Lee Harvey Oswald

Born October 18, 1939, Oswald spent his childhood cycling through twelve schools and juvenile detention for truancy, labeled "emotionally disturbed" by a psychiatrist who noted the absence of normal family life. At seventeen he joined the Marines, was court-martialed twice, then defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. He lived in Minsk, married a Russian woman named Marina, and had a daughter before returning to the United States in June 1962 and settling in Dallas, where their second daughter was born. On November 22, 1963, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, he shot John F. Kennedy as the presidential motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza. Forty-five minutes later he killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit on a side street, then slipped into a movie theater where he was arrested. Charged with Kennedy's assassination, he told reporters he was a patsy. On November 24, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him dead in the basement of police headquarters as cameras rolled.