THE bloody family secrets of Woody Harrelson, the Hollywood actor, are to be revealed in a prison memoir written by his father, a professional hitman.

Charles “Chuck” Harrelson, who died in a Colorado maximum security jail last month, left a bundle of papers to his three sons with a plea to clear him of murdering a judge. But he admits in the memoir that he was involved in dozens of killings stretching back to the early 1960s.

Woody Harrelson, who played a psychopath in Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers, has not yet decided what to do with the papers, although he has already challenged the final conviction that landed his father in a “supermax” high-security prison.

His father, who wanted his life story to be published, first went to prison when Woody was seven and was jailed for life when his son was at college, but said he always hoped that one day they would have a “straight, no bull” talk about his past.

Chuck Harrelson’s death at 69 following heart trouble meant that conversation never took place. However, the papers are expected to answer questions posed both by his family and by the relatives of his many supposed victims.

Prosecutors said Harrelson, a violent thief and killer for hire in his twenties, was unusual because he used a sniper rifle rather than a handgun. “Charles Harrelson damaged everyone he came in contact with,” said the prosecutor at his last trial.

Harrelson even boasted — probably to impress potential employers — that he had shot President John F Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. He claimed to have been one of three men dressed as tramps on the grassy knoll close to the Kennedy cavalcade and said that Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed assassin, was too far away from the president to get a clear shot.

If the grassy knoll story was a self-promoting fabrication, it seems to have worked. In 1979 he was allegedly paid $250,000 to shoot a Texas judge preparing to sentence a drug dealer. The plot backfired. The judge died but the dealer was arrested and claimed to have hired Harrelson, who received two life sentences.

In 2003 the dealer recanted, saying someone else had shot the judge. Woody Harrelson stepped up pressure for a retrial, but his father died before lawyers could get him out of jail. “My father was no saint, but a lot of sources led me to believe it was not a fair trial,” he said recently.

Woody Harrelson, 45, who rose to fame as the slow, sweet-natured barman Woody Boyd in the TV comedy Cheers, has generated more recent headlines with political stunts. He scaled the Golden Gate bridge to unveil an antilogging banner and, as a vegan, has protested against factory farming.

He will appear next in a film called Battle in Seattle, set amid violent protests against the World Trade Organisation summit in 1999. “It’s to make up for not being there myself,” he joked.

Harrelson has had his own misadventures. He once admitted to “sex addiction” and in the early 1980s was fined after dancing in traffic and jumping out of a moving police van. He remains unsure how his life was influenced by his father’s criminal career.

“I suspect it’s a mixed influence — it made me think outlaw, but I would not want to hurt anyone,” he said.

Chuck Harrelson revealed his literary ambitions to Kenny Gallo, a convicted mafia “associate” in the FBI witness protection programme. “He wrote to me saying he was writing the book that exposed all the lies written about him over the years,” Gallo said.

He denied that Harrelson had killed 50 people: “He may have been involved in that many killings, maybe driving the car or something, but he only carried out maybe six killings himself.”

America no longer produced assassins like Harrelson, he added. “Today, you want someone killed, you call in a Russian or an Israeli. I don’t know how Woody feels about his father, but Harrelson was probably the last of a killing breed.”

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?