Ekdahl visited Mrs. Oswald on weekends and stayed at Victor Street.[A13-92] By the following year she had resolved her doubts about marrying him, influenced in part by his substantial income[A13-93] and perhaps by the visit some time earlier of his sister, who favored the marriage because of his ill health.[A13-94] Explaining that she expected to travel a great deal, Mrs. Oswald tried unsuccessfully to return the older boys to the home in February 1945.[A13-95] She and Ekdahl were married in May.[A13-96] After a brief honeymoon, they returned to Victor Street.[A13-97]
Ekdahl got along well with the boys, on whom he lavished much attention.[A13-98] John testified that Ekdahl treated them as if they were his own children and that Lee seemed to find in Ekdahl “the father he never had”; John recalled that on one occasion he told Lee that Ekdahl and his mother had become reconciled after a separation, and that “this seemed to really elate Lee, this made him really happy that they were getting back together.”[A13-99]
Because Ekdahl’s business required him to make frequent trips, in September, John and Robert were placed in the Chamberlain-Hunt Military Academy at Port Gibson, Miss.;[A13-100] their mother paid the tuition herself, using the proceeds from the sale of the Alvar Street property.[A13-101] They remained at the academy for the next 3 years, returning home only for vacations.[A13-102] Lee accompanied his parents on their travels.[A13-103] Mrs. Myrtle Evans, who had known both Marguerite and Ekdahl before their marriage,[A13-104] testified that Marguerite insisted on keeping Lee with her; Mrs. Evans thought that Marguerite was “too close” to Lee and “spoiled him to death,” which hurt her marriage to Ekdahl.[A13-105]
Sometime in the fall after John and Robert were at boarding school, the Ekdahls moved to Benbrook, a suburb of Fort Worth, where they lived on Granbury Road,[A13-106] in a house of stone or brick, set on a large plot of land.[A13-107] Records of the Benbrook Common School show Lee’s admission into the first grade on October 31; his birth date is incorrectly given as July 9, 1939, his mother presumably having given that date to satisfy the age requirement.[A13-108] On February 8, 1946, he was admitted to the Harris Hospital in Fort Worth with “acute mastoiditis.”[A13-109] A mastoidectomy was performed without complications, and Lee left the hospital in 4 days.[A13-110] (In 1955, Lee indicated on a school form that he had an “abnormal ear drum in left ear,”[A13-111] presumably a reference to the mastoidectomy; but when he entered the Marines 1 year later, physical examination disclosed no physical defects.)[A13-112]
The Ekdahls’ marriage quickly broke down. Before they had been married a year, Marguerite suspected Ekdahl of infidelity.[A13-113] She thought him stingy,[A13-114] and there were frequent arguments about his insistence that she account for her expenditures and his refusal to share his money with her.[A13-115] In the summer of 1946, she left Ekdahl, picked up John and Robert at Chamberlain-Hunt, and moved with the boys to Covington, La.,[A13-116] where they lived for at least part of the time at 311 Vermont Street. [A13-117] Mrs. Evans described them at Covington, possibly during this summer, as “really a happy family”; Lee seemed like a normal boy but “kept to himself” and seemed not “to want to be with any other children.”[A13-118] The separation continued after the two boys returned to boarding school, and in September Lee was enrolled in the Covington Elementary School.[A13-119] His record at Benbrook had been satisfactory—he was present on 82 school days and absent on 15, and received all A’s and B’s[A13-120]—but he had not completed the work of the first grade, in which he was enrolled for a second time.[A13-121]
Lee received no grades at the Covington School, from which he was withdrawn on January 23, 1947,[A13-122] because his parents, now reconciled, were moving to Fort Worth, where they lived at 1505 Eighth Avenue.[A13-123] Four days later, he enrolled in the Clayton Public School; he was still in the first grade, which he completed in May with B’s in every subject except physical education and health, in which he received A’s.[A13-124] In the fall, he entered the second grade in the same school but, relations between his parents having deteriorated again, was withdrawn before any grades were recorded.[A13-125]
After the move to Fort Worth, the Ekdahls continued to argue frequently; according to John, “they would have a fight about every other day and he would leave and come back.”[A13-126] That summer, Marguerite obtained what she regarded as proof that Ekdahl was having some sort of affair. According to her testimony, a neighbor told her that Ekdahl had been living on Eighth Avenue with another woman while she was in Covington.[A13-127] Then, at a time when Ekdahl was supposed to be out of town,[A13-128] she went with John and several of his friends to an apartment in Fort Worth; one of the boys posed as a telegram carrier, and when the door opened she pushed her way into the apartment and found Ekdahl in his shirt sleeves in the company of a woman in a negligee.[A13-129]
Despite this apparent confirmation of her suspicions, Marguerite continued to live with Ekdahl until January 1948.[A13-130] In January, according to Ekdahl’s allegations in the subsequent divorce proceedings, she “directed * * * [him] to leave the home immediately and never to return,” which he did.[A13-131] Ekdahl filed suit for divorce in March.[A13-132] The complaint alleged that Marguerite constantly nagged Ekdahl and argued “with reference to money matters,” accused him of infidelity, threw things at him, and finally ordered him out of the house; that these acts were unprovoked by Ekdahl’s conduct toward her; that her acts endangered his already impaired health; and that her “excesses, harsh and cruel treatment and outrages” toward him made it impossible for them to live together.[A13-133] She denied all these allegations.[A13-134] After a trial, at which John testified and, he thought, Lee was called to the stand but was excused without testifying,[A13-135] the jury found on special issues that Marguerite was “guilty of excesses, cruel treatment, or outrages” unprovoked by Ekdahl’s conduct.[A13-136] On June 24, the court granted the divorce and approved an agreement between the parties disposing of their property between them and awarding Marguerite $1,500; at her request, the divorce restored to Marguerite her former name, Marguerite C. Oswald.[A13-137]
While the divorce suit was pending, Marguerite moved from Eighth Avenue to a house on 3300 Willing Street, next to railroad tracks.[A13-138] The boys found her there in May when they returned from the military academy; for John, the move signified that they “were back down in the lower class again.”[A13-139] Lee’s withdrawal from the Clayton School on March 18, 1948,[A13-140] probably coincided with the move to Willing Street. He entered the Clark Elementary School on the following day, and in June completed the second grade with a record mostly of B’s and A’s.[A13-141] Philip Vinson, a classmate at the Clayton School, has described Lee at that time as “a quiet type of kid,” who “didn’t make a lot of noise.”[A13-142] Lee was “stocky and well built,” which made other boys look up to him and regard him as the leader of one of their schoolyard “gangs.”[A13-143] Vinson thought that Lee was not a bully and got along with his classmates, but had the impression that he rarely played with them or brought them home after school.[A13-144]
Shortly after the divorce, Mrs. Oswald purchased a small house in Benbrook, on what is now San Saba Street;[A13-145] John has testified that it had a single bedroom, in which Lee slept with his mother, and a screened porch where John and Robert slept.[A13-146] Mrs. Oswald worked at a department store in Fort Worth, and left the three boys home alone.[A13-147] A neighbor, Mrs. W. H. Bell, has stated that Lee seemed to enjoy being by himself and to resent discipline;[A13-148] another neighbor, Otis R. Carlton, stated that he once saw Lee chase John with a knife and throw it at him, an incident which, Carlton said, their mother passed off as a “little scuffle.”[A13-149] At the end of the summer, Carlton purchased the property. He stated that he appraised it at $2,750 at Mrs. Oswald’s request; she then insisted that he had made an offer to purchase at that price, which he finally agreed to do.[A13-150]