Documents confirm arrest of suspect in plot to kill JFK in Chicago three weeks before Dallas

FBI Director Hoover replied to suspect in letter about four years after Kennedy’s assassination

By Kevin James Shay
COPYRIGHT 2023

This article was updated on November 7, 2023.

As the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death approaches, new information released about the crime of the 20th century has become scarce.

In 2022, I wrote about a letter, found among released National Archives documents and written by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1968, that confirms that another suspect in the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy was arrested in Chicago three weeks before the killing in Dallas.

That, to me, is a key part of this case. The official story blames Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin. This letter shows that at least one other person, who happened to be arrested by police with weapons and ammunition, was targeting JFK at the same time as Oswald supposedly was.

This letter has only been mentioned by one other researcher, to my knowledge. Yet, it is an important piece of the puzzle, lending official acknowledgement that there was more than one person trying to kill Kennedy that same month. In fact, there was likely not just a Chicago plot, but possibly others, including in Tampa and Miami. It’s unknown if the participants in these attempts knew of the others, but if they weren’t related, it sure was a big coincidence that they occurred in more cities than Dallas at about the same time.

You would think Dallas officials would have a vested interest in wanting this story out. It shows that the assassination could have happened in another city, though Dallas was more conservative and anti-Kennedy than most at that time. Furthermore, this line of research seems more compelling than most others. Other paths get bogged down in too many technical details or are easily explained away.

The letter signed by Hoover includes a typewritten note by someone with the FBI at the bottom that referred to how former Marine and John Birch Society member Thomas Arthur Vallee was arrested by Chicago police on November 2, 1963, “after notification by Secret Service that he might cause trouble during President Kennedy’s visit to Chicago on that date.” JFK was scheduled to visit the Windy City on November 2, riding in a motorcade to the Army-Air…