Twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was the accused murderer of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy. Oswald was a former U.S. Marine who embraced Marxism and defected, for a time, to the Soviet Union. Oswald never stood trial for the murder. On Sunday, November 24, 1963, two days after Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner with connections to the criminal underworld, in the basement of Dallas City Hall.
A special President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, better known as the Warren Commission because it was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, investigated the assassination from November 1963 to September 1964. Its report concluded that neither Oswald nor Ruby “was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.” However, in March 1979, after a two-year investigation, a special House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that a second assassin may also have fired a shot and that there may have been a conspiracy. The evidence remains highly debatable.