One of the most dramatic events in history was the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. The scene at the assassination was, as might be expected, described as pure chaos, with people crouching to protect themselves and others who were fleeing to get as far away from the scene as possible. The police had stopped working for them, looking for the man who fired the fatal shot. They were even looking for someone who might have caught the crime on camera. It was from this hunt that the story of the Babushka lady emerged, and you must read below to discover the origin of this woman’s name and identity.
As police quickly found out, hardly anyone saw exactly what happened, and the few people who had used a camera pointed at the president. Police were still collecting all the footage they could get because the assassination was desperate for clues.
The police’s hard work in sifting through all the footage paid off when, amidst the collected images, they saw a woman – her face covered with a headscarf or a camera or her hands. It looked to her as if she had a camera that had caught the assassination live on film. They immediately issued a bulletin asking for information about the woman, whom they dubbed the Babushka lady because the supposed headscarf covered much of her face.
Who was the babushka?
Removed from the drama even after many years from the aftermath of the assassination by JFK, the FBI and other agencies never fully figured out exactly who the Babushka lady was. There have been many people who have claimed to be the camera-shy woman, but their claims have been largely dismissed for lack of evidence. However, there was one lady who stood out from the crowd of applicants.
A woman named Beverly Oliver came with a revelation in 1970 that she was the Babushka Lady. She had spoken to a conspiracy researcher named Gary Shaw when they were at a church revitalization meeting in Texas. She made claims that she filmed the assassination with a Super 8 film Yashica camera, but then said it was confiscated by two FBI agents before she could develop the film. She said that although she never saw the credentials, she claimed to be an agent. She also said she was told the film would be sent back to her in 10 days, which never happened and she never saw the video again. She justified this by saying that she feared being arrested for marijuana possession.Did she really film the JFK assassination?
Her story was picked up by local news crews and documentary filmmakers have also been embellishing her story more and more. She persisted with her story, but so did many of the people who doubted it and spoke out against it. The doubters first grabbed the detail of the camera. They pointed out that the Yashica Super 8 was not manufactured until six years after the 1969 assassination. She denied that she owned an experimental model of the camera, which she received before it became widely available.
Some other opponents of her story said that the person depicted in the picture of the babushka lady was a tall, slender 17-year-old, and not the short older woman that came out in 1970.
Without an accurate identification of exactly who the Babushka lady was, it was difficult to determine if she really filmed the assassination attempt on President JF Kennedy. However, Beverly Oliver’s story gave rise to many conspiracy theories based on the babushka lady having been a Russian spy and claiming that a government cover-up was underway due to the two FBI agents she spoke to on video and never returned it.
It’s unclear to this day if there is indeed a babushka lady out there clinging to a piece of American history, or if Beverly Oliver’s story is true and the evidence was actually taken from her, or if there was any video at all?
