18 Facts About Josiah Thompson

Josiah Thompson graduated from Yale University in 1957 and immediately entered the Navy, serving in Underwater Demolition Team 21.

Josiah Thompson joined the Yale faculty as Instructor in Philosophy and then moved on to teach at Haverford College.

Josiah Thompson was part of the Haverford philosophy faculty, including a period living and researching in Denmark, until 1976.

In 1976 Josiah Thompson left academia and moved to San Francisco, to begin a new career as a private investigator, first working for Hal Lipset and then David Fechheimer.

Josiah Thompson worked as a PI for thirty-five years, retiring in 2011.

Josiah Thompson worked mostly in criminal cases, including the investigation of dozens of murders.

Josiah Thompson was appointed by the federal court as investigator on the defense team for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing trial, and investigated the bombing attack on environmental activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney.

In 1988, Josiah Thompson published Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye, a well-received memoir discussing his post-academic life as a private detective.

Since 1976, Josiah Thompson has lived with his wife, Nancy, in Bolinas, California, a seaside village just north of San Francisco.

Josiah Thompson serves as registered agent for the Bolinas Cemetery Corporation, defending the 150-year-old graveyard from vandals, litterbugs and developers.

In Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson argued that the physical evidence and eye-witness accounts showed that multiple shooters fired within the same few seconds at President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22,1963.

Years later, Josiah Thompson completely revised his work on the Kennedy assassination, including some of his conclusions.

In 1979, twelve years after publication of Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson was hired to write part of a new book on the then-just-released House Select Committee on Assassinations Report.

Josiah Thompson's assignment was to evaluate the part of the House Report dealing with the physical facts of what happened in Dealey Plaza.

Josiah Thompson gave up that project in frustration, the new book explains, when he became convinced that the core evidence in the case, as then understood, was internally contradictory.

Josiah Thompson relies not only on the Zapruder film and the police radio dictabelt recording of the shooting, but begins the book by quoting the reports of numerous witnesses he interviewed for LIFE magazine in 1966 and 1967.

Josiah Thompson argues from close examination of the Zapruder film that the last two shots can be seen hitting their target, and contends that these impacts match exactly the timing of shots heard on the dictabelt recording.

The first of these final and equally non-survivable shots, Josiah Thompson argues, came from behind a stockade fence atop the grassy knoll and not from the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald was located.