Clay Shaw Is Dead at 60; Freed in Kennedy ‘Plot’ (Published 1974) (2024)

Clay L. Shaw, the businessman who was acquitted of plotting to assassinate President Kennedy after one of the nation's more sensational trials, died yesterday of cancer in his New Orleans home. He was 60 years old.

A tall, imposing, silverhaired bachelor who made a hobby of restoring homes in the New Orleans French Quarter, Mr. Shaw was arrested in March, 1967, on charges brought by, District Attorney Jim Garrison that he helped plan the killing of President Kennedy with alleged accomplices in New Orleans.

The trial, which began in 1969, took five weeks. The main evidence against Mr. Shaw came from a 25‐year‐old Baton Rouge insurance salesman, whose memory had to be jogged three times by hypnosis before he could take the stand, and a 29‐year‐old heroin addict who had begun using drugs at the age of 13.

One man appeared to testify dressed in a toga and solemnly told the court, that he Was a reincarnation of Julius Caesar.

A “mystery witness” from New York who said he overheard Mr. Shaw plotting at party turned out to be a man who once fingerprinted his own daughter before allowing her into the house because his “enemies” had often impersonated his relatives in their efforts to destroy him.

Doubts Are Cited

Mr. Garrison was one of many who expressed concern about the doubts that remained after the Kennedy assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, but Mr. Shaw was the only suspect ever tried for the killing.

Mr. Shaw, who came out of World War II as a decorated Army major, went on to become prominent in New Orleans business circles and retired in 1965 as managing director of the International Trade Mart there.

Every effort was made in the trial to undermine Mr. Shaw's position, but he never showed signs of despondency. He chainsmoked filter cigarettes impassively at the defense table as prosecution witnesses described him as a flamboyant hom*osexual.

Mr. Garrison had set the stage for such descriptions when, after Mr. Shaw's arrest in 1967, the District Attorney's office released a list of articles, including five leather whips, confiscated at Mr. Shaw's apartment. The whips, Mr. Shaw explained, had been used as props for Mardi Gras costumes.

Mr. Shaw steadfastly denied that he had any part in any conspiracy or that he even knew the two persons he was accused of conspiring with.

Both ‘Plotters’ Dead

Both of the alleged co‐conspirators were dead when Mr. “Shaw was arrested. One was Lee Harvey Oswald, the man the Warren Commission determined acted alone in killing President Kennedy. Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby two days after the assassination. The other man was a pilot named David Ferrie, who had died of a brain hemorrhage.

Despite Mr. Garrison's repeated contentions that he had “solved” the murder of the President, the jury was unconvinced. It took the 12 men only 50 minutes to reach a verdict of not guilty just two months to the day after Mr. Shaw was arrested.

Mr. Garrison kept after Mr. Shaw, trying then to prosecute him on a charge of perjury. But the Federal courts ruled against the District Attorney.

Later Mr. Shaw said his reputation had been tarnished and his personal fortune depleted by the trial. To pay his bills he had to sell his home, which was the first in the French Quarter to have a private swimming pool.

“I often wonder what would have happened to me had been penniless and without friends,” Mr. Shaw said. “Justice can be a costly process.”

He called his trial “one of the seediest and shabbiest episodes in American judicial history.”

Speech to Students

“I was arrested and charged with what must surely be the most shocking crime of the century, of which I had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever,” Mr. Shaw said in a speech to college students two years after his acquittal. “It doesn't matter what happened to me personally, terrible things happen to everybody. But what I'm talking about tonight could happen to anybody within the sound of my voice. You think that's impossible. I assure you it's not.”

There was agreement with Mr, Shaw's assessment of the trial.

The New Orleans StatesItem called for Mr. Garrison's resignation. “He abused the vast powers of his office,” the paper said in a. Page One editorial. “He has perverted the law rather than prosecuted it.”

At his death Mr. Shaw had been pressing a $5‐million lawsuit against Mr. Garrison and several wealthy businessmen who had helped finance the District Attorney's investigation. Hearings on the suit had been scheduled to begin next month in Federal court.

Mr. Garrison was defeated for re‐election last year and is now a candidate for the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Mr. Shaw was born in 1914 in Kentwood La., a community in Tangipahoa Parish (county) about 100 miles north of New Orleans, where his grandfather and namesake had been town marshal around the turn of the century.