It was 5 a.m. when the phone rang at the home of a Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter.
“It’s going to happen!” said an excited man on the line, an attorney for Marina Oswald Porter.
“Meet me at the gate in front of Rose Hill Memorial Park at 6:30.”
Marina, of course, was the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald. And what was about to happen on that Sunday morning in October 1981 was the exhumation of his grave — a macabre effort to settle once and for all whether the corpse buried there 18 years earlier was really Oswald.
If it wasn’t, as some including Marina had come to believe, perhaps they had buried a lookalike Russian spy who had been the real assassin of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
“Put enough gas in your car to drive to Dallas,” the attorney told the reporter before hanging up.
As the sun rose over the east Fort Worth cemetery that morning, a trenching machine let out a steady shriek as it dug into the red clay.
