6

“Hunter of Fascists”

January 1963 was a good start to the new year for Oswald. On the twenty-fifth, he sent two postal money orders, totaling $106, to the State Department as the final installment on his repatriation loan.1 He also made the final payment on the $200 loan his brother, Robert, had given him the previous October.* Free of debt for the first time in America, he turned his attention to things he had wanted for some time. On January 28, he sent a mail-order coupon with $10 in cash to the Los Angeles-based Seaport Traders and ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 special revolver. The balance of $19.95 was to be paid C.O.D. when delivered to his post-office box.² The order form was signed by A. J. Hidell, and the line requiring a witness by D. F. Drittal. Hidell was the third authorized name to receive mail at the post-office box, the others being Marina and Lee. After the assassination, handwriting experts confirmed Oswald had signed both Hidell and Drittal.³

January also started well for Marina, free of Oswald’s marital abuse. But when the beatings resumed, they were with increased intensity. He no longer just slapped her, but now delivered multiple punches to her head.4 Marina remembered that late in January he began arguing over “trifling reasons” and was “very unrestrained and very explosive …”⁵ Whenever he wanted sex, he forced himself on her. Once when she called him “crazy,” he grabbed her by the throat and threatened to kill her if she ever called him that again.⁶

Their first night away from their flat was on February 13, when the de Mohrenschildts invited them to a dinner party at their house. Oswald spent the evening talking to a young German geologist, Volkmar Schmidt. De Mohrenschildt was surprised to see them getting along at all since he had expected that Schmidt, a right-winger, would antagonize Oswald. Schmidt later commented that based upon their political conversation, Oswald “appeared to be a violent person.”⁷

When de Mohrenschildt drove the Oswalds home from the party, Lee expressed astonishment at meeting a fascist. De Mohrenschildt gave him a lecture about the dangers posed by people like Schmidt and other right-wing fanatics. Marina thought Oswald acted differently after the conversations that evening. No one in Dallas had political sway over him except de Mohrenschildt, whose opinion he respected. Marina later believed that de Mohrenschildt had “influenced Lee’s sick fantasy.”⁸

The next day, Oswald saw a front-page story in the Dallas Morning News that seemed a prime example of what de Mohrenschildt had warned about. The News had extensive coverage that General Edwin Walker had joined right-wing evangelist Billy James Hargis in Operation Midnight Ride, a five-week national tour to fight the threat of Communism. Walker disturbed Oswald.⁹ General Edwin Walker had been the commanding officer of the 24th Army Division under NATO, but President Kennedy relieved him of his post in 1961 for distributing right-wing literature to his troops. Walker resigned from the Army and returned to his native Texas. He was a virulent anti-Communist and strict segregationist who quickly became a prominent voice in the right-wing John Birch Society. Between well-planned speaking tours and high-profile incidents such as his 1962 efforts to prevent James Meredith from enrolling as the first black student at the University of Mississippi, Walker became a moving force for the political right.* The endemic conservatism of Texas, coupled with fears engendered by the cold war and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Russia and the U.S. came close to nuclear confrontation, all boosted Walker’s public standing. In 1962, he ran for governor of Texas, and while he lost in a six-man primary to John Connally, he received over 138,000 votes.¹⁰ Following the press coverage of Operation Midnight Ride, the papers and local radio and television had additional stories about the general, focusing on his radical anti-Castro stance.

De Mohrenschildt never hid his own distaste for the John Birch Society and people like Walker. “I don’t like that movement personally,” he said. “I dislike it very much.… I get sometimes into heated discussion and sometimes I say things which maybe you don’t think.”¹¹ De Mohrenschildt’s attitude was so evident that Katya and Declan Ford, as well as Marina, shared the feeling that he had said to Oswald in mid-February that anyone who “knocked off Walker” would be doing society a favor.¹²

A couple of weeks after his order for the revolver, and near the time of the de Mohrenschildt party, Marina noticed Lee spent several evenings in the kitchen, poring over maps of Dallas and a bus schedule. When she asked him what he was doing, he said he was trying to find the quickest route from his job at Jaggars to the typing course in which he had enrolled. That satisfied Marina, but it was a lie. The typing institute was only a few blocks from Jaggars, a walk of less than five minutes.

That same day, February 14, when Oswald read the news coverage about Walker’s Operation Midnight Ride, he and Marina also celebrated their daughter June’s first birthday. The next day, Marina told Oswald she was pregnant. While he was temporarily pleased with the news, it did not stop him from instituting a new punishment for her. “Anytime I did something which didn’t please him, he would make me sit down at a table and write letters to the Soviet Embassy stating that I wanted to go back to Russia,” she said. “He liked to tease me and torment me in this way.”13 Two days later he forced her to write the first letter. Marina’s great stress showed in the sloppy Russian handwriting, uncharacteristic of her; she told the embassy she wanted to return to the USSR to “again feel a full-fledged citizen,” and pleaded, “I beg you once more not to refuse my request.”¹⁴ Marina hated her life with Oswald, but she liked America, and since her family had warned her that she would be terribly unhappy in the U.S., she was too embarrassed to ask them for help. Oswald recognized Marina’s predicament and knew the threat of sending her back to Russia was one that further tormented her.

On Friday evening, February 22, the Oswalds attended a small dinner party given by Everett Glover and his roommate, Volkmar Schmidt. Schmidt was curious about Oswald, and Glover remembered “it was a gathering for a fairly specific reason, to look at this fellow and let some other people look at him and see what they made of him …”¹⁵ The de Mohrenschildts were also at the dinner, as were several of Glover’s friends who were studying Russian, including Ruth Paine, a thirty-one-year-old beginner in the Russian language, whom Glover had met through a madrigal singing group from the local Unitarian church. Despite the language barriers, Ruth spent most of the evening trying to talk to Marina. Ruth Paine was a Quaker, scrupulously honest, with a strong conscience. Although she could not always understand her, Marina immediately liked her sincere and direct approach. Ruth and her husband, Michael (who missed the party because of a cold), were ACLU members, and in 1963 Texas they were part of a liberal political minority.* The Paines would eventually become the Oswalds’ closest acquaintances in the months before the assassination.

But on that night, the attention was turned to Lee. Glover remembered: “He was pretty much flattered that someone else would take an interest in him, and I think he ate this up to be questioned about something by somebody who might have some status in society where he didn’t have any.”16 Oswald spoke about his time in Russia and some of his general political thoughts. The de Mohrenschildts left early; they had heard Lee expound often before. Oswald told the group he was a Marxist who had failed to find the ideal society. By the end of the evening, his listeners were not impressed. “He was poorly adjusted as far as his whole living was concerned,” remembered Glover. “He certainly was very immature.”¹⁷ Although Ruth “didn’t like” Lee, she wanted to know more about Marina and took her address.¹⁸

The dinner party did not provide Marina much of a break from Lee’s abuse. Although he knew she was pregnant, he continued to pummel her for the slightest infraction. Marina later reported that the week after she had been forced to write the Soviet embassy was the most violent of their marriage.¹⁹ He seemed to hit her harder and with greater anger than ever before. On the next night, Saturday, Oswald flew into a rage over Marina’s inability to cook a Southern dish, red beans and rice, which he demanded for dinner. The fight ended in their bedroom, with Oswald choking her and threatening, “I won’t let you out of this alive.”²⁰ When June started crying, it stemmed Oswald’s fury. As he tended to the baby, Marina looked at her bruised face in a mirror and decided her life was useless. She later told Katya Ford she felt she had no way out.²¹ Within a few minutes she had taken the clothesline rope, climbed onto the toilet seat, and looked for a place to hook the rope. But Lee returned to find her fumbling with the cord. “At my attempt at suicide, Lee struck me in the face and told me to go to bed and I should never attempt to do that,” she recalled. “Only foolish people would do it.”²²

Ever since their fights had attracted the attention of neighbors, Oswald had resolved to move. He occasionally spent free time looking in the neighborhood for a new apartment, and finally found one near the end of February, at 214 West Neely Street. Only a block away from their current apartment, it had a balcony and a small private room he could make into a study, and cost eight dollars less a month. They walked their goods over on Saturday, March 2. A few days later a letter arrived for Marina, a rare occurrence. It had been forwarded from the Elsbeth Street address and was from Ruth Paine, requesting permission to visit.23 Marina wrote a short note to Ruth, providing the new address and welcoming her. Oswald was not there when Ruth arrived mid-morning Tuesday, March 12. She and Marina took a walk in a nearby park, and Marina confided her pregnancy. “I was impressed, talking with her in the park, with what I felt to be her need to have a friend,” Ruth recalled. They departed with Ruth promising to visit occasionally.

The Soviet embassy replied to Marina’s request for a return to Russia on March 8. It asked for complete applications, a biography, letters to the Soviet ambassador, passport photos, several letters from Marina’s relatives living in the USSR, and some indication of professional interest, all in triplicate. Five to six months was given as the minimum processing time.²⁴ In the midst of their quarrels, Oswald even went further and had Marina prepare a response, an application, and a biography to at least start her file, all of which she finally sent on March 17.²⁵

Meanwhile, he began promoting his political philosophy. The results were evident in a letter published in the March 11 issue of The Militant. The letter, signed “L.H.” was listed under the heading “News and Views from Dallas.” In it he lauded the paper as “the most informative radical publication in America.”²⁶* Near the time The Militant published his letter, Oswald visited the vicinity of General Walker’s Dallas home. He took at least two photos of the back of Walker’s house, and one that depicted an entrance to the general’s driveway from a back alley. Two other photos show rail tracks about half a mile from the Walker home.²⁷† In his fantasy espionage world, Oswald had placed the “enemy” under surveillance.

The day after his Walker vigil, Monday, March 12, he clipped a coupon from the February issue of American Rifleman and sent a $21.45 money order to a Chicago-based mail-order house, Klein’s Sporting Goods. He ordered, under his alias A. Hidell, an Italian military rifle, a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano, complete with a four power (4x) scope.28* Most critics disparage the Carcano rifle as a poor choice for eventual use in an assassination. Robert Sam Anson says it “had a reputation for being notoriously inaccurate” and that the Italians had dubbed it “the humanitarian rifle” since it never was known to hurt anyone.²⁹ Mark Lane alleges the Carcano is “universally condemned as inaccurate and slow” and the ammunition was “old and unreliable.”³⁰ Besides the fact that Oswald would not have known this, firearms experts say the opposite. When the FBI ran Oswald’s gun through a series of rigorous shooting tests, it concluded “it is a very accurate weapon.”³¹ It had low kickback compared to other military rifles, which helped in rapid bolt-action firing.³² With a 4x scope, even an untrained shooter could fire at a target like a marksman. As the FBI firearms expert Robert Frazier said, “It requires no training at all to shoot a weapon with a telescopic sight,” and that particular sight needed virtually no adjustment at less than 200 yards, the range of the eventual assassination shots.³³ The Carcano is rated an effective battle weapon, good at killing people, and as accurate as the U.S. Army’s M-14 rifle.³⁴ The Carcano’s bullets, 6.5 millimeter shells, are 30 to 50 percent heavier than the average bullet of that diameter, and travel with the same velocity, 2,100 feet per second, as the Russian AK-47 assault rifle.³⁵ “The 6.5mm bullet, when fired, is like a flying drill,” says Art Pence, a competitions firearms expert.³⁶ Some game hunters use the 6.5mm shell to bring down animals as large as elephants. The bullets manufactured for Oswald’s Carcano were made by Western Cartridge Company, and the FBI considered them “very accurate … [and] very dependable,” never having misfired in dozens of tests.³⁷ The FBI’s Frazier concluded the Carcano was a good rifle for the assassination.³⁸

Oswald was anxious for his rifle, and the pistol he had ordered in January, to arrive. Starting the week of March 18, he left Jaggars early enough each evening to check his post-office box for the packages.39 That same week, Marina was cleaning the apartment and came across photos of a house she did not recognize. She asked Lee what they were, but he didn’t answer, and later kept his study clean himself so she would not have to enter.⁴⁰ She thought little of it. Lee had always been secretive; even in Russia he closeted himself to one side of the apartment and scribbled notes about his Soviet experiences, refusing to share any of them with her. She did not know he had ordered a revolver or rifle or that he had forged identifications in another name.

By coincidence, the rifle from Klein’s and the revolver from Seaport Traders were shipped on the same day, March 20. Five days later Oswald left work early. He went first to the post office, where he picked up the rifle, and then traveled across town for the revolver that was sent to the offices of REA Express.⁴¹ Marina saw the rifle for the first time later that week. It was leaning against the corner of Lee’s study, a raincoat partially hiding it. She asked why he had it, and he said he might go hunting sometime.⁴² “And this was not too surprising because in Russia, too, we had a rifle,” she recalled. Marina did not like a gun in the house, but when she objected, she remembered his answer: “That for a man to have a rifle—since I am a woman, I don’t understand him, and I shouldn’t bother him. A fine life.”⁴³ She stopped complaining because it could easily lead to another beating.

Oswald increasingly spent time locked in his small study. There, unknown to Marina, he compiled a blue looseleaf folder, an operations manual for an action he was planning against Walker. It was filled with photographs of the general’s house and a safe place to stash a rifle, as well as maps of a carefully designed escape route. Later, when Marina discovered its existence, he told her it was “a complete record so that all the details would be in it. He told me that these entries consisted of the description of the house of General Walker, the distances, the location, and the distribution of windows in it.”⁴⁴ Oswald also wrote two political documents during this time—one the rationale for his coming act against Walker, and the other his proposals for a future society. In his justification, he condemned the U.S. and USSR as reprehensible: “No man, having known, having lived, under the Russian Communist and American capitalist system, could possibly make a choice between them, there is not choice, one offers oppresstion the other poverty. Both offer imperialistic injustice, tinted with two brands of slavery.… There are two world systems, one twisted beyond recognition by its misuse, the other decadent and dying in its final evolution.”45 He also damned the American Communist party for being a tool of the USSR. But most of the vitriolic paper condemned the U.S. and the capitalist system: “It is fairly readily forseeable that a coming economic, political or military crisis … will bring about the final destruction of the capitalist system …”⁴⁶ In his proposals for a future system, he wrote “Fascism [must] be abolished.”⁴⁷ Calling himself a “radical futurist,” he spoke of the time “after the military debacle of the United States,” with the goal of replacing the U.S. government with a “separate, democratic, pure communist sociaty.” ⁴⁸

While Oswald compiled his book of plans for Walker, he temporarily stopped fighting with Marina. She had an opportunity to develop her budding friendship with Ruth Paine. Ruth stopped by to visit the Neely Street apartment again on March 20, and the following week took Marina and June for a visit to her house in Irving, a Dallas suburb. With the recent letter to the Soviet embassy fresh in her mind, Marina told Ruth about Lee’s insistence she return to Russia and her desire to stay in America.⁴⁹ That disclosure, coupled with Lee’s refusal to teach Marina English, angered Ruth.⁵⁰ Since her command of Russian was poor, Ruth decided to put her thoughts into Russian in a letter instead of struggling through a conversation. For over a week she carefully prepared a letter for Marina. She decided to invite Marina to live with her, so there would be another option besides staying with Oswald or returning to Russia. But Ruth never sent it. She even carried it with her on another visit to Neely Street, but did not give it to Marina. “I didn’t want to get into a position of competition with Lee for his wife. I thought about that, and thought he might be very offended.… It is possible he even might have been violent …”⁵¹

On Sunday afternoon, March 31, Marina was in the small fenced-in backyard hanging up diapers when Lee asked her to take a picture. She protested that she had never taken a photo in her life, but he assured her it was simple. He returned to the apartment and in a few minutes emerged dressed all in black, a revolver tucked into the waist of his pants, a rifle held in one hand, and a camera and some newspapers in the other hand.* Marina broke into laughter: “I asked him then why he had dressed himself up like that … I thought he had gone crazy, and he said he wanted to send that to a newspaper. I thought that Lee [was] … just playing around.”⁵² But he was absolutely serious, and angry that she thought it was funny. Marina became a “little scared” as she worried about taking the pictures correctly and whether anyone in the neighborhood could see him.⁵³ “It was quite embarrassing the way he was dressed,” she recalled.⁵⁴ He posed and she snapped the shutter. Then he walked over and reset the shutter and she did it again, and again.† Oswald developed the photos himself, probably the next day when he returned to work. He brought one back to Marina and inscribed on the back: “For Junie from Papa.” Marina was flabbergasted and asked why June would want a picture of him holding guns. “To remember Papa by sometime,” Oswald said.⁵⁵

The backyard photos have become one of the most debated issues in the conspiracy press. The critics are led by self-appointed photo expert Jack White, who has made a small business from producing videos, booklets, and lecture series on why he believes the photos are fake. His primary arguments are alleged shadow inconsistencies, conflicting body proportions, a variant chin, and suggestion of a grafting line between the mouth and the chin.56 While the Warren Commission’s FBI photo experts concluded the shots were real and there was no evidence of retouching, the technology did not exist in 1964 to settle the issue dispositively. However, by the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s, science could resolve the matter. Twenty-two of the nation’s leading experts studied the backyard photos, utilizing sophisticated photo enhancements and measurements to determine their validity. Because of microscopic frame edge marks and scratches left by a camera on a negative, they concluded that Oswald’s Imperial Reflex took the photos, to the exclusion of any other camera ever made.⁵⁷ Once it was determined Oswald’s camera took the shots, the photo experts tested to see if the photos were composites. Using five tests, Calvin McCamy, speaking for the photographic panel, said, “We found no evidence whatsoever of any kind of faking in these photographs.”⁵⁸* The HSCA panel addressed twenty-one issues raised by the critics and scientifically disproved each.⁵⁹ The panel also settled the issue of whether the rifle in the photos was the same as that found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the President’s assassination. Twenty-one photos, revealing fifty-six different and unique marks on the rifle found at the depository, were compared to enhancements of the photo of the rifle Oswald held in the backyard shots, and the panel concluded the rifle was the same, to the exclusion of all others.⁶⁰ Finally, HSCA handwriting experts determined that Oswald’s handwriting was present in an inscription on the back of one of the originals.⁶¹

Even committed conspiracy buffs like Anthony Summers, after reviewing the HSCA report on the backyard photos, admitted “they are probably genuine pictures of Oswald,” but Summers added that “his purpose in posing for them remains mysterious.”62 But Oswald’s motivation is only “mysterious” if one ignores his personality and his expressed desires to Marina about the photos. From the prints he developed, Oswald told Marina he intended to send one to The Militant.⁶³* He was proud of his guns and his activism, saying he wanted the newspaper to have his photo to prove he was “ready for anything.”⁶⁴ On the back of another photograph, which de Mohrenschildt turned over to federal investigators years after the assassination, was the inscription “Hunter of Fascists, ha, ha, ha.”†

By coincidence, on the day Oswald had Marina take the photographs, March 31, FBI special agent James Hosty recommended that the Oswald file be reopened. He had picked up information that Oswald was on a mailing list for The New York Daily Worker and had reports that he was drinking heavily and beating his wife (the drinking reports were wrong).⁶⁵ Later, Hosty learned that a confidential informant, identified in FBI reports only as T-2, reported that Oswald had been in contact with the Communist and pro-Castro organization Fair Play for Cuba. According to the informant, Oswald told Fair Play for Cuba that he had passed out pamphlets in Dallas on its behalf while wearing a sign around his neck proclaiming, “Hands Off Cuba, Viva Fidel.”⁶⁶‡ Hosty intended to visit Oswald within forty-five days of the reopening of the file, but when he checked at Neely Street in the middle of May, he found they had moved, with no forwarding address. Hosty did not know what happened to Oswald until June, when the New Orleans FBI contacted Dallas, “advising that one Lee Oswald, was apparently in New Orleans, and [they] requested information on him.”67

The very day Oswald likely processed the prints of the backyard photos at Jaggars, April 1, appears to be the day he was also fired and given a week’s notice. The quality of his work had deteriorated since the beginning of the year, when Jaggars tried to give him more responsibility. According to Robert Stovall, one of the founders of the company, Oswald “was a constant source of irritation because of his lack of productive ability …”⁶⁸ Stovall called his work “inefficient [and] … inept.”⁶⁹ Grumbling about him had spread to management. The area in which they worked was small and required that workers be considerate of each other as they moved about the room. Instead, Oswald charged around the shop, constantly knocking into other workers and never uttering an apology. Finally, some became so frustrated with his “selfish and aggressive” actions they almost had fistfights with him.⁷⁰ Oswald was also spotted reading a Russian paper, Krokodil, in the firm cafeteria, and his supervisor, John Graef, had enough. He privately informed Oswald that he was fired. It was the only job he had ever liked, and since he had spent almost everything he earned, the dismissal was crushing news. Graef recalled his reaction: “And there was no outburst on his part. He took this whole time looking at the floor … and after I was through, he said, ‘Well, thank you.’ And he turned around and walked off.”⁷¹ He internalized the anger, appearing on the surface to be calm and collected.

That evening he did not tell Marina he was fired. He did confide in a co-worker, Dennis Ofstein, that he had been dismissed. Ofstein asked him what he intended to do. Oswald said “he would look around and if he didn’t find anything else he could always go back to the Soviet Union …” recalled Ofstein.⁷² He again sought help from the Texas Employment Commission, but it was unable to find him new work.

The day after Oswald was informed of his discharge, Tuesday, April 2, he and Marina went to dinner at Ruth Paine’s house. Michael, Ruth’s husband, drove to Neely Street to pick them up. It was his first meeting with the Oswalds, and he was immediately “shocked” by Lee’s “cruel” conduct toward Marina. Although Paine could not understand Russian, by Lee’s tone and attitude he could tell that Marina was “a vassal to him.”73 While they waited for Marina to get ready, Paine had a half-hour political conversation with Oswald. Paine’s father had been an avid Trotskyite, and Michael was intensely interested in politics. Lee’s defection to Russia was one of the reasons Paine wanted to meet him. That half-hour talk was the most open and informative he ever had with Oswald.⁷⁴ Lee told him of his early attraction to Marxism, “without ever having met a communist,” and his search for the “paradise of the world” when he defected to Russia. He expressed his anger at both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and “great resentment” at capitalism’s “exploitation of man by man.” “It seemed to me, he was critical of almost everything that occurs in this country,” Paine recalled.⁷⁵

When Paine tried to have a debate with Oswald, he found it was not possible. “He was quite dogmatic,” he recalled. “[He thought] he knew the truth and therefore I was just spouting the line that was fed to me by the power structure.”⁷⁶ That night at dinner, Oswald closed off any discussion with the Paines once they challenged his ideas. In a conversation about religion, Michael remembers that “when he couldn’t answer he would just state … the Communist line … [and then] instead of supporting further his view … he just restated it.” Michael recalls that they all “seemed to agree … the far right was unfortunate in its thoughts.” Soon, the conversation turned to Dallas’s most prominent far right representative, General Edwin Walker. “He was familiar with Walker … quite familiar.”⁷⁷ But Oswald did not say anything about his recent surveillance of the general’s house.

The evening ended on the sour note, again, of Lee’s mistreatment of Marina. “He spoke loudly to her,” said Michael. “Spoke surprisingly harshly especially in front of a guest … he would slap her down verbally.” After the supper, Ruth informed her husband that Lee had been calling Marina a “fool” during dinner and telling her that she did not know anything. Michael thought Marina was in “bondage and servitude,” but he did not express his distaste to Oswald.78 They instead spoke of politics during the car ride home.

Three days later, Friday, Lee checked out of work a few minutes after 5:00 P.M., and as he approached the apartment in a rush, he ran into Marina outside with the baby carriage. He disappeared inside the flat for a moment, and when he returned she noticed he was carrying his rifle, hidden under his Marine Corps raincoat.⁷⁹ She was startled and asked what he was doing. “Target practice,” he replied. At the bus stop, they argued, with Marina telling him not to come home and that she hoped the police caught him.⁸⁰ She saw him get on a bus marked LOVE FIELD. When he returned at 9:00 P.M., Marina again warned him about the police, but he told her not to worry since no one could hear him where he practiced.⁸¹ The FBI later studied the Love Field bus route and found that a five-minute ride took Oswald within walking distance of a protected levee.⁸² Marina once noticed a box of ammunition at the apartment and saw him clean his rifle on four or five nights, but she does not believe he shot the gun on each occasion.⁸³ But he did not need much practice to be proficient with the Carcano. Firearms experts testified after the assassination that a marksman such as Oswald would need to fire only ten rounds to adjust the scope and become familiar with the peculiarities of that rifle.

Around April 4 or 5, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt stopped by for an afternoon visit. It was her first visit to the Neely Street apartment, as the de Mohrenschildts had been busy preparing to move from Dallas to Haiti, where George had another of his ambitious business projects in the works. While Marina showed Jeanne around the apartment, she opened a clothes closet and the rifle was leaning against the corner. Jeanne recalls, “She just said, we are so short of money, and this crazy lunatic buys a rifle.”⁸⁴ She was probably the only person besides Marina to see the rifle before the presidential assassination.

Lee’s last day at work was Saturday, April 6. He still had not told Marina he had been fired almost a week earlier. On the following day, he left the apartment with his rifle, and when he returned home that evening, he no longer had it.85 Oswald had begun to put his Walker plan into action. He later told Marina that he buried the Carcano near some railroad tracks only some minutes’ walk from Walker’s house, probably the same tracks he had photographed.⁸⁶ On Monday, April 8, Oswald left in the evening on a bus, which Marina assumed was to take him to his typing course, but she did not know he had already quit the class. Instead, he traveled to Walker’s house, where he intended to assassinate the general. But he later told Marina he discovered that the Mormon church whose parking lot was adjacent to General Walker’s home had services scheduled for Wednesday evening, providing him a better chance of not standing out in the otherwise quiet neighborhood. On Tuesday, Oswald continued the charade over his job, telling Marina that it was a holiday. In the evening, he was kind to her for the first time in months.

On Wednesday, April 10, Oswald finally told Marina he had been fired. She recalled he had tears in his eyes, blaming the FBI for inquiring about him and costing him the position. “When will they leave me alone?” he asked.⁸⁷ She actually felt sorry for him as he left that day. He was home for an early dinner and Marina noticed “he was tense … I could tell by his face.”⁸⁸ He left immediately after supper. By the time she put June to bed, between 8:00 and 9:00, she wondered why he was not home. There was no one to call. She paced between the rooms, and on a supposition, opened the door to his small study. There, she found a piece of paper on the desk, with a key on top. Immediately, she thought he had left her. She picked it up and read it (the translation from the Russian does not include any of Oswald’s original misspellings or grammatical mistakes):

1. Here is the key to the post office box, which is located in the main post office downtown on Ervay Street, the street where there is a drugstore where you always used to stand. The post office is four blocks from the drugstore on the same street. There you will find our mailbox. I paid for the mailbox last month so you needn’t worry about it.

2. Send information about what has happened to me to the [Soviet] Embassy and also send newspaper clippings (if there’s anything about me in the papers). I think the Embassy will come quickly to your aid once they know everything.

3. I paid our rent on the second so don’t worry about it.

4. I have also paid for the water and gas.

5. There may be some money from work. They will send it to your post office box. Go to the bank and they will cash it.

6. You can either throw out my clothing or give it away. Do not keep it [emphasis in original]. As for my personal papers (both military papers and papers for the factory), I prefer that you keep them.

7. Certain of my papers are in the small blue suitcase.

8. My address book is on the table in my study if you need it.

9. We have friends here and the Red Cross will also help you.

10. I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month, and you and Junie can live for two months on $10 a week.

11. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is at the end of the bridge we always used to cross when we went to town (the very beginning of town after the bridge).

Marina started shaking. “I couldn’t understand at all what can he be arrested for,” she recalled.89 She was frantic by the time Oswald returned at 11:30.⁹⁰ He was pale and out of breath from walking quickly. “I showed him the note and asked him, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ … And he told me not to ask him any questions,” she said. “He only told me that he had shot at General Walker.”⁹¹ She was horrified. She asked about the rifle, and he said he had buried it. “Don’t ask any questions,” he commanded her.⁹² He flipped on the radio but was disappointed as there was no news. “When he fired, he did not know whether he had hit Walker or not,” Marina said. Oswald could not understand that the radio was silent about the assassination. Frustrated there was no coverage, he went to bed within the hour. “I didn’t sleep all night,” said Marina. “I thought that any minute now, the police will come.”93 She was also petrified of tracking dogs, and expected they would follow Lee’s scent from the shooting to Neely Street.

Although Marina was appalled that Lee had tried to kill someone, she never seriously thought of turning him in to the police. Not only was she completely dependent on him, but her Russian upbringing made her fear the police. She worried what would happen to her, alone in the U.S., if her husband was charged with murder. There was no way she could have imagined that by postponing any decision on the Walker shooting, she would find herself in seven months in the very situation she hoped to avoid, only with a much more prominent victim.* Marina finally fell asleep in the early morning hours.

It was a fluke that Walker was not dead. The general had been sitting behind a desk in his dining room, working on his income taxes, when the shot was fired. Oswald had likely taken a position inside Walker’s backyard fence, leaning against the general’s station wagon to brace himself for the shot.⁹⁴ He was less than one hundred feet away from the window, which had no covering to block his view into the brightly lit room. “I heard a blast and crack right over my head,” recalled Walker. “I thought possibly somebody had thrown a firecracker, that it exploded right over my head through the window right behind me.”⁹⁵ Walker stood up from the desk, looked around the room, and noticed a hole in the wall, just left of where he had been sitting. He went upstairs to get a gun and it was several minutes before he noticed his right forearm was bleeding, the result of bullet fragments.⁹⁶ What saved Walker’s life was the wooden frame across the middle of the double window. Upon close examination, it turned out that the bullet had passed through a wire screen, then grooved along the bottom of the wooden bar, and then through the glass. When it struck the wooden frame, the bullet was deflected so minutely that it passed through Walker’s hair instead of into his skull.* “He [Oswald] couldn’t see from his position any of the latticework either in the windows or in the screens because of the light,” said Walker. “It would have looked like one big lighted area, and he could have been a very good shot and just by chance he hit the woodwork.”⁹⁷†

When Marina awoke, Oswald was bent over a radio. “I missed,” he said disgustedly. She was immensely relieved. “He said only that he had taken very good aim, that it was just chance that caused him to miss,” Marina remembered.⁹⁸ Now she felt relaxed enough to ask him questions about Walker. He told Marina that he had planned the Walker assassination for two months, and then he showed her his operations book, crammed with photographs of Walker’s residence, a map, and pages of handwritten notes.⁹⁹ Marina was shocked. She thought he had been writing his memoirs, as he had when they lived in Russia “He said that this was a very bad man, that he was a fascist, that he was the leader of a fascist organization, and when I said that even though all of that might be true, just the same he had no right to take his life, he said if someone had killed Hitler in time it would have saved many lives. I told him that this is no method to prove your ideas, by means of a rifle.… I told him he had no right to kill people in peacetime, he had no right to take their life because not everybody has the same ideas as he has.”¹⁰⁰ Marina thought he was “sick” and “not a stable-minded person.”¹⁰¹

He left the apartment to purchase the local newspapers, which carried front-page stories about the failed assassination. In the initial reports the police mistakenly identified the mangled bullet as a .30–06. A Walker aide said he had seen an unlicensed car near the general’s house several nights before the shooting. A fifteen-year-old neighbor, Walter Kirk Coleman, said he saw two cars speed away from the scene right after the shooting. According to Marina, those errors made Lee laugh heartily. He called them fools over the bullet. Regarding the false reports of getaway cars, he said, “Americans are so spoiled, it never occurs to them that you might use your own two legs.”102*

Marina said Lee was “very sorry that he had not hit him,” and she worried he might try again—she made him promise that he would not. “I asked him to give me his word that he would not repeat anything like that,” she recalled. “I said that this chance shows that he [Walker] must live and that he should not be shot at again. I told him that I would save the note and that if something like that should be repeated again, I would go to the police and I would have the proof in the form of that note.”¹⁰³ Marina hid the note in a cookbook. Then she asked him what he intended to do with his notebook of Walker photos and assassination plans. He said he wanted to save it “as a keepsake.”¹⁰⁴† She was furious and told him it was evidence that could be used against him. But he initially ignored her and saved the book.105 Marina was convinced there was only one guarantee that Oswald would not try again to kill Walker. “And then I insisted that it would be better for him to go to New Orleans where he had relatives,” she said. “I insisted on that because I wanted to get him further removed from Dallas and Walker, because even though he gave me his word, I wanted to have him further away, because a rifle for him was not a very good toy—a toy that was too enticing.”¹⁰⁶

For two days after the Walker attack, Marina reported that Lee suffered convulsive anxiety attacks during his sleep, but without waking up.¹⁰⁷ By Friday, he tried to return to a normal routine, filing a claim for unemployment benefits. Saturday, the Oswalds spent a quiet day at the Neely Street apartment. They had just gone to bed that night when there was loud pounding at the front door. Marina’s heart jumped, as she feared it was the police, until she heard George de Mohrenschildt’s deep voice. She vividly recalled what happened next. “As he opened the door, he said, ‘Lee, how is it possible that you missed?’ I looked at Lee. I thought he had told de Mohrenschildt about it. And Lee looked at me, and he apparently thought I had told.… I noticed that his [Lee’s] face changed, that he almost became speechless.”¹⁰⁸ De Mohrenschildt knew about Oswald’s distaste for Walker, and his wife, Jeanne, had informed him just a week ago that she saw a rifle at the Oswald apartment.* It was his idea of a joke, but he could immediately tell he had hit a target.

“He sort of shriveled,” de Mohrenschildt recalled, “when I asked this question. Became tense, you see, and didn’t answer anything, smiled … made a peculiar face. [It] had an effect on him.”109 That surprise visit, the evening before Easter, was the last time the de Mohrenschildts ever saw the Oswalds. The de Mohrenschildts moved from Dallas five days later.*

The following day, Easter Sunday, April 14, Oswald thought the manhunt for Walker’s shooter had slackened and that it was safe to retrieve his rifle. Less than an hour after his return with it, he decided Marina was right about his operations book for the Walker assassination. Marina smelled burnt matches and walked into the bathroom. Lee was burning most of the evidence over the washbasin.¹¹⁰†

By April 17, Oswald had told Marina he was ready to move to New Orleans.¹¹¹ The decision seemed to improve his mood, which had been miserable after his failure to kill Walker a week earlier. The Oswalds even joined Ruth Paine and her two children for a picnic on Sunday, April 21. But as soon as Marina began to relax over the Walker episode and Lee’s receding temper, another incident sent her into a panic. When Oswald read the Monday morning paper, its front-page headline was NIXCON CALLS FOR DECISION TO FORCE REDS OUT OF CUBA. Marina said, “Then he got dressed and put on a good suit. I saw that he took a pistol. I asked him where he was going, and why he was getting dressed. He answered, ‘Nixon is coming. I want to go and have a look.’ I said, ‘I know how you look.’”112 She did not know who Nixon was, but was determined that Lee should not leave the house with the pistol. She asked him to join her in the bathroom, and when he entered she jumped out and slammed the door shut. Bracing her feet against the nearby wall, she struggled as hard as she could to keep the door closed against his efforts to push out. “I remember that I held him,” she said. “We actually struggled for several minutes and then he quieted down. I remember that I told him that if he goes it would be better for him to kill me than to go out.”¹¹³ Some have questioned whether Marina could have prevented Oswald from leaving the bathroom. “He is not a big man,” remarked Marina. “When he is very upset, my husband … is not strong and when I want to and when I collect all my forces and want to do something very badly I am stronger than he is.”¹¹⁴ She reminded him of her pregnancy and that the excitement could cause a miscarriage. At first he was furious, but as he calmed, Oswald agreed to strip to his underwear, and stayed home reading the remainder of the day. They quarreled often that afternoon, with Marina reminding him of his promise, and saying she was sick about “all these pranks of his.”¹¹⁵ He gave Marina the pistol and she hid it under the mattress, but he took it back that evening. The next day he informed her that Nixon had not come to town after all.*

Two days later, Wednesday, April 24, Ruth Paine, with her two children, drove to the Oswald apartment. She was expecting to spend the morning visiting Marina and instead was shocked to see Lee Oswald fully packed and ready to move. “I was evidently expected,” Ruth recalls. “I and my car, because he asked if I could take these bags and duffel bags, suitcases, to the bus station for him.”116 Oswald merely told her that he was unable to find work in Dallas and had decided to try his native New Orleans, and Marina would stay in the Neely Street flat until he had found a job and an apartment. She helped him load her 1955 Chevrolet station wagon and drove him to the downtown bus station. When Oswald went to buy the tickets, Ruth said, “I was thinking, while he was in the bus station, and suggested that it would be a very difficult thing for a pregnant woman with a small child to take a 12-hour, 13-hour bus trip to New Orleans, and suggested that I drive her down with June.”¹¹⁷ Ruth said that instead of Marina returning to the Neely Street apartment, she was welcome to stay with her until she left for New Orleans. He readily accepted the offer. He stopped briefly at his post-office box to pick up fifty leaflets sent to him on April 19 by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Adding those to his luggage, he was set for the overnight bus trip home to New Orleans.

* How did the Oswalds manage to repay the State Department and Robert when Lee was only earning $1.35 an hour? “We lived very modestly,” Marina testified. “Perhaps for you it is hard to imagine how we existed.… He worked and we paid out the debt. Six or seven months we were paying off this debt” (WC Vol. I, p. 62). It actually took them eight months to repay the loans. Copies of Oswald’s tax returns show he had little money left after paying monthly expenses.

* Walker’s segregationist stance was another factor that must have infuriated Oswald. De Mohrenschildt described Oswald as a “ferocious … advocate of integration.”

* Michael Paine was a research engineer at Bell Helicopter. Although the Paines were temporarily separated, they remained very friendly and saw each other frequently.

* Some contest whether the letter was written by Oswald since it is only signed “L.H.” and refers to an independent Senate campaign in Massachusetts, about which he supposedly would not have any knowledge. But the campaign in question, of H. Stuart Hughes, was covered in the September 7, 1962, issue of Time, to which Oswald subscribed. Others claim that Oswald did not write the letter since it does not have his trademark misspellings. But The Militant did not have the original, and admitted its policy was to edit for syntax, grammar, and spelling.

† FBI photo experts later determined the pictures were taken by Oswald’s Imperial Reflex camera. He may have taken other photos that day, but only those five have survived.

* Treasury Department and FBI document experts later confirmed that the hand-printing on the coupon, as well as the addresses on the envelope, were done by Oswald.

*Some claim the newspapers, The Militant and The Worker, were issues dated after Marina said the photos were taken. Oswald subscribed to both papers. Through enhancements and blowups, photo experts determined that The Worker was the March 24, 1963, issue, which had been mailed from New York on March 21, and The Militant was the March 11, 1963, issue (which contained the letter from Oswald), mailed on March 7. Both were sent second class and should have arrived in Dallas in six to seven days, well in time for the March 31 photos.

† Marina took at least three different pictures that day, since three different poses exist. It is unrealistic to think that anyone making a composite photograph would make three versions, thereby allowing photo experts more basis for comparison in uncovering any fake. Some critics have used the number of photos to attack Marina’s credibility since she originally said she took one, then later admitted to two or more. “I was very nervous that day when I took the pictures,” she told the author. “I can’t remember how many I took, but I know I took them and that is what is important. It would be easier if I said I never took them, but that is not the truth.”

*The tests used were photogrammetry, varying exposures, digital image processing, vanishing point analysis, and stereoscopic viewing of the pictures. A digital computer enhancement showed a grain pattern unique to each photo. When the entire print is scanned, any disruption in the minute pattern is clear evidence of fakery. There was none.

* After the assassination, The Militant checked its files but claimed not to find any photo of Oswald. In 1993, two former Militant staffers reportedly admitted that one of Oswald’s backyard photos had indeed arrived at their office before the assassination. It vanished after JFK’s death.

†That inscription is in Cyrillic, written by a pen traced over pencil, and because of its condition, handwriting experts could not positively identify who wrote it. However, Marina, while not certain, believes it is her writing. That photo, together with some English-Russian language records, was apparently sent to de Mohrenschildt from New Orleans sometime after May 4, 1963, the date that House Select Committee handwriting experts determined Oswald had inscribed on the rear.

‡The Dallas police reported an incident of chasing a pro-Castro demonstrator around this time but not catching him. In an undated letter to Fair Play for Cuba’s national headquarters in New York, Oswald wrote, “I stood yesterday for the first time in my life, with a placard around my neck, passing out fair play for Cuba pamplets …” He said he had been “cursed as well as praised” and requested forty to fifty more of Fair Play’s leaflets. Oswald could have carried out his demonstrations on any day from Sunday, April 7, until the afternoon of Wednesday, April 10. Although he practiced with his rifle and also conducted some surveillance at General Walker’s house on those days, he had time to distribute the pamphlets.

* Even after the Kennedy assassination, she did not tell the FBI about the Walker shooting until the Bureau confronted her with the incriminating note that was discovered among Oswald’s belongings.

* The author personally examined the window and damaged frame, still in General Walker’s possession, shortly before Walker died in November 1993.

† The bullet, recovered in another room of the house, was so badly damaged that ballistics experts could not match it to Oswald’s rifle to the exclusion of all others, but they did conclude, based on the visible markings, there was a good probability that it was fired from Oswald’s Carcano. The House Select Committee utilized an advanced technique to subject the bullet to neutron-activation tests, and determined the Walker slug was a Western Cartridge Company 6.5mm bullet, the same type of bullet, made by the same manufacturer, as that used later in President Kennedy’s assassination.

* Walter Coleman was playing with a friend in the back room of his house when he heard “a car backfire” between 9:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. He looked into the parking lot of the Mormon church. Contrary to press reports that he saw two men get into separate cars and race away, he told the FBI that he only saw one car leave, and it moved at a normal rate of speed. At least six other cars were in the parking lot at the same time. Other neighbors contradicted Coleman’s story, saying no cars left after the noise. If he did see a departing car, it was probably because church services had just finished. The pastor told the FBI that on Wednesdays, services began at 7:30 and finished at 9:00, leaving the area busy with people. Oswald’s original plan was to mix with that crowd.

† An issue was later created when the Warren Commission showed Marina one of the surviving five photographs Lee had taken of the Walker residence, of a car parked in front of the house. There was a hole in the print in the area of the license plate. Marina said the hole had not been there when Lee had shown it to her. But Marina may be mistaken. A photo of evidence taken from Oswald’s flat after the assassination shows the hole was in the print at that time. (The photo in question was reproduced in a 1969 book, JFK Assassination File, by Dallas police chief Jesse Curry. Many critics contend there is no hole visible in that reproduction, but upon close examination, it is evident that a similarly toned piece of paper, lying underneath the Walker photo, is actually filling in the hole around the license plate.) Also, the photo was taken from such a distance that the license plate of the car would not have been legible in any case, and it was later determined the car belonged to a Walker aide, Charles Klihr.

* In their testimony to the Warren Commission, the de Mohrenschildts mistakenly recalled one visit to Neely Street, April 13. But Jeanne had forgotten about her solo visit to Marina on April 4 or 5. She confused the sighting of the rifle and the joke her husband made about the shooting and thought they both happened on April 13. George de Mohrenschildt gave the same testimony. The Warren Commission believed their version. But Marina is clear about two separate visits, and more important, Oswald did not retrieve his rifle until Sunday, April 14, a day after the de Mohrenschildts’ visit. So Mrs. de Mohrenschildt could not have seen the rifle on April 13 as she thought, but only on the earlier visit on either April 4 or 5.

* On March 29, 1977, de Mohrenschildt told Edward Jay Epstein that the CIA had asked him to keep tabs on Oswald in Dallas during 1962. Several hours later, de Mohrenschildt killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. However, most books fail to disclose that de Mohrenschildt was quite mad by the time he gave his final interview. For nearly a year before his death, he was paranoid, fearful that the “FBI and Jewish mafia” were out to kill him. He twice tried to kill himself with drug overdoses, and another time cut his wrists and submerged himself in a bathtub. After he began waking in the middle of every night, screaming and beating himself, his wife finally committed him to the Parkland Hospital psychiatric unit, where he was diagnosed as psychotic and given two months of intensive shock therapy. After his treatment he said he had been with Oswald on the day of the assassination, though he was actually with dozens of guests at the Bulgarian embassy in Haiti the day JFK was killed. Despite de Mohrenschildt’s imbalance, Epstein and others still quote the final interview as though it were an uncontested fact.

† Henry Hurt writes in Reasonable Doubt that there is no evidence “that this mild-mannered young man [Oswald] had ever committed an act of serious violence,” and he dismisses the Walker shooting in two sentences, concluding “the evidence [was] … of the flimsiest kind.” John Davis, in more than six hundred pages of Mafia Kingfish, covers the shooting in a single sentence, and rejects it as unproven. David Scheim, in Contract on America; Jim Garrison, in On the Trail of the Assassins; and David Lifton, in Best Evidence, do not even mention the Walker shooting. Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations dropped the entire Walker incident into a single footnote because it could not find any accomplices to fit into its eventual conclusion of an overall conspiracy.

* Nixon was not in Dallas on the day Oswald packed a pistol and set out to meet him. Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was due in Dallas within a day, but Marina is certain the name was Nixon. Oswald was dyslexic and could have confused the news about Nixon’s anti-Castro plans with the visit of the “VicePresident,” a title still used to refer to Nixon. Also, Nixon may have just been the excuse given to Marina, and it is possible Oswald had second thoughts about agreeing to let Walker live. The fact that Oswald could not physically fulfill his stated mission does not extirpate the seriousness of the incident, and again highlights his increasing instability.