There have been scores of books written about the JFK assassination and the persons involved in some way in the investigation. This new book, Wife of the Accused Assassin, by Wallace Heitman, a retired FBI agent, who was directly involved in the official investigation, provides a new slant to this historical event. Marina Oswald, a young former pharmaceutical student in Minsk, Russia, found herself in the middle of a massive whodunit inquiry. A legion of conspiracy theories name Castro, the KGB, The Mafia, President Lyndon B. Johnson, or a New Orleans clique, as the managers of the event. Although there remain doubts in some minds as to the conclusion of the Warren Commission Report that names Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole perpetrator, it is now the prevailing version. The author of this book has no doubt that the Commission got it right.
In the lead story of the book, titled as the book, Marina recounts her life with Oswald. In scores of interviews with Agent Heitman she unfolds the nature of Oswald's complex personality, the beauty, then the despair of their marriage, and of her dramatic and reflexive action at the moment she first heard that president Kennedy had been shot.
There are eleven other stories in the book, most of which are based on the FBI investigations by Heitman. The author tells of his long ride with a Navajo Indian posse in the hunt for a murderer in The Last Posse. He combines investigative events covering several years in his chapters entitled, Remembering The Communist Threat, Cemeteries and Dead Bodies, and Death on Route 66. Many of his stories are set in New Mexico and Arizona, so he describes these high desert states in two travelogues - Along TheWay to Santa Fe and Geology 101: Westermost Texas and New Mexico.
there are stories of a personal nature, including A Sojourn in Prison - a recounting of his living in the Washington, D.C. prison as a parole intern and the events he witnessed there. Another tale is from his early years - Door to Door, a telling of the three summers selling bibles in the lands of the Mennonites and the Amish to get money for college.
No history of an FBI career would be complete wtihout a chapter on J. Edgar Hoover. He treats Mr. Hoover with seriousness and with humor.
This is a rather thin book, yet it covers much ground in the life of an agent in the old FBI, in the days of J. Edgar Hoover.