Kennedy Assassination Trutherism

Fifty years ago today. And we're still dealing with Kennedy truthers.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Seeking the truth behind the tragedy of Kennedy's assassination":

Barb Junkkarinen emerges from the bedroom with the gift her husband and son gave her one Christmas.

It's a 1940 Italian-made rifle, like the one Lee Harvey Oswald fired from a sixth-floor window at the Texas School Book Depository, killing President Kennedy on an autumn afternoon in Dallas. He'd spirited the weapon into the building by disguising it as a curtain rod.

"This is how Oswald carried his package," she says, holding the butt of the rifle low, the way witnesses described. "He had it cupped in his hand, like this."

Junkkarinen's husband, Juha, and son, Jason, nod at the demonstration they've seen again and again. They help adjust the unloaded weapon just so. They point out there's also a scope and ammunition.

Over more than half her lifetime, Barb Junkkarinen has made a hobby of delving into rumors, theories and contradictory facts that swirl around a killing that continues to titillate — and divide — Americans on the 50th anniversary of the events of Nov. 22, 1963.

In the world of online Kennedy discussion groups, she learned "lurkers" tune in but never post; "fringies" attribute a political motive to every turn; false witnesses claim to have been places they haven't. Those who believe Oswald acted alone are "lone-nutters."

And people like Junkkarinen are CTs, for conspiracy theorists.

She has amassed a trove of artifacts: autopsy reports, investigation documents, shelves of books and photos, and a model of the Lincoln Continental limousine Kennedy rode in when he was shot in Dealey Plaza. There's also a life-sized plastic model of a human skull she uses to make detailed arguments about bullet entry and exit.

Inside her Portland-area home office, she avidly dissects the latest theories of the paranoid and the emotionally unstable.

They include those who believe Kennedy was first hit in the throat with a bullet made of ice; that a man in Dealey Plaza fatally wounded the president with a dart fired from an umbrella; and that J. Edgar Hoover attended a party the night before the assassination celebrating JFK's imminent demise.

Junkkarinen rejects those theories. She blames gangsters and spies.

Well, I'm a "lone-nutter."

Although, since Oswald was a communist, it's natural you'd get Democrats as the leading conspiracists. See, "Secretary of State John Kerry Has 'Doubts' Lee Harvey Oswald Acted Alone in Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

And don't miss Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK.