Dealey Plaza — Decode the November Conspiracy

Dealey Plaza stretches before you, this three-hectare esplanade named in 1940 after George Bannerman Dealey, founder of the Dallas Morning News. On November 22, 1963 at 12:30 PM, the presidential blue Lincoln Continental convertible limousine crosses this square at 18 km/h. John F. Kennedy, 46, waves to the Texan crowd that came to cheer him, Jackie by his side in her pink Chanel suit. The pergola where you stand offered spectators the best viewpoint of the presidential motorcade. Abraham Zapruder films from the nearby promontory, unknowingly creating the most analyzed document in American criminal history.

Elm Street slopes gently down toward the Triple Underpass, this artery where the three gunshots from 12:30 still echo. The presidential limousine was rolling at this precise spot when the first bullet hits Kennedy in the back, the second goes through his throat, the third shatters his skull. Governor John Connally, seated in front of the president, is also hit. Jackie Kennedy, splattered with blood, tries to retrieve a skull fragment from her husband on the rear trunk. Agent Roy Kellerman orders driver William Greer to accelerate toward Parkland Hospital, 6 kilometers away.

The Texas School Book Depository dominates Dealey Plaza with its seven floors of red brick, built in 1901 to house textbook warehouses. Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, employed since October 16, 1963 at $1.25 per hour, fires from the sixth-floor window. The Warren Commission establishes that he uses an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle purchased by mail under the false name A. Hidell. Forty-five minutes after the gunshots, Oswald kills police officer J.D. Tippit in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, then hides at the Texas Theatre where he's arrested at 1:50 PM.

The Grassy Knoll, this grassy mound overlooking Elm Street, has concentrated all conspiracy theories since 1963. Several witnesses claim to have heard gunshots coming from this hill, behind the wooden fence. Gordon Arnold, a soldier on leave, states that a man in a suit threatened him just before the attack. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concludes in 1978 that a fourth shot was probably fired from the Grassy Knoll, reigniting controversy over a second shooter's existence.

Your journey through Dallas reveals the scope of the Kennedy mystery: 888 witnesses questioned, 26 volumes of investigation, 50,000 pages of archives. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza, inaugurated in 1970, perpetuates the memory of the 35th American president in this city forever marked by 6.8 seconds that changed America. You leave with pieces of a puzzle that neither the Warren Commission in 1964, nor the Church Committee in 1975, nor the 2,891 documents declassified in 2017 have definitively solved.