Torment of the Russian bride left to suffer
OSWALD’S Russian wife Marina is now 76 and has had a chequered life since the assassination.
I’m not sure she would have survived long if she’d returned to the Soviet Union. So she stayed in the US with their daughter, June Lee, and avoided conversations about her husband.
Two years later she married drag racer Kenneth Porter, with whom she had a son. But when books began questioning whether Oswald acted alone, she was amazed. She had been assured the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman” report was right and had supported it.
Now she realised she had been led up the garden path. We met after I wrote JFK: The Second Plot, the first book to clear Oswald, and we got on like a house on fire. She came to meet me in England with her husband.
She was still very Russian – certainly not a soft and pliable lady. She was quite determined, and had a good right to be. I was in touch until a couple of years ago.
The last time we spoke she said: “Matthew, I am doing no more.”
She was, I think, frazzled by all the people who found their way to her and it was going on and on.
But we were good friends and still send Christmas cards.
Matthew Smith is a leading researcher into the assassination and has written a series of books about it over the past 25 years.