Jared Gendron stared at the screen as the 350 lots in his John F. Kennedy auction went past midnight into Wednesday morning.
The bidding started to end around 8:30 pm ET, but the top lots in the batch at JG Autographs kept getting bid up.
It was mostly predictable.
A Lee Harvey Oswald handwritten envelope, addressed when he was in Russia in 1961. An autographed JFK portrait. And a signed letter from George de Mohrenschildt.
Wait, who?
While the fascination around JFK's assassination hasn't waned in the 63 years since the tragic event, de Mohrenschildt has been lost to history, save for the few obsessed buffs who are familiar with his story.
A bidding war for what looked to be an innocuous letter from de Mohrenschildt, simply signed "G de M," sold for $6,215, tying for the top price paid for any of the lots in the auction. The pre-sale estimate on the letter was $125-$150.
So what happened?
The winner, who Gendron said was a first-time buyer, said he made the connection between de Mohrenschildt and Oswald. And de Mohrenschildt signatures are as rare as they come. How rare? We couldn't find another time his autograph has sold, and Kevin Keating, principal authenticator for PSA, told cllct he has not seen one either.
“We were very surprised to see the bidding escalate that high, though it’s not entirely unexpected,” Gendron said. “We’ve sold thousands of Kennedy items over the last 25 years, and time and again, we’ve seen rare names generate surprising results when die-hard Kennedy collectors need them for their collections.
"What’s especially interesting here is that there were multiple bidders pushing this piece well into the multi-thousand-dollar range — it wasn’t just two people battling it out.”
Gendron said the letter came from the collection of more than 2,000 items from a deceased collector who was a former customer.
Out of the more than 550 witnesses that came before the Warren Commission over a 10-month period after the assassination, no one testified longer than de Mohrenschildt.
And there was a reason why. He told the commission he was introduced by a CIA operative to Oswald in 1962, when he came from Russia to Texas. And the Oswald and the de Mohrenschildt families became close.
Having a hard time making ends meet, Oswald's wife, Marina, and his child lived at de Mohrenschildt's daughter's home. And the two men were frequently seen together — from parties to anti-Castro meetings.
By the time of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, de Mohrenschildt was living in Haiti. He eventually moved back, and the Warren Commission concluded he couldn't be connected to the plan to assassinate the president.
But in 1977, the House Select Committee, pressured by what the public thought was a lack of credibility in the initial investigations of the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., charged itself with trying to find out more.
An investigator for the initiative, Gaeton Fonzi, was trying to track down de Mohrenschildt. However, before he was called to testify, de Mohrenschildt was found dead of a gun shot wound. His wife then testified in his place, saying she didn't think he killed himself, and she believed Oswald had obvious CIA connections.
Soon after, Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans testified and said de Mohrenschildt told him Oswald "acted on his instructions" and "they discussed the assassination A to Z, and they knew there were going to kill Kennedy."
While the de Mohrenschildt letter and its contents don't say anything remarkable, there is an interesting connection with the woman it is addressed to, Doris Burns.
After cllct cross-referenced the letter, we found Burns is the same Doris Burns who was considered a witness to the JFK assassination because she worked on the third floor of the Texas Book Depository.
Burns was employed there for roughly five years before Oswald got his job in early 1963. She told the Warren Commission she did not know Oswald when she met him in the elevator the week before.
Burns was a person of interest because, shortly after the shooting, she was in the bathroom and said she heard someone running down the stairs.
When asked what her résumé was, Burns said she worked for a geologist in the early 1950s, which, judging by the letter was likely de Mohrenschildt, a petroleum engineer who had a company that searched for land to buy to later drill for oil. His business was largely unsuccessful.
Rare autographs of key players in the Kennedy assassination often sell for big bucks. The de Mohrenschildt sold for $2,000 more than another rare signature that sold in September 2023. That signature of video-camera hobbyist Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the infamous video of Kennedy's assassination, sold for $4,038 at RR Auction.
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Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.