As seen in the first three segments, Lee H. Oswald has a far more interesting and controversial life than anybody ever imagined. Far more so than anything written in the original Warren Commission report. The outlandish idea that he may have been a special project of the CIA, along with a body double, has some gravitas. It can be easily shown that Oswald was a CIA operative. In fact, it is the easiest thing to prove in the whole case. His SIG 201 file alone assures that sicne one is never filed on anyone but a CIA operative. Over the years various CIA officers have come forward to admit it. In many ways Lee Oswald as CIA agent is the purloin letter. It is so out in the open people stumble over it. But to move on from there thrusts the explorer into a deeper fog. That fog that never really lets one know what happened. All we can ever uncover is a closer approximation to the events surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy.
This final phase of Lee Oswald’s life from the summer of 1962 to the fall of 1963 is marked but four major periods. First, the restless period of going from job to job; second, the Fair Play For Cuba committee of which he is the sole member of in New Orleans; third, the trip to Mexico City dubbed “Oswald’s Magical Mystery Tour” due to the strangeness that surrounds it; and lastly, the lead-up events to the assassination and the post-events that resulted in his death. I have decided for the sake of brevity, and the fact these subjects have been covered elsewhere inn this blog, to concentrate on the final events leading up to the tragic events of November 22, 1963. It’s all weird, but the final events are the strangest of all.
In and Out of New Orleans and Back to Dallas
The last year of Oswald’s life is marked by a series of events that lead nowhere. His stint as the chairman (listed under his alias, Alek Hidell) of the Fair Play For Cuba committee does nothing for Castro and he soon gives it up; his trip to Mexico to allegedly get visas to allow him to return to the Soviet Union hits a dead-end as he never files the proper paperwork. In short, these are all futile attempts to achieve things that have a stated purpose but don’t fit into the general scheme of things, whatever the scheme was. Perhaps they are all a series of ruses to build the character of Lee Oswald, the loser with delusions of grandeur.
Landing back in Dallas, Lee rents a room at a boarding house while Marina and child stay with Ruth Paine. She is separated from her husband Michael during this time. He job hunts through the Texas Employment Commission and collects unemployment checks. He stores his things in Ruth’s garage. (Interesting that on every move since returning from the Soviet Union they always have the ability to rent an apartment, but at this juncture all he can afford is a room.) He begins the final phase living apart from his wife and children. It is similar to John Wilkes Booth living alone in his hotel room just before the assassination of Lincoln, estranged from his girlfriend. Eventually Ruth Paine gives the helping hand for the job at the Texas School Book Depository and the rest as they say, is history.
Lee Oswald, The Omnipresent Man
As stated before in this series there may have been other Oswalds in circulation. It’s a crazy idea until you start cross checking witness testimony and the wealth of conflicting records. It really kicks into overdrive in the last two months before the assassination. It’s particularly telling because Oswald maintains a perfect work record at the TSBD (Texas School Book Depository) with no absences of any kind.
Here is a brief list of Oswald appearances in conflict with his work records:
October 24. Mrs. James Walker says she chatted with an “Oswald Lee” at a gather at the home of Harold Zotch in Grand Prairie. He talked a bit about his background and bore a resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald, though he sported a snake and dagger tattoo on his left forearm. Oswald is in Dallas at the time of this gathering. The pathologist Dr. Earl Rose will document there was no tattoo on the body of the Lee Oswald he autopsied.
October 24 and (November 7). Lee Oswald gets haircuts at Cliff Shasteen’s barbershop in Irving. Seen driving up. Arrives with a blonde, blue eyed, teenage boy both times. It is unknown who this boy was. Oswald was working at the TSBD on both dates.
October 25. Oswald and wife chat with Aldene Magee and takes a look at her garage apartment in Baton Rouge. Unusual to say the least. How was Oswald going to get to his job in Dallas with no car, a distance of 371 miles one way? Another oddity is Marina, or most likely an impersonator, was shown to be pregnant. However, she already had given birth to their second child Audrey, five days earlier. Oswald tells Aldene that he has guns and needs strong locks on the doors. His work records indicate he was filling orders at the TSBD at this exact time.
October 30. Edna Walker sees Oswald standing out front of her barbershop with a tall, thin, swarthy woman in the early afternoon around 1-2 PM. Again, Oswald is working at this time. The woman’s description fits that of Ruth Paine.
November 6 or 7. Edith Whitworth, owner of Furniture Mart, has Lee, Marina, and both children appear at her furniture store. She says he drove up in a two-tone car. Only chats with Lee, Marina is silent. Edith’s friend Gertrude Hunter was there and a witness to them as well. Both would give their testimony to the WC in relation to this event and personally meet Marina and children there. Both women identify Marina and her children. Once again, Oswald is working at the TSBD at this time as either date is a work day.
November 7-8. James Markham would meet Oswald, going by the name “Ozzie” through a mutual friend. They pal around a few days at or near noon and James never sees him again. According to James, Ozzie tries to enlist him in a plot to assassinate Kennedy. James brushes it off as a joke. Oswald’s employment records show him at the TSBD at this time. Of note: James is the son of Helen Markham, the first person to arrive at the murder scene of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippet.
November 12. On another day when Lee Oswald is working, he is spotted along with Jack Ruby at the Contact Electronics store. Owners Robert Patterson and Donald Stuart, along with employee Charles Arndt speak with them. Oswald and Ruby are there for about an hour discussing different PA systems for use in Ruby’s club. Robert Patterson notices the same tattoo on Oswald’s left forearm that Mrs. James Walker did when she met him on October 24.
November 20. Another famous incident of Oswald in a restaurant being rude and cussing at waitress Mary Dowling for eggs not cooked properly. Occurs at 10 AM. Oswald has already started work at the TSBD at 8:00 AM with no absences this day, or any other day while he worked there. Interestingly, J. D. Tippet is in the restaurant at the same time and a witness to Oswald’s behavior.
Of all these instances, probably the most difficult for the Warren Commission and the FBI to resolve is the Furniture Mart appearance. Not only is Oswald not supposed to be able to drive a car, but he is there during a weekday when he is documented to be at the TSBD working. And you have two witnesses whose testimony is unimpeachable. Interestingly, Marina denies ever going to the furniture store. Edith Whitworth and Gertrude Hunter stood firm in their recollections. And Marina might be telling the truth about this if these are indeed impostors of her and Lee and the children visiting the store. The Warren Commission follows a familiar pattern; let the issue lie and move on or just simply state that the witnesses were mistaken. To have all of the sightings of Oswald in two different places at once, where he simply couldn’t be, is a conspiracy in itself. J. Edgar Hoover knew it and had his agents bury it.
There is more going on here at this stage than the doppelganger interactions mentioned in the early parts of this series. Even his wife is being impersonated too. We see a man being publicly provocative and portraying an image of one who is an unstable misfit. Oswald being impersonated during his Mexico trip features solid documentation and is even admitted to by Hoover. Apparently the impersonation did not end there. It followed him the last two months of his life. It is worth nothing that in every single incidence of Oswald shooting at the Sports Dome, he should be someplace else; either at his job, in Irving staying with his wife and children at Ruth Paine’s house, or hanging out in his room in Dallas. There are witnesses for all of these places and incidents. In many ways this period mimics his school days where he has a perfect attendance record at Beauregard Junior High, while his tax records show him a full time employee of the Dolly Shoe Company.
This man’s life is one long running oxymoron.
The part of find most perplexing is why have all of the impersonators out and about at the same time like this? I would have their activities parsed not simultaneously but staggered during the day and night. In other words, have one guy at home while the other guy is out and vise-versa. This has the appearance of a sloppiness in execution if this is indeed, some sort of operation going on here. It does have one good side effect: it cancels out witness testimony of those people seeing Oswald at certain locations with certain people. This happened to waitress Mary Lawrence at the Lucas B&B Restaurant who saw Oswald and Ruby together at 2:15 AM on the morning of the 22nd. Since Oswald was supposed to be sleeping with his wife in Ruth Paine’s house at that time, her testimony was dismissed.
The Framing of the Guilty Man
Lee Oswald was going to jail that day for something. As I documented in my article, The Tale of Two Wallets, Oswald’s wallet was found at the Tippet murder scene. He was arrested with his second wallet on him. This reoccurring theme of framing the guilty man continues with the rarely reported account of the discovery of a second paper bag, similar to the one Oswald is alleged to have used to sneak the rifle into work the morning of the assassination.
Two weeks after the assassination, workers at the Dallas post office found a package addressed to Oswald in the dead letter department. The street address of 601 West Nassau Street which does not exist in Dallas. It was $.12 short of postage and no return address. It was postmarked two days before the assassination and mailed in Dallas. The Post Master opened it to find an empty paper bag of same length and dimensions of the bag found in the 6th floor of the TSBD, the bag that Oswald allegedly made and left there. (It should be noted that his fingerprints were never found on this bag.)
This means that either Oswald was truly a nut and went around mailing empty paper bags to himself using the wrong address and in the process, incriminating himself; or, there were other people that knew what Oswald’s mission was and sought to insure his guilt and cover their own. Whatever happened that package was meant to arrive at the post office and stop. It was there to be discovered and it was.
The End Game
It all quickly spirals down to the end. We’ve been there and rehearsed it all before. At 7:30 AM the morning of the final day of John Kennedy and J. D. Tippet’s lives, one more impersonator shows up at the Top Ten Record shop to buy some tickets for Dick Clark’s show at the Dallas Municipal auditorium for that night. This is witnessed by three people. Interestingly, J. D. Tippet is in the same record store at the same time for unknown reasons. In a phase of high strangeness he is in the presence of his alleged killer twice in the same week and not only that but his alleged killer is supposed to be someplace at each of these instances. It is unknown if the tickets were ever used. It seems unlikely that somebody resembling Lee Oswald would go to a show with the most recognized face in the world.
In a maze of conflicting witness testimony, conflicting timelines, strange coincidences, phantom Secret Service agents, warped laws of physics, unusual power and phone outages, two men are dead two others are wounded. John Kennedy, everything he ever was or anything he would ever be, is one with the ages. The assailant, a man that never went to the firing range a week before the event, never practiced shooting at moving targets, an alleged communist and loser is apprehended in a strange turn of events within moments of the disaster. The drama doesn’t end till the assailant is killed a few days later by another alleged lone nut. A swift investigation follows which is more of a sham than anything else, leaving many stones unturned. Public distrust soon follows never to be abated.
John Armstrong the leading researcher in the “Oswald as doppelganger” theory. His research is compelling for such a fringe subject. He has the double doing the shooting on the sixth floor while the other Oswald is fooling around on the first and second floors. The likelihood of having two Oswalds in the same building is an imaginative way to parse the differing witness accounts but is speculation at best. Armstrong follows a similar pattern with Oswald in the Marines. Armstrong falters with this part of the scenario but there still remains the nagging issue of the conflicting records and witnesses to account for more than one Lee Oswald at play.
I still have a lot of issues with the doppelganger idea. Having another Lee Oswald around does solve a lot of inconsistencies and general confusion in some of the events but still leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Such as, where did the Oswald double go after that assassination? Did the conspirators kill him too? Why have both out and about around witnesses at the same time? If this starts as a teenager then apparently his mother was a doppelganger too? And where did her double go?
Never the less there is one final caveat. In the autopsy of Lee Oswald, Dr. Earl Rose documents every scar on Oswald’s body. However, nothing is recorded on the face sheet regarding the two main scars--the mastoid scar behind the left ear and the gun shot wound on the back the left upper arm. (One minor scar, the small pox vaccine is not documented either.) The mortician Paul Groody will be asked by both the Secret service and the FBI about these scars as well, and he doesn’t report seeing them either. Groody said the Secret Service agent on the phone stated, “Well Paul, we just don't know who we have out there in that grave.” At the last minute the FBI appears for one last set of fingerprints from Lee Oswald’s (if that is truly him) dead fingers. A show of apparent concern on their part since they have three other sets to examine.
If Lee Oswald was a doppelganger then it remains the biggest secret of the Kennedy assassination and most likely the biggest source of the cover-up that has in-sued since that November day in Dallas in 1963.
The Final Word
I leave you with these mysterious words from the widow, Marina.
“I had two husbands: Lee, the father of my children, an affectionate and kind man; and Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy.”
Sources: Armstrong, John, Harvey and Lee; Marrs, Jim, Crossfire; Douglass, James, JFK and the Unspeakable; www.history-matters.com
Interview, Paul Groody, www.coasttocoastam.com
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