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Lee Harvey Oswald coffin up for sale

The coffin of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President John F Kennedy, is up for auction.

A Los Angeles auction house said on Tuesday it would sell the simple pine coffin in which Oswald was buried for almost 20 years.

Bidding will start at $1,000 (£640), but the item is expected to fetch strong interest from museums and collectors of presidential memorabilia when it goes under the hammer on Dec. 16.

“There’s just a lot of interest in Kennedy and anything to do with his assassination,” said Laura Yntema, auction manager at Santa Monica, California-based Nate D. Sanders.

The coffin was unearthed in October 1981 after a legal dispute between Oswald’s widow, Marina, and his brother, Robert. Marina successfully sought an exhumation to test a conspiracy theory that a lookalike Russian agent had been buried in her husband’s place, according to the auction house.

A medical exam showed the badly decomposed body was indeed Oswald’s, and he was returned to Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park in Fort Worth, Texas, in a new casket.

The original coffin, which had suffered extensive water damage, is being sold by Baumgardner Funeral Home, the local undertaker which handled the re-internment.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .