Ruth Paine, the Texas woman whose decision to house Marina Oswald and her children in 1963 left her inexorably linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Sunday at a senior living facility in Santa Rosa, California. She was 92, her daughter Tamarin Laurel-Paine said Thursday.
Paine had befriended Marina, who was Russian-born, earlier that year and offered a place to stay in Paine's Irving, Texas, home as the young couple struggled. Lee Harvey Oswald, who worked at the Texas School Book Depository, typically visited on weekends; he stayed at Paine's house the night before the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination and the next morning left a brown paper package containing a disassembled rifle, investigators said. Paine later said she had no knowledge the weapon had been stored in her garage.
Authorities arrested Oswald after President Kennedy was shot while riding in a Dallas motorcade that Nov. 22. The Warren Commission, the government panel that investigated the killing, concluded that Oswald acted alone. Marina Oswald testified to the commission that the rifle had been among her husband's belongings moved into Paine's garage, wrapped in a blanket and stored without Paine's knowledge.
Laurel-Paine said her mother responded to inquiries and researchers for decades, embracing a role she described as a witness to history. "She had adopted the notion that she was just there to be witness to what she knew of history and she would do it for any serious inquiry," her daughter said.
Author Thomas Mallon, who wrote Mrs. Paine’s Garage, said Paine "was determined to tell the truth of her experience" and endured years of suspicion and conspiracy theories with restraint. "She really put up with a lot of preposterous notions that people had, people who were determined to in some ways implicate her in what had gone on," Mallon said. "I think that took real strength of character."
Paine was 31 and the mother of two when she offered housing to Marina Oswald and her children; Paine was amicably separated from her husband at the time and had studied Russian. The arrangement helped the struggling Oswald family and gave Paine an opportunity to practice the language. Oswald made an unexpected midweek visit to Paine's house the day before the assassination; he reportedly left behind his wedding ring and about $170 when he departed the next morning for his job at the book depository.
After the turmoil following the assassination, Paine built a career in education. She became principal of a small Quaker school near Philadelphia, earned a master’s degree and worked for many years as a school psychologist in Florida before retiring and moving to California, her daughter said. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination, the Paine home in Irving was opened to the public as a museum recreating its 1963 appearance.
Paine maintained that the assassination did not define the rest of her life and affirmed her belief in the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone, Mallon said. She continued to participate in serious inquiries into the events, providing interviews and testimony to researchers seeking to document what she had witnessed.