Forty-eight years later, who REALLY shot JFK?

jgibbs@acnpapers.com

Forty-eight years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the majority of Americans still don't believe the Warren Commission's findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of the president.

And, every year, thousands of people visit the JFK museum in Dallas, looking for clues to what many call America's Greatest Unsolved Mystery.

"There's no way that Oswald killed President Kennedy that fateful day in November," said Bruce Engelman, a Baptist minister in Fort Worth and Chaplain of the Fort Worth Police Department. "His supervisor and another employee did a search of the building about 78 seconds after the shots from the 6th floor were fired and found Oswald at the Coke machine getting a Coke. They said he didn't look tired or nervous or anything. So you have that fact. Plus, you have the fact that Oswald was a lousy shot. There's no way he could have hit the president with a single, bolt-action rifle and fired it three times like the Warren Commission say he did."

Engelman has written his own book on the Kennedy assassination, Eternal Flame, which he started on Nov. 22, 1993 at the Kennedy Memorial in Washington, D.C. and finished on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas Nov. 22, 2003.

Engelman, who has worked for several national news organizations, including ABC, has a national sports talk show that he records every Tuesday night. Last Tuesday, however, he had a special guest in his recording studio -- Mike Brownlow of Dallas. Brownlow was a 13-year-old kid who was near the Grassy Knoll in Dallas when JFK was shot.

"I heard one shot and then, immediately after that, I heard a second shot," Brownlow said. "Then, after that, I heard several shots in succession -- POP! POP! POP! Then, in a matter of five or six seconds, it was all over. The shooting had stopped. And I definitely think that the last shot I heard came from the Grassy Knoll."

Brownlow said that, after the shots were fired, people started running up toward the Gassy Knoll, trying to find out where the shots had come from.

Brownlow said he has been an ardent student of the JFK assassination since that day and that it is a day that he will never forget.

"It was easily one of the saddest, if not the saddest day of my life," he said. "I still remember it all very vividly. And there's no one that can convince me that Oswald even fired a shot that day. He was down in the cafeteria eating his lunch when all the shooting happened."

Brownlow said that he personally suspects vice president Lyndon Baines Johnson and the CIA as being the one behind the assassination attempt but Engelman said he doesn't necessarily agree with that theory.

"Everybody's got a different theory about it," Engelman said. "During the course of writing my book, I talked to more than 100 people who were either eye-witnesses to the case or had some kind of first-hand experience about it. Even after all of my research, it is still unclear to me who may have actually killed the president that day. It could have easily been Jack Ruby because many people said that they saw him on the grassy knoll that day."

Engelman said that, contrary to popular belief, Ruby was a more significant figure in the assassination than most people give him credit for.

"The standard line that people will say is that Jack Ruby was just a wannabe, a guy who wanted to be a big shot and was really just a nobody who wound up shooting Oswald because he just happened into an opportunity to do it," Engelman said. "But that's not true. Jack Ruby was a major underworld figure and had a lot of ties to organized crime in Chicago before he ever moved to Dallas and opened his nightclub."

Engelman spent 10 years writing his book Eternal Flame and did it, mainly, out of his respect for President Kennedy.

"In my lifetime, there have been two great presidents," Engelman said. "JFK and Ronald Reagan. Both were great men. And, even though I just a four-year old kid growing up in Ohio at the time of Kennedy's assassination, I was still very moved by it and it has always fascinated me because, to me, it has remained one of America's great unsolved mysteries."

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