7. Who was the Babushka Lady?
There are a few photographic and video records of the events of that day well known to the public, most famously the Zapruder film, which captured in graphic detail that final and fatal shot. Others exist, such as the films of Orville Nix, Marie Muchmore and Mark Bell.
All of which capture a curious and still unidentified spectator present during the 1963 assassination, one who also might have photographed the events that occurred in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza at the time President John F. Kennedy was shot, but has never come forward with her film.
Known as the Babushka Lady, due to the headscarf she was wearing, she stood on the grass between Elm and Main streets when the shooting began and the chaos ensued, strangely she remained standing in place with the camera at her face, presumably continuing to capture the moment while her surrounding witnesses took cover.
After the shooting stopped and Kennedy’s presidential limousine sped off she crossed Elm Street and joined the crowd that went up the grassy knoll. She is last seen in photographs walking east on Elm Street. In every frame that captured this mysterious woman, none of them have helped in her identification as she was either facing away from the camera, or her face obscured by her own camera.
In 1970, a woman named Beverly Oliver came forward claiming to be the illusive photographer, stating that she turned the undeveloped film over to two men who identified themselves to her as FBI agents. In March 1979, the Photographic Evidence Panel of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations indicated that they were unable to locate any film attributed to the Babushka Lady.
However, many doubt her claims due to the fact that Oliver stated that she filmed the assassination with a Super 8 film Yashica, that model of camera was not made until 1969. When confronted with this, she countered that she received the “experimental” camera from a friend and was not even sure the manufacturer’s name was on it.
Some 57 years later, the Babushka Lady, if still alive, has yet to come forward to produce the pictures she took that day and just as importantly, to explain why she calmly stood snapping images while all hell broke loose around her.
