Some of the nation’s foremost experts on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. will gather April 8-9 for a conference at Olney Central College.
Political Assassinations of the 1960s: New Revelations in the Murders of JFK, RFK and MLK will explore, in an academic setting, the deaths of these iconic leaders.
“The conference will feature an outstanding array of authors, researchers, historians, and educators who possess extensive knowledge on the subjects,” said OCC Assistant Professor and conference organizer David Denton. “They will discuss some of the new revelations that have come out including the newly declassified documents that were released in the last few years. It will be a fantastic weekend.”
The in-person event is free and open to the public. Those unable to attend can join via Zoom. The link may be accessed and purchased for $40 through www.projectjfk.com.
Featured Speakers
Brian Edwards has spent more than 40 years researching the JFK assassination. He has interviewed more than 50 of the Dealey Plaza witnesses along with Dallas police officers and detectives who were directly involved in the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination and the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit. In addition, he has interviewed 10 of the doctors and medical personnel who were inside Trauma Room 1 at Parkland Hospital. He has also interviewed many of the Navy corpsmen who were on duty at Bethesda Naval Medical Center on November 22, 1963.
In 1993, Edwards was granted a two-day interview with Marina Oswald-Porter at her home in Rockwall, Texas. He is featured in the Showtime documentary, JFK revisited: Through The Looking Glass by Oliver Stone.
Ed Tatro is one of today’s preeminent experts on President Kennedy’s Assassination. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English, a master’s degree in Urban Education and a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies in Educational Administration. He taught high school English for 38 years, specializing in science fiction, mystery and horror, satire and comedy, creative writing, media and propaganda, and the origin, history, and poetry of rock music. He also taught college and adult education courses for 30 years, specializing in the JFK assassination, subliminal messages in advertising, the influence of rock music on drug abuse, backward messages in music, and plagiarism in music.
Tatro is the author of more than 30 mystery and horror short stories, literary essays and poems published in many magazines across the country, including many research articles pertaining to the JFK assassination conspiracy. His work has been acknowledged or footnoted in many JFK assassination books. Tatro is the original editor of Texas in the Morning, the memoirs of LBJ’s mistress, Madeleine Duncan Brown, and editor of the Bugliosi chapter in Biting the Elephant by Dr. Rodger Remington. He contributed research to Sen. Sam Ervin’s Watergate Investigative Committee, the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the National Academy of Sciences (JFK acoustical analysis project). He attended Clay Shaw’s trial in New Orleans, in February 1969, and was given access to the court exhibits by Judge Edward Haggerty.
Tatro also served as a minor consultant to Oliver Stone’s film, JFK. He testified before the Assassination Records Review Board in March 1995, in Boston, Mass. He was responsible, via the ARRB, for the release of the unidentified print found on a box in the alleged sniper’s nest in the Texas School Book Depository, and, via the LBJ Library, for the release of the rough drafts of the rough draft of NSAM #273, which he shared with L. Fletcher Prouty, who shared them with Oliver Stone for post-JFK research.
Tatro was a consultant to Nigel Turner’s The Truth Shall Set You Free, and The Smoking Guns, parts six and seven of The Men Who Killed Kennedy series. He was a primary recruiter and participant in Turner’s The Guilty Men, part nine of the same series.
David Knight has been an academic researcher and lecturer on the murder of President John F. Kennedy since 1989. He has produced several documentary films with Project JFK.
Casey Quinlan is the director of Project JFK and has been the featured lecturer at many universities throughout the Midwest. In 1991, he was a guest historian for the A & E Network and the History Channel for Oliver Stone’s blockbuster movie, JFK. His first publication, Beyond the Fence Line: The Eyewitness Testimony of Ed Hoffman and the Murder of President Kennedy, continues to be a best-seller.
David Denton has been a history professor at Olney Central College in Illinois since 1990. He has given numerous presentations across Illinois and Indiana at both public libraries and forums. He participated in the Illinois Humanities Council speakers’ bureau from 1995 to 2002, giving presentations on the Vietnam War, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 2001, he began teaching a course on political assassinations of the 1960s, which explores the deaths of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Gary Shaw was formerly co-director with Larry N. Howard of the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas. He was co-author with Larry R. Harris of Cover-Up: The Government Conspiracy to Conceal the facts About the Public Execution of John Kennedy. He also is the co-author with Charles Crenshaw of Trauma Room One.
Ryan Jones is a historian for the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. His responsibility requires providing the validity of museum interpretation and reviewing scholarly historical content shared by the site. Jones attended the University of Tennessee at Martin and the University of Memphis. He has presented at numerous conferences on topics including the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement.
Larry Rivera is Chairman of the Oswald Innocence Campaign. He has made a lifelong study of the JFK assassination, making his first trip to Dealey Plaza in 1991. He has published many articles on the assassination and has many YouTube videos covering his research. He has given numerous presentations on the assassination. He has a degree in Computer Networking and is an expert at computer imaging technology and facial recognition, using state of the art digital overlays.
Randy Benson is the director, producer and editor of The Searchers. His work has garnered numerous awards, most notably an Academy Award for Best Student Documentary at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Academy Awards. Benson received an Eastman Kodak Excellence in Filmmaking Award at the Cannes Film Festival and a First Appearance Award at the International Documentary Film Festival.
He has been an instructor of film and video at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for over a decade, and he serves on Award Juries at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C., and the Let’s All Be Free Film Festival in London, U.K.
Mal Hyman is the author of Burying the Lead: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy. He has served as an associate professor of sociology at Coker College in Hartsville, S.C. since 1987 and is currently the Coordinator of the Political Science Program. His past presentations have included Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy and Media Coverage of the Assassination of JFK.
Hyman holds a bachelor’s of arts degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and a master’s of arts degree from the University of California, Riverside. He has an ABD from the University of South Carolina in Government and International Relations.
A distinguished educator, Hyman received the South Carolina Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1993. He was named Coker College’s Master Professor of the Year in 1992, 1999 and 2012. In 2004, Hyman received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in South Korea.
Additional speakers are anticipated and will be announced closer to the event. A complete schedule will be posted soon.
For more information, contact David Denton at 618-204-1498 or email dentond@iecc.edu.
The conference is sponsored and funded by the Olney Central College Foundation.
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