Mystery behind 'Nick Beef's' headstone near Kennedy's assassin's grave finally unraveled

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ANI Washington
Last Updated : Aug 11 2013 | 10:40 AM IST

The mystery surrounding the headstone, marked 'Nick Beef', near the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald, who allegedly shot dead former President John F. Kennedy, has been resolved.

For years, curiosity seekers visiting the Fort Worth, Texas, grave of Oswald have wondered about the simple headstone next door, marked Nick Beef as it turned out that the person is alive and living in New York, the Huffington Post reports.

Beef, born Patric Abedin, 56, calls himself a nonperforming performance artist said that he purchased the cemetery plot next to Oswald's in 1975 when he was 18.

The story behind the purchase goes like this: on Nov. 21, 1963, President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, landed at the former Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth as part of a two-day Texas tour and Beef saw the first couple pass just a few feet away.

The next day Kennedy was shot by Oswald and Beef's mother had told him to never forget that he got to see Kennedy the night before he died.

It was when he was 18 that he purchased the plot and often asked himself why he wanted it, but believed that it meant something to him in life.

The report said that he then moved to New York settled with wife and kids and later divorced and while he was doing some freelance comedy writing that he came up with the name 'Nick Beef' while joking around with a friend.

When he visited Texas to arrange a funeral for her mother in late 1996, he visited his burial plot and decided to buy a gravestone with the exact dimensions as Oswald's and asked the cemetery to inscribe it as 'Nick Beef'.

However, he has no plans to ever be buried there and would prefer to be cremated.

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First Published: Aug 11 2013 | 10:36 AM IST

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