by Jim Marrs
Many people considered Ruby a hero for eliminating Kennedy’s presumed assassin. Cards and letters—even money—came from all over. Ruby’s attorney Tom Howard echoed their sentiment when he stated, “I think Ruby deserves a congressional medal.”
But despite the favorable pretrial publicity, Ruby never had much of a chance in the Dallas of those days. As right-wing assistant district attorney Bill Alexander explained to newsman Seth Kantor, “Jack Ruby was about as handicapped as you can get in Dallas. First he was a Yankee. Second, he was a Jew. Third, he was in the nightclub business.”
To appeal to the mind-set of Dallas at that time, attorney Joe Tonahill was asked to join in his defense. Tonahill had the east Texas drawl and the rural mannerisms more acceptable to a Dallas jury.
But the heavyweight of Ruby’s defense was flamboyant San Francisco super-attorney Melvin Belli, who quickly set himself at odds with the down-home provincialism of Dallas.
Belli’s avenue of defense was to have Ruby declared a victim of “temporary insanity” due to “psychomotor epilepsy.” To this end, Belli put a string of psychiatrists on the stand to testify. It also meant that he would not allow Ruby to take the stand on his own behalf.
This failure to allow Ruby to testify, coupled with the tight security in the Dallas County Jail, effectively kept Ruby isolated from the news media and the public. Ruby even cautioned his few visitors to the jail that his conversations were being recorded and monitored.
The only reporter to get a private interview with Ruby during his trial in March 1964 was nationally syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who prevailed on lawyer Tonahill to arrange the meeting with presiding judge Joe B. Brown. She claimed to have a message for Ruby from a mutual friend who “may have been some kind of singer.”
Judge Brown, impressed with the famous Broadway newspaperwoman, agreed and, according to Kilgallen biographer Lee Israel, the pair met in a small office behind the judge’s bench without the four sheriff’s deputies who were always at Ruby’s side. Israel wrote, “They were together privately for about eight minutes in what may have been the only safe house Ruby had occupied since his arrest.”
Although Kilgallen mentioned this unique private meeting with Ruby to close friends, she did not publicly write about it. The fact that she did not publicly disclose what she learned in this meeting prompted biographer Israel to write:
That she withheld suggests strongly that she was either saving the information for her book, Murder One, a chapter of which she had decided to devote to the Ruby trial; that he furnished her with a lead which she was actively pursuing; that he exacted a promise of confidentiality from her; or that she was acting merely as a courier. Each possibility puts her in the thick of things.
Israel also records that toward the end of her life, Kilgallen may have obtained inside assassination information from yet another source. He wrote, “Dorothy began to draw drinking companions to her. Joan Crawford . . . was among them. She tooled around with Crawford. . . . They boozed abundantly together in the back of Crawford’s touring car, which was well stocked with hundred-proof vodka.”
Upon her husband’s death, Crawford had become a principal owner of Pepsi-Cola, the firm that counted Richard Nixon as an attorney. Both Nixon and Crawford had been in Dallas the week of the assassination and may have been privy to inside information.
Whatever information Kilgallen learned and from whatever source, it fired her desire to solve the JFK assassination. She told attorney Mark Lane, “They’ve killed the President, [and] the government is not prepared to tell us the truth” and that she planned to “break the case.” To other friends she said, “This has to be a conspiracy! [The Warren Commission is] laughable. . . . I’m going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century.” And in her last column item regarding the assassination, published on September 3, 1965, Kilgallen wrote, “This story isn’t going to die as long as there’s a real reporter alive—and there are a lot of them.”
But on November 8, 1965, there was one less reporter. That day Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her home. It was initially reported that she died of a heart attack, but quickly this was changed to an overdose of alcohol and pills. Her death certificate, dated November 15, 1965, stated the cause of death was “acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication—circumstances undetermined.”
Israel later wrote, “After three years of investigating the events surrounding Dorothy’s death, it is clear to me that she did not die accidentally and that a network of varied activities, impelled by disparate purposes, conspired effectively to obfuscate the truth.”
No trace of her notes or writings about what she may have learned from Ruby or Crawford was ever found.
During Ruby’s trial, Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade made a strong case for premeditation but carefully skirted the issue of conspiracy. He explained that he was given instructions from Johnson’s aide Cliff Carter, who called from Washington at least three times on Friday afternoon: “Any word of a conspiracy . . . to kill President Kennedy would shake our nation to its foundation. President Johnson was worried about some conspiracy on the part of the Russians [saying] it would hurt foreign relations if I alleged a conspiracy—whether I could prove it or not—I was to charge Oswald with plain murder.”
But according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of March 18, 1964, Wade’s “big decision” later was to not call witnesses “who insisted they had seen Ruby and Oswald together at various times.”
A parade of police witnesses recalled various remarks Ruby reportedly made at the time of the shooting, such as:
You rotten son of a bitch, you shot the President. . . . I intended to get off three shots. . . . I did it because you [the police] couldn’t do it. . . . I did it to show the world that Jews have guts. . . . I first thought of killing him at the Friday night press conference.
It was such publicized statements as these, as well as Judge Brown’s refusal of a change of venue, that prompted the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reverse Ruby’s conviction on October 5, 1966. The appeals court ordered a new trial but Ruby did not live to see it.
Although Ruby was not allowed to testify at his trial, he was interviewed by the Warren Commission on June 7, 1964. Representing the Warren Commission were US Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren and representative Gerald R. Ford along with general counsel J. Lee Rankin and staff attorneys Arlen Specter and Joseph Ball. Also present were attorneys Leon Jaworski and Robert G. Storey, who were acting as liaisons between the Commission and Texas authorities; Secret Service agent Elmer W. Moore; Dallas County assistant district attorney Jim Bowie; sheriff Bill Decker; Ruby attorney Joe Tonahill; and several Dallas police officers.
Oddly enough, due to an internal squabble over the handling of Dallas witnesses, the two Commission staffers who were in charge of the Ruby investigation—Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin—were not allowed to sit in on this important interview.
During this interview, Ruby vacillated. After about an hour of a rambling account of his activities prior to shooting Oswald and some rather innocuous questions, it appeared that Warren was ready to wrap up the interview. Apparently sensing this, Ruby said, “You can get more out of me. Let’s not break up too soon.”
Ford then began questioning Ruby about his trips to Cuba in 1959, but just as the answers appeared to be leading into fruitful territory, Warren cut Ford off and changed the subject.
Tonahill later told newsman Seth Kantor, “Ford never did finish his interrogation on Cuba. Warren blocked Ford out on it. That was very impressive, I thought. Ford gave him a hard look, too. I was sitting right there and saw it happen.”
Ruby became desperate, pleading:
Gentlemen, my life is in danger here. . . . Do I sound sober enough to you as I say this? . . . Then follow this up. I may not live tomorrow to give any further testimony. . . . The only thing I want to get out to the public, and I can’t say it here, is with authenticity, with sincerity of the truth of
everything and why my act was committed, but it can’t be said here. . . . Chairman Warren, if you felt that your life was in danger at the moment, how would you feel? Wouldn’t you be reluctant to go on speaking, even though you request me to do so?
Having previously voiced the suspicion that his words and actions were being monitored in Dallas, Ruby then asked to be taken out of his present circumstances, saying, “Gentlemen, if you want to hear any further testimony, you will have to get me to Washington soon, because it has something to do with you, Chief Warren. . . . I want to tell the truth and I can’t tell it here. Does that make sense to you?”
Ruby begged to be taken to Washington, away from Dallas, at least eight times. He complained that his “life was in danger. . . . [My] whole family is in jeopardy.” He was shrugged off by Warren, who replied, “There are a good many things involved in that, Mr. Ruby.”
Asked to explain, Warren replied, “Well, the public attention that it would attract, and the people who would be around. We have no place for you to be safe when we take you out, and we are not law enforcement officers, and it isn’t our responsibility to go into anything of that kind. And certainly it couldn’t be done on a moment’s notice this way.”
Ruby grew more blunt:
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. And if you don’t have the power to take me back, I won’t be around to be able to prove my innocence or guilt. . . . All I know is maybe something can be saved. Because right now, I want to tell you this. I am used as a scapegoat. . . . Now maybe something can be saved. It may not be too late, whatever happens, if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me. But if I am eliminated, there won’t be any way of knowing.
Asked if he knew Officer Tippit, he replied that “there was three Tippits on the force” but he knew only one and didn’t think he was the murdered policeman. Incredibly, no one followed up on this to find out which Tippit Ruby did know and how he knew it wasn’t the murdered officer. To this author’s knowledge, there were no other Tippits on the police force at that time.
Then Rankin asked him about a rumor that Ruby had been seen in the Carousel Club shortly before the assassination with a Mr. Weissman—the man who had paid for an anti-Kennedy newspaper ad—Officer Tippit, and a rich Dallas oilman.
Ruby said the story was untrue, then may have uttered an ironic truth. Looking around the room, he proclaimed, “I am as innocent regarding any conspiracy as any of you gentlemen in the room.”
As early as December 1963, Ruby had asked to be given a lie detector test, perhaps reasoning that such a test would bring out the truth by revealing his account of events to be false. During his meeting with Warren he again begged to be given a polygraph test and the Commission dutifully agreed. A polygraph test was administered to Ruby on July 18, 1964, and his answers did not indicate he was lying. These test results have been used during the years to support the contention that Ruby was not part of any conspiracy and shot Oswald only out of personal motives.
Few people bothered to read the last page of the Warren Report, where in Appendix XVII, J. Edgar Hoover commented:
It should be pointed out that the polygraph, often referred to as “lie detector” is not in fact such a device. . . . During the proceedings at Dallas, Texas, on July 18, 1964, Dr. William R. Beavers, a psychiatrist, testified that he would generally describe Jack Ruby as a “psychotic depressive.” In view of the serious question raised as to Ruby’s mental condition, no significance should be placed on the polygraph examination and it should be considered nonconclusive as the charts cannot be relied upon.
Apparently unwilling or unable to see that Ruby was desperately trying to tell them something outside the surveillance of Dallas authorities, the Warren Commission entourage prepared to leave Ruby’s interview. Failure to fully question Jack Ruby was one of the Commission’s greatest mistakes—if it was a mistake.
A resigned Ruby told them, “Well, you won’t ever see me again. I tell you that. . . . A whole new form of government is going to take over the country, and I know I won’t live to see you another time.”
He didn’t.
The Sudden Death of Jack Ruby
In the days following his trial and interview by the Warren Commission, Jack Ruby’s moods went from confident highs to suicidal lows. A prisoner with few opportunities to communicate with the outside, Ruby nevertheless was given the run of sheriff Bill Decker’s jail. He reportedly was able to roam freely, occasionally use the telephone, and even sleep in a corridor. But at all times he was under close guard, especially after several inept suicide attempts.
On one occasion he tried to hang himself but there was not enough time to rip his clothing and fashion a knot before a guard got to him. Another time, Ruby became so despondent he tried to split his skull by running headlong into a wall. This attempt merely left him with a large knot on his head.
His most pathetic attempt took place when a guard went off for a drink of water. Quickly Ruby unscrewed an overhead lightbulb, then threw water from his own glass onto his feet as a conduit. However, he couldn’t reach the light socket with his finger while standing in the water. His guard, deputy sheriff Jess Stevenson, found him ineffectually jumping up and down trying to complete the circuit. The attempt was “something nearly comical,” Stevenson told newsman Seth Kantor.
As time dragged on and his isolation began to take its toll, Ruby became more despondent. His mood worsened after he came to believe that Stevenson, who had chatted at length with the prisoner after preaching the Bible to him, actually was passing information gleaned through their conversations back to Dallas authorities.
Long after the Warren Commission had issued its report in the fall of 1964, while waiting for the outcome of his conviction appeal, Ruby apparently wrote a sixteen-page letter to a fellow prisoner who was leaving the jail. Ruby asked the prisoner to memorize names and facts in the letter, then destroy it. The prisoner, identified only as “John,” decided instead to sell the letter, and it ended up in the hands of longtime researcher Penn Jones. Jones purchased the letter from New York autograph dealer Charles Hamilton, who had the document appraised as authentic.
The letter is disjointed, rambling, and full of references to Nazis, the death of Jews, and, most intriguing, derogatory references to Lyndon Johnson. Many researchers, as improbable as it seems, feel Ruby’s letter, though written in a state of questionable mental equilibrium, laid bare some of his secret knowledge and fears. He wrote:
First, you must realize that the people here want everyone to think I am crazy, so if what I know is actually [sic], and then no one will believe me, because of my supposed insanity. Now, I know that my time is running out . . . they plan on doing away with [me]. . . . As soon as you get out you must read Texan looks at Lyndon [A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power, by J. Evetts Haley] and it might open your eyes to a lot of things. This man [Johnson] is a Nazi in the worst order. For over a year now they have been doing away with my people. . . . Don’t believe the Warren report, that was only put out to make me look innocent in that it would throw the Americans and all the European country’s [sic] off guard. . . . There are so many things that have been played with success that it would take all nite [sic] to write them out. . . . There wouldn’t be any purpose of my writing you all of this unless you were convinced of how much I loved my country. . . . I am going to die a horrible death anyway, so what would I have to gain by writing all this. So you must believe me. . . . Johnson is going to try to have an all-out war with Russia and when that happens, Johnson and his cohorts will be on the side-lines where they won’t get hurt, while the Americans may get wiped out. The only way this can be avoided is that if Russia would be informed as to [who] the real enemies are, and in that way they won’t be tricked into starting a war with the U.S. . . . One more thing, isn’t it strange that Oswald who hasn’t worked a l
ick most of his life, should be fortunate enough to get a job at the Book Bldg. two wks. before the president himself didn’t know as to when he was to visit Dallas, now where would a jerk like Oswald get the information that the president was coming to Dallas. Only one person could have had that information, and that man was Johnson who knew weeks in advance as to what was going to happen because he is the one who was going to arrange the trip for the president, this had been planned long before the president himself knew about [it], so you figure that one out. The only one who gained by the shooting of the president was Johnson, and he was in a car in the rear and safe when the shooting took place. What would the Russians, Castro or anyone else have to gain by eliminating the president? If Johnson was so heartbroken over Kennedy, why didn’t he do something for Robert Kennedy? All he did was snub him.
In a second letter smuggled out of the Dallas County Jail, Ruby was more blunt in his accusations. He wrote:
They found some very clever means and ways to trick me and which will be used later as evidence to show the American people that I was part of the conspiracy in the assassination of [the] president, and I was used to silence Oswald. . . . They alone planned the killing, by they, I mean Johnson and others. . . . Read the book Texas Looks At Lyndon [another reference to Haley’s book] and you may learn quite a bit about Johnson and how he has fooled everyone. . . . In all the history of the U.S. never has a president been elected that has the background of Johnson. Believe me, compared to him I am a Saint.
Not long before his death, Ruby was interviewed by psychiatrist Werner Teuter. Perhaps realizing his end was near, Ruby told Teuter the assassination was “an act of overthrowing the government” and that he knew “who had President Kennedy killed.” He added, “I am doomed. I do not want to die. But I am not insane. I was framed to kill Oswald.”