The assassination of John F. Kennedy is perhaps the most infamous crime in American history. Yet the only person ever to be brought to trial for the killing was an obscure—and completely innocent—businessman named Clay LaVergne Shaw. What’s more, his trial took place not in Dallas, where the US President was killed by lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, but almost 500 miles away, in New Orleans.

Shaw’s prosecution emerged from the homophobic conspiracism of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (1921–1992), who’d been instructed by extremely (some might say comically) dubious informants that Shaw had conspired to kill JFK either as part of a “homosexual thrill killing” led by “high-status fags,” or a CIA plot aimed at reversing Kennedy’s foreign policies (or some combination of both). At one point during the trial, the prosecution had a memo read aloud, based on a lurid interview with fabulist Perry Russo, to the effect that “[Russo] remembers seeing [Shaw] at the Nashville Street Wharf when he went to see J.F.K. speak. He said he particularly remembers this guy because he was apparently a queer. It seems that instead of looking at J.F.K. speak, Shaw kept turning around and looking at all the young boys.”

The case never should have gone to trial, and the jury properly acquitted Shaw after less than an hour of deliberation. Nevertheless, Garrison has remained a folk hero among conspiracy theorists, much thanks to the sympathetic treatment he received in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, the plot of which was partly based on Garrison’s memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins. One writer for the Advocate summed up JFK as “the most homophobic film ever to come out of Hollywood.”