Beyond the conspiracy theories, movies and thousands of documents, President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas continues to captivate millions of people 40 years later.

It's a real-life murder mystery caught on film and told through hundreds of news reports and documentaries. More than 500 books and Hollywood movies have been made about that November day in 1963, each debating hundreds of facts and conspiracy theories surrounding the president's death.

Those interested in the historic event say people forever will doubt answers from the government and theorize possible conspiracies.

Some of the most popular ideas suggest Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that another gunman was stationed on the grassy knoll, a small hill to the right of the presidential motorcade. Another theory says a shooter hid in a storm drain and shot from the curb. More radical theories suggest organized crime, the CIA or even Russian activists were responsible for the shooting.

"I keep a list of every individual that has been named in print to have been in Dealey Plaza to do bodily harm to the president; at last count there were 68 people on this list," said Kennedy assassination researcher Dave Perry, of Grapevine, Texas.

During the past 25 years, Perry has gathered thousands of government documents, everything from Oswald's military records to a map showing the spot in the Atlantic Ocean where the U.S. military dumped a bronze casket used to transport the slain president from Dallas to Washington.

While Perry has been studying the possible conspiracy theories for years, he doesn't consider himself a "nut." A self-proclaimed "conservative pro-conspiracy researcher," Perry spends his time studying the more probable theories.

"Some radicals have accused me of being a government agent sent to mush up conspiracy theorists in Dallas," he said. "I'm just waiting to hear from that crew again. We're never going to satisfy everybody; we just want them to know not all these theories are true.

"We're just trying to get to the bottom of it."

As the subject of the recent Discovery Channel documentary "Unsolved History," Perry aimed to prove the Warren Commission report false. Perry and other historians set up real-scale models of Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, as well as the Texas School Book Depository, said to be Oswald's sniper nest, and ran tests comparing results to the report.

The Warren Commission report was compiled by the government after the Kennedy assassination. It offered documents and eye-witness interviews that concluded there was no conspiracy and Oswald was the lone gunman, shooting three shots - the third of which struck the president in the head, killing him.

And interest in the assassination runs all the way from conspiracy theorists' bulletin boards to MSU's campus.

MSU American thought and language Professor Kathleen Rout teaches a class centered around the 1960s and said she's long pondered the idea that Kennedy's assassination was a conspiracy, possibly linked with the later assassinations of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, President Kennedy's brother.

"In Zapruder's film, it looks very clear as though Kennedy's head goes back, that he was not shot from the back but from the front," Rout said, speaking of the only footage of the assassination, shot on a home movie camera by parade-watcher Abraham Zapruder. "This is completely denied in the Warren Commission Report.

"I think something is still missing - there are some things (the government) will not let out, and I don't know why not."

But some former theory believers say not enough evidence points to most "out-there" ideas.

"Anybody who spends any length of time on this case goes 360 degrees," said Dale Myers of Milford. Myers developed a computer animation of the assassination used in Peter Jennings' ABC News report "The Kennedy Assassination - Beyond Conspiracy," which aired Thursday night.

"When you start going to original sources and you start comparing these facts to books, you notice almost all that information is taken out of context and distorted," he said.

Even if the case is solved, it undoubtedly will continue to interest millions and frustrate others.

"The biggest lie placed on the American public is the idea of a conspiracy, not the other way around," he said. "It's the conspiracy theorists who have bamboozled the public - they are convincing the public of something that didn't happen."

Sarah Frank can be reached at franksa2@msu.edu.