Cleburne author Shaw proposes JFK assassination answers

Much seemed off from the get go, Cleburne author Gary Shaw said. Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shooting suspected presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald two days after the fact for starters.

"By that Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, I was thinking, 'Man, there's something wrong here,'" Shaw said. "I was thinking Oswald was not a lone gunman as they were already saying. They already had the case solved by then within 24 hours of [President John Kennedy] getting shot."

Shaw's skepticism over the official version of Kennedy's Nov. 22, 1963 assassination set him on a path 60 plus years and counting.

"It started me on a quest," Shaw said. "I never ever thought I'd be doing this all these years later, but I've been pursuing this since the day Oswald was shot."

A pursuit Shaw, now 86, has doggedly engaged since via combing through the Warren Commission Report and related documents to interviewing witnesses and chasing down assorted evidence. All of which, as Cleburne Rotarian Sinclaire Newby cited in her introduction, transformed Shaw into "an internationally known researcher and critic of the JFK assassination investigation" and led to his former posts as director of the JFK Assassination and Information Center in Dallas and the Assassination Archive and Research Center in Washington, D.C.

Shaw's search for answers inspired him to write several books on the subject including "Cover Up," which he started in 1969 and finally published in 1976.

"I was very successful in not selling it," Shaw joked. "It did not do very well. It was a self printed run of 3,000 copies but they now sell for $300 to $1,500 as collector's copies if you can find one."

One of Shaw's subsequent books, "Conspiracy of Silence," co-written with Dr. Charles Crenshaw, a surgeon as Parkland Hospital when Kennedy was brought in, fared better. That book topped the New York Times bestseller list.

Shaw discussed his latest book, "Admitted Assassin," during Thursday's weekly Cleburne Rotary Club meeting. In the book — which is well researched and gripping regardless of whether one believes Oswald acted alone, or others were involved — Shaw and his co-authors target former Dallas police officer Roscoe White as the true killer of President Kennedy. Or at least one of them.

It's a book decades years in the making, Shaw said, partly due to research but also partly because, well, an inordinate number of assassination witnesses and researchers have met untimely, that is to say "convenient" ends in the 61 years since Kennedy rode through Dallas.

"You can't do this and not think that," Shaw said when Newby asked if he ever felt like he had to look over his shoulder. "You watch your back but refuse to be paranoid. But I have been run off the road, had my office broken into. With this book I was afraid for [White's son's] life as he had been threatened. That's why we waited 30 years to publish the book."

Shaw said he first met Ricky White, White's son, in 1988.

"He came to see me and said, 'I think my father killed the president,'" Shaw said.

White's father was, like Oswald, a U.S. Marine, Shaw said, and the two possibly knew each other having served together during the same period and having been on a ship together. Roscoe White, once his service wrapped up joined the Dallas Police Department, possibly courtesy of special treatment, while his wife went to work for Ruby.

Roscoe White "quote unquote" died in an accident in 1971, Shaw said.

"Admitted Assassin" details Ricky White's story of military correspondence placing his father and at least two others in Dallas on that fateful day. Diaries and scrapbooks Ricky White discovered after his father's death contain admissions by his father of having shot and killed Kennedy, according to the book. Diaries FBI agents allegedly stole though the scrapbook and other information remains accounted for. Evidence, according to the book, indicates that Roscoe White carried out numerous hits before and after the Kennedy assassination including hits on a number of witnesses after the fact.

The mafia, CIA, military/industrial complex, take your pick, Shaw replied in answer to Rotarian Dan Taylor's question of who exactly wanted JFK dead.

"[Kennedy] had made enemies with every major force in this country," Shaw said. "How many believe that our government is really in Washington D.C.? Something goes on outside D.C. that tells D.C. what to do and Kennedy refused to go along with the powers that be."

Of Ruby at least, Shaw has first-hand knowledge.

"Now, I don't look old enough to know Jack Ruby," Shaw joked. "But I was in his club many times."

While still a senior at Cleburne High School in 1957, Shaw and three of his friends formed a doo-wop combo. They frequently backed rockabilly singer Johnny Carroll, a Godley native, in Ruby's Dallas clubs and other venues including the Texas Theatre where Oswald was later arrested the day of Kennedy's shooting.

Shaw said he encountered Ruby numerous times from '57 to '62 or so.

It's more what he suspected than that he thought it was out of character for Ruby to shoot Oswald that raised his suspicions, Shaw said.

"In Dallas through those years before it was a whispered thing about Ruby being connected to the mob," Shaw said after his Thursday talk. "Haven't heard all that and that association is what made me think that it was probably a mob attempt to silence Oswald so he couldn't talk. Plus Ruby knew 90% of the Dallas police officers and could pretty much go anywhere he wanted."

Shaw spoke too of Ruby's alleged connections to Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, who shared a mistress, Judith Exner, with JFK.

Rotarian Paul Verwers asked Shaw if President-Elect Donald Trump might, as he has indicated in the past, release additional governmental files tied to the assassination.

Perhaps, Shaw said, adding that any new information is always welcome. How revealing any such information may be remains to be determined, he said.

"We've fought to get these documents released that they've sequestered and hidden all these years," Shaw said. "But I will guarantee you that there's not one smidgen of information in those files that would lead us to the culprit that killed John Kennedy. If a document like that ever was written it was long ago deep sixed."

Rotarian Jerry Cash asked about Ruby's "friend" Candy Barr, LBJ and Bobby Kennedy.

"There's actually more evidence of a conspiracy in the death of Robert Kennedy than there is of his brother," Shaw said.

Shaw concluded by recalling how much he enjoyed his membership in the Cleburne Rotary Club in the 1970s and '80s.

"I was 10 years old at the time," Shaw joked.