Whatever information Kilgallen learned and from whatever source, many researchers believe it brought about her strange death. She told attorney Mark Lane: "They've killed the President, (and) the government is not prepared to tell us the truth..." and that she planned to "break the case." To other friends she said: "This has to be a conspiracy!... I'm going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century." And in her last column item regarding the assassination, published on September 3, 1965, Kilgallen wrote: "This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them." But on November 8, 1965, there was one less reporter. That day Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her home. It was initially reported that she died of a heart attack, but quickly this was changed to an overdose of alcohol and pills.

One witness was Warren Reynolds, who chased Tippit's killer. He, too, failed to identify Oswald as Tippit's killer until after he was shot in the head two months later. After recovering, Reynolds identified Oswald to the Warren Commission. (A suspect was arrested in the Reynolds shooting, but released when a former Jack Ruby stripper named Betty Mooney MacDonald provided an alibi. One week after her word released the suspect, MacDonald was arrested by Dallas Police and a few hours later was found hanged in her jail cell. Neither the FBI nor the Warren Commission investigated this strange incident.)

In a remarkable attempt to resolve the issue, Nosenko underwent "hostile interrogation." He was kept in solitary confinement for 1,277 days under intense physical and psychological pressure.

He was put on a diet of weak tea, macaroni, and porridge, given nothing to read, a light was left burning in his unheated cell twenty-four hours a day, and his guards were forbidden to speak with him or even smile. His Isolation was so complete that Nosenko eventually began to hallucinate, according to CIA testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Toward the end of this ordeal, Nosenko was given at least two lie detector tests by the CIA. He failed both. But Nosenko did not crack.

The believers of Nosenko, headed by the CIA's Richard Helms and J. Edgar Hoover, took his intransigence to mean that he was telling the truth but the KGB having no interest in Oswald.

But doubts remained. So at the CIA's request, the Warren Commission obligingly made no reference to Nosenko. Angleton retired from the CIA and later wrote: "The ... exoneration or official decision that Nosenko is/was bona fide is a travesty. It is an indictment of the CIA and, if the FBI subscribes to it, of that bureau too. The ramifications for the U.S. intelligence community, and specifically the CIA, are tragic."

The counterintelligence faction, led by Angleton, still believes that Nosenko's defection was contrived by the KGB for two purposes: to allay suspicions that the Soviets had anything to do with the JFK assassination to cover for Soviet "moles," or agents deep within US intelligence.

Marrs was asleep in his dorm room when events transpired at 12:30 p.m. November 22, 1963, to wake him from his reverie. Like Jim Garrison in JFK, Marrs would sleep no more when he heard John Kennedy had been shot while driving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, gunned down by the bullets of an assassin. His initial reaction to the news of the president's shooting was one of relief, happiness. His roommate woke him to tell him what had happened, and all Marrs could say was one word: "Good."

By his own admission, he was then a "typical Texas redneck" who thought Kennedy was a handsome man determined to hand the country over to the liberals and blacks. He had no use for the man or his utopian vision of one nation under Camelot. But like the rest of the country, he was stuck to the television, watching every second of news coverage. When Walter Cronkite showed up at 1 p.m. to announce Kennedy's death, Marrs was watching and, he insists, thinking about how he could get involved in covering the biggest news story to come out of North Texas in decades. Even now, he has all the newspaper clippings from November 1963. They would, in time, become his life's roadmap.