The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  “My father is alive,” Crenshaw said slowly. “He lives in Boca Raton, Florida, now. I lost my mother about a year ago. He’s very frail; the doctors say he’s got a bad heart. It’s important not to agitate him. I guess that’s why I didn’t tell him about Eric Mathis’s visit to me.”

  “I don’t want to upset your father,” I said. “You don’t have to upset your father. You don’t have to change your life or his in any way. Everything can go on for you the same way it always has, the way you want it. I can keep both of you out of this story. That’s the quid pro quo I’m offering you.”

  “In other words, you’re threatening me with publicity to get me to talk to you.”

  I’d actually walked into his office with a different plan. That one had been the opposite, to make him a media star. But, like I said, I’m good at reading people. And I read Howard Crenshaw as a man who wasn’t looking for fame or even fortune. He just wanted to live a normal, quiet life. And taking that away from him was the biggest threat I had. I wasn’t proud of what I was doing. But then I’m never proud of a lot of things I do as a reporter. The most important thing for me has always been getting the story, no matter what it takes. And the truth is, I wasn’t really going to expose his sick father to public scrutiny or turn Crenshaw’s life upside down. I just needed him to think that.

  “Eric Mathis was here,” he said finally.

  “What did he want?”

  “Details about his adoption.”

  “And you gave them to him?”

  “Yes. After I verified who he was. He has a right to that information as a relative of the person who was adopted.”

  Crenshaw took out the case file from a drawer and told me the same things he’d told Mathis. About who the birth mother was. And the father. That the baby—Eric Mathis’s father—had been conceived while Oswald was in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 prior to the assassination. That shortly after the baby was born, Emily Springer jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge into the Mississippi River and killed herself. Her family—a mother and a younger sister—thought about trying to raise the baby, but it was too much for them. That’s when they made arrangements for the adoption, which was handled by Crenshaw’s father, to the Mathis family.

  “What else did Eric ask you, Mr. Crenshaw?”

  “He wanted to know how to get in touch with the family of his birth mother.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  Crenshaw shrugged. “I told him what I had. But it’s been so long . . . the parents of his biological mother—the ones who came to my father to give up the baby for adoption—must be long dead. The only member of the family who might still be alive is a sister. I believe she was a few years younger than Emily had been. At least from what I saw in my father’s adoption records. I gave Eric the last contact information I had on the sister. Although even that was very old. If she is still alive, I’m sure she must have moved on since then.”

  “Tell me the name of the sister.”

  “Laura Springer,” he said.

  The same woman the author who called himself Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. had written about in his book.

  Chapter 24

  AMAZINGLY, LAURA SPRINGER still lived at the home of her parents, which had been listed during the adoption proceedings. When I called her, she said I could come over that afternoon if I wanted to talk to her. I didn’t tell her why a reporter from New York City wanted to interview her, and she didn’t ask. I was pretty sure she already knew.

  I spent the rest of the morning visiting the section of the city where Lee Harvey Oswald had been during the summer of 1963.

  I was especially interested in 544 Camp Street. It was the building Oswald had worked out of that summer, handing out pamphlets for a pro-Castro group called Fair Play for Cuba. He had also been arrested on Camp Street after a battle on the street with anti-Castro demonstrators. From what we knew about Oswald, the Camp Street area had been where he’d spent most of his time that summer, talking about being a Marxist and openly advertising the time he’d spent living in the Soviet Union before returning to the United States in the early ’60s.

  The building wasn’t there anymore. But I stood at the site where it used to be fifty years ago. The problem—as many investigators and Kennedy conspiracy theorists had pointed out over the years—was that Oswald’s presence in the building, in this neighborhood back then, made no sense at all.

  Because the building in the early ’60s housed tenants who had been anti-Castro activists, not pro-Castro as Oswald claimed to be, as well as many right-wing organizations known for their connections to the American intelligence community. Also, nearby were headquarters of Navy Intelligence, the Secret Service, and various CIA-connected fronts and groups. The entire U.S. intelligence community in New Orleans in those days was on Camp Street, and there too—right in the middle of it—was Lee Harvey Oswald. Which raised real questions about what Oswald was really doing in New Orleans during the months before the assassination of President Kennedy.

  I thought about a quote I’d read in Mathis’s book. From someone on the House Assassinations Committee who investigated the JFK killing again in 1979: “In the months leading up to the assassination, I think Oswald got in over his head. He was no longer sure who he was working for or why. Somebody was using him.”

  Standing there on this hot summer day, I thought about how Lee Harvey Oswald walked this same street a half century earlier, and wondered what he might have been thinking about back then.

  I wondered too if Eric Mathis, Oswald’s grandson, had walked this street too not long before me, trying to find the same kind of answers as I was now.

  And, most of all, I wondered where Eric Mathis was and what he was doing.

  Laura Springer was still a handsome woman, even though she must have been close to seventy. She had silver hair and piercing blue eyes, and was wearing jeans and a T-shirt pullover that revealed a still more than decent body when she opened the door for me.

  She told me she’d done some modeling over the years when she was younger, then got married and settled down to being a full-time wife and mother. There were pictures of her family all over her living room where we sat talking. Even though the house was very old, the furniture was more contemporary. She wasn’t some old lady living in the past. She pointed out her husband in one of the pictures. Her three children. Two grandkids. And one very old picture, worn and faded now, which she said was her as a young girl with her sister Emily. Emily was holding a baby in her arms in the picture.

  “Is that the baby from the affair she had with Lee Harvey Oswald?” I asked.

  “You get right to the point, don’t you, Mr. Malloy?”

  “I’m a newspaperman. I like to put the lead in the first graph.”

  I smiled. She smiled back. Ah, you still got it, Malloy. Women melt when you turn on the charm. At least senior citizens do. The thing was I liked Laura Springer. She had a real elegance, a presence about her. I asked her to tell me whatever she remembered about her sister Emily and the events of that summer when she met Oswald and eventually had his baby.

  “My gosh, that was so long ago,” she said, looking at the picture of her sister as she talked. “I was just seventeen years old then. Emmy was twenty-one. She was my big sister, and I idolized her. I wanted to be just like Emmy. I tried to dress like her, wear my hair like her, I wanted to be my big sister back then. We were very close, despite the age difference. I told her all my secrets, and she shared hers with me. Even the things that . . . well, the things that sometimes I wish now that I’d never known.”

  “You mean like having the affair with Lee Harvey Oswald and getting pregnant with his baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she meet him?”

  “At the strip club.”

  “The strip club where she worked. How did your sister—this sister whom you idolized—wind up working at a
strip club?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time, and that’s what I’m here for.” I smiled.

  She told me that her sister had fought with their parents about everything, the way teenagers do—clothes, makeup, friends, and, most of all, boys. At some point, things had escalated from normal teenage trauma with her parents to all-out war. Emily ran away from home a few times but came back. Then she left for good. She found a place to live and struggled to make it on her own. She worked for a while as a clerk in a grocery store, then as a waitress at a coffee shop, and finally—because she was such a beautiful girl—she got the job at the strip club.

  “‘It’s just for a little while, Laura.’ That’s what she told me,” her sister said. “ ‘Until I figure out what I want to do with my life. The pay is better than bagging groceries or waiting on tables, and it’s really not that bad. Most of the men are actually very nice.’”

  “And that’s where she met Oswald?” I asked.

  Laura Springer nodded.

  “She told you about the affair with Oswald? Is it possible she just made it up for some reason after the assassination?”

  “Oh, I met him. Before that day in Dallas. She couldn’t come back to our house because of the fight with our parents. So I would meet her places. A couple of times Oswald was with her. She introduced me to him. And then, of course, I recognized him after I saw his picture on television after President Kennedy was shot.”

  “What was Oswald like?”

  “I didn’t like him. I know it’s easy to say that now, but I really felt that way at the time. He was very volatile, very moody, very preoccupied—he seemed angry a lot. He talked politics all the time. Going on about communism and living in Russia and Castro in Cuba and a lot of other things I didn’t really understand then. He thought a lot of himself. He acted like he was destined for some kind of greatness, even though he was just struggling along in a low-level job. Plus, of course, there was the fact that he was married with a family. He even had another baby on the way with his wife, Marina. I thought he was all wrong for my sister. I told her that. But she didn’t listen to me.”

  “So he was with Marina at the same time he was dating your sister?”

  “That’s right. He grew up in New Orleans, you know. Then, that spring before the JFK assassination, he and Marina and their baby daughter moved back here. Marina was pregnant with their second child. That’s when he started going to the strip club and met my sister. They saw each other throughout that summer until Oswald’s wife was about to give birth to the second child, and then they moved back to Dallas.”

  “Did Oswald know Emily was pregnant with his baby?”

  “She told him. I think that might be why he moved back to Dallas. I always wondered if Marina might have found out and made him go back to Dallas to keep him away from Emily.”

  I shook my head sadly. If it were all true, and I had no reason to disbelieve anything this woman was telling me, history could have been changed by this encounter between her sister and Oswald in the strip club. If they hadn’t met, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with his child, if Oswald hadn’t gone back to Dallas before the president arrived . . . so many ifs.

  She said that she and her sister had watched the events in Dallas unfold together with shock and disbelief. When Oswald’s face came on the screen as the assassin—when he was fatally shot by Jack Ruby—Emily cried. She was several months pregnant at that time. She could have aborted the child, but abortion was much more difficult for a woman in the South in those days. For whatever reason, she decided to go ahead and have the baby. No one else but her sister knew who the baby’s father was at that point. But Emily did put it on the birth certificate, for some reason.

  “I think she wanted someone to know that the baby had a father,” Laura Springer said. “No matter who that father was. Every baby has a right to have a father.”

  I had been taking notes prolifically during the interview with her. I stopped for a second now and looked over at the picture of Emily Springer, holding the son of Lee Harvey Oswald in her arms.

  “So what happened to the baby?” I asked. “How did he wind up being adopted?”

  “Emmy died about six months later after Lee was killed. My parents didn’t want to raise him, and I was too young. So they arranged for the adoption with Mr. Crenshaw.”

  “Tell me about your sister’s death.”

  “She jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge and drowned. Not far from here. Committed suicide. At least, that’s what the official report said.”

  “It sounds like you don’t necessarily believe that.”

  “After the assassination and Oswald’s death, Emmy told me she thought people were following her. Spying on her. Watching her. I told her she was just being paranoid, but she began to believe it more and more. She told me she thought she was in danger, but she wasn’t sure from whom. And then suddenly she was dead. Suicide, the authorities said. Pretty convenient if someone really wanted her dead, I say.”

  “You don’t think your sister killed herself?”

  “Emmy never seemed suicidal to me. Just scared.”

  “Did you tell the authorities your sister thought she was in danger from someone?”

  “Yes, but they didn’t take it seriously. They said it was just an example of the delusional state she was in, which led her to take her own life. I wasn’t sure myself at the time. But later, when I heard about all the mysterious deaths of people connected to the assassination in some way . . .”

  “And you never told anyone else about any of this until now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “At some point, I guess I decided there was nothing to be gained by talking about it. No one seemed to care about Emmy. Why would they care what I had to say? Maybe I was a bit afraid too. Afraid that I might wind up dead like her. So I just pretty much pretended it never happened. I went on with my life, got married, raised my family—all in the same house where Emmy and I were raised. My parents are long dead, of course. My husband too; he had a heart attack about ten years ago. My three children are grown up and on their own. I’m all alone in this house now. But it’s been a good life. I just wish Emmy could have enjoyed a life like I have, instead of it ending so quickly.”

  She looked over at the picture of her long-dead sister again.

  “I just tried to pretend it all never happened,” she muttered, more to the picture than to me.

  “Until Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.—your sister’s child—contacted you?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “And you told him everything?”

  “Everything I know.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought he had a right to know. And I guess I thought someone else should know. Finally talking about it with him has had an interesting effect on me. I’m not afraid anymore. I thought it was time to tell the story. To him. And now, I guess, to you too.”

  “And Eric Mathis?”

  “Yes, he was here too.”

  “When?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was Emily’s grandson. He said he wanted to know the truth about her and about Lee and about how his father came into this world. And so I told him. He got very upset. Very angry. He stormed out of here, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

  Chapter 25

  WE NEED TO talk about Eric,” I said to Lee Mathis, who now called himself Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.

  “What does my son have to do with this?”

  We were sitting in the living room of his Washington Heights apartment again. I’d called him on my way back from Dallas and set up the new interview. I took a cab directly to his place after my plane landed. Didn’t go back to my apartment or to the office. I wanted to get to him as soon as possible. />
  “You told Eric you had changed your name to Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. and that you were writing a book about being his secret son and all the rest of it approximately a year ago, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same time as Eric moved to Dallas and went to work at the JFK museum in Dealey Plaza?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then a few weeks ago you sent him a copy of the manuscript?”

  He nodded.

  “What was his reaction?”

  “He was very . . . well, very upset.”

  “And you haven’t heard from him since.”

  “No. He won’t answer any of my phone calls or email messages. What’s wrong, Mr. Malloy? Why are you asking me all of these questions about Eric? Has something happened to him?”

  I’d gone over and over it all again in my head on the trip back from Dallas. There was only one logical scenario. Eric had become obsessed with the JFK assassination after he learned his father had changed his name to embrace his own biological father, who he now believed was innocent and not the horrendous villain he’d been made out to be. Then, when Eric had read his father’s book, he disappeared from his job and began some kind of journey to find out the truth for himself. Did that journey take him to New York City? And was he now out there in this city somewhere killing people as part of his own vendetta to avenge the injustices he believed had been done to the man he now knew was his own grandfather?

  I told it all to Oswald now. Everything I’d found out in Dallas. And the trip to the adoption lawyer in New Orleans and then to his biological mother’s sister. The same sister he had talked to who provided Lee Harvey Oswald with an alibi for that day in Dallas. By the time I had finished, I could see the anguish in his face. Maybe he had suspected his son was involved somehow. Feared it as the evidence piled up. But he’d probably told himself it couldn’t be true, had tried to blot the possibility from his mind that his son could be responsible for what was happening. But it was out there now, and he couldn’t ignore it anymore.