But not everybody was quick to applaud. The FBI had kept an eye on Al-Amin, amassing a 40,000-page file on him. Local cops secretly suspected him of murder, gunrunning, and at least one assault.
On March 16, 2000, a Fulton County sheriff’s deputy was killed and another wounded in a shootout in the West End while trying to serve Al-Amin a warrant for an unpaid speeding ticket. He fled briefly before he was arrested. In 2002, he was convicted of first-degree murder and twelve other counts, and sentenced to life in state prison without the possibility of parole.
Georgia handed over the troublesome high-profile killer to federal authorities. Today he is in his seventies, incarcerated in the ADX Florence Supermax federal prison on the plains of Colorado with terrorists, cartel kingpins, mob hit men, and serial killers such as al Qaeda’s Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols.
H. Rap Brown might have changed his spots, but deep down, he remained the sociopath who spawned a wave of domestic terror that has reverberated over more than forty years.
And I can’t help but think that Ralph Featherstone and William Payne, among others, died for his sins.
‹ FIVE ›
Digging Up Lee Harvey Oswald
It’s possible that we love our conspiracy theories because they almost always explain tragedy as an intentional act of people who are smarter and more powerful than we are. It’s perversely reassuring somehow. Whether it’s black helicopters, the Illuminati, Roswell, the moon landing, the collapse of the World Trade Center, or the assassination of President Kennedy, we simply don’t want to believe we’re wrong or unlucky, that Fate sometimes works against us, or that lone, deluded, lunatic punks can change the course of human history.
DALLAS, TEXAS. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1963.
Ninety minutes after the world watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin lay dead on a bloody operating table at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, mere steps from the room where President Kennedy was pronounced dead two days before (and in the same surgical room where Ruby himself would die a little more than three years later).
Ruby’s .38-caliber bullet had entered Oswald’s lower chest just below his left nipple and lodged in a noticeable lump under the skin on the right side of his back. It pierced nearly every major organ and blood vessel in his abdominal cavity—stomach, spleen, liver, aorta, diaphragm, renal vein, a kidney, and the inferior vena cava, a major vein that carries deoxygenated blood from the lower extremities back to the heart. Oswald bled out very quickly through a dozen or more holes. Trauma surgeons poured fifteen pints of blood into him and manually squeezed his faltering heart to revive it, but it simply stopped for good at 1:07 p.m. local time.
Oswald arrived for his autopsy already a chopped-up mess. The suspected assassin had endured a brutal two days since the president was shot. His left eye was bruised and his lip split while resisting arrest. His guts had been mortally shredded by a bullet fired point-blank into his chest. Emergency surgeons had tried to save him through a gaping, foot-long slit in his belly and another long slice near the entrance wound.
Dallas County medical examiner Earl Rose started his autopsy less than two hours after Oswald was pronounced dead. He was already cool to the touch. Blood, no longer being pumped by his dead heart, was pooling naturally in the corpse’s hollows. Aside from the wounds of the past two days, Rose’s external examination found nothing remarkable: The average-sized, wavy-haired, slightly balding man on Rose’s slab had slate-blue eyes, decent oral hygiene, a few old scars, no sign of alcohol or drug abuse, a shaved chest and pubic area, and was in otherwise good physical shape, if you didn’t count being dead.
Rose sawed open Oswald’s skull to find a completely normal brain. Apart from his tattered innards and a heart roughly handled by his would-be lifesavers, Oswald’s other vital organs appeared normal. Even his bowels went miraculously untouched by the bullet. So Rose sealed all of his severed parts in a beige plastic bag the size of a grocery sack, and tucked it in Oswald’s abdominal cavity before sending him off to be prepared for a hurried burial the next day.
The autopsy had taken less than an hour.
At Miller’s Funeral Home in Fort Worth, undertaker Paul Groody couldn’t waste any time. On a hunch that Oswald would someday be exhumed, he pumped a double dose of embalming fluid into the body and dressed him off the funeral home’s private rack: white boxers patterned with little green diamonds, dark socks, light shirt, thin black tie, and a cheap, dark brown suit whose trousers were cinched around the waist not by a belt but by an elastic band. Keeping with a typical custom, the corpse wore no shoes. The family was charged $48 for the going-away outfit.
Oswald’s hair was washed and combed, his visible bruises were concealed with makeup, and his eyes and lips sealed for eternity.
Then Groody placed two rings on Oswald’s fingers. One was a gold wedding band and the other a smaller ring with a red gemstone.
The body, looking presentable again, was laid in a $300 pine casket with a curved lid. Several photos were taken, a grave was reserved, $25 worth of flowers ordered, and Groody’s clerk typed up a $710 invoice, due within ten days.
The assassin’s burial—deliberately scheduled the next day around the same moment as the president’s nationally televised funeral and the somber services for Officer J. D. Tippit to discourage any public mourning—were attended only by Oswald’s small, destitute, shell-shocked family, a handful of reporters, and a local pastor who didn’t know Oswald but believed no man should be buried without a prayer. Since nobody else came, six reporters were drafted as spur-of-the-moment pallbearers to lug his cheap pine casket to a mangy little rise at Rose Hill.
The Reverend Louis Saunders’s eulogy had been painfully brief, partly because two other ministers had refused at the last minute out of fear they themselves would be assassinated by a sniper. He recited passages from the Twenty-third Psalm and John 14, then added only:
“Mrs. Oswald tells me that her son, Lee Harvey, was a good boy and that she loved him. We are not here to judge, only to commit for burial Lee Harvey Oswald. And today, Lord, we commit his spirit to Your divine care.”
His widow Marina, her eyes red and swollen from crying for three straight days, stepped up to the sealed coffin and whispered something nobody could hear before it was lowered into the damp hole. Everyone left and the grave was filled in for eternity.
But eternity is for poets. Conspiracy theorists aren’t that patient.
* * *
Michael Eddowes wasn’t a Fleet Street tabloid scribbler or a paranoid witch-hunter. Instead, he was a distinguished, educated gentleman who’d played tennis at Wimbledon and cricket in Britain’s minor leagues. He graduated from the venerable Uppingham School but abandoned his dream of attending Oxford in order to help at his ailing father’s London law firm, where he became a full-fledged lawyer himself. When he sold the firm in 1956, he opened a chain of popular upscale restaurants and dabbled in sports car design.
A Renaissance man of sorts, Eddowes was also fascinated with injustice. In 1955, he wrote a book, The Man on Your Conscience, which explored the case of a Welsh laborer named Timothy Evans, who’d been hanged in 1950 for murdering his wife and infant child. He proved how prosecutors had hidden evidence in the deeply flawed case. Eddowes claimed Evans could not have been the killer … and he was right. A serial killer who lived downstairs in the same building later confessed. Eddowes’s reporting was credited with helping to abolish England’s death penalty ten years later.
Eddowes was sixty years old when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in America in 1963. He eventually moved to Dallas to be closer to the story, and he was intrigued by the rumors he heard about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union after he left the Marines in 1959.
In 1975, he self-published Khrushchev Killed Kennedy, in which he alleged that a “look-alike” Soviet agent had killed Kennedy, not Oswald. Eddowes believed the KGB’s Department 13—its sab
otage and assassination squad—had trained a body double named Alec to assume Oswald’s identity. This agent (not Oswald, Eddowes says) met the young Marina Prusakova at a dance in Minsk, married her six weeks later, and returned to America in 1962 with his wife and infant daughter. He was such a dead ringer for Oswald, “Alec” was able to fool Oswald’s own mother.
His mission: Blend in, wait for the right moment, kill the president, and die in the chaos that followed.
Evidence of the switch? Eddowes lists several specific “inconsistencies” between Oswald’s Marine Corps medical records and his autopsy report.
Eddowes wasn’t alone in his suspicions. As odd as it sounds, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself and other government officials feared in 1960 the Russians might try to replace the defector Oswald with a deadly impostor.
In 1976, Eddowes published another book, Nov. 22: How They Killed Kennedy, in England (later titled The Oswald File when it was released in the United States). His timing was perfect: The new House Select Committee on Assassinations had rekindled American interest in JFK’s murder.
Eddowes doubled down. He proposed that Oswald’s body be exhumed to prove that the man buried in Fort Worth’s Rose Hill Cemetery was not Oswald but his doppelgänger Soviet substitute, Alec.
Eddowes’s quest began with Dr. Feliks Gwozdz, then medical examiner for Tarrant County, Texas, where Oswald was buried. When Dr. Gwozdz refused to dig up Oswald, Eddowes filed a lawsuit to force the exhumation, but it was dismissed quickly.
While he appealed the ruling, Eddowes approached Dr. Linda Norton, then an assistant medical examiner in Dallas, suggesting that the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office reassert its original jurisdiction over Oswald’s body.
Norton was intrigued. After consulting with her boss, Dr. Charles Petty, Dallas County’s Chief Medical Examiner, she ordered a copy of Oswald’s medical and dental records from the Military Personnel Records Center. They’d ultimately be crucial for any identification because they were dated before Oswald’s defection to the USSR and thus contained authentic identity data of the “real” Lee Harvey Oswald.
“I feel it would be in the best public interest to conduct the exhumation,” Dr. Norton told the Dallas Morning News. “If there’s a question and a reasonable question that science can resolve, then that’s our business.”
In October 1979, Dr. Petty formally requested that his Fort Worth forensic colleagues exhume Oswald and bring him to Dallas for an examination. They balked. The Tarrant County medical examiner wanted the approval of his district attorney and widow Marina Oswald before he dug up the assassin.
While the two MEs quarreled into 1980, opponents were gathering. Indignant newspapers editorialized. The forensic community grumbled. And G. Robert Blakey, the former chief counsel to the recently disbanded House Select Committee on Assassinations, slammed Eddowes’s theory.
“I have read his book and it is trash,” Blakey said. “This whole question is a non-question. The committee carefully looked into the so-called two Oswalds theory … there is nothing to it.”
And Earl Rose, the Dallas ME who had done Oswald’s original autopsy, told reporters he was certain that the “real” Oswald was buried in Rose Hill because he’d personally compared the fingerprints.
The whole mess seemed to dissipate when Tarrant County surrendered jurisdiction to the Dallas medical examiner in August 1980. But Dr. Petty shocked everyone when he shrugged it off, saying he saw no need to dig Oswald up.
Eddowes was undeterred. Promising to pay all expenses, he persuaded Marina Oswald—who suspected the grave was empty—to consent to a private autopsy by Dr. Petty. Marina was haunted by a 1964 visit with government agents who asked her to sign a stack of cemetery papers without explanation. With only a basic understanding of English, Marina came to believe that her late husband’s remains had been disturbed somehow. She’d grown morbidly suspicious that he’d been secretly removed.
But a new hurdle popped up. News of the impending exhumation prompted Oswald’s older brother Robert, a former Marine himself, to get a temporary restraining order.
The legal wrangling rattled the Dallas county commissioners. Fearing “adverse publicity,” they forbade the use of any county facility for the autopsy.
Even before the legal path was cleared for Oswald’s possible reemergence into the world, Dr. Norton was picked as the exhumation’s chief forensic pathologist because of her familiarity with the case, and she assembled a small team, including two of the country’s best forensic odontologists and me. She wanted to move quickly when the time came.
I had worked with Dr. Norton before. After my Army tour of duty ended in 1972, I joined the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office under Dr. Petty. Pleasant and reserved, Dr. Petty had quietly built up another of the best ME offices in the country. I started as a junior assistant medical examiner, but within a few years, I was the deputy chief. I worked there through most of the Oswald controversy until February 1981, when I became the Chief Medical Examiner for Bexar County, Texas, in San Antonio. So Dr. Norton knew me and trusted my abilities.
The courtroom battle over Oswald’s remains raged for a few months after I left Dallas, until August 1981, when a frustrated Marina sued her former brother-in-law Robert. A month later, a Texas court ruled Robert had no standing to thwart his brother’s exhumation against Marina’s wishes, and Robert withdrew his opposition.
At midnight on October 3, 1981, Robert’s restraining order expired.
Before the sun rose on October 4, we stood at the killer’s open grave. On that unseasonably muggy morning, we dug up Lee Harvey Oswald—or somebody—just to be sure America had buried the right man in 1963.
* * *
Ironically, almost nobody paid any attention when Oswald went into the ground, and now a crowd of reporters clustered outside the cemetery gates and a half-dozen news helicopters swarmed overhead like corpse flies as we lifted him out.
To be sure, there hadn’t been much doubt at the time. Oswald’s corpse had been fingerprinted in the mortuary, and authorities were convinced that the twenty-four-year-old ex-Marine who defected to the USSR from 1959 to 1962, the laborer who worked in the Texas School Book Depository, the shooter whose palm print had been found on the suspected murder rifle and boxes near the sniper’s perch, the feisty fugitive who had been arrested at the Texas Theatre, and the suspect mortally wounded by Jack Ruby were all the same man: Lee Harvey Oswald.
And almost eighteen years later, I wasn’t expecting any surprises either. Forensically, I’d always been ambivalent about JFK’s assassination. It was an uncomplicated gunshot case that had gotten tangled up in a thousand different agendas. As with so many historic and newsworthy cases before and since, people quickly came to believe what they wanted to believe, damn the facts. I had been initially reluctant to join this exhumation team, knowing that our findings would just be fed into the conspiracy meat grinder. Any questions we might answer would only spawn new questions.
Second autopsies like this are often a waste of time. Too often, they’re not prompted by new evidence, but by profit, curiosity, and urban legend. A second autopsy on President Kennedy might have definitively answered questions that went unanswered in his unskillful first, but digging up Oswald to satisfy a widow’s discomfort with media speculation made little medical or legal sense.
And it wasn’t rocket science. Any forensic pathologist—and maybe even a couple of backwoods coroners—could have done it. This promised to be a simple task I’d done thousands of times: identify a dead man. We had enough dental X-rays and other medical records from the US Marine Corps to help us prove, one way or another, if Lee Harvey Oswald was buried in Lee Harvey Oswald’s grave.1
But history sucked me in. The simplicity of the challenge was trumped by the significance of this dead killer’s role in human events. In the end, I couldn’t resist taking one last look at a man who changed the course of history—no matter who he might be.
* * *
&n
bsp; The actual exhumation took much longer than expected.
We had planned to simply lift the entire 2,700-pound, steel-reinforced vault out of the grave and open it elsewhere, but the vault—guaranteed to last forever, they said—had cracked, allowing water to seep in. The rotting casket inside had grown brittle and was splotched with stains and mildew. Its metal handles were badly corroded. Part of the lid over the cadaver’s upper body had already caved in and we glimpsed, at the very least, that Lee Harvey Oswald’s grave wasn’t empty.
So much for best-laid plans and eternal warranties. On the fly, gravediggers cut a trench parallel to the defective vault, which would be removed so they could carefully slide the delicate, crumbling casket onto a makeshift wooden platform in the trench. In all, an operation that should have taken less than an hour went on for almost three hours.
And in the meantime, a large crowd of reporters and curious bystanders had gathered all around us. The situation was getting crowded and a little chaotic. I was nervous. We had to get the casket out of there as quickly as possible and start our work securely.
So as soon as we could do it without spilling a corpse onto the lawn in front of a hundred hungry news cameras, Oswald’s crumbling casket was lifted out of the musty earth and slid into a waiting hearse. The exhumation team and official observers, including Marina Oswald, Michael Eddowes, a hired photographer, the original morticians, and four lawyers representing Marina, Eddowes, Oswald’s brother Robert, and Rose Hill Cemetery, convoyed to the examination site in private cars.
The press had started murmuring that the second autopsy would be done at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas. A logical conclusion, since Marina had publicly insisted that her late husband’s body not leave the Dallas–Fort Worth area, and DIFS—home of the Dallas City and County medical examiner and my former workplace—was a top-notch morgue and uniquely outfitted for this kind of work.
Morgue Page 12