Just two hours after the burial of President Kennedy, the body of Lee Harvey Oswald was put into a hastily dug grave in Fort Worth's Rose Hill cemetery. The arrangements were made quietly by the Secret Service. The only mourners were Oswald's 56-year-old mother Marguerite, his Russian-born wife Marina, 22, his two baby daughters and his brother Robert, 29, a Denton, Texas, brick salesman.
No pallbearers were to be found among friends, so seven newsmen were recruited for the job. Texas ministers, for all their talk about the shame of Dallas and the redemption of sin, seemed notably reluctant to preside. So the police chief telephoned the Rev. Louis A. Saunders, executive secretary of the Fort Worth Council of Churches, who left off watching Kennedy's funeral on TV and went to the cemetery. "Someone," he explained, "had to help this family."
The plain pine coffin was opened. Marina Oswald placed two rings on her dead husband's fingers and kissed him. The coffin was closed and lowered into a 6-ft.-deep vault, which weighed 2,700 lbs., was asphalt-lined and reinforced with steel bars. Said the funeral director: "It would be extremely hard for anyone to break into the grave."
A Plot? Even as Oswald's corpse was being unceremoniously disposed of, Government investigators were deep in one of the nation's most intensive searches. First of all, they were looking for motivation: Was it rational, perhaps part of a plot, or simply the result of an aberrant mind? That answer they might never find. But they were also digging into the dark background of Lee Oswald, from birth right up to the day of his crime, and on that they found plenty.
One key discovery was turned up in New York City, where the Oswald family lived for a time. Lee Oswald was a poor student and a chronic truant in his early teens. A psychiatric report concluded that he had schizophrenic tendencies and was "potentially dangerous," recommended that the boy be committed to an institution—but the city Family Court turned down the recommendation. Many of the other details of Oswald's early life—his disgruntled Marine Corps years, his 33-month stay in Moscow during an unsuccessful attempt to get Soviet citizenship, his marriage there to Hospital Pharmacist Marina Prusakova—had become known within hours after his arrest (TIME, Nov. 29). He returned to the U.S. in June 1962, with his wife and four-month-old baby, and drifted among various odd jobs in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. There the Oswalds met several Russian immigrants, notably a sympathetic woman, Mrs. Ruth Paine, 31, who quickly befriended Marina.
The Commander. Oswald was driven by a storm of black compulsions. He forbade his wife to wear lipstick, insisted that they speak only Russian, refused to let her learn English—though she desperately wanted to learn the language and hoped to become an American citizen. A nonsmoker and teetotaler, he flew into rages when his wife lit a cigarette. He beat her on several occasions. They both fought furiously, often over tiny differences. Once, at the dinner table, he told her: "Get the catchup." Marina replied: "Quit being a commander." Snapped her husband: "I am the commander."