Fall means many things to different people.    Early on, it's the start of school and the changing of colors.    Later on, it's Thanksgiving and holiday preparations.

      For cable TV history channels, it's time to crack open a new round of Kennedy assassination documentaries, just in case anyone forgot that JFK was murdered (insert number here) years ago this November.

      Discovery does a pair of new offerings early next week, one that supposedly pins the murder on the mob and another that links Jack Ruby, the accused killer of the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to other unsavory Mafia interests.

      It makes for fascinating television--who among us doesn't love "CSI" or "Cold Case"?      It's even more compelling because this is about REAL people.

      Don't buy it, folks, at least not anyone who tries pitching you on Oswald being a patsy and the victim of some sort of elaborate frame-up.

      After years of reading about JFK, watching every documentary imaginable and going full circle on who did what, I'm firmly convinced that the weaselly little book warehouse clerk pulled off one of the great crimes of the 20th century.

      We can argue ballistics, motives, botched autopsies, and conspiracies all you want.     The bottom line: Oswald killed Kennedy.

      Forgetting everything else, remember this: Oswald had already tried to kill conservative General Edwin Walker months before JFK came to Dallas.    Using the same cheap Italian rifle, he squeezed off a round into Walker's living room as the General worked at a desk.    The slug hit a window frame and did no harm.     Authorities wouldn't figure out who pulled the trigger until after the Kennedy murder.

      Oswald owned guns.    He bought both the rifle and a pistol that he would use to execute a Dallas police officer as he was trying to make a run for it after doing in JFK.     And, let's not forget: he tried using that same sidearm on the officers who arrested him in a movie theater after the patrolman's slaying.    After screaming, "This is it!", he brandished the weapon and pulled the trigger as cops pounced on him in the seats.     The only thing that kept him from taking out another officer was the fact that the weapon jammed--a detective's hand got in the way of the firing mechanism, keeping the gun from going off.

      Oswald had no explanation for his whereabouts at the time of the Kennedy murder, no firm escape plan after he committed the deed.    He couldn't explain away how his alias wound up on the purchase order for the guns.     And, he couldn't tell anyone what happened to the bundle he brought to work the day of the assassination--"curtain rods", is what he told a co-worker who'd given him a ride in that day.    Officers found lots inside the Texas School Book Depository as they turned it inside-out following the killing, but they never came up with "curtain rods".

      JFK's assassination is a cottage industry.     It's generated books, documentaries, even a feature length movie or two.    It gives cable history channels several nights of programming every fall.     I've done my part in contributing to the empire.    I have shelves packed with the latest blockbuster expose that claims to crack the caper by blaming everyone from Jimmy Hoffa to Fidel Castro to Jack Parr.    Take it in, as much as you want.     Question, challenge and be skeptical.    

      But, for God's sake and for the memory of a murdered President, don't give Oswald a pass.      There's guilty, and there's being toast beyond a shadow of a doubt.     Don't waste time trying to absolve one of history's more pathetic fringe players.     While it's hard to blame one of the great crimes of our era on such an insignificant character, one has to only remember that it's not always the greatest criminals who pull them off.     For all that went wrong in Oswald's life up to the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, he was, for that one tragic moment, finally capable of pulling off something he coldly set out to do.

      Remember that as you take all of this November's JFK offerings in.