"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (60 page)

 

OSWALD, MARGUERITE
passed away in 1981 at age 73. For more than fifteen years she had relentlessly crusaded to clear the name of her son, who had been declared by the Warren Commission as the sole killer of John Kennedy. Marguerite insisted that, owing to certain intimations from Lee over the years and things that she learned from Lee's wife Marina on the day of the assassination, if only someone would listen she could verify that JFK had been assassinated by a conspiracy and her son, though he previously had met with members of
that group, did not in any way partake of their decision to assassinate the president.

 

ROSEELLI, JOHNNY,
aka JOHNNY HANDSOME, was on April 9, 1976 found floating in a 55 gallon steel fuel drum located in Dumfounding Bay, not far from Miami, FL. An autopsy revealed he had been shot and strangled, and that both his legs were sawed off, likely while the man was still alive. Probably a hit was carried out by his onetime compatriot Santo Trafficante, Jr. (after being ordered from above, likely by Sam Giancanna) as retribution for Rosselli's “singing like a bird” when he was called before a Senate Committee to testify on joint attempts by the Mob and CIA to kill Castro and assassinate Pres. Kennedy.

 

SINATRA, FRANK
, continued to reign as the world's greatest singer of ballads and pop-standards until his passing in 1998. When distribution rights to the film
The Manchurian Candidate
eventually fell into Sinatra's hands, the movie disappeared from re-release in theatres or on TV for many years. Though it has been claimed that the aging film was “played out,” that makes no sense since other classics from that era continued to regularly be broadcast. Even before
The Manchurian Candidate
slipped out of the public's view,
Suddenly
had long since ceased to show up on TV.

 

STURGIS, FRANK
, aka ‘George,' was along with four other men arrested on June 19, 1972 for breaking into and attempting to set up a wiretap in the Democrat party's headquarters in the
Watergate Hotel, Washington. One possible reason was to learn if that party's presidential candidate, George McGovern, was in contact with Fidel Castro in hopes of normalizing relations between the two countries should McGovern win the upcoming election against former vice-president Richard Nixon. While serving his prison term, Sturgis insisted “I will never leave this jail alive” if the full truth came to be known. Before his death in 1993 Sturgis confessed to Cardinal Cook of New York City's Catholic church that he had arranged the
assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and framed Lee Harvey Oswald for that crime.

 

WALKER, MAJOR GENERAL EDWIN,
continued to live in Dallas until his death from natural causes in 1993, at age 83. His political ambitions were based on his continuing insistence that for America to flourish as it, in his mind, once had, segregation must be re-established between the races so that a “pure” white ruling class could control what he believed to be the mongrel ethnic minorities. Always, he insisted that the unknown person who had attempted to assassinate him in his home on April 19, 1963, had to be the same shooter who killed President Kennedy.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Douglas Brode is a novelist, graphic novelist, produced playwright, Hollywood screenwriter, film and TV historian, and multi-award-winning journalist.

His more than thirty-five published books include the novel
Sweet Prince
, a retelling of the Hamlet legend, and
Shakespeare in the Movies
for Oxford University Press. He and Carol Kramer Serling collaborated on
Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone,
the only official analysis of that late author's work and vision. Among Brode's best known books are studies of the careers of directors Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen, such genres as the gangster film and the Western, and the relationship of popular culture to contemporary politics. Brode's op-ed pieces are regularly syndicated to newspapers across the country.

During the course of his lifetime, Brode has been employed as a TV talk show host, radio commentator, drama and film critic, regional theatre actor, and magazine editor.
As an educator, Brode teaches at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, during the fall semester, and for the department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at San Antonio, each spring.