After legal battle, Lee Harvey Oswald gravestone returns to Texas

By Marice Richter

DALLAS (Reuters) - A Dallas man won a long battle to retrieve a notorious piece of U.S. history, the gravestone of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, which came back to Texas this week from a small-town Illinois museum after a years of legal fights.

David Card had to fight relatives and an Illinois museum to bring back the headstone that spent a few years on the grave of the man who shot President John F. Kennedy in 1963 in Dallas.

"It was ours, and it is the original headstone of the most famous and infamous assassin in the history of Western civilization … maybe of all time," said Card, owner of a prominent Dallas music club, who is limited on what he can say under terms of the settlement deal.

Before turning up in the Historic Automotive Attractions museum in Roscoe, Illinois in 2009, it had been stolen, recovered, hidden away, forgotten and then passed around among Card family relatives.

The 130-lb (59 kg) gravestone is engraved with Oswald’s name, birth and death dates and a cross surrounded by an elaborate engraved floral border. It was replaced with a simple headstone that now marks Oswald’s grave at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth.

The original headstone was stolen from the cemetery four years after Kennedy’s death as a prank by Oklahoma teenagers. It was found by police and returned to Oswald’s mother, Marguerite Oswald, who stashed it away in her Fort Worth home.

After her death in 1981, Card’s father and step-mother purchased her home, according to Card’s attorney Mike Futia.

"The Card family acquired the house 'as is' with whatever was left behind," Futia said. It was unaware of the tombstone until an electrician discovered it while working on the home.

The family handed the tombstone off to other relatives to prevent the home from being targeted by thieves. It ended up in the possession of a relative’s widow and then re-appeared in Wayne Lensing's Roscoe museum of historic automobiles and memorabilia.

Lensing declined to respond to an inquiry for comment.

Card said he would like to donate the tombstone to Dallas’ Sixth Floor Museum, which is dedicated to the Kennedy assassination, or somewhere that will publicly display it.

"While this was very costly, every day I am more certain that I made the correct decisions,” Card said.

(Editing by Jon Herskovitz and Tom Heneghan)