One of the most dramatic events in history was the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. The scene at the assassination has been described as pure chaos, as can be expected, with people ducking to the ground to protect themselves and others fleeing to get as far away from the scene as possible. The police in the aftermath had their work cut out for them, searching for the man who had fired the fatal shot. They had also sought anyone at all who may have captured the crime on camera. It is from this hunt that the story of the Babushka Lady emerged and you need to read on below to discover the origin of the name and who this woman was.
As the police were quick to discover, hardly anyone saw exactly what had happened and the few people who had been wielding a camera had it pointed at the president. The police still proceeded to collect all the footage they could get their hands on related to the assassination looking desperately for clues.
The hard work of the police in scouring through all the footage paid off when in the midst of the pictures gathered, they saw a woman – her face had been covered with a headscarf or a camera or her hands. It looked to them like she had a camera which had captured the assassination live on film. They immediately issued a bulletin, calling for information on the woman whom they dubbed the Babushka Lady due to the supposed headscarf that had obscured much of her face.
Who Was the Babushka Lady?
Even after many years removed from the dramatic effects of the JFK assassination, the FBI and other authorities have never quite figured out who exactly the Babushka Lady was. There have been many people who have come forward, claiming to be the camera-shy woman but their claims have mostly been dismissed for lacking proof. There was, however, one lady who stood out from the crowd of claimants.
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A woman named Beverly Oliver came out with a revelation in 1970 that she was the Babushka Lady. She had spoken to a conspiracy researcher named Gary Shaw while they were at a church revival meeting in Texas. She made the claim that she had filmed the assassination on a Super 8 film Yashica camera, but then said that before she could develop the film it was confiscated by two FBI agents. She said that although she had never seen the credentials, they had claimed to be agents. She also said that she had been told that the film would be returned to her in 10 days which never happened and she never saw the video again. She gave her reason for not following up as the fear that she would be arrested for possessing marijuana.
Did She Capture JFK’s Assassination ON Camera?
Her story was carried by local news crews and documentary filmmakers also picked it up, embellishing her tale more and more. She was insistent on her story but so were many of the people who doubted and opposed it. The doubters first picked at the detail of the camera. They pointed out that the Yashica Super 8 had not been produced until six years after the assassination in 1969. She hit back at their doubt by insisting that she had an experimental model of the camera that she had gotten before it was made available widely.
Some other opposers of her story said that the person who had featured in the image of the Babushka Lady was a tall, thin 17-year-old rather than the short older woman that had come out in 1970.
Without a precise identification of who exactly the Babushka Lady was, it is hard to determine whether she really did film the assassination of President J. F Kennedy. Beverly Oliver’s story, however, caused a lot of conspiracy theories to spring up from suggestions that the Babushka Lady had been a Russian Spy to claims that a government cover-up was underway due to the two FBI agents she had spoken of who had taken the video and never returned it.
It is anyone’s guess till this day whether there is indeed a Babushka Lady out there holding on to a piece of American history or whether Beverly Oliver’s story is true and the evidence was indeed taken away from her or whether there was ever really a video in the first place.
