Free Republic

A Fort Worth funeral home is being forced to return a coffin that held the body of Lee Harvey Oswald to his brother after attempting to sell it for $87,468, according to news reports. By concealing the coffin’s existence from Oswald’s family members and later offering it for sale, Allen S. Baumgardner Sr., the owner of Baumgardner Funeral Home, engaged “wrongful and wanton and malicious conduct” Judge Donald J. Cosby of the District Court in Fort Worth ruled, according to the New York Times. Oswald was originally buried in the pine bluff casket after killing President John F. Kennedy on...

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...