A previously unpublished photograph of John F Kennedy’s motorcade snapped minutes before his assassination in Dallas in 1963 has been unearthed in a Texas second hand store.
George Rebeles made the extraordinary discovery inside a used Bachman Turner Overdrive compact disc case that he bought at the Souls Harbor Thrift Store in the city of Ferris, according to local news site WFAA.
Mr Rebeles told WFAA he opened the case about a month after making the purchase, and was stunned to see the black and white Polaroid photo with the date of 11-22-63 handwritten on the back.
“How this could have ended up in a small town thrift store, fascinates me,” Mr Rebeles told the ABC affiliate.
JFK historian Farris Rookstool told WFAA that the photo appeared to have been taken as the presidential motorcade left Love Field Airport.
According to the JFK Library, the president and wife Jackie Kennedy Onassis arrived at Love Field at 11.38am after taking a short flight from Fort Worth on the morning of 22 November 1963.
The president’s limousine left the airport for the 10 mile ride into downtown Dallas, where he was shot at Dealey Plaza at around 12.30pm. The Warren Commission would later rule that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for JFK’s murder.
However, questions and conspiracies have continued to swirl around the assassination, and investigators continue to push for the government to release all of its classified files.
The National Archives and Records Administration released more than 13,000 documents about the assassination in December,
Mr Rookstool told the news site that the photo would make a nice family heirloom, but was unlikely to be very valuable.
Its new owner said he was yet to decide if he would try to sell the photograph, and that he was more interested in figuring out how it would up in a thrift store in Ferris.
Mr Rebeles told WFAA his discovery had added another perplexing chapter to the enduring mystery of JFK’s death.
“I’m not a huge conspiracy nut or anything like that, but sometimes things don’t quite add up,” he said.
