Fight breaks out over Lee Harvey Oswald's original, crumbling coffin

AUSTIN, TEXAS – Hours after his younger brother Lee Harvey Oswald, the presidential assassin, was gunned down in the basement of the Dallas police station, Robert Oswald wrote a $710 cashier's check to a Fort Worth funeral home as he made arrangements for his brother's burial.

The purchase included a No. 31 Pine Bluff coffin and vault, a dark suit and flowers. More than five decades later, the simple pine coffin — now badly deteriorating — is at the heart of an unlikely epilogue to the tragedy that gripped the nation on Nov. 22, 1963.

Three days after he assassinated President John F. Kennedy from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, and a day after he himself was shot and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, Oswald was laid to rest in a Fort Worth cemetery in a service so poorly attended that reporters were used as pallbearers.

The coffin was exhumed in 1981 to dispel conspiracy theories including assertions that the body inside may have been that of a Soviet impostor. Oswald, his identity confirmed by medical tests, was reburied in a new coffin, and the original was stored for years in Baumgardner Funeral Home in Fort Worth.

Now, the latest chapter in the unfinished tale of Oswald's original coffin is playing out in a Fort Worth court.

After learning that Baumgardner Funeral Home sold the coffin through a Los Angeles auction house for $87,468, Lee Harvey Oswald's brother filed suit to block the sale, contending that marketing the crumbling coffin was "ghoulish" and had no historical value. The funeral home is fighting back, defending its right to the coffin and contending that Robert Oswald, now 80, relinquished his legal claim by making it a "gift" to his dead brother.

State District Judge Don Cosby of Fort Worth heard testimony and arguments in a two-day trial that ended Tuesday. Lawyers say the judge is not expected to rule before Christmas.

Oswald called the sale of the coffin "bad taste" in the video and described himself as its rightful owner. He has also said that he thought the coffin had been destroyed after the exhumation until he learned of the 2010 sale through the Nate D. Sanders Inc. auction house.

"He doesn't want money. He doesn't want the casket in a museum," said Oswald's lawyer, Gant Grimes of Wichita Falls. "He wants the thing destroyed. There's got to be a limit somewhere on what the public deserves as part of historical curiosity and just good taste." In his video deposition, Oswald said he knew of "no case where anyone has ever bought a used coffin."

A differing perspective comes from Allen Baumgardner Sr., the funeral homeowner. He acquired Miller Funeral Home, which performed the original burial, changing the name to Baumgardner Funeral Home. He assisted in the 1981 exhumation.

When the coffin was exhumed, it was too badly damaged to be reused, and Baumgardner, who also testified during the trial, kept it in a storage room in the funeral home for 30 years before putting it up for auction four years ago, according to news media accounts and court documents. He said his funeral home became the rightful owner of the coffin because no one else claimed it, and he believes the coffin should not be destroyed because it is "part of history."

A central tenet of Baumgardner's argument is that when Robert Oswald purchased the coffin it became a gift to his dead brother's estate, said Brett Myers, the Dallas-based lawyer for Baumgardner, and neither the assassin's widow, Marina Oswald Porter, nor their two grown daughters has made a claim on the coffin.

Oswald's lawsuit also asserts that the funeral home used the Los Angeles auction house to sell items related to the Oswald family besides the coffin, including an embalming table and his brother's original death certificate, which was invalidated because of an error.

The funeral home said it acted properly in claiming possession of the items because they were funeral home equipment or records and paperwork related to the funeral home's activities.

Baumgardner then turned to the Los Angeles auction house. The coffin, measuring 80 inches long and 24 inches deep, was sold to an unnamed bidder. But the sale was canceled after Oswald filed his suit in 2010. The coffin sits in storage "at a site in Los Angeles," said Laura Yntema, the auction manager at Nate D. Sanders Auctions.

"It's in limbo until the case is resolved," she said. "So whatever the court tells us to do, we'll do regarding the casket. It's being kept in a secure facility, so it's safe."

The sales notice for the coffin stated that it was falling apart, citing extensive water damage, aging and other signs of disrepair.

But all of those involved say the dispute reaches well beyond decaying pieces of wood and into a part of U.S. history that seems frozen in time. Even a line from Oswald's petition rises above legalese to offer a jarring reminder of the past.

"Plaintiff is the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald, deceased. On Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy."

"It seems like it happened so long ago," said Myers, the lawyer representing the funeral home. "But when you get a chance to talk to these people who have firsthand recollections of these events, it makes it seem like it wasn't that long ago at all."