public interest grew even further.
It was around this time that Margaret began to think of the assassination not as a historical event but a cancer that had awoken in her life on November 22, 1963. It had gone into remission for a while but was now active again. She also began to realize it had been one of the central governing factors in almost every major decision she had made since that sun-soaked Friday.
With the cigarette now half-gone, she glanced up briefly at the ceiling and shook her head. In her memory, she reached the most recent segment of this interminable nightmare. It also had a specific launch date —March 6, 1975, just over a year ago —and coincided seamlessly with the decline of her health. That evening, millions watched as two conspiracy theorists, along with host Geraldo Rivera, played the Zapruder film on ABC’s Good Night America . The public’s reaction was immediate and decisive, with renewed demands on the government to finally resolve the question of who really killed John Kennedy. This horrified outrage eventually led to the formation of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations as well as a small army of neo-conspiratorialists, all of whom dedicated an abundance of time, energy, and money to the examination of virtually every piece of evidence that could be found. Nostone went unturned, no theory unstudied, and no witness unquestioned.
This was also when a small group of curious persons began to ponder the identity of the woman, previously overlooked, whom they provisionally named “the Babushka Lady.”
She was there in a few photographs, grainy and unfocused. One was taken a good distance behind her but clearly established her proximity to the president’s limousine. Another had the woman in midstride across Elm along with several others exiting the scene. And she was there, albeit briefly, in Abraham Zapruder’s grisly record of the killing.
Most researchers believed the Babushka Lady —so dubbed because of her distinctive headscarf —was holding a motion camera of her own and had witnessed the assassination from a unique angle. If this was the case, then perhaps her film had caught something equally unique. In particular, they wondered if there was clear evidence to support the growing theory that a second shooter was positioned behind the stockade fence that stood atop a tiny hill just a few yards away from the Bryan pergola, a region of Dealey Plaza that would eventually become known as the “grassy knoll.” If so —if the Babushka Lady did, in fact, have such evidence —why hadn’t she come forward with it? Had she been tracked down by the conspirators and killed, as many believed others had been? Or was she still out there now, waiting for just the right time to come forward? Perhaps she had already sold the film to some powerful media presence, like Time or Life , for an astronomical sum, and they were the ones sitting on it. There was also the suggestion that the woman in question wasn’t even aware of what she had and that the film had been innocently relegated to a forgotten box in her home somewhere.
Whatever the case, two points were now very clear toMargaret Baker. One was that she was the person known as the Babushka Lady. The other was that many people associated with the assassination wanted to find her.
She took a final puff and dropped the cigarette onto the cement floor, crushing it out with her shoe. A part of her had always suspected this day would come. In the end, it wasn’t the film’s potential implications or the quest for justice or even the thought of shadowy figures searching for her that brought about this moment —it was the blood she saw in the toilet three days ago following her morning routine. The hypertension that was gradually obliterating her strength had begun with the usual symptoms —fatigue, occasional dizziness —then moved to the more severe —blinding headaches, irregular