Warren Commission legal professional stays firm: Oswald lone JFK assassin

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — He is retired now from a very long profession as a Cuyahoga County Widespread Pleas Court docket choose, but will often be linked to the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

Burt Griffin life a tranquil life in suburban Cleveland, but remembers the horror he felt 60 several years back as a young lawyer.

“As I step on to the elevator, anyone suggests, ‘Kennedy has been shot in Dallas,'” Griffin recalled when we sat down to talk to him. 

In Cleveland on November 22, 1963 – Burt Griffin, like most of the environment, shuddered with the information the president had been assassinated by a gunman perched substantial previously mentioned the Dallas, Texas presidential motorcade route. 

At the time Cleveland’s Griffin experienced no thought quickly he would be selected to investigate the assassination. “They have been on the lookout for men and women how had some qualifications, some expertise in the prison apply. I experienced been an assistant U.S. Attorney,” Griffin mentioned. 

In January 1964 Griffin joined the Warren Commission led by Main Justice Earl Warren. Newbie film of the motorcade captured by spectator Abe Zapruder served as primary evidence. 

The film captured the tragic 6 seconds when three pictures were being fired two of them hitting the nation’s 35th president and Texas Governor John Connally. 

The instances were being far diverse in 1963 indicated by the president using in an open-top auto alongside a route of tens of hundreds of persons. 

“Top secret Provider agents, police officers ended up not even wanting up in the home windows of these structures together the parade route,” Griffin said. 

From the Texas Book Depository developing overlooking the motorcade, the deadly photographs arrived. Lee Harvey Oswald was quickly arrested not considerably away. He was tied to the rifle made use of. In the subsequent exhaustive investigation, Oswald would be identified by the Warren Fee as the lone assassin. 

But inside hrs of his arrest, Oswald shouted he was – in his words and phrases – a “patsy” – framed by an individual “simply because he experienced defected to the Soviet Union,” Griffin explained. 

 For a long time Griffin has been so moved by his function investigating the assassination, he has composed a new expansive e book on it, “JFK, Oswald and Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Reality.”  In it, he writes of extreme moments, a presidential assassination, the real movie of it and the perplexed scene at the medical center where Kennedy is taken. He dives into the arrest of Oswald, the circus atmosphere about the Dallas police station exactly where Oswald is questioned. It is at that law enforcement station the place stability is lax, letting Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby to casually walk up to Oswald as television cameras rolled, and shoot him. All when the planet is watching. 

“So the assassin is assassinated. Which is why people today feel conspiracy,” we asked of Griffin. “Appropriate! Specifically,” reported the former Warren Commission investigator. 

Fueling Ruby’s murder of Oswald was an anti-Kennedy ad in the Dallas newspaper that November 22nd, signed by a person applying a title Ruby imagined to be that of a Jew. In his brain Ruby, a Jew, attracts a link from the advert to the assassination. In Ruby’s head, he ought to help you save the title of Jews because …. “He thinks Jews are likely to be blamed for the assassination of the president,” Griffin mentioned.   

In the comfort of his suburban Cleveland property, lengthy retired from the Cuyahoga County Frequent Pleas Court bench, Decide Burt Griffin is by no means considerably from thoughts on the assassination of President Kennedy 60 a long time back. There have been dozens of conspiracy theories on the assassination, which include people place forth in Hollywood flicks, but Griffin gives them no thing to consider. Instead he retains to the official Warren Fee report in which he contributed: that the lone gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald, the similar Oswald who never ever went to trial for killing President Kennedy – since Oswald was assassinated himself.