Oswald was placed in juvenile detention at age 12 for truancy, during which time he was assessed by a psychiatrist as "emotionally disturbed" due to a lack of normal family life.

Evelyn D. Siegel, a social worker who interviewed both Lee and Marguerite Oswald at Youth House, while describing "a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him", found that he had detached himself from the world around him because "no one in it ever met any of his needs for love".

Furthermore, his mother did not apparently indicate an awareness of the relationship between her conduct and her son's psychological problems, with Siegel describing Marguerite as a "defensive, rigid, self-involved person who had real difficulty in accepting and relating to people" and who had "little understanding" of Lee's behavior and of the "protective shell he has drawn around himself".

Hartogs reported that she did not understand that Lee's withdrawal was a form of "violent but silent protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life".

[27][28] Oswald enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on October 24, 1956, just a week after his seventeenth birthday; because of his age, his brother Robert Jr. was required to sign as his legal guardian.

A May 1957 document stated that he was "granted final clearance to handle classified matter up to and including confidential after careful check of local records had disclosed no derogatory data".

[43] In November 1958, Oswald transferred back to El Toro[44] where his unit's function "was to serveil [sic] for aircraft, but basically to train both enlisted men and officers for later assignment overseas".

[n 3] Oswald spent two days with his mother in Fort Worth, then embarked by ship on September 20 from New Orleans to Le Havre, France, and immediately traveled to the United Kingdom.

Distraught, Oswald inflicted a minor but bloody wound to his left wrist in his hotel room bathtub soon before his Intourist guide was due to arrive to escort him from the country, according to his diary because he wished to kill himself in a way that would shock her.

[69] German later described Oswald as "a pleasant-looking guy with a good sense of humor ... not as rough and rude as the men here were back then";[70] she did not love him, but thought he was lonely and continued to date him out of pity.

"[117] On May 26, Oswald wrote to the New York City headquarters of the pro-Fidel Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, proposing to rent "a small office at my own expense for the purpose of forming a FPCC branch here in New Orleans".

[135][136] He arrived in Mexico City on September 27, where he applied for a transit visa at the Cuban consulate,[137] claiming he wanted to visit Cuba on his way to the Soviet Union.

[140] Later, on October 18, the Cuban embassy approved the visa, but by this time Oswald was back in the United States and had given up on his plans to visit Cuba and the Soviet Union.

[166] Various workers – including Givens, Junior Jarman, Troy West, Danny Arce, Jack Dougherty, Joe Molina, Mrs. Robert Reid, and Bill Lovelady – who were either in the first or second floor lunchrooms at times between 12:00 and 12:30 pm reported that Oswald was not present in those rooms during their lunch breaks.

"[173] The paper bag Frazier had described was found by police near the open sixth-floor window from which Oswald was determined to have fired;[157] it was 38 inches (97 cm) long and had marks on its inside consistent with having been used to carry a rifle.

[178][179] Mrs. Robert Reid, a clerical supervisor at the depository who returned to her office within two minutes of the shooting, said she saw Oswald, "very calm", on the second floor holding a Coca-Cola bottle.

Suspicious of this activity, Brewer watched Oswald continue up the street and slip without paying into the nearby Texas Theatre, where the film War Is Hell was playing.

Oswald was then shown a forged Selective Service System card bearing his photograph and the alias, "Alek James Hidell" that he had in his possession at the time of his arrest.

[210][211] FBI Special Agent James P. Hosty and Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz (chief of homicide) conducted the first interrogation of Oswald on Friday, November 22.

He said that he then went to the second-floor lunchroom to buy a Coca-Cola from the soda machine there and was drinking it when he encountered Dallas motorcycle policeman Marrion L. Baker, who had entered the building with his gun drawn.

Holmes (who attended the interrogation at the invitation of Captain Will Fritz) said that Oswald replied that he was working on an upper floor when the shooting occurred, then went downstairs where he encountered Dallas motorcycle policeman Marrion L.

Frederick Bieberdorf, a medical student on duty who rode in the ambulance, said that—several blocks before reaching the hospital—Oswald started thrashing about, resisting Beiberdorf's efforts of heart massage and attempting to free an oxygen mask over his mouth.

[230] Dallas County medical examiner Earl Rose announced the results of the gross autopsy: "The two things that we could determine were, first, that he died from a hemorrhage from a gunshot wound, and that otherwise he was a physically healthy male.

[240] In 1964, Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his photograph taken immediately after the shot was fired, as Oswald began to double over in pain.

[252] In 2010, Miller Funeral Home employed a Los Angeles auction house to sell the original mole-skin covered pine coffin to an anonymous bidder for $87,468.

[255] In 1979, after a review of the evidence and of prior investigations, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) largely concurred with the Warren Commission and was preparing to issue a finding that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy.

[258][259][260][261][262][263] Officer H. B. McLain, from whose motorcycle radio the HSCA acoustic experts said the Dictabelt evidence came,[264][265] has repeatedly stated that he was not yet in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination.

'"[267] In 1982, a panel of twelve scientists appointed by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), including Nobel laureates Norman Ramsey and Luis Alvarez, unanimously concluded that the acoustic evidence submitted to the HSCA was "seriously flawed", was recorded after the shots, and did not indicate additional gunshots.

[274] Oswald had sent one of the photos to The Militant's New York office with an accompanying letter stating he was "prepared for anything": according to Sylvia Weinstein, who handled the newspaper's subscriptions at the time, Oswald was seen as "kookie" and politically "dumb and totally naive", as he apparently did not know that The Militant, published by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, and The Worker, published by the pro-Soviet Communist Party USA, were rival publications and ideologically opposed to each other.

Garrison believed that the men were part of an arms smuggling ring supplying weapons to the anti-Castro Cubans in a conspiracy with elements of the CIA to kill Kennedy.