"Thank you Dallas, good night!
Posted on 12/12/2014 3:38:32 PM PST by Theoria
Hours after his younger brother Lee Harvey Oswald, the presidential assassin, was gunned down in the basement of the Dallas police station, Robert Oswald wrote a $710 cashier’s check to a Fort Worth funeral home as he made arrangements for his brother’s burial.
The purchase included a No. 31 Pine Bluff coffin and vault, a dark suit and flowers. More than five decades later, the simple pine coffin — now badly deteriorating — is at the heart of an unlikely epilogue to the drama that gripped the nation on Nov. 22, 1963.
Three days after he assassinated President Kennedy from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, and a day after he himself was shot and killed by the nightclub owner Jack Ruby, Mr. Oswald was laid to rest in a Fort Worth cemetery in a service so poorly attended that reporters were used as pallbearers.
His body was exhumed in 1981 to dispel conspiracy theories, including assertions that the occupant of the coffin may have been a Soviet impostor. Mr. Oswald, his identity confirmed by medical tests, was reburied in a new coffin, and the original was stored for years in Baumgardner Funeral Home in Fort Worth.
Now, a little more than a year since the nation observed the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, the latest chapter in the tale of Mr. Oswald’s original coffin is playing out in a Fort Worth court.
After learning that Baumgardner Funeral Home sold the coffin through a Los Angeles auction house for $87,468, Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother filed suit to block the sale, contending that marketing the crumbling coffin was “ghoulish” and had no historical value.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If the burial plots were purchased and paid for, and the coffin was also, the real property has not been abandoned.
He should have had the immediate next of kin sign off to allow him to dispose of the coffin as (he) the Funeral Director saw fit.
I was in the Funeral business for 30 years.
Sounds like the funeral home sold Mr. Oswald’s property illegally.
Paging Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Oh, wait...
$710 in 1963 sounds pretty steep.
Looking forward to it.
However, Oswald had a wife. She would be next of kin I would suppose.
I would consider the coffin a "gift" to the family.
Any profit should go to next of kin, i.e., his wife.
Bull hockey; the kill shots came from the grassy knoll, the grassy knoll I tell ya </tinfoil hat>
I take it the original coffin was deteriorating so badly because many people were peeing on his grave?
Correction: No funeral director would cannibalize his profits fro the sale of overpriced coffins by offering a slightly used one. I think the Oswald family abandoned they property and made no effort to recover it. I figure, though the funeral home will settle this out of court and give a substantial share of the windfall to the Oswalds and their attorney.
"Thank you Dallas, good night!
I would think that in the state regulated funeral and burial business there would be plenty of existing law which establishes chain of custody before and after burial of the remains and "associated stuff" put in the grave.
"Sold my coffin? I'm dead! Do I Look Like I Care?"
What idiot would invest high dollars into a decaying coffin? But fools and their money easily separated. Mr. Oswald should demand some money IMO.
Here is the proof:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6naJ08Tskk
If a disposition of the items resulting from a court ordered exhumation of the grave was needed by any party to the plot purchased, legal notice requiring a response would be required.
Since Michael Jackson's departure from the auctions for lunatics circuit, I would say you raise a fair question? There is another creepy dude out there somewhere?
All the assassins throughout history have been male models.
Why would anyone want to own anything so ghoulish?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
