Mark Lane, died of a heart attack Tuesday night at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, a publicist’s statement said. He was 89.  Mark Lane, the defense lawyer, social activist and author who concluded in a blockbuster book in the mid-1960s that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy, a thesis supported in part by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979, died on Tuesday at his home in Charlottesville, Va. The politically active author also served one term in the New York State Assembly, starting in 1960. Lane went on to investigate the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, and was a lawyer for the civil rights leader's killer, James Earl Ray.
– Mark Lane, "one of the most important experts on the Kennedy assassination," died Tuesday at his his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the age of 89, the New York Times reports. Lane came to national prominence with his best-selling 1966 book Rush to Judgment, which questioned the findings of the Warren Commission and concluded a second gunman helped Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate Kennedy. He was the first to use the now well-known phrase "grassy knoll." He went on to publish multiple books—and write a number of films—on the Kennedy assassination. “While I don’t agree with his conspiracy theories about President Kennedy’s assassination, he deserves credit for raising important questions,” the director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics tells the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Lane was also a defense lawyer who represented some high-profile clients, including James Earl Ray and cult leader Jim Jones. Even after Ray was convicted of killing Martin Luther King Jr., Lane maintained his innocence and believed another conspiracy could be at play, the New York Daily News reports. Lane was also a civil-rights activist and served one term in the New York State Assembly. “His life was just an absolute testament to what people can become,” his assistant and friend Sue Herndon tells the Times-Dispatch. “He lived more lives than so many people.” Lane passed away one year before all government records of Kennedy's death are set to be made public.