Fifty years after he assassinated President John F. Kennedy, the back yard where Lee Harvey Oswald infamously posed with his rifle looks almost untouched.
The white picket fence and wooden stairs remain behind the two-story boarding house at 214 W. Neely St. in Dallas, where Oswald and his wife, Marina, rented an upstairs apartment in March 1963.
The notorious rifle photo, which was from the Dallas Police Department’s file and the Warren Commission documents, was taken before the Oswalds moved to another apartment in Dallas’ Oak Cliff neighborhood.
The photo shows Oswald holding a rifle in one hand “and Communist newspapers in the other,” standing in front of an exterior staircase, according to the Dallas police description.
The snapshot, taken by Oswald’s wife on March 31, 1963, became famous after a similar photo appeared on the cover of Life magazine shortly after the assassination.
Oswald wanted the photo because he was said to be proud of the rifle, which he had just bought by mail order.
Conspiracy theorists have claimed that differences in the shaded light in the photo indicates that it was composed and that Oswald didn’t pose with the rifle.
But Marina Oswald confirmed to investigators that she took the photo of her rifle-toting husband, dressed in black and with a revolver in a holster at his side.
“I asked him why he had dressed himself up like that,” she said. “I thought he had gone crazy.”
An FBI agent later tried to locate Oswald at the home, his only known address, but the Oswalds had moved out. Oswald slept at the home of a friend of his wife on Nov. 21, 1963, the night before the assassination.