By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

For Americans who do not accept the findings of the Warren Commission that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a disgruntled defector named Lee Harvey Oswald, the events of Nov. 22, 1963, remain one of the nation’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

Ben Rogers, director of the Baylor Collections of Political Materials, said lingering questions about Kennedy’s death and its aftermath continue to haunt the thoughts of skeptics – and not just those in the United States.

He gets calls regularly from Australia, Sweden and Uruguay – anywhere there are curious souls seeking one more piece of the puzzle of the shooting that shook the world.

That is because Baylor joined the conspiracy community more than four years ago, with the acquisition of the papers and memorabilia of W. Penn Jones Jr., a Texas newspaper owner and editor who sold his publication, the Midlothian Mirror, in 1974 to devote himself full-time to researching the JFK assassination.

Between 1966 and 1976, Jones wrote four books on his findings – Forgive My Grief I-IV – and published a newsletter, The Continuing Inquiry, into the 1980s.

Jones, an outspoken liberal in the heart of conservative Texas, was one of the first public skeptics of the lone-gunman theory. The newsman was one of the first generation of assassination researchers who believed the government was behind the Kennedy killing. Every year, on the assassination’s anniversary, he held a memorial service at Dealey Plaza. Jones died in 1998.

The Baylor Collections of Political Materials also has copies of JFK materials held by others, including hundreds of photographs, documentary DVDs, volumes of police reports on Oswald and his killer, Jack Ruby, and recordings of radio interviews with people who witnessed the assassination, Rogers said.

Rogers said for more than four years he and his staff have catalogued the holdings on conspiracy theories, and linked them on the Baylor Collections of Political Materials’ Web site.

With the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death coming in 2013, Rogers predicted that demand for the conspiracy materials and the Kennedy collection in general will increase.

“Our goal for the 50th is to have it all in one place, and easy to use,” Rogers said.

The assassination materials are housed at the W. R. Poage Legislative Library. Because the assassination reverberated throughout Texas politics at the mid-20th century, it is not such an odd fit for the library, an archive that encompasses the political lives of former Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, 12 U.S. congressmen and other Texas political figures.

Besides the paper and photo trails, the Baylor Collections of Political Materials also boasts a few unusual artifacts of the period, Rogers added, such as a replica of the rifle Oswald is said to have used to shoot Kennedy; UPI and Associated Press teletype dispatches on Nov. 22, 1963; and Ruby’s prison hospital slippers.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

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