After Strange Saga, Oswald's Gravestone Is Moved 900 Miles

Dallas bar-owner David Card spent nearly four years of his life and a "brutal" amount in legal fees for the right to return the grave marker of Lee Harvey Oswald, who he calls "the most famous assassin in the history of civilization," home to Texas. And, last week he finally did just that, the Dallas Morning News reports. The strange history of the marker started on the fourth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, when some Oklahoma teens swiped it from a Fort Worth cemetery as a prank. CBS DFW reports the marker was returned to Oswald's mother, who put a more discreet marker on his grave and stashed the original in her crawlspace. Card's father eventually bought the Oswald home. After changing hands within the family, a distant relative eventually sold the marker to Illinois' Historic Auto Attractions in 2011 for $45,000.

CBS reports Card went to court to prove his relative didn't have the right to sell the marker, and on July 19 the parties settled out of court. Last week, Card and a friend drove the 140-pound granite marker back to Texas all the way from Roscoe, Ill.—a distance of more than 900 miles. "You touch it, and it's like you're reaching 6 feet down and right into Oswald's coffin," he told the Morning News. Card tells CBS he'd like to give the marker to the museum housed in the building from which Oswald allegedly fired, but he may have a private showing of it in his bar first. At the moment, he claims that Oswald's grave marker is "in an undisclosed location guarded by the hounds from hell." (More John F. Kennedy stories.)