Pensacola had its own death conspiracy linked to JFK’s assassination – Pensacola News Journal

As President Donald Trump’s day one executive order to release all of the government’s classified documents on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy took effect and led to some of the files being released Tuesday night, many around the country are scanning copious amounts of pages to get the full story.

While Kennedy’s assassination has been the subject of many conspiracy theories for decades, Pensacola is home to its own conspiracy related to the president’s assassination.

The conspiracy revolves around a man named Thomas Hank Killam, a 45-year-old man who died on Palafox street March 17, 1964, four months after Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.

What happened to Hank Killam?

Killam, who was allegedly in part of the same circles as Oswald, claimed he was being harassed by “agents” before he was found dead on a downtown Pensacola sidewalk. Killam had allegedly died by suicide after he threw himself through the front window panel of a department store on Palafox Street.

After throwing himself through the window, a shard of glass left a single, 3-inch deep slash to his jugular vein, killing him in minutes. Dr. A. H. Northup, the county coroner at the time, listed the death as accidental, not knowing police had already chalked up Killam’s death as “probable suicide.”

Killam was previously in Dallas where he married cigarette girl Wanda Davis, who worked at The Carousel Club owned by Jack Ruby, slayer of Oswald.

Following the Nov. 22, 1963, death of Kennedy, Killam came under heavy investigation and questioning because of his wife’s link with Ruby and also because he had worked several jobs with John Carter, a man who once shared a room with Oswald in a Dallas boarding house.

Constant harassment from what he called “agents” and “plotters” – who he never identified – forced him to leave his wife in Texas and come back to Pensacola where he faced a 10-year prison sentence for violating probation. He brought with him files related to Kennedy’s assassination.

“I’m a dead man,” he told his brother Earl. “But I’ve run as far as I’m going to run.”

A few days later Killam was dead.

Hank Killam’s investigation

Three years after Killam died, Escambia County Solicitor Carl Harper began an investigation into his death, believing it was not suicide.

“Say he tripped on a piece of broken concrete on the sidewalk and stumbled into the window accidentally,” Harper told the News Journal in 1967. “The question is still there: Why wasn’t he cut up more?”

After a monthslong investigation into Killam’s death and his connection to the Kennedy assassination, Harper concluded that there was no evidence whatsoever to show that Killam was a victim of anything other than his own self-induced fears.

Read the JFK files

Looking to read the JFK files yourself? You can find them on the National Archives’ website here.

Not all documents posted online Tuesday night

The documents were released just before 7 p.m.

The National Archives and Records Administration, the keeper of the documents, posted them with this statement:

“In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released.”

The National Archives said it partnered with agencies across the federal government to comply with the President’s directive in support of Executive Order 14176. It said the records are available to access either online or in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

“As the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page,” the National Archives said, suggesting that not all of the documents were being released on Tuesday in digital form.

The National Archives also said some information might still be withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, and because some tax return information is subject to Internal Revenue Code prohibitions. 

Josh Meyer of USA TODAY contributed to this report