Monday afternoon, a stout 78-year-old man from Tyler walked into a Lakewood antiques shop with something to sell. He did not have the item with him, because it is too big to transport — too valuable, too, he believes. The item remained in Tyler, where it has been ever since it was removed from a Dallas museum over a decade ago and put on eBay, where it infamously sold for $3 million that the buyer turned out not to have.

Fred McLane, the man from Tyler, brought with him to Dallas only 10 pages of stapled-together photos, letters and legal documents. McLane says these papers prove the item is what he says it is — "a piece of history" tied to Nov. 22, 1963. There are just two words on the cover page: "THE WINDOW."

As in, the window through which Lee Harvey Oswald (allegedly, I guess) shot and killed President John F. Kennedy as his motorcade crawled down Elm Street. The window was removed from the former Texas School Book Depository not long after the assassination. The so-called Sniper's Perch.

The window as it looked during its time in the Sixth Floor Museum. This photo was used in the eBay ad in 2007, and is in the documents Fred McLane is passing around as he tries to sell the window.

Allegedly. Because for many years, two men claimed each owned the real thing. And those two men are now dead.

I have very little interest in Kennedy assassination memorabilia, the grim keepsakes commemorating a man's murder in downtown Dallas. But when I heard Curiosities owner Jason Cohen had been offered the Sniper's Perch, I was drawn back into a story I hadn't thought of in years.

I wrote about this window a long time ago, and never did know what had become of it. I cannot tell you definitely that it's the genuine article. All I can say for sure is that in the mid-1990s, it was displayed in the Sixth Floor Museum as the "Original Window From the Sniper's Perch." More than a million visitors saw it, believing it to be the real thing.

But in 1997, my then-Dallas Observer colleague Ann Zimmerman wrote a long and thrilling story about a hush-hush tussle between two men claiming to own the perch. One was Caruth Byrd, a prominent Dallas native whose father, Col. D. Harold Byrd, owned the School Book Depository at the time of the assassination. The other was Aubrey Mayhew, a man from Nashville best known for managing country singer Johnny "Take This Job and Shove It" Paycheck.

It was reasonable to believe either man could have walked away with the window. Caruth Byrd, who produced movies, inherited the perch from his father, who, for decades, had displayed the window in his University Park home. In 1970, Mayhew bought the School Book Depository from Col. Byrd, hoping to turn it into a museum. Three years later, he defaulted on the loan and had to give it back to Byrd.

Jeff West and Caruth Byrd, barely visible through the window, unveil the Sniper's Perch window from the sixth floor that was removed six weeks after the shooting. The window was one of two "missing pieces of history" that were added to the Sixth Floor Museum during a ceremony and reception in 1997. (File Photo / Staff)

In 2007, when Caruth Byrd tried to auction off the window, I started writing stories about it — so, too, did media outlets around the world. Two years later, I hopped back in after Byrd sued Mayhew, who very publicly insisted he owned the real Sniper's Perch and that the one still in Dallas was just some meaningless window pulled from elsewhere on the sixth floor of the old School Book Depository. That also became an international scandal.

Mayhew would never provide documentation or let anyone see the window. I once asked him how are we supposed to believe him. To which Mayhew replied, "Well, I know. I don't care if you know."

Both men had experts ready to defend and discredit them, yet there never was a trial. They died within months of each other — Mayhew in March 2009 at the age of 81, Byrd at just 69 in December 2010. I never heard about the window after that, never knew what had become of it.

The case was officially closed on Feb. 17, 2010, when Judge Gina Slaughter signed a final declaratory judgment that said Mayhew "was not the owner of the window previously located in the Texas School Depository Building ... from which Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed President John F. Kennedy." Which sounds pretty definitive.

But Dallas attorney Paul Fourt says the ruling simply meant that Mayhew had turned over the perch to one of his sons.

"That judgment means nothing as far as the authenticity of that window," he told me Thursday.

Joel Elliott, who represented Byrd, hadn't thought about this case in almost a decade until I bugged him this week. He stands by his late client, insisting the window's authenticity was never in dispute "until money was going to be involved."

Which brings us back to Fred McLane, the man from Tyler.

He was Caruth Byrd's producing partner in the 1970s, and sits on the board of the Caruth C. Byrd Wildlife Foundation in Van, to which the window was willed. McLane said they are trying to sell the window to keep funding the foundation because its money began drying up when Byrd died. He doesn't know how much the window's worth — maybe $250,000? That's what Cohen said McLean was asking.

Guess it's whatever someone will pay. If they believe it's the real thing.

"Oh, everybody's always got a version of it," McLane told me. "I hear them all the time, saying this, that, and the other. But this is the window, no matter what these guys say."