This news was published January 16th, 2011.
For the JFK-assassination conspiracy junkie who has everything: L ee Harvey Oswald’s coffin. Body not included.
A Los Angeles auction house said on Tuesday it would sell the simple pine coffin in which the suspected assassin of President John F. Kennedy was buried for almost 20 years.
Bidding will start at $1,000, but the item is expected to fetch strong interest from museums and collectors of presidential memorabilia when it goes on the block on December 16.
“There’s just a lot of interest in Kennedy and anything to do with his assassination,” said Laura Yntema, auction manager at Santa Monica, California-based Nate D. Sanders.
The coffin was unearthed in October 1981 after a legal dispute between Oswald’s widow, Marina, and his brother, Robert. Marina successfully sought an exhumation to test a conspiracy theory that a lookalike Russian agent had been buried in her husband’s place, according to the auction house…
A medical exam showed the badly decomposed body was indeed Oswald’s, and he was returned to Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park in Fort Worth, Texas, in a new casket.
The original coffin, which had suffered extensive water damage, is being sold by Baumgardner Funeral Home, the local undertaker which handled the re-internment.
One day later……
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Posted on December 17, 2010 at 10:00 AM
Lee Harvey Oswald’s original coffin sold at auction Thursday night for $87,469.
The auction house declined to identify the winner but said the person might be named today.
The online bidding started at $1,000 early in the day and reached $23,000 by afternoon.
The original deadline for bidding was 7 p.m., but Nate Sanders, of Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Santa Monica, Calif., said auction rules allowed bidding to continue until one of two final competitors conceded. The auction ended about 10 p.m.
The wooden coffin was used for the burial of Oswald in 1963 but was exhumed in 1981.
Auction officials had predicted the casket could fetch up to $100,000.
The artifact was offered for sale by Allen Baumgardner, who kept it for three decades in a storage area of his funeral home in Fort Worth. Baumgardner, 68, said that he had decided to sell it because “none of us is going to be around forever.”
Baumgardner participated in the 1981 exhumation of Oswald’s body, which was pushed by a British conspiracy theorist who believed that the man accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 was actually a Soviet agent.
Let’s say something about his dead. On Sunday, November 24 Oswald was being led through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters preparatory to his transfer to the county jail when, at 11:21 a.m., Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby stepped from the crowd and shot Oswald in the abdomen. Oswald died at 1:07 p.m. at Parkland Memorial Hospital—the same hospital where Kennedy had died two days earlier. A network television camera, there to cover the transfer, was broadcasting live at the time, and millions thereby witnessed the shooting as it happened. The event was also captured in a well-known photograph (see right). Ruby later said he had been distraught over Kennedy’s death, though some have hypothesized it was part of a conspiracy. After autopsy, Oswald was buried in Fort Worth’s Rose Hill Memorial Burial Park. A marker inscribed simply Oswald replaces the stolen original tombstone, which gave Oswald’s full name and birth–death dates.
I found some strange and interesting text around the web….
In the church sanctuary
42. White male. Unmarried,
The simple casket, pine and brass handles, there lays
As the mother and father watch in black, dark greys
The pews polished and clean
Ready for mourners, but attendance is lean
Very few friends or acquaintances come
Their thoughts and feelings of grieving mum
Sorrow and shame intermingle to make sand,
Although it is not up to them for him to be damned,
Cards, loves, wreaths of fresh flowers
Justice, not vengeance, they are all vowers
Tears and sound bites flow
All believing humanity must have reached at an all time low
Did you know him?
Yes, he was a great man. My best friend.
How many best friends can one man have?
Is there anything bad said of those who have died young, accidentally, or intentionally by the hand of another?
Phalanxes of the sorrowful line the block
Harder to sympathize than mock
Caught up in the media spotlight
Crying over the unknown dead seems so trite
The victim’s funerals are much different
Than those of the perpetrator.
I think youve got something good here. But what if you make a couple links to a page that backs up what youre saying? Or maybe you could give us something to look at, I could revisit & read more sometime soon.2
I found this blog on Yahoo I have to say it’s a cool find. thank you very much for posting this it’s huge info.
Kacey, let’s spend the rest of our lives together enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Marry Me!! -N