Kerry Thornley
Kerry Thornley, author of a book about Lee Harvey Oswald written in part before he was accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy, died in late November of cardiac arrest. He was 60.
Thornley befriended Oswald in 1959 when both were serving in the Marines in California. He began writing The Idle Warriors, the story of a disillusioned Marine who defects to the Soviet Union, after Oswald defected.
He finished the manuscript in 1962, and in 1964 was called before the Warren Commission. He testified about Oswald's apparent fascination with Communism. A few years later he was brought into court by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who accused him of conspiring to kill the president.
The Idle Warriors was eventually published in 1991. A second manuscript, a non-fiction book called Oswald, was published in 1965.
Thornley was the subject of a chapter in Jonathan Vankin's 1992 book Conspiracies, Coverups, and Crimes. According to Vankin, "Thornley's association with the President's alleged assassin has long ceased to seem a coincidence to him ... he has come to believe that he was, against his will and without his knowledge, part of the conspiracy that killed Kennedy."
Vankin wrote that Thornley believed he and Oswald were part of a master plot that started before either was even born. "I've realized that I'm the product of a German breeding experiment. My mother and father were spies for Japan during the war." Vankin speculated that Thornley may have been engaging in "an elaborate mind game he plays with himself and anyone who'll join in," but by no means stated that conclusively.
Vanking also wrote that Thornley traced some of what happened to him to a 1961 meeting in New Orleans with a man he came to believe was an intelligence agent. "He basically predicted everything to me that was going to happen in the next twenty years, including the Manson family, the war in Vietnam, and so on and so forth," Vankin quoted Thornley as saying. "He told me I'd be persecuted to the end of my life. I probably will be. I'm getting used to it, I guess."
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