In January 1982 at halftime of a Texas Christian University basketball game, long-time JFK assassination researcher Jack White was approached by an unassuming older man with a receding hairline whom he did not immediately recognize. “Remember me, Jack?” the man asked in response to White’s quizzical gaze. “I am Paul Groody and I embalmed Lee Harvey Oswald.” With this innocuous meeting begins the story of one of the more colorful characters in the history of the JFK assassination saga.

  Paul Groody

Much of what researchers know about the 1981 exhumation and identification of Lee Harvey Oswald seems to come from a brief segment in the documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy (hereafter TMWKK) that originally aired on the Arts and Entertainment network (A&E) and is rebroadcast annually by the History Channel. The blurb features mortician Groody, a former employee of the Miller Funeral Home where Oswald’s body was prepared for burial in 1963 and who was also present at the exhumation and forensic identification. Alan Baumgardner assisted Groody both in ’63 and at the time of the exhumation.

In 1988, Groody appeared in TMWKK and his story became widely known. It was also featured in Jim Marrs’ 1989 book Crossfire and was repeated by conspiracy theorists in numerous articles and other publications. The story and its implications were largely accepted as fact and remained unchallenged until the 1992 Internet publication of an article by M. Duke Lane. The article titled “Grave Doubts” used the Norton Report and good common sense to refute Groody’s allegations. However, many conspiracy theorists remained unconvinced and annual airings of TMWKK exposed new viewers to the story.

In an interview with this writer, Jack White recalled his first meeting with Groody, “I had previously known Paul Groody because he had asked our ad agency to submit an ad proposal for his business a year or so previous to the exhumation, which if I remember was 1981.” White continued, “… Groody spotted me in the stands, and came over and told me the same basic story which is well-known.”

Groody’s story concerned what he saw during the exhumation and later in the examination room at Baylor Medical Center both prior to and after the forensic exam. As the mortician of record, it was his job to identify the body as the one that he had prepared in 1963 and after the examination to place the body in a new casket for transport back to the gravesite. Groody was very confident that the body would be in good shape for the identification. One researcher who has probably studied the exhumation events more closely than anyone is Gary Mack, who is now the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas (Author's Note-Mr. Mack's comments here represent his own opinion based on his studies of the subject as a private researcher in the 1980's and do not represent the opinion of the Sixth Floor Museum).

Mack remembered in a 2000 interview, “Groody gave several interviews during the exhumation attempts over the years, claiming he “over embalmed” Oswald on the chance someone may need to dig him up someday. This jibes with White’s memory as well, “He embalmed the body with several times the usual amount of formaldehyde so that the body would be well-preserved for all time,” he recalled.

The first sign of trouble from Groody’s perspective came when the burial vault of Oswald was brought to the surface. Groody made the following observation in his now famous TMWKK segment, “At the time of the '63 burial time, I put Lee Harvey Oswald in a steel reinforced concrete vault. That vault was hermetically sealed. The vault is guaranteed not to break, crack, or go to pieces-it's heavy concrete with steel in it with an asphalt lining. And when I opened the grave in '81 and found that that vault had been broken and the bottom of the vault was the part that was broken-the top was still intact-I noticed at that time that the casket had been disturbed-I questioned in my own mind what had been going on.”

After the vault was opened, Groody and other graveside observers also noticed damage to the casket. The top of the casket just above and behind the head was damaged and a section approximately 18 by 3-4 inches was missing. The opening was large enough so the observers could actually see the remains of the alleged assassin. Following the transfer of the remains to Baylor, Groody identified the body before the exam and he and Baumgardner took care of the remains afterward. Both men had a chance to get a brief but close-up look at the body during their activities. Groody called Marina Oswald sometime later and told her that everything had been above board at the exhumation in his view. “When I opened that casket the first time”, he recalled several years later, “I sent my wife Virginia to Marina to tell her, "yes, there is a body in that grave" because that was her concern.”

Next: The Groody Allegations

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