MAGIC TOOTH,

VANISHING SCARS

Myra DaRouse was (HARVEY) Oswald's 8th grade homeroom teacher at Beauregard JHS (New Orleans) in the winter/spring semester of 1954. Myra knew and remembered (HARVEY) Oswald very well. She broke up a fight when Oswald was being attacked by several boys. She said, "He didn't start the fight, HARVEY had no fight in him whatsoever." After school, during basketball season, Ed Voebel ran out of the building and said to Myra and fellow teacher Dorothy Duvic, "A piano fell on HARVEY." Myra and Dorothy ran to the basement cafeteria and saw HARVEY, in the middle of the floor, with a piano on top of his legs. The teachers lifted the piano from HARVEY'S legs and Myra asked the school principal if she should take HARVEY to the clinic. Myra drove him to the Monte Lepri Clinic for an examination. She then drove him to his apartment at 126 Exchange Place. Myra saw HARVEY every day reading books, both before and after school. And she saw HARVEY and Ed Voebel ride their bicycles around the school ground during the spring of 1954. After the spring semester ended, neither she nor Ed Voebel saw HARVEY again.

Six months later, in the fall of 1954, Ed Voebel became acquainted with LEE Oswald after he witnessed him in a fight with Johnny and Mike Neumeyer (9th grade). The fight lasted a long time and was witnessed and remembered by several students at Beauregard. After the fight Voebel and two friends got some ice for (LEE) Oswald and attempted to patch him up. Forty years later Johnny Neumeyer and John Lane still remembered the fight, but neither man remembered whether or not Oswald lost a tooth. Voebel remembered, and testified before the Warren Commission (Volume 8, page 3):

Mr. JENNER. But you do remember that you attempted to help him when he was struck in the mouth on that occasion; is that right?

Mr. VOEBEL. Yes; I think he even lost a tooth from that. I think he was cut on the lip, and a tooth was knocked out.

--Warren Commission: Vol. 8, Page 3

A few days later a friend of the Neumeyers, Robin Reily, was quietly waiting for Oswald on the school steps. As (LEE) Oswald walked down the steps Reily punched Oswald in the face and then quickly ran away. Another bloody lip for Oswald.

Shortly after the fight, which occurred in November, 1954, Voebel took this photograph that appears to show (LEE) Oswald missing a front tooth. After the assassination, Voebel sold his photo to LIFE magazine for $75.

Life magazine editors must have been thrilled to find a photo suggesting Oswald was a hostile kid even in the ninth grade. But did this 15 year old teenager grow up to be the accused assassin of President Kennedy ?

When Myra was shown the LIFE Magazine photo of Oswald, she stared at the photo for several minutes. She remembered the teacher and several students in the photo, but Myra said the young man facing the camera was not HARVEY. She said, "Look at him, he is tall and husky. HARVEY was a little fellow, short and thin. I don't know who this fellow is." Myra was correct, the LIFE magazine photo was of LEE Oswald (not HARVEY).

Click here to see interview of Myra Darouse.

Ed Voebel had befriended the small, thin HARVEY Oswald for several months in the spring of 1954. Six months later Voebel met the tall, husky LEE Oswald when he got into a fight with the Neymeyer brothers. Their friendship grew and Voebel met LEE Oswald's tall, nice-looking mother. The boys played pool and attended a pre-high school orientation in the spring of 1955. It was Voebel who got Oswald interested in the CAP. Their friendship lasted thru the summer of 1955.

Following the assassination, Voebel talked about his friendship with LEE Oswald, on camera. Voebel said that he liked Oswald and that he (LEE Oswald) never backed down from a fight. Voebel said that whenever LEE got into a fight, he was determined to finish it. Ed Voebel was perhaps the only person who befriended both "HARVEY" (last semester of the 8th grade) and "LEE" (both semesters of the 9th grade) at Beauregard JHS. Eight years later, following the assassination of President Kennedy, Voebel may never have realized that it was HARVEY, not LEE, who was accused of killing JFK. But if Ed Voebel, or anyone else, were ever to realize that HARVEY Oswald and LEE Oswald were two different people who shared the same identity, then that knowledge could place them in serious jeopardy. Hiding the true identities of HARVEY and LEE and merging them into a single "Lee Harvey Oswald" was paramount and crucial to the governmental coverup. If the "Oswald Project" was ever exposed to the public, it would lead directly to the people and the agency responsible for the assassination.

One evening in 1971 Voebel called home and said he wasn't feeling well. A doctor spoke with Voebel's sister and asked if he (Voebel) had been around any insecticides or poisons, which he had not. Voebel then told his sister that he was feeling OK and he would be home tomorrow. Voebel died that evening at the age of 31 at the Oshner Clinic, in New Orleans. Curiously, the local newspaper reported that Voebel died at the Memorial Hospital.

Ed Voebel would have made a fascinating witness for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The Committee sought to locate Voebel to take his testimony but learned from his father, Sidney Voebel, that his son had died in 1971. Sidney Voebel could not recall what his son had told him regarding his past contacts with Oswald and Ferrie. While stating that he doesn't "have any proof," Mr. Voebel said he believed that the circumstances surrounding his son's death were "mysterious." He "died suddenly from a blood clot" at the age of 31 when he suffered an attack of pneumonia. (HSCA, vol 9, p 109). Similarly, Dave Ferrie knew LEE Oswald in the CAP (1955) and met HARVEY Oswald in the summer of 1963. Ferrie died at age 49 under suspicious circumstances.

In 1981, HARVEY Oswald's body was exhumed, autopsied, photographed (below) and x-rayed, but there were no missing or chipped teeth. The boy in the LIFE Magazine photo with the missing tooth (LEE Oswald) was not the person killed by Jack Ruby.

LEE OSWALD: two scars from a gunshot wound

On October 27, 1957 Richard Cyr was standing about 15 yards from his barracks in Atsugi, Japan and heard a gunshot. Cyr and other marines ran into the building and found (LEE) Oswald sitting on his locker with a nickel-plated .22 derringer laying nearby on the floor. (LEE) Oswald said, "It seems as though I've shot myself." Oswald was taken to the sick bay for treatment and then taken to the U.S. Navy Hospital in nearby Yokosuku. A Navy surgeon closed the wound with stitches and allowed the .22 slug, which lay just below the surface on the back side of Oswald's upper left arm, to remain in his arm. A week later, on November 4, Dr. Greenlees made an incision on the back side of Oswald's arm, removed the .22 caliber slug, and closed the wound with stitches which were removed 10 days later. LEE Oswald had two incisions and now had two scars.

After (HARVEY) Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963, an autopsy was performed by Dr. Earl Rose of Dallas. Dr. Rose listed and described numerous small scars on Oswald's body, including "a pale, white, oblique 1/4 inch scar." But nowhere, in the lengthly and precise autopsy report, did Dr. Rose observe or report any scars on Oswald's left arm. Photographs were taken of Oswalds arms, but show no scars from a bullet wound.

After the autopsy, (HARVEY) Oswald was taken to the funeral home where he was embalmed and prepared for burial by mortician Paul Groody. Groody was subsequently interviewed by the Secret Service and asked if there were any scars on Oswald's arms and he (Groody) repeatedly said there were no scars on Oswald's upper left arm.

LEE OSWALD: three-inch mastoidectomy scar

When LEE Oswald was 6 years old, he had a mastoidectomy operation behind his left ear. In 1956, at age 17, LEE Oswald's Marine medical examination report listed a three-inch mastoid scar behind his left ear. When (HARVEY) Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, Dr. Earl Rose performed the autopsy and noted scars in his report as small as one-sixteenth inch. Dr. Rose also took 27 color slides of Oswald's body which are now in the National Archives. There is no three-inch mastoidectomy scar shown on the autopsy report nor can such a scar be seen in any of the color slides. LEE Oswald had the three-inch mastoidectomy scar, but not HARVEY Oswald, who was shot and killed by Jack Ruby (Ruby knew LEE and HARVEY).

A missing front tooth, scars from a medical operations, and scars from a gunshot wound have long puzzled JFK researchers, but the solution is simple enough. It was LEE Oswald who had a mastoidectomy operation in 1945, lost a tooth from a fight in 1954, and shot himself in the left arm in 1957. But it was HARVEY Oswald who was killed by Jack Ruby, and had no such scars nor a missing front tooth.

After his arrest (HARVEY) Oswald told DPD officer Adamcik and FBI agent Clements, "I am 5 ft. 9 in., weight 140 lbs., have brown hair, blue-gray eyes, and have no tattoos or permanent scars." But (LEE) Oswald had a large mastoidectomy scar and upper-arm scars that were both noted in Marine Corps records (Warren Report, pp 614-618).