Charles Harrelson’s arrest came under circumstances that were, in themselves, dramatic enough to be notable. In September 1980, he was located in Van Horn, Texas — a small West Texas city in Culberson County, in the high desert of the Trans-Pecos region, near the Mexican border. He was in possession of cocaine, had been using it, and when confronted, he barricaded himself in a vehicle and refused to surrender for approximately six hours. During the standoff, he made a series of statements that reflected the specific psychology of a man under the influence of stimulants and confronting the apparent end of his freedom. Among those statements was a claim that he had killed President John F. Kennedy.
The JFK claim was, from the standpoint of the investigation, a distraction. Investigators did not credit it, and subsequent analysis of the claim has consistently concluded that it was either a cocaine-fueled delusion, an attempt to create confusion and leverage, or some combination of the two. Harrelson himself later recanted the claim, saying it had been an attempt to prolong his life — presumably on the theory that if he was believed to have information about the Kennedy assassination, he would be kept alive and questioned rather than simply tried and imprisoned.
The claim has, over the decades since, attracted a substantial amount of the kind of conspiratorial attention that any assertion connecting an already-convicted criminal to the Kennedy assassination tends to attract. Some theorists have identified Charles Harrelson as one of three men photographed near Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963 — the so-called “three tramps” who were briefly detained by Dallas police after the assassination and whose identities were disputed for years. A forensic artist named Lois Gibson examined the photographs and offered an opinion that one of the three tramps resembled Charles Harrelson.