As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy‘s assassination nears, the wedding band of shooter Lee Harvey Oswald is going up for auction.
Oswald’s Mug Shot
Oswald‘s gold wedding band will be auctioned in Boston on October 24–one week after what would have been the alleged assassin’s 74th birthday.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s Wedding Band, engraved with a hammer and sickle and a Soviet star
The ring will be accompanied by a five-page letter handwritten by Oswald’s widow, Marina Oswald Porter, detailing the ring’s history. Auction experts estimate that the ring will be sold for $30,000 to $50,000.
Letter from Marina Oswald Porter that will accompany the ring. Inset photo of Lee and Marina Oswald
Oswald reportedly left the ring in a cup next to his wife’s bed before he shot and killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963. At the time, Oswald did not live with Marina; he rented an elfin room in Oak Cliff, Texas.
The ring was a key piece of evidence in the Warren Report on the assassination, as it was used to show the mindset of Lee Harvey Oswald on that morning.
Oswald, who apparently never took off his wedding ring, did so on that fateful day in 1963, when he left it, along with $170 cash, on a nightstand at Mrs. Ruth Paine‘s house where his then-estranged wife, 22-year-old Marina, was staying.
Marina Oswald
The ring itself tells a bigger story, as the inside is engraved with a hammer and sickle and a Soviet star. Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, defected to the Soviet Union before meeting Marina there, at a dance, in 1961. He purchased his 14-karat gold wedding band in Minsk, Belarus, before marrying Marina later that same year.
Oswald himself was shot and killed two days after JFK’s assassination by club owner Jack Ruby at Dallas police headquarters, thus fueling decades of speculation on an alleged conspiracy that “silenced” Oswald.
Jack Ruby, about to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald
The Secret Service confiscated the ring and gave it to Marina Oswald‘s former lawyer, who then gave it to the law office of her attorney, where it remained in a manila folder until it was rediscovered in 2004.
No one staked a claim to the ring or contacted his widow for eight years, until one of the law office partners wrote her a letter telling her that the ring had been found. Marina Oswald Porter picked it up in early 2013 and is now eager to part with it.
Oswalds Returning from Russia
“This is the only item of Lee’s that has been returned to me, and it took almost 50 years,” Marina Oswald Porter said in the letter. “I’m remarried for many years now, raised my children and have been blessed with grandchildren… At this time of my life, I don’t wish to have Lee’s ring in my possession because symbolically I want to let go of my past that is connecting [me] with November 22, 1963.”
What if John Kennedy had lived and Jackie Kennedy had succumbed to the conspiracy plot? Read SAVING JACKIE K, a thrilling adventure to rescue the First Lady.
