President-elect Donald Trump promised that the remaining classified files related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy would be released, and when he said this, it renewed interest in one of America’s most enduring mysteries. Now, years after that fateful day in Dallas, new theories of who really pulled the trigger keep surfacing. “I think that he will do his best to do it, but the problem is, they’ve had 61 years to do what they want to with those documents,” said J Gary Shaw, co-author of the released book Admitted Assassin . Shaw went to school with Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer and believes the truth might be harder to find than many expect.
The most cogent alternative theory was put forward in a book by Shaw and his co-author, Brian Edwards. They claim to have identified the ‘actual’ assassin, former US Marine Roscoe White, and pointed to his links with both Oswald and Jack Ruby. White, who became a Dallas police officer, served with Oswald in the Far East , and there is photographic evidence of them serving together. “It was a far better suspect than Lee Harvey Oswald, that’s for sure,” Shaw maintains.
But the timing is even more curious: White joined the Dallas Police Department in October 1963, just one month before the assassination and at the same time that Oswald began working at the Texas School Book Depository. The authors’ research led to even more astonishing interconnections. They found out that White’s wife worked for Ruby and included parts of White’s personal scrapbook, with codes and cryptography still partly unsolved, in their book, as per The Sun .
White was mysteriously killed in an industrial fire in 1971, but years later, his son approached Shaw with a bombshell of a confession—he believed his father killed Kennedy. “Eventually, we got the artifacts that are in the book, the orders for him to kill the president, and then to follow up on killing some witnesses that were troublesome to the case,” Shaw said.
Rear seat of JFK’s limousine, right after the assassination, 1963. pic.twitter.com/eMw4Zdsc5v
— Creepy (@creepydotorg) November 22, 2024
The book also includes the first-ever published photo of tobacco heiress Doris Duke, whose connection to the case was through her husband, Dominican ladiesman Porfirio Rubirosa, who died under mysterious circumstances in a car collision two years after the assassination. Edwards, a former police officer himself, pointed out that though they believe they know who pulled the trigger, the bigger mystery still remains. “Roscoe White was acting on orders from high above him,” the author said. “He was a soldier. He was doing as he was told. He thought he was doing it as a patriotic event.”
As far as the classified JFK files are concerned, this quest for transparency isn’t new to Trump. While he did the same during his first term, he had promised a similar move but buckled under pressure from the CIA and FBI to prevent some documents from being declassified. Now, as president-elect, he has ramped up his pledge to disclose any remaining files.
One of the more fascinating parts of the Joe Rogan podcast with Donald Trump was when he asked why he didn’t release remaining JFK files. Trump responded that there are people still alive that are involved. Who do you think would be revealed? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/ajtZy4cCwT
— Jimmy Corsetti (@BrightInsight6) October 28, 2024
In an interview recently with Joe Rogan, Trump let some new reasons slip for his holding back on some document releases. “There was concern from good people,” he said, possibly referring to Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State. The delay appeared to be because such a move would expose people ‘working for the government’ or are ‘somehow involved,’ as per Forbes .