He began his life with all the classic handicaps and disadvantages. His mother was a powerfully built, domineering woman who found it difficult to love anyone. She had been married three times and her second husband had divorced her because she beat him up regularly. The father of the child I am describing was her third husband. He died of a heart attack a few months before the child's birth. As a consequence the mother had to work long hours from his earliest childhood. She gave him no affection, no love, no discipline and no training during those formative years. She even refused to allow him to call her at work.

Other children had little to do with him so he was alone most of the time. He was absolutely rejected from his earliest days. He was ugly, poor and untrained. He was 13 years old when a child psychologist commented that he probably didn't even know the meaning of the word love.

During adolescence girls would have nothing to do with him and he fought continuously with boys. Despite a high IQ he failed miserably and finally dropped out during his third year at high school.

He thought he might find acceptance in the Marine Corps: they reportedly built men and he wanted to be a man. However, his problems went with him - the other marines laughed at him and ridiculed him. He fought back, resisted authority and was thrown out of the Marines with a dishonourable discharge.

So, there he was, a young man in his early twenties absolutely friendless and shipwrecked. He was small in stature with an adolescent squeak in his voice. He was balding and he had no talent. He had no skill, no sense of worth whatsoever and he didn't hold a driving licence.

Once again he thought he could run away from his problems so he went to live in a foreign country, but he was rejected there too. Whilst he was there he married a girl who herself had been an illegitimate child. He brought her back to America with him but soon she developed the same kind of contempt for him as everyone else had displayed. She bore him two children but he never enjoyed the respect and status that a father should have.

His marriage began to crumble as his wife demanded more and more things that he could not provide. Instead of being his ally against a bitter world as he had hoped she would be, she became his most vicious opponent. She outfought him and she learned to bully him. On one occasion she locked him in the bathroom as a punishment and finally she forced him to leave.

He tried to make a go of things on his own, but he was so lonely. After days of solitude he returned home and literally begged his wife to take him back. He surrendered all pride, he crawled and accepted humiliation as he came on her terms. Despite his meagre salary he gave her $80 as a gift and asked her to spend it on anything she wanted. She just laughed at him and belittled his feeble attempt to supply the family needs. She mocked him in his failure and made fun of his sexual impotence. She did this repeatedly in front of a friend who was there and at one point he fell on his knees and wept bitterly as the great darkness of his personal nightmare engulfed him.

Finally in silence he pleaded no more. No one wanted him, no one had ever wanted him. He was perhaps the most rejected man of our time. His ego lay shattered in a fragment of dust.

The next day he was a strangely different man. He arose and went to the garage, taking down a rifle. He carried the rifle with him to his newly acquired job at the bookseller's building. Then from a window on the third floor shortly after noon on 22 November 1963 He sent two bullets crashing into the head Of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the rejected, unlovable failure killed the man who more than any other man on the face of the earth embodied all the success, beauty, wealth, love and affection which he lacked. In firing the rifle Lee Harvey Oswald utilised the one skill he had learned in his entire miserable life.

(Extract from a tape by Larry Tomczak)