The Miller-Meteor Cadillac hearse that carried former U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s casket after he was assassinated in 1963 was auctioned at a Scottsdale, Arizona auction this weekend for $160,000.
Stephen Tebo, a real estate developer from Colorado, bought the hearse that carried the former President, along with his wife Jacqueline Kennedy, from a Dallas hospital to the airport.
Tebo, who purchased the car from the auction company Barrett-Jackson, will keep the vehicle as part of his extensive rare vehicle collection, featuring over 400 automobiles including a custom Rolls-Royce limousine once owned by John Lennon.
“A Cadillac hearse like this would ordinarily be worth about $40,000 if not for its connection to the Kennedy assassination,” said McKeel Hagerty, President of the collector car insurance company, Hagerty Insurance.
According to Daily Mail reports, it was a Don McElroy, from the O’Neal Funeral Home in Dallas, who received a call from the Secret Service to ready a casket and hearse and bring it to the Park Memorial Hospital in the city.
McElroy reportedly helped move the President’s body into the car and pushed down the rear seat in order to allow Jacqueline Kennedy to sit close to her husband. Secret Service agents then drove the hearse to the airport and left it there after they boarded the plane to Washington.
The funeral home kept the hearse till the late 1960s, when it was sold to a collector who, decades later, sold it to it a second owner who then put it up for auction at the Barrett-Jackson event.g>
