Who Killed John F. Kennedy? Seven Suspects Who Aren’t Lee Harvey Oswald

Clay Shaw, The Only JFK Assassination Suspect Ever Put On Trial

Public DomainClay Shaw, the only person ever put on trial for the JFK assassination.

David Ferrie wasn’t the only person that Garrison suspected. The D.A. also claimed that a New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw had something to do with the JFK assassination — and Garrison even took Shaw to trial.

As The New York Times reports, Garrison believed that Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw had worked together to assassinate the president. With Ferrie and Oswald dead, Garrison focused his energies on prosecuting Shaw. But the 1969 trial was widely seen as both a circus and homophobic.

Shaw was known to be gay, and Garrison had speculated at one point that the Kennedy assassination was a “homosexual thrill killing.” Indeed, much of Shaw’s trial was focused on Shaw’s tight-fitting pants as well as the five leather whips that had been discovered at his home (Shaw claimed that the whips were merely props left over from Mardi Gras.)

What’s more, Garrison’s parade of witnesses hardly inspired confidence. The New York Times reports that they included a heroin addict, an insurance salesman who had to undergo hypnosis before taking the stand, a man who claimed to be the reincarnation of Julius Caesar, and a man who checked his own daughter’s fingerprints before letting her in the house.

The Times-Picayune ArchiveClay Shaw following his arrest as an accused JFK assassin in 1967.

In the end, it took a jury less than an hour to acquit Shaw.

“I was arrested and charged with what must surely be the most shocking crime of the century, of which I had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever,” Clay Shaw later said of the experience. He called his trial “one of the seediest and shabbiest episodes in American judicial history.”

That said, Garrison wasn’t entirely wrong in his suspicions that Shaw was hiding something. It was later revealed that Shaw was indeed involved in a top-secret CIA organization called the Domestic Contact Service (DCS), in which Shaw reported any shady business dealings to the CIA.

And Garrison ultimately believed that the answer to the question “Who killed JFK?” lay with the Central Intelligence Agency.

History Uncovered Podcast

Episode 96: Who Really Killed JFK?

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the Warren Commission determined that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president — but many believe that there's more to the story.