The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (37 page)

A. Well, I gained the impression talking to family members about that particular alleged statement that it was not a typical – not that he would say that particularly – communicate that, but it was the sort of throwaway comment he might make. I have also gathered that it is quite possible that it was not made at the time that was initially alleged but possibly a year beforehand.

Q. We have seen now diaries. Mr Broucher thought it was February 2003. He did say it was a deep memory pocket. We have seen diaries which suggest that he has met Mr Broucher in February 2002 and Mr Broucher has said they only met once. So that may mean it is February 2002. Does that assist?

A. I think it is pure coincidence. I do not think it is relevant to understanding Dr Kelly’s death.

156. It is a strange coincidence that Dr Kelly was found dead in the woods, but for the reasons which I give in paragraph 157 I am satisfied that Dr Kelly took his own life and that there was no third party involvement in his death.

The cause of the death of Dr Kelly

157. In the light of the evidence which I have heard I am satisfied that Dr Kelly took his own life in the wood at Harrowdown Hill at a time between 4.15 p.m. on 17 July and 1.15 a.m. on 18 July 2003 and that the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to the left wrist which Dr Kelly inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body. It is probable that the ingestion of an excess amount of Coproxamol tablets coupled with apparently clinically silent coronary artery disease would both have played a part in bringing about death more certainly and more rapidly than would have otherwise been the case. Accordingly the causes of death are:

1a Haemorrhage

1b Incised wounds to the left wrist

2 Coproxamol ingestion and coronary artery atherosclerosis I am satisfied that no other person was involved in the death of Dr Kelly for the following reasons:

1) A very careful and lengthy examination of the area where his body was found by police officers and by a forensic biologist found no traces whatever of a struggle or of any involvement by a third party or third parties and a very careful and detailed post-mortem examination by Dr Hunt, together with the examination of specimens from the body by a forensic toxicologist, Dr Allan, found no traces or indications whatever of violence or force inflicted on Dr Kelly by a third party or third parties either at the place where his body was found or elsewhere.

2) The wounds to his wrist were inflicted by a knife which came from Dr Kelly’s desk in his study in his home, and which had belonged to him from boyhood.

3) It is highly unlikely that a third party or third parties could have forced Dr Kelly to swallow a large number of Coproxamol tablets.

These conclusions are strongly supported by the evidence of Professor Hawton, Dr Hunt and Assistant Chief Constable Page.

158. I am further satisfied from the evidence of Professor Hawton that Dr Kelly was not suffering from any significant mental illness at the time he took his own life.

The statement issued by the BBC after Dr Kelly’s death

159. On Sunday 20 July the BBC issued the following statement:

The BBC deeply regrets the death of Dr David Kelly. We had the greatest respect for his achievements in Iraq and elsewhere over many years and wish once again to express our condolences to his family.

There has been much speculation about whether Dr Kelly was the source for the
Today
programme report by Andrew Gilligan on May 29th. Having now informed Dr Kelly’s family, we can confirm that Dr Kelly was the principal source for both Andrew Gilligan’s report and for Susan Watts’ reports on Newsnight on June 2nd and 4th.

The BBC believes we accurately interpreted and reported the factual information obtained by us during interviews with Dr Kelly.

Over the past few weeks we have been at pains to protect Dr Kelly being identified as the source of these reports. We clearly owed him a duty of confidentiality. Following his death, we now believe, in order to end the continuing speculation, it is important to release this information as swiftly as possible. We did not release it until this morning at the request of Dr Kelly’s family.

The BBC will fully cooperate with the Government’s inquiry. We will make a full and frank submission to Lord Hutton and will provide full details of all the contacts between Dr Kelly and the two BBC journalists including contemporaneous notes and other materials made by both journalists, independently.

We continue to believe we were right to place Dr Kelly’s views in the public domain. However, the BBC is profoundly sorry that his involvement as our source has ended so tragically.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

Since the assassination of the thirty-fifth President of the US in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, in 1963, an average of forty books a year have sought to explain – even explain away – his murder. It is the Big One. The Mother of All Mysteries, the Daddy of all Conspiracy Theories.

Nearly fifty years on, the images still loop from that fateful November day:

Kennedy in the back of the open-top Lincoln, next to Jackie, all smiles and waves in the sun …

Kennedy, his head slumped sideways …

Jackie leaning over to her husband …

Jackie trying to climb up the back of the car …

A blur of speeding cars and motorbike outriders …

Lyndon B. Johnson inside Air Force One taking the oath of presidency, Jackie statue-like by his side …

Elected to the White House in 1960 aged forty-six, Democrat John F. Kennedy was supposedly the bringer of a fresh new dawn. Handsome, charismatic and liberal, JFK promised hope for an entire generation. That hope was snuffed out at 12.30 p.m. on 22 November 1963 in Dealey Plaza.

Kennedy had chosen to visit Dallas to boost the Democratic cause in Texas, a marginal state, and to generate funds for the upcoming November 1964 presidential election. Both Kennedy and his staff had expressed concerns about security because, only a month earlier, US Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson had been jostled and spat upon during a visit to Dallas. Nevertheless, the route the president’s motorcade would take through Dallas was published in Dallas newspapers on the eve of the visit, 21 November 1963. The next day, a little before 12.30 p.m. CST, his Lincoln limousine entered Dealey Plaza and slowly approached the Texas School Book Depository. It then turned 120 degrees left, directly in front of the Depository, just 65 feet away.

As the presidential Lincoln passed the Depository and continued down Elm Street, shots were fired at Kennedy, who was waving to the crowds on his right. One shot entered his upper back, penetrated his neck, and exited his throat. He raised his clenched fists up to his neck and leaned to his left as Jacqueline Kennedy put her arms round him. Texas Governor John Connally, sitting with his wife in front of the Kennedys in the limousine, was hit in the back and yelled out, “Oh, no, no, no … My God, they’re going to kill us all!”

The final shot occurred as the presidential limo passed in front of the John Neely Bryan pergola. As the shot sounded, President Kennedy’s head exploded, covering the interior of the Lincoln with blood and tissue.

Secret Service agent Clint Hill was riding on the running board of the car behind the limousine. After the first shot struck the president, Hill jumped off and ran to overtake it. By then the president had been hit in the head and Mrs Kennedy was climbing onto the boot of the car. Hill jumped on the back of the limousine, pushed Mrs Kennedy back into her seat, and clung to the car as it sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital. At 1.00 p.m. President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead by hospital staff. A formality. The president was certainly dead before the limo reached the doors of the emergency department.

Meanwhile, back in Dealey Plaza, the first witnesses were talking to police. Howard Brennan, across from the Texas School Book Depository, distinctly heard gunshots from that building. So did Harold Norman, James Jarman Jr and Bonnie Ray Williams, employees of the Depository who had watched the motorcade from a window at the south-east corner of the fifth floor; they heard three shots from directly over their heads. (Of the eye and ear witnesses who would eventually give testimony as to the direction from which the fatal shots came, 56 [53.8 per cent] believed they came from the direction of the Depository, 35 [33.7 per cent] thought they came from a “grassy knoll” on the north side of the Plaza, and 8 [7.7 per cent] thought the shots came from other locations. Only 5 [4.8 per cent] thought they heard shots from two separate locations.) A police search of the Book Depository revealed that one employee, Lee Harvey Oswald, was missing, having left the building immediately after the shooting. After eighty minutes of frantic manhunt Oswald was spotted on a sidewalk by Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, who on approaching Oswald was shot dead. One hour later, Oswald was cornered in a movie house and arrested. The next day he was charged with the murders of Kennedy and Tippit. He denied shooting anyone and claimed he’d been set up as a “patsy”.

On 24 November at 11.21 a.m., as Oswald was being transferred from Dallas Police Headquarters to the county jail, a local strip-club owner, Jack Ruby, stepped out of the crowd and fatally gunned him down. Ruby was convicted of Oswald’s murder in 1964, but the conviction was overturned. Ruby died in jail awaiting retrial.

A week after Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Baines Johnson (“LBJ”) set up a commission under Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the killing. The Warren Commission published its findings in September 1964. According to the Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald had shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, where an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle had been found with his fingerprints on it. A bullet on Governor Connally’s stretcher matched this rifle. Oswald, a misfit with Marxist leanings, had been instrumental in setting up the New Orleans branch of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He had, concluded the Commission, “an overriding hostility to his environment … [a] hatred for American Society” and had sought “a place in history”. The Commission “could not find any persuasive evidence of a domestic or foreign conspiracy involving any other person(s), group(s), or country(ies), and [believed] that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone”.

In a US still traumatized by the event, the Warren Commission report was initially met with a sense of relief and acceptance. The mood, however, gradually passed to unease and then outright distrust, as it became clear that LBJ had ordered an embargo on huge swathes of the report for thirty years to come. Moreover, the bits and pieces of the report that had been released contained as many questions as they did answers. Why hadn’t the Commission interviewed Ruby, especially as he had informed them he would “come clean”? Then there was the matter of the murder weapon: could a bolt-action relic of the Second World War really deliver three accurate shots, at range, in six to seven seconds?

With the manifest inadequacy of the official investigation into Kennedy’s death, numerous independent investigations tried to get at the truth. Among the keenest-eyed readers of the Warren Report’s selected extracts was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who spotted a passing reference to one Clay Bertrand, whom Garrison identified as homosexual New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw. In 1969, Garrison prosecuted Shaw for conspiring to murder the president; unfortunately for Garrison, two of his key witnesses, David Ferrie and Guy Bannister, died in suspicious circumstances before they could testify. (Aside from Oswald, Ruby, Ferrie and Bannister, anything up to forty witnesses in the JFK case have mysteriously died or been murdered.) Shaw was acquitted after less than an hour of deliberation by the jury, yet Garrison’s quest was not in vain; Ferrie would later be identified as a possible co-conspirator by the 1976 House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Also, Garrison forced the first public showing of the 486-frame, 8 mm movie shot by Abraham Zapruder of Kennedy’s killing, which shows a backwards blast of brains and blood from Kennedy’s head. On the Zapruder film, it looks as though the president has been shot from in front; Oswald was high up, to the president’s right, at the time of the shooting. If the fatal bullet came from the front, there must have been another gunman. In its 1979 report, the HSCA concluded that there was “a high probability that two gunmen” fired at Kennedy, and that he was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”. In evidence, the HSCA heard a Dictabelt recording from a Dallas police motorcyclist’s radio, on which four gunshots could be heard, one more than Oswald supposedly fired. Among the other evidence supporting the two-gunmen theory was the testimony of Dr McClelland, a physician in the Portland emergency room, that the back right-hand part of President Kennedy’s head had been blown out. Top rifle experts of the FBI could not make the Mannlicher rifle used by Oswald fire two shots in the 2.3-second time frame that Oswald allegedly fired off his first two rounds. Neither could Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, the senior instructor for the US Marine Corps Sniper Instructor School at Quantico, Virginia. “We reconstructed the whole thing,” said Hathcock, “the angle, the range, the moving target, the time limit, the obstacles, everything. I don’t know how many times we tried it, but we couldn’t duplicate what the Warren Commission said Oswald did. Now if I can’t do it, how in the world could a guy who as a non-qual on the rifle range and later only qualified ‘marksman’ do it?”

Disregarding the truly lunatic theories that John F. Kennedy was murdered by Martin Bormann (who, like Elvis Presley never dies) or time-travelling aliens, the finger of suspicion points at five possible culprits: