Who really killed JFK?

Some conspiracy theories are fun. This one isn't really. A president was shot in front of his wife and a cheering crowd, and the man accused of doing it was himself shot dead two days later, live on television. If you had designed an event to make people suspicious forever, you couldn't have done it better.

I wanted to look at it properly. It's the granddaddy of all modern conspiracy theories.

What happened

On 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was riding in an open car through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. At 12:30, shots were fired. Kennedy was hit in the neck and the head. Texas Governor John Connally, sitting in front of him, was badly wounded.

Within hours, police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine who had once defected to the Soviet Union and come back. He worked at the Texas School Book Depository, overlooking the route, and a rifle was found on the sixth floor. Oswald said he was "just a patsy". Two days later, while being moved through a police basement, he was shot by a nightclub owner called Jack Ruby. There would be no trial.

The official answer

In 1964, the Warren Commission said Oswald fired three shots from the sixth-floor window and acted alone.

The most attacked part of the report is the so-called "single bullet theory". It says one bullet passed through Kennedy's neck and then went on to cause all of Connally's wounds, in his back, chest, wrist and thigh. Critics nicknamed it the "magic bullet", especially because the bullet was found in surprisingly good condition.

When the official story needs a "magic bullet", people will start looking for a magician.

Why so many people don't buy it

The Zapruder film. A local man, Abraham Zapruder, filmed the whole thing on his home movie camera. In the film, Kennedy's head moves sharply backwards at the fatal shot, which to many viewers suggests a shot from the front, from the grassy knoll, not from behind.

The grassy knoll. Several witnesses said they heard shots from behind a wooden fence on a small hill in front of the car.

A second investigation disagreed. In 1979, a US House committee concluded that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy". That conclusion leaned heavily on a police radio recording that seemed to contain a fourth shot. A few years later, a panel of scientists re-examined that recording and found that the sounds came from about a minute after the shooting.

The CIA did hide things. This is the part that matters most to me. Later investigations showed the CIA hadn't told the Warren Commission about its secret plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, and that it had been watching Oswald closely weeks before, during a visit to Mexico City. Governments hiding things isn't a theory here. It's documented.

What the evidence says now

Modern 3D reconstructions of the car show that Connally was sitting lower and further inside than Kennedy, and turned in his seat. From the sixth-floor window, a straight line through Kennedy's neck does lead to Connally's wounds. The "magic" bullet path looks much less magical when you model the real positions. Medical experts also explain the backward head movement as a reaction of the body, not proof of a shot from the front. That's still argued about.

And then there are the files. After Oliver Stone's film JFK in 1991 caused public outrage, the US passed a law to release all the assassination records. That took decades. Tens of thousands of pages were finally released in 2025. Historians found plenty of embarrassing detail about the CIA's Cold War operations. What they didn't find was a smoking gun showing that someone other than Oswald pulled the trigger.

Where I land

I think the evidence points to Oswald firing the shots. I also understand completely why people don't trust that answer. The CIA withheld information, the investigation was rushed, and the man who could have told us the most was killed before he could speak.

I think the real cover-up was probably not murder. It was embarrassment: intelligence agencies hiding how much they knew about Oswald, and the things they were doing that they didn't want anyone to see. Secrecy around the truth can look exactly like a lie.

That might be the most important lesson of all the conspiracy theories in this section. When institutions hide things, even small, unrelated things, people fill the gap with the worst possible story. And sometimes, honestly, who can blame them?

Verdict: most likely Oswald, most likely alone. But the secrecy was real, and that's why the doubt will never die.

— Desly