WASHINGTON, October 23 (RIA Novosti) – More than 300 artifacts linked to the presidency of John F. Kennedy will be auctioned off Thursday in Boston, including the gold wedding ring which Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, purchased in the USSR.
“At this time of my life I don’t wish to have Lee’s ring in my possession because symbolically I want to let go of my past that is connecting with Nov. 22, 1963,” the assassin’s widow Marina Oswald Porter wrote in a letter to RR Auction of New Hampshire, explaining why she had decided to sell the ring.
November 22 is that date that Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas.
Oswald purchased the ring in a jewelry store in Minsk in 1961, before his marriage to the then- Marina Prusakova, according to RR Auction. He left it by her beside the morning he shot Kennedy, the first time he had ever removed it, his widow said.
“We both wore our wedding rings at all times,” Porter told the auction house in her letter.
The ring was handed to the US Secret Service after Kennedy’s assassination but was later returned to the attorney who had represented Oswald’s widow. Placed in an envelope, it lay forgotten in a file for five decades, until finally being returned to Porter earlier this year.
Live bidding on the “JFK 50 Years After Dallas” auction will start at noon EDT (1600 GMT) Thursday.
Oswald’s ring had already fetched $32, 541 when online bidding closed Wednesday afternoon.
