Babushka lady

The Babushka Lady is a nickname for an unknown woman who might have filmed the presidential motorcade in Dealey Plaza during the John F. Kennedy assassination. She was called the Babushka Lady because she wore a headscarf similar to scarves worn by elderly Russian women or grandmothers (бабушка means grandmother or old woman in Russian). She appeared to be filming with an amateur movie camera.

She was in turn filmed by others, proving her presence on the square (such as this [http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/muchmore.jpgMuchmore frame] and Zapruder [http://www.assassinationresearch.com/zfilm/z285.jpgFrame 285] ), but it is not positively known who she was. The Babushka Lady was standing on the grass between Elm and Main streets and she can be seen in the Zapruder film as well as in the films of Orville Nix [http://www.jfk-online.com/1nix.html] , Marie Muchmore and Mark Bell [http://www.jfk-online.com/1bell.html] (44 seconds and 49 seconds into the Bell film: even though the shooting had already taken place and most of her surrounding witnesses took cover, she can be seen still standing and even seems to continue filming). After the shootings, she crossed Elm Street and joined the crowd that went up the grassy knoll in search of a gunman. She is last seen in photographs walking east on Elm Street.

The Babushka Lady never came forward. The police and the FBI did not find her, and the film shot from her position never turned up, despite a request by the FBI to local photo processors that they would be interested in any pictures or films of the assassination.

In 1970, a woman named Beverly Oliver came forward and claimed to be the Babushka Lady. She had worked in 1963 as a singer and dancer at a strip club that competed with Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. In 1994, she released a memoir chronicling the events of the day of Kennedy's assassination, but she has not been able to provide convincing proof she was there. Oliver says her film was taken by Federal agent Regis Kennedy and never returned.

Critics have noted a number of inconsistencies with her story, such as her alleged use of a model of camera that did not exist in 1963, and her claim to have positioned herself just behind Charles Brehm and his son, despite Brehm's testimony that he and his son had hurried to that position at the last moment.

Oliver was played by Lolita Davidovich in the 1991 film "JFK", but is not portrayed as claiming to be the Babushka Lady. In the director's cut she is depicted as wearing a head scarf at Dealey Plaza and speaking of having given the film she shot to two men claiming to be FBI agents.

External links

* [http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/oliver.htm Is Beverly Oliver the "Babushka Lady"?] .
* [http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100bev.html The JFK 100: 100 Errors in Fact and Judgment in Oliver Stone's Assassination Movie: Beverly Oliver] .
* [http://www.geocities.com/shotonelm/Knoll/babushka.html Shot on Elm: The Babushka Lady] .