This book tells, for the first time in its entirety, the story surrounding the ordeal of Clay Shaw, who was arrested and charged with conspiracy in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Shaw's trial and the events leading up to it were headline news internationally for two years in the late 1960s. Those who dismissed the Warren Report as a government cover-up now saw the conspiracy that they had always suspected slowly being unraveled before their eyes.

The only problem was that it was all a fraud - an imaginary plot put together by New Orleans's volatile and charismatic District Attorney, Jim Garrison. "Evidence" had been manufactured out of whole cloth, identifications falsified, perjured testimony made under threat. Lives and reputations were ruined. Yet to this day, many who lived through the period still believe that Garrison "must have had something." Over the years, interest subsided. But then in 1990, Oliver Stone's movie JFK was released.

Patricia Lambert takes the reader through this almost unbelievable tale; from its beginning in a New Orleans hospital room; to the halls of justice, where it should have ended; to its present-day incarnations on video and in the JFK Collection at the National Archives.