The Lone Star Speaks: Untold Texas Stories about the JFK Assassination - Hardcover

by K. W. Zachry (Author), Sara Peterson (Author)

Both authors became interested in President Kennedy's assassination at a young age. Zachry's grandparents lived in Dallas in 1963, and saved newspapers from that era. Her grandfather was connected to the Dallas oil industry. Peterson became interested in the assassination in 1978 when she participated in the Presidential Classroom for Young Americans program in Washington, D. C. The two have collected books and artifacts concerning the assassination for years.

Both are currently employed by Midland College. The Lone Star Speaks began with a presentation the authors made to the West Texas Historical Symposium in 2014. The presentation soon expanded into a four-year research project that resulted in the authors finding and interviewing more than 150 individuals.

Among the most intriguing is Robert T. Davis, who was the Assistant Attorney General in Texas in 1963. As an attorney who was sent to help interview Warren Commission witnesses, Davis immediately sensed that the official investigation was a "whitewash." Davis was one of the first to suggest that the investigation should include Jack Ruby's contacts with Mafia members.

Other witnesses whom the authors located include a Lyndon Johnson staff member who was directed by the new President to serve as his eyes and ears in Dallas after the assassination. She personally reported Oswald's death immediately to President Johnson on November 24, 1963.

Still another previously unknown witness (who even today insists on anonymity) was part of at least two "abort teams" in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Working with a U. S. Marshall in Dallas that day, he attempted to tell the FBI that more than one assassin had been firing at the President. More than a half-century later, he is still bitter that his information was ignored by officials.

Other individuals who have helped the authors add information to the Kennedy assassination puzzle include a personal female friend of President Kennedy, and another woman who spent the late hours of November 21, 1963 with Jack Ruby. The authors also uncovered several individuals who can personally vouch for the fact that there was and is a Dixie/Texas Mafia, and that it may have been involved with the Kennedy assassination.

The Lone Star Speaks provides new insights into the assassination of John F. Kennedy and uses actual witness testimony to raise new questions concerning what many have called "the crime of the twentieth century."

Author Biography

K. W. Zachry earned a Bachelor of Science in English and Political Science from McMurry College and a Master of Arts in English from the University of Texas at El Paso. Her interest in the Kennedy assassination began when her grandparents, who lived in Dallas on 11/22/63, shared with her all of the local newspapers from the assassination. She has been reading, researching, and "digging for bits and pieces" from people with first-hand information about the events surrounding the president's murder ever since. By combining information and sources with Sara, she discovered that many uninterviewed Texans possessed information about the greatest mystery of the twentieth century. Sara Peterson attended the University of La Verne in California, where she earned a Bachelor's of Arts Degree in Political Science and in History. After being told by her Political Science Department Chair that she could not do her senior thesis on the Kennedy assassination, she went ahead anyway, focusing on those planning, carrying out, and covering up the Kennedy assassination. Among the most powerful, she decided, was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a former Texan senator and then U.S. Vice-President. Since then, she has continued her research on the assassination and why the Warren Report's "evidence" is, in her view, inaccurate, incomplete, and in some cases manufactured. She is currently employed at a college in Texas as the Coordinator of the Developmental Education Language Lab and Writing Center.