"IT might not have been Good Friday W but make no mistake, a man was crucified that day." That date was November 22nd, 1963 and the death that so concerns Jimmy O'Hagan and brought him to Liverpool from Ireland at the weekend to attend the first European conference on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not the US president's but Lee Harvey Oswald's. Within a few hours of being arrested for the murders of Kennedy and police officer Tippett, Oswald was himself shot dead by night club owner Jack Ruby, thus denying Oswald the chance of defending himself and the world the chance of laying to rest the Kennedy myth.
After 18 years of study Mr O'Hagan, of Magherafelt, Co Derry, believes he has stumbled on information which will clear Oswald of all blame. Sadly he had no intention of revealing to The Irish Times, or anyone else at the conference, the exact nature of the "explosive" evidence safely lodged in a bank vault back home. Just knowledge of what the eight page document reveals puts him in danger, he explained. But from whom he wouldn't say.
"As for these Americans," he said, referring to the speakers, "I can pick holes in everything they say. They're in this for one thing only. Megabucks."
While it is certainly true that "In my book," or "In the book I'm working on" were asides that occurred rather too frequently for comfort during the weekend, it is hard to believe that money is what drives these people to dedicate their lives to a case now 33 years old.
Noticeable by their absence among the authors were the two speakers on the sceptic side of the conspiracy divide. Paul Mahon a former Liverpool local politician who accepts the official version in its totality and Chris Longbottom, a lecturer in children's dentistry at Dundee University who, although dismissive of the Warren Commission's findings, accepts the medical evidence which points to the shots being fired from the Book Depository where Oswald worked.
But adherence to the official version is not what brought most people to the conference. United against Mahon and Longbottom were ranged the full spectrum of conspiracy theorists who believe that the medical evidence was falsified to accommodate the establishment's position that Oswald acted on his own. Disbelieve the medical evidence, however, and by extension you have also to reject the photographic evidence, from the famous Zapruder home movie footage, through snaps of bystanders and autopsy reference stills. How all this could have been tampered with was never explained. As with too many aspects of the story, the more complicated the procedure and detail, the more "obvious" that whoever the perpetrators were, they had help from on high.
And my goodness, what detail there was. Names Alex Heidel, Sylvia Oddio, Gayton Fonzi, General Escallante, Operation Mongoose. Numbers from film frames to bullet sizes, from secret files to war plans. And with every name and number a new layer to the labyrinth. This was club talk man talk serving to bind the 164 or so men present and exclude the six women (counting myself), none of whom contributed a single word.
Peter Dawnay, a particularly vocal member of the audience whose frequent interruptions were a welcome source of light relief, warned me that Paul Mahon was "a plant". A retired publisher in his 60s and a dead ringer for George Bernard Shaw, Mr Dawnay sees the assassination of Kennedy as the most important historical event of the second half of the 20th century.
"Quite simply it was a coup d'etat." I should be on my guard, he warned. "The CIA are everywhere. I believe I see one of them now." So saying he indicated with his chin an American panellist who bore more than a passing resemblance to Kevin Keegan in his pre-management days and whose oeuvre includes The JFK Assassination Quiz Book.
Around 1,000 books have now been written about those six seconds in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, not to mention documentaries and feature films.
"We know the Where and the When," a speaker reminded the audience. "But we still don't know the Who, the How and the Why." Some 83 per cent of Americans, it seems, agree with this view. However, to the uncommitted observer the more puzzling question surrounding what was described as "the greatest murder mystery of all time" is why, after 33 years, people still question the official findings and find the fantastical so much more easy to accept than the mundane.
Alasdair Stark, head of American Studies at a university college in Winchester, England believes the conspiracy theorists are self deluding. "They say they're libertarian and confronting authority, but they're not. They want to be reassured that somebody is pulling the levers. It's the appeal of magic to sort our miserable lives out to believe there's somebody out there in charge. It's end of the century, millennium stuff. If you want proof, take a look at the books on sale. Side by side with the Kennedy stuff, most of which is unreadable, are things on aliens."
Back in the conference hall, there was evidence from an actual eye witness, Dr Charles Crenshaw, who was present in Trauma Room One at Parkland Memorial Hospital where Kennedy was taken, and where he died. Dr Crenshaw's evidence on the location of Kennedy's head wound was very different to that reported in the later autopsy and recorded by photographs. It also does not accord with the memories of other doctors involved. Speaking with some uncertainty, possibly as the result of a recent stroke, Crenshaw is clearly not a well man and questioning was less rigorous than perhaps it could have been. But to believe him is to believe that all the photographic evidence has been tampered with in short, a conspiracy of massive proportions.
At the end of Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express, we learn that everyone had a motive. The same, it seems, is true of Kennedy's assassination. Though far from complete, the main suspects are as follows the Mafia, Texas oilmen, CIA, FBI, anti Castro and pro Castro forces, military industrial complex, Dallas police, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. Candidates for role of gunman include the driver of the limousine, secret service agent in the back up car, three Corsicans, and even Jackie Kennedy with a Deringer hidden in her handbag.
Paul Mahon believes that the focus changes with the times and parallels the concerns of the day. "The conspiracy is," he explained, "a wilderness of mirrors in which nothing can be trusted."
