Marina Oswald Porter

She was widowed at age 22, two days after the assassination when Oswald was fatally shot by Jack Ruby as Oswald was being transferred from the City Jail to the County Jail. Marina asked to go to Parkland Hospital to see Oswald's body. She opened his eyelids and said, “He cry, he eye wet.“ After the assassination of Kennedy and the arrest of her husband, Marina was under Secret Service protection until she completed her testimony before the Warren Commission. She made a total of four appearances before the commission. Questions about her reliability as a witness were expressed within the commission, particularly in regard to her claims about an assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker, and her allegation that Lee Oswald had intended to assassinate Richard Nixon. In her testimony, she stated her belief that her husband was guilty, an opinion she reiterated in testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.

In 1965 she enrolled at the University of Michigan, but she later returned to Dallas and bought a house. In 1965 she married electronics worker Kenneth Jess Porter, with whom she had a son, and whom she later accused of domestic violence. In 1989, she became a naturalized United States citizen.

In January 1963, Oswald mail-ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver and then, in March, a Mannlicher–Carcano rifle. Later that month, as Marina told the Warren Commission, she took only one photograph of Oswald dressed in black and holding his weapons along with an issue of The Militant newspaper, which named ex-general Edwin Walker as a "fascist." Despite her sworn testimony that she took only one photo, the Warren Commission had two different poses of Lee Oswald, and they browbeat Marina into supposing that she might have accidentally taken the second pose. Since then, history has yielded four different poses, and a credible statement of one more.

These photos became known as the "backyard photos" of Lee Oswald, which some conspiracy theorists dismissed as fake. The series of photographs was later found in the garage of the Paine household, with the exception of one, which had been given to George de Mohrenschildt. The photograph given to de Mohrenschildt was signed and dated by Lee Oswald on April 5, 1963. It also has a quote attributed to Marina in Russian, the translation of which reads "Hunter of Fascists, Ha-Ha-Ha!!!" Marina denied writing the inscription in her 1977 testimony to the HSCA.

In April 1963, Marina and her daughter moved in with Ruth Paine (who had recently separated from her husband, Michael). Lee Oswald rented a separate room in Dallas and briefly moved to New Orleans during the summer of 1963. He returned to Dallas in early October, eventually renting a room in a boarding house in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. Paine learned from a neighbor that employment was available at the Texas School Book Depository, and Oswald was hired and began working there on October 16, 1963, as an order filler. On October 18, Marina and Ruth Paine had planned a birthday party for Oswald. They put up some decorations and got a birthday cake and wine. Oswald was so moved by the gesture that he had tears in his eyes. He remained emotional throughout the evening, crying and apologising to Marina for all the things he had put her through. On October 20, Marina gave birth to a second daughter, Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Her husband continued to live in Oak Cliff on weekdays, but stayed with her at the Paine household in Irving on weekends, an arrangement that continued until Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President Kennedy.

Marina met Lee Harvey Oswald (a former U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union) at a dance on March 17, 1961. They married six weeks later and had a daughter, June Lee, born the following year. In June 1962, the family emigrated to the United States and settled in Dallas, Texas. At a party in February 1963, George de Mohrenschildt introduced the couple to Ruth Paine, a Quaker and Russian language student.

Porter was born Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova in the city of Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk), in Arkhangelsk Oblast, in the northwest of the Soviet Union. She lived there with her mother and stepfather until 1957, when she moved to Minsk to live with her uncle Ilya Prusakov, a colonel in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, and to study pharmacy.

Marina Nikolayevna Oswald Porter (née Prusakova; Russian: Марина Николаевна Прусакова; born July 17, 1941) is the Russian-American widow of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of US President John F. Kennedy.