by Jon E. Lewis
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:
CIA and Anti-Castro Cuban Exile Conspiracy
Something very bad is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds.
President John F. Kennedy
Kennedy despised the CIA for bungling the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, and afterwards accepted the resignation of the CIA chief Allen Dulles. The Agency reciprocated Kennedy’s feeling because, aside from his stinging criticism, he was intending to withdraw from Vietnam and seek detente with the Communists. According to Crime and Cover-Up (1977) by Peter Dale Scott, Kennedy’s initiatives would have caused the scaling down of the CIA empire, as well as the curbing of its lucrative narcotics-trafficking business. The Military-Industrial Complex financed the hit, since it had a vested interest in continuing the war in ’Nam, from which it was making billions. Assassination was the CIA’s stock-in-trade. It had participated in the successful murders of two (at least) heads of state, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Why not murder its own head of state? It had the expertise, after all.
HSCA reviewed these theories and concluded that, although Oswald assassinated Kennedy in a conspiracy with others, the conspiracy did not include any US Intelligence agencies. HSCA did believe, however, that anti-Castro Cuban exiles might have participated in Kennedy’s murder. These exiles had worked closely with CIA operatives in covert operations against Castro’s Cuba.
The Commies
Early JFK conspiracy theories centred on the USSR and its stooges. Kennedy had, of course, gone toe-to-toe with the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Plot and Counterplot, Edward J. Epstein suggested that Dallas was payback time by a smarting Moscow. Oswald, who had once defected to the USSR but returned to the US, was according to this hypothesis a KGB agent. A variant of the Reds dunnit is that the Communist leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, organized the assassination. During its investigation, HSCA visited Cuba and interviewed Castro about Cuban complicity in Kennedy’s assassination. He replied: “That [the Cuban Government might have been involved in Kennedy’s death] was insane. From the ideological point of view it was insane. And from the political point of view, it was a tremendous insanity.”
Obviously Castro might have been lying to HSCA, but his point is good: why give the US a 22-carat pretext to invade Cuba by assassinating its leader?
The Military-Industrial Complex
In his farewell speech to the nation, Kennedy’s predecessor Dwight Eisenhower – a former soldier and Republican, so no pinko – railed against the US arms industry: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government … We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
A year later the new White House incumbent, JFK, blamed the military-industrial complex for fanning fears about the “bomber” and “missile” gaps, which pushed military spending to levels beyond those Eisenhower already thought intolerable. Kennedy’s call for cuts and stated intention of withdrawing troops from ’Nam was hardly likely to win him friends in boardrooms and messes. So, the military-industrial complex
wanted him out of the White House, and a more amenable president in his place.
Since the military-industrial complex is a phenomenon or concept, not a corporeal body, it would have been incapable of pulling a trigger. That is not to say that elements of the military-industrial complex were not delighted with, and maybe even helped, the accession of Lyndon B. Johnson.
LBJ
One of the most vociferous blamers of Cuba was VP LBJ, whose oft-repeated mantra was: “Kennedy was trying to kill Castro. Castro got him first.”
A smokescreen? After all, on the basis of “who profits?” LBJ wins out as Barr McClellan noted in 2003’s Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK. Here Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, together with an accomplice, Edward Clark, planned and covered up the assassination in Dallas. LBJ certainly had a motive: aside from the intrinsic attraction of succeeding to the most important job in the world, Johnson was the subject of four major criminal investigations involving government contract violations, misappropriation of funds, money-laundering and bribery at the time of Kennedy’s murder. All these investigations were terminated upon LBJ’s assumption of the presidency. Worse, LBJ knew Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, a convicted murderer, because Wallace was the on-off boyfriend of LBJ’s sister Josefa; in 1998 JFK assassination researcher Walt Brown announced that he had identified a fingerprint in the “sniper’s nest” in the Book Depository as belonging to Wallace. Former CIA officer and Watergate agent E. Howard Hunt also implicated LBJ in a deathbed confession, along with CIA agents Bill Harvey, Cord Meyer and David Sanchez Morales; in Hunt’s confession the shooter was named Lucien Sarti and shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll.