A Secret Service agent who was just feet away when John F. Kennedy was shot has spoken out and raised new questions about the circumstances behind the 35th president’s assassination.

The New York Times’ Peter Baker reported on the newly-emerged account of Paul Landis, who stood six decades ago on the running board of the motorcade car when Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas.

Landis is offering his recollections in his upcoming memoir, The Final Witness, and he is expected to contradict the Warren Commission’s official findings, the “magic bullet” theory, and even the two statements Landis previously filed to the authorities right after the shooting.

“I just think it had been long enough that I needed to tell my story,” Landis told reporters about the upcoming book.

The “magic bullet” theory refers to the Warren Commission’s understanding that Kennedy was struck by a bullet that went though his throat and subsequently wounded Texas Governor John Connally in multiple places. Baker noted that part of the theory’s weight was because investigators found the bullet on Connally’s stretcher, bolstering the idea that the bullet exited his body during life-saving efforts.

Landis said he heard multiple shots ring out during the attack, and that the Warren Commission got it wrong on where the casing for the magic bullet was found.

From the Times:

What it comes down to is a copper-jacketed 6.5-millimeter projectile. The Warren Commission decided that one of the bullets fired that day struck the president from behind, exited from the front of his throat and continued on to hit Mr. Connally, somehow managing to injure his back, chest, wrist and thigh. It seemed incredible that a single bullet could do all that, so skeptics called it the magic bullet theory.

Investigators came to that conclusion partly because the bullet was found on a stretcher believed to have held Mr. Connally at Parkland Memorial Hospital, so they assumed it had exited his body during efforts to save his life. But Mr. Landis, who was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, said that is not what happened.

In fact, he said, he was the one who found the bullet — and he found it not in the hospital near Mr. Connally but in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting.

When he spotted the bullet after the motorcade arrived at the hospital, he said he grabbed it to thwart souvenir hunters. Then, for reasons that still seem fuzzy even to him, he said he entered the hospital and placed it next to Kennedy on the president’s stretcher, assuming it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened. At some point, he now guesses, the stretchers must have been pushed together and the bullet was shaken from one to another.

“There was nobody there to secure the scene, and that was a big, big bother to me,” Mr. Landis said. “All the agents that were there were focused on the president.” A crowd was gathering. “This was all going on so quickly. And I was just afraid that — it was a piece of evidence, that I realized right away. Very important. And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision,’ and I grabbed it.’”

Mr. Landis theorizes that the bullet struck Kennedy in the back but for some reason was undercharged and did not penetrate deeply, therefore popping back out before the president’s body was removed from the limousine.

But Landis was “reluctant” to speculate beyond that, the Times reported, although the former agent did that, while he always believed Lee Harvey Oswald was the “lone gunman,” he has begun to “doubt” himself.

“At this point, I’m beginning to doubt myself,” he said. “Now I begin to wonder.” That is as far as he is willing to go.

For decades, the Kennedy assassination and the events surrounding it have been a source of political intrigue and countless conspiracy theories. Baker reported that Landis ran his story with multiple officials with varying opinions about the veracity of his claims, and there is a great deal of skepticism surrounding the details.

More from the Times:

Mr. Landis’s account varies in a couple of respects from two written statements he filed in the week after the shooting. Aside from not mentioning finding the bullet, he reported hearing only two shots. “I do not recall hearing a third shot,” he wrote. Likewise, he did not mention going into the trauma room where Kennedy was taken, writing that he “remained outside by the door” when the first lady went in…

Mr. Landis said the reports he filed after the assassination included mistakes; he was in shock and had barely slept for five days as he focused on helping the first lady through the ordeal, he said, and not paying enough attention to what he submitted. He did not think to mention the bullet, he said.

It was not until 2014 that he realized that the official account of the bullet differed from his memory, he said, but he did not come forward then out of a feeling that he had made a mistake in putting it on the stretcher without telling anyone in that pre-C.S.I., secure-the-crime-scene era.

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” Mr. Landis said. “I was afraid. I started to think, did I do something wrong? There was a fear that I might have done something wrong and I shouldn’t talk about it.”

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