Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  If Ruby was a hit man for the mob, how is it, then, that they would cut it that close? Wouldn’t this, by definition, have required Captain Will Fritz and one or more of his men to conspire with the mob to kill Oswald? How else could the mob be assured that the Dallas police wouldn’t get Oswald into a car a minute or so earlier? But no sensible person could possibly believe that Captain Fritz conspired with the mob to kill Oswald.

  If Ruby was a hit man for organized crime, how is it that for at least five minutes or so before he shot Oswald, he wasn’t lying in wait for Oswald to appear in the basement garage of City Hall, but instead was approximately one and a half football fields away waiting for the person in front of him to complete his transaction so Ruby could wire his money to Karen Bennett Carlin? Only a silly person (i.e., only an avid conspiracy theorist) could possibly believe the hit man theory. No one said it better than author Norman Mailer. If Ruby killed Oswald for the mob, he asks, “Why was Ruby standing [in] line [at the] Western Union waiting his turn to send $25 to a stripper while time kept floating away and Oswald might be moved at any moment?…How many confederates—and most of them had to be police—would be necessary to coordinate such a move? No one who is the key figure in a careful schedule that will reach its climax just as the target is being transferred is going to be found dawdling [down] the street at a Western Union office with only a few minutes to go. It would take hours for a stage director to begin to choreograph such a scene for an opera.”10 In simple language, if Ruby had planned ahead to kill Oswald in the basement, it is absolutely inconceivable that he would not have been in the basement far in advance of when Oswald was supposed to be brought down. He never would have taken a chance on possibly missing Oswald, since he would know it would most likely be the last chance he would ever have to silence him. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about this.

  Moreover, the possibility that one or more members of the Dallas Police Department conspired with Ruby and signaled him (how? there were no cell phones in those days) or told him exactly when Oswald was going to be brought down has no merit. Not only is there no evidence to support this rank speculation, but as Dallas police captain Orville A. Jones put it, “If there was some type of conspiracy, [Ruby]…would have had to have known what time the man was coming down, which we didn’t know, Fritz didn’t know, nor did any of the policemen. The only reference to it was made by Curry when he told the press that if they’d get there by 10:00…it would be early enough. He didn’t know exactly what time it was going to be. So if there was a signal or something, somebody had to have some rather Divine Knowledge of what was going to happen.”11

  2. Forrest Sorrels, the special agent in charge of the Dallas Secret Service office, testified before the Warren Commission that when the interrogation session of Oswald wound up after 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, November 24, Oswald was told he was going to be moved to the county jail, and “he requested that he be permitted to get a shirt out of…the clothes that had been brought in, that belonged to him, because the shirt he was wearing at the time he had been apprehended was taken, apparently for laboratory examination. And so Captain Fritz sent out and got his clothes and, as I recall it, he selected a dark colored kind of sweater type shirt…and then he was taken out.”12 Obviously, if Oswald hadn’t made the request he did, necessitating a delay of at least one to two minutes, he probably would have left the basement in the police car by the time Ruby arrived. So unless Oswald was a party to the conspiracy to murder himself, it would appear from this fact alone that Ruby’s killing of Oswald at 11:21 a.m. was not a planned event.

  3. Going back even further, how did it happen that Dallas U.S. postal inspector Harry D. Holmes attended the interrogation session of Oswald on Sunday morning, the day Oswald was shot? It was completely fortuitous. In his testimony before the Warren Commission, Holmes said, “I had been in and out of Captain Fritz’ office on numerous occasions during this two and a half day period [of interrogation of Oswald]. 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.’ So I drove directly on down to the police station and walked in, and as I did, Captain Fritz motioned to me and said, ‘We’re getting ready to have a last interrogation with Oswald before we transfer him to the county jail. Would you like to join us?’ I said, ‘I would.’”13 What’s the relevance of Holmes’s attending this Sunday-morning session? It’s so enormous that by itself it disposes of the hit man theory. As opposed to the previous interrogation sessions, Holmes participated heavily in this one (it is the only one he submitted a memorandum on), thus helping appreciably to lengthen the session beyond the time it had been scheduled to end. Captain Fritz testified that the Sunday-morning interrogation session had been scheduled to end “by ten o’clock,” but “we went…an hour overtime with the interrogation.”14 Therefore, Oswald’s transfer from the Dallas Police Department to the sheriff’s office, which had been scheduled for 10:00 a.m., was delayed over an hour.15

  Following is a four-paragraph excerpt from a “Memorandum of Interview” prepared by Holmes and signed on December 17, 1963, summarizing the portion of the Sunday-morning session he participated in. As can be seen from this excerpt, the interrogation of Oswald by Holmes of Oswald’s post office boxes in Dallas and New Orleans was extensive and time-consuming. The memorandum was based on notes Holmes took during the interview as well as his memory.

  P.O. Boxes---He [Oswald] was the three boxes he had rented, and in each instance his answers were quick, direct and accurate as reflected on the box rental applications. He stated without prompting that he had rented Box 2915 at the Main Post Office [in Dallas] for several months prior to his going to New Orleans, that this box was rented in his own name, Lee H. Oswald, and that he had taken out two keys to the box, and that when he had closed the box, he directed that his mail be forwarded to him at his street address in New Orleans.

  He stated that no one received mail in this box other than himself, nor did he receive any mail under any other name than his own true name; that no one had access to the box other than himself nor did he permit anyone else to use this box. He stated it was possible that on rare occasions he may have handed one of the keys to his wife to go get his mail but certainly nobody else. He denied emphatically that he ever ordered a rifle under his name or any other name, nor permitted anyone else to order a rifle to be received in this box. Further, he denied he had ever ordered any rifle by mail order or bought any money order for the purpose of paying for such a rifle. In fact, he claimed he owned no rifle and had not practiced or shot a rifle, other than possibly a .22 small barrel rifle, since his days with the Marine Corp. He stated that “How could I afford to order a rifle on my salary of $1.25 an hour when I can’t hardly feed myself on what I make.”

  When asked if he had a post office box in New Orleans, he stated that he did, for the reason that he subscribed to several publications, at least two of which were published in Russia, one being the hometown paper published in Minsk where he met and married his wife, and that he moved around so much that it was more practical to simply rent post office boxes and have his mail forwarded from one box to the next rather than going through the process of furnishing changes of address to the publishers. When asked if he permitted anyone other than himself to get mail in Box 30061 at New Orleans, he stated that he did not. It will be recalled that on this box rental application he showed that both Marina Oswald and A. J. Hidell were listed under the caption “Persons entitled to receive mail through box.” After denying that anyone else was permitted to get mail in the box, he was reminded that this application showed the name Marina Oswald as being entitled to receive mail in the box and he replied “well, so what, she was my wife and I see nothing wrong with that, and it could very well be that I did place her name on the application.” He was then reminded that the application also showed the name of A. J. Hidell was also entitled to recei
ve mail in the box, at which he simply shrugged his shoulders and stated “I don’t recall anything about that.”

  He stated that when he came to Dallas and after he had gone to work for the Texas School Book Depository, he had rented a box at the nearby Terminal Annex Postal Station, this being Box 6225, and that this box was also rented in his name, Lee H. Oswald. He stated he had only checked out one key for this box, which information was found to be accurate, and this key was found on his person at the time of his arrest. He professed not to recall the fact that he showed on the box rental application under the name of corporation, “Fair Play For Cuba Committee” and “American Civil Liberties Union.” When asked why he showed these organizations on the application, he simply shrugged and said that he didn’t recall showing them. When asked if he paid the box rental fee or did the organizations pay it, he stated that he paid it. In answer to another question, he also stated that no one had any knowledge that he had this box other than himself.16

  For those who might say it isn’t 100 percent clear from these paragraphs that Holmes himself was conducting the interview,* and therefore his mere presence at the interrogation session did not lengthen it, let’s look at some snippets of his testimony on this point: “In questioning him about the boxes, which I had original applications [for] in front of me”; “I brought it up first as to did he ever have a package sent to him from anywhere. I said, ‘Did you receive mail through this Box 2915 under the name of any other name than Lee Oswald?’”; “‘Well, who is A. J. Hidell?’ I asked him”; “I showed him the box rental application for the post office box in New Orleans and I read from it. I said…”; “And I said also it says ‘A. J. Hidell’”; “When I was discussing with him about [the] rental application for Box No. 6225 at the Terminal Annex, I asked him if he had shown that anyone else was entitled to get mail in that box”; “I said, ‘…What did you show as your business?’ and he said, ‘I didn’t show anything’”; “I asked…‘Is that why you came to Dallas, to organize a cell of this organization in Dallas?’”17

  It is very clear, then, that if Holmes hadn’t decided to go downtown to the police station on Sunday morning, November 24, a completely fortuitous event, the interrogation session would have ended quite a bit earlier, and Oswald would have been transferred to the Dallas county jail well before Ruby arrived in the basement—in fact, probably before Ruby even left his apartment to go to the Western Union office.

  So unless Postal Inspector Holmes was part of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy or to cover it up—a possibility that would be just fine with conspiracy theorists—Ruby’s killing Oswald was exactly as he said it was, a spontaneous decision on his part that was not pursuant to any conspiracy involving others.*

  Parenthetically, it was stated on radio and television that Oswald was to be transferred to the sheriff’s office at 10:00 Sunday morning.18 In fact, Ruby himself acknowledges knowing this.19 Since there is no evidence that anyone from the Dallas Police Department was in touch with Ruby to inform him of the new time for transferring Oswald, if Ruby’s shooting of Oswald was planned, and part of a conspiracy, why wasn’t he down at the police station at 10:00 a.m. to carry out his assignment? We know that Ruby was still at his apartment at 10:00 a.m. Records from Southwestern Bell Telephone Company show that Ruby’s employee, stripteaser Karen “Little Lynn” Carlin, called Ruby at his apartment at 10:19 a.m. on Sunday.20 This was the call asking for money that led to Ruby’s going downtown to the Western Union office to wire twenty-five dollars to Carlin. And George Senator, Ruby’s roommate, testified that Ruby didn’t leave the apartment until around 11:00 a.m., some time after the call, among other things first shaving and getting dressed.21

  Anthony Summers, in his book Conspiracy, sets forth the conspiracy theorists’ position that someone did inform Ruby of Oswald’s new transfer time and more: “The suspicion is that somebody in the know kept Ruby closely in touch with Oswald’s changing timetable.”22 As indicated, cell phones were not in existence in those days, and though the conspiracy theorists have struggled long and hard, they haven’t come up with any evidence to support this hypothesis, support for which they would be willing to donate one of their bodily organs. The conspiracy theorists have focused their “suspicion” on four Dallas police officers—Sergeant Patrick Dean, who was in charge of securing the basement garage against unauthorized persons, and three of his men assigned to the security detail, Officer William Harrison, Detective Louis D. Miller, and Lieutenant George Butler—claiming suspicious behavior on the part of all four. But in the process, they rewrite the official record. For instance, shortly after 8:00 that Sunday morning, Harrison and Miller went out for coffee at the Deluxe Diner near the police station. Summers writes that Miller testified that while there, “Officer Harrison received a telephone call from an unknown person.”23 But despite the quotation marks Summers uses, that was not quite Miller’s testimony. He testified, “When the person that works there at the diner answered the phone, he said, ‘Phone for one of you.’ Officer Harrison answered it and came back to the counter and said we were to come back to the office as soon as we finished eating and were to remain there until further notice.”

  Question: “Did he tell you who made the telephone call?”

  Answer: “No, sir, he never did, and I never did ask him.”

  Question: “Do you know whether it was somebody from the police department that made that call?”

  Answer: “I presumed it was.”24

  In other words, the caller was not an “unknown person”; the caller was only unknown to Miller. And the call wasn’t specifically for Harrison, it was for either Harrison or Miller. Moreover, Harrison himself testified that the call was from the deskman at the police station, Charles Goolsby, telling him and Miller to “come on back to the bureau when we got through eating.”25 In The Ruby Cover-Up, conspiracy theorist Seth Kantor writes that Harrison was given a polygraph test “concerning his movements as they could have involved Ruby on that morning” and the results were “not conclusive.” Kantor quotes no source for any of this.26 The only testimony regarding the issue of whether or not Harrison passed the polygraph test came from Dallas police lieutenant Jack Revill. Revill said that Harrison was given a polygraph test on the sole issue of whether Harrison had seen Ruby standing to his left rear before Ruby shot Oswald, and Harrison, who denied seeing Ruby, passed the test.27

  The Dallas Police Department, naturally very concerned about its failure to protect Oswald, and cognizant of all the whispers that maybe one or more of its officers had helped Ruby sneak into the basement garage, conducted an extensive investigation that revealed no evidence of complicity between Ruby and any Dallas police officer.28

  It should be noted that at Ruby’s trial for murdering Oswald, perhaps more than any other evidence against him, the testimony of Dallas police officers as to what Ruby told them right after he shot Oswald refuted and negated his defense of temporary insanity. (See discussion in Ruby trial section.) Therefore, the charge of Dallas police complicity with Ruby “ignores,” as Ruby author and appellate attorney Elmer Gertz points out, “the implications of Ruby’s failure to accuse the [Dallas] police after the imposition of the death sentence [against] him. Why would Ruby remain silent if the police had aided and then double-crossed him?”29 Instead, Ruby maintained to the end that the officers in the Dallas Police Department were his friends.30 After the trial, he even gave Sergeant Patrick Dean, whose testimony of Ruby’s statements were the most damaging of all to Ruby’s case, a copy of the Warren Report “with a fond inscription in it, and tried to give him his watch and his gun.”31*

  Not that we can persuasively cite Jack Ruby himself to rebut the never-ending suspicions of the conspiracy theorists, but Ruby did testify that when he drove past City Hall (on the way to the Western Union office after 11:00 a.m.) and saw a crowd gathered there, “I took it for granted that he [Oswald] had already been moved.”32 The reason why it is highly probable that Ruby was telling the truth is tha
t he took his beloved dog Sheba with him that morning and, even more tellingly, left her in the car when he entered the basement. As one of his appellate lawyers, William Kunstler, argued to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin, Texas, on June 24, 1966, “Was that the act of a man planning to shoot another in a crowded basement, knowing he would never get out?”33 Ruby’s friends have said that his love for Sheba was such that if he had planned in advance to shoot Oswald in the basement of the police station, he never would have left his beloved dog in the car, since he would have to know he would be taken into custody and would not be coming back to the car.34

  Countless words have been written on the importance of Jack Ruby in the Kennedy assassination. Every conspiracy book that propounds the “mob killed Kennedy” theory tries to establish, above all, the connection between Ruby and organized crime. Richard Billings, a former Life magazine editor who wrote extensively on organized crime and coauthored the book The Plot to Kill the President, puts it this way: “If there’s a smoking gun in this case, it’s the pistol that was used by Jack Ruby to kill Oswald in the basement of the police station. The main piece of evidence of Organized Crime complicity in the conspiracy is Jack Ruby.” Billings goes on to say that “if you’re going to determine the final answer to this crime, the murder of the president, the character of Ruby is crucial.”35