JFK, RFK and MLK: The conspiracies behind each assassination that continue to enthrall amateur sleuths
As the deadline for the release of the files looms, Rhian Lubin revisits some of the outlandish and more compelling theories out there about the killings of JFK, RFK and MLK
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:
John F Kennedy assassination — Dallas, November 22, 1963
The widely accepted theory
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.
Multiple gunmen and the umbrella man
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.
When asked by staff counsel to the committee Robert Genzman whether the umbrella ever contains “a gun or weapon of any sort,” Witt replied: “This umbrella? No.”
CIA’s ‘retaliation’ over failed operation
The failed Bay of Pigs CIA invasion in Cuba ordered by Kennedy in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government led some Americans to link the intelligence agency to the president’s murder.
In 2017, the release of classified papers detailed plans that Kennedy’s administration and the CIA developed to kill Castro, including one where they would give the keen diver an exploding seashell or contaminated diving suit.
When the assassination attempt on Castro failed, some believe that the tension between the CIA and Kennedy’s administration led the agency to retaliate by ordering the hit. The CIA has repeatedly denied the conspiracy.
Kennedy’s nephew, RFK Jr, is one believer of the CIA theory. “The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder and in the cover-up,” he told a podcast in May 2024, while on the campaign trail before he defected to Trump.
Former mobster who claims he is the true assassin
During a 25-year stint in prison for the attempted murder of two Chicago police officers, former mobster James Files converted to Christianity and owned up to a previous murder — the assassination of Kennedy.
The 83-year-old insists that he was situated behind a fence on the infamous grassy knoll and took the fatal shot, he told The Times of London.
His claims have been widely disregarded, but he maintains that he was working with a team of mafia hitmen, allegedly trained and recruited by the CIA. He told the newspaper that his debrief with CIA handlers ten days after the killing is buried in the agency’s files.
Even the former mobster doesn’t think that the files will unearth anything new. “The government tells a lie, they have to live the lie. I don’t think Trump will get any further than what’s already been disclosed,” Files told the outlet. “The CIA has lied to the American public for 61 years. Does anyone really think the CIA is going to say, ‘We’re sorry, we lied to you’? A hundred years from now they will still say that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and there was no conspiracy.”
Ted Cruz’s dad and aliens
Trump was at the center of the wild conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz’s dad, Rafael Cruz, was linked to Kennedy’s assassination.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump peddled a photograph published by the National Enquirer tabloid that last year was confirmed to be made up. The fake photo showed his then-rival’s father, a Cuban immigrant, with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans in 1963 handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets.
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said on the campaign trail. “I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?”
Trump didn’t apologize for pushing the conspiracy theory.
From one baseless theory to another, aliens were responsible for the murder of Kennedy, according to the late conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper, because the president was about to expose his knowledge of a secret martian base on the moon to Congress.
Martin Luther King Jr assassination — Memphis, April 4, 1968
MLK was the target of a wider plot
The death of King has been investigated by the authorities five times since he was murdered on the Lorraine motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.
While Congress, the Justice Department and district attorneys conclude that James Earl Ray was responsible for King’s death, the civil rights leader’s own family vehemently disagrees.
In March 1997, one of King's two sons, Dexter Scott King, visited Ray in prison and said he thought he was innocent. He died in prison the following year.
Until the day she died in 2006, King’s widow Coretta believed “there is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy,” she told a 1999 press conference. “The Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband...Mr Ray was set up to take the blame.”
To the family and many others who lived through the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, the idea of such high-level government involvement in an assassination plot was not fanciful. King knew the FBI had been operating against him. On November 18, 1964, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, had publicly denounced him as “the most notorious liar in the country.”
This all laid the groundwork for the idea that King was the target of a much bigger plot, according to his family, the Washington Post reported in 2018.
Even those investigating the case admitted Ray’s version of events “kept changing” and theorized that he may have had help, but poured cold water on the idea that it was an inside job.
“I’m not saying he didn’t have help,” John Campbell, who investigated the case, told the newspaper. “But he didn’t have the FBI, the CIA, the Memphis police or the mafia.”
‘Sharpshooting’ Memphis police officer fired fatal shot
No one has championed Ray’s innocence more than William Pepper, a civil rights activist and attorney who continued to investigate the case after Ray died.
Pepper has tracked down witnesses in Memphis to support his theory of what he believes really happened that day.
“That J. Edgar Hoover used his longtime assistant, Clyde Tolson, to deliver cash to members of the Memphis underworld, that those shadowy figures then hired a sharpshooting Memphis police officer, and that officer — not Ray — fired the fatal shot,” the Post reported, outlining Pepper’s theory.
Segregationist presidential candidate and the Ku Klux Klan
Another theory put forward by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 speculated that Ray killed King for a $50,000 bounty, offered by the supporters of presidential candidate George Wallace, a segregationist. The committee could never prove it.
Authors Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, meanwhile, argued in a book The Awful Grace of God that the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi issued the bounty. FBI files of the KKK were examined by the committee but they “found no evidence that these organizations had anything to do with the assassination.”
Robert F Kennedy assassination — Los Angeles, June 5, 1968
Killer was ‘hypnotized’
Five years after the death of his brother, Robert Kennedy had just delivered a victory speech after winning California’s Democratic primary and had momentum in primary season.
In the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Kennedy was fatally shot.
Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of the murder and jailed in 1969, but he has claimed to have no memory of what happened.
Sirhan, a Palestinian, had emigrated to the U.S. from Jordan and admitted to the crime during the trial. In the aftermath of the killing, Sirhan said he was angry at Kennedy for his support of Israel. But Sirhan’s testimony changed on numerous occasions and his legal team argued at one point that he had been hypnotized.
The second shooter theory
Kennedy’s son, RFK Jr, believes Sirhan is innocent.
RFK Jr, who was 14 when his father was murdered, met Sirhan in California’s Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility just outside of San Diego in 2018 and became convinced of his innocence during their three-hour exchange.
“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” RFK Jr, now Trump’s health secretary, told the Washington Post at the time. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.”
RFK Jr believes the theory that there was a second shooter, implicating security guard Eugene Thane Cesar in a 2023 television interview. In 1990, Cesar said that he had gone to the Ambassador Hotel that night with the intent to kill Kennedy, but “that Arab fellow shot him before I could.”
Writing in The Independent last month, former intelligence officer John Kiriakou said that the files set to be released Sunday “could shed light” on the second gunman theory.
“Sirhan fired eight shots at Kennedy with an eight-shot revolver. But Sirhan was in front of Kennedy when he began shooting. And Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi testified that the fatal shot came from behind Kennedy, at a distance of between one and three inches,” Kiriakou writes.
“Furthermore, a 2006 forensic analysis of a recording of the shooting found that between 10 and 13 shots had been fired. In 2008, John Pilger, the Australian documentary-maker, who had been covering the Kennedy campaign, witnessed his assassination and maintained he had seen a second gunman.”
Kiriakou said it is unlikely that the declassified documents will provide a “smoking gun.”
“But what we do expect,” he said, “is that the documents will at least shed some contemporaneous light on one of the most important and tragic events in American history.”
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments