Across from a strip mall, on a suburban street stands an ordinary looking house: a clipped lawn, row of bushes, Stars and Stripes flying on a flagpole, red tiled roof, green floored porch and white, ornately patterned front door. But a yard sign indicates something is different here: “Oswald Rooming House Museum.”
The house at 1026 North Beckley in Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas is where Lee Harvey Oswald was staying before he allegedly gunned down President John F Kennedy 60 years ago on Wednesday, leaving a scar on the American conscience.
To some, the idea of preserving its memory might appear morbid or tasteless. But to owner and curator Patricia Puckett-Hall the house, now her home, represents a mission. As memories of the assassination fade and conspiracy theories around it run out of steam, she has styled herself as the last and most vocal defender of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Aged 11 at the time, Puckett-Hall has only fond recollections of Oswald renting a tiny room for six weeks from her grandmother, Gladys Johnson, and trying to help with her homework. She has spent a lifetime believing that the most hated man in America was wrongly maligned in a wider plot involving the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
“The public thinks it’s strange; my friends think it’s a little strange,” Puckett-Hall admitted, sitting in her front room, surrounded by a vintage radio, record player and TV, all of which still work. “But this house is a part of the history. Whether it’s good history or bad history, it is history. It is important.
“Our government has vilified this young man that had so much to live for. He had a beautiful wife, two babies – two years old and a newborn. Those little girls don’t even remember their daddy. This government ruined his life, their lives, and my goal is to simply encourage the search for the truth, whether it comes down to being a lone gunman or not, but they’d better be able to prove it without a shadow of a doubt. I want to put a human face on a man that most people don’t even recognise.”
Oswald was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1939. His father died two months before he was born and he spent some time in an orphanage. In 1956 Oswald dropped out of high school and joined the US marines, where he earned a “sharpshooter” qualification. Three years later he defected to the Soviet Union, where he married Marina Prusakova and had a daughter, June. In 1962 he returned to the US with his family.
Oswald became increasingly political and critical of US policies towards communist Cuba. In April 1963 in Dallas he allegedly shot at but missed Edwin A Walker, a former army general and rightwing extremist. In October Oswald’s second daughter, Audrey, was born and he landed a job at the Texas school book depository. He rented one of 18 rooms in Gladys Johnson’s boarding house under the name OH Lee.
On 22 November, from a window on the sixth floor of the depository building, Oswald allegedly fired the three shots that killed Kennedy. He then took a bus and taxi to the boarding house but soon departed and, about a mile away, was stopped by police officer JD Tippit, whom he allegedly killed with a revolver. Oswald was arrested soon after and denied involvement in both crimes. Two days later he was shot and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police department.
The Oswald that the world knows from news footage played and replayed over six decades is different from the one that Puckett-Hall remembers. “When he first moved in, he would try to help me with my homework but two dyslexics working on the same thing really doesn’t work,” she said.
“It would frustrate both of us and so he backed off on that but any time he saw me getting upset over homework or an upcoming test he’d always come over to me in a soft, gentle voice and say, ‘Don’t worry about it. You just do your best and it’ll all work out in the end.’ At that time in my life, I desperately needed encouragement because I wasn’t getting it from home or school because they decided I just wasn’t putting forth the effort. We didn’t know what dyslexia was in those days.”
On one occasion, she recalls, Oswald broke up a fight between her two brothers. “He sits down between them says, ‘Boys, let me tell you something. Listen to me. It’s very important. You’re brothers. You’ve got to care for each other. You got to love each other and never do anything that would harm another human being.’
“Now, that’s life advice that a 24-year-old is telling to little boys he’s barely known six weeks. That’s not the voice of a killer. That’s not the actions of a killer. It says more about the core of the man than anything else.”
But Puckett-Hall acknowledges that while Oswald was “wide open”, he was a little more “standoffish” with adults. “Once you know more about his childhood and his teenage years, it’s understandable why he would be a little leery of adults compared to children.”
On the day of the assassination, Puckett-Hall’s mother unplugged all the TVs and told her children that they were broken. She allowed the TVs back on two days later – but then came Oswald’s ill-fated transfer from the police headquarters. Puckett-Hall recalled: “Detective Leavelle brings him out. My brother starts hollering, ‘Mommy, look, Mr Lee’s on TV! He’s on TV!’
“And Jack Ruby steps forward and shoots him. We go hysterical. My mother jumps up, turns off the TV - it’s broke again and [she] has to sit down with us and explain to us what he’s been accused of, what’s been going on over here with my grandmother, with the police and the FBI, and why we just saw our friend shot on TV.”
Puckett-Hall says her grandmother concluded that Oswald was innocent. “She didn’t believe he did this. About the first 36 hours, she did believe what they were saying to her but, once she was able to sit down calmly and think about the young man she had in her home, that she allowed to play with her grandchildren, that’s when she came out to the family and said: ‘He didn’t do this.’
“That’s what the family has maintained until I came along and started doing my own research. I am convinced he was most definitely a CIA operative and that he did not fire a single shot that day. He did not kill President Kennedy and he did not kill Officer Tippit.”
Then who did? Puckett-Hall replied: “It was someone within the CIA that looked very similar to Mr Lee. There were several sightings of Lee in different places throughout Dallas that, one, he didn’t have access to, and two, he was working all the time or he was here or in Irving, Texas. They set him up very well.”
Puckett-Hall’s museum turns 10 years old on Wednesday and remains frozen in time. Oswald’s bed looks at it might in 1963, neatly made as if waiting for his return. His Eisenhower jacket, wrapped in cellophane, still hangs in the wardrobe. On the wall hangs a shadow box of documents including Oswald’s diary (which was found in the room) and social security card as well as childhood photos and a pistol.
On a dining table are newspapers with front page headlines such as: “Kennedy Slain on Dallas Street”; on a table sits a Life magazine with Kennedy’s photo surrounded by a black border. There are other items of period furniture and Kennedy memorabilia including a first attempt at a death certificate that contains typographical errors.
Puckett-Hall says she has had thousands of visitors from all over the world, each paying $30 to sit in her front room and ask her anything. She offers them her theory that Oswald was framed for the crime. “Basically I stack the circumstantial evidence of the CIA’s involvement chronologically and it only leads to one direction. You always follow the money.”
Oswald’s widow and daughters, all of whom are still in the general area but out of the public eye, have not visited, at least as far as she knows. “I’ve been very vocal about wanting them to come because if anybody deserves to know that someone feels very nice and very good about their memories of Mr Lee, it’s that family.”
Most visitors do believe there was a conspiracy, Puckett-Hall added. “Sometimes I’ll get someone that’s a diehard lone gunman and that’s fine. I like discussing it; I won’t argue. But I love discussing what they know, what they’ve learned. They may teach me and I have changed my theories according to new evidence that has come forward and so you have to keep an open mind.
“Unfortunately, we have too many researchers and authors that have written books that never came over here and talked to my grandmother or my mother, wrote their books with their own agenda and so they have done more damage than the government has in keeping their mouths shut. If you can’t solidly prove it, don’t state it.”
An investigation by the Warren Commission found no broader conspiracy involving the CIA, mafia or anyone else. But such theories have lingered and thrived for six decades, fuelled by police blunders at the time, countless books and documentaries and a nagging sense that such a seismic trauma and national inflection point could not have been the work of one troubled loner.
Larry Sabato, author of The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F Kennedy, said: “I believed in a conspiracy for a long time. I just did not believe that this waif, this nothing could have killed President Kennedy alone. I’ve spent a lot of time examining it in Dallas.
“I’m an academic so facts matter and eventually I had to come to terms with the great likelihood that Lee Harvey Oswald did all the shooting and the probability that no one else was involved. No one encouraged him. Clearly no one funded him: he didn’t have any money. I’d like to believe in a conspiracy. I want to think there was more meaning to it.”
