Eternal Neighbors: Nick Beef and Lee Harvey Oswald

In Fort Worth, Texas, an inconspicuous grave marker in Shannon Rose Hill Chapel & Cemetery says “OSWALD.” It’s the final resting place of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man charged with the assassination of President Kennedy. But next to that simple marker is another strange one. It reads, “NICK BEEF.” Who is Nick Beef and why is this marker there? In this episode, we tell the story and find the truth. Then we chat with “The Mind Noodler,” Matt Donnelly! 

It was an unseasonably warm day in November when Ray Carney showed up at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth. His floral company had been hired to deliver flowers to the gravesite of Lee Harvey Oswald exactly 4 years and one day after he was charged with killing the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. On that Thursday, he delivered the flowers and a card from an anonymous sender that simply read “You will never be forgotten.” But when he found Oswald’s plot, the headstone was missing. 

The headstone had been engraved with Oswald’s full name, birth date, death date and a floral border with a large cross in the middle. But now it was missing, so Carney reported this to the cemetery superintendent Earl Johnson, who placed a small temporary marker in its place. In the meantime, newspapers came to report on the theft of the notable marker. While they were there, another bunch of flowers was delivered with a card that read: “As these flowers hold sweet scent, this grave does hold me innocent. I am. No other voices speak that louder grow. No longer weak. Who if legal means do fail, will some names, true killers tell.” It was signed “C.D.E., Jr, but again no one has ever identified the identity of the sender. 3 years later, Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother, replaced the headstone with a much more discrete version, simply reading, “Oswald” in the hopes that it maybe wouldn’t attract as much attention. She was the one that purchased the plot for her son and planted a large weeping willow tree next to it. 

Lee Harvey Oswald is the man who is blamed for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Of course, since the assassination on November 22nd, 1963 and continuing today, there are all sorts of theories on whether or not Oswald fired the fatal shot, or if there was a conspiracy involving possible other assassins. This podcast isn’t about that. It’s about Oswald’s grave in Fort Worth. 

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans. His father died shortly before he was born and when Lee was 5, his mother moved the family to Fort Worth, Texas. His mother moved the family around a lot requiring Lee to attend multiple different schools around the area. His difficult childhood landed him in juvenile detention by the age of 12 and this continued into adulthood. He had tried living with his half-brother in New York, but that didn’t work out because he tried to stab him. They moved around a ton – Texas, New York, New Orleans and eventually his brother co-signed for him to join the Marine Corps at the age of 17. 

The reports on Oswald’s military service are kind of confusing. On one hand, he scored very high on his shooting test, sort of teetering on the levels of sharpshooter and marksman. But on the other hand, he shot himself in the arm at one point, fought with the sergeant about it, and was court martialed, demoted and imprisoned.  While some of his fellow Marines described him as a “very competent crew chief,” he continued to face punishment for insubordination and was referred to as “Oswaldkovich” by some fellow service members because of his affinity for the Soviet Union and it’s causes. He taught himself Russian while serving and eventually left the Marines on a hardship discharge because he told the Marine Corps that he needed to take care of his ailing mother.

So there’s a lot of weird stuff that happened after this. And I’m trying to pull myself back from talking about all of it, because again – this podcast isn’t about that. But a few bullet points. 

• 1959 Oswald defected to Russia 
• Tried to kill himself in a Russian bathtub
• He unofficially renounced his US citizenship
• Fell in love with a woman from Belarus and proposed to her, but was rejected
• In 1961, he starts to rethink his defection, marries a Russian woman and they apply to return to the U.S. which they do in 1962.
• This whole time, the CIA has been keeping a file on Oswald.

So then we get to 1963. He actually attempted an assassination in April of 63. This was a new piece of information for me – I had never heard about this and it all came out from the Warren Commission which was the group that investigated the JFK assassination. Oswald sent away for this Carcano Rifle through the mail and used it to try to shoot U.S. Major General Edwin Walker, who was an anti-communist, segregationist. None of this was tied to Oswald until after his death. 

It was that same rifle that was found in the 6th floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building after the JFK Assassination. But in between April and November, Oswald had moved back to New Orleans where he was notably handing out flyers for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This was a pro-Castro, anti-U.S. government, activist group that supported Socialist causes and was outspoken against the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. Now some have claimed that he was only part of this group as a spy to infiltrate the organization. There’s no evidence of that, but who knows what we’ll learn in the future as more and more files are released. Between New Orleans and the Kennedy Assassination, he traveled to Mexico City with apparent plans to then go to Cuba, and eventually back to the Soviet Union. He was denied a visa and ended up returning to Dallas in October.

The official published Warren Commission conclusion was that Lee Harvey Oswald and only Lee Harvey Oswald was the person responsible for that fateful day on November 22, 1963. And this is where my podcast is going to do something that I bet every other podcast about Lee Harvey Oswald doesn’t do. I’m skipping past the thing he’s known best for. We’re not talking about the JFK assassination. So let’s skip forward to November 24 – two days after the shooting.

Lee Harvey Oswald was being escorted through the Dallas Police Headquarters to the county jail. It was just before noon and the basement was filled with press, so the whole thing was caught on camera. There was even a crowd outside the police station. 

Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner stepped forward out of the crowd of reporters in the basement and pressed forward a small .38 Colt Cobra revolver toward Oswald and fired a shot into his abdomen. It injured several organs and major arteries. He was taken to the Parkland Memorial Hospital – the same hospital where the President had died, and at 1:07pm – almost exactly 2 days after Kennedy, Oswald died. His last recorded words were “I want to see the American Civil Liberties Union.” 

Lee Harvey Oswald was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth. Before finding a burial space there, multiple other cemeteries had refused to accept his burial. The public obviously hated Oswald – so much so that he had no friends to be his pallbearers. The local press carried his casket. 

Most of the public blamed Oswald alone for killing the President. In those early days, there wasn’t the massive speculation and doubt that exists today. The Warren Commission didn’t release their report until 2 years later, which caused more doubt about the official story when people read what came to be known as the “magic bullet theory.” So it was interesting that there would be the occasional flowers and messages of support laid at Oswald’s grave. 

Like most graves of famous – or infamous – people, it was frequently visited whether people supported him or not. And after that gravestone near the NorthWest corner of the cemetery was stolen 4 years later, Oswald’s elderly mother replaced it with one she thought would garner less attention. It read “Oswald.” But from here on out, we’re changing stories. This isn’t about Oswald’s grave stone. It’s about a strange and mysterious grave stone that appeared immediately to the right of it 30s later. 

In 1997, visitors to the Lee Harvey Oswald burial site saw a strange name next to it. The grave marker said nothing more than the name “Nick Beef.” Nick Beef? Who the hell is Nick Beef? For the next 16 years, no one knew. We know now.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother purchased a newer, less drescript grave marker for her son, and when she passed in 1981, she was buried in a grave nearby. But in 1997, a gravestone showed up to the immediate right of Lee’s. It said, “Nick Beef.” 

For years, people wondered who this person was. History buffs, or curious locals would visit the grave and wonder if Nick Beef was part of the story or perhaps a distant relative. This Houston Chronicle newspaper article from 2005 brings up the mystery with the headline, “Mysterious headstone beside Lee Harvey Oswald grave puzzles Kennedy History buffs.” The article displayed a photo of the gravesite and mentions something that only made things more interesting: the grave was empty. The Manager of the cemetery, Deby Alexander said nobody is on file for that plot, but a burial has not been done there. One theory that people spread was that the cemetery would refuse to give directions to Oswald’s grave so a couple local reporters bought the plot next to it, so people could ask for the name “Nick Beef” in order to find the Oswald burial plot. But that wasn’t the truth – just a rumor. 

One of America’s most debated and controversial events now had another – albeit small – element of mystery. But in 2013, 16 years after the stone was placed, Nick Beef came forward. 

It was coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination and the man who owns the Nick Beef grave marker decided it had been long enough and it was time to tell the truth. The truth is: Nick Beef isn’t anyone. It’s a pseudonym made up by Patric Abedin – a man who considers himself a comedian and performance artist, which is funny because he doesn’t perform and he’s never done stand up comedy. He told his story to NBC News.

He said when he was a child, his parents had brought him to see the President when John F. Kennedy visited Texas in 1963. He was there on November 21st, cheering in the crowd at the airport to greet John and Jackie Kennedy when they landed at Carswell Air Force Base before continuing on to Dallas the next day. He recalled sitting on the shoulders of a nearby Military Police Officer so he could get a glimpse at the President and First Lady as they went by. The next day at school, he told his classmates about how he got to see the President in person. And that day, it was announced over the school loudspeaker that President Kennedy had been shot. Like many people, Abedin remembers exactly where he was when he heard the news. But for him, it was a little bit more personal. 

As he grew older in Texas, he and his mother would drive to Carswell Base and as part of their ritual, they would stop at the Rose Hill Cemetery on their way home and visit the grave of Oswald. His mother said to him, “Never forget that you got to see Kennedy the night before he died.” And when he was 18, there was a newspaper article talking about how the grave beside Oswald’s stood empty because nobody wanted to be buried next to one of history’s most famous assassins. Without so much as a thought, he drove to the cemetery and put down $17.50 and a promise of a further $10 payment for the next 16 months. That was 1975 – and the plot that he purchased stayed empty for the next 22 years. In that time, he had moved to New York and dabbled in Comedy, at first as a player in an Improv Troupe and later as an occasional humor writer, using his Pseudonym of Nick Beef. 

Why “Nick Beef?” It was an inside joke between Patric and his friend from years earlier. They had gone into a restaurant and his buddy had jokingly referred to himself as “Hash Brown,” so Patric played along and said, “I’ll be Nick Beef.” It became a running joke between them and a sort of alter-ego for Abedin. 

In 1996, Abedin’s mother died and he returned to Texas to help conduct her funeral. During that trip, he visited his plot on a pilgrimage to visit Oswald’s grave like he and his mother had done so many times in the past. And this time, he decided he would place his own marker there. He bought a stone that almost perfectly matched the size of Oswald’s. And when they asked him what he wanted on it, he told them “Nick Beef.”

For a lot of people, putting your name – even a fake name – next to a notorious killer would seem morbid. But for Abedin, it was a way to remember that day – and the special bond he had with his family and his mother. Maybe he knew that the general public would find that morbid, so maybe that’s why he chose to put his fake name there. He doesn’t plan on being interred there. He wants to be cremated. The plot isn’t for a body – it’s for his memory. It was his way of commemorating a formative memory in his life. And that’s pretty morbid. But Patric Abedin – who is still alive and living in New York – a non-performing performance artist – readily admits he’s sort of a morbid guy. 

The Internet says it’s true. 

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