Funeral home to pay nearly $100K after wrongly selling Lee Harvey Oswald’s casket

Funeral home to pay nearly $100K after wrongly selling Lee Harvey Oswald’s casket

A judge rules that the funeral home's conduct was "wrongful, wanton, and malicious" in selling the coffin that they had kept unbeknownst to the Oswald family.

The casket of Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was sold by a funeral home for $87,468 — a sum that the funeral home that sold it will now have to give back.

Baumgardner Funeral Home in Fort Worth, Texas, had possession of a pine bluff casket Robert Oswald had purchased for his brother in 1981. It was exhumed in 1981 due to conspiracy theories that Oswald’s body was not in the casket, but after a Dallas hospital reconfirmed that it was his body through dental records, it was reburied in a different casket as the original was too damaged, according to a Fort Worth Star-Telegram report.

Oswald’s family had been under the impression that the original casket had been discarded, but in reality the funeral home kept it in storage and later sold it at an auction along with Oswald’s death certificate and other items, such as the embalming tools and the table used for his burial, to an anonymous buyer through an auction house in Santa Monica, Calif., according to the report.

This prompted Oswald’s brother, Robert, to file suit against the funeral home, which still has possession of the casket as the lawsuit put the sale on hold and was never actually completed, according to the judgment.

Now, the funeral home must not only return the casket, it must also pay $87,468 in damages as well as $10,000 in storage fees to Robert Oswald, as District Judge Don Cosby called the home’s conduct “wrongful, wanton, and malicious.”

In addition, the funeral home will need to cover the expense of sending the coffin from California to Texas, and the family plans to destroy it once it gets there.

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