Lee Harvey Oswald’s attempted murder of Edwin Walker was the first and best opportunity for action that would have prevented Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy seven months later.
Marina Oswald knew that her husband had tried to kill Walker and helped him cover it up. Perhaps this is excusable. She was very young and in a foreign country. In America, moreover, wives are not legally required to testify against their husbands.
Baron George de Mohrenschildt* at minimum strongly suspected Oswald had tried to murder Walker. That De Mohrenschildt did nothing is not excusable. Had he reported his suspicions to the FBI or the Dallas Police, Oswald would have been in jail on 22 November when the President visited Dallas.
Extensive news coverage in the days following the Walker shooting made it clear that the Dallas Police had no idea who the shooter was. Accordingly, on Saturday 13 April Oswald retrieved his sniper rifle from its hiding place by the railway tracks and brought it back to their duplex on W. Neely Street.
That evening De Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne stopped by unexpectedly to drop off an Easter gift for the Oswald’s baby girl. The first thing he said to Oswald as he came though the door was, “Hey Lee, how is it possible you missed Walker?”
This might have been said half jokingly. But then, Jeanne spotted the sniper rifle in full view against the wall. “Look, George, they have a gun here,” she said.
Uncomfortable, De Mohrenschildt and Jeanne left in short order. After eight months of friendship and frequent meetings, they never saw the Oswald’s again.
Two days later, on 15 April, De Mohrenschildt and Jeanne abruptly departed Dallas. Within weeks, they moved to Haiti, a country that had no extradition treaty with the United States and where he had some vague business dealings.
Years later, De Mohrenschildt admitted that he feared being implicated in the Walker murder attempt. Oswald had signed a copy of the infamous photo, “To my friend George from Lee Oswald, 5 April 1963.” But De Mohrenschildt’s failure to report what he knew verged on criminal obstruction of justice. Why would he take such a monumental risk? What else was he trying to hide?
As I suggested in Part Seven, I suspect that De Mohrenschildt had been recruited by the KGB and served as their point of contact for Oswald in Dallas during the Cuban Missile Crisis up through the Walker shooting in April 1963.
On 29 March 1977, almost 14 years to the day after Marina took the infamous photo of Oswald dressed in black, George de Mohrenschildt put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He had just learned that investigators from the House Special Committee of Assassinations wanted to question him.
*There is no Public Domain photograph available of De Mohrenschildt. You can easily find a photo of him on the internet, however.