Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Marguerite began to suspect Ekdahl of infidelity and was also distressed by Ekdahl’s closeness with money. Even though they stayed in good hotels when they traveled and lived lavishly because of his expense account, he gave her only a hundred dollars a month for household expenses and demanded a strict accounting of it. She continued to use her own dwindling supply of money for the boys’ expenses at the military school.71

  In early February of 1946, Lee was admitted to Harris Hospital in Fort Worth with “acute mastoiditis” on the left side, which was successfully treated by a mastoidectomy (the removal of part of the mastoid bone, behind the ear, to drain the infection). He left the hospital in four days.72

  After the spring semester in 1946, arrangements had been made for Robert and John to remain at Chamberlain-Hunt to attend the summer session. They didn’t much mind, as they liked the school, and they were enjoying the two-or three-week hiatus before the summer session was to start when Marguerite showed up with Lee and told them she and Ekdahl had separated. Instead of having them attend school, she took them to Covington, Louisiana, for the rest of the summer. John thinks she may even have consulted Commandant Farrell, who was an attorney, about divorce proceedings. The four of them spent the rest of the summer in Covington, a pleasant resort town on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain (near New Orleans). Marguerite took a house on Vermont Street, where they seemed to be a “very happy family,” at least according to one observer, Marguerite’s friend Myrtle Evans. They went swimming, ate watermelon, and owned a couple of dogs, though she noticed that little Lee always preferred his own company. Myrtle admired the way Marguerite, never well-off, provided for her children, and she thought the boys were aware of how hard she worked to put them through school and give them what they needed.73

  In the fall, John and Robert returned to the military academy, but Marguerite and Lee stayed on. She enrolled him in Covington Elementary School, again in the first grade since, in spite of his good record at Benbrook of all As and Bs, he hadn’t completed his first year.74 Mother and son attended the only Lutheran church in Covington, and six-year-old Lee distinguished himself by singing a solo “Silent Night” in church during the Christmas season.75 Lee did well during the four-month period he attended Covington Elementary School, receiving Bs, including one in “conduct.”76 But his mother and Ekdahl reconciled, and on January 23, 1947, Lee was withdrawn from Covington Elementary School77 and Marguerite and Lee moved back to Fort Worth to an upstairs apartment at 1505 Eighth Avenue that Ekdahl had been renting.78

  Four days later, Lee was enrolled in Clayton Elementary School in Fort Worth. This was already his third school and he was still in the first grade, which he finally completed that May, although he seems to have done well enough, with Bs in every subject except physical education and health, in which he earned As.79

  Whatever Marguerite hoped for from the new start, the reconciliation did not last long. She was convinced that Ekdahl was leading a double life. A day or two after she and Lee had moved into the upstairs flat on Eighth Avenue, she went downstairs to hang clothes out in the yard. There she met a neighbor to whom she introduced herself as Mrs. Ekdahl. The woman’s expression betrayed her astonishment and aroused Marguerite’s suspicion. Later the woman told her that until recently there had been another woman living in the apartment with Ekdahl, a woman whom she had thought was the engineer’s wife.80

  By the time the boys returned from the military academy at the beginning of summer, the ill feelings between Ekdahl and Marguerite could no longer be hidden—they fought every other day and frequently separated. There’s no doubt the turmoil in the household had its effect on Lee. Fifteen-year-old John came home from his summer job as assistant manager of the Tex-Gold Ice Cream Parlor shortly after ten one night and found his stepfather and mother in Ekdahl’s car, on their way to spend the night at a downtown hotel—yet another reconciliation period. When John passed the word on to his seven-year-old brother, Lee was clearly delighted. Robert thought that Lee wanted more than anything else for his parents to make up their differences and get back together.81

  The reprieve was temporary at best. One day toward the end of that summer of 1947 Marguerite got a telegram from Ekdahl saying he would not be home from his business trip for several more days. So she rang his secretary at the company office in Fort Worth to pass the news along, but before she could do so, the secretary told her that Ekdahl was not in, that he was out to lunch. That afternoon she drove to his office, watched him leave the building, and followed him to another apartment house, that of a married woman named Mrs. Clary. Marguerite went home and consulted a neighbor who was an attorney, John McClain. He suggested she call Mrs. Clary and let her know she knew her husband was there, but Marguerite realized her husband could say he was just there on business. She wanted to trap her husband.

  By this time John had come home from his job and was there with several friends—Sammy, two years older than himself, and Sammy’s friends, a young married couple named Marvin and Goldie. All four of them and Marguerite piled into Marvin’s car and drove over to Mrs. Clary’s, where Sammy went to the door pretending to deliver a telegram. Mrs. Clary told him to push it under the door, but Sammy told her she had to sign for it. As Mrs. Clary, in a negligee, answered the door, Marguerite pushed inside and surprised her husband, who was seated, in his shirt sleeves—in his “athletic shirt,” according to Marguerite’s sister Lillian—in the living room. “Marguerite, Marguerite,” he protested, “you have everything wrong, you have everything wrong. Listen to me.”

  “I don’t want to hear one thing,” she snapped. “I have seen everything I want to see. This is it.”82

  According to her sister Lillian, who recalled only what Marguerite had told her, Marguerite consulted her pastor about getting a divorce, but he warned against it because of Ekdahl’s heart problem. Ekdahl was in the hospital shortly thereafter, and when Marguerite went to visit him, Lillian thought “they had a roar-up right there at the hospital.”83 The marriage nonetheless dragged on several more months. The older boys returned to Chamberlain-Hunt in the fall, and Lee went back to Clayton Elementary, where he started second grade.84 Philip Vinson, a classmate at Clayton, recalled Lee at that time as a “quiet type of kid” who “didn’t make a lot of noise” but was nonetheless a leader of one of the small gangs among the fifteen or so boys in the second grade. Lee was a year older than most of the boys and was sturdily built and husky, which made other boys look up to him. Though he was “a tough guy type,” he was not a bully. Vinson had the impression that Lee rarely played with his friends or brought them home after school.85

  When Lee’s older brothers came home for the Christmas holidays, Ekdahl was nowhere in evidence, and on January 10, 1948, Marguerite ordered Ekdahl out of their home for good.86

  Evidently somewhat to Marguerite’s surprise, Ekdahl was the one who started divorce proceedings against her on March 23, 1948.87 “I thought I was sitting pretty,” she would later say. “He didn’t have anything on me. I had him for adultery with witnesses and everything and I didn’t have any idea that he could sue me for a divorce, but Mr. Ekdahl did.”88 He also made plenty of charges in his complaint, alleging that shortly after February 1, 1947—less than two years after the marriage—Marguerite “commenced a course of harsh and cruel treatment…which has continued with very slight interruptions until the date of the filing of this petition.” She nagged him about money, accused him of infidelity, threw a bottle at him, scratched him on the arm, had outbursts of uncontrollable temper, and on one occasion threw a glass at him accurately enough that he moved to avoid it but it still hit him, causing partial paralysis of his right arm. This “ill treatment” took place “with the full knowledge of plaintiff’s condition”—severe heart disease. The petition added “that a continuation…of the marital relationship would result in a serious impairment of plaintiff’s health.”89

  Marguerite, not surprisingly, denied all of these allegations and asked for attorney’s fe
es.90 While the divorce was pending, Marguerite moved yet again, from Eighth Avenue to a house at 3300 Willing Street in Fort Worth, “right slap” next to the railroad tracks, which is where John and Robert came home in May for the summer. From the house they could hear the sound of trains throughout the day and night. What had happened to the family was clear, at least to John, who noted that they “were back down in the lower class again.” He had a feeling that Robert and he would not be going back to Chamberlain-Hunt.91 Lee had withdrawn from the Clayton school in mid-March of 1948 and started in the George C. Clark Elementary School shortly afterward. Although he spent only two and a half months at Clark, he did complete the second grade with a record of mostly Bs and As.92

  In early June, both John and Lee went downtown to testify in the divorce proceeding, which Marguerite contested in the hope of getting financial support from Ekdahl, but eight-year-old Lee told the court he wouldn’t know the truth from a falsehood and he was excused from testifying.93 In any case, Marguerite lost and Ekdahl was granted a divorce. The jury found her “guilty of excesses, cruel treatment, or outrages toward the plaintiff” that had not been provoked by Ekdahl. Since there was no appeal, there was no transcript, but we can assume Marguerite presented evidence of Ekdahl’s infidelity. By the jury’s finding that Marguerite’s cruel treatment of Ekdahl was unprovoked, one can only assume the jury concluded that, as the expression “you’re driving me to drink” goes, Ekdahl had been driven into his infidelity. The court ratified a property agreement which gave Marguerite $1,500 in “full and final” settlement and whatever community property had been acquired during the marriage, mostly furnishings and clothing. The defendant also recovered her name, Marguerite C. Oswald, and was awarded $250 as reasonable attorney’s fees.94 The divorce became final on June 24, 1948.*

  Lee had lost not only the first father he had ever known, but also the last. To a degree, he also lost a full-time mother, since Marguerite, without Ekdahl’s support, had to return to work.95

  Shortly after the divorce became final, the Oswalds moved yet again, to a small L-shaped house in Benbrook, though not so far out in the country as the large Benbrook house Ekdahl had leased. Marguerite had bought the house a year earlier with a small downpayment and had leased it out for $50 a month.96 The house was the only one built on a street that didn’t even have a name, although it was later christened San Saba Street.* There was only one bedroom, where Lee slept in the same bed with his mother, and a screen porch, where John and Robert slept on studio couches.97 Marguerite got a job at Leonard Brothers Department Store in Fort Worth.98 A neighbor, Mrs. W. H. Bell, recalled the family’s brief sojourn in Benbrook. The talkative Marguerite constantly complained that she was very poor and that “society was against her,” that it was very hard for a widow to provide for her family. Lee, Bell observed, was a boy who liked to be alone and did not like discipline. Mrs. Bell thought his older brothers got along better with other children in the neighborhood than Lee did.99

  Another neighbor, Otis R. Carlton, had good reason to remember Marguerite and Lee. She asked him to come over one night in 1948 and estimate what she might get for her house if she sold it. He told her he was a schoolteacher, not a real estate agent, but when she insisted, he guessed she might get $2,750 for the house and lot.100 Carlton himself wound up buying the house from Marguerite for that amount, although the sale wasn’t completed until November 6, 1951, three years later.101 He later told the FBI that the night he went over, while talking with Marguerite in her living room, he saw Lee chase John through the kitchen door brandishing a long butcher knife. He threw the knife at John but missed, hitting the wall. Marguerite passed it off by saying, “They have these little scuffles all the time…Don’t worry about it.”102†

  Presumably renting out the San Saba house in Benbrook again before it was sold a few years later, Marguerite moved in the fall of 1948 into Fort Worth, buying a two-bedroom frame house at 7408 Ewing. It was a small step up in the world. The house was still small, but it did have two bedrooms, asbestos siding, a small porch on the front, and a garage, all on an average-sized lot, and it was within the city limits, not “out in the sticks,” as John put it.103 Lee could walk to his third-grade class at Arlington Heights Elementary School.104 John was not to be so lucky. Although Marguerite finally told John and Robert that they would not be returning to Chamberlain-Hunt in the fall, which they had wanted to do, sixteen-year-old John was at least looking forward to starting eleventh grade in Fort Worth. To his dismay, Marguerite ordered him out to work (though Robert, fourteen, returned to school, as did Lee, nine). His income, she said, would be needed to support the family. He got a twenty-five-dollar-a week job as a shoe stock boy at a downtown department store. His take-home pay came to about $22.50, out of which he handed over $15.00 to Marguerite. After bus fare, there wasn’t anything left for himself. For the first time he began to feel real hostility toward his mother, and he began to ignore her as much as he could. Though John had never been affectionate with Marguerite, from then on he felt no “motherly love feeling” at all toward her.105

  These early years had proved to be the best years of young Lee’s life, not only because he had gained a “father,” but because of the one brother he had and the other one (John) he had acquired. The age gap between them—five years with Robert and seven with John—naturally limited the relationship, but the older boys clearly cared for and looked after Lee, and he idolized them. But now it would become a much more lonely life for a child increasingly thrown upon his own resources.106

  For one thing, Marguerite and John would return home late from work, well after Lee got home from school.107 And although Robert, like Lee, was going to school, he had taken on a part-time job after school at a nearby grocery store to pitch in with family support, so he wasn’t home when Lee returned from school either.108 Marguerite worked at a variety of jobs during this period, but she always worked. At one time she apparently sold insurance, at others she worked in department stores—she became an assistant store manager for Lerner Shops. She seldom kept any employment longer than half a year.109

  Although Lee came home to an empty house every day, Marguerite instructed him to stay there. She thought it safer for him to be in the house doing minor chores like taking out the garbage or playing with his dog Blackie than to be out playing with other children—she felt he could not get in much trouble alone in the house.110 There were few children his age in the neighborhood anyway—most were closer in age to John and Robert.111 But Lee did not seem to mind the solitude at home.112 And despite his nomadic existence, his schoolwork did not suffer. He completed third grade with As in social studies, arithmetic, music, and physical education; Bs in citizenship, handwriting, English, and art; and a D in spelling113—no doubt an indication of his struggle with dyslexia, a learning disability that had not yet been identified in America, much less treated at the time. In September of 1949 he transferred to the newly built Ridgelea West Elementary School, where he continued to perform satisfactorily over the next three years with mostly Bs in the fourth and fifth grades, Bs and Cs in the sixth. Dyslexia may again account for the Ds he got in fifth-and sixth-grade spelling and arithmetic. On achievement tests in each of the three years at Ridgelea (the longest he had ever been at one school), he twice did his best in reading, twice his worst in spelling. He got Cs in Spanish in the fourth and sixth grades, which may account in part for his rudimentary acquaintance with that language as an adult.114 He scored 103 on a fourth-grade IQ test.115

  Mrs. Clyde Livingston, a sympathetic teacher who had Lee in her homeroom in the fourth grade, recalled that the boy, quiet and shy, took a long time to make friends with other students. She took extra pains to coach him in spelling and worried about the fact that he was left at home so much. “Lee left an empty home in the morning, went home to an empty home for lunch, and returned to an empty home [after school],” she told Life magazine. When she asked him if his mother would leave a lunch for him, he told her, “No, but I
can open a can of soup as well as anyone.” He responded to her warmth and solicitude by presenting her with a puppy at Christmas of 1949. She sensed that his visiting the puppy became a pretext for further visits with her.116

  One Ewing Street neighbor, a tool inspector at General Dynamics named Hiram Conway, who had a daughter about the age of John and Robert, took a liking to John and taught him to play chess. His friendship with John lasted for many years—John never came through Fort Worth without stopping to call on him. He nonetheless formed a highly negative impression of Lee, saying that Lee was “a bad kid” and “just ornery…vicious almost…is the best word I can describe it,” and “quick to anger.” He said Lee would walk up and down the street looking for other kids to throw stones at. He recalled Lee trying to fight with John and Robert too, trying to kick their shins while they fended him off. He also thought Lee was bright, but overall “very strange.” His chess students told him that Lee had picked up the game from them and had occasionally beaten them, but also that he got angry when he lost.117

  Lee filled a lot of his lonely hours with reading, an odd pastime for a child troubled by dyslexia. He liked comic books, but he read books as well, some of them, his mother thought, beyond his depth. Before they got television, he listened to the radio a great deal, particularly the news, which he would break off reading for. “He was always reading,” John would later recall. Lee particularly liked animals, about which he read a good deal, and maps, which held a particular fascination for him.118 Years later his Aunt Lillian noted that “he always carried a map with him to find directions. If he wanted to go to a certain place, he would never ask you how to get there. He would always take this map and mark the route out himself.”119 Taking a cue from John and Robert, he started his own stamp collection, and played chess and Monopoly with his brothers when they had the time. And he’d love to climb up on the roof of their house so he could get closer to the stars, the heavens fascinating him, and Marguerite would have to fetch the older boys to get him down. John thought Lee was a “normal, healthy, robust boy who would get in fights and still have his serious moments.”120