Morgue (16 page)

“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 sabotage 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.

*   *   *

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.

But unknown to the public, the Dallas county commissioners had refused to host Oswald's second autopsy at the institute. We had to hunt for a new autopsy space in the metropolitan area, and we had few options.

Above all, we needed a highly secure facility. Marina dreaded the possibility that gruesome unauthorized morgue photos of her late husband would leak out, as they had after his 1963 autopsy. We had to be able to control who got in and what they could do.

Luckily, Baylor University Medical Center's autopsy suite in Dallas fit our bill. It had the layout and all the equipment we'd need. More important, it had only one door in. At one point, some two dozen people—most of them merely observers—would squeeze into the tiny lab.

So when our grim cortege exited Rose Hill Cemetery's gates, a hearse sped east toward Dallas. It was a decoy, and it worked. The media throng raced twenty miles ahead to the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences to be there waiting when we arrived—while we diverted with a second, secret hearse to Baylor Hospital virtually unnoticed.

Inside, the cardboard-covered casket was rolled on a gurney through a warren of basement corridors and narrow hallways to our makeshift morgue. Orderlies wheeled it to the far end of the cramped lab, where we had already prepared for the autopsy. If all went as planned, it wouldn't take long to confirm whether we had dug up Lee Harvey Oswald or someone else.

All we needed was his head.

*   *   *

I've always hated the stink of decomposing bodies. This may be a professional flaw or just a natural human reaction, but I never got so accustomed to it that I didn't notice. Fortunately, a severely deviated septum dulled my sense of smell for most of my career. Some maladies are lucky.