Robert Groden, JFK assassination researcher, has had way more than his 15 minutes of fame. In the mid-1970s, he painstakingly created an enhancement of the Abraham Zapruder film that landed him a high-profile appearance on Geraldo Rivera's Goodnight America television show. The film showed in gruesome detail President Kennedy's head snapping back with extreme force after it was struck by a bullet -- suggesting that he might have been shot from the front, a direct contradiction of the conclusion reached in the controversial Warren Commission Report.
Some people -- even the folks who run the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza -- credit Groden's work on the Zapruder film with helping spur creation of the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.
Groden served as a staff photographic consultant to the House Select Committee for three years, went on to write several books on the assassination -- some of them best-sellers -- and wound up as a technical consultant to director Oliver Stone on his 1991 movie JFK.
But in recent years, the bearded, bespectacled, 51-year-old Groden has fallen on hard times. He suffered seven strokes after he fell in an icy parking lot and hit his head. The strokes have impaired his memory and limited his job opportunities. Except for the occasional stint as an expert witness in a court proceeding -- Groden testified in O.J. Simpson's civil trial that the infamous photograph of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes was a fake -- there isn't much full-time work for photographic and assassination experts these days.
For the last year, Groden and his wife, Diane, whom he met on the grassy knoll four years ago during a memorial service commemorating the 30th anniversary of Kennedy's murder, have eked a living peddling videos and magazine-sized condensed versions of his pro-conspiracy books to the two million tourists who flock to Dealey Plaza each year.
