By Jacob G. Hornberger
The Future of Freedom Foundation
June 10, 2026
Even before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the "patsy," Lee Harvey Oswald, was a "Dead Man Walking." There was no way that the orchestrators of the assassination and the cover-up would have ever permitted him to come to trial. Silencing Oswald by killing him immediately after the assassination was always part and parcel of the assassination and its cover-up.
How can we be certain of this ? By examining the circumstances surrounding the fraudulent autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment conducted on President Kennedy's body on the very evening of the assassination.
A fraudulent autopsy was also part and parcel of the assassination and its cover-up. I detail various aspects of the fraud in my book The Kennedy Autopsy.There is no need to cover them again here in this article.
But what I wish to focus on here is is how the autopsy showed that Oswald's days were numbered even before JFK's assassination.
Among the most important aspects of the cover-up were to get JFK's body out of Dallas without an autopsy and into the hands of the U.S. military, whose job it would be to conduct a fraudulent autopsy - one that would alter the president's body in order to falsely establish that all the shots at Kennedy came from his rear and that none came from his front.
Why was it important to show that all the shots were fired from the rear ? Because that's where the patsy Oswald had been positioned. By making it appear that all the shots had come from the rear, it would be easier to frame the patsy.
Of course, the obvious question arises: If one is going to frame a person who is supposedly firing from the rear, why have any shots whatsoever fired from the front ? The answer is that that was part of the ingenious way that the orchestrators succeeded in immediately shutting down the official investigation into the assassination, as I explain in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
Thus, a team of Secret Service agents, in violation of Texas state law, and operating on orders, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital in Dallas with the president's body without permitting an autopsy to be conducted. They then transported the body to Air Force One at Dallas Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it.
The body was then flown to Andrews Air Base in Maryland, where Johnson dutifully delivered it into the hands of the military, which then proceeded to conduct the fraudulent autopsy, including the top-secret pre-autopsy alteration of the president's wounds.
The orchestrators necessarily had to enlist Navy personnel, especially enlisted men, to help with the autopsy - men who had nothing to do with the assassination. To ensure they kept their mouths shut about what they had seen and done, including with respect to the fraudulent pre-autopsy procedures, they were forced to sign written secrecy oaths and then were threatened with court martial and criminal prosecution if they ever talked.
The military also knew that they could count on a deferential press not to ask any questions or initiate any investigation into the autopsy. Given that this was the height of the old Cold War racket, the press was simply too scared to question the official narrative stating that a communist former Marine had killed the president.
But there was one big flaw in the fraudulent-autopsy plan: criminal-defense lawyers. It was a virtual certainty that Oswald would have a top-notch team of criminal-defense lawyers representing him at trial, which would have been a death-penalty murder trial under Texas state law.
Those lawyers would have never accepted the military's official autopsy report at face value, especially when they discovered all of the unusual circumstances surrounding its preparation. They would have subpoenaed every single person involved in the autopsy and called them to testify as to what they had seen and what they had done. The entire fraud would have come to light, especially since witnesses would not have been permitted to sit in the courtroom and listen to the testimony of other witnesses.
Consider, for example, Douglas Horne's remarkable documentary The Three Bethesda Casket Entries Revisited . That documentary, which I highly recommend watching, conclusively establishes that there were three separate casket entries into the Bethesda morgue. The military was able to keep two of those casket entries secret for many years.
Today, of course, the last thing the mainstream press is interested in is getting to the bottom of those three casket entries. There is a simple reason for that: There is no innocent explanation for them. They necessarily equate to criminal conduct on the part of the military. They were part and parcel of the fraudulent pre-autopsy alteration of JFK's wounds. That's not something the mainstream press is going to address.
But if we go back to 1964, when a criminal trial would have been conducted, Oswald's criminal-defense team would have subpoenaed every single person involved in those three top-secret casket entries and forced them to testify as to the fraudulent purpose of the casket entries. All the secrecy oaths that Navy personnel had been forced to sign would have been ripped apart during the trial, given the defendant's right to defend himself from a wrongful prosecution. The entire fraudulent autopsy would have been exposed at trial.
What does all this have to do with Oswald as Dead Man Walking ? One of the most revealing aspects of the three pre-autopsy casket entries, the pre-autopsy fraud, and then all the fraudulent activity during the autopsy itself was that there was total indifference on the part of the autopsy personnel to the possibly of having to later testify in a criminal trial. In other words, no one ever said, "How is all this going to be explained when everyone is called to testify at trial?"
Why wasn't any such concern ever expressed ? Because the orchestrators of the assassination and the cover-up knew for certain that there was never going to be a trial. The patsy was always going to be silenced. He had to be killed so that there would never be a trial. Even though he didn't realize it, the patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a Dead Man Walking before they even assassinated JFK.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.