Lee Harvey Oswald's Russian in-laws say they disliked him from the very first, when Marina Prusakova invited him home after a dance, and detested him after he started to beat her.
They considered the man later accused of killing President John F. Ken-nedy not handsome or smart enough to deserve marrying the pretty Marina."I don't know why she liked him," Marina's aunt Valentina Prusakova told the newspaper Izvestia in an interview published Friday. "Well, he looked clean and proper, despite the fact that he worked as a locksmith at a factory, but . . . what else . . . I don't know."
Oswald was discharged from the U.S. Marines in 1959 and moved to the Soviet Union. He lived in Minsk, where he met and married Marina. The couple left for the United States in 1962, after Oswald's request to receive Soviet citizenship was turned down.
"Maybe what she really wanted was to go to America," said Prusakova, whose family took care of the orphan Marina. "But she said she loved him and he loved her, even when he started beating her. He would beat her and then cry."
Marina's family, and especially Prusakova's husband, a high-ranking retired police officer, vehemently objected to the couple's plan to settle in the United States but gave up after a long struggle.
Prusakova went to the United States to see Marina this year - for the first time in 31 years. "They came to meet me in Dallas, and we immediately recognized each other and started crying," she said.
After Oswald was accused of assassinating Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and was himself shot to death two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, Marina was left with two daughters and could not get a job. She later married Kenneth Porter, a factory worker. They now live in Rockwell, Texas.
"We were sitting in the kitchen several nights in a row, remembering the past and crying," Prusakova said.