The Woman Who Kept Filming While Everyone Else Ran: Who Was the Babushka Lady?

On November 22, 1963, at about twelve-thirty in the afternoon, President John F. Kennedy's motorcade turned onto Elm Street in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

Hundreds of people lined the streets. Many of them had cameras.

On the grass between Elm and Main Streets, very close to the President's car, stood a woman in a tan coat, with a scarf tied under her chin. She was holding something up to her face. It looked like a camera.

When the shots were fired, people around her threw themselves to the ground. Parents covered their children. People ran.

She did not. In the films taken that day, she appears to keep filming. Calm. Still.

Afterward, she walked away up the street, and disappeared into the crowd.

She has never been identified. And whatever she filmed has never been found.

Dealey Plaza

Dealey Plaza is a small open area at the western edge of downtown Dallas. Three streets, Elm, Main and Commerce, run through it and pass under a railroad bridge called the triple underpass.

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy's motorcade drove through downtown Dallas, turned onto Houston Street, then turned left onto Elm Street, passing in front of the Texas School Book Depository.

It was a sunny day. The crowds were large and friendly. Many people brought home movie cameras and still cameras to capture the President passing by.

That is why the assassination is one of the most photographed events of the twentieth century. And it is also why one woman's missing film has fascinated researchers for more than sixty years.

The woman in the films

The woman appears in several of the best-known films taken that day.

She can be seen in the Zapruder film, the most famous home movie of the assassination. She can be seen in films taken by Orville Nix and Marie Muchmore. And she can be seen in footage by Mark Bell.

She was wearing a light brown or tan coat that came to about her knees. A scarf was tied under her chin, the way older Russian women often wore them. That is where her nickname comes from. In Russian, "babushka" means grandmother, and it came to be used for that style of headscarf.

She may have been wearing sunglasses.

Researchers who have studied the images describe her as a woman perhaps thirty to forty years old, somewhat stocky, with dark hair visible under the scarf.

She was standing on the grass between Elm Street and Main Street, on the south side of Elm, close to the President's car as it passed. And she was holding something up to her face, the way you would hold a camera.

During the shots

What makes her stand out is how she behaved.

As the shots were fired, people around her reacted the way you would expect. Some dropped to the ground. Some covered their families. Some ran.

The Babushka Lady, in the footage, appears to stay where she is, with the camera at her face.

In the Mark Bell film, taken after the shooting, when most of the crowd had taken cover, she is still standing with the camera raised.

Then she crosses Elm Street and joins the crowd moving up the grassy slope known as the grassy knoll. In later still photographs, she is seen walking east on Elm Street, away from the scene.

After that, she is gone.

The missing film

Think about where she was standing. If she was filming, her camera would have been pointed at the President's car at the moment of the shots, from a different angle than Abraham Zapruder, and she would have had the grassy knoll and the Book Depository in the background.

Her film could have been one of the most important pieces of evidence in the case.

It has never been found.

In March 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, a special committee of Congress that re-investigated the killing, reported on the photographic evidence. Its photographic panel said it could not locate a number of items, and specifically listed "the Babushka Lady film."

The woman who said it was her

In 1970, a woman named Beverly Oliver told a researcher, at a church revival meeting in Texas, that she was the Babushka Lady.

Her story was this. She said she had been in Dealey Plaza that day, filming with a small movie camera. She said that a few days later, two men who said they were FBI agents took her undeveloped film and promised to return it within ten days. She said she never got a receipt and never got the film back.

She repeated the story in a 1988 documentary, in a 1994 book, and in testimony to the Assassination Records Review Board in 1994. Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK included a character based on her.

But many researchers do not believe her.

The first problem is the camera. She originally said she filmed with a Yashica Super 8 camera. But that model was not manufactured until 1969, six years after the assassination. Later, she said she had borrowed an experimental camera from a friend, and was not sure it had a manufacturer's name on it.

The second problem is how she looked. In 1963, Oliver was a slender seventeen-year-old blonde. The woman in the films appears older, heavier, and dark-haired.

Other researchers have gone through her claims point by point and rejected them. The prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi wrote that she had never proved to most people's satisfaction that she was even in Dealey Plaza that day.

The Kodak lab

There is another intriguing account.

In 1994, a researcher named Gary Mack testified that a former executive at Kodak in Dallas had told him about a woman who came in on the day of the assassination, while the Zapruder film itself was being processed. She was in her early thirties, with brunette hair, and she brought in film of the assassination.

According to the account, she told federal investigators at the office that she had run from Main Street across the grass to Elm, stopped, and taken a picture. The image was described as extremely blurry and virtually useless.

A Kodak technician also said he developed color film for a brunette woman in her thirties or forties that day.

That description is much closer to the woman in the films than Beverly Oliver was. But nobody recorded her name. She is believed to have gone home, unidentified.

Could she have been the Babushka Lady? Possibly. Nobody knows.

Other theories

Over the years, people have proposed other identities.

In 2023, a filmmaker named Mary Haverstick suggested in a book that the Babushka Lady could have been the aviator Jerrie Cobb, one of the women who trained for spaceflight in the early 1960s, or possibly a CIA operative named June Cobb. These ideas are speculative, and they have not been widely accepted by assassination researchers.

Some people believe the Babushka Lady was simply an ordinary spectator who was in shock, kept her camera running out of instinct, went home, and either did not realize the importance of what she had, or did not want to be part of a national tragedy.

Others believe her film was taken, and deliberately disappeared.

There is no evidence that settles the question either way.

What we still don't know

Today, Dealey Plaza is a national historic landmark. Visitors stand on the grassy knoll and look down at Elm Street.

On the grass across the street, between Elm and Main, is roughly where the Babushka Lady stood.

More than sixty years later, after congressional investigations, the release of millions of pages of government records, and countless books and documentaries, we still do not know who she was.

We do not know if she was really filming, or holding a still camera, or something else. We do not know if she ever developed her film. We do not know whether it was taken from her, thrown away, or is sitting in a box in someone's attic.

What we do know is that one woman stood calmly on the grass and pointed something at the President's car while the world fell apart around her.

Who do you think she was? And what happened to her film?