Photo courtesy of Jack Owens.
1213 Jack Owens
Following a 30-year career with the FBI, Jack Owens has written a novel about the John F. Kennedy assassination.
When the sound of a gunshot rang through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Jack Owens knew he had to tell John F. Kennedy. He tried to run to Kennedy’s car, but he couldn’t get there before the shot pierced him.
In reality, Owens was not in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, but over the decades to follow, this scenario at Dealey would play out over and over again in his dreams.
“From the first time I saw John Kennedy in the mid-50s, I admired him,” Owens said. “I was so happy when he was elected, and when he was killed, I never got over it.”
Every weekend following the assassination Owens walked from his college in Washington, D.C. to Arlington Cemetery to visit Kennedy’s grave. He had watched Kennedy’s press conferences weekly starting in high school, and today he owns transcripts of all of them, along with Kennedy’s letters from when he was a teenager and college student, ones he said are full of both eloquence and wit.
“He had a big heart and understood the needs of poor people like the coal miners in West Virginia where I grew up,” he said.
Owens followed Kennedy’s call for young people to go into public service, and after retiring in 1999 from 30 years as an FBI agent based in Homewood, he has published a book about the greatest influence in his life.
“I was very suspicious about the government findings that he was killed by just one person and not a conspiracy when I was in college and law school,” he said. “From the time those findings came out, the American people didn’t believe it, and I didn’t either.”
But his time immersed in the Bureau’s forest of files depicting events before and after the Kennedy assassination convinced him the FBI got it right. That didn’t stop his imagination from wandering, though. If he was going to write a book about the assassination that was interesting, he knew it had to involve a conspiracy.
Watchman: JFK’s Last Ride, which was published in November by Keith Publications in Arizona, blends what Owens knows as fact with what he created as fiction. Even as he describes the plot, the lines between the two are blurred.
“Many things you will read are true, but the characters are mostly fictional,” he said.
In the novel, three Soviet gunmen conspire to kill Kennedy, as inspired by Owens’ interest in counterintelligence during the Cold War.
“I met so many Soviets that I felt like I had a handle on how they worked and tried to recruit spies in America,” he said.
In fact, Owens said Lee Harvey Oswald, who was convicted for the assassination in real life, had spent two years in the U.S.S.R., and after the assassination, the Soviets were assuring the U.S. that they did not send him.
With the Kennedy book published, Owens is now working under contract on three novels set in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa about a serial killer named Pok, a religious zealot who was inspired by the profiles of dozens of serial killers Owens encountered while in the FBI.
He’s been told it’s funny, just like the JFK book, as it mimics the dialogue among his FBI colleagues.
“You need a sense of humor because you see the dark side of the people and the good side, too,” he said.
Owens and his wife, Patricia, a longtime Homewood High School chemistry teacher, live in their third Homewood home, and their six children are graduates of Edgewood Elementary and Homewood High School. For more about his books, including Watchman and a memoir about his FBI career, visit jackowensbooks.com.
