David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

In September 1971 a shipment of 90,000 metric tons of seed grain arrived in the Iraqi port of Basra. The American barley and Mexican wheat — which had been chemically treated with methylmercury to prevent rot — were sprayed a bright pink to indicate their lethal coating, and clear warnings were printed on the bags — but only in English and Spanish. Before they could be distributed to the farmers, the bags were stolen from the docks and the grain was sold as food to the starving populace. The Iraqi government, embarrassed at its criminal negligence or for other reasons, hushed up the story, and it was not until two years later that an American newsman came up with evidence that 6,530 hospital cases of mercury poisoning were attributable to the unsavoury affair. Officials would admit to only 459 deaths, but total fatalities were probably more like 6,000, with another 100,000 suffering such permanent effects as blindness, deafness and brain damage.

In the spring of 1972 the Chandka Forest area in India — already suffering from drought — was hit by a searing heat wave as well. The local elephants, who normally were no problem, became so crazed by the high temperatures and lack of water that the villagers told authorities they were afraid to venture out and to farm their land. By summer the situation had worsened. On July 10, the elephant herds went berserk and stampeded through five villages, leaving general devastation and 24 deaths in their wake.

According to the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin in the killing of President Kennedy. However, a large majority of the public believes that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, the military, pro-Castro Cubans and anti-Castro Cubans have all been cited as possible forces behind the scenes. Among the people accused of doing the actual shooting are the following:

According to jailed French mobster Christian David, Kennedy was shot by three Corsican assassins. David named the deceased Sarti as one of the gunmen and offered to reveal the identities of the others if he was given his freedom. According to David, the two unnamed assassins were in buildings to the rear of the President, while Sarti fired from the grassy knoll in front of the motorcade. The British television documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy identified Sarti as the man in a police uniform apparently firing a rifle on the grassy knoll visible in a computer-enhanced enlargement of a photo taken by Mary Moorman at the moment of the fatal shot.

Harrelson — the father of actor Woody Harrelson — has been serving a life sentence since 1979 for murdering federal judge John H. Wood Jr. During a six-hour stand-off before his arrest, Harrelson held a gun to his head and confessed to shooting Kennedy. He later retracted the statement, saying he had been high on cocaine at the time.

Minister Raymond Broshears reported that David Ferrie — a bizarre individual often suspected of involvement in the assassination who had ties to Oswald, the CIA and the Mafia — would, after getting drunk, often talk about his role in the conspiracy. Ferrie reportedly said his job was to wait in Houston for two gunmen, one of them a Cuban exile Ferrie referred to as Carlos, and then fly them on the second leg of an escape route that was to take the assassins to South Africa via South America. Ferrie told Broshears the plan fell apart when the assassins, flying in a light plane, decided to skip the stop in Houston and press on to Mexico. They allegedly died when their plane crashed near Corpus Christi, Texas.

According to assassination researcher Penn Jones, Castillo has stated under hypnosis that ‘he was on the parade route with a rifle that day… [with] instructions to shoot at a man in a car with red roses’. Jackie Kennedy was the only person in the motorcade with red roses; all the other women had been given yellow Texas roses.

According to ‘Harry Dean’ (the ‘war name’ of a man who claims to be a former CIA agent), as quoted by W.B. Morris and R.B. Cutler in Alias Oswald , the assassins were anti-Castro activists Hall and del Valle, who were hired by the John Birch Society. Although Hall says he was at his home in California on November 22, 1963, he allegedly told the Dallas Morning News in 1978 that, a month before the assassination, right-wing activists working with the CIA tried to recruit him for a plot to kill Kennedy. As for del Valle, he died under suspicious circumstances in 1967. Del Valle, who was being searched for as a possible witness in the Clay Shaw conspiracy trial, was discovered shot through the heart and with his head split open by a machete.

In 1992 Kerry Thornley appeared on the television show A Current Affair and said he had been part of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. His co-conspirators were two men he called ‘Brother-in-Law’ and ‘Slim’. Thornley also denied having been responsible for framing Oswald, whom Thornley had befriended in the Marines: ‘I would gladly have killed Kennedy, but I would never have betrayed Oswald.’ He added, ‘I wanted [Kennedy] dead. I would have shot him myself.’ Thornley has also claimed that he and Oswald were the products of a genetic engineering experiment carried out by a secret neo-Nazi sect of eugenicists called the Vril Society, and that the two of them had been manipulated since childhood by Vril overlords.

Soutre, a terrorist in the French Secret Army Organisation, is believed by some researchers to have been recruited by the CIA to serve as an assassin. According to CIA documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by researcher Mary Ferrell, French intelligence reported that Soutre was in Fort Worth on the morning of November 22, 1963, and in Dallas that afternoon. Soutre was picked up by US authorities in Texas within 48 hours of the assassination and expelled from the country.

In 1990 Ricky White claimed his father Roscoe, a Dallas police officer, had been one of President Kennedy’s assassins. According to Ricky, a detailed description of the conspiracy could be found in Roscoe’s diary, which had disappeared after it was taken by the FBI for inspection. Two other gunmen, referred to in the diary only by the code names ‘Saul’ and ‘Lebanon’, were also involved. In addition, Roscoe’s widow, Geneva, told journalist Ron Laytner that she had overheard Roscoe and Jack Ruby plotting to kill Kennedy, adding, ‘We at first thought the assassination was more Mob [but later realised] it was more CIA.’ Fifteen years before Ricky and Geneva White went public, Hugh McDonald, in Appointment in Dallas , identified one of the killers as a professional assassin known as Saul. McDonald claimed to have tracked down Saul, who admitted to having been paid $50,000 to shoot the President. Saul claimed to have fired from the Dallas County Records Building — which was also described in Roscoe White’s diary as one of the locations the assassins had shot from. Despite these similarities, there are some inconsistencies in the plots described by McDonald and Ricky White. Most notably, Roscoe White in his diary and Saul in his meeting with McDonald each allegedly claimed to have fired the fatal shot.