SLIPPERY ROCK — More than 100 people packed into a lecture hall at Slippery Rock University Wednesday hoping to hear some insight into a 52-year-old mystery.

Who was really behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

Douglas Horne, author and government analyst, spoke for more than two and a half hours focusing on inconsistencies in the medical evidence that point to a government conspiracy.

Horne asserts that the assassination and an attempt to cover it up were arranged by “superpatriots” inside the U.S. Government who disagreed with Kennedy’s handling of foreign policy during a tense time in the Cold War.

Horne opened by saying that the good turnout shows that people still want to find out the truth about what happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

“The fact that you are here willingly is an indicator that nobody in this country is really satisfied with what they have been told so far,” he said.

Horne has been researching the assassination since the 1990s and has published several books on the topic.

The Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963, did an investigation and released a report in 1964 that found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president.

The assassination continued to be written about and debated, and public interest was aroused again in 1991 with the release of the film “JFK,” directed by Oliver Stone, which depicts a government conspiracy.

In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which established an assassination records review board to collect government records and place them in the National Archives.

Horne served as the chief analyst for military records on the review board, which spent four years reviewing 60,000 records and dealing with requests from government agencies to have certain information redacted.

Its job was not to reinvestigate the murder, but it did provide an opportunity to make new information available to the public.

“We were not allowed to come up with findings of fact or conclusions. We were like super-librarians, but the neat part for me was that we did a lot of extra credit work,” he said.

The board conducted 10 depositions and numerous other interviews, mainly with people who were present for the autopsy of the president at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

Two of the biggest disputes regarding the assassination are how many times Kennedy was shot and how many shooters there were.

The official autopsy report in the archives as well as testimony from Dr. James Humes and others held that he was shot twice in the head and that both bullets came from behind.

However, evidence has led some researchers to conclude that Kennedy was shot once from behind and twice from the front.

The doctors were allegedly told to make the body appear as if there had been two bullet wounds both coming from the back, making Oswald the only shooter.

Numerous people who saw the body have testified that they witnessed a wound on the back of Kennedy’s head that could have only been caused by a bullet that was fired from in front of the car.

Witnesses have also said that there was a small circular entrance wound on the front of his neck that appears in autopsy photographs as a wide gash.

A mortician, two FBI agents and a nurse who were at the hospital all gave accounts of wounds that differ from the official autopsy photographs.

“This is a cover-up on the fly and it’s not being done very well,” Horne said about the conflicting accounts and possibility that the remains were tampered with.

There are also records of multiple versions of the autopsy report, containing different conclusions. Humes confirmed in a deposition that he burned his early autopsy notes and autopsy draft, which were stained with blood.

Horne said the men who he believes were behind a conspiracy are now mostly dead and the time for them to be officially tried has past. But that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be upset that such a thing could have happened.

“The good news is we can talk about it and we’re not going to get thrown in jail,” he said.

“But the bad news is all this nonsense happened and its never been straightened out and accounted for and you should be mad as hell about it because I’m still mad as hell about it,” he said.

Horne was brought to campus by history professor Thomas Pearcy, who has taught a class on the JFK assassination five times since 2003.

The SRU history, criminology and criminal justice, political science programs and the Honors Program sponsored the event.

Horne’s books include “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK” and “JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy was Assassinated.”