SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — He is retired now from a long career as a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court judge, but will always be linked to the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Burt Griffin lives a quiet life in suburban Cleveland, but remembers the horror he felt 60 years ago as a young attorney.
"As I step onto the elevator, somebody says, 'Kennedy has been shot in Dallas,'" Griffin recalled when we sat down to talk to him.
In Cleveland on November 22, 1963 - Burt Griffin, like most of the world, shuddered with the news the president had been assassinated by a gunman perched high above the Dallas, Texas presidential motorcade route.
At the time Cleveland's Griffin had no idea soon he would be selected to investigate the assassination. "They were looking for people how had some background, some experience in the criminal practice. I had been an assistant U.S. Attorney," Griffin said.
In January 1964 Griffin joined the Warren Commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Amateur film of the motorcade captured by spectator Abe Zapruder served as prime evidence.
The film captured the tragic six seconds when three shots were fired; two of them hitting the nation's 35th president and Texas Governor John Connally.
The times were far different in 1963 indicated by the president riding in an open-top car along a route of tens of thousands of people.
"Secret Service agents, police officers were not even looking up in the windows of these buildings along the parade route," Griffin said.
From the Texas Book Depository building overlooking the motorcade, the fatal shots came. Lee Harvey Oswald was quickly arrested not far away. He was tied to the rifle used. In the subsequent exhaustive investigation, Oswald would be identified by the Warren Commission as the lone assassin.
But within hours of his arrest, Oswald shouted he was - in his words - a "patsy" - framed by someone "because he had defected to the Soviet Union," Griffin said.
For decades Griffin has been so moved by his work investigating the assassination, he has written a new expansive book on it, "JFK, Oswald and Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth." In it, he writes of intense times, a presidential assassination, the actual film of it and the confused scene at the hospital where Kennedy is taken. He dives into the arrest of Oswald, the circus atmosphere around the Dallas police station where Oswald is questioned. It is at that police station where security is lax, allowing Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby to casually walk up to Oswald as television cameras rolled, and shoot him. All while the world is watching.
"So the assassin is assassinated. That's why people think conspiracy," we asked of Griffin. "Right! Exactly," said the former Warren Commission investigator.
Fueling Ruby's murder of Oswald was an anti-Kennedy advertisement in the Dallas newspaper that November 22nd, signed by someone using a name Ruby thought to be that of a Jew. In his mind Ruby, a Jew, draws a connection from the ad to the assassination. In Ruby's mind, he must save the name of Jews because …. "He thinks Jews are going to be blamed for the assassination of the president," Griffin said.
In the comfort of his suburban Cleveland home, long retired from the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court bench, Judge Burt Griffin is never far from thoughts on the assassination of President Kennedy 60 years ago. There have been dozens of conspiracy theories on the assassination, including those put forth in Hollywood movies, but Griffin gives them no consideration. Instead he holds to the official Warren Commission report in which he contributed: that the lone gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald, the same Oswald who never went to trial for killing President Kennedy - because Oswald was assassinated himself.