Who Killed Kennedy (novel)

Who Killed Kennedy was a DWU novel published by Virgin Books. It is often considered by fans to be a part of the Virgin Missing Adventures series, although it was released as a standalone novel without ties to any of Virgin's ranges. It is the first true Doctor-lite novel. It revolves around how journalist James Stevens' investigations into the Kennedy assassination led him into the world of the Doctor. This allows the author to explore a number of televised stories from the perspective of a neutral observer, much as the character of Elton Pope would later be used in Love & Monsters.

The book is further notable — perhaps even infamous — for a subplot involving the rape, near-wedding and murder of former companion Dodo Chaplet. However, this aspect of the story has often been conflated with aspects of The Man in the Velvet Mask. As a result, many fans wrongly believe that Kennedy tells the story of Dodo dying from syphilis — something that never happens in either book.

Stylistically, author David Bishop unusually attempts to present the story as genuine journalism. In pursuit of realism, he even allows Stevens front cover credit for writing the book.

Publisher's summary
The shocking secret linking a Time Lord and a President.

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on 22 November, 1963.

Now, the publication of this volume reveals frightening new information about the assassination, the real reasons why the President of the United States had to die and an incredible plan to save the man known as JFK!

These stunning revelations involve an ultra-secret military force disguised as a minor off-shot of the United Nations and an international terrorist leader who has twice brought the world to the brink of nuclear conflict.

For more than three decades the public has been fed lies, half-truths and misinformation. Now despite — government attempts to halt the publication of this volume — the complete, shocking story can be told. Read the book they tried to ban!

October 1969
James Stevens is a Daily Chronicle writer, obsessed with the John F. Kennedy assassination. He is annoyed today that he has to answer the phone. The caller is a man named Mullins, a porter at Ashbridge Cottage Hospital trying to sell the newspaper a news story. The day before, there was a heatwave across Essex and meteorites fell in Oxley Woods. Furthermore, a man with inhuman blood was found in the woods. Stevens soon found himself driving to Essex in one of the Chronicle's vehicles.

He arrived to find the hospital swarmed with news reporters, as well as members of UNIT. They were met at the door by Captain Munro, who informed them that he could tell them nothing about the man or why they were there. Stevens noted as a brigadier  and his female aide walked into the hospital. Minutes later, James saw the Brigadier driving away, avoiding their questions. Noticing the hospital's phone was in use, James went to a pub to call the paper.

He returned to the register, where he turned the apparently boring story into an eighteen-page-long 'sexy' article 'of deadly debris from space and sinister cover-up scaremongering'. At 7:00 p.m, he was ready to go home, but was hesitant, due to his unhappy relationship with his wife, Natasha.

The next day, he was surprised to see the word 'UNIT' had been replaced with 'the authorities' instead. He asked who had done this and learned that an editor had changed it right before it went out. He was also shocked to see all of the other newspapers reacting with stories covering up the scene, calling the inhuman blood a '...prank gone wrong...'

Soon after, however, he received a phone call from an anonymous tipper telling him that someone tried to kidnap the alleged alien man. He called around and found one nurse who had seen the incident. She told him she had heard a gunshot and had looked outside, but had been told to keep quiet. She refused to tell him any more and hung up. He soon realised that the target for this story shouldn't be the man, but UNIT. He went to the reference library, but was surprised to find that both "UNIT" and "Lethbridge-Stewart, Alistair Gordon" had folders, but each were empty, as if the contents had been removed.

The following day, one of the most infamous terrorist attacks of the 1960s occurred. During the early hours of Black Thursday, Terrorists began attacking helpless citizens in the street. They also turned off all power and disabled TV and radio stations, cutting off media. If the attacks had not stopped within the hour, the terrorists might have achieved their goal.

Stevens was late that day, and was shocked when told of the incident. Unlike his fellow reporters, he doubted the story, as it claimed there were only a few terrorists out of the hundreds of attackers. Despite this, the paper continued to print the official government story. Throughout the week, however, many people called the paper claiming to have been attacked by window shop dummies. This was written off with the heading 'Black Thursday Brings Mass Hysteria.'

November 1963
Things soon return to normal.

Stevens has become the correspondent for the upcoming Mars Probe flights that would occur soon. Inspired by Britain's increasing space program, James begins writing a new column for the paper on scientific breakthroughs, and starts off by interviewing Ralph Cornish and Professor J.P. Kettlewell. He also had an appointment scheduled with Frederick Masters, but that was cancelled because Masters was unavailable.

The next day, a virus spreads through London. In the middle of the chaos, Stevens receives another call from him mystery tipper. He tells him that Frederick Masters had been the first to die from the plague sweeping London. Stevens receives Wenley Moor's phone number from the tipper, and calls the Research Centre. The Brigadier answers, but on discovering Stevens is a reporter, demands to know how he got this number before hanging up.

Stevens is still able to write a good story, and the next day the Chronicle is surrounded by reporters. Apparently, his story had caused controversy in the government. Two officials already planned to quit. That night, he and his friends go to a bar to celebrate. Stevens ends up sleeping with a red-haired girl he meets, named Natasha.

Stevens returns home after his one-night-stand with the stranger. His wife, Natasha Stevens, is infuriated that he was home late, having made him a meal to celebrate that she may have been pregnant. He became enraged at her, since he had said that he had not wanted kids. He angrily left the house.

James then decided that it was time to research further into this UNIT group...

December 1969
The Mars Recovery 7 went up into space to retrieve Mars Probe 7. It lost communication for a brief while, and came down without anyone in it. Days later, a second recovery mission went up, and Stevens then noticed Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart at the Space Centre on his TV set.

After finally receiving the permission to investigate UNIT, he finds a link between the group and C19, another group, which served as a link between UNIT and the government. In his research, Stevens soon found that UNIT also had an address, and he ventured there to try and meet the brigadier. He had no such luck.

After his trip to UNIT H.Q., Stevens began getting threatening mail and phone calls. Information was harder to get, and one day someone called suggesting he stop, or else he may end up in "the Glasshouse." The phone calls also soon began being sent to Natasha, who was informed that the caller had "...personal habits [of James] she might find very revealing." Stevens compared stories with his wife, and soon discovered that C19 had been trying to threaten him. Stevens decided to investigate the group further.

Unable to talk to most of his previous contacts anymore, Stevens found only one individual willing to talk him, a local fashion photographer infamous for her stories of an alien invasion, Isobel Watkins. Most had denounced her as a fraud, including Stevens, but he was interested in the fact that she also claimed UNIT and the Brigadier were involved in her invasion.

Stevens is shocked to discover that Isobel is not only not a raving insane person, but is also pretty and intelligent. She tells him of the alien invasion that she had witnessed, and describes the people she saw there, including the Brigadier, Zoe, Jamie and Doctor John Smith, or just "the Doctor." Stevens shows the most interest in the Doctor.

Walking home, Stevens notices a C19 car parked across the street from Isobel's house and runs — fearing that he is being followed.

January 1970
Stevens spent most of January 1970 secretly researching UNIT and placing it into a timeline, entitled "The UNIT Dossier."

February 1970
After typing his three-thousand word essay on UNIT, James returns to work on the newspaper. He renames his science column "Bad Science," due to all of the mistakes in science projects that had happened recently. He soon discovers another science project that had failed called the Inferno Project. In a pursuit of what had happened there, Stevens tracks down Greg Sutton who, after becoming drunk, tells about how the Inferno project had failed. He also tells him about another man named 'Doctor John Smith' who had claimed to have gone to a parallel universe where the Inferno Project had caused the destruction of the planet. More shocking is that this man's appearance matches that of the individual who went up in the second Recovery 7 mission to save Mars Probe 7.

Shortly before publishing the first section of 'Bad Science', Stevens once more received a call from his mystery tipper. The tipper had called to congratulate Stevens on a job well done recently, but he hangs up once Stevens mentioned C19 and the Glasshouse.

Characters

 * James Stevens
 * Dodo Chaplet
 * The Master
 * Francis Cleary
 * Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
 * Liz Shaw
 * The Third Doctor
 * Jo Grant
 * Sgt. Benton
 * Natasha Stevens
 * Ogrons
 * Professor J.P. Kettlewell
 * Mullins
 * Sam Seeley
 * Professor Ralph Cornish
 * Greg Sutton
 * Petra Williams
 * Isobel Watkins
 * Professor Kettering
 * Roland Summers
 * George Patrick Barnham
 * Alastair Fergus
 * Professor Gilbert Horner
 * Ross Tubberty
 * Catherine
 * Frederick Masters
 * Autons

Companions of the Doctor

 * Susan Foreman
 * Ian Chesterton
 * Barbara Chesterton (Barbara Wright)
 * Ben Jackson
 * Polly Wright
 * Jamie McCrimmon
 * Zoe Heriot
 * Sarah Jane Smith
 * Melanie Bush
 * Ace

Earth-based conflicts

 * The Shoreditch Incident
 * Black Thursday

Individuals

 * James Stevens spent time as a journalism teacher and mentored both "Ruby" (by implication Ruby Duvall, though the dates don't match) and Sarah Jane Smith.
 * Horatio Chinn
 * Group Captain Gilmore
 * Rachel Jensen

Time technology

 * Time ring

Corporations

 * International Electromatics

UNIT and Affliates

 * UNIT
 * ICMG
 * C19
 * The Glasshouse

Continuity

 * James Stevens was the Daily Chronicle reporter to whom the Ashbridge Cottage Hospital porter Mullins spoke on the phone. He said a man with inhuman blood had been admitted as a patient following a meteorite shower. Stevens was one of many reporters barred entry by the Brigadier and UNIT. Shortly after, Stevens met a poacher named Sam Seeley in a pub. Sam told him he had found one of the "thunderballs" recently fallen to Earth. Stevens dismissed Seeley's claims as no more than the ramblings of a drunk. Several days later, London was crippled by the events of Black Thursday, a terrorist attack when hysterical members of the public reported seeing window shop dummies coming to life. (DW: Spearhead from Space)
 * Stevens' mysterious contact directs him to the Wenley Moor nuclear research facility. Stevens calls the facility and is surprised when the phone is answered by the Brigadier, who hangs up as soon as he realises that he is speaking to a journalist. (DW: Doctor Who and the Silurians)
 * Several weeks after the plague outbreak, a woman named Doris Squire was still being treated for shock "after claiming to see some sort of lizard walking upright like a man." According to Stevens, this story did not even make the gutter press. (DW: Doctor Who and the Silurians)
 * While interviewing Ralph Cornish of the Space Centre on the state of British scientific development in the run-up in the Mars Probe 7 crisis (DW: The Ambassadors of Death), Stevens inquires as to the effect of the death of International Electromatics founder Tobias Vaughn on said development (DW: The Invasion). Refusing to answer the question directly, Cornish directs him to Vaughn's former associate Ashley Chapel. (MA: Millennial Rites)
 * Stevens dismisses Isobel Watkins' claims that Earth had been invaded by "robot men from outer space" (DW: The Invasion), as well as Greg Sutton's similarly outlandish claim that a green slime from the centre of the Earth transformed scientists into wolf monsters during the Inferno Project. He describes Sutton's story as sounding like the plot of a "science fiction potboiler". (DW: Inferno)
 * While interviewing Isobel Watkins, Stevens jokes that the country "...[isn't] decimalised yet..." (DW: An Unearthly Child)
 * Stevens collects reports of a series of agent provcateurs known as "the Doctor" who have been involved in unusual incidents such as the ULTIMA Incident in 1943 (DW: The Curse of Fenric), the Shangri-La Incident in 1959 (DW: Delta and the Bannermen), the Shoreditch Incident in November 1963 (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks), the C-Day fiasco and the contemporaneous Gatwick Incident on 20 July 1966 (DW: The War Machines, DW: The Faceless Ones), as well as the aforementioned death of Tobias Vaughn and the Wenley Moor Incident.
 * After almost a year of attempting to collate information about the "Doctor" agents from disparate sources, Stevens finally sees one of them in person at the press demonstration of the experimental Keller Process at Stangmoor Prison. The Doctor was accompanied by a "small, mousy looking woman with a pleasant face." (DW: The Mind of Evil)
 * Stevens suspects that the Doctor and UNIT may have been involved in the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old Coal Hill School pupil named Susan Foreman and her teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright from Shoreditch in November 1963. Susan, whose home address was I.M. Foreman's junkyard at 76 Totter's Lane, only spent several months at the school and had difficulty making friends. Other students described her as being strange and remembered that she mentioned that she lived with her grandfather. All of her records were later found to be clever forgeries. Despite extensive searches and appeals for assistance, Susan was never found. (DW: An Unearthly Child) On the other hand, Chesterton and Wright reappeared in the summer of 1965. (DW: The Chase) They claimed to have spent the previous year and a half doing missionary work in Central Africa. Not quite returning to their old lives, Wright became a university history lecturer, specialising in the Aztec period of Central American history (DW: The Aztecs) and Ian became a university science lecturer and gained a professorship within a year. He specialised in astronomy, but showed expertise across a wide range of fields beyond the scope of a former secondary school science teacher's training. (DW: An Unearthly Child, et al.) They eventually married (PDA: The Face of the Enemy, SJA: Death of the Doctor), had a son named John (NA: Timewyrm: Revelation) and began writing a diary to leave for Susan in the 22nd century (PDA: Byzantium!).
 * Stevens later meets a young woman named Dodo Chaplet who suffered a nervous breakdown following the events of C-Day. (DW: The War Machines) She does not remember anything about that day, but her claims to have met one-eyed reptile men (DW: The Ark) and Wild West gunfighters (DW: The Gunfighters), as well as having played games with living dolls (DW: The Celestial Toymaker), resulted in her being sent to a psychiatric institution.
 * In 1971, a terrorist known as Victor Magister or "the Master" is arrested following an incident at the village Devil's End. (DW: The Dæmons) He and his accomplices are subsequently charged with the attack on Black Thursday (DW: Spearhead from Space), the plague outbreak (DW: Doctor Who and the Silurians) and the failure of the World Peace Conference (DW: The Mind of Evil), among other incidents. Magister escaped from custody in the autumn of 1971, causing a great deal of scandal in the prison service. (DW: The Sea Devils) Stevens notes that his terrorist activities of the early 1970s were little remembered by most British people in 1996.
 * A Northern Irish UNIT soldier named Francis Cleary is deeply disturbed by the sight of one of his fellow soldiers, a good friend, being killed by an alien at the Nuton Power Complex (DW: The Claws of Axos) and finally goes mad after seeing Satan himself at a church in Devil's End (DW: The Dæmons).
 * Following Dodo's murder, Stevens sees a television report which mentions that UNIT is providing security for the Second World Peace Conference at Auderly House. Entering the grounds of the manor house clandestinely, he is saved from death at the hands of an ape creature by the Doctor. The Brigadier later shows him its body, which finally convinces him that the various outlandish stories which he has heard about aliens visiting and/or the invading the Earth are entirely true. (DW: Day of the Daleks)
 * Stevens notes that the Brigadier retired from UNIT in the mid 1970s and began teaching mathematics at "a minor public school for boys." (DW: Mawdryn Undead) According to Stevens' sources, he is "occasionally wheeled out when things are going very wrong somewhere in the world". (DW: Battlefield, BFA: Minuet in Hell)
 * Ruby Duvall first appeared in NA: Iceberg.
 * NA: The Dying Days mentions the fiction book-within-a-book Who Killed Kennedy. It also attempts to explain why some of the UNIT dating is wrong: it was changed prior to publication. Stevens had "gone to ground" in April 1996 whereas his co-author David Bishop was still in London in May 1997.
 * The Ninth Doctor was present at Kennedy's assassination. (DW: Rose)

Timeline

 * At various points throughout, the events of the novel take place contemporaneously with those of every Doctor Who serial from DW: Spearhead from Space to DW: Day of the Daleks.