Friday, February 16, 2007

UPDATED: Netherlands bidder wins shooter’s perch auction

By Teresa Gubbins

Updated 11:51 a.m., February 16, 2007

With the final few hours ticking down on the infamous eBay auction for the John F Kennedy Assassination Shooters Perch Window, Aubrey Mayhew wants to warn potential bidders that they’re about to get fleeced out of $3 million-plus.

Mayhew, a longtime collector of JFK memorabilia as well as a country-music producer (he produced a new CD by Dale Watson which comes out this spring), challenges the authenticity of the eBay auction because he claims to have it himself, and promises that the seller is perpetrating a fraud.

"Anybody that is connected to the Kennedy situation knows that this is a fraud," Mayhew says, from his home in Nashville, Tenn. "I'm a collector and have been for 40 years. I don't go out in public, I don't have an ego, and I don't exploit my collection. I'm not trying to prove anything. I don't collect for profit. But I know it's the original window. I know it's real, like everything else I have."

The official seller on eBay is one Christian McLane from Tyler, Texas, an erstwhile actor whose last role was in the '06 film Lost Signal, in which he played the "Drunk Guy on Stairs".

But McLane is fronting for Caruth Byrd, whose family owned the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the assassination. Mayhew owned the building in the early '70s, until the Byrd family reclaimed it. (Mayhew was the first to suggest a museum, which everyone in Dallas scorned until the Byrds revived the idea, which by then the city liked after all.) The uncertainty over the window results from conflicting stories over which maintenance worker removed what window, and when.

This isn't the first time Mayhew and Byrd have tangled. One once called the other a "nut"; the other called one "idiot."

Queried about the authenticity of the window on eBay, McClane answered in an email: "The auction includes a video interview with the man that removed it and we also are including a number of documents and letters that help to verify it's authenticity. The window has been in the Byrd family since the assassination." (Someone needs to explain to him the difference between its and it's.)

The original terms of the auction were that the bidder pay via cashier's check, but after this rather skeptical discussion surfaced on a forum, the seller expanded the payment options to include wire transfer.

"I’ve been collecting since the day JFK was shot," Mayhew says. "My credibility is impeccable as a Kennedy collector. Everybody knows me. I'm 80 years old, I don’t have any motive. My only motive is to save the poor soul that’s bidding on this thing. Because once he hands the money over, it's not going to be easy to get it back."

UPDATE: The number of bids on the window auction has dropped from 196 last night to a current (8:30 a.m.) total of 188. Some bids have been cancelled by seller because the bidders' histories weren't good; other bidders have retracted their bids, claiming that they accidentally entered the wrong amount.

UPDATE TO UPDATE:: And the winning bidder is one R. Seydel, based in the Netherlands.

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• Local History

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