David Lifton

David Samuel Lifton (September 20, 1939 – December 6, 2022) was an American author who wrote the 1981 bestseller Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, a work that puts forth evidence that there was a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Lifton grew up in Rockaway Beach, New York. He graduated from Cornell University's School of Engineering Physics in 1962 and thereupon enrolled in the University of California, Los Angeles to work on an advance degree in engineering. While there Lifton worked nights as a computer engineer for North American Aviation, a contractor for the Apollo program. In autumn 1964, around the time the Warren Report was published, Lifton became interested in the JFK case after attending a lecture on the topic of the conspiracy to cover up the Kennedy assassination by Mark Lane. Lifton purchased a set of the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission's investigation and started his own research on the Kennedy case. In 1966, Lifton was dismissed from UCLA for neglecting his studies. He quit his aerospace job, devoting all his time to the Kennedy assassination.The January 1967 issue of Ramparts magazine presented a "special report" by Lifton, with David Welsh, entitled "The Case for Three Assassins" that laid out the scenario that more than one assassin was firing at Kennedy based on anomalies in the medical evidence.In 1993, Lifton was played by Robert Picardo in the television movie Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald. He testified before the Assassination Records Review Board in September 1996, and provided the Board with various materials including 35mm interpositives of the Zapruder film, as well as copies of audiotapes, videotapes, and transcripts of witness interviews he conducted.As of 2010, Lifton lived in West Los Angeles where he was working full-time on a major written work about Oswald entitled Final Charade.On the Kennedy assassination website Kennedys and King (successor to the Kennedy assassination activist website CTKA.NET which lobbied for access to files), James DiEugenio wrote about David Lifton's unpublished work a few weeks after his death:

"At the time of his death, Lifton had been working for a very long time - decades actually - on a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. That book was entitled Final Charade. This was to be part of a trilogy of Best Evidence, Final Charade and a volume on the Zapruder film. In the anthology The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, Lifton submitted an essay called “Pig on a Leash” about his theories of Z film alteration.

"We should all hope that the manuscript of Final Charade will eventually be published. Lifton spent so many years on it, so much money, and so much effort, that it needs to be printed. Only then can it be judged as part of the Lifton canon."Lifton died on December 6, 2022, at the age of 83.