Zapruder film, frame #285. Babushka Lady stands behind a father and son as JFK is shot.

While doing some research tonight, I ran into the Babushka Lady for the first time. She’s the unknown woman who points a camera directly at President Kennedy when he gets shot in the head. Standing behind a father and son, she wears a headscarf and films the scene. After everybody scatters, she keeps rolling tape before heading towards the grassy knoll.

And then she disappeared. Nobody could find her. The tape never surfaced.

Babushka Lady. A spectral American figure. The stuff of national ghost stories.

In 1970, a woman named Beverly Oliver announced that she was the Babushka Lady. She said the FBI confiscated her assassination film. They told her to keep quiet. A lot of people said she was lying. She was too young. She was an exotic dancer. But Oliver claimed that, in addition to being muscled by the FBI, she also hung out at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, where she was introduced to Lee Harvey Oswald and several tangential mob and CIA figures. These connections fueled the engines of Oliver Stone’s JFK, Don Delillo’s Libra, and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid.

I ran into the Babushka Lady tonight because I’m researching American sheriffs. And here’s a strange quirk in American history: Beverly Oliver’s husband was George McGann, a Dixie Mafia hit man involved in the murder of Sheriff Buford Pusser’s wife. Pusser was a badass sheriff (and former professional wrestler) who was stabbed and shot fifteen times (and survived) while fighting the State Line Mob, a Mafia outfit that ran gambling rings, prostitutes, and guns along the border of Tennessee and Mississippi. One night, two cars pulled alongside Pusser’s patrol car and opened fire, killing his wife and disfiguring Pusser.

Pusser swore revenge. Three years later, Oliver’s husband turned up dead in Texas, along with another accomplice. In 1974, Pusser drove his Corvette into an embankment and died. His life story inspired the 1973 film Walking Tall, as well as a remake starring “The Rock” in 2004. And I’ve driven the Buford Pusser Memorial Highway across Tennessee several times.

Now back to that image. Frame #285. A shattering moment before my time, yet we continue to reel from its effects. Remember Obama’s inauguration, when the media was impressed that he stepped outside of the limo? They said he was brave.

The Babushka Lady is just a purplish smear against a vivid green, a mysterious woman standing before a dying president. It’s a blurry image that plugs into so many strange threads of American history. Endless mythologies, now surfacing as colorful names and obituaries hyperlinked across the internet.

Maybe Beverly Oliver wasn’t the Babushka Lady. But we know a woman stood on the grass that day, filming the murder of a president.

As I write this, news is breaking that WikiLeaks posted 91,000 classified documents about the Afghan War. Strange symmetry between today’s endless crush of accessible information and the frustration of staring into a grainy frame of mysterious film from fifty years back, looking for clues.

Notes: All of the Zapruder frames are available here; here’s a site saying Oliver isn’t the Babushka Lady; here’s a site that says she is. Here’s some general info on Buford Pusser and his movie. And The Rock.