A Los
Angeles auction house said on Tuesday it would sell the simple pine coffin in
which the suspected assassin of President John F. Kennedy was buried for almost
20 years. Bidding will start at $1,000, but the item is expected to fetch
strong interest from museums and collectors of presidential memorabilia when it
goes on the block on Dec. 16.
"There's just a lot of interest in Kennedy
and anything to do with his assassination," said Laura Yntema, auction
manager at Santa Monica, California-based Nate D. Sanders. The coffin was
unearthed in October 1981 after a legal dispute between Oswald's widow, Marina,
and his brother, Robert.
Marina successfully sought an exhumation to test a
conspiracy theory that a lookalike Russian agent had been buried in her
husband's place, according to the auction house. A medical exam showed the
badly decomposed body was indeed Oswald's, and he was returned to Shannon Rose
Hill Memorial Park in Fort Worth, Texas, in a new casket.
