JFK’s Assassination’s Second Shooter Was Hiding In A Sewer

The JFK assassination led to a probe by the office of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison — an investigation recreated by Oliver Stone for the 1991 movie “JFK” — but a crucial piece of evidence supporting the team's theory linking the CIA to President John F. Kennedy's murder was found too late!

I, Stephen Jaffe (left), am the last surviving member of Garrison’s team, which built a case against local businessman and suspected CIA operative Clay Shaw in connection the assassination. We’d charged Shaw in March 1967 with conspiring to murder Kennedy nearly four years earlier.

In November 1967, I shot photos at three spots in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, where we suspected kill squads had fired upon JFK: the Texas School Book Depository building, the “grassy knoll” and the second floor of the Dal-Tex Building. But back in New Orleans, I felt something eluded me.

Secret Service Agent Clint Hill had told the Warren Commission the second shot fired at JFK’s motorcade (recreated here in 1996) “had almost a double sound — as though you were standing against something metal and firing into it, and you hear both the sound of a gun going off and the sound of the cartridge hitting the metal place.”

I kept thinking, “What am I missing?” Then I had it — I had stood on the potential spot Hill had been describing and overlooked it! I flew back to Dallas and obtained the 1934 plans for the sewer system beneath Dealey Plaza.

Just as I recalled: A manhole cover was on the north side of Elm St., 54 feet from where Kennedy had been shot. Under this manhole was a cement space about the size of a small walk-in closet. From that space, two pipes ran off large enough for a man to crawl through.

One led under the grassy knoll — a perfect escape route amid the madness. I rented a convertible and enlisted two assistants. At 4 a.m., I removed the manhole cover and lowered myself into the concrete “bunker.”

My helpers drove the rental 20 times through the plaza. The sight lines added up with given witness statements. Cartridges, if I had been firing a rifle, would have fallen onto concrete and accounted for the metallic double sound reported by Hill.

What I didn’t know at the time was the most compelling piece of circumstantial evidence supporting our theory. In 1976, Louisiana State Trooper Francis Fruge told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Dallas police raided anti-Castro Cuban and known CIA operative Sergio Arcacha Smith’s home after JFK’s slaying.

There, they found diagrams of the Dealey Plaza sewer system. Fruge, under oath, told the committee Dallas Police Capt. Will Fritz — who notably interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald — had admitted as much. I have remained silent about my sewer sniper discovery until now — because history can no longer wait.