Lee Harvey Oswald and me: A strange obsession of a lifetime

In the room where Lee Harvey Oswald slept, I tried to commune with his spirit.
(CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

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Twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald lingers in the dark corners of my mind — tormenting me, mocking me, that damned smirk never fading.

As a teen in suburban Pittsburgh, I devoured everything about him and JFK’s assassination — Life, Time, Look, fringe newsletters and thick, dog-eared books from musty library shelves.

In 1975, I watched, horrified, as the Zapruder film played on American TV for the first time. Then I bought a bootleg copy of the film of Kennedy's murder to study it for myself. In our family basement, I watched, aghast, when Frame 313 — the gruesome head-shot impact frame — melted from the heat from the bulb of our ancient 8-millimeter projector. 

A Life magazine, a tattered assassination book
 and a bootleg copy of the Zapruder film
 — the stuff that occupied my time long ago.

Fueled by teenage righteousness, I called a local radio show to challenge U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter on his cherished Single-Bullet Theory. Inspired by that encounter, I ordered a Dallas phone book and began cold-calling assassination witnesses.

Peering through a deer rifle’s scope in the snowy western Pennsylvania woods, I imagined Oswald in his sniper’s nest. Even in my high school Russian class, "The Smirker" wandered through my daydreams. I studied the language, of course, because he had. To uncover the "truth" about "The Crime of the Century," I even pondered becoming a CIA agent. 

As a 25-year-old, I took a job in the sports department at The Dallas Morning News, in part, because of you-know-who. In Dallas, I often visited Dealey Plaza after deadline and the downtown bars had closed. 

Full of beer and bluster, I stood behind the infamous picket fence on the grassy knoll and then on the Elm Street "X" — the spot where a president died and time stood still. While Oliver Stone filmed the motorcade scene in Dealey Plaza for his awful JFK, I watched from the sixth floor of the old Texas School Book Depository, near the sniper's nest. 

The Smirker's nest.

A historical marker at 10th and Patton streets
 near where Lee Harvey Oswald murdered
police officer J.D. Tippit.

Upon meeting Marina, my tormentor’s Russian-born wife, I handed the sixty-something woman photos of her family from 1963 — gifts from a veteran photographer at my newspaper. While courting Carol, my future wife, I introduced her to an assassination conference — a strange world of oddballs, weirdos, obsessives and academics that had long captivated me.

Years later, our 9-year-old daughter in tow, I attended  another such gathering. When I told a conspiracy author he was the main reason I’d come, he barked, “No shit!” I laughed nervously, wondering what exactly I had become.

Near the infamous grassy knoll, I met Jean Hill, the “Lady in Red” and one of the most outspoken witnesses to the assassination. Her autograph on a tattered card remained in my wallet for years. And in Dallas’ West End, I met a man so consumed by the case he became a postman in Oak Cliff — the neighborhood where my tormentor killed Officer J.D. Tippit — just to quiz witnesses as he delivered the mail. I understood him. His obsession, after all, was mine, too.

The 'morgue,' a visit to his grave and a new haunt

Holding left-wing literature and a rifle, Lee Harvey Oswald stands in the backyard
of his apartment on West Neely Street in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas;
 Right, the same site today.

In gritty Oak Cliff, I stood outside the grungy apartments where my tormentor once lived with Marina. With two other like-minded souls, I peered over a fence at the University Park mansion where he squeezed off a rifle shot at Edwin Walker, the loony former U.S. Army major general. (He barely missed.) The bleak corner of 10th and Patton, where he killed the Dallas cop, became an assassination destination, too. 

This "X" on Elm Street marks the approximate
location of JFK's limo when he received
 his fatal wound.

At The Dallas Morning News' "morgue," where the newspaper stored photos and other treasure, I examined images of his near-lifeless body on a stretcher after nightclub owner Jack Ruby had pumped a .38-caliber bullet from a Colt Cobra revolver into his gut in the basement of Dallas Police HQ. At The News, I even worked on the same area on the second floor where Ruby placed ads for his clubs the morning of the assassination. 

At Shannon Rose Hill Park in Fort Worth, I found myself before The Smirker’s gravestone. The Hispanic workers weren’t supposed to show me the way, yet with furtive hand signals, they led me through the quiet rows when no one was watching. Perhaps my tormentor still haunted their thoughts, too.

Recently, after years away, I returned: to the West Neely Street apartment where the backyard photos were taken; to the gas station where he ditched his jacket; to the Texas Theatre, where police finally caught him; and then to Dealey Plaza — forever grim, now invaded by tourists smiling for selfies on the “X.”

The gas station where Oswald tossed his
 jacket after killing Dallas cop J.D. Tippit
 at 10th and Patton.

Finally, I visited a new haunt: the Oak Cliff rooming house where The Smirker, estranged from Marina at the time, lived for six weeks before 11/22/63. For 30 bucks, Pat Hall — granddaughter of the house’s 1963 owner, Gladys Johnson — will guide you through its rooms, sharing stories that make the past feel uncannily alive. It’s her home now, but echoes of my tormentor's short, fateful stay seem to linger in the corners.

Oswald's rooming house at 1026 North Beckley

Pat Hall, granddaugther of the 1963 owner of the rooming house where Oswald lived
for six weeks in the fall of 1963. 

Red, white, and blue bunting hangs from the porch of the tired, 89-year-old brick house. In 1963, it had 18 rooms — six in the basement. Grandma Johnson rented to single men: 18 bucks a week for a large room, 12 for a medium, eight for the smallest. Oswald, a loner with little money, fit the place’s rhythms.

Inside the timeworn living room, a Silverstone television sits exactly where its twin once stood on that terrible day. Like something out of The Twilight Zone, it endlessly loops the news flashes of Nov. 22, 1963 — the same stunned voices, the same electric panic. Above it, stacks of assassination books — each signed — stand on a shelf. Original assassination-related newspapers rest on the coffee table, their edges torn by shameless souvenir hunters.

Behind me, family photos line the walls: Hall’s father, her brothers Hal and Mike, their faces frozen in the years before everything changed. A small table holds a framed copy of the president’s memorial certificate ... for the morbidly curious. On a stand near the back wall rests a phone that dates to 1963 — it was used by Oswald, Hall says.  

The Dallas rooming house where Oswald
 lived in the fall of 1963. 

Near the doorway, beneath a sign pointing to the rooming house’s Facebook page, visitors slip donations into a wooden box. Business ranges from a few visits a week to several per day; tour companies bring groups by and give Hall a cut. The extra income helps keep the house off life support. On the 50th anniversary in 2013, Hall says she led 42 tours in a single day. People come from everywhere — Australia, Russia, Africa, Europe. Hell, even California.

After some small talk, Hall and I sit on the living-room couch — the same one Oswald flopped onto in 1963. But as she talks about him, I find myself wincing.

“We knew him as a sweet, kind, compassionate man who loved children,” she says. They called him “Mr. Lee.” He’d registered under the pseudonym “O.H. Lee.”

In the front yard, “Mr. Lee” played with Hal, then 10, and Mike, 6. Both boys are gone now.

“Grandma didn’t want them playing in the driveway,” Hall recalls with a chuckle. “She was afraid they’d break a window. But the front yard was fine — they’d roll the ball into the street.”

A copy of the president's
 "memorial certificate." 

On the day of the assassination, Hall — then 11 — was at James Bowie Elementary. Teachers wheeled a TV into the hallway to watch coverage of the president’s visit. After the shooting, the school fell silent. Then the principal’s voice cracked over the loudspeaker as he announced Kennedy’s death.

Blocks away, Hall's mother, Fay Puckett, owned a photography studio across from the Texas Theatre. She watched the arrest of Oswald — the gentle man who played with her sons — and rushed home, horrified. She unplugged the TV, refusing to turn it back on until Sunday morning.

That morning, Hall, Hal, and Mike watched in shock as Mob-connected  Ruby killed “Mr. Lee” on live television.

“That’s Mr. Lee!” they cried. “Why did they shoot Mr. Lee?!”

“My brothers went crazy,” Hall says softly.

The Room

Oswald lived in this room, no bigger than a large walk-in closet.

"Can I see 'The Room'?" I ask politely, interrupting another of Hall's stories.

Steps from the living room, there it is, his room, no bigger than a large walk-in closet. It was Grandma Johnson's favorite — she put plants in here, Hall says. After the assassination, "Mr. Lee" returned to this tiny space to grab his jacket and revolver. Decades ago, law enforcement tore this room apart.

Pat Hall shows a replica of the 
Eisenhower jacket worn by Oswald.

To my right stands a small armoire — the very one my tormentor used. Inside, wrapped in plastic, hangs an Eisenhower jacket like the one "Mr. Lee" chucked behind the nearby gas station during his mad scramble to the Texas Theatre.

And then there’s the bed. The frame dates to 1963, but the mattress does not.

"That would be too creepy for me,” Hall says.

The Smirker slept here. When "Mr. Lee" went to visit Marina in Irving, Hall says she did too.

To show the size of the room, visitors often stretch their arms to touch opposite walls and snap photos. Hall takes one of me doing the same, my left foot braced on The Smirker’s bed in a little spike-the-football moment. And as I stand in this unremarkable space, I can’t help wondering what went through his mind here in November 1963.

Did he lie awake wondering why Marina no longer loved him?

Did he question whether to kill the president — or whether someone else would pick him up afterward, as they’d allegedly promised?

Did he stare at that phone and think about making one last call?

Hall doesn’t believe “Mr. Lee” assassinated Kennedy, though she concedes The Smirker may have been in on a plot to kill the president.

“He could have been a CIA operative,” she says.

Then Hall tells one final story.

One evening, “Mr. Lee” sat on the porch as her brothers wrestled out front. Hal, known for his short temper, was in the middle of the tussle when Grandma Johnson’s mysterious boarder stepped in, separating the brawlers.

The Texas Theatre, where Dallas police
apprehended Lee Harvey Oswald
on Nov. 22, 1963.

"Boys," he said, according to Hall, "let me tell you something: You gotta care for and love each other.”

As I stepped from that tiny room, my tormentor followed. He always does.

For reasons I still can’t pinpoint, a part of him has lived inside me for decades. Not the assassin. Not the ghost. But the riddle: the small life that somehow left the deepest mark. I used to think I was chasing him — the man in the window, the smirk frozen in grainy frames. But standing there, near the narrow space where he slept, wondered, and decided whatever he decided, I realized I’d been chasing something else entirely: the moment before everything broke, the part of myself that still believed answers were possible.

But Oswald left no answers. Only wreckage. Only questions. Only a shadow shaped like a man — lingering, impossible to forget.

So curses to you, Lee Harvey Oswald — for haunting the boy I once was and the man I became.

The phone I hold and wallpaper behind me in the rooming house date to 1963, Pat Hall says. 

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