Marina Oswald Porter, the Russian-born widow of the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, wanted the remains of her late husband exhumed to answer doubts for the sake of her children.
Assured the body in Fort Worth's Rose Hill Burial Park is Oswald's, now she just wants to forget the past and become Mrs. Porter again -- the 40-year-old wife of Rockwall, Texas, carpenter Kenneth Porter and the mother of three children.
Born Marina Nichilayeva Prusakova in Minsk, Russia, in 1941, she was the niece of Soviet Secret Police Col. Ilya Prusakova. In the early years of her life, she was trained to be a pharmacist and worked as a clerk in a pharmacy in Minsk.
It was at a Soviet-sponsored youth dance in 1961 that she met a slight young man who she later said seemed like a native Russian 'because of his accent and mannerisms.'
That man was Lee Harvey Oswald, a native Texan who had defected to the Soviet Union two years earlier rather than stay in the Marine Corps.
By most standards, it was consider a whirlwind courtship that resulted in marriage just sixweeks after they first met. The following year, however, Oswald petitioned the Soviets for permission to take his bride and leave Russia, returning to Dallas in 1962.
A year later, her husband was accused of standing in a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a high-powered rifle, looking down on the presidential motorcade passing underneath.
Remembering the day President John F. Kennedy was killed, Mrs. Porter told the House Committee on Assassinations years later that she heard on television that shots had been fired from the building where her husband worked.
'My heart kind of stopped,' she said. 'I felt very uncomfortable. I thought my face would be betray me. My face went red. I fled outside. It crossed my mind ... I hoped it wasn't him.'
While assassination conspiracies swirled around her, some of which claimed her husband was an operative of the Soviet Union dedicated to Kennedy's death, she remained in seclusion in the small town of Rockwall outside Dallas and tried to hide her children from the taunts and probes of a world grown hostile.
She met and eventually married Porter and began rebuilding her life.
The questions and conspiracies, however, never stopped and finally - in 1980 -- Mrs. Porter joined the efforts of British author Michael Eddowes to have the body exhumed to determine for sure whether Lee Harvey Oswald or a Soviet KGB agent was responsible for the Kennedy death.
'I'm doing this for my family,' she said a few weeks ago during the court battle to exhume the remains. 'I never want my children to go through what I've had to go through all these years.'
She has three children -- two by Oswald, June, 19, and Rachel, 17, and one by Porter, Mark, 15.
During the autopsy at Baylor University Medical Center Sunday, she refused to look at the skeletal remains but identified two rings she placed on Oswald's body the day of his burial in November 1963. That put to rest forever her doubts.
