October 13, 1999

TC resident teaches class on assisination of Kennedy

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       While the actual sequence of events may be lost to history, the outcome of the shooting 36 years ago in Dealey Plaza changed the course of a nation.
      When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it quickly became the crime of the century, morbidly fascinating a nation even decades later. While the mystery surrounding the shooting still shows no signs of unraveling completely, a dedicated cadre of assassination experts keep the investigation alive.
      Swapping documents, enhanced videos and theories on the Internet and via mail, many of these investigators have come to believe in a conspiracy, both to kill the president and then to cover it up. Locally, Jeff Shaw, the mild-mannered manager of Oleson's Food Store on Garfield Avenue, is doing his part to solve the mystery.
      "I'm interested in uncovering the truth because I believe the psyche of our country was damaged on November 22, 1963, and those wounds still aren't healed," said Shaw, a city resident who is has been researching and following the assassination investigation off and on for decades. "The Warren Commission slapped a Band-Aid over the wound. For me, I still feel a part of the generation that lost some of its innocence with the shooting."
      Shaw was eight when Kennedy was assassinated. The enormity of the event did not hit him at first, despite being let out of school early, until he saw the bus driver crying. Later when he got home and his mother was in front of the TV with her eyes bloodshot, he knew something big had happened. Like the rest of America, the family was glued to their TV set for the weekend and witnessed Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald.
      "I do remember talk of communist conspiracy and the term grassy knoll," recalled Shaw, a native of Indianapolis. "But I was more frightened a year earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the airport where my dad worked in Indianapolis was stockpiling food for employees and their families."
      In high school, he found a box of papers on that day in the garage his father had collected from various cities and his interest was piqued. After following the investigation closely during the 1970s and early 80s, he took a ten-year hiatus from reading about it and conducting research.
      Just three years ago he got bitten by the bug of curiosity again and has not looked back since. Shaw has since corresponded with the experts who have authored the definitive accounts of the shooting and subsequent investigations. When the JFK Act of 1992 released up to four million original documents from numerous government agencies, he and other researchers began the time-consuming process of sifting through looking for pieces of the puzzle.
      A few years ago, Shaw purchased a rifle the same model as Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly had, loaded it with the same caliber bullets and fired it into buffalo rib bones propped up 60 yards away. The resulting shredded metal fragments were the final straw that convinced him something was not adding up between the official version of the event, sanctioned by the Warren Commission, and physical evidence.
      With this experiment, he proved to himself that one bullet could not do all the damage it was purported to do, inflicting seven different injuries on two people. Therefore, he believed that there had to be another shooter, most likely positioned on the infamous grassy knoll, firing multiple times. This is a popular theory in the research community investigating the shooting.
      "The big debate in the research community now is whether the Zapruder film was altered and I believe it was," Shaw said. "Another question is whether Kennedy's body was altered between taking off at Dallas' Love Field and reaching Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy. I believe it was."
      Shaw has compiled so many tapes, magazines and documents, which, combined with his passion for the whole issue, prompted him to put together a course entitled Who Killed JFK? for NMC's Extended Educational Services division. Last fall, he drew eight students, some skeptical of his conspiracy theories, some agreeing, but all interested in finding out more.
      "It's not like we're not interested in the assassination, it's an intriguing topic and unresolved in most people's minds," said Carol Evans, director of Extended Education Services at Northwestern Michigan College. "As in many cases of looking at what courses the community might be interested in, this is something different, kind of a curiosity
      For more information on Who Killed JFK, which begins again this month, contact the Extended Education Services division at 922-1170.