Australian detective re-examines JFK shooting
A retired Australian detective says he believes a US secret service officer fired one of the bullets that felled US President John F Kennedy.
Weeks before the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, ReelzChannel will broadcast a docudrama that suggests the president was accidentally shot by a Secret Service agent.
JFK: The Smoking Gun, is based on the work of retired Australian police Detective Colin McLaren and the book Mortal Error: The Shot that Killed JFK, by Bonar Menninger.
McLaren spent four years combing through evidence from Kennedy’s death on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. He and Menninger also relied on ballistics evidence from an earlier book by Howard Donahue.
It suggests that agent George Hickey fired one of the bullets that hit Kennedy. Hickey, who is now dead, was riding in the car behind Kennedy’s limo that day.
“What we’re saying is that we believe it was a tragic accident in the heat of that moment,” McLaren told the Television Critics Association on Sunday.
When Lee Harvey Oswald fired his first shot, McLaren said Hickey responded by trying to fire back on Oswald’s position using his Secret Service-issued rifle. But because he was inexperienced with the weapon and the car lurched forward, McLaren said the shot went awry and accidentally hit Kennedy, who was struck in the neck but quite possibly not fatally wounded by Oswald’s second shot.
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“We don’t suggest that he was in any way involved in a conspiracy,” McLaren said of Hickey.
The Warren Commission report in the 1960s concluded that Oswald was the lone gunman in officially explaining the assassination.
The two-hour docu-drama will be broadcast in the US, Australia and Canada in November.
