million eyewitnesses saw it happen. The killer was a 52-year-old Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby. Who was Ruby? Why did he shoot Oswald? Ruby is the Wild Card in the Kennedy assassination story. Maybe he's the single best card the conspiracy theorists have to play. Or maybe he's the second Joker in the pack: the second lone assassin who brings the whole conspiratorial house of cards crashing down ... Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net     Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus  

“His basic desire was to get to Cuba by any means, and all the rest of it was window dressing for that purpose.” That was how Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife Marina described the five turbulent months that she and husband spent living in New Orleans between April and September of 1963. How strong, exactly, was Oswald’s desire to get to Cuba? When Marina said he was ready to get there “by any means”, what did she mean? Was there anything Oswald wouldn’t do in pursuit of his Cuban fantasies? If we want to understand why Oswald shot Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the five months he spent in New Orleans provide the final piece of the puzzle. Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus  

Why did Lee Harvey Oswald murder JFK? Can his psychological motives be disentangled from his political ones?  Show notes: www.ghostsofdallas.net  Support the podcast: https://paypal.me/goodbadbogus  

A detailed look at Lee Harvey Oswald’s movements on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. What was the mysterious, rifle-shaped package Oswald took to work that morning? Where was he at 12.30pm, when three shots were fired at the presidential motorcade? Why did he flee the Texas Schoolbook Depository immediately afterwards? Why did he go back to his apartment and grab a loaded pistol? Was it Oswald who murdered Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit 45 minutes after the shooting of Kennedy? Is it even remotely possible that Oswald was framed? When he claimed to be a patsy, did he really mean what everybody thinks he meant?