The day they dug up Lee Harvey Oswald in Fort Worth: 1981 photos seen for first time.

It was 5 a.m. when the phone rang at the home of a Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter.

“It’s going to happen!” said an excited man on the line, an attorney for Marina Oswald Porter.

“Meet me at the gate in front of Rose Hill Memorial Park at 6:30.”

Marina, of course, was the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald. And what was about to happen on that Sunday morning in October 1981 was the exhumation of his grave — a macabre effort to settle once and for all whether the corpse buried there 18 years earlier was really Oswald.

If it wasn’t, as some including Marina had come to believe, perhaps they had buried a lookalike Russian spy who had been the real assassin of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

“Put enough gas in your car to drive to Dallas,” the attorney told the reporter before hanging up.

As the sun rose over the east Fort Worth cemetery that morning, a trenching machine let out a steady shriek as it dug into the red clay.

A small group of people — only a select few knew this was happening — gazed intently as the crew worked to unearth the buried concrete vault. Marina sat with a friend in a small silver station wagon parked within sight of the dig, which was partially shielded by a makeshift green canvas tent. Her second husband, Kenneth Porter, watched closer to the grave.

Meanwhile, the reporters who had been tipped off were kept behind a fence to watch and take photos — dozens and dozens of photos, plus more in Dallas where the body would undergo a four-hour autopsy by nationally renowned pathologists before being reburied in Fort Worth that same day.

For the first time in 43 years, we’re publishing some of these images taken by Star-Telegram photographers. The negatives have been kept in cold storage at UT Arlington Libraries; we went through hundreds of them to choose which ones to digitize and see the light of day. None showed Oswald’s remains.

Oswald’s exhumation — and the events that led up to it — are a somewhat forgotten footnote in the history of the JFK assassination. Here in Fort Worth, we remember how Kennedy spent his final night here, and his chamber speech at the Hilton and the exuberant crowds cheering his motorcade before the Kennedys flew to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

But in 1981, the Oswald question was big news. For years, there had been growing speculation that Oswald wasn’t really the man who killed Kennedy.

The conspiracy theory was sowed in the 1975 book “The Oswald File” by British author Michael Eddowes. He theorized that there were really two Oswalds — one who defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, and a KGB imposter who came to the U.S. just before Kennedy’s assassination. Whichever Oswald had killed the president, he was fatally shot himself two days later by Jack Ruby.

Eddowes had pushed for a second autopsy for years. Oswald’s brother, Robert, fought it in court until the legal battles became untenable. And by then, Marina was on board with Eddowes, too. The author even paid the $10,000 to $12,000 expense. And he was there at the cemetery at 6:30 a.m., watching the dig.

Two rings and a scar

When the gravediggers finally opened the concrete vault, they found that Oswald’s simple oak casket had rotted and partially collapsed, and his remains were badly decomposed in the remnants of a dark suit.

They noted almost immediately two rings — a plain gold wedding band and a ruby ring. Marina had slipped both onto Oswald’s left hand before his coffin was sealed on Nov. 25, 1963.

The remains were carefully raised from the ground — including the rotted casket — and loaded into a black hearse bound for Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, where the team of forensic specialists were waiting in a basement under the watch of lawyers, security guards, hospital officials and family representatives.

One of the examiners was Dr. Vincent DiMaio, who would go on to investigate many high-profile deaths and testified for George Zimmerman’s defense in the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

The team took X-rays of the skull to match dental records from Oswald’s time in the Marines, and from a routine visit to the dentist on March 27, 1958.

And they confirmed a small round hole behind Oswald’s left ear, drilled when he was 6 years old. The scar wasn’t noted in a 1963 autopsy, which had fueled conspiracies.

The autopsy left “no question” that it was Oswald.

“We, independently and as a team, have concluded beyond any doubt, and I mean any doubt, that the individual buried under the name Lee Harvey Oswald in Rose Hill is, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald,” Dr. Linda Norton told a crowd of news reporters.

“We hope this puts the matter to rest and that the Porters can go about living normal lives again... . There is no reason to ever disturb that body again. Ever.”

‘I just had to come’

Immediately after, the remains were placed into a new steel casket and driven back to Rose Hill Memorial Park for reburial.

By then, word had gotten out about the exhumation and a crowd of as many as 200 curious onlookers had gathered near the cemetery on the warm, football Sunday afternoon. Some took souvenirs of small rocks from the dig site.

“It’s just something I’ve lived with all my life. I just had to come,” explained Bobby Jones, watching from the fence, to a Star-Telegram reporter.

Cars lined both sides of Rose Hill Drive for almost three blocks. The spectators came in church clothes or cutoff jeans. “Occasionally the sounds of the Dallas Cowboys football game being played in St. Louis would blare form one of the parked vehicles,” the newspaper reported.

The following day, the Star-Telegram’s front page carried a banner headline that Oswald was indeed Oswald.

One of the many stories in that edition recounted how much the day’s high-profile events contrasted with Oswald’s obscure burial in 1963, which was attended by so few people that reporters had to help carry the casket. Kennedy’s funeral had been only hours earlier in Washington.

Mike Cochran, an Associated Press reporter, was one of those pallbearers. He returned to Rose Hill the day of the exhumation for the first time.

“You always think back to that thought. You’re a pallbearer by default,” he told the Star-Telegram. “You’re thinking of all that has changed and yet here you are 18 years later and there is this hole in the ground. It’s eerie.”

MORE : Check out Star-Telegram archive photos in our collection here , including:

• Dolly Parton’s 1977 concert in Fort Worth’s Panther Hall

• Fort Worth’s long-gone grocery stores

• 100 years of Boy Scouts in Fort Worth/North Texas

• Fort Worth’s Forest Park Zoo in the 1940s-50s

• Long-lost restaurants of Fort Worth

• Hollywood movie stars in Fort Worth

• Paschal High School in the 1950s

• Elvis Presley in Fort Worth

• President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Fort Worth in 1978

• Historic photos of Fort Worth Stock Show parade

• 1972 demolition of 18-story Worth Hotel

• Leonards Department Store in 1940s-50s

• Fort Worth housewives in 1952 prepare for Thanksgiving

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