Piece of blood-spattered leather from John F. Kennedy auctioned for $46,865

The piece of leather also includes a letter from the maintenance engineer of the presidential limo at the time. He writes that four days after the assassination, he received an order from the White House to convert the car so that the new president could use it. He cut out the blood-spattered leather and decided to put it on the market later, perhaps in the hope of one day making a nice profit from it.

Not for the first time

That didn’t quite work out. This is not the first time that the presidential blood spatter has changed hands. It was also auctioned in 2014, when it was sold for just over 2000 dollars. In 9 years, the soiled piece of leather became worth more than 20 times as much.

Sixty years later, the assassination of the president continues to appeal to the imagination of many. According to the official version, the president was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot dead the president from the sixth floor window of a government building as he drove through Dallas in an open car and was cheered on.

Conspiracy theories

But because Oswald himself was murdered before he could be convicted, the murder has fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories. For example, people claim that they heard shots from a completely different direction than the building where Oswald was found, namely from this hill along the route from behind the wooden fence.

And yes: part of that fence has also been auctioned. For $13,740.

Souvenirjagers

The auction house hastens to emphasize that this is ‘undeniably’ an original piece of the fence. This is proven by the rusty nails that are still there. Many of the posts have been dug out and taken by souvenir hunters over the years, meaning they had to be replaced.

The auction house does not say how the seller himself ever came across this piece of fencing. The seller only mentions that her father, a well-known investigator into the murder, had at some point ‘collected enough stuff related to the murder through his relations’ for her own small museum.