Ruth Paine, a woman of deep Quaker faith who in 1963 opened her modest ranch-style house in a Dallas suburb to Marina Oswald and, to a lesser extent, her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the months before he was arrested and charged with killing President John F. Kennedy, died on Aug. 31 in Santa Rosa, Calif. She was 92.
Her death, in a Quaker retirement village, was confirmed by her son, Chris Paine.
Ms. Paine’s knowledge of the Oswalds made her a noteworthy witness during the Warren Commission’s investigation into the assassination. The panel concluded that Mr. Oswald had acted alone when he fired shots at President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, from an open window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Gov. John B. Connally of Texas, who had been in the limousine with President Kennedy and their wives, was wounded in the shooting but recovered.
“She knew more about the Oswalds’ movements and moods in the months prior to the assassination than anyone else did,” said Thomas Mallon, who wrote about Ms. Paine and the Oswalds for an article in The New Yorker in 2001, which he expanded into a book, “Mrs. Paine’s Garage: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy” (2002).
Ms. Paine, who was living in Irving, a suburb of Dallas, met the Oswalds at a party in Highland Park, in Dallas County, on Feb. 22, 1963. She had been looking forward to the gathering because she was told that Mr. Oswald, a young American who had spent time in the Soviet Union, would be there with his Soviet-born wife. The party offered Ms. Paine a chance to speak to someone in Russian, which she had been studying through Berlitz and other language courses on and off for several years.
Mr. Oswald talked about his time in the Soviet Union, where he had defected in 1959, and where he had married Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova before returning to the United States in 1962.
“He really enjoyed being the center of attention,” Ms. Paine told Mr. Mallon, adding that she was unimpressed and gravitated instead to Mrs. Oswald. “I wanted to see if I could talk with her, if we could communicate.”
Ms. Paine, a 30-year-old homemaker raising two children, was about a decade older than Mrs. Oswald, but they developed a warm friendship. Both women were lonely: Ms. Paine was separated from her husband, and Mrs. Oswald — who spoke no English, had one daughter and gave birth to her second in October — had a tempestuous relationship with her husband.
In Mrs. Oswald, Ms. Paine saw a vulnerable young woman who appealed to her religiously inspired impulse to help people. She came to view Mr. Oswald as sullen and unfriendly. He wouldn’t let his wife learn English, increasing her isolation. The Oswalds bickered often.
Ms. Paine said she came to feel a familial love for Mrs. Oswald and had an arrangement by which Mrs. Oswald could stay rent free with her, in return for light housework and helping her improve her Russian.
Mrs. Oswald lived with Ms. Paine for two weeks in May before her host drove her to New Orleans, where Mr. Oswald had gone to look for work. In late September, after her own vacation in New Orleans, Ms. Paine brought Mrs. Oswald back to Irving. Mr. Oswald followed two weeks later, jobless, and stayed at a rooming house in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. On most weekends, he stayed with his wife and daughters at Ms. Paine’s home.
On one such visit, Ms. Paine, acting on a tip from a neighbor, encouraged Mr. Oswald to apply for an open position at the book depository. He was hired.
While Mr. Oswald usually showed up for visits at Ms. Paine’s house on Fridays, he arrived unexpectedly on Thursday, Nov. 21. While there, he played with Ms. Paine’s son, Chris, and retrieved the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that he had hidden in a rolled-up green and brown blanket in the garage. He left for work the next morning, with the rifle that the Warren Commission said was the murder weapon.
Mr. Oswald had used the same rifle in an unsuccessful attempt in April 1963 to kill Edwin A. Walker, a retired Army major general who held extreme conservative views, according to the Warren Commission report. His wife knew of the attempted shooting, the report said, and that finding was used to show Mr. Oswald’s propensity for violence.
When the news bulletin that President Kennedy had been shot flashed on the television in Ms. Paine’s house on the afternoon of Nov. 22, she translated the newscaster’s words into Russian for Mrs. Oswald. Then, after a report that the shots had been fired from the book depository, Ms. Paine translated once more.
“Marina said nothing but she furtively checked the blanket roll in the garage,” the historian William Manchester wrote in “The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963” (1967). “Seeing it there, not knowing it was empty, she whispered to herself, ‘Thank God.’”
Following the assassination, local law enforcement officers descended on Ms. Paine’s house and examined the garage, where they found the blanket, now without the rifle. They packed up Ms. Paine and Mrs. Oswald’s belongings — although Ms. Paine told Mr. Mallon that they did not have a warrant — and took the women to a Dallas police station. After questioning, they returned that night to the Irving house.
The Warren Commission questioned Ms. Paine about the rolled-up blanket. She testified that she would step around it in the garage, not knowing that it secreted the rifle. Mrs. Oswald said she knew about it (she had actually unrolled the blanket and saw the weapon two weeks before the assassination) but didn’t tell Ms. Paine. Ms. Paine’s husband also knew about the weapon, most likely from a picture of Mr. Oswald holding it, her son said.
“I think what she regrets,” Mr. Paine said, referring to his mother, “is that my father didn’t tell her about Lee having a gun. But if she had found it, he probably would have stored it someplace else.”
Ruth Avery Hyde was born on Sept. 3, 1932, in Manhattan to William Hyde, who worked at an insurance company, and a distant cousin, Carol Hyde.
After graduating in 1955 from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with a bachelor’s degree in elementary and secondary education, Ruth taught physical education at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. She met her future husband, Michael Paine, at a folk dance, and they married in 1957. They settled in Irving two years later when he, was hired as an engineer by Bell Helicopter.
After the Secret Service took Mrs. Oswald into protective custody, she and Ms. Paine saw each other only once more, in 1964. The next year, Marina Oswald married Kenneth Porter. The couple had a son and lived quietly in a Dallas suburb.
For the next 62 years, Ms. Paine remained well known to people familiar with the assassination story. She became director of a Montessori school in Texas and principal of a Quaker school in Philadelphia; received a master’s degree in school psychology from the University of South Florida in 1980; and worked as a school psychologist in Florida.
She also worked as a clerk and coordinator with ProNica, a grass-roots Quaker group that helps Nicaraguan people, and was one of a group of people who refuse to pay portions of their federal taxes to protest the part of the federal budget that funds war and militarism. As a result of her stance, she was audited.
“She also provided guidance for others in her area interested in war tax resistance,” Lincoln Rice, coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, wrote in an email.
In addition to her son, Ms. Paine is survived by a daughter, Tamarin Laurel-Paine; a brother, Carl Hyde; and two step-grandchildren. Her marriage to Michael Paine ended in divorce in 1970.
Not surprisingly, as someone who knew and provided lodging to the Oswalds, her name has figured in conspiracy theories, including one that portrayed her as a C.I.A. asset who babysat for Mr. Oswald and placed him at the book depository, Mr. Mallon said.
“She ignored the theories,” Mr. Paine said in an interview. “She had litmus tests in order to see where someone was coming from and whether she would talk to them or not. If they were conspiracy theorists, she’d bypass you.”
Her home, at 2515 West Fifth Street in Irving, was turned into the Ruth Paine House Museum in 2013. The city of Irving restored it to how it looked when the Paines lived there and added videos, projected onto glass panes, on which actors played the Paines and the Oswalds.
When she visited the museum in 2023, an interviewer asked her about the blanket that once concealed the rifle in her garage.
“We were so close to discovering what was going on — and didn’t,” she said.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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