60 years later, mystery still swirls around whether Lee Harvey Oswald once lived in North Dakota

Nov. 22—FARGO — Most of us can only imagine what newsrooms all over the nation were like that afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. As the noon hour hit, The Forum newsroom was all but empty as reporters, editors and photographers popped out for a quick lunch — maybe a sandwich at a downtown diner or, if they were feeling adventurous, tacos or pizza,

the newest foods in town.

Wherever they ate that day, their lunch was cut short when news came in just after 12:30 p.m. that shots had been fired at President John F. Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas.

Hours later, the newsroom was no longer empty as frantic journalists, like Americans everywhere, tried to wrap their heads around the news: President Kennedy was dead.

You can probably picture the smoke-filled newsroom as reporters and editors worked the phones, ripped the Associated Press wire, listened to the radio and tried to figure out how to tell the story from a North Dakota angle.

Reporters were sent all over town, including The Graver Hotel and The Elks Club, to get reactions from local citizens. But then an unexpected tip came in.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the man suspected of being the assassin, once lived in Stanley, North Dakota.

Could it be true? Strangely enough, it's a question we're still asking 60 years later.

In his book "Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination," Dr. John Delane Williams, a retired University of North Dakota professor said, "Most of what we know about this episode stems from a letter sent by Mrs. Alma Cole" to the newly sworn-in President Lyndon Johnson.

In the letter, Cole, a former resident of Stanley, North Dakota, said Lee Harvey Oswald was an acquaintance of her son, William Timmer, when they all lived there in the 1950s.

In the book, Williams said in the summer of 1953, the 13-year-old Oswald and his mother Marguerite, left their home in New York to take a trip to parts of the western United States, two weeks of which, were spent in Stanley, North Dakota (whose population at time was around 1,500).

After Johnson received Cole's letter on Dec. 19, 1963, he forwarded it to the FBI. The next day, FBI agents interviewed Cole in Arizona, where she was living at the time. On Dec. 21 and 22, agents were dispatched to Stanley to interview residents there.

According to Williams, Cole's son, William Timmer, was interviewed in Spokane, Washington. During the interview, Timmer said the boy he remembered was a little older than him and "went by Harv or Harvey."

Timmer said Oswald wore shabby clothes, got in a few fights, and once showed him a "Communist pamphlet written by someone with a name like Marks (Marx)."

Williams, who holds two doctorates (one in statistics and research methodologies and the other in clinical psychology) and worked for the University of North Dakota for 42 years, set out to investigate the Stanley connection with another former Grand Forks man who was first intrigued by the story two months before Kennedy even was assassinated.

Gary Severson was just 16 years old when he and a buddy skipped classes at Grand Forks Central so they could see Kennedy deliver a speech at UND.

"You'd think it was the Beatles. In the first 20 rows, there were a lot of coeds. They jumped onto their chairs, literal hysteria pulling their hair, crying, screaming as he walked in. It was like he was a movie star, which he kind of was, you know," Severson said.

But more surprising than the hysteria that day was just how easy it was for Severson and his friend to get inside the building using a back door.

"The first set of doors were open, then the inside set of doors are open. There's no security," he said, "Nobody there, and yet there's a sharpshooter on the roof."

They didn't just get inside the building unchecked. They made it all the way past the Secret Service agent to two empty seats in the front row.

Severson says he didn't give it much thought at the time. But two months later, when the president was shot, it struck him just how vulnerable Kennedy had been that day in Grand Forks.

Life moved on for Severson. He graduated from Grand Forks Central and later from UND, where he played hockey. Ironically, he eventually took a job teaching history at John F. Kennedy High School in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Now, after what he said has been "60 years and two months" of research, he believes there is evidence to suggest that Kennedy's assassination might have been in the works during Kennedy's Conservation Tour in September of 1963 which included stops in Minnesota, Wyoming, Montana and Grand Forks, North Dakota.

"Is that why we passed through those doors (so easily)?" he asked.

Severson said he later talked to the liaison between the president and the university that day. The liaison first suggested that maybe the custodians forgot to lock the doors, then later claimed he gave the keys to the Secret Service at 7:30 a.m., so Severson and his friend shouldn't have been able to get in at 10:30.

Severson met Professor Williams in 1997 at a conference at the University of Minnesota. The two men decided to dig deeper into a possible connection between North Dakota and the JFK assassination by going to Stanley themselves to conduct interviews.

In his book's endnotes, Williams mentions an interview with a tailor in Stanley named Lyle Aho, who told the story of meeting "a Southerner named 'Lee,' who was trying to recruit him and one other boy to go to Central America and join Fidel Castro."

He later identified several photos of Oswald as the boy he knew in "probably the summer of 1955 or '56."

After the interview, he asked the two men "Who is that guy, anyway?" When he was told it was Lee Harvey Oswald, he still didn't know who it was. When they explained he was the guy accused of killing Kennedy, he replied "Oh."

Williams wrote, "This seemed unsettling to Aho."

Severson replied, "I'm agnostic about that."

In other words, maybe the stories are true or maybe that's just what they are — stories.

Aho mentioned to Williams and Severson the popularity of communism in town, most likely because the town had been settled by some Finlanders who supported the ideology. It was such a hot spot that Ella Reeve 'Mother' Bloor, a communist organizer from New York, even came to Stanley to pass out leaflets.

Severson said Kennedy had enemies in North Dakota, including some oil men and members of an ultra-conservative, anti-communist group. Severson said he has spoken to people who say they overheard their fathers, who belonged to the group, seriously discussing killing Kennedy prior to the assassination.

He said those men might have been aware of Stanley's ties to Finnish communism and saw it as the perfect place to frame Oswald and Communism for the President's death, whether it would happen nearby at the UND speech or in Dallas.

Were they told to say what they said about knowing Oswald?

Severson says "Maybe the people in Stanley weren't really who they said they were. In other words, they were incorporated into a plot. And when I would talk to them in places where they had moved, whether it was Arizona or Washington, man, they were evasive! They were scared."

Forum and WDAY journalists first heard about a possible connection to Oswald and Stanley soon after Oswald emerged as a suspect. Television and radio reports mentioned that Oswald had once lived in the state. The reports seemed to have been based on a 1959 story written by Aline Moseby for United Press International.

She had interviewed Oswald after he defected to the Soviet Union in October of that year. In the story, she quoted Oswald as saying that he became interested in Marxism when he was a teenager and someone handed him a pamphlet about saving Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who were eventually executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union).

"Then we moved to North Dakota and I discovered one book in the library, 'Das Kapitan' (by Karl Marx). It was what I had been looking for," Moseby quoted Oswald as saying.

When they heard this, journalists all over the state of North Dakota started digging through their records and archives to try and figure out exactly where Oswald would have lived. They came up empty.

Then, three days later, on Sunday, Nov. 26, a spokesperson from UPI told The Forum that Moseby "in the haste of the moment" had incorrectly translated her note reading "N.O." as "N.D." meaning she should have written New Orleans instead of North Dakota.

The Forum published a story saying there was no proof Oswald ever lived in North Dakota. One of the editors, Phil Matthews later expressed relief.

"I wanted to nail that down because I was sure it was wrong and it would be tragic if 20 years from now pupils read in their history books that President Kennedy's assassin learned about communism in North Dakota," he said.

Severson says questions remain. By the time the Warren Commission started looking into the assassination in 1964, the story from Moseby still read "North Dakota" and not "New Orleans."

He questions if it had been changed to "North Dakota" on purpose by someone at the FBI knowing that it would be easier to convict Oswald if they knew he was tied to a communist sub-community there.

"The people who were orchestrating this were at the top of the foreign policy establishment, which of course, fits in with the thesis that the CIA allowed him to be killed," he said.

In September of 1964, the Warren Commission released an 888 report ruling that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting the president and Jack Ruby acted alone in shooting Oswald.

Interestingly, a Minnesota native has been among the most vocal in debunking the alternate theories to the assassination.

Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charles Manson, tried to put an end to conspiracy theories in 2007 with his 1,600-page book, "Reclaiming History," which re-examined evidence, testimony and scenarios to conclude Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president.

"Because of these conspiracy theorists who split hairs and proceeded to split the split hairs, this case has been transformed into the most complex murder case in world history," he told the Los Angeles Times."But, at its core, it's a simple case."

However, 60 years later, Severson says there are still too many "loose ends." He wants closure. He wishes President Joe Biden wouldn't have recently told the CIA that it wasn't necessary to release any further information about the assassination. He said thousands of documents have yet to be seen.

"All of this stuff becomes enough circumstantial evidence to say that there was something going on in Grand Forks and Stanley, North Dakota," Severson said. "You do this in an out-of-the-way place like North Dakota that everybody makes fun of. It'll simply be reduced to 'those hicks out there wouldn't know a conspiracy if they saw it.'"

Clint Hill: Hill was born in Washburn and graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead before he joined the Secret Service. In 1960, he was the agent assigned to protect First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. He was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 and was seen climbing onto the car to shield her from the assassin's bullets.

He remained with her until 1964.

Edward Thompson: Raised in St. Thomas, Edward Thompson wrote for UND's Dakota Student, Carrington's Foster County Independent, The Forum and the Milwaukee Journal before becoming editor of Life magazine. Life was responsible for bringing the famous Zapruder film of the assassination to the public. The magazine also published the famous "backyard" photo of Oswald holding two communist newspapers and a rifle. Oswald claimed the photo had been doctored.

Pierre Salinger: Salinger was President Kennedy's press secretary at the time of the assassination. He attended the Navy officers training program at Dickinson State Teacher's College in 1943 and 1944.

Robert Bahmer: Born and raised on a farm in southeastern Bottineau County, Bahmer was the head of the U.S. National Archives who discovered in 1966 that bodily evidence from the assassination (including Kennedy's brain and 84 slides, tissue samples and blood smears) were missing from a lockbox given to them by Robert Kennedy.

Karen Kupcinet: The daughter of Irv Kupcinet, a well known University of North Dakota football player in the 1930s, Karen Kupcinet had become a television and movie actress in the 1960s. According to the Chicago Daily News, she made a "frantic" call on Nov. 22 declaring that "the President is going to be killed." Twenty minutes later, JFK was shot. Six days later, Kupcinet was found strangled to death in a Hollywood apartment. In 1967, author William Penn Jones claimed Kupcinet learned of the assassination plot from Oswald assassin Jack Ruby. Irv Kupcinet denied his daughter had any knowledge of the assassination.

Listen to their firsthand account from a commemorative edition of The Forum published on Dec. 9, 1963, read by Forum reporter Tracy Briggs.

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