INTRODUCTION

This is the late Kerry Thornley's exclusive inside story -- an unprecedented first person account of his involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate the President, and his long strange personal journey towards realizing its significance.

Kerry Wendell Thornley served in the Marines with Lee Harvey Oswald at El Toro Marine Base in California, in the spring of 1959. By July of that year, Thornley had been transferred to Atsugi, Japan -- Oswald's former outfit.

An aspiring novelist, he began writing a novel inspired by Oswalds' attempted defection in Moscow that autumn.

Called The Idle Warriors, this fictionalized portrait of a disenchanted Marine in peacetime Japan who defects to Russia was completed well over a year BEFORE the assassination of President Kennedy.

The unpublished manuscript was turned over to the Warren Commission, and wound up in the National Archives. It was published for the first time in 1991 by IllumiNet Press.

After his release from the Marines, Thornley moved to New Orleans, where he participated in a number of discussions advocating the assassination of the President. When called before the Warren Commission in 1964, Thornley described in detail his relationship with Oswald, but omitted the incriminating conversations he'd had with others. (Vol. XI)

In 1964, Thornley wrote Oswald, presenting an account based on his lone-assassin theory (Novel Books). However, in 1965, Warren Report critic David Lifton contacted Thornley, and in the course of an evening, persuaded him that Oswald was innocent and that the Warren Report was a cover-up.

In 1968, Jim Garrison accused Thornley of meeting with Oswald in the French Quarter in 1963. Summoned before the Grand Jury, Thornley testified that he had not seen Oswald since 1959, and he was then charged with perjury by Garrison. While the case never came to trial, nonetheless Garrison's probe uncovered so many "remarkable coincidences," in Garrison's own words, that Thornley began to suspect that he had been an unwitting participant in a conspiracy. Among other significant coincidences, Thornley began to realize he had met David Ferrie, Guy Banister, and Clay Shaw, and that both Banister and Shaw had expressed an unusual degree of interest in The Idle Warriors.

By 1975, the Watergate revelations convinced Thornley that his most important link to the assassination was not Oswald, but the two shadowy denizens of the French Quarter known as Slim Brooks and Brother-in-Law, who had discussed killing Kennedy with him for a period of over three years. Their true identities cloaked in mystery, one bore a striking resemblance to one of the Watergate burglars, and the other answered the description of one of Guy Banister's anti-Castro coordinators.

Finally, Thornley began to realize he had been a participant in a genocidal conspiracy whose goals did not stop with the assassination of the President.

NEXT

CONFESSION TO CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE JFK
SONDRALONDON DOTCOM
Runcible Tales | Paintings | Couture | Autographs | About | Contact