by R. G. Belsky
He didn’t.
Maybe his book would.
Chapter 16
THE TITLE OF the book was The Kennedy Connection: Lee Harvey Oswald’s Secret Son Searches for the Truth About Dallas.
I took it home with me that night. Home was a one-bedroom apartment on the eleventh floor of a prewar building at 96th Street just off of Third Avenue. I’d moved there after Susan and I broke up. It was supposed to be a temporary place, until I figured out what I wanted to do. But like a lot of things in my life now, I’d never gotten around to making a decision about finding a new apartment. It wasn’t a bad building or location, but the landlord wasn’t exactly motivated to make repairs. I had peeling paint on the walls, bad plumbing, and—worst of all—air-conditioning that would inexplicably run at full blast in the middle of winter, then shut down completely in the summer. On hot summer nights like this one, the only way to get any kind of air into the place was to open a big picture window in the living room. But that meant bugs and dirt and noise from the outside came through too. It was always a tricky decision for me whether to leave that window open or closed. This time, I opted for the open window. Then I sat down in my living room to read Lee Harvey Oswald’s book.
The beginning of the manuscript was devoted to Oswald’s discovery of who his biological father was and his efforts to deal with the trauma that caused him.
He went on at some length about the effect all of this had had on him and his family and his life. He told of his descent from a normal existence into a cauldron of despair and depression after he found out about his biological father. About how that led to his estrangement from his wife and his two children. There were times, he said, when he contemplated suicide. Especially when he looked at pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald in history books and saw glimpses of himself in that face.
The turning point came for him one day when he tried to call his son, Eric, on the son’s birthday. Eric Mathis had taken the Oswald news harder than anyone else, he recalled, directing all of his anger at his father even if that wasn’t a logical target. That anger had culminated when Lee tried to make the birthday call. “I’d like to speak to Eric,” he said. “This is his father.” The person who answered the phone came back and said, “Eric said he doesn’t have a father.”
His daughter, Samantha, would speak to him, but only barely. And his wife, Carol, had remarried and moved to a new city. Everyone in his family, he said, wanted desperately to have nothing to do with him or with the evil it was now clear he had been spawned from.
For Lee himself, his rebirth had come, he wrote, when he decided to find out the truth about his infamous father, what he had actually done and why.
He soon found himself consumed by all the conspiracy theories about what happened that day in Dallas—all of them centered on the idea that Oswald was not a lone, deranged assassin and had, at worst, been caught up in something bigger than him that terrible day. “I’m just a patsy,” Oswald had said in one of his few public comments after the arrest. His son decided to prove that was true. Maybe because he really believed it. Or maybe because he thought it was the only way he could save a bit of his own life too.
The Kennedy conspiracy stuff itself in the book—Oswald Jr.’s “investigation” and theories into what happened in Dallas—was disappointing to me. Maybe because I’d already heard all this so many times that this part of the manuscript had a stale, retold feel about it. No matter how hard Oswald Jr. tried to make the case that he was somehow looking at his father’s life and death from a new, personal perspective.
A lot of it focused on the same questions and evidence about the investigation that had been analyzed, dissected, and argued about by historians, journalists, and conspiracy buffs many times before.
He started by giving the official version of the Kennedy assassination as we have always heard it. Lee Harvey Oswald firing three shots at the motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald fleeing the building afterward as the president was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later. Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit’s fatal encounter with Oswald, who shot and killed Tippit when the policeman got out of his squad car to question him. Oswald’s arrest in the Texas Theatre, a movie house nearby where he had fled after the Tippit shooting. His forty-eight hours of questioning by police as the nation grieved for the young president. And finally, of course, the death of Oswald himself when he was shot by Jack Ruby, who said he wanted to spare First Lady Jackie Kennedy the agony of an Oswald trial.
Then he laid out in the manuscript the key points that he believed proved his father was innocent or, at worst, only an unwilling participant in the tragic events. These were:
• If Oswald really acted alone, he would have had to fire all three shots from the window of the Book Depository building in approximately six seconds. This would have been almost impossible to do.
• There was never any visual sighting of Oswald on the sixth floor of the Book Depository building that day. No one actually saw Oswald crouching behind a box at the window getting ready to fire his shots at the presidential motorcade.
• There had to be other gunmen firing at Kennedy from some other point besides the Book Depository, most likely from the grassy knoll across the street from it. Ah, the grassy knoll. The holy grail of all JFK conspiracy theories. The facts on the grassy knoll that Oswald talked about in the book were the same ones I’d heard so many times before. The famous Zapruder film of the assassination shows Kennedy’s head snapping back—not forward—from the impact of the final shot. That seemed to indicate the shot came from someplace in front of the motorcade—the grassy knoll—and not from behind in the direction of the Book Depository.
Anyway, Oswald Jr. had simply regurgitated all the familiar theories of a conspiracy without hard new evidence to back up any of it. There was no smoking gun here. Not on the grassy knoll. Or anywhere else either.
The thing that interested me more was the personal stuff.
Like the death of his mother when he was a baby—and his efforts to go back and determine the exact circumstances of what had happened to her.
The official version was pretty straightforward. Emily Springer, his mother, had worked as a dancer at a strip club in New Orleans. That was where she had met Oswald, who lived in the city during the spring and summer of 1963. One night in early 1964, not long after Lee Jr. was born, she got in her car, drove to a bridge over the nearby Mississippi River, and leaped to her death.
But digging deeper into the death of his mother, he had discovered some disturbing facts. His mother had been telling people in the days before her death that she had questions—and indicated she knew something—about the Kennedy assassination. Presumably based on her romantic relationship with Oswald in the months before the assassination. The Warren Commission was still meeting to prepare its report, and her coworkers said Emily Springer had said she wanted to talk to the commission about what she knew.
He speculated that this may have gotten back to other people, people who didn’t want her talking to the Warren Commission or to anyone else.
He also said that Emily’s sister, Laura, claimed that Emily had never talked about suicide or exhibited any suicidal tendencies. On the contrary, she had embraced the idea of being a single mother and raising the boy that was the result of her romance with Lee Harvey Oswald. Even more disturbing, he wrote, was that the sister had recalled his mother appeared nervous in the days before her death, complaining that she felt as if someone was following and watching her.
Oswald then compared his mother’s death to the deaths of other people linked to the JFK assassination in some way. From the moment Jack Ruby had silenced Oswald forever with a gunshot to the stomach two days after the assassination, people with ties to the events in Dallas had been dying mysteriously and in mind-boggling numbers.
The thing that made me think the mos
t, though—the thing that made me sit bolt upright in my chair when I read it—was a clue to what his mother might have known about the assassination.
And might have been prepared to tell the Warren Commission, if she’d ever gotten the chance.
An alibi for Lee Harvey Oswald.
On that fateful morning, Laura Springer had received a phone call from Emily.
She remembered it vividly because the call had woken her up at six in the morning.
Emily said she was at the New Orleans bus station and that Lee Harvey Oswald was with her. She had just bought him a bus ticket for an eight-hour ride back to Dallas, and he was about to board the bus. He had taken the bus in from Dallas to New Orleans the previous day to see her. When he had gotten there, Oswald told Emily there were big changes coming in his life—exciting changes, the big break he had been hoping for—and that he wanted to share it all with her. They had stayed up all night talking about how he would leave his wife, Marina, and their family in Dallas, then come to live with Emily and the baby they would have together.
At one point, Emily put Oswald on the phone with her sister. Laura remembered asking him about his job at the Book Depository and how he got the time off to go to New Orleans. She said he just laughed and said, “Don’t worry, that’s all been taken care of. I’m taking a bus back to Dallas now. All I have to do is be there in time to meet someone this afternoon. Someone very important. Someone who is finally going to change my life. Everything’s going to be different from now on.”
It was, of course, the last time Emily Springer would ever see him.
Later, when Emily saw Oswald all over the news and eventually watched him gunned down on TV, she took out the receipt for the ticket she’d bought him that day. She told her sister she would keep it forever. As a memory of that wonderful last time they spent together.
Lee Mathis, who now called himself Lee Harvey Oswald Jr., said in the manuscript after writing this account:
What was the big opportunity—the big change in his life—my father thought he was going to get? Who was he supposed to meet that afternoon instead of going to work at the Book Depository? What did he mean when he said he didn’t have to go to work that day because “it had all been taken care of”?
There had always been stories of Oswald “doubles.” Sightings of my father in the weeks before the assassination that seemed staged, as if it wasn’t really him, but someone who wanted to make it seem like it was. These Oswald “sightings” included a trip to Mexico to meet with Communist officials at the Soviet embassy; an incident at a rifle range where he seemed to go out of his way to make a public display of anger against the U.S.; even a famous picture of him holding the assassination rifle in his backyard before November 22 had been accused by some of being a phony photo with a double. So what if the people who saw my father the day of the assassination—who said he was in the Book Depository—actually saw another “Oswald double”? Someone who was instructed to make himself noticeable as Oswald that fateful day?
And where was the meeting he had that afternoon in Dallas? Could that have been why he went into the Texas Theatre where he was captured? To meet what he thought was going to be a contact who could change his life? Instead, he walked into a trap that set him up to be the greatest villain in history.
I don’t know the answers to all of these questions.
But let me ask this simple—but crucial—question:
If my mother had bought Oswald a bus ticket for an eight-hour ride back to Dallas at six a.m., how could he have gotten there in time to assassinate the president at 12:30?
Chapter 17
I WANT TO GO to Dallas,” I said.
“What’s in Dallas?” Marilyn Staley asked.
“The scene of the JFK assassination.”
“What’s the point of going there now?”
“Whoever wrote that note to me and killed those two people is motivated for some reason by the JFK assassination. It doesn’t make any sense, of course. What happened in Dallas all those years ago that could possibly motivate someone today to commit murders in New York City? Nothing any logical mind could fathom. But then murderers—especially serial killers—generally don’t have logical minds.
“So I go to Dallas and try to figure out what that motivation might be. I go to Dealey Plaza. The Texas School Book Depository where Oswald supposedly fired the shots from the sixth-floor window. The Dallas police station where he was shot by Jack Ruby two days later. The rooming house where he lived. The movie theater he fled into just before he was arrested. All of the spots that are a part of the JFK assassination history.
“Maybe I stumble on some answers that help us figure out what’s going on here now. Maybe I don’t. But I think there’s an answer there. Somewhere. There has to be. Something we’re not seeing, some connection that I might be able to figure out by retracing the steps of the assassination.
“And even if I don’t, we still get a good story out of it. An in-depth feature piece. Talking about the two Kennedy murders here and how we went to Dallas looking for answers from the past, etc. C’mon, Marilyn, even if I just wind up asking a lot of questions without answers, it could still be a nice read.”
We were sitting in Staley’s office. Me, her, and Carrie Bratten. Carrie didn’t look happy. She kept glaring at me with a tight look on her mouth as I talked about the trip to Dallas and my idea for a feature story. I’d expected that reaction from her. To be honest, I actually had looked forward to it.
The arrogant little bitch. I hadn’t told her about any of this before we went into Staley’s office. I hadn’t told her about what was coming up next either.
“That could be a good Sunday feature,” Staley said. “You go to Dallas, soak up the local color for a few days, and then write it up for the weekend edition. I like that, Gil.”
The smile on Carrie’s face got tighter.
“Meanwhile, Carrie can add some of the live stuff here from the police investigation into the murders for tomorrow to keep the story going until your weekend piece. What do you think, Carrie?”
“Uh . . . well, I’ll have to make some calls to see what I can come up with,” she said, obviously rattled and a bit off her game. “I’m sure I’ll be able to find something new and . . .”
“Actually, I have something for tomorrow too,” I said.
I took out Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.’s manuscript and plopped it down on Staley’s desk.
“Are you saying that you think the person who wrote this book could have done the Kennedy killings now out of some sort of weird revenge motive or quest for justice over what happened to Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963?” Staley asked with amazement after I’d told her what I found in the manuscript.
“Doubtful.”
I explained his serious health issues and the wheelchair and the oxygen tube tied to him.
“He could be faking the illness,” she pointed out.
“I don’t think so. I spent time with him. He looks very frail; he’s in pretty bad shape. I’m sure he’s really incapacitated.”
“Maybe he hired someone to carry out the murders for him,” she suggested.
“Possible, but unlikely. He doesn’t seem like a violent or angry man. More tragic than anything. His whole life was destroyed by being Lee Harvey Oswald’s son. And now he is dying. Which is why he wrote the book.”
“And you think he’s telling the truth about this?”
“As far as I can tell. At least, he believes it. The birth certificate seems genuine. Of course, DNA testing could tell for sure. But yes, I think it’s very possible he is the secret son of Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Staley skimmed through the pages of the manuscript, stopping once in a while to read a paragraph or two.
“Let me see if I understand this,” she said finally. “You don’t think that the person who wrote this manuscript—even though he could well
be Lee Harvey Oswald’s secret son—murdered those two people, left Kennedy half-dollars with their bodies as a sick clue, or wrote you a letter warning of new violence at Kennedy Airport? Or that he is responsible for anything else going on in the city now?”
“Right.”
“Then what’s the story?”
“That is the story,” I said. “It’s a helluva connection. Someone is killing people and claiming to have done it to mark the JFK assassination. At the same time, the unknown son of Lee Harvey Oswald emerges with this claim that his father was secretly set up for the killing. We lay it all out for the readers just like that. We talk about Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. and the book and his claim of his father’s innocence. And we simply point out that this is all happening at the same time as the other killings and threats taking place. That’s all.”
“And this Oswald character—or whatever his real name is—he’s okay with you quoting stuff from the manuscript?”
“He wants this information out there,” I said. “I want this information out there too. It works for both of us. We get a good story out of this, and he gets publicity for the book. Hell, we’ll probably make it a best seller before this is all over. It’s a win-win situation for everyone, Marilyn.”
After we left Staley’s office, Carrie didn’t speak to me until we got back to her desk in the newsroom.
“Why didn’t you tell me about any of this stuff you were working on?” she asked. “I thought we were working as a team.”
“C’mon, Carrie,” I said. “Let’s be honest here. Just you and me talking. If you had something hot like this manuscript—an exclusive dropped right into your lap—would you have told me about it? Honestly?”
“Yes,” she said. “I would have.”
I looked at her face again. The tightness around her mouth was still there. The anger too. But there was something else I saw this time. Shock. She looked as if I had just slapped her across the face.
