The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture

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Kerry freely ranged about in the JFK/MLK/RFK assassination matrixes like a conspiratorial version of Diogenes, the ancient Greek who loved to mock the philosophers and statesmen of his day. Lots of kooky characters killing time by pulling pranks and drinking profusely on leave in the city. In January 1968, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, certain there had been a New Orleans-based conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kerry Wendell Thornley—the hero of our story—was born on April 17, 1938, to Helen and Kenneth Thornley.

Last years' THE SHADOW OVER SANTA SUSANA: BLACK MAGIC, MIND CONTROL AND THE "MANSON FAMILY" MYTHOS gave us one of the best books on Charles Manson in well over two decades. After getting appropriately drunk, the two visited a Tijuana brothel, where Kerry lost his virginity.

Adam Gorightly: Robert Anton Wilson claims that the Discordians were waving the peace sign a few years before them damn hippies and yippies started up. Another high school chum was Bill Stephens, who hung out with both Kerry and mutual pal, Bob Newport.

Kerry graduated from CalHi in 1957, and in 1958 attended the University of Southern California to study journalism.For the next 30 years, Thornley traveled and lived all over the United States and was involved in a variety of activities, ranging from editing underground newspapers to attending graduate school. We occasionally would be herded into a truck which resembled a cattle car and driven to the parade grounds at El Toro. Also, I think I first became aware of that particular Greek goddess from the Dreamworks film Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, which came out just two years before the dwarf planet’s discovery. Struggling with illness in his final days, Kerry Thornley died of cardiac arrest in Atlanta on November 28, 1998, at the age of 60.

Thornley became increasingly paranoid and distrustful in the wake of his experiences during the 1960s, both by his own accounts and those of personal acquaintances.Wilson’s stated goal, which shouldn’t diminish his considerable merits as a pure entertainer, was “to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything. A poll appeared in the evening paper indicating that most Americans now thought the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. I had never heard of him before so it was interesting to see his ties to Oswald, and the dwarf planet Eris.