Body not included.....

For sale: Final resting place of JFK's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (body not included)

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 12:56 PM on 1st December 2010

• Pine coffin where killer lay until 1981 exhumation set for auction

The coffin in which the body of President John F Kennedy's suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald lay for 20 years is to be sold at auction.

A Los Angeles auction house yesterday announced the simple pine coffin will go to the highest bidder on December 16.

Bidding will start at $1,000, but the item is expected to fetch much more due to strong interest from museums and collectors of presidential memorabilia.

Final resting place: The coffin in which the body of President John F Kennedy's suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald lay for 20 years is to be sold at auction this month

Mugshot: Oswald denied killing Kennedy

The auction also includes several instruments that were used to embalm Oswald, his death certificate, an Easter card he sent to his brother, and a section of the car seat on which President Kennedy was sitting when he was shot.

Laura Yntema, auction manager at Nate D Sanders in Santa Monica California, said: 'There's just a lot of interest in Kennedy and anything to do with his assassination.'

After authorities conducted an autopsy on Oswald, he was buried in Rose Hill Memorial Park in Fort Worth, Texas.

The burial plot's original tombstone, which gave Oswald's full name and the dates of his birth and death, was stolen and was replaced by a marker simply inscribed 'Oswald'.

But the coffin was unearthed in October 1981 after a legal dispute between Oswald's widow, Marina, and his brother, Robert. 

Marina successfully sought an exhumation to test a conspiracy theory that a lookalike Russian agent had been buried in her husband's place, according to the auction house.

Bidding will start at $1,000. The auction is expected to attract strong interest from museums and collectors of presidential memorabilia

A medical examination showed the decomposed body was indeed Oswald's, and he was returned to his plot in Rose Hill Memorial Park in a new casket.

The original coffin, which had suffered extensive water damage, is being sold by Baumgardner Funeral Home, the local undertaker which handled the re-internment.

A statement from the Nate D Sanders auction house says: 'The original deteriorated coffin offered here, measures 80in long by 24in deep, with the thickness of the sides of the casket approximately one inch. Sitting on wood crate which measures 84in by 24in.'

Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository from which the fatal shots were said to have been fired, was arrested on charges of the murder of a local police officer, JD Tippit, 40 minutes after Kennedy's assassination.

He was subsequently charged with murdering the president.

But he denied shooting anyone and was then killed by Jack Ruby two days later on November 24, before he could be indicted or tried. Ruby died from cancer in 1967.

Assassinated assassin: Nightclub owner Jack Ruby shoots Oswald dead in the basement of Dallas Police HQ

President Lyndon Johnson set-up the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination a week after Kennedy's death. In September 1964, the commission concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin.

However, its findings were widely disputed and suspicions have long abounded of a government cover-up. To this day, conspiracy theories abound as to who killed Kennedy, and why.

Among the grey areas in dispute are where President Kennedy was shot from - ahead of or behind him - how many shooters there were, what the murder weapon was exactly, and why key witnesses and documents went missing.

Some even linked President Kennedy with organised crime rings.

Moments from assassination: President John F Kennedy and his wife Jackie ride through Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334629/John-F-Kennedy-assassin-Lee-Harvey-Oswalds-coffin-sale.html#ixzz16rlspTOt