DALLAS – Ruth Paine, whose kindness to Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife as a young mother near Dallas would leave her inexorably linked to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has died. She was 92.
Paine died on Sunday in a senior living facility in Santa Rosa, California, her daughter Tamarin Laurel-Paine said Thursday.
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Oswald’s wife and children had been staying at Paine’s home in the Dallas of suburb of Irving in the fall of 1963. Oswald stayed at the house the night before the assassination, and before setting off to his job at the Texas School Book Depository, retrieved his rifle that he had stowed in the garage — unbeknownst to Paine.
Laurel-Paine said she admired her mother’s willingness over the years to grant interviews and speak out. “She had adopted the notion that she was just there to be witness to what she knew of history and she would do it for any serious inquiry,” Laurel-Paine said.
Thomas Mallon, author of the book “Mrs. Paine’s Garage,” said Paine “was determined to tell the truth of her experience.”
“She really put up with a lot of preposterous notions that people had, people who were determined to in some ways implicate her in what had gone on and I think she braved this very, very well, very politely always and I think that that took real strength of character,” Mallon said.
Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, as shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building as his motorcade was ending its parade route. Police arrested Oswald, who worked in the building and was believed to have positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor.
That fall, Oswald’s Russian-born wife Marina Oswald and her two children had been staying with Paine, a 31-year-old mother of two who was amicably separated from her husband.
The two women had become friends earlier that year, and the living arrangement helped the struggling Oswalds while also giving Paine a chance to improve her Russian, which she had studied.
“Ruth’s intention was to help this young couple out,” Mallon said.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who was living in a rooming house near downtown, would usually visit his family at Paine’s house on the weekends. But on the day before the assassination, he made an unexpected mid-week visit to Paine’s home, where he’d tried unsuccessfully to reconcile with his wife after a fight a few days earlier.
Oswald suggested they begin living together again, but she told him that she and the children should stay with Paine through the holidays. The next morning, Oswald left behind his wedding ring and $170. Investigators said he carried with him a brown paper package holding a disassembled rifle.
Marina Oswald told the Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that the rifle was among the possessions her husband had moved into Paine’s garage, storing it in a blanket there unbeknownst to Paine.
“She had no idea, Ruth, that the gun was in her garage, and no idea what was going to come,” Mallon said.
Mallon said that Paine once told him that though the assassination had had an “enormous impact on her life,” she did not let it “govern her life.” Paine “firmly believed” that Oswald had acted alone, Mallon said.
In the years after the assassination Paine became the principal of a small private Quaker school in the Philadelphia area, then got her master’s degree and worked for many years as a school psychologist in Florida before retiring and moving to California, Laurel-Paine said.
In 2013 — the 50th anniversary of the assassination — her former home in Irving opened as a museum re-creating the way it would have looked in 1963.
