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A soap opera tape caught the shot
Breakfast in Palm Beach
It was March 1977, and de Mohrenschildt was in Palm Beach. That morning he sat down for breakfast with journalist Edward Epstein at the Breakers Hotel and admitted that his CIA contact, J. Walt Moore, had put him on Oswald. They broke for lunch and planned to pick things back up at 3:00.
That same morning, congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi drove to de Mohrenschildt's house. De Mohrenschildt wasn't home, so Fonzi left his card with his daughter. De Mohrenschildt came back at 2:00, saw the card, and went upstairs.
The shot on tape
Almost 40 minutes later, his daughter found him. He had apparently shot himself with a shotgun. A maid in the house had been recording a soap opera, and on the tape a single blast comes at 2:21, followed by the sound of a gun hitting the floor.
Why was a congressional committee investigating in 1977?
The House Select Committee on Assassinations was created in 1976 to reexamine the killings of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Gaeton Fonzi was one of its investigators. In 1979 the committee concluded that Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy, a finding based largely on a disputed audio recording from Dealey Plaza. A National Research Council panel reviewed that recording in 1982 and concluded it did not support the existence of a second shooter.
Why was Epstein interviewing de Mohrenschildt?
Edward Jay Epstein had already written Inquest in 1966, a book questioning how the Warren Commission did its work. He later turned to Oswald's own story, and de Mohrenschildt was one of the few adults who had been close to Oswald in Dallas. De Mohrenschildt had testified to the Warren Commission in 1964 about that friendship. Epstein published Legend, his book on Oswald's years in the Soviet Union, in 1978.
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