Original subtitles

a stunned world looked on as President John F. Kennedy

was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald.

But remarkably, JFK's death

at the hands of a lone assassin almost happened

three years earlier.

Today, a derelict house in the backwoods of New England

is all that remains of a man who swore himself to

the cause of killing Kennedy.

He was a homicidal maniac.

In the fall of 1960,

in the weeks before JFK was sworn into office,

he would stalk the President-Elect

across the country looking for a suitable location

to murder him.

The weapon he would use would not be a marksman's rifle,

but a car bomb.

With never before heard witness testimony

He had told my husband that,

you probably won't see me again, but you'll hear of me.

This is the little known story

of one man's audacious plot to assassinate a president,

in a bid to go down in history as Kennedy's Suicide Bomber.

Had he detonated it, we would

have had a dead President-Elect.

Truth is stranger than fiction!

Truth is stranger than fiction!

#Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy...#

As America looked for a new President to succeed Eisenhower,

few would have initially expected it would come

from a candidate who opponents scorned as more of a playboy

than a politician.

But on July 13th, 1960, John F. Kennedy won the

Democratic nomination and began his bid

for the presidency.

I will be worthy of your trust - we will carry the fight to

the people in the fall, and we shall win.

The Democrats pitting the fresh

faced Kennedy against the republicans veteran Nixon,

signaled a new era for American politics.

JFK symbolized youth, he symbolized new direction,

he was glamorous, he was articulate

and the country just fell in love with him.

But not everyone took the

charismatic young leader to their hearts.

John F. Kennedy's father, Joe, was a powerful

and influential businessman.

And there were rumblings in some quarters that he was attempting

to buy the White House through back room deals

and brinksmanship.

Joe Kennedy, the father,

had made his money bootlegging with the mafia.

He really sided with the Nazis, and with Hitler.

Admired Hitler, said democracy was finished, and that came out,

so that didn't help JFK's image.

Across the country, pockets of

Kennedy dissenters watched his campaign very closely.

But maybe none more so than one resident of the tiny community

of Belmont in New Hampshire.

The town of Belmont is about 35 square

miles, some very plain houses where people just couldn't

afford anything better; so it was very much a mixed

neighborhood, but certainly a residential neighborhood.

On the outskirts of the town,

reclaimed by woodland, is a crumbling house

- a last remnant of the life of one of Kennedy's

greatest and perhaps one of his most dangerous detractors.

Earl Sweeney was a young police sergeant back in 1960

and remembers the occupant of the house very well.

He lived alone, by himself,

I don't know if he was a widower

or if he ever was married, but he didn't take great care

of the house or anything.

He was a medium height gentleman, he had a very dour

expression on his face, I never saw him smile;

he always looked like he was frowning

or unhappy about something.

He had a big shock of white hair.

The possessions that haunt the

remains of the decaying home give little away,

they offer no real clues as to why in the fall of 1960,

the occupant packed up, and left.

Hello, can we come in?

Neighbors are still able to

recall a secretive man who wanted prying eyes kept away.

He kept to himself pretty much.

He planted them all in that old stuff that was going around

the lot there, picky bushes, picky bushes...

to keep us - to keep people from going through.

The reclusive figure who lived

in the house was 73 year old Richard Pavlick.

A retired postal worker, Pavlick was a familiar face around town

to Earl Sweeney.

And he was known as a troublemaker with a bad temper.

When I came on

the police force, I became to know him

as sort of a rabble rouser, I guess you might call it.

Someone who was not happy with local government.

He would go to town meeting.

He would always be generally against something, was almost

like a self winding watch.

The more he spoke, the more passionate he became.

Pavlick's strong views on what

he deemed to be rogue politics and politicians saw him turn his

attention to John F. Kennedy in the Spring of 1960.

I would not have run for it

if in any way I didn't feel like I could do the job.

I come here today saying that I think that this is

an issue of...

Pavlick was by now being very vocal around town about his

contempt for Kennedy and his violent temper was increasingly

coming to the fore in daily life,

giving the authorities, cause for concern.

On one occasion,

he became angry at the local power company

because they were going to shut off his electricity.

He felt that the power company were sending something through

the wires that was harmful to people,

would affect their brains.

He was very upset and shouting and red in the face.

And he was threatening he was gonna shoot the man

from the power company.

These kinds of run-ins with

the locals led to Pavlick's increased isolation from the

community, and society itself.

By late August of 1960, Kennedy was still lagging

behind Nixon in the polls, but all that was to change

little more than a month later.

On the 26th of September, the two men went head-to-head

in their first televised debate.

...for discussion of issues

in the current political campaign

by the two major candidates for the Presidency.

Pavlick watched on,

as the young pretender outplayed Nixon in a confident

and coherent display that overnight would see Kennedy

turn the tables on his rival.

If we are moving

ahead, then I think freedom will be secure around the world.

If we fail, then freedom fails.

During the coming weeks

as Kennedy and Nixon continued to slug it out on television,

Pavlick began venting his increasingly

vitriolic views.

As Pope John 23rd

formally announces the convocation

of an ecumenical council...

His concerns about

any corruption stoked by Joe Kennedy,

were worsened by a hatred for Kennedy's Catholic faith

and the church itself.

He felt that if Kennedy

was elected President that the Pope would be actually

running the country from Rome, instead of the White House

running it.

Pavlick began to obsess

over the election campaign, gathering press clippings

that he displayed on the wall of his home.

Kennedy evoked a certain kind of

deep hatred by a certain segment of the population,

who didn't just oppose his policies, but really kind

of demonized him.

Pavlick now believed he was duty

bound to do something to stop Kennedy from taking

control of the country.

But few could ever have anticipated his plot.

Or that he would use a symbol of the American dream -

his beloved Buick.

To create the ultimate nightmare - the death of a president.

In the Fall of 1960, John F. Kennedy

was deep into his campaign against Nixon to win

the race for the White House.

...and we shall win.

But as Kennedy travelled

the length and breadth of the country, bidding to win support,

in the backwoods of New England, there was one man who

would not be voting for him.

Richard Pavlick had formed a personal vendetta against

Kennedy, one that was about to take a very deadly turn.

A reclusive man by nature, Pavlick had no friends,

but perhaps because he had been a postal worker himself once,

he made an unlikely if unwilling confidante

for his darkest thoughts in the form

of the town's postmaster, Mr. Thomas Murphy.

He came into the post office, quite often, and he

always had something crazy to say, or what he was gonna do.

Nobody could have predicted what

was to come next, but as Kennedy's popularity grew,

Pavlick began turning his heartfelt hatred for the man

into a hard cooked plan- to prevent him from ever being

sworn into office.

Mr. Thomas Murphy, the postmaster, asked if he

could speak to me privately, and, he told me that when

John F. Kennedy first ran for President,

that Mr. Pavlick became very upset.

He had made apparently a couple of comments

that if he gets elected, somebody should shoot

the bastard.

A hotly contested

election campaign closes with Senator John F. Kennedy

the choice of his countrymen as the 34th president

of the United States.

On November 8th, 1960, Kennedy

clinched a hard fought victory.

An enraged Pavlick was about to turn empty threats into

something more deadly,

'Bout the last time he went into the post

office, he said "you probably won't see me again,

but you will hear of me."

But despite owning a firearm,

Pavlick wasn't intending to shoot Kennedy, he had

more explosive plans.

Pavlick went to a hardware store and purchased dynamite,

detonation cord, a trigger switch,

a battery and exploding caps.

He was building a bomb.

But it was his beloved Buick that formed the centerpiece

of his master plan.

Pavlick was a First World War army veteran

and had experimented with dynamite both in his back yard

and on an empty lot in Florida.

Pavlick rigged the trunk of the Buick with a handful

of sticks of grade II dynamite used in the construction

and mining industry.

Pavlick very much meets the prototype of what we

consider as a suicide bomber.

The dynamite had blasting caps

attached to them that were fused with copper wire

and attached to a battery.

It's very clear that from the outset

he wanted to kill himself.

He then drilled holes in the

rear wheel wells of the Buick.

The intent of the bombing itself

is to evoke some sort of political change.

Through these he threaded

the detonating cord, which was attached,

via the blasting caps, to the dynamite.

The wire was long enough to reach the passenger seat,

where it was attached to a detonation switch.

With the car now a mobile bomb, all Pavlick had to do was find

the right moment to drive at Kennedy, detonate the device

and send himself down in history as the man

who murdered a President.

For an individual

who typically hasn't engaged in terrorist attacks before,

that takes a great deal of rationality

to be able to plan, strategize and ultimately take part

in a solo terrorist attack.

With his car bomb built, Pavlick

was now ready to hit the road and hunt Kennedy down.

He left town rather abruptly,

in his old Buick.

That would be the last time many

of the residents of Belmont would ever see him.

Hordes of people turned out to celebrate wherever Kennedy went.

But hidden amongst the crowds on many occasions was the shambling

figure of Pavlick - who watched every move the President-Elect

made.

News reports kept him informed of Kennedy's movements and over

the next ten days he clocked up over 1500 miles in his car

keeping up with him.

With the Buick packed with dynamite, Pavlick was looking

for a suitable place to attack Kennedy, who at times,

made himself an easy target.

Running into crowds and running in an open top car

made Kennedy fairly vulnerable.

When you're out on the campaign trail, they have to get out

and shake hands and hug babies and we were

always concerned.

It was just something that we had to adapt to.

At this stage Pavlick was still

not on the radar of the authorities as posing a lethal

threat to Kennedy.

But that was to change - and all because

he couldn't resist maintaining contact with

his old friend Thomas Murphy.

Pavlick sent the postmaster a postcard from every pit stop

he made.

On reading them, Murphy began fearing the worst.

I am at the end of my rope, here I die some place

in Florida, you will read about it perhaps within three weeks.

I came down to die, you will see it on TV.

The quiet and unassuming

Mr. Murphy could not have realized just how he

chose to react now to Pavlick's rambling postcards,

could mean the difference between life and death

for John F. Kennedy.

With his Buick primed as a car bomb, in the ten days since

leaving his hometown of Belmont, Pavlick had been looking

for an opportunity to launch his suicide attack against Kennedy.

But stalking the President-Elect on his celebration trail

was proving to be a frustrating experience.

Kennedy was constantly on the move,

and never in the same place twice, meaning Pavlick

couldn't lock his target down.

But all that changed when JFK arrived in the wealthy enclave

of Palm Beach, Florida, for a vacation.

Joe Kennedy, the father and

Rose Kennedy had had a home on Palm Beach and JFK would visit

and during his presidency that was considered

the "Florida White House".

But what Pavlick had in mind,

would turn this playground of the rich and famous

into a graveyard.

Pavlick had made his base at a motel a few miles

from where the Kennedy's lived.

On the morning of December 11th he awoke early, to write,

one final farewell postcard to Thomas Murphy.

Getting into his car, he headed straight to the Kennedy's home

on North Ocean Boulevard.

Parking outside, he waited and watched.

Kennedy was readying the family for church.

For the first time Pavlick's quarry was in his range.

All JFK had to do now was step outside the door.

But the battered Buick drew the unwanted attention

of Special Agent Ed Tucker.

He had parked his car up about two or three hundred yards

from the main entrance into the Kennedy Property

in Palm Beach.

I mentioned it to another Agent,

I said "That car's been up there for quite a while"

So, we advised the Florida State

Police Detail and the Palm Beach Police Department

that we were suspicious of that car.

Previously classified documents

suggest Pavlick had a change of heart.

When he saw Jackie and the baby Caroline, allegedly

he decided not to do it there.

Jerry Blaine, who was part

of the Secret Service detail at the time,

is certain that Pavlick could have succeeded.

Had he not had a change of heart and detonated it,

there was little we could've done.

We would have had a dead President-Elect.

Either because he was spooked or changed his mind,

Pavlick fled the scene.

Returning to his motel, he waited for a few hours.

At 10AM, he once again left.

His destination this time was the Church of St. Edward,

on North County Road, where he knew

Kennedy would be attending Mass.

The Secret Service files from the period reveal that Pavlick

surveyed the street and the building.

He thought Kennedy was vulnerable to a strike,

the moment he entered or exited the church.

The Buick pulled up outside the church just before

the start of Midday Mass.

The car was still primed with explosives,

but there was no sign of Kennedy - who was already inside

taking his seat.

Pavlick now found himself unable to just sit in the car and wait.

In a chilling turn of events, he decided to go

inside the church to get a good look

at the President-Elect.

This elderly

gentleman came in, disheveled, and it was clear he wanted

to be near the President.

It was a matter of me going up and grabbing him by the elbow.

I said 'I think you'll find a seat in the back and he turned

around and walked to the exit.

So I took down the license plate and he drove away.

With his cover blown again,

Pavlick fled the scene.

He retired to his motel room for the next few days where once

again, he put pen to paper.

It wasn't long before 1500 miles away in Belmont, Thomas Murphy

received a new flurry of post cards from Pavlick.

The tone was even more violent and volatile than usual -

the sole source of his vitriol, John F. Kennedy.

Watch the papers and radio for what

would have been done to you.

You should change your moronic attitude...

someone will take you over some hot coals and do a job

on you but it won't be me for I would've done it and should've.

He didn't know whether to

turn him in or not, but he decided maybe he better.

The postmaster said I think he's

following the President around and he may intend some harm.

He said on several occasions watch the news, because you're

going to be hearing from me in a big way,

so he and I decided that I would report it to my

chief, and the Sheriff and I, because we were all working

together on it, that we would also report it

to the Secret Service.

Robert Rust was an Assistant

District Attorney in Palm Beach at the time and along

with his colleague John Marshall was alerted to the situation

by a cable that was sent to all justice departments

in the region.

John took the step of notifying every police

department to be on the lookout for Richard Paul Pavlick.

Pavlick was now a marked man... and his Buick the most

sought after car in the state.

The FBI office decided

that this met the standard to submit a so-called

'stop and hold' order on him.

When Pavlick ventured out

of the motel the next day, he had no idea that every cop

in town was on the lookout for his Buick with

New Hampshire license plates.

Leaving his motel, he drove over the bridge into Palm Beach,

once again heading to the area where Kennedy was vacationing.

Having crossed the bridge, however, he was forced

to slow to a halt.

A motorcycle cop was on his tail and flagged him down.

Lester Free arrested Pavlick

on one of the bridges from West Palm Beach

to Palm Beach.

Pavlick's rambling written

threats, and speculation that this elderly man was in town

to kill JFK, were not enough to throw the book at him.

Robert Rust, was now responsible to finding a charge to detain

Pavlick under, so the alleged threat

could be investigated further.

Pavlick had mentioned during an interview

a vague comment about dynamite, which he subsequently withdrew.

Rust knew the threats to Kennedy's life already

made to the Postmaster.

Could it be that Pavlick, planned to blow

the President up?

Rust and his colleague, John Marshall now set out

to discover whether Pavlick had bought explosives

back in Belmont.

We were both asking these

hardware stores and lumber yards if they'd sold any dynamite

to Richard Paul Pavlick.

On the 37th call, somebody said "Oh yeah he was in here

two to three weeks ago.

We sold him 10 sticks of dynamite, copper wire,

a battery, a switch and electronic detonators."

I turned to John and I said "This son of a bitch

is the real deal."

But despite coming up

with this information, Rust still faced

a major problem.

Unbelievably, at the time there was no law in place

against threatening the life of the President-Elect.

This meant Rust had to use every ounce of his legal ingenuity

to cook up a charge that would stick.

And it came from an unlikely source.

When there were

the Ku Klux Klan bombings of black churches in the South,

and they created a misdemeanor that said it was a criminal

offense to blow up a church.

Rust's legal legwork meant

that Pavlick was charged with intent to destroy

the Church of St. Edward.

This paved the way for a warrant to search

Pavlick's car and motel.

Rust was convinced he would find incriminating evidence

that would force Pavlick into a confession.

We searched the car,

the dynamite's in the trunk, the copper wire goes to the

front seat, there's a switch in the front seat -

all he's gotta do is push the switch

down and the dynamite blows up over the gas tank.

So now we have not just ten sticks of dynamite,

we have napalm!

This is the dynamite, the battery,

the copper wire.

This is a, certainly one of the original world's car bombs,

which would be enough to wipe out not only

the people in the church, but the church itself.

The discovery of the dynamite

and the way it was rigged meant that Pavlick was now charged

with being in possession of a deadly weapon, but he still

refused to confess to anything.

Rust now had to look for further incriminating evidence.

With a search warrant in hand, he took Pavlick

back to his motel room.

As the search of the room began, Rust could sense they might be

on to something, although even the smart young assistant DA

didn't see what was coming next.

I get down on my hands

and knees, pull a suitcase out from underneath the bed,

and I'll be damned, I open it up and here

is the last will and testament of Richard Paul Pavlick,

describing exactly how he was gonna kill Kennedy.

Wow!

Dynamite!

There it is!

The whole nine yards!

I turned to Pavlick and I said,

"You really did come down here to kill John F. Kennedy didn't

you?" and he says "Yes I did!" - very proudly.

This startling discovery

was the compelling piece of evidence that Rust

needed to charge Pavlick.

To the citizens

of the United States of America, I am not the vicious

person as my actions may have indicated; there should be only

one law for all - not a religion made by

the Catholic Church.

Now that the presidency was sold to the Kennedy's they must be

stopped by any and all means possible.

If my actions have caused the decease

of the President-Elect, then a better qualified and experienced

man will have to take over.

It's a functional madman committed to a cause...

Pavlick may have written

what he believed to be a deathbed confession,

but over 50 years later, one big question remains...

if he had pressed the trigger,

would Richard Pavlick, and not Lee Harvey Oswald,

have gone down in history as the man who killed JFK?

The discovery that Pavlick's Buick was rigged as a bomb,

as well as his written confession,

saw him placed under lock and key.

The judge orders the prisoner sent

to the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri.

At the time, speculation

circulated that had he detonated the bomb, he would have gone

down in history as the man who killed JFK.

Since his plot was foiled before he could strike,

it remained pure speculation.

But today over 50 years later, a remarkable experiment is about

to take place that may shed new light,

on this dark chapter of history.

At the Centre for Ordnance Science and Technology testing

ground in Wiltshire, England, explosives experts

are hard at work.

A Buick - identical to Pavlick's is about to be turned

into a car bomb.

Explosives expert Trevor Lawrence a

veteran of conflicts in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan

knows first-hand the damage suicide bombers can cause.

The advantage of a car over a person carrying

a bomb, obviously you can have a much larger charge, and you can

hide the charge a lot easier.

And the damage they can cause is absolutely massive.

You can get it exactly to the optimum point,

huge structural damage and mass casualties.

While the type of dynamite

Pavlick purchased is no longer manufactured, Trevor has sourced

a modern day equivalent.

The actual explosive he used was a

dynamite, a commercially available blasting explosive.

What we're gonna do is use a very similar explosive to that.

Its nitro-glycerine based, the same as the explosive

he used, and again it's a blasting explosive.

Trevor places the primed

explosives in the trunk.

The experiment will attempt to simulate what would have

happened if Pavlick had put his plan into play outside

the church of St. Edward.

Driving towards the church, when Kennedy was leaving

and walking down the steps, Pavlick would

have driven straight at him.

When he was as close as he possibly could be, he would have

detonated the device.

Do we have range clear Paul?

Range clear...

Standby.

Everything was in place, all it

took was the movement of his hand from the steering wheel

to the switch.

As the smoke and

debris clears, the experiment delivers a surprising result.

The mannequins are still standing.

But why?

Suicide bombers usually drive straight at their targets.

But the Buick engine block was so solid that

it would have absorbed the majority of the energy

from the blast.

So you can clearly see here,

that's where the explosives were positioned,

and that's the actual seat of the explosion, and it's torn

away all this light superstructure, has been thrown

enormous distances.

But if you look at the front, the actual engine block,

is all still in one piece.

It's not only deflected the blast, but it's

stopped anything forward from being torn off.

So no major fragmentations have gone forward.

This could have meant that JFK,

and any Secret Service personnel around him, would have only

had to protect themselves from relatively small

pieces of debris.

Watch the explosion again.

You can clearly see that because the explosives were in the trunk

of the car, heavy duty shrapnel such as the doors and the side

panels are only thrown upwards or outwards, but significantly

not in front of the engine block.

This meant the mannequins were left standing,

and the President, if he'd been in their

place, may well have survived.

If he'd positioned a bit further

forward, so the charge had been more adjacent to where they were

- absolutely no chance for them.

I mean, they were, purely by luck, stood in exactly

the right place.

But all is not quite

as it seems.

Even without being hit by shrapnel, JFK could have faced

mortal jeopardy from the blast.

Watch the explosion again. This rippling effect on the image

is a shockwave from the blast.

This is known as blast overpressure - and depending on

how close you are standing to the point of detonation, it can

prove to be fatal.

They don't

appear to have been struck by any of the fragments,

but there's gonna be an enormous amount of overpressure.

That does a lot of damage to the human body.

The power of the shockwave

diminishes the further you are away from the car,

but scientific calculations carried out by Trevor suggest

that there was a 50% chance that JFK would have

sustained lethal blast damage.

It's gonna enter

the body orifices, it's gonna blow out their ear drums, may

have suffered internal damage, lung damage, internal bleeding.

You also have this phenomenon called blast lung,

where the blast overpressure enters the body and

damages the alveoli in the lung, and what happens over time they

start to produce fluid and you basically internally drown.

Quite often people have walked away from explosions and seemed

to be OK and hours later have died simply from fluid

collecting in their lungs.

But the only person certain

to have perished would have been Pavlick himself.

Not such a happy

tale for him, he was right in the force of the blast

and there are various bits of him scattered around here.

Which is kind of what would have happened in real life.

Kennedy was sworn into office

on January 20th, 1961.

If Pavlick had succeeded with his bomb plot,

it would have been his name, not Lee Harvey Oswald,

that would have gone down in history as Kennedy's killer.

So why isn't Pavlick's story better known?

I've been waiting years

for somebody to come ask me.

I've never been interviewed by anybody.

Back in 1960, Robert Rust was

the Assistant District Attorney who brought the original charges

against Pavlick.

He thinks he knows why the story isn't more widely known.

John F. Kennedy

and the Secret Service were very worried about a copycat,

so they wanted to soft-pedal any publicity about this.

They don't want to describe the effort in full for fear

that copycats will weeks or months later commit

the same crime successfully.

Added to this, the New York air

disaster where two planes collided over the city,

took place on the day of Pavlick's arrest,

keeping him off most of the front pages.

Two airliners collided and fell

on New York City in the worst air disaster

of all time.

It took the greatest disaster force ever assembled in New York

to conquer the blaze.

Even with his bomb plot foiled

and all but lost to history, the story of Richard Pavlick

was far from over and in the years to follow,

it would bring strange and surprising turns.

It would bring strange and surprising turns.

Pavlick's audacious plot to kill Kennedy with a car bomb,

may have been covered up by the White House, but the man

himself remained troublesome for the administration,

in no small part because he was constantly

proclaiming his innocence, despite the evidence

stacked against him.

With his mental competency in question, a series of court

hearings saw Pavlick shifted between mental hospitals

and jailhouses.

He at times was declared insane, at times he was

declared competent.

Witnesses to his supposed statements were not

cross-examined.

That's a kind of torture, I mean he seems

to have entered this kind of purgatorial limbo

where no one would take responsibility for any

definitive judgement.

For the next few years Pavlick

became lost in the system.

[three gun shots] But in yet another strange twist

to his story, it was the actual assassination of JFK

on November 22nd, 1963 that set him on the path to freedom.

At the request of the Secret Service,

Pavlick was interviewed by a doctor to gauge

his response to the news.

He didn't infer any notable reaction - and certainly nothing

to suggest that he was glad the President was dead.

This proved to be a turning point.

Pavlick was no longer deemed to be such a danger

and he was moved to the New Hampshire Mental Hospital,

in his home state.

Perhaps buoyed by being back on home turf, Pavlick

became a prolific man of words - writing letters to everyone

and anyone who might be able to make him

a free man.

He wrote 18,000, 28,000

letters over this period.

This is my last letter

asking you all to fight to get me a lawyer.

I did not threaten Kennedy.

If I had wanted to kill Kennedy, why did I let

a good chance go by?

You now have my life in your hands.

It wasn't long before he got the ear of William Loeb,

the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader.

Loeb was a close friend of Jimmy Hoffa.

Hoffa was boss of the powerful Teamster Union -

a divisive character, he was no lover of the Kennedy cause -

and he saw taking on Pavlick's case, as well as

paying his legal fees, as a way of smearing

the Kennedy name.

John Marshall tells me that

Jimmy Hoffa has arranged to hire the lawyers to try

and get Pavlick out of the New Hampshire insane asylum.

They published a series of articles that made Pavlick

look like a choir boy.

And after a series of news

articles and legal proceedings, on December 13th, 1966 Pavlick

was let go from the Concord Insane Asylum, as a free man

Mr Pavlick was eventually

released, took an apartment in the city of Manchester.

During his years

of incarceration, Pavlick's hatred of JFK

may well have quelled.

But it was to be replaced by a new figure of contempt.

His one time friend, Thomas Murphy the Postmaster -

whom he discovered had been responsible

for alerting the Secret Service to the bomb plot.

Mr. Murphy had a number

of children and he was very concerned.

Mr Pavlick was saying "I understand you got an award

from the postal service for turning me in.

One of these days I'll come and see you" and this really

concerned the postmaster.

He'd drive to Belmont and park in front of the Murphy residence

and be staring at the house.

He'd sit for hours on end parked

outside the Murphy household just watching the family

come and go.

There was no law at the time against stalking or harassment,

so Pavlick's intimidating behavior was perfectly legal.

Was very, very

terrifying to them.

My husband felt his family was threatened.

And I think that's probably why we didn't tell the girls too

much about it - we didn't wanna scare them.

I recall when I was growing up, any time I heard

Pavlick's name, I would be very afraid. I just thought he was

really bad and it would scare me when I would hear his name.

Richard Pavlick died on

November 11th, 1975 aged 88.

He may now just be a curious footnote in history, the man

who could have killed JFK.

But if he had succeeded, history may have taken

a very different path If JFK had been assassinated

earlier by Pavlick, I think we would see some

different decisions. I don't know how Johnson would have

handled the Cuban missile crisis, whether he would have

been even more belligerent, but there's no question

that history would have been changed if the assassination

had taken place.

But to those who knew Pavlick,

both the man and his actions continue to leave a lasting mark

on their lives.

Well I think he was an

unfortunate soul, a very tortured soul, and I will

remember him as such.

And just very thankful that the Postmaster did do what he do,

and observed what he observed.

I consider Dad a hero,

because he definitely could have saved

the President's life.

Definitely proud of my father.

And if anyone is in any doubt

that President Kennedy was grateful, they only need ask

former State Attorney, Robert Rust -

who has a very special memento.

I got this within several months

after the arrest of Pavlick, Mr. Robert Rust,

with very best wishes, John F. Kennedy -

bless his heart.