Minutes after the shooting, Dallas police zeroed in on the Texas School Book Depository as a place where a sniper could have fired on the motorcade. A short time later, police received a call that Officer J. D. Tippett had been shot and killed. Later that afternoon, police swarmed into a movie theater and arrested Lee Harvey Oswald for Tippett's murder. He quickly became a suspect in the president's death after investigators discovered he was the only employee who had left the Texas School Book Depository after the assassination.

Early Life

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans October 18, 1939, two months after his father Robert suffered a fatal heart attack. When he was three, his mother Marguerite placed Lee and his brothers in a Lutheran orphanage. He stayed there for nearly two years until Marguerite took him with her to Dallas, where she married her third husband, Edwin Ekdahl, in 1944. His brothers stayed in military school. The couple divorced in 1948, and Lee moved with his mother to New York City when he was twelve years old. They rented a small apartment in the Bronx and Marguerite found work in a dress shop. She worked a twelve-hour day, leaving Lee to make his own meals and fend for himself. A small, almost scrawny youth, Lee lived a solitary existence, killing time at the library or local museums. But mostly he rode the subway aimlessly for hours on end.

Although he was enrolled in the eighth grade, Lee was chronically truant and at one point stayed away from school for two months. Eventually, he was caught by a truant officer and taken to juvenile court. He was sentenced to a detention center for a three-week psychiatric evaluation. His social worker, Evelyn Siegel, determined he was not mentally disturbed; just an emotionally distant boy who was distrustful of others. That said, she also labeled him as possessing a “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.” But the determination wasn't enough to keep him incarcerated or hospitalized.

A Communist Sympathizer

According to diary entries, Oswald's political awakening occurred when he read a leaflet protesting the pending executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of being Soviet spies. He found a sense of purpose in opposing the status quo — a system that had largely ignored and abandoned him. He began reading every book he could find on socialism he could find in the local libraries.

After Oswald was apprehended a second time for truancy, breaking terms of his earlier probation, Marguerite and Lee left New York for New Orleans and settled in a seedy neighborhood adjacent to the French Quarter. His nomadic life had left him rootless and volatile — Lee was known to hit his mother and had threatened some members of his family with a knife. Searching for a sense of belonging, he enlisted in the marines at age seventeen. But all he found was more estrangement.

While in the service, Oswald earned a sharpshooting rating but he quickly ran afoul of regulations. A year after enlisting, he accidentally shot himself with an unauthorized pistol and was courtmartialed. He then was courtmartialed and jailed after attacking an officer. He left the marines, saying his mother was in poor health and needed him to look after her.

Defection to the Soviet Union

When he was nineteen, Oswald emigrated to the Soviet Union. While proclaiming himself to be a dedicated Marxist, acquaintances of his in Russia claim he showed no interest in communism. He seemed to arouse suspicion among both Soviet and American intelligence officials with whom he had contact.

In the Soviet Union, he met a woman named Marina Prusakova. The two married, had a daughter, and returned to the United States in 1962. Oswald went through a series of jobs before finding employment at the Texas School Book Depository in October 1963.

November 1963

Police questioned Oswald for two days after Kennedy's assassination, but Oswald never confessed to anything. On November 24, Oswald was fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby as he was being transferred to the Dallas County Jail.

Was Oswald a Russian spy, a double agent, an angry outcast looking to make a statement or name for himself? Nobody knows for absolute sure. Was he a lone gunman acting on his own or part of a conspiracy? Nobody knows that for sure, either. The suspicious circumstances surrounding Oswald's life and the unanswered questions about the president's death, made Jackie's tragedy that much more profound in the eyes of the public.