For 20 Years, a Reporter Met a Fearful Witness Who Said JFK Ruined His Life

The knock came at a house in Manhattan Beach, California. Journalist Dick Russell had flown from New York after tracking down the address of Richard Case Nagle, a decorated Army veteran, Bronze Star winner, and former intelligence officer who said he had known Lee Harvey Oswald.

The man who answered matched the wary figure Russell later described as a "shadowy figure with a scar across his face." After a long pause, he allowed Russell inside.

Russell had first heard of Nagle in the 1970s from another researcher studying President John F. Kennedy's assassination. In El Paso, where Nagle had been arrested, Russell found newspaper and court files, along with federal records indicating Nagle had requested "to speak to a Secret Service agent about an urgent matter" on the afternoon of the assassination. Russell kept returning for years because Nagle told him his knowledge of the assassination had wrecked his life.

At that first meeting, Russell asked if he could tape the conversation. Nagle answered, "No, but I'm gonna tape you," and turned on his own recorder. He spoke cryptically about Oswald and his own involvement, yet Russell felt he had earned a measure of trust.

They met again at a rundown bar, chosen because Nagle believed he was being followed. There Nagle confided that his knowledge had wrecked his life.

Russell recalls staying in touch with Nagle across more than two decades. Russell says the CIA followed Nagle after prison and that there were attempts on his life. He described Nagle as torn between revealing what he knew and fearing he would be killed if he told everything, offering hints instead to point Russell in the right direction, like the secret Watergate source known as Deep Throat.

Nagle also said a complete account of his knowledge was stored in separate places, known to only a few people, and that he believed that arrangement kept him alive.

In 1995, a federal board reviewing assassination records heard Russell discuss Nagle at a conference and decided to question him. Nagle was found dead the day the subpoena reached his apartment. The account offers no official cause of death. It reports that Nagle's son said the apartment had been entered and searched, and that a key left by his father led to a storage unit in Tucson holding a purple trunk of hidden material. When the son flew there and opened the unit, the trunk alone had vanished. Asked whether Nagle had been murdered to keep him from testifying, Russell said, "Yeah, I believe he was."