hey gang, let's buy Oswald's coffin~!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131736456

http://media.npr.org/images/ap//AP_News_Wire:_Latest_Headlines/4_Oswalds_Coffin.sff.jpg?t=1291293232

I was reading about this morning...so creepy. The thing I don't get: his wife has the body exhumed in 1980 because she doesn't believe it's down there, so they bring the casket up, then...what? If they have the casket now, whatever happened to the body (or whatever was left of it in 1980)?

the remains were transferred to a new casket and reburied in Oswald's original grave.

interestingly, the body was exhumed (with Oswald's wife's support) at the request of a crackpot lawyer who was seeking to validate his conspiracy theory:

Eddowes’ first of three assassination books was the 1975 self-published Khrushchev Killed Kennedy mostly written in Dallas where he would spend much of his time over the next several years. The book, which received little attention, contended that a Russian assassin had been substituted for the real Lee Harvey Oswald after his defection to the Soviet Union, a fact the United States government suppressed to avoid World War Three. The content of this volume would provide the backbone for most of Eddowes’ future work.

In 1976, Eddowes published Nov. 22, How They Killed Kennedy in England. This title was later released in the United States as The Oswald File and was the best known of the three volumes. Encouraged by renewed public interest in the JFK case in the wake of the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation, Eddowes was now ready to take a bold new step. He felt that if Oswald’s body could be examined, it would prove that the man buried there was not Oswald but the Russian agent he had written about. In his mind, there was only one way to prove his theory conclusively-Oswald had to be exhumed. In 1978 he instigated an almost three-year process that ultimately led to the exhumation.

(from this article)

this shd've been a twofer w/ JFK's birthday cake icing that was sold last month.

rip patton oswalt

I'm thinking that the ultimate twofer in terms of morbidity might be Oswald's casket + Ted Williams' head. You put the closed casket in your front room, set Williams' head on top, and impress all your friends.

i think at the point you start to do stuff like that, ted williams would be your only friend

Lee Harvey Oswald's grave lays next to one marked for ''Nick Beef''

"According to the folks in the black suits at the cemetery office, Nick Beef is the stage name of a comedian who bought the plot and had a headstone with that name installed. In his act, he apparently tells people that if they want to find Oswald's grave (which info the cemetery office will not give out)...just ask for Nick Beef instead and you will find Oswald. Only thing is...now they won't tell people where Nick Beef's grave is either! Once the cemetery folks realized a group of us (Arthur and Margaret Snyder, Bill Hamley, and myself) who were out there already knew where Oswald's grave was and were just curious about Nick Beef, they told us the story. Of additional note...Marguerite (Oswald's mother) is buried on the other side of Oswald.... sans headstone."