A small crowd gathered on the crisp autumn morning of October 4, 1981 at the Rose Hill Burial Park in Fort Worth, Texas to witness a unique event. The body of accused Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was to be exhumed in order to verify that the remains buried under his name were indeed those of the enigmatic ex-Marine. Among those in attendance that day was a well-dressed older gentleman whose manner and appearance suggested a person of means and importance. Indeed, he was no ordinary bystander; he had begun the process that ultimately led to the unusual excavation. His name was Michael Eddowes.

Born in 1903 in Derby, England, Eddowes was a prominent lawyer, author, and restaurateur. He was an energetic youth who played tennis at Wimbledon as well as cricket on a minor-league level. After his graduation from Uppingham, he practiced law at his father’s firm before eventually establishing his own practice. In 1958, after selling his law firm two years previously, Eddowes established the Bistro Vino chain of restaurants. Other business ventures included his own sports car design that was a forerunner of the E-type Jaguar. Despite his success in business and law, Eddowes was probably best known for his controversial private investigations and the books based on them.

His first book, The Man on Your Conscience, concerned the case of Timothy Evans: a British laborer hanged in 1950 for the murder of his wife and infant child. The book, which purported to show that an inquiry and subsequent report concerning the Evans’ case was flawed, and that the British government had suppressed evidence, caused a firestorm in Great Britain and led to a new investigation and ultimately Evans’ posthumous pardon by the Queen. Many credited the subsequent abolition of capital punishment in England to Eddowes’ work on the case.

Despite his unqualified success with the Evans case, Eddowes was reluctant to take on similar projects. However, in 1962 Eddowes became involved by chance in what would later become known as the British Profumo Scandal. This experience would lead to a trilogy of books whose thesis would eventually encompass the Chinese invasion of India, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Kennedy assassination, as well as the Profumo affair.

Eddowes involvement in the scandal began when osteopath Stephen Ward treated him at his London practice following a car accident. There, in October of 1962 Ward introduced him to Soviet Naval attaché Eugene Ivanov. Later, Eddowes would also meet party girl Christine Keeler who had affairs with Ivanov and British Minister of War, John Profumo. When Profumo’s indiscretion with Keeler became public, he was forced to resign while Ward, facing criminal charges, eventually committed suicide. Eddowes believed that Ward and Ivanov had conspired to bring down Profumo.

  Michael Eddowes

In 1963, Eddowes published a letter alleging that Ivanov had asked Keeler to obtain the date of delivery of nuclear warheads to West Germany from Profumo. Eddowes later became convinced that Ward had arranged for another woman to be sent to the U.S. to similarly compromise President Kennedy and claimed to have worked with the FBI to establish this fact. Whatever the truth about the Profumo scandal’s possible ties to the Kennedy administration, there can be no doubt that Eddowes’ later work was greatly influenced by this experience.

Eddowes’ first of three assassination books was the 1975 self-published Khrushchev Killed Kennedy mostly written in Dallas where he would spend much of his time over the next several years. The book, which received little attention, contended that a Russian assassin had been substituted for the real Lee Harvey Oswald after his defection to the Soviet Union, a fact the United States government suppressed to avoid World War Three. The content of this volume would provide the backbone for most of Eddowes’ future work.

In 1976, Eddowes published Nov. 22, How They Killed Kennedy in England. This title was later released in the United States as The Oswald File and was the best known of the three volumes. Encouraged by renewed public interest in the JFK case in the wake of the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation, Eddowes was now ready to take a bold new step. He felt that if Oswald’s body could be examined, it would prove that the man buried there was not Oswald but the Russian agent he had written about. In his mind, there was only one way to prove his theory conclusively-Oswald had to be exhumed. In 1978 he instigated an almost three-year process that ultimately led to the exhumation.

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