“I Am Jack Ruby. You All Know Me”
Where was Ruby during the assassination of President Kennedy? What did he do over the weekend of November 22 leading up to his deadly encounter with Oswald on Sunday? It is important to follow Ruby carefully to discover whether there is any evidence of a conspiracy.
Thursday, November 21, the day before the assassination, he left his apartment and arrived at AAA Bonding Service near 10:30 A.M. There, he talked to Max Rudberg about protecting himself from Jada’s pending breach-of-contract lawsuit.1 When he left Rudberg, he spent two hours with Connie Trammel, a young woman he had met several months earlier, who was job hunting in Dallas.2 Near the end of his time with Trammel, about 1:00, he stopped at the Merchants State Bank and paid the rent for the Carousel.3 Ruby then went to the district attorney’s office, where he saw assistant D.A. Bill Alexander and spoke to him about bad checks that a friend had recently passed while visiting Dallas.4 After that, he telephoned John Newman, a salesman in the advertising department of the Dallas Morning News, and talked to him about some copy for the weekend ads he wanted to run for the Carousel and Vegas clubs.5
Sometime on Thursday he also telephoned a local lawyer who was handling his federal excise-tax problem.6 Before heading to the Carousel, Ruby ran into several people on the street. He gave some of them passes to the club, and tried to make a date with a woman, so he could persuade her to work for him.7
The Carousel opened in the late afternoon and closed officially at midnight (but Ruby often kept it open until 2:00 A.M. if business was good), seven days a week.8 He arrived at the club at 3:00 P.M.* His sister Eva normally ran the Vegas, leaving him responsible only for the Carousel. However, she was recuperating from abdominal surgery, and Ruby had to watch both clubs.9 He stayed at the Carousel for over four hours and then drove Curtis LaVerne Crafard, known as Larry, a young drifter who was living at the club and acting as its handyman, to the Vegas at 7:30 that evening. Crafard had agreed to help Ruby oversee the Vegas while Eva convalesced. Ruby then returned to the Carousel, where he spoke for nearly an hour with Lawrence Meyers, a Chicago sales manager for a diversified line of consumer goods, who was visiting Dallas.10 Meyers, who had first met Ruby at the Carousel four years earlier, was a steady customer during his visits to Dallas. Ruby complained about his contractual dispute with Jada as well as the Weinsteins’ amateur nights and how they were crippling his business.11 Meyers planned to meet his brother and sister-in-law, who were in town for a Pepsi-Cola distributors’ convention, at a nightclub at his hotel, the Cabana, at 11:00 P.M. He invited Ruby to meet them, and “he said he would if he could.”12
From about 9:45 to 10:45, Ruby had dinner with Dallas businessman Ralph Paul, his good friend and financial backer. They ate at the Egyptian Lounge, a restaurant and nightclub.* After dinner, he returned to the Carousel, where he acted as the master of ceremonies, and at one point evicted an unruly patron.13 Shortly before midnight he drove to the Bon Vivant room at the Cabana Hotel, where he joined his Chicago friend Meyers, Meyers’ brother, Eddie, and sister-in-law, Thelma. When Ruby found out that Eddie Meyers worked for Pepsi-Cola, he spent the conversation trying to interest him in his twist-board product. It was a $3.95 exercise/diet gimmick composed of a small wooden platform set on ball bearings, on which the user twisted and rotated. He argued it would be a good tie-in for Pepsi.14 But Myers was not interested and Ruby left the Cabana Hotel by 12:30 A.M. and returned to the Carousel to get the night’s receipts.15†
After finishing work at the Carousel, he drove to the Vegas club to collect its receipts. By 2:30 A.M., he went to his usual early-morning hangout, the Lucas B&B Restaurant, next door to the Vegas. There he joined Crafard, and they had a meal.16* Between 3:30 and 4:00 in the morning, he again returned to the Carousel to drop off Crafard, and then drove to his apartment. His roommate, George Senator, was already asleep when he arrived.17
On Friday, November 22, Ruby was up by 9:30 and at the Dallas Morning News shortly before 11:00, in order to place his regular weekend advertisements for his two nightclubs.18* On his way into the building, he saw two newspaper employees, waved at one across the ground floor while yelling, “Hi. The President is going to be here today,” and spoke to the other about some diet pills he had recommended.19 He then stopped by the office of Tony Zoppi, the newspaper’s entertainment reporter, but he was not in.20 Ruby next went to the second-floor advertising department, where he met with Don Campbell, the sales agent he had seen at the Cabana Hotel the night before. Campbell worked with him as he wrote his weekend advertisements. Ruby complained about how “lousy” business was and that he was tired of having to act as the unofficial bouncer, even though he was a “very capable fighter.”21†
Campbell was with Ruby from 12:00 to 12:25 P.M., just five minutes before the President was shot. The News building was five blocks from Dealey Plaza. From several second-floor windows of the News building, it was possible to observe the Texas School Book Depository, but Ruby apparently never went to those windows. Before 12:40, John Newman, another advertising-department employee, observed Ruby sitting at the same desk where Campbell had left him.22‡ He was reading the Morning News and had the paper open to page 14.23 The entire page was a black-bordered advertisement, headed in large block letters, “Welcome Mr. Kennedy,” and the text accused the President of being a Communist tool. It was signed by “The American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman.”24 Ruby was very disturbed that the News should have run such a demeaning advertisement and was dismayed that it was signed by someone with a Jewish name.* It was the second time he had focused on the ad that day (earlier he had called his sister Eva to complain about it).25 “Who is this Weissman?” Ruby asked Newman, and he complained about the ad’s “lousy taste.”26 “What the hell, are you so money hungry?” Ruby asked Newman. “He was upset that a Jewish name should be part of something he thought was so insulting to the President,” says Earl Ruby. “It was something that got under his skin the wrong way.”27
A few minutes after Newman saw him staring at the ad, two News employees ran into the office and announced that shots had been fired at the motorcade and the President may have been hit.28 Pandemonium erupted. Newman said Ruby had a look of “stunned disbelief,” and he was “emotionally upset.”29
“I don’t recall what was said,” Jack Ruby later testified. “And I was in a state of hysteria, I mean. You say, ‘Oh my God, it can’t happen.’ You carry on crazy sayings.”30
Within minutes, several advertisers telephoned Newman to cancel the ads they had placed for the weekend.31 Ruby believed the cancellations were motivated by the offending Weissman ad: “The phones were ringing off the desk,” said Ruby, “and they were having a turmoil in the News Building because of a person by the name of Bernard Weissman placing that particular ad … criticizing a lot of things about our beloved President.… I heard John Newman say, ‘I told him not to take that ad.’”32
Ruby asked Newman if he could use his phone, and he again called Eva. She was crying over the news about Kennedy. “This is my sister and she is hysterical,” he said, holding the phone out for Newman to hear.33 Newman said Eva “sounded very upset,” and he listened for a moment, without saying a word, while Ruby tried “to calm her down.”34 Jack was distraught that his sister was “crying hysterically.” He turned to Newman. “John, I will leave Dallas. John, I am not opening up tonight.”35 According to Newman, Ruby left the News no later than 1:30. “I left the building,” Ruby recalled, “and I went down and I got my car, and I couldn’t stop crying …”36 He said he then drove back to the Carousel.37
Seth Kantor, a respected journalist and member of the Washington press corps covering the President’s trip to Texas, was at Parkland Hospital after the assassination. He knew Ruby and had worked for the Dallas Times Herald before moving to Washington. Kantor was running up some stairs when he felt someone tug at his suit coat. “It was Jack Ruby,” said Kantor. “Ruby called me by my first name and I grasped his extended hand. He looked miserable. Grim. Pale. There were tears brimming in his eyes.”38 Ruby commented on how “terrible the moment was” and asked Kantor if he should close his nightclubs because of the tragedy. Kantor said it was a good idea.39
Ruby later denied to the FBI and the Warren Commission that he had ever been at Parkland that day. None of the many press photos or television films shot of Parkland show him in the crowd. Although he knew many Dallas policemen and reporters, no one saw him except Kantor.* The Warren Commission believed Ruby and said Kantor was mistaken.40 However, the House Select Committee determined that Kantor “probably was not” mistaken.41
Is Kantor correct when he says Ruby was at Parkland? Kantor claimed he saw Ruby between 1:30 and 2:00.42 Newman said Ruby left the News no later than 1:30.43 News advertising salesman Richard Saunders thought he left the newspaper around 1:10 P.M.44 According to the Warren Commission, Ruby arrived at the Carousel Club by 1:45, leaving too little time for him to stop by the hospital.45 But the Commission inaccurately cited the testimony of Andrew Armstrong, a bartender, to support Ruby’s arrival at the club.46 Actually, Armstrong said that Ruby arrived about five minutes after he heard the radio announcement that the President was dead.47 That would have placed his arrival at the Carousel shortly before 2:00. The club’s phone records show a call to Chicago, to his sister Eileen, at 2:05.48†
Ruby not only had the time to stop briefly by Parkland (it was a round-trip of eight miles), but had reason to lie about being there, in the same way he later lied about the number of times he was at the jail near Oswald over the weekend. “By the time he testified about it,” says assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, who prosecuted Ruby for killing Oswald, “he knew that whether he spent a long time in prison or not might depend on whether he shot Oswald on the spur of the moment or whether there was premeditation. Visiting Parkland on Sunday, hanging out at the jail over the weekend, might be natural for a fellow like Ruby. But a jury didn’t know him, and who knew how they would look at all that?”49
Kantor was not surprised when he saw Ruby at Parkland. “I very well remember my first thought,” he told the Warren Commission. “I thought, well, there is Jack Ruby. I had been away from Dallas for eighteen months and one day at that time, but it seemed just perfectly normal to see Jack Ruby standing there, because he was a known goer to events.”50 Kantor later described him as a “town character … [who was] self-seeking and publicity hungry.”51
“If there was one Ruby trait that stands out,” says Tony Zoppi, “it is that he had to be where the action was. He was like horse-shit, all over the place, wherever anything exciting was happening. That’s why the President’s assassination and all the follow-up activity at the jail with Oswald and the press attracted Jack like a magnet. It was a natural for him.”52
After briefly stopping by Parkland, Ruby continued to the Carousel. He knew Kennedy was dead. “He just got on the telephone,” recalled his bartender, Armstrong. “He kept saying, ‘It’s a shame,’ like that and … he was crying.”53 He first called his sister Eileen. When she answered the phone, he was crying.
“Did you hear the awful news?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Oh my God, oh my God.” He repeated it several times. “What a black mark for Dallas. Maybe I’ll fly up [to Chicago] to be with you tonight.”
“Well, I don’t think that will be necessary,” she told him.
She asked how Eva was, and he cried more. “Oh, she’s terrible. When she heard this news, she’s even worse.” Eileen told him to stay in Dallas and that she would call him later that night.54
Ruby stayed at the club for an hour. All those who saw or spoke to him remember his grief was visible and real. Gladys Craddock, who worked for him as a hostess, said he had great admiration for the Kennedy family.55 Wynn Warner, a musician who had worked for Jack, said the President’s murder shattered his world, especially since it happened in Dallas.56 It was almost as if the assassination had triggered an emotional collapse for Ruby, who was already under tremendous business pressure. His stability also might have been adversely affected by his severe dieting, aided by an appetite suppressant, Preludin, an “upper,” which exacerbated his volatile temperament. Even Ruby later admitted it was a “stimulus to give me an emotional feeling …”57
“He was heartbroken,” recalled his friend Ralph Paul. “[He was] very bad emotionally, and said, ‘I can’t believe it. … It’s a terrible, terrible thing.’”58 Ruby had telephoned Paul to say he was thinking of closing his clubs for three days. Paul informed him that he did not intend to close his restaurant and that Ruby’s competition, the Weinsteins, would probably not close. According to Paul, Ruby said, “You can do whatever you want. … I don’t care about the other clubs.”59
When he had spoken to his sister Eileen, she felt he just wanted to talk to people. Though he was “crying pretty bad,” he called an ex-girlfriend he had not dated in eleven years, Alice Nichols, to express his shock.60 Alex Gruber was a boyhood friend living in Los Angeles, and Ruby telephoned him. Although Gruber felt Ruby was emotionally distraught and needed to talk, the conversation was brief since Jack broke down sobbing and had to hang up.61
In her conversation with him, Eva could hear how distraught he was and told him, “You better come here.”62 When he left the Carousel at 3:15 he went directly to Eva’s apartment, but stayed less than half an hour, leaving again to pick up food for the weekend.63 He stopped by the Ritz Delicatessen, only two blocks from the Carousel, and then went to the club and told Crafard to prepare a sign saying it was closed.64 Ruby was back at Eva’s by 5:30 and stayed for two hours.
Eva said he returned with “enough groceries for 20 people … but he didn’t know what he was doing then.”65 He told her that he wanted to close the clubs. “And he said, ‘Listen, we are broke anyway, so I will be a broken millionaire. I am going to close for three days.’”66 In dire financial straits, and barely breaking even with both clubs open seven days a week, his decision to close was an important gesture. He called the News to cancel his advertisements, but they had already reserved the space for him, so he changed the ads to say the clubs were closed. He made some more telephone calls from Eva’s apartment. Those he spoke to later remarked how agitated he was. Cecil Hamlin, a longtime friend, said he was “very emotional … and broken up.” He was fond of Hamlin’s young daughter and told him how upset he was for the Kennedy “kids.”
But his sister Eva witnessed the real depth of his anguish, and unwittingly contributed to it. “He was sitting on this chair and crying. … He was sick to his stomach … and went into the bathroom. … He looked terrible.”67 Eva and Jack watched the television news, and were fascinated as details became known about the accused assassin. “One of the things he loved about this President,” she said, “he didn’t care what you were, you were a human being and Jack felt that this was one time in history that Jews are getting the break. He [Kennedy] put in great Jewish men in office …”68 She told her brother that Oswald was a “barbarian,” and said, “That lousy Commie. Don’t worry, the Commie, we will get him.”69 She said Jack was sitting with his head in his hands, and said, “Really, he was crazy … what a creep.”70 “You see,” said Eva, “‘a creep’ is a real low life to Jack.”71
When Jack left, Eva remembered, “He looked pretty bad.… I can’t explain it to you. He looked too broken, a broken man already. He did make the remark, he said, ‘I never felt so bad in my life, even when Ma and Pa died.… Someone tore my heart out.’”72
Although Ruby was not religious, he had twice telephoned Temple Shearith Israel to check on the time for the evening’s services and was told a special memorial for the President would start at 8:00 P.M. He planned to attend. But first, he apparently stopped by the Dallas police headquarters—although he told the Warren Commission he was not there Friday night before 11:15 P.M., and it believed him.73 At least five witnesses, police and reporters who knew him, reported seeing Ruby on the third floor of the headquarters sometime between 6:00 and 9:00 P.M.74 John Rutledge, the night police reporter for the Dallas Morning News, knew Ruby. He saw him step off the elevator, hunched between two out-of-state reporters with press identifications on their coats. “The three of them just walked past policemen, around the corner, past those cameras and lights, and on down the hall,” recalled Rutledge.75 The next time Rutledge saw him, he was standing outside room 317, where Oswald was being interrogated, and “he was explaining to members of the out-of-state press who everybody was that came in and out of that door.… There would be a thousand questions shot at him at once, and Jack would straighten them all out.…”76 Soon, several detectives walked by, and one recognized him. “Hey, Jack, what are you doing here?” “I am helping all these fellows,” Ruby said, pointing to the pack of reporters.77
“You have to understand,” says Tony Zoppi, “that Jack was in his element. He was the center of attention at the hottest place in the city.”78 “That’s where the limelight was,” recalled Barney Weinstein, Ruby’s competitor in the nightclub business. “He just had to get into everything, including the excitement of that weekend Kennedy died.”79
Victor Robertson, a WFAA radio reporter, also knew Ruby. He saw him approach the door to the office where Oswald was being interrogated and start to open it. “He had the door open a few inches,” recalled Robertson, “and began to step into the room, and the two officers stopped him.… One of them said, ‘You can’t go in there, Jack.’”80
Ruby probably left police headquarters shortly after 8:30 and proceeded to his apartment. His home telephone records show that, among others, he called his friend Ralph Paul, his brother Hyman, and two sisters, Marion and Ann, about 9:00 P.M.81 Hyman said Jack was so disturbed about what happened in Dallas that he talked about selling his business and returning to Chicago.82 Buddy Raymon, a comedian, remembered that when Ruby telephoned him, “he was crying and carrying on: ‘What do you think of a character like that killing the President?’ I was trying to calm him down. I said, ‘Jack, he’s not normal; no normal man kills the President on his lunch hour and takes a bus home.’ But he just kept saying, ‘He killed our President.’”83 George Senator said it was the “first time I ever saw tears in his eyes.”84
From his apartment, Ruby finally drove to the temple and arrived in time for the end of a special memorial service for the President. He cried openly at the synagogue.85* “They didn’t believe a guy like Jack would ever cry,” said his brother Hyman. “Jack never cried in his life. He is not that kind of a guy to cry.”86
By 10:30, he left the temple and arrived at Phil’s Delicatessen, near his Vegas Club. There, he stocked up on kosher sandwiches and sodas.87 While he waited for the sandwiches, he talked to a group of students at the deli, lamenting the President’s death, saying the assassination was very bad for Dallas and proudly telling them he had closed his clubs out of respect.88 When he left the deli, he hoped to stop by KLIF radio, his personal favorite, and drop off some food, but he did not have the station’s private night-line number. He then drove to police headquarters, past several nightclubs, and noticed most were open. “I can’t understand some of the clubs remaining open,” he said. “It struck me funny at such a tragic time …”89
When he arrived at the third floor of the station, he encountered a uniformed officer who did not recognize him. Ruby saw several detectives he knew, shouted to them, and they helped him get inside. Once there, he said he was “carried away with the excitement of history.”90 Detective A. M. Eberhardt, who knew Ruby and had been at his club, was in the burglary-and-theft section when Jack “stuck his head in our door and hollered at us. … He came in and said hello to me, shook hands with me. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was a translator for the newspapers. … He said, ‘I am here as a reporter’ and he took the notebook and hit it.”91 Eberhardt, who knew Ruby spoke some Yiddish, figured he was translating for Israeli papers. Ruby told them about the sandwiches he had brought, and then the discussion switched to the assassination. He told the detectives “how terrible it was for it to happen in the city.… It’s hard to realize that a complete nothing, a zero like that, could kill a man like President Kennedy. It’s hard to understand how a complete nothing could have done this.”92
In less than half an hour, Oswald was brought out of room 317 on the way to the basement assembly room for the midnight press conference. Ruby recalled that as Oswald walked past, “I was standing about two or three feet away.”93*
“I went down to the assembly room in the basement,” Ruby said. “I felt perfectly free walking in there. No one asked me or anything.”94 One of the detectives assigned to guard Oswald was Ruby’s friend A. M. Eberhardt. He noticed Ruby in the right-hand corner, with a notebook and pencil in his hand.95 Ruby thought Oswald was smirking at his police guards, and in only a few minutes he was convinced that Oswald was guilty.96
When the press conference finished, Ruby walked outside the room and saw Dallas district attorney Henry Wade. “‘Hi, Henry,’ he yelled real loud,” recalled Wade, “and put his hand out to shake hands with me and I shook hands with him. And he said, ‘Don’t you know me? I am Jack Ruby, I run the Vegas Club.’ And I said, ‘What are you doing in here?’ He said, ‘I know all these fellows.’”97
Ruby even introduced himself to justice of the peace David Johnston, who had earlier arraigned Oswald, and gave him a pass to the Carousel.98 He did the same to Ike Pappas, then a reporter for New York radio station WNEW. In a few minutes he saw that Pappas had an open telephone line and was trying to get Henry Wade’s attention. Ruby took it upon himself to interrupt Wade’s conversation with several other men, and took the district attorney over to Pappas for the telephone interview.99 Ruby said, “I felt I was deputized as a reporter momentarily.”100
He then telephoned KLIF radio station (he had obtained the private night-line number since arriving at police headquarters) and said he was bringing sandwiches over. He also asked if the station wanted a live interview with district attorney Wade. “I heard someone call, ‘Henry Wade wanted on the phone,’” recalled Wade, “and I gradually got around to one of the police phones and as I get there it is Jack Ruby. … I didn’t know a thing, and I just picked up the phone and they said this is so and so [Glenn Duncan] at KLIF and started asking questions.”101 Several minutes later Ruby returned upstairs and ran into one of the KLIF disc jockeys, Russ Knight, who was at police headquarters covering the story. “He [Ruby] overheard me ask where Wade was,” recalled Knight, “and then he said, ‘I’ll show you.’”102 Ruby took Knight to the basement and pointed out Wade, and introduced them. “Ruby was insistent that I ask Wade if Oswald were insane,” said Knight. Wade said Oswald was not insane and that the President’s murder was premeditated.103
After that interview, Knight walked the four blocks back to KLIF, and Ruby drove there. Ruby had walked in with his sandwiches and sodas by 1:45 A.M. He talked briefly to Knight and several other employees before the 2:00 A.M. newscast. Again, he expressed his sadness over the assassination, and said he was glad the evidence was mounting against Oswald, whom he bragged he had personally seen.104 At the 2:00 A.M. newscast, Knight talked about his interview with Wade, and said, “Through a tip from a local nightclub owner, I asked Mr. Wade the question of Oswald’s insanity.”105 Glen Duncan, a KLIF employee who spoke to Ruby over the phone and at the station, felt he was excited about becoming part of the unfolding story.106
Although it was approaching 2:30 in the morning, Ruby decided to drive to the Dallas Times Herald. Before leaving KLIF, he went to his car and returned with a pamphlet for Russ Knight titled “Heroism.”107 On the way to the Herald, Ruby saw Harry Olsen and Kay Helen Coleman near a downtown parking lot. They waved him over to their car and he joined them. They talked for nearly an hour. Harry Olsen was a Dallas policeman, and Kay Coleman was a stripper who worked at the Carousel under the stage name Kathy Kay.*
They were all upset about the killings of JFK and Officer Tip-pit.108 Ruby told them, “It’s too bad a peon could do something like that, that son-of-a-bitch.”109 Coleman described Ruby as “kind of wild-eyed,” and said that Ruby reiterated that he was mad that the other club owners had not closed, and that he “was real upset … talked about Mrs. Kennedy and the children and how terrible it was. … He would just keep saying over and over how terrible it was, what a wonderful man the President was and how sorry he felt for Mrs. Kennedy and the children.”110 He told Olsen and Coleman that Oswald “looked like a little rat, real sneaky looking.”111
“And they talked and they carried on,” said Ruby, “and they thought I was the greatest guy in the world, and he stated they should cut this guy inch by inch into ribbons, and so on. And she said, ‘Well, if he was in England, they would drag him through the streets and would have hung him.’ … I left them after a long delay. They kept me from leaving. They were constantly talking and were in a pretty dramatic mood. They were crying and carrying on.”112*
Ruby left Olsen and Coleman and arrived at the Times Herald offices just before 4:00 A.M. He often visited the Herald at that early morning hour in order to check on his ads for the following day.113 He talked to several employees, and they remembered him as “pretty shaken up” about the assassination, but also excited over his involvement with Henry Wade and having seen Oswald.114 Again, he complained about the Weissman ad in the Dallas Morning News. “He thought the name Weissman was evidently Jewish,” recalled Arthur Watherwax, a printer at the newspaper. “He thought it was a plan that would make the Jews look bad, that it would really reflect on the Jews.”115 Ruby also complained that Oswald was “a little weasel of a guy.”116 Roy Pryor, who had known Ruby for years, thought his voice was laced with hatred and revulsion when he spoke of Oswald.117 At one point, shaking the newspaper emphatically in the air, he said, “Poor Mrs. Kennedy—Jackie and the kids.”118 Watherwax and Pryor thought he was trying to “be a big-shot,” especially when he told them, “You see, I’m in good with the district attorney,” and how he had corrected Wade at the press conference about his Fair Play for Cuba mistake.119*
Ruby left the Times Herald offices about 4:30 A.M. and drove back to his apartment. On the way, he began fixating on a billboard he had seen earlier, which demanded, in large block letters: IMPEACH EARL WARREN. He wondered whether there was a connection between that sign and the Weissman advertisement. When he arrived at his apartment, “I very impatiently awakened George Senator,” Ruby remembered.120
“The next thing I knew,” recalled Senator, “somebody was hollering at me, and shaking me up, [and it was] Ruby. He was excited. He was moody; and the first thing come [sic] out of his mouth is … ‘Gee, his poor children and Mrs. Kennedy, what a terrible thing to happen.’”121 Next he told Senator about the IMPEACH EARL WARREN sign. He made Senator get dressed and called Larry Crafard, who was sleeping at the Carousel Club, and ordered him to “get that Polaroid with the flashbulbs and meet me downstairs. I’ll be right downtown.”122
At nearly 5:00 in the morning, the three of them drove to the Warren sign, and Ruby had Crafard take some photos.† There was a post-office box number on the billboard, 1754, and Ruby mistakenly thought it was the same post-office box listed in the Weissman advertisement, 1792.123 “I can’t understand why they want to impeach Earl Warren,” said Ruby. “This must be the work of the John Birch Society or the Communist Party.”124 The three of them drove next to the post office’s terminal annex and spoke to the night clerk about the owner of the box. The clerk could not give them any information, but Ruby looked inside the box and was “deeply annoyed” to see there was a large mail response to the ad.125 He had earlier failed to find Weissman in the phone book, which encouraged his belief that the name was invented in order to blame Jews for the events in Dallas.
It was after 5:30 A.M. when they left the post office and drove to the Southland Hotel’s coffee shop. There, a copy of Friday’s Dallas Morning News was on the counter, and Ruby picked it up and again saw the Weissman advertisement. “He was very, very disturbed,” recalled Senator.126 He kept rereading the ad and mumbling that he could not understand why someone would publish such an insulting tirade against the President. Senator felt Ruby, who had a strange and abnormal stare, was disturbed in a way he had never before seen.127 “He was deeply hurt about the President, terribly,” said Senator. Again, Ruby talked about JFK’s children, and he had “tears in his eyes.”
Ruby dropped Crafard off at the Carousel at daybreak. Back at his apartment with Senator, he put on the television for a short while before going to bed a little after 6:00 A.M. At 8:30, Crafard woke Ruby by telephoning to say there was no canned food for the dogs at the Carousel. He was furious that Crafard had called so early, and berated him.128 Crafard had been at the Carousel for nearly six weeks, but Ruby’s odd behavior the night before, and now this vicious verbal attack, was too much for the youngster. Later that morning, around 11:00, he took $5 from the club’s cash register and left Dallas, hitchhiking back to his sister in Michigan.129 Crafard, a drifter who did not even know where his wife and two children lived, admitted to the Warren Commission that he had done similar things in the past. He told only the garage attendant next to the club that he was leaving.130
Ruby’s spirits were not much better when he finally got up Saturday. Shortly after being woken by Crafard, Ruby turned on the television and saw a memorial service broadcast from New York. “I watched Rabbi Seligman,” he recalled. “He eulogized that here is a man [JFK] that fought in every battle, went to every country, and had to come back to his own country to be shot in the back. That created a tremendous emotional feeling for me, the way he said that.”131
Marjorie Richey, who worked for him, telephoned near noon, asking if the club would reopen that night. He said no, and when he spoke of the “terrible” assassination, “his voice was shaking …”132 He drove by the Carousel. At the Nichols Parking Garage next door, at about 1:30 P.M., he told Tom Brown, an attendant, to notify any of his acquaintances who stopped by that the Carousel would stay closed for the weekend.133 He then went to Sol’s Turf Bar, on Commerce Street. Near 2:00, he was spotted there by Frank Bellocchio, the owner of a jewelry firm and a Ruby acquaintance for almost eight years.134*
Bellocchio was in a discussion with a friend, in which he blamed Dallas for the assassination, when Ruby got involved. “He was very incoherent,” recalled Bellocchio, who tried to make his point about Dallas’s responsibility by showing Ruby a copy of Friday’s Weissman advertisement.135 It was like waving a red flag at a bull. Ruby went into a tirade about the ad being the work of radical groups trying to “stir up anti-Jewish feelings,” claiming Weissman was fictitious and that the ad was dangerous since Jews in Dallas might be blamed for the assassination. He produced two of his IMPEACH EARL WARREN photos, and when Bellocchio asked for one, he refused since he said it was part of a “scoop” he was working on.136
When Ruby left Sol’s it was shortly after 2:30 P.M. He then went past police headquarters, where policeman D. V. Harkness saw him near a large crowd that had gathered for a scheduled transfer of Oswald at 4:00 P.M.137* Ruby drove back toward the Carousel and stopped at the Nichols garage to check if he had any messages. Garnett Hallmark, the garage’s general manager, spoke to Ruby, who told him he was “acting like a reporter,” and then got on the phone in the cashier’s office.138 He called KLIF radio station twice within a few minutes and spoke both times to Ken Dowe, a news announcer. “I understand they are moving Oswald over to the county jail,” he told Dowe. “Would you like for me to go over there and get some news stories? Would you like me to cover it, because I am a pretty good friend of Henry Wade’s and I believe I can get some news stories.” Dowe put him on hold and asked another newsman, Gary De-Laune, “Who the devil is Jack Ruby?” “He is just a guy that calls on the telephone,” DeLaune responded, “and he knows everybody in town and maybe he can help us.”139 Dowe told Ruby they appreciated any help he could provide. As far as Jack was concerned, he was now officially representing KLIF as a reporter.140
Ruby then went to Dealey Plaza, where he looked at the many memorial wreaths that had been left overnight. As he walked around the plaza, he ran into an acquaintance, Wes Wise, a newsman from KRLD radio. They talked about the assassination. “The only thing I noticed,” recalled Wise, “was that when I mentioned that at the Trade Mart I had gone into the room where President Kennedy’s rocking chair [was] … located and saw the two large presents meant for Caroline and John and they were Western saddles that were going to be given to Kennedy to give to his children … I noticed tears in his eyes.”141 He informed Wise that Chief Curry and Captain Fritz were at the Plaza looking at the memorial wreaths, and Wise thanked him and left to interview them. It was nearly 3:30 when Ruby pulled up in his 1960 white Oldsmobile to policeman James Chaney, who was acquainted with him. Ruby asked if the two men standing several hundred feet away were Chief Curry and Captain Fritz. Chaney said yes. “Good. I just told reporters up the street that they were down there.”142 Then he abruptly drove away, because he was about to cry and did not want Chaney to see him break down.143
When he left Dealey Plaza, it appears Ruby once more went to the third floor of the police headquarters, expecting an Oswald transfer that never took place. He later denied being there Saturday because, again, he probably feared it might be interpreted as evidence of premeditation. The Warren Commission said it “reached no firm conclusion as to whether or not Ruby visited the Dallas Police Department on Saturday.”144 Yet credible eyewitness testimony shows he was there.
Earlier in the day, Ruby had put his head through the open window of a remote television truck for NBC affiliate WBAP, and without asking anyone’s permission began watching the monitors that showed the activity on the third floor of the jail.145 He told the reporters he “knew Wade personally and he could get some information for us or he could get him to come out and talk to us.”146 Ruby was so bothersome that the WBAP reporters dubbed him “the creep.” Later in the afternoon they saw him on their monitors wandering the third floor of police headquarters and approaching Wade in an office, from which regular reporters were barred.147 Only the next day, after Oswald was shot, did the van’s reporters learn “the creep” was Ruby.
On the third floor, several reporters saw him. Philippe Labro, a reporter for France-Soir, a daily French newspaper, ran into Ruby, who asked who he was and what he did. When Labro told him, Ruby’s response was, “Ooh la la Folies-Bergère,” which Labro was convinced was the only French he knew. He then gave Labro a pass to the Carousel.148 Another French correspondent, François Pelou, saw him later hand out sandwiches to some of the press. Frank Johnston, a UPI photographer, saw him at the same time.149 Thayer Waldo, a reporter with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, watched Ruby giving out Carousel cards to reporters between 4:00 and 5:00 P.M. He was aggressive in getting the reporters’ attention, pulling the sleeves of some and slapping others on the back or arms. When he got to Waldo, Ruby said, “You’re one of the boys, aren’t you? Here’s my card with both my clubs on it. Everybody around here knows me. Ask anybody who Jack Ruby is. As soon as you get a chance, I want all of you boys to come over to my place, the one downtown here is more convenient, and have a drink on me. I’ll be seeing you.”150
Before Ruby left police headquarters, he called his friend and attorney Stanley Kaufman, complaining about the Weissman ad and asking for help in locating Weissman. Kaufman said Ruby “rambled,” and that he was “upset” about the effects on the Dallas Jewish community. Jack told him that the ad’s black border was a tipoff that those who placed it knew about the assassination, and Ruby assured Kaufman he was helping the police get to the bottom of the Weissman matter.151
Ruby left the headquarters just before 6:00 P.M., the same time Chief Curry told the press they expected to transfer Oswald at 10:00 A.M. the next day.152 Not long after that, he arrived at the Carousel. Andrew Armstrong, the club’s bartender, thought he was still “more worried than ever,” remarking that he was “in a sad and sorrowful mood … and disturbed … over the assassination.”153 Armstrong had received calls from patrons who wanted to book reservations for that night’s show, and from most of the strippers, trying to find out if the club was going to open. Ruby said no, it would stay closed until Monday.*
He left the Carousel between 7:00 and 7:30 P.M., heading for Eva’s apartment, where he stayed for more than an hour.154† He told her of his early-morning expedition to photograph the IMPEACH EARL WARREN sign and its links to the Weissman ad. “I thought my brother Jack was plain nuts,” said Eva. “He figured that a gentile is using that name to blame all this on Jews … and then he analyzed the ad on Saturday and he saw the black border.”155
He asked if she would be well enough to attend Tippit’s funeral with him on Monday. Using her telephone, he made several calls to local acquaintances, and in each complained about the Earl Warren sign and that competing nightclubs had stayed open.156 Russ Knight at KLIF received a brief call from him, and “he asked me who Earl Warren was …”157*
By 9:30 Ruby had returned to his apartment. There, he received a call from one of his strippers, Karen Bennett Carlin, whose stage name was Little Lynn. She had driven into Dallas from Fort Worth with her husband and wondered if the Carousel was going to open over the weekend, because she needed money. “He got very angry and was very short with me,” Carlin recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t you have any respect for the President? Don’t you know the President is dead? … I don’t know when I will open. I don’t know if I will ever open back up.’”158 She apologized for bothering him but still asked for part of her salary, and he promised to meet them in an hour at the Carousel. When he had not arrived by 10:30, Carlin’s husband, Bruce, again telephoned the apartment, and emphasized they needed money for rent and groceries. On this occasion, Ruby spoke to the attendant at the Nichols garage, Huey Reeves, and persuaded him to lend the Carlins $5 so they could at least return to Fort Worth, and told Carlin to call him the next day about getting more money.159*
Ruby telephoned Eva complaining about his deteriorating mood. “He was very depressed,” she recalled. “He was so low.”160 She encouraged him to visit some of his friends, but he was not certain he wanted to leave his apartment. He next telephoned Lawrence Meyers, the Chicago friend he had seen Thursday night. Ruby complained about the “terrible, terrible thing,” and then began talking about Mrs. Kennedy and her children. “He was so absolutely repetitious about those poor people,” recalled Meyers. “I said … life goes on. She will make a new life for herself.… Then he was obviously very upset.… This night he seemed far more incoherent than I have ever listened to him. The guy sounded like he had flipped his lid, I guess. … He became so incoherent, so vehement about those … poor children.… [He said] ‘Those poor people, those poor people, I have got to do something about it.’”161
Meyers tried to pacify him, but each attempt only resulted in “another tirade.”162 Ruby turned down an offer to have coffee with Meyers at his hotel, but promised to call the next night at 6:00 P.M. to arrange for dinner.
Shortly after speaking to Meyers, Ruby drove back to his sister’s apartment. From there he telephoned Ralph Paul’s Bullpen restaurant and spoke to his close friend. Paul remembered that Eva was crying in the background and that Ruby told him he had driven around the city to check on his competitors and none of them were doing any business.163 A nineteen-year-old waitress at the Bullpen, Wanda Helmick, testified she overheard Paul’s end of the conversation and heard him mention something about a gun, and that he also exclaimed, “Are you crazy?”164 However, Paul adamantly denied he ever made such statements. 165†
Ruby left his sister’s apartment and arrived at the Nichols garage shortly after 11:00 P.M. He repaid the attendant the $5 he had loaned to the Carlins. Outside the Carousel, he briefly said hello to Harry Olsen and Kay Coleman, the couple he had spoken to for an hour late the previous night. Inside the club, he made several brief calls to Ralph Paul and made a two-minute call to Breck Wall, a friend and entertainer who had gone to Galveston when his Dallas show had suspended its performances because of the assassination. Wall was also the newly elected president of the Dallas council of AGVA, the union with which Ruby was having difficulties. “He was very upset that he had closed and they [the Weinsteins] had stayed open,” recalled Wall. “He thought it wasn’t right and he wanted to know when I would return to Dallas and I told him probably Monday or Tuesday and he said, well, when I got in town would I call him.… I told him fine and that was it.”166*
After finishing his calls at 11:48 P.M., Ruby left for the Pago Club, about ten minutes away from the Carousel. He sat at a table by himself, ordered a Coke, and asked the waitress in a disparaging tone, “Why are you open?”167 Soon, the Pago’s owner, Robert Norton, joined him at the table. They talked about the assassination, and Norton expressed strong feelings. “It was terrible and I think it was an insult to our country,” he told Ruby. “It was terrible for the man himself. We couldn’t do enough to the person that had done this sort of thing.”168 Ruby was uncharacteristically quiet. He complained he was tired and, only fifteen minutes after arriving, left to return to his apartment.169 George Senator later claimed he was asleep when Ruby returned.170 Jack telephoned Eva at 12:45 to see how she was feeling and then went to bed himself by 1:30.171
On Sunday, Mrs. Elnora Pitts, Ruby’s cleaning lady, called between 8:30 and 9:00 A.M., waking him up. She asked if she should stop by to clean the apartment later that day. “He sounded just terrible strange to me,” she recalled.172 He told her to call him back at 2:00 before she came over.* Ruby did not get up until 9:00 to 9:30.173 Senator noticed he was a “little worse this day … the way he talked. He was even mumbling, which I didn’t understand.… His lips were going. What he was jabbering, I don’t know. But he was really pacing.”174 Ruby turned on the television to listen to the latest news and read the morning’s Dallas Times Herald.† At 10:19, while still lounging in the apartment in his underwear, he received a call from his dancer Karen Carlin (her phone record revealed the exact time). Although she sensed he “still seemed upset,” she told him, “I have called, Jack, to try to get some money, because the rent is due and I need some money for groceries and you told me to call.” Ruby asked how much she needed, and she said $25. He offered to go downtown and send it to her by Western Union, but told her it would “take a little while to get dressed.…”175
According to Senator, he got ready slowly. “Jack was never a fast dresser or never a fast washer.… He sure had a moody and very faraway look to me. It was a look that I had never seen before on him …”176 Ruby left the apartment a few minutes before 11:00 A.M. His route downtown took him past Dealey Plaza, where he saw the many new wreaths left overnight in memory of the President. Again, he cried.177 As he drove near the jail, he noticed a large crowd and assumed Oswald had already been transferred.178
At the police station, if everything had gone according to plan, Oswald would have been moved to the sheriff’s custody nearly an hour earlier.179 By 9:00 A.M., the police had cleared the basement. Guards were posted at the two driveway ramps, and at the five doorways into the garage. Then the press was allowed to set up to film the transfer.180*
A crowd of several hundred had gathered before 10:00, in front of the jail, to watch the event.181 However, the transfer had undergone a series of last-second changes and delays. Although they had received anonymous telephone threats on Oswald’s life, the police had considered and rejected a secret nighttime transfer. Their plans stayed in a state of flux as they decided on the best compromise between security and press access.182 Only an hour and a half before the planned move, the police decided to make the arrangements themselves, instead of the usual policy of allowing the sheriff’s department to take responsibility.183 An hour before the transfer, Fritz decided to bring Oswald through the basement, so the press could have more room to take pictures.184
The original plan to transfer Oswald in an armored truck went awry when two armored vehicles arrived that were unusable. One was too small to hold guards, and the other was too tall to fit under the jail’s eight-foot driveway clearance.185 Captain Fritz decided to use the larger armored truck as a decoy and move Oswald in an unmarked police car.
One of the biggest delays to the scheduled transfer was caused by the arrival of postal inspector Harry Holmes for a final interrogation. “I had been in and out of Captain Fritz’s office on numerous occasions during this 2½-day period,” recalled Holmes. “On this morning, I had no appointment. I actually started to church with my wife. I got to church and I said, ‘You get out, I am going down and see if I can do something for Captain Fritz. I imagine he is as sleepy as I am.’”186 When Holmes arrived at police headquarters, Fritz asked if he wanted to participate in the final interrogation of Oswald. Holmes’s extensive questioning about Oswald’s use of his post-office boxes made the session run long. Captain Fritz remembered, “We went, I believe, an hour overtime with the interrogation, but we tried to finish by 10:00 …”187 Holmes remembered that near the end of the session, Chief Curry “was beating on the door.”188 The questioning lasted more than one and a half hours and did not end until shortly after 11:00 A.M.189
Ruby parked across the street from the Western Union station, only one block from police headquarters, near 11:05.* At Western Union, he filled out the forms for sending $25 to Karen Carlin. Then he patiently waited in line while another customer completed her business. According to the clerk, Ruby was in no hurry.190 It was impossible for him to know that Oswald had not been transferred, since there was no television or radio at the Western Union office. There was a public telephone, but Ruby did not use it.191 When he got to the counter, the cost for sending the moneygram totaled $26.87. He handed over $30 and waited for his change while the clerk finished filling out the forms and then time-stamped the documents. Ruby’s receipt was stamped 11:17.192* When he left Western Union, he was less than two hundred steps from the entrance to police headquarters.
On the third floor of the headquarters, police had informed Oswald shortly after 11:00 A.M. that they would immediately take him downstairs and move him to the sheriffs jail. He asked if he could change his clothes. Captain Fritz sent for some sweaters, and when they were brought to him, he put on a beige one, and then changed his mind and switched to a black sweater. Then he announced he was ready to leave.193 If Oswald had not decided at the last moment to get a sweater, he would have left the jail almost five minutes earlier, while Ruby was still inside the Western Union office.
Now, Ruby walked the one block along Main Street and stopped near the eight-foot-wide rampway. It was guarded by policeman E. R. Vaughn. At 11:20, about fifty-five seconds before Oswald was shot, Lt. Rio Pierce drove a black car up the Main Street ramp as part of the decoy plan. That ramp was normally a one-way entrance into headquarters, but Pierce had to use it as an exit since the large armored truck that was originally scheduled to move Oswald was blocking the Commerce Street ramp. Officer Roy Vaughn stepped away from the center of the rampway, into the middle of Main Street, to stop the traffic so Pierce could safely exit.194
Ruby slipped inside while Vaughn was distracted. He walked down the ramp and arrived at the back of a crowd of police and press only seconds before Oswald was brought past. If the car that was scheduled to move Oswald had been in its correct position at the bottom of the ramp, it would have blocked Ruby from gaining access. 195†
Oswald was taken downstairs from the third floor to the basement. Cramped inside the garage confines were almost thirty reporters and seventy police. The glare from the bright television lights made it difficult to see. As Oswald walked into the garage, the large clock on the wall turned to 11:21.196
Jimmy Turner, a television director at WBAP, was waiting for Oswald to come out the door when he saw a man walking at the bottom of the Main Street ramp. He noticed Ruby’s dark suit and hat, and later said the man on the ramp was the same one who shot Oswald.197 When Turner first saw Ruby at the ramp, it was only thirty seconds before the shooting. Then Ruby walked closer to where Oswald was to emerge. “There was only a matter of four seconds, or five seconds, when he arrived there,” Turner said, “until Oswald reached the point where he was assassinated.”198 Even Ruby told the Warren Commission that he could never have planned to have made it there at the instant Oswald walked past, unless they believed it was “the most perfect conspiracy in the history of the world … if it had been three seconds later I would have missed this person.” Ruby later concluded, “The ironic part of this is had I not made an illegal turn behind the bus to the parking lot, had I gone the way I was supposed to go, straight down Main Street, I would never have met this fate because the difference in meeting this fate was thirty seconds one way or the other.”199*
“Just as they reached the edge of the ramp,” recalled policeman Don Archer, who was stationed directly across from where Ruby broke through, “I caught the movement of a man, and my first thought was, as I started moving, my first thought was that somebody jumped out of the crowd, maybe to take a sock at him.… And as I moved forward I saw the man reach Oswald, raise up, and then the shot was fired.” As he fired, Ruby yelled, “You killed my President, you rat!”200
Oswald was fatally shot through the abdomen. Several policemen immediately tackled Ruby. “The next thing, I was down on the floor,” remembered Ruby. “I said, ‘I am Jack Ruby. You all know me.’”201
An ambulance arrived within three minutes and took Oswald to Parkland Hospital, the same trauma unit that only forty-eight hours earlier had treated President Kennedy and Governor Connally. Homicide detective Chuck Dhority was one of those in the ambulance. “He [Oswald] looked up at me one time,” recalled Dhority, “and kind of gurgled, with his eyes open, but that was all that come out of him.”202 The Parkland surgeons could not save him. “It’s pretty hard to imagine one bullet doing more damage than that,” says Dr. John Lattimer. “It perforated the chest cavity, went through the diaphragm, spleen, and stomach. It cut off the main intestinal artery, and the aorta, and the body’s main vein, as well as breaking up the right kidney. That wound was definitely fatal.”203*
Ruby was rushed inside the jail and taken to a third-floor interrogation room. “I hope I killed the son of a bitch,” he muttered on the way upstairs. “It will save you guys a lot of trouble.”204 One of the police pushing him along was Detective Barnard Clardy. Ruby looked at him and said, “I’m Jack Ruby. Don’t you know me? Don’t you know me?” Clardy assured him he did know him.205 When they got to the third floor, Ruby, who was excited from the shooting, talked to anybody who came by. “If I had planned this I couldn’t have had my timing better,” he bragged. “It was one chance in a million.”206 He told the police that he had wanted to get off at least three shots, but could only fire one before he was tackled. Within a few minutes, several asked him why he did it. He explained that he did not want Mrs. Kennedy to have to return to Dallas for a trial and “go through this ordeal for this son-of-a-bitch.”207† Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels was one of the first to see him. Ruby told Sorrels “he had been to the Western Union office to send a telegram, and that he guessed he had worked himself into a state of insanity, where he had to do it. And to use his words after that, ‘I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts.’ … He wanted [us] not to hate him for what he had done.”208
Assistant district attorney Bill Alexander arrived when Ruby was changing from his clothes into the jail’s white coveralls. “I said, ‘Goddamn it, Jack, what did you do this for?’” recalls Alexander. “And he said, ‘Well, you guys couldn’t do it. Someone had to do it. That son of a bitch killed my President.’ The excitement of the shooting had really buoyed him up. He thought he was going to go through the booking, and then he would be released. He just thought, How mad can you get with the guy who just killed the President’s assassin? Jack actually thought he might come out of this as a hero of sorts, getting the acknowledgment he always wanted in Dallas. He thought he had erased any stigma the city had by knocking off Oswald.”209 Jim Martin, an attorney who spoke to Ruby during his first hours in jail, said, “He never expected to spend a night in jail.”210*
“Jack was one of the most talkative guys you would ever meet,” says Tony Zoppi. “He’d be the worst fellow in the world to be part of a conspiracy, because he just plain talked too much.”211 “Jack Ruby would be the last one that I could ever trust to do anything,” said Rabbi Silverman.212 While in jail, Ruby often granted press interviews, and talked to police and investigators and with others.† He wrote frequent letters. Rabbi Silverman met with him at least once a week for nearly a year.213 The first visit was the morning after Oswald was killed. “I entered his cell,” recalls the rabbi. “I knew him very well.… He was a very volatile, a very emotional, unbalanced person. He thought he was doing the right thing. He loved Kennedy. This man killed Kennedy. He happened to be there. … He was impetuous. He pulled the trigger.”214 Ruby told his friend Breck Wall that “I was right to kill Oswald.”215 When he saw his brother Earl, he told him that when he arrived in the basement and saw Oswald, he noticed “there was a smirk on his face, and he thought, Why you little s.o.b.,” and pulled out his gun and shot him.216 Jack’s sister Eva may have had the best insight into his motivation: “The truth is this … he said he did it for Jackie and the kids, but I think he’s just looking for a reason.” Eva realized that shooting Oswald was a momentary explosion caused by his violent temper. There was perhaps no single motivation.*
Earl Ruby hired flamboyant San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, the “King of Torts,” to defend Jack. Belli agreed to do it for nothing: The publicity and the book that would result would be enough.217 In Texas, there was a crime called murder without malice, equivalent to manslaughter in most states. The maximum penalty for such a conviction was five years. However, Belli gambled that he could acquit him completely and argued that Ruby’s family had a history of mental illness and that he was insane when he shot Oswald.
“Belli took a good five-year murder-without-malice case,” says Bill Alexander, “and made it into a death penalty for his client. He came down here thinking he was going to teach us ‘hicks’ in Texas a lesson. He probably thought we had never heard the word psychiatrist before. Well, he put on this god-awful defense, and day by day Jack melted—he just looked worse and worse. He was a pitiful object by the time the trial was over. Instead of [Jack’s] being a hero, Belli was bringing out all this stuff about Jack’s mother in an insane asylum and how Jack himself was sick. He just wanted to get on the stand and say, ‘I shot the guy because he killed my President,’ but Belli hacked away at his family in public. It was humiliating for Ruby. I actually felt sorry for him. It took away whatever dignity he had left.”218
On March 14, 1964, after deliberating less than an hour, the jury returned a guilty verdict of premeditated murder, later sentencing Ruby to be executed for the crime. After his arrest, there had been a steady mental deterioration and the conviction hastened his decline. The very item that kicked off his original interest on the weekend of the assassination, the Weissman advertisement, and his belief that it could have been published to embarrass Jews, grew into an obsession. His sister Eva was distraught over his disintegration. He often told her to kill herself because “he thinks they are going to kill out all the Jews and he has made remarks that 25 million Jews have been slaughtered, on the floor below, in the jail. Sometimes it’s planes going over and they are dropping bombs on the Jews.”219 He told Eva that he could hear and see Jews boiled in oil and that he had recurrent visions of his brother Earl and his children being dismembered.220 The police guards used to watch him put his ear to the jail wall and say, “Shhh! Do you hear the screams? They are torturing the Jews again down in the basement.”221
He thought he had been blamed for killing President Kennedy, that Lyndon Johnson was a Nazi, and there was a conspiracy to eliminate all Jews, to which he had fallen a victim by killing Oswald. Jack tried to kill himself on several occasions. Once, he tried to split his skull by pounding his head against the wall.222 Once he tried hanging, and once he tried to electrocute himself with a light fixture. He kept a picture of President Kennedy in his cell and kissed it during the day.223 “He is mentally deranged,” Eva told the Warren Commission.224
Ruby was in this state of mind when the Warren Commission interviewed him on June 7, 1964. During the course of the questioning he pleaded to take a polygraph to prove “I am as innocent regarding any conspiracy as any of you gentlemen in this room. … All I want to take is a polygraph test and tell the truth about things and combat the lies that have been told about me.… There was no conspiracy.”225 He told the Commission that he was “a scapegoat [used] … to create a falsehood about some of the Jewish faith, especially at the terrible heinous crime such as the killing of President Kennedy.”226 He warned Chief Justice Warren that “the Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” that “my people are going to suffer about things that will be said about me,” and “I don’t want my people to be blamed for something that is untrue …”227
Ruby also repeatedly asked the Commission, “Do I sound screwy?” and sometimes lost control and cried.228 Conspiracy theorists have focused on the fact that Ruby asked nine times to be taken to Washington. They assert that he could not tell the truth about some secret conspiracy to kill JFK while he was in Texas.229 When Ruby’s entire testimony is read, however, it is evident his pleas were exactly the opposite, a desire to be taken to Washington to vindicate himself of the rumors that he was part of a conspiracy. “If you don’t take me back to Washington tonight to give me a chance to prove to the President that I am not guilty, then you will see the most tragic thing that will ever happen,” he told Earl Warren. Ruby thought his life was in danger, as part of an extermination program against Jews, primarily undertaken by the John Birch Society.230 The “great conspiracy” he spoke about was his belief that his lawyers and the district attorney had plotted to portray him as insane and to prevent him from getting another trial.231*
“In his demented frame of mind,” said Rabbi Silverman, “he thought Washington was the only place where he could tell the world that he had nothing to do with Oswald and nothing to do with the conspiracy, not that there was any other story.… The man was schizophrenic. He was psychotic.”232 Ruby was convinced he could get a fair polygraph only in Washington, and he was ready to leave for the nation’s capital immediately. The Warren Commission decided not to take him.
The Commission did have a polygraph exam administered on July 18, 1964. According to the Commission’s experts, Ruby told the truth when he said he never knew Oswald, that he took the Main Street ramp to enter the jail’s basement, that he shot Oswald on his own, and had not decided to do it until the last moment on Sunday.233*
On October 5, 1966, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted him a new trial on the grounds that his statements to Dallas policemen immediately after the shooting should not have been allowed, and that the original court should have granted a change of venue to another jurisdiction since a fair trial was all but impossible in Dallas. By December 5, Wichita Falls, Texas, was selected as the site for the retrial.
When the sheriff from Wichita Falls arrived in December 1966 to move Ruby for his new trial, he refused to take him because he seemed too sick. The Dallas jail had been treating him with Pepto-Bismol for a stomach problem.234 At Parkland Hospital, he was first diagnosed with pneumonia, but a day later the doctors realized he had cancer in his liver, brain, and lungs. Although he had probably had it for fifteen months, none of the jail physicians had seen his condition as a serious one.235 Ruby died, officially of a blood clot, on January 3, 1967, more than three years after he shot Oswald.
* A number of people thought they saw Ruby in Houston on Thursday afternoon. Despite the numerous witnesses that reported his busy day in Dallas, author David Scheim says, “Ruby was there [Houston], monitoring President Kennedy’s movements in preparation for the next day’s assassination in Dallas.” Claiming that Ruby left Dallas by noon (though he was with Connie Trammel until 1:00 and had later visited a bank and the district attorney’s office), Scheim writes that Ruby drove the “243 miles on the freeway to Houston at an 80- to 100-mile-per-hour Texas clip. Such a speed would have been natural for Ruby given his many traffic violations, including four for speeding” (Contract on America, p. 261). One of the Houston witnesses claimed Ruby had a scar on the left side of his face. Ruby had no such scar, yet Scheim contends it was “perhaps noticeable only in the background of heavy stubble.” The Houston witnesses reported the man they saw was an oil worker, wearing an army jacket and boots, which Scheim calls a “carelessly presented disguise.” Scheim says that Ruby returned to Dallas the same afternoon, repeating his high-speed highway trip.
* The owner of the Egyptian Lounge, Joseph Campisi, was reportedly a ranking member of the Dallas underworld. Ruby was a frequent patron at the Egyptian Lounge, so his Thursday night dinner there was not out of the ordinary (CE 2980, p. 9, WC Vol. XXVI). Campisi did not see Ruby that night (HSCA Vol. I, pp. 363–64, 374). Summers, relying on an FBI report, says Ruby had a brief conversation at the Lounge with someone named “Connors” from the Dallas Morning News and “no person of that name worked at the News in 1963,” implying there is a mystery about the person whom Ruby spoke to (Summers, p. 451). However, the FBI mistakenly listed the name as “Connors.” Ruby actually spoke to Don Campbell, a salesmen in the advertising department of the News. He invited Ruby to the Castaway Club on Thursday night, but Ruby declined (Testimony of Jack Ruby, WC Vol. V, pp. 183–84; testimony of Don Campbell, State of Texas v. Jack Rubenstein, CE 2406, p. 26, WC Vol. XXV; Hall (C. Ray) Exhibit 3, p. 3, WC Vol. XX).
† Summers uses another mistake in an FBI report to say Ruby called Larry Crafard from the Cabana as late as 2:30 A.M. (Conspiracy, p. 452). That is a misreading of Crafard’s statement, which actually says he did not see Ruby again until nearly 2:30 in the morning (Crafard Exhibit 5226, p. 4, WC Vol. XIX). It is important for conspiracy writers to establish that Ruby remained for some time at the Cabana after talking to Meyers, because another guest at the hotel that night was Eugene “Jim” Brading, who had a criminal record and was questioned by the police the day of the assassination, when he was spotted in a building opposite Dealey Plaza “without a good excuse.” He was quickly released when he gave a legitimate business purpose for being in downtown Dallas (CD 385, 401, 816; Dallas police report, C. L. Lewis, November 22, 1963; statement of Jim Brading, November 22, 1963). Ruby did not know Brading, and while they were both at the same hotel on November 21, they did not meet. Witnesses at the Cabana say that Ruby left there at 12:30 A.M., and did not return (C. Ray Hall Exhibit 3, p. 3).
* After the assassination, a B&B waitress, Mary Lawrence, claimed the man with Ruby looked like Oswald (CD 223, pp. 366–67). However, Larry Crafard resembled Oswald. Mary Lawrence described Ruby’s restaurant acquaintance as having a small scar near his mouth. Oswald did not have one, while Crafard did. A number of people later identified Crafard as Oswald, leading to the mistaken speculation that Ruby and Oswald knew each other (WR, pp. 360–62). There were also other stories of a Ruby-Oswald relationship. Beverly Oliver, the woman who claims to be the missing “babushka lady” of Dealey Plaza, said that Jada introduced her to Ruby and Oswald over drinks at the Carousel. Oliver claimed Ruby introduced his friend as “Lee Oswald of the CIA.” However, within two weeks of the assassination, Jada told the FBI she had never seen Oswald and that she knew of no Ruby-Oswald association (CE 1561, p. 303). She was also extensively interviewed by reporters soon after the assassination and never mentioned seeing Oswald. Although Jada is dead, the author spoke to her son, Joe Conforto, who had been involved in a business with his mother. “She never mentioned anything like that,” he said. “It’s just not true.” Some of Ruby’s employees, who initially told the police and FBI they had never seen Oswald, told reporters years later that Oswald had been at the club and used to banter loudly with the stage acts; bump and grind with the strippers; meet with mobsters; hang out with David Ferrie, who supposedly visited from New Orleans for nights of partying; talk loudly about opening a narcotics ring or killing Governor Connally; and, sometimes, get into fist fights. Oswald’s wild double life at Ruby’s club supposedly took place during the time when Earlene Roberts and his other rooming-house tenants said he was home every night by 6:00 P.M.
The Warren Commission and the Select Committee investigated the rumors, and both concluded there was “no evidence they were ever acquainted.” Bill Alexander, who prosecuted Ruby, told the author, “After Ruby killed Oswald, there was a groundswell of these stories, people who claimed they saw them together. I would have had the greatest murder case in the world if any of it was right. It would have made our case easier and I would have pursued it in a moment. But we checked out every one of those stories, took them all seriously, and I know of no credible witness or evidence that connects Ruby to Oswald at any place, at any time, in any way. Not a single one was true.”
* A Dallas policeman, T. M. Hansen, said he saw Ruby in front of the Dallas police station and said hello to him at 9:30 A.M. either on Thursday, November 21, or Friday, November 22. He was not certain of the day, but was confident it was one of those two (WC Vol. XV, pp. 442–43). It was most likely Thursday, since George Senator said Ruby left too late on Friday to be at the police station by 9:30.
† Anthony Summers says Ruby “made himself obvious to a number of employees during that morning,” implying he made a special effort to establish a memorable alibi (Conspiracy, p. 454). “That’s nonsense,” Tony Zoppi told the author. “Jack was outgoing as hell to everyone he saw. That was his way, and whenever he came to our offices, it was a visit people remembered. He always had some angle or gimmick going. On the Friday the President was shot, I later learned he had stopped by my office to see whether I was going to run a piece on a new master of ceremonies he was hiring, a guy who did ESP with the audience. It was going to be a Dallas first. That was Jack.” Also, Ruby had to appear in person and pay cash for his ads, because of past problems with tardy payments (WC Vol. V, p. 184).
‡ An FBI report quoted Georgia Mayor, a News employee, as saying Ruby was at a desk from which he could see Dealey Plaza. But Mayor actually saw Ruby at Newman’s desk, from which Dealey and the Book Depository were not visible (WC Vol. XV, pp. 536–39; WC Vol. XXV, pp. 390–91). Jim Marrs speculates that in the approximately ten minutes Ruby was alone, he could have “left the newspaper offices, been in Dealey Plaza, and returned unnoticed …” (Crossfire, pp. 327–28). Not only is the timing of such an excursion almost impossible, but the News building was crowded with employees, and no one saw Ruby leave the second floor until after the assassination.
* The ad was paid for by a group of political right-wingers, including Bunker Hunt of the oil-rich Dallas family. While the organization was fictitious, Bernard Weissman did exist. He was a politically conservative twenty-six-year-old, recently discharged from the U.S. Army. He had been in Dallas only three and a half weeks and had agreed to the use of his name in the ad (WC Vol. V, pp. 489, 491, 504, 508–09, 514). Mark Lane later claimed that a secret source notified him that Weissman and Officer J. D. Tippit, who was killed by Oswald, had met with Ruby at the Carousel on November 14, eight days before the assassination (WC Vol. V, pp. 521–22). Weissman not only denied the story but also confronted Lane: “You have never taken the trouble to contact me. … I am in the phone book. … If you had any courage or commonsense or really wanted to get at the facts, you would have called and asked me, too” (WC Vol. V, p. 522). Lane promised to arrange a meeting in Dallas at which Weissman could confront the story’s source. He never heard from Lane again (WC Vol. V, p. 524).
Ruby did know a Tippit on the Dallas police force, but it was G. M. Tippit, a member of the special services bureau, not J. D. Tippit (CE 1620; CE 2430).
* Wilma Tice, a former manager of the Dallas Juvenile Department’s foster home, went to Parkland out of curiosity. She testified that she overheard someone called “Jack,” whom she later identified from newspaper photos as Ruby (WC Vol. XV, pp. 391–94). However, she acknowledged in her Warren Commission testimony that “it could have been somebody else that looked just like Jack, named Jack” (WC Vol. XV, p. 391).
† Another reason the Commission thought Ruby arrived at the Carousel no later than 1:45 was because the club’s telephone records showed two toll calls, one at 1:45 and the other at 1:51, that they believed Ruby made. The 1:45 call was to Karen Carlin, a stripper, to tell her the club would probably be closed. However, she testified that she received that call from Armstrong and not from Ruby (WC Vol. XIII, p. 208). The 1:51 call was to Ralph Paul’s Bullpen Drive-In restaurant, but it was also made by Armstrong. Paul testified he did not hear from Ruby until he received a call at his house about 2:45 (WC Vol. XIV, p. 151). The Carousel’s records show a call to the Bullpen restaurant at 2:42 for less than a minute. When Ruby discovered Paul was not at the restaurant but instead at home, he telephoned him there. The phone record shows he called Paul at 2:43 (CE 2303, p. 27, WC Vol. XXV).
* Summers said that “the rabbi, who talked to him, noticed that Ruby said nothing at all about the assassination,” implying that Ruby was not that disturbed over Kennedy’s killing (Conspiracy, pp. 455-56). Ruby later said, “I wasn’t in a conversational mood” (WC Vol. V, p. 187). Rabbi Silverman, however, remembered Ruby appeared to be in “shock or depressed,” and that he was in a daze (CE 2281, WC Vol. XXV).
* In his first statement to the FBI, Ruby admitted he had his .38 caliber revolver with him on Friday night (CD 1252.9). Later, when he realized that carrying his pistol might be construed as evidence of premeditation, he said he did not have his gun on Friday. However, a photo of the rear of Ruby, taken in the third-floor corridor that night, shows a lump under the right rear of his jacket. If he was a mob-hired killer with a contract on Oswald, he would have shot him at his first opportunity. Certainly, any contract to kill Oswald would not have been one Ruby could fulfill at his leisure. Yet when he had the perfect opportunity, with Oswald only a couple of feet away, Ruby did not shoot him.
* Coleman and Olsen were dating, and married several months later (WC Vol. XIV, p. 641).
* Harry and Kay Olsen denied making the inflammatory remarks about Oswald. However, Joe Tonahill, one of Ruby’s attorneys, believed that Ruby, without even realizing it, could have easily been led, through the power of suggestion, to have killed Oswald. “The conversation with Olsen and Kay could have been the beginning of it,” he said. “It could have been a lot stronger.… Ruby didn’t want to talk about that conversation because he had enough sense to know that was premeditation” (Kantor, The Ruby Cover-Up, pp. 103–4). Ruby kept the chance meeting with Olsen and Coleman a secret until after his trial was finished.
* Before leaving the Herald offices, Ruby and several of the employees tried a twistboard he had promised the newspaper’s foreman, Clyde Gadash. Some interpret the use of the twistboard as an indication that Ruby was not really that upset over the assassination. However, the Herald employees all testified that while he showed them how to use the board and several of them tried it, his general mood was one of sorrow (CE 2816, p. 1510, WC Vol. XXVI).
* When Ruby was arrested for shooting Oswald, three photos of the Warren billboard were in his suit pocket.
* Bellocchio’s most contemporaneous statement, taken by the FBI on December 6, 1963, only two weeks after the event, gives the time he saw Ruby as “between 1:00 and 2:00 P.M.” Because of Ruby’s visit to the Nichols Parking Garage at 1:30, it is possible to place the encounter closer to 2:00 P.M. In his Warren Commission testimony almost seven months later, Bellocchio changed the time of the meeting to 4:00 P.M. (WC Vol. XV, pp. 468–69). He did not change the time because he remembered it differently but rather because a friend who saw him there remembered being there at 4:00. However, Ruby’s accountant, Abraham Kleinman, also saw Jack at Sol’s, and he was clear it was at 2:30, because he arrived at that time and Ruby left a few minutes later (WC Vol. XV, pp. 386–87). In its final report, the Warren Commission set Ruby’s appearance at Sol’s Turf Bar as 3:00 P.M., a time mentioned by no one (WR, p. 347). The Commission filled Ruby’s time between his appearance at the garage and the time it decided he went to Sol’s with an encounter with a policeman and a reporter at Dealey Plaza (WR, p. 346). Yet those two witnesses say Ruby was at Dealey by 3:00, and their testimony is confirmed by an interview the reporter conducted with Dallas police chief Jesse Curry shortly afterward. The Warren Commission’s sequence of events has been used by most researchers on the assassination, yet it is clearly mistaken about the early part of Saturday afternoon.
* Dallas police chief Jesse Curry wanted to transfer Oswald from his headquarters to the custody of Sheriff Bill Decker’s more secure prison, one mile away at Dealey Plaza However, Captain Will Fritz wanted more time to interrogate him before he lost custody. Curry, hoping Fritz would be ready to relinquish Oswald by the afternoon, initially planned the transfer for 4:00 P.M. on Saturday, November 23. Although there was no public announcement, word quickly spread around headquarters that a transfer was imminent, and a crowd had begun gathering near the jail by 3:00 P.M.
* Later that evening, Ruby lost his temper with Armstrong, who refused to stay at the club until 10:00 P.M. just in case any customers arrived who did not know it was closed. Armstrong, who said he was “fed up” with Ruby’s unexpected temper tantrums, quit on the spot.
† Eva later testified that her brother was at her apartment only once on Saturday, between approximately 4:00 and 8:00 P.M. However, the first visit to Eva’s apartment was a brief one shortly before 8:00, and then later that night Ruby returned by 10:00 for a longer visit. From there he telephoned Ralph Paul, who heard Eva in the background. Phone records show the call was made at 10:44 P.M., from her apartment. Eva was on painkillers and sedatives for her recent abdominal surgery and admitted the medication may have affected her recall of the exact number and times of his Saturday visits (WC Vol. XV, p. 342).
* From conversations with others before the Knight call, it is evident that Ruby knew Earl Warren was someone prominent in government but was not sure of which position he held until Knight told him.
* Many who knew Ruby said he was “a soft touch,” loaning or giving money frequently to his workers (Wills and Demaris, “The Avenger,” Esquire, May 1967, pp. 158–59).
† Helmick did not report her information until June 1964, seven months after the incident. None of the other workers at the Bullpen who were near Helmick at the time corroborated her testimony. However, when Paul testified before the Warren Commission in August 1964, Ruby’s murder conviction was on appeal, and it is doubtful he would have said anything that could have been used as evidence of premeditation against his friend. Telephone records reveal the conversation at the Bullpen lasted nine minutes, but all Paul remembered was that Ruby said the other clubs in town were doing terrible business. Ruby telephoned the restaurant again at 11:18 and discovered Paul had gone home. He then telephoned Paul three times at home, at 11:19 for three minutes, at 11:36 for two minutes, and at 11:47 for one minute. Paul said he did not feel well, and told Ruby “I was sick and I was going to bed and not to call me” (WC Vol. XV, pp. 672–73).
* In 1964, Wall told the Warren Commission that Ruby did not discuss Oswald during their telephone conversation. In 1988, he told the Dallas Morning News, “Then in the course of the conversation, he [Ruby] started talking about Oswald. I don’t think he ever said his name. He said ‘This guy who killed our President, someone needs to do the same to him” (“In Their Own Words,” November 20, 1988, p. 29). Wall is only one of many witnesses who recalls more information years after the event than he did in his contemporaneous testimony. Unless there is a convincing explanation for the alteration or addition to the original statements, the earliest account must be considered accurate. In this example, Wall’s Warren Commission testimony, where he stated that Oswald was not mentioned during his conversation with Ruby, is the most credible.
* Some, like David Scheim, claim the reason Pitts found the man on the phone so strange is that it was an imposter and that the real Ruby was already at police headquarters waiting for Oswald’s transfer, due to take place at 10:00 A.M. However, the Warren Commission asked Pitts if she was certain she had spoken to Ruby, and she responded: “Yes, sir. It was him. I’m sure of that …” (WC Vol. XIII, p. 232). The evidence that he was at police headquarters early on Sunday is based upon reports of four WBAP-TV technicians, who claimed to see him between 8:00 and 11:00 A.M. None of them, however, knew Ruby. They described him wearing clothes he did not own, and their physical descriptions were not accurate. Videotapes of the scenes early that morning reveal the source of their confusion, a man near the WBAP remote truck who resembled Ruby (KRLD-TV reel 13; CE 3072, WC Vol. XXVI).
A witness at Ruby’s apartment complex thought he saw him doing the laundry near 10:00. However, that was George Senator, mistaken for Ruby.
† When the police searched Ruby’s apartment after the shooting, they found a copy of the paper at the foot of his bed. It was turned to a page that had an open letter to Caroline Kennedy. Ruby remembered reading the letter on Sunday morning and called it, “the most heartbreaking letter” (WR, p. 354). Next to that letter was an article that concluded Mrs. Kennedy would have to return to Dallas for Oswald’s trial (WR, p. 355). According to Senator, “The effect [of those articles] on Jack was it put him in a worse mood than he was, more solemn than ever, and he had tears in his eyes” (Dallas Morning News, November 20, 1988, p. 30).
* Despite these precautions, it was never clear whether the door near the public elevators was properly locked. The basement was also accessible from an unguarded hallway inside the police and courts building. Newsmen running to photograph Oswald passed through this door without ever being asked for credentials (CE 2027, 2062, WC Vol. XXIV).
* His favorite dog, Sheba, was left in the car. “People that didn’t know Jack will never understand this,” Bill Alexander told the author, “but Ruby would never have taken that dog with him and left it in the car if he knew he was going to shoot Oswald and end up in jail. He would have made sure that dog was at home with Senator and was well taken care of.”
* The time clock at that office was coordinated nationwide with all Western Union offices. It was connected with the U.S. Naval Observatory Clock in Washington D.C., and each day at 11:00 A.M., the time was synchronized (WC Vol. XIII, p. 224).
† Vaughn passed a lie detector test that he did not see Ruby walk past him. Dallas policeman Don Flusche, who was parked across the street from the ramp, knew Ruby, yet did not see him enter, either. The House Select Committee decided that Ruby had not entered by the Main Street ramp because there were no witnesses to his entrance (although those in the garage admitted they had concentrated on the jail door where Oswald was about to exit and not on the driveway ramps) (HSCA Rpt., pp. 156–57). The committee concluded that the most likely entrance was “an alleyway located next to the Dallas Municipal Building and a stairway leading to the basement garage of police headquarters” (HSCA Rpt., p. 157). The committee finally viewed Ruby’s act as premeditated. It could not accept the use of the Main Street ramp entrance because it was only happenstance that Vaughn was momentarily distracted when Pierce’s car drove up that ramp a minute before Oswald walked into the garage. Within thirty minutes of the shooting, Ruby told three Dallas policemen that he had walked to the top of the Main Street ramp and that he had entered when Pierce’s car distracted Vaughn (WC Vol. XII, pp. 434–38; WC Vol. XV, pp. 188–89; McMillon Exhibit 5018). At that time, there was no way that Ruby could have known about Pierce’s car, much less that the Main Street ramp had been changed from an entrance to an exit, unless he saw it. However, in arriving at its conclusion, the committee did not believe the police testimony since the officers had not said it in their initial written reports. It ignored the fact that Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels also said he heard Ruby tell Captain Fritz, later on the same day of the shooting, that he had come down the ramp (Dallas Morning News, March 25, 1979).
Because of his frequent visits to police headquarters, Ruby was intimately familiar with the building and could have known about the alternate route described by the Select Committee. Nevertheless, it appears the committee is mistaken in its conclusion.
* Still, did the police let Ruby know when Oswald would be transferred, as some have contended, and that the rest of the morning’s events were only contrived to provide him a defense to show the murder was not premeditated? Such a plot would have centered around Karen Carlin, whose plea for money took him to the Western Union office and near the jail. Some of the others guilty of complicity would include George Senator, for confirming the Carlin story and Ruby’s departure time from the apartment; postal inspector Harry Holmes, for delaying the transfer with his questions; police chief Curry and Captain Fritz, for selecting the basement and abandoning the armored cars; Lt. Rio Pierce, for driving his car up the ramp a minute before Oswald was taken from the jail; and Officer Roy Vaughn, for turning his back when Ruby walked down the ramp. And what of Oswald himself, whose last-minute request for a clothing change delayed his transfer by at least five minutes? Was he coordinating a suicide wish with Ruby’s arrival?
* In 1992, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who had been a junior resident and part of the team that tried to save Oswald at Parkland, claimed he had answered a telephone call and it was from President Lyndon Johnson, demanding a deathbed confession from Oswald. No other doctors support his story. That was the same day that President Kennedy’s memorial service was held in Washington, with an enormous contingent of foreign heads of state. A review of the telephone logs from the White House do not show that the President called Parkland Hospital at any time that day (LBJ Library, Austin, Texas; interview with David Perry, May 24, 1993).
† After his trial, Ruby was furious with his defense staff for their handling of his case and actually thought they were part of a conspiracy to frame him. In apparent retaliation against one of his original attorneys, Tom Howard, he claimed that Howard was responsible for concocting the story that he had shot Oswald because of concern over Mrs. Kennedy. “That’s crap,” assistant district attorney Bill Alexander told the author. “I saw Ruby at the jail before Tom Howard ever arrived, and he was telling people then that he had shot Oswald because he was so upset about Mrs. Kennedy. No one told Jack to say that.”
† The initial reaction of the several hundred people gathered across the street from the jail indicated Ruby might be treated as a hero. When the word spread that Oswald had been shot inside police headquarters, the crowd spontaneously broke into cheers and applause. Ruby later received thousands of letters while in jail, most praising his murder of Oswald.
* One of the best indicators that Ruby had not killed Oswald at the behest of organized crime was that one of Ruby’s earliest visitors while he was in jail was Joe Campisi, reputedly Dallas’s number-two mafia figure. Campisi, owner of the Egyptian Lounge restaurant, knew Ruby well and visited the jail together with his wife. The author spoke to a number of experts on organized crime; none of them recalled an instance in which a mob boss issued a murder contract and then visited the arrested hit man in jail. “If the mob had hired Ruby for a hit,” a retired FBI agent told the author, “they would have run twenty miles away from him. Campisi would never have gone near that jail.”
* Ruby’s friends were all surprised when they learned that he had killed Oswald, but some did not think it was out of character. “At the club, after the first shock,” said Carousel drummer Bill Willis, “we all said, ‘Well, it figures. Jack thought while he was downtown he might as well kill Oswald, too.’” Max Rudberg, a Ruby friend, said, “Well, everyone was saying the son-of-a-bitch needs killing, and Jack was anxious to please. … He couldn’t possibly pass it by.” Milton Joseph, a local jeweler, had no doubt that Ruby killed Oswald to be in the limelight (Wills and Demaris, “The Avenger,” pp. 85, 158; see also CE 1460, 1480).
* In one of the last notes he smuggled out of prison, Ruby wrote that he was worried “that I am being framed for the assassination that my motive was to silence Oswald.” It is proof that, even in his final days, he was still protesting the implication that he had killed Oswald “to silence” him.
* The House Select Committee had its own panel of experts review the polygraph. They reported they were “unable to interpret the examination” due to “numerous procedural errors” (HSCA Rpt., p. 159).