Man says his father helped assassinate John F. Kennedy

AUSTIN, Texas — An unemployed oil equipment salesman claims that his late father, a former Dallas police officer, was one of three men who assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Ricky White scheduled a meeting with reporters Monday in Dallas to offer evidence he said implicates his father, Roscoe White, in the 1963 assassination, the Austin American-Statesman reported Sunday.

The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired the shots that killed Kennedy and wounded Texas Gov. John Connally. Despite the commission’s findings, many conspiracy theories exist.

White, 29, said he “had no conception of ever, ever giving this story” to the media, but decided to do so after the FBI began questioning him in May 1988 in relation to his claims.

Woody Specht, FBI special agent in Dallas, refused to comment on the claims, other than to say: “You really need to evaluate the source on these types of things.”

White said he can prove that his father fired two of the three bullets that killed the president and that his father, not Oswald, also killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit less than an hour after the assassination.

White said Oswald was involved in the plot, but did not fire any shots. The two other shooters were referred to in his father’s diary only by code names, White said.

Roscoe White died in a fire in 1971.

The evidence White reportedly will provide includes a rifle with telescopic sight that uses ammunition he said is similar to that used in Oswald’s gun; records showing Oswald and White served together in the Marines; and three faded messages he believes were sent by U.S. intelligence officials ordering Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963.

Bobby Inman, the former deputy CIA director, viewed the messages and told the American-Statesman they were not genuine.

White said that he and his mother read his father’s diary, which detailed the assassination. His mother, Geneva White, is seriously ill and unable to be interviewed, family members told the newspaper.

The diary disappeared from his home after it was inspected by the FBI, White says.

White said his mother worked briefly at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in Dallas. Ruby fatally shot Oswald two days after Kennedy was assassinated.

Clues found among his father’s effects and available government records show that Roscoe White and Oswald served together in the U.S. Marine Corps in the late 1950s, Ricky White said. He said his father claimed to have become acquainted with Oswald in Japan and the Philippines.

He said his father’s possessions also included a photograph, taken by Marina Oswald of her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, holding a rifle in the back yard of their Dallas home in 1963.

Oswald was discharged in 1959 and defected to the Soviet Union. He returned to the United States in 1962, settling first in Fort Worth before moving to Dallas.

The elder White was discharged in late 1962 and joined his wife and two sons in Paris, Texas. Ricky White says his family later moved to Dallas where his father sold insurance.

Dallas police records show that on Oct. 7, 1963, Roscoe White joined the department as a photographer and clerk, and that he became a patrol officer in 1964.

White says his father shot from behind a fence atop the grassy knoll that was to the right and front of Kennedy’s limousine when he was shot.