CONSPIRACY: The Babushka Lady

It's been 57 years since President John F.

Kennedy was assassinated, and America has never been the same.

Not just because of the gruesomeness of the crime, but because we still want answers.

Who really did it and why?

There's no shortage of theories, and many of them center around a mysterious woman in a headscarf seen filming the assassination.

She's been dubbed the Babushka Lady, and for years, nobody knew who she was until one day she came forward.

This is Supernatural.

I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week's episode is about the Babushka lady, a bystander who apparently filmed the Kennedy assassination.

For years, she remained nameless until one day she stepped forward with a story no one expected.

We'll dig into the story right after this.

Stay with us.

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At 11:40 a.m.

on November 22nd, 1963, President John F.

Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, touched down in Dallas aboard the Air Force One.

The Kennedys were in the midst of a four-day trip through Texas trying to drum up support for the president's upcoming reelection campaign.

Of all the cities in Texas, Dallas was considered the least friendly to the president, so it was a crucial stop.

The first couple wasn't doing this tour alone.

They were traveling with the Democratic governor of Texas, John Connolly, and his wife Nellie.

The Connollys were also young and somewhat glamorous, though not nearly as glamorous as John and Jackie.

The four of them disembarked Air Force One and climbed into a convertible limousine that was part of a long motorcade of police motorcycles, Secret Service, and press.

Then they started the 30-minute drive through downtown Dallas.

Kennedy wants to be as accessible to the public as possible.

So not only is he in a convertible, but he also doesn't have any Secret Service agents standing on the running boards of his car.

This laissez-faire approach definitely makes the police nervous.

The crowds are insane.

People are standing eight and ten deep on the sidewalks, eager to get a glimpse of Kennedy.

A few are even close enough to shake his hand.

The whole thing is a recipe for disaster.

At 1229 p.m., Kennedy's car is driving through Dealey Plaza, a city park that borders the west end of downtown.

The motorcade makes a left on the plaza's Elm Street, passing a seven-story red brick building on the corner.

It's called the Texas School Book Depository, and it's the last tall building that the motorcade passes before heading into the greener part of the park.

Standing further down the street on Elm is a 58-year-old Ukrainian-born clothing manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder.

He's perched on top of a wide concrete pillar about four feet high and he's filming with his eight millimeter bell and howl camera.

Because he's standing above the crowds, Zapruder has an almost totally clear view of the motorcade as it's coming down the street.

So just as the president's limo takes the turn onto Elm, he clicks record.

There's no sound, technology hasn't gotten that far yet, but the picture is clear, which is all Zapruder really wants, just a memory of seeing the president.

But just as Kennedy's limo approaches Zapruder's post, there's a crack of gunshot.

Some people think it's a firecracker or a motorcycle backfiring.

Three and a half seconds later, there's another one.

This one makes impact.

A Secret Service agent riding in the car behind the president sees Kennedy get hit in the back about four inches below his right shoulder.

And from where he's filming, Zapruder sees the president jerk and lean towards Jackie.

It looks like the president is honestly like making a joke, pretending to be shot.

But then Zapruder realizes that the president would never do this.

He's actually been hit.

Meanwhile, in the seat in front of the president, Governor Conley realizes he's been hit too.

He cries out, they're going to kill us all.

His wife pulls him down out of sight and covers his body with her own.

Jackie's not sure what has happened yet, but she turns toward her husband with concern.

Then, nearly five seconds later, there's another shot.

This one hits the president in the head.

He slumps over toward Jackie, who starts to crawl out of the back seat and onto the rear of the car, but a Secret Service agent climbs onto the back of the limo and pushes her back inside.

Meanwhile, Zapruder is still filming.

He keeps his camera on until the limo has ridden out of sight.

When he stops recording, he realizes what he's just seen.

The president of the United States has been murdered.

Chaos breaks out in the plaza.

People and police are running in every direction.

And at about 10 minutes after the assassination, Zapruder locates a reporter in the crowd.

Stunned, Zapruder tells the reporter that he's got it all on film, and the reporter says the Secret Service will definitely want to see it.

By late afternoon, Zapruder has given an interview on local television, met up with an agent from the Secret Service, and developed his film.

Right away, Life magazine wants to buy the rights.

So the next morning, Zapruder screens the the film for Life and a few other publications, plus more members of the Secret Service.

The film leaves everyone speechless.

It's taken so close to Kennedy that the violence is palpable.

Zapruder plays it again and again, and after a while, they start to take note of the other onlookers in the frame.

By now, most of these faces have already come forward and given statements to police, but one of them hasn't.

It's a woman.

She appears to be in the film just after the president has been shot for the first time.

She's wearing a bulky tan coat that looks like a raincoat and a cream-colored scarf that seems to have a pattern on it.

She's also holding what looks like a movie camera to her face, but because the pruder pans across her so quickly, it's a little hard to tell if it's a film camera or a still camera.

With her face hidden by the camera, it's impossible to know how old this person is is or what she looks like.

But from her stocky build, lumpy coat and scarf, she appears to be in her 40s at least.

The woman's standing about 20 feet away from the president and she keeps filming as he passes her.

Then, just as she leaves the frame, we see Kennedy shot in the head.

Now, at least eight other people filmed the motorcade that day in Dealey Plaza, but only a few were able to capture the assassination.

Like Zapruder, those tapes start trickling into the authorities one at a time, and the same mystery woman appears in them.

In one film, we can see her standing from behind.

She has an extremely wide stance, the kind of stance you'd more often expect from a man or a soldier at the time.

And I should mention that she's also in the footage taken immediately after the shooting.

All around her, people are running or even lying down in the grass in terror.

but the woman is standing completely still.

In any case, this person, whoever she is, has camera footage that could be crucial to the investigation.

But in the days following the assassination, nobody tries too hard to track her down.

For one, there's already a deluge of other witnesses who want to tell their story.

And law enforcement is pretty preoccupied with pinning down their main suspect.

So let's rewind a bit to the minutes right after Kennedy was shot.

People are fleeing the scene, but a construction worker named Howard Brennan finds the police and reports that he saw a man firing from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

The suspect is white with brown hair and a slim build, and he seemed to be in his mid-20s.

Immediately, police surround the building.

One of them stops a man who fits the description, but lets him go when he hears the man works there.

This same man goes home, grabs a revolver, and at 1.15 p.m., not even two hours after Kennedy's assassination, he publicly shoots and kills a police officer in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas.

The shooter's name, of course, is Lee Harvey Oswald.

35 minutes later, Oswald is arrested inside a movie theater.

The Dallas FBI immediately recognize his name because they have a file on him.

He's spent time in the Soviet Union, so he and his wife are being watched as possible spies.

The idea that Oswald is a Soviet agent puts everyone on edge.

The FBI and the police begin to suspect a Russian conspiracy behind the assassination, and by midnight, he's charged with the murder of President Kennedy.

But the saga isn't over because on Sunday, November 24th, less than than two days after the shooting, Oswald himself is killed.

The murderer is Jack Ruby, a 42-year-old nightclub owner.

Ruby walks right up to Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department and fires on him on live television.

Needless to say, America is traumatized.

Nobody knows what to make of these events, but people wonder if Oswald was involved in some some sort of conspiracy and if Ruby was ordered to silence him.

But just what this conspiracy is and who all it involves varies.

Some people believe the Soviets killed Kennedy.

Others think the hit came from Cuba in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs.

Still others believe it's the mob orchestrating revenge on the president's brother, Bobby Kennedy, for his crackdown on organized crime.

Either way, a Gallup poll taken between November 22nd and November 27th shows that 52% of Americans said they believed that some sort of group was responsible for Kennedy's death.

So by November 29th, one week after the assassination, the new president, Lyndon B.

Johnson, establishes the Warren Commission.

Its purpose is to investigate the case from all angles and deliver the truth once and for all as to whether Oswald acted alone.

10 months later, in September 1964, the commission publishes a nearly 900-page report.

It states that Oswald acted alone and that all three shots were fired from his rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, meaning all three shots came from behind the president.

Oswald missed the first time, the second bullet went through both Kennedy and Connolly, and the third struck Kennedy in the back of the head.

The commission also couldn't find any evidence of a conspiracy involving Oswald or Jack Ruby.

In other words, case closed.

But this decisiveness just fueled the conspiracy theories even more.

To most Americans, it didn't seem plausible that one disturbed guy could take down the president only to be killed two days later by pure coincidence.

And as the years pass, new eyewitnesses come forward.

They say they saw a puff of smoke and a commotion on the grassy knoll to the front right of the president, all of which suggests a second gunman, someone that was much closer to Kennedy than Oswald.

Now, at this point, the Zapruder film still hasn't been released to the public.

Life magazine publishes some black and white stills from it a week after the shooting, and the next year, in 1964, they release some color stills.

Assassination researchers notice the woman in the headscarf and they wonder who she is and what it was she filmed.

Some believe that she could be an accomplice to the murder, possibly even a man in drag.

One researcher dubs her the Babushka Lady because of her headscarf.

But for years, her identity remained a mystery until 1970 when out of the blue, she turns up.

We'll hear more about the babushka lady when we come back.

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Now back to the story.

In November 1970, about seven years after Kennedy's murder, an assassination researcher named Gary Shaw attends a church revival in the small town of Joshua, Texas.

Gary's views on the assassination are firmly in the conspiracy camp.

He's spent hours upon hours researching how the Warren Commission manipulated or flat out ignored evidence of a second gunman, and he loves to talk about these theories.

So after the revival, Gary's having lunch with a couple of preachers and he gets to talking about Kennedy.

He shows them the Zapruder film, which still hasn't been shown to the American public, at least not on a large scale.

Now, I'm not sure how Gary got his hands on a copy, but like many, he believed it was being kept under lock and key because it showed Kennedy being hit from the front.

The preachers see the video and they have an energetic discussion.

Then, later that night, Gary goes to another event at the church.

This time, one of the preachers introduces him to a woman.

Her name is Beverly Oliver.

She's blonde, big-haired, and seems to be in her mid-20s.

The preacher casually mentions that Beverly was in Dealey Plaza the day of the shooting, and Beverly tells Gary her story.

In 1963, Beverly Oliver was a 17-year-old singer at the Colony Club, which stood next door to the club owned by Jack Ruby called the Carousel Club.

Allegedly, Beverly went down to Dealey Plaza the morning of the president's visit and stood on Elm Street, hoping to get a glimpse of Kennedy.

She brought along a Yashica Super 8 movie camera a friend had loaned her.

As she's filming, she witnesses the president's assassination.

She wanders around the plaza in a daze, then walks up the grassy knoll and goes home.

Beverly spends the weekend in shock, and she takes so many sleeping pills that it barely lands that her friend, Jack Ruby, has murdered Oswald.

But her story doesn't end there.

The following Monday night, she arrives for work to see two FBI agents waiting for her, or actually, one is FBI and the other introduces himself as CIA.

According to Beverly, they already know her name and they ask her for the film.

They promise to get it back to her within 10 days.

For whatever reason, Beverly actually has the film in her makeup case, so she gives it to the agents without question, but she never gets it back or sees the agents ever again.

In his book, Gary doesn't go into a lot of detail about his reaction, but I think it's safe to say he loses it.

I mean, this woman is the babushka lady.

Later that night, Beverly tells Gary even more.

And this is maybe the biggest bombshell.

She claims that one night, a few weeks before the assassination, she went to her friend Jack's club.

There was a strange, unsmiling man sitting at Jack's table, and Jack introduced him as Lee, my friend from the CIA.

It wasn't until she saw the news later on that Beverly realized Lee was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald.

Gary is hearing all this and he is ecstatic.

This is exactly what conspiracy theorists have been trying to prove for years, which is that Oswald and Ruby knew each other and that the CIA was somehow involved in Kennedy's death.

But Gary isn't completely taken in yet.

He wants to be be absolutely sure that this woman is who he thinks she is.

So he takes Beverly down to Dealey Plaza where they meet up with Gary's friend and fellow researcher, Richard Sprague, who incidentally is the person who came up with the name Babushka Lady in the first place.

Gary and Richard ask Beverly to go stand in the same spot she was in as the motorcade went by.

They figure since she's never seen the Zapruder film, she won't know where to go unless she's the real real deal.

Well, according to Beverly in her book, Nightmare in Dallas, she goes to the exact same spot where the babushka lady stood.

The men are in awe.

Beverly has to be the babushka lady.

And not only that, she can put Oswald and Ruby in the same room together, which is something the Warren Commission could never do.

To bolster her story, Beverly says that a stripper from the carousel named Jada met Oswald too.

But Jada disappeared after the assassination.

She was never heard from again.

Gary, Richard, and other conspiracy theorists know Beverly's their mystery woman.

Gary writes about her in his book Cover-Up.

Jim Mars mentions her in his book Crossfire.

The entire conspiracy verse crackles with excitement.

The babushka lady isn't an accomplice after all.

She's a victim of the conspiracy herself.

Her film has been taken and obviously suppressed.

And America's suspicions about the Kennedy assassination haven't tapered off.

At one point, 81% of Americans are positive there was a conspiracy and a cover-up.

Like, that's how common these suspicions are.

In any case, five years pass since Gary and Richard first met Beverly.

Then, on March 6th, 1975, another bombshell drops, one that leaves even the most hardened skeptics reeling.

Up next, the Zapruder film unleashes a new cleric

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Clue.

Now back to the story.

For years following the Kennedy assassination, Life magazine kept the Abraham Zapruder film to themselves.

The magazine had published a few stills and that was it.

But on March 6th, 1975, all of that changes.

The Zapruder film airs on network television.

For the first time, the general public sees the third bullet hit Kennedy in the head, and it's deeply disturbing.

Not only that, it's clear to viewers that Kennedy's head snapped backward when it was hit.

This indicates that the bullet came from the front, not behind, like the Warren Commission concluded, which means that there may have been more bullets than the three Oswald fired.

The film causes an uproar, and in 1976, 13 years after the assassination, a new congressional committee is formed to reopen the investigation.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations spends the next two years sifting through the evidence.

In the end, they conclude that, quote, there was a 95% certainty that a fourth shot was fired from the grassy knoll, and therefore there was a conspiracy involving a second gunman, end quote.

But they still don't know who was involved in the conspiracy.

All they can say is that the Soviets weren't involved, or the Cubans or the mob, or of course, the CIA.

To some, it's maddeningly inconclusive.

To others, it's more evidence of a government cover-up, which Beverly Oliver's story would seem to validate, except her story is starting to fall apart.

For one, there's the problem of her age.

If Beverly is the babushka lady, she would have only been 17 in 1963, which doesn't seem right.

Like, sure, we can't see the babushka lady's face, but for so long, so many people thought she looked too old to be a teenage girl.

And again, nobody can corroborate Beverly's story that she was even at Dealey Plaza that day.

I mean, yes, she stood in the same spot when Gary asked her to, but remember, he'd shown her preacher friend as a pruder film.

For all we know, she was coached.

Then there's the bit about Jada the stripper.

Beverly had told researchers that Jada was also present the night Jack introduced her to Oswald.

But according to Beverly, nobody could ever confirm this because Jada herself had disappeared.

Except, that's not true.

As the years go by, evidence comes out that Jada was interviewed by the FBI as part of their investigation into Ruby and Oswald's relationship.

Jada told them she'd never seen Oswald before in her life, and she didn't disappear.

She moved to New Mexico, where she lived until she passed away in 1980.

I should also mention that Beverly named the FBI agent who took her film.

However, that same agent was actually in New Orleans on the night in question.

But maybe the biggest crack in Beverly's story is the one about her camera.

From the beginning, she described it as a Yashika Super 8, but it turns out Yashika didn't even have a Super 8 movie camera in the U.S.

until 1969, six years after the assassination.

Beverly eventually stopped calling it a Yashika and a Super 8, but the damage was done.

Most people decided she was a fraud.

But for what it's worth, Beverly's always stuck to her story, and and she's done a convincing job.

Watch any video of her on YouTube and you'll notice she clearly believes she's the babushka lady.

It could be that she's delusional, but she honestly doesn't sound like that.

And if she's flat out lying, it's impressive.

She also says she only has one regret and that's coming forward.

Which if you think about it, makes sense.

Why would someone open themselves up to constant ridicule unless they really were who they said they were.

Unless there's a totally different explanation for her story.

It's a bit more complicated than lies or delusions, but it has to do with memory.

Elizabeth Loftus is a professor at University of California, Irvine.

She's made studying memory the focus of her whole entire career, but she's specifically interested in the fallibility of memories.

In her own words, memory is a quote Wikipedia page.

You can go in and change it, but so can a bunch of other people, end quote.

In 2005, Loftus wrote a paper with a colleague, Daniel M.

Bernstein, about the creation of what they call rich false memories.

These are memories of experiences that are so real we can even recall certain feelings like how something tasted, smelled, or sounded, but the event itself may never have happened at all.

It sounds impossible, but apparently false memories aren't that hard to create.

Loftus designed a study where she had patients look at fake ad copies for Disneyland featuring the character Bugs Bunny.

Then she asked the patients to recall some of their fondest memories of Disneyland.

16% of the people remembered meeting Bugs Bunny, even though he's not part of the Disney cast at all.

He's a Warner Brothers character.

Still, the more times Loftus showed people the ad, the more people remembered meeting him.

They talked about what Bugs Bunny looked like, how his costume felt, the carrot that he was chewing on.

Suggestion, in other words, is powerful.

The Kennedy assassination is proof of this.

The witnesses who were in Dealey Plaza gave a lot of conflicting information to the police, and some of them are still changing their accounts of what happened.

For Beverly Oliver, who was already 24 and living in Dallas when Gary met her, she'd probably heard a ton about the assassination.

Plus, it seems she really was a singer at the Colony Club, so she automatically had a closer connection to the case just by knowing Jack Ruby.

It makes sense that she paid close attention to any rumors involving Jack and his rumored associate, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Over time, she may have even imagined she was in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination.

And I should mention that in Beverly's case, there may be other, more personal reasons.

She talks openly openly in her book about being abused by her first husband and suffering through a drug addiction, in which case it's possible she may have been suffering from trauma, which can also have an effect on the formation of memories.

All of this combined may have led Beverly to be convinced that she was the babushka lady.

Whatever the case, it's worth pointing out that Beverly's story may still shed some light on what actually happened to Kennedy.

For all the things she said that didn't line up, it's still true that she was a singer at the Colony Club.

The idea that she was friends with Jack Ruby?

Not so far-fetched.

And for all we know, she really did meet Oswald at the Carousel Club.

But at this point, almost 60 years later, with so much already reported and speculated about this one event, the truth is probably impossible to know.

There's never been a satisfactory answer to Kennedy's assassination, so there's never been any closure.

And some people say there never will be.

Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audio Chuck Originals.

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