Oswald's coffin auctioned off for $87,469

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Dec. 17 (UPI) -- The former coffin of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald has been sold for $87,469, a California auction house said.

Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Santa Monica did not identify the buyer but said the person might be named Friday, The Dallas Morning News reported.

Online bidding started at $1,000 Thursday and ended around 10 p.m.

The wooden coffin was used for Oswald's burial after he shot President John F. Kennedy in 1963 but was exhumed in 1981.

It was sold by Allen Baumgardner, who kept it for three decades in his Fort Worth, Texas, funeral home.

Baumgardner participated in the exhumation, which was pushed by a British conspiracy theorist who said he believed the body actually was a Soviet agent's.

Medical examiners said the 1981 autopsy confirmed the man in the casket was Oswald. The remains were placed in a new casket and reburied in the Shannon Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth.