Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - The JFK Assassination

Episode Date: August 15, 2026

On the morning of November 22nd, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald got up before his family was awake, left his wedding ring on the dresser, and carried a long brown package to work. He told his coworker it was curtain rods. A few miles away, President John F. Kennedy was getting ready for a motorcade through downtown Dallas. In the first part of our 3-part series on the JFK assassination, Katie Ring traces everything that had to happen, and everything that went wrong, before the two men ended up on the same street.Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this.

Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. On the morning of Friday, November 22nd, 1963, two men woke up a few miles apart in Texas. One was arguably the most famous man alive.

He'd spent the night in a hotel in Fort Worth and by lunchtime, he would be riding through downtown Dallas in an open car, waving to a crowd of thousands of people. The other was a broke husband and a father, sleeping alone in a rented room across town under a name that wasn't his. That morning, he got up before dawn and headed to work at a warehouse overlooking a square called Dealey Plaza. He carried a long package wrapped in brown paper,

and a coworker asked what it was. He said it was curtain rods, but it wasn't. By one o'clock that afternoon, the president of the United States would be dead. And the man who'd lied about the package would become the most hated man in the country, Lee, Harvey, Oswald. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away.

Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm catering, and this is America's most infamous crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still on us today. This is the first of our three-episode series on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a tragedy that changed America forever. Today, we're going back to the beginning, to the president the world adored, and the drifter

with nothing to lose. Because to understand what happened on that street in Dallas, you have to understand how both of them got there. In the fall of 1963, John F. Kennedy was about as close as America had ever come to a movie star in the White House. He was 46, tall, tanned, and quick with a joke, usually at his own expense. He had a beautiful wife the whole country adored, two little kids who played under his desk in the Oval Office, and a way of speaking on television that made people feel like he was talking to them alone. There would eventually be a word for it all, Camelot. That word came later, and it came from

his widow. At the time, people just knew they liked him. What they didn't see, was how much of that image was held together with willpower and medication. Behind the healthy tan was a man who'd been sick for most of his life. As a boy, JFK was in and out of hospitals, so often his family half joked he might not reach adulthood. As an adult, he lived with chronic back pain and a serious illness called Addison's disease, which left his body unable to regulate itself without daily medicine. He wore a brace under his shirt. Some days, he could barely bend to lift his own children. That picture of youth and energy that America fell in love with was actually a man in pain who'd simply decided the country would never see it. His father had groomed his sons for

public life, and during World War II, he'd become a real hero. When a Japanese destroyer sliced his patrol boat in half in the Pacific, Kennedy gathered his surviving crew and swam for hours to a tiny island, towing a badly burned man the whole way by a life vest strap, clenched in his teeth, wrecking his back for good in the process. After the war, he served in Congress, then the Senate, and then in 1960, the presidency, by one of the narrowest margins in American history, against a sitting vice president, Richard Nixon, and it didn't come easily. JFK was Catholic, and a lot of Protestants were afraid that he'd take his orders from the Pope.

Kennedy faced it head on, standing before a room of skeptical ministers, and promising he believed in America where church and state stayed firmly separate. The other test was television. In the first ever televised presidential debates, Kennedy looked calm and youthful, while Nixon looked pale, sweaty and old, and politics changed forever.

At 43, John F. Kennedy became the youngest man ever elected president and the first Catholic. On a freezing January morning in 1961, he told the country to ask, not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. And a lot of people believed him. He called his agenda the new frontier.

During his first months in office, he created the Peace Corps, sending young Americans overseas to help others. And he set a goal for the country that sounded almost absurd at the time to land a man on the moon and bring him safely home before the decade was out. It was exactly what people loved about him, the feeling that the future was just something you could decide to go build, but it wasn't all smooth sailing. Just a few months in, he signed off on a secret plan to land a force of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs

and toppled Fidel Castro. It was a fiasco. The invasion collapsed on the beach, the men were captured or killed, and JFK looked weak in front of the world. He didn't try and hide from it, though. Kennedy went on TV and took the blame himself, and the next time he, got tested, the results were much different. In October of 1962, spy planes caught the Soviet Union installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. It was a massive escalation in the Cold War and for the next two weeks, the world was at the brink of a nuclear disaster.

But Kennedy didn't fold under the pressure. He managed to cut a deal behind the scenes, and the Soviets pulled the missiles out. JFK had plenty to deal with in the U.S. too. The civil rights movement was gaining steam and Kennedy was doing what he could to support it. In June of 1963, he sent federal authorities to make sure two black students were allowed to enroll at the University of Alabama. He called segregation a moral crisis and sent Congress a massive civil rights bill, which didn't make him a lot of friends in certain parts of the country. And overseas, he was gathering military assets in Vietnam as the latest move in the fight between, communism and capitalism. It was the early stages of the massive war that would go on to define a

generation and another decision that put JFK under a magnifying glass. All the while he was going through a painful family tragedy. Kennedy and his wife Jackie were seen as one of the world's biggest power couples. She was fashionable, elegant, and capable of charming anyone who set foot in the White House, all while giving birth to two children, Caroline and John Jr. And in August of 1963, they had another baby boy, Patrick. But he was born too early before his lungs were fully developed. He lived for only two days and died with his father holding his hand. The Kennedy's friend said the loss broke something in both of them and drew them closer than they'd been in years, which is part of why that fall, Jackie agreed to do something she almost never did,

go along on a political trip, a quick swing through Texas, four cities, and two days. It was another high-stakes moment in JFK's political career. Texas Democrats were feuding and Kennedy needed the state for the re-election fight coming in 1964, so the president would go down and play peacemaker. He'd shake hands, give speeches, raise money, and remind everyone they were on the same team. team. And in a lot of ways, he was venturing into enemy territory, especially in Dallas, where there was a lot of anger about him and his administration. Just a few weeks earlier, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations had been jeered, spat on, and even hit over the head with a

protest sign by a furious crowd there. And in the days before JFK's visit, hostile leaflets attacking him had started appearing around town. The mood in Dallas was so bad, some of the president's advisors wondered if it would be safe for him to visit at all. But by the fall of 1963, JFK's trip to Dallas was set in motion. Hey, Ontario, come on down to BetmGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive the Price is Right Fortune Pick has to offer. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show only at BetmGM. Check out how we've reimagined three of the show's iconic games, like Plinko, Cliff,

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Listen to Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts. The other man in the story began with almost nothing and spent his short life chasing somewhere to belong. Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans in 1939, two months after his father. died of a heart attack. He was mostly raised by his mother, a difficult, self-absorbed woman named Marguerite who moved the family constantly from city to city. When money got too tight, she parked her boys in an orphanage for a while. Oswald was barely three. By the time he was a teenager, he'd been enrolled in a dozen different schools. Growing up in that kind of chaotic environment, it's no surprise that he grew up into a bit of a loner. Oswald was smart enough but with

drawn and had something dark simmering underneath the surface. During one stretch living in New York, he stopped going to school almost entirely. A truancy case landed him in front of a judge, and for several weeks he was held in a juvenile detention center for evaluation. The psychiatrist who examined him described a tense, detached kid who lived almost entirely inside his own head, resentful of a world he already felt had no place for him. But nobody thought he was dangerous. They thought he was just lonely, and he was. At 17, Oswald found the first thing that ever felt like an identity, the United States Marine Corps. He enlisted, trained as a radar operator tracking aircraft, and served overseas, including a tour in Japan. He learned to handle a rifle the way every Marine does,

but he still didn't fit in. Oswald was vocal about his beliefs in communism, which didn't exactly make him popular with his fellow Marines. He even got himself court-martialed twice, once after an unauthorized pistol he'd been keeping went off and wounded him in the arm, and once for picking a fight with a sergeant, and he'd talked a lot about starting his life over somewhere far away. In 1959, he made that fantasy a reality. Oswald got an early discharge claiming he needed to care for his mother, then almost immediately did the one thing guaranteed to horrify everyone back home. He went to the Soviet Union. Oswald turned up in Moscow and announced he wanted to give up his American citizenship and become a Soviet citizen. You'd think they'd be

happy to have him, but the truth was, even they didn't really know what to make of him. So they told Oswald he had to go back home. But he didn't take the rejection well and tried to die by suicide in his hotel room. And the Soviets decided to let him stay. And right away, he tried to make his loyalties loud and clear. On his way out of the embassy, Oswald summoned American reporters to denounce his own country. That didn't mean he was going to be paraded around as a poster child for communism, though. The Soviets shipped Oswald off to the city of Minsk and put him to work at a radio factory. But it wasn't all bad. They gave him an apartment that was nicer than anything he'd ever had at home, and he even fell in love. In Minsk, Oswald met a young pharmacy worker

named Marina at a dance. They got married just a few weeks later and a baby girl followed shortly after that, but the good times didn't last. Oswald found Soviet life gray, dull, and disappointing. The factory work was tedious and there weren't exactly a lot of entertainment options in the city. Within a couple of years, he wanted out.

Back to the country, he tried to renounce. And in the summer of 1962, with a small loan from the U.S. government to cover the trip, He came home to Texas with a Russian wife, a baby daughter, and a fresh grievance against both nations. He settled first around Fort Worth, Texas, then Dallas. The area's small community of Russian expats took a liking to Marina and tried to help the young family, but they were put off by Oswald, who struck them as arrogant and cold.

He bounced from one low-wage job to the next and lost most of them, including a sin at a Dallas printing company. and his personal life wasn't any better. He directed his anger into abusing his wife, and his politics got even more extreme. Oswald was convinced that the whole system was rotten and that he was going to bring it all down. In early 1963, using a fake name, he mail-ordered two weapons, a 38-caliber revolver and an Italian military rifle, which was a 6.5-millimeter Carcano fitted with a cheap telescope. site. That spring, in the backyard of their Dallas home, Marina snapped a photograph of him that the whole world would see soon enough. Oswald dressed in black, the rifle in one hand,

a pair of left-wing newspapers in the other, and the pistol on his hip. In that picture, he looked like a man cosplaying as a revolutionary, but then he used the rifle for real. His target was a former army general named Edwin Walker, a far-right political figure, Oswald. couldn't stand. In the days beforehand, he photographed Walker's house in Dallas and the alley behind it. Then, on an April night in 1963, Oswald aimed his rifle through Walker's window while he sat at his desk and fired. The bullet smacked into the window frame missing Walker by an inch. He was just nicked by a few bullet fragments, but nothing serious. Oswald hid the rifle and went home. The shooting stayed unsolved for months. Investigators,

wouldn't connect it to Oswald until after JFK's assassination. But in hindsight, it shows us that he'd already decided that killing a public figure he hated was something he was willing to do. And it wouldn't be long until he found a new target. In the summer of 1963, he drifted again, this time back to his hometown of New Orleans, where he expressed a newfound loyalty. He threw his support behind Cuba, setting up a one-man chapter of a pro-cassad. Castro group. Oswald handed out leaflets on street corners, got arrested after a public scuffle with anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and even argued his case on local radio. But he wasn't getting the attention he wanted. In the fall, he made one last desperate move. He traveled down to Mexico

City and showed up at the Cuban and Soviet embassies, trying to get permission to go to Cuba. And from there, maybe back to the Soviet Union. Both of them turned him down. So in Early October of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald came back to Dallas. He was 24 years old with no money and no real job. His marriage was hanging by a thread. Marina was pregnant with their second child, living with a friend out in the suburbs, while Oswald rented a cheap room in the city under yet another fake name.

He failed at nearly everything he'd ever attempted just to find somewhere he belonged to feel important. And soon, he would try and adjust. achieve it in the most horrifying way possible. In the middle of October 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald needed work. His wife, Marino was staying with a family friend named Ruth Payne in the suburb of Irving, and it was through her that he got a lead. One of Ruth's neighbors mentioned there was an opening at a warehouse downtown,

a book depository that filled school textbook orders. The pay was bad and the work was boring, but it was a job and Oswald took it. He started clocking in around the middle of the month. The building sat on the corner of a downtown square called Dealey Plaza. There's no evidence Oswald chose it for any other reason beyond the fact that they were hiring. When he started that October, there was no presidential trip on the calendar. No reason on earth to think the president of the United States would ever come near a textbook warehouse in Dallas.

It was simply a job a drifter took because a neighbor happened to mention it. The work itself was simple and forgiven. Oswald filled orders for schoolbooks, pulling titles off shelves, carrying cartons between floors, punching in and out alongside a couple dozen other men. To the people he worked next to every day, he was just Lee, the new hire who didn't say much. None of them knew about Russia or the rifle in the suburbs or the general across town who'd nearly been shot at his own desk a few months earlier. Around the same time, Oswald's second daughter was born. He was now, a father of two who saw his family only on weekends riding out to irving on Fridays and coming back

into the city for work during the week he rented a small room in the oak cliff section of dallas under the name o h lee the landlady knew him only as a quiet odd little man who kept to himself and he kept the rifle out of sight broken down wrapped in a blanket stored in the garage of the house in irving where marina and the girls were living out of sight out of mind for now. Meanwhile, the president's trip was taking shape. The whole point was to bring the warring factions of the Texas Democrats together, and the man caught in the middle was the state's governor, John Connolly, a tough conservative power broker who'd been riding in JFK's car. Connolly's conservative faction was on one side. The state's liberals led by a U.S. senator who wouldn't even share a car

with the vice president was on the other. Kennedy was coming down to hold the fragile coalition together in 1964. The plan was a quick two-day swing, San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, and then on Friday, Dallas. There would be a luncheon speech at a hall called the trademark with a 10-mile motorcade winding through downtown to get him there. The idea was to let people see him, to put the president in a slow, open car so that the crowds packed along the curbs could get a good long look at him and his glamorous wife. By mid-November, their route was locked in, and like any other big public event, it ran in the local papers so people would know where to stand. Days before the visit, Dallas newspapers printed the path.

The motorcade would roll down Main Street, turn right onto Houston, then make a slow, sharp left onto Elm, a hairpin turn that forced the cars to crawl, and that would carry the president's open limousine directly past the upper windows of the Texas School Book Depository, the same warehouse where Lee Harvey Oswald had been working for the past five weeks. The route was picked for ordinary reasons. It was the natural way to get from downtown out to the luncheon hall. The men guarding the president were worried about the things they were always worried about. But in 1963, a sitting president still rode through American cities in an open convertible,

close enough to reach out and touch. On Thursday, November 21st, 1963, Kennedy flew into Texas and, worked his way across the state. A warm reception in San Antonio, then Houston, where Jackie surprised and delighted a Latino civic group by addressing them in Spanish, then Fort Worth for the night. The crowds were big and friendly and the earlier fear that Texas might turn ugly started to fade. That same Thursday, Lee Harvey Oswald did something he never did. He asked a co-worker for a ride out to Irving on a weeknight, not his usual Friday.

He said he wanted to go home to pick up some curtain rods for his room. He spent the night at the house where his wife and daughters were staying and tried one more time to talk Marina into moving back in with him. She said no, and at some point that evening out in the garage, the blanket holding the rifle was disturbed. The next morning, Friday, November 22nd, John F. Kennedy woke up in Fort Worth to a light rain and a crowd already gathered in the wet outside his his hotel, just hoping to catch a glimpse of him. He went out and spoke to them in the drizzle. Then he headed inside for a breakfast speech, and Jackie came down in a pink suit and matching pillbox hat, ready for the day ahead. In Irving, Lee Harvey Oswald got up before his wife and children were awake. He left his wedding ring behind, dropped in a little cup on the dresser. He left almost

all his cash he had, about $170 for Marina and the girls. And he carried a long long time. He package wrapped in brown paper out to his co-worker's car, holding it oddly, cupped down along his side. The coworker noticed it and asked what it was. Oswald told him again, it was curtain rods for his apartment. The man would later remember Oswald walking in front of him and carrying the package close. Inside, the morning started like any other. Oswald clocked in and went to work and nobody paid him any mind. What made that particular day different was the building itself. A crew was busy laying new plywood flooring on the upper levels, and things had been shuffled around to make room, leaving the top floors unusually empty and quiet.

Oswald had the run of all of it, including the sixth floor, where towers of book cartons stood stacked beside the tall windows that looked straight down onto Elm Street. By late morning, the rain over Dallas had blown off, and the sky opened into a bright, warm afternoon. The weather turned so pleasant that the clear plastic bubble top was taken off the president's car. Downtown, the crowds were enormous and friendly, people standing three and four deep along the route, waving, cheering, lifting their kids onto their shoulders to see. The president's plane touched down at Love Field a little after 1130. Jackie was handed a bouquet of red roses as she stepped off. The most powerful man in the world walked straight over to the fence line to shake hands with the

people who'd come out to see him while the crowd roared. But a few blocks away on the sixth floor of a textbook warehouse overlooking Dealey Plaza, the brown paper package was already open and empty. It's time to ring the alarm where I'll be answering all of your questions and give my unfiltered thoughts on the case. So make sure to comment below and let's keep the discussion going. Okay, we're one episode in. What's the thing about Lee Harvey Oswald? you keep circling back to. I think one thing is just how small his life was. We build him up in our heads as this larger than life figure because of what he's attached to. But the guy himself was 24 years old, broke, couldn't hold down a job, couldn't keep his marriage together. He had failed at literally

everything he had ever tried. The Marines defecting to Russia, then coming crawling back, and the whole revolutionary act down in New Orleans. Every door he walked through, he turned around and walked right back out of, usually because he'd set it on fire behind him. And I think that's the part people really don't want, because it's so much less satisfying than a grand plan. He wasn't a criminal mastermind. He was a deeply unhappy, deeply resentful man who desperately wanted to be somebody and kept coming up empty. And two things can coexist. You can have real compassion for a lonely, fatherless kid who got bounced through a dozen schools and a juvenile detention center, but also realized at some point this person had made decisions that shaped who he is and the monstrous act he carried out.

Understanding where someone comes from is not the same thing as excusing where he ended up. Those are two different jobs and we're going to keep both of them honest this week. Do you think he was always going to do something like this? I don't think you can ever really say always going to. That said, there were definitely signs of escalating behavior, behavior that clearly showed he was capable of what he did. particularly the walker shooting, which I don't think we talk about enough, because I didn't even know about it really until researching for this episode. Six, seven months before Dallas, this man picked up a rifle

and tried to kill a public figure he hated through the window of the guy's own home. He missed by inches and got clean away with it. Nobody even knew it was him for months. So the idea that Oswald was capable of this kind of political violence, that wasn't a theory people cooked up afterward. There is already a dress rehearsal. It just failed and failed quietly and everyone moved on with their lives. There's a whole universe of people who are absolutely certain he didn't act alone. You're not going to tell us where you land, are you? Not yet, but we will be getting into all of that in part three. The Warren Commission, the second investigation that reached a totally different conclusion. The theories and the documents they are still releasing to this day.

There are a lot of conspiracies, and I definitely have my own opinions, so make sure to stay tuned. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. To enhance your listening experience, join Crimehouse Plus and get all three parts of each week's America's most infamous crime stories dropped at once every Monday and at free. You also get the rest of the crimehouse lineup at free and early and exclusive bonus episodes. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com, or if you listen on Apple podcast, tap try free at the top of the America's Most Infamous Crime Show page. Come back tomorrow for the next episode on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for

hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.