[3][4] She created a shrine in her home to honor his life and military service, and frequently promoted conspiracy theories regarding the assassination.
She wrote a booklet titled Aftermath of an Execution: The Burial and Final Rites of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was never published.
In 1911, her mother died, leaving Oswald, her three sisters, and brothers Charles and John in the care of their streetcar conductor father, who raised them on a salary of $90 per month (equivalent to $2,900 in 2023), though he had the help of housekeepers.
[6][7] Shortly before she turned 17, she began working at a New Orleans law firm as a receptionist,[6][7] falsely claiming on her application that she had graduated high school.
[6] In August 1929, while she was still working at the law firm, Oswald married Edward John Pic Jr., a clerk for a stevedoring company.
[7] In August 1952, Oswald and Lee moved to New York City, where they lived for a short time with her son John Pic,[8] a Coast Guard staff sergeant who worked at the Port Security Unit at Ellis Island, and who lived with his 18-year-old wife Marge and their three-month-old son[9] in an apartment at 325 East 92nd Street.
During the Oswalds' stay, Lee enrolled in the seventh grade at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran School on Watson Avenue.
Lee was found to exhibit higher-than-normal intelligence for his age, and showed no signs of neurological impairment or mental illness, having scored 118 on an IQ test.
However, Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Renatus Hartogs found:[10] Lee has to be diagnosed as 'personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive—aggressive tendencies.'
Evelyn D. Siegel, a social worker who interviewed both Lee and 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."
Hartogs reported that Oswald 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.
[10] On November 22, 1963, after Lee had publicly been identified in connection with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Marguerite Oswald phoned the offices of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and asked for a ride to Dallas.
"[17][18] After the assassination, Secret Service agent Jerry Parr was assigned to protect Oswald until the completion of her February 1964 testimony before the Warren Commission.
[22][23] In September 1964, Harold Feldman wrote an article on Oswald, in which he said she was being treated poorly by the media and by the Warren Commission.
Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, described her as "a nice lady, and I enjoyed talking to her and answering questions for her, but she was really different...weird as can be".
[30] She died of cancer on January 17, 1981, and is buried beside her son Lee at the Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Burial Park in Fort Worth, Texas.
In the film, journalist Willem Oltmans makes claims about his contacts with George de Mohrenschildt and Oswald.
[33] Oswald was the subject of a 2015 play, Mama's Boy, by Rob Urbinati, which premiered at Good Theater in Portland, Maine featuring Betsy Aidem as Marguerite, and was published by Samuel French in 2017.