Josiah Thompson, Ph.D.

Josiah Thompson, Ph.D. taught in the Yale philosophy department after receiving his Ph.D. there in the early 1960s. He wrote Six Seconds in Dallas, the groundbreaking 1967 re-investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination, while teaching philosophy at Haverford. Shortly after becoming a tenured professor at Haverford in the mid-1970s, he resigned his professorship to make his living as a private investigator in San Francisco. For the last 25 years, he has specialized in criminal defense. In the late 1970s, he participated in the defense of Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and Bill/Emily Harris of the SLA. He was defense investigator for Chol Soo Lee in the death penalty case that became the film True Believer. He was defense investigator for Stephen Bingham in the aftermath of the San Quentin Six case and for Ben Dosti in the retrial of the Billionaire Boys Club case. In the early 1990s, he was retained to investigate the Judi Bari bombing and, in 1996 and 1997, was defense investigator for Tim McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing. More recently, he defended Sara Jane Olson and Bill/Emily Harris in their recent SLA cases. His 1988 memoir, Gumshoe, has been called "the best book ever written about the life of the private eye" and his 1974 biography, Kierkegaard, has become a reference work in its field.