Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Was it duplicitous of Alexander to encourage Ruby to talk to Holbrook? Not if you know Alexander the way I think I’ve gotten to know him. He’s just a straight shooter who would prosecute his…well, you know whom I mean, if she ran afoul of the law. At the trial, Alexander, who once said that impeachment was too good for Earl Warren—he needed hanging—told reporters, “They want to examine Ruby’s brain? We’ll be glad to deliver it to them from Huntsville after we fry him.” (Gertz, Moment of Madness, p.6) Frontier lore and legend have invariably focused on the marshals and sheriffs of the lawless West, not the prosecutors, but the tall, rawboned Alexander, with his gallows humor told with a slight grin, would have fit the mold precisely.

  * In another appearance on The Merv Griffin Show I won’t forget, this time with Belli, Griffin would ask Mel a question, he’d answer, then he’d ask me a question, and Mel would try to answer that question too. I’m pretty aggressive in a courtroom, but since this was not a trial or even a debate, I was more amused than anything else. I chuckled to Griffin during a break, “Merv, Mel loves the camera and I’m not going to compete with him for it. If you want me to be more involved you’ll have to be more insistent that you want to hear from me.” I forget just what happened during the next segment or two but my recollection is that I participated more.

  * Indeed, in his daily diary, one of the jurors, J. Waymon Rose, wrote that Ruby “looks pitiful and alone, as though he is a head of cabbage.” Elsewhere, he referred to “the pitiful, lost look” Ruby had in his eyes. (Dallas Morning News, August 3, 2002, p.30A)

  * Despite this critical testimony by Dean against Ruby (whose truthfulness was challenged by a Warren Commission assistant counsel—see endnote discussion), Dean, who admitted being a friend of Ruby’s and the recipient of a bottle of whiskey from him every Christmas, said that after the trial Ruby sent word he wanted to see him in his jail cell. “He hugged me and was glad to see me,” Dean recalled. “I saw he had a pair of broken glasses, so I got the prescription and bought him a new pair.” Eight months later Ruby gave Dean his copy of the Warren Commission Report with the inscription, “Your Buddy, Jack Ruby.” (Earl Golz, “Ex-Officer Fears ‘Set-up,’” Dallas Morning News, March 25, 1979, p.34A)

  †In fact, although prosecutor Bill Alexander told me he did not believe that Ruby was insane or even mentally ill, he acknowledged to me that Ruby was “wired up different.” Of course, for even a straight shooter like Alexander, it would be mighty difficult for him, as Ruby’s prosecutor, to acknowledge that Ruby was mentally ill. (Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on December 11, 2001)

  As part of Ruby’s insanity defense, Belli attempted to introduce at the trial certified copies of the hospital commitments for mental illness of Ruby’s mother, Fanny, one of his brothers, Earl, and one of his sisters, Eileen, on the ground that mental illness ran in his client’s family and was hereditary, but Judge Brown ruled the documents were “not admissible…under Texas law.” However, in his direct examination of Dr. Martin Towler, Belli did sneak into the record that Ruby’s mother had been hospitalized for mental illness. (Kaplan and Waltz, Trial of Jack Ruby, pp.214, 225, 242; Earl Ruby’s hospitalization in a psychopathic ward: 14 H 372, WCT Earl Ruby)

  * The closest Belli came to establishing his point was not from the testimony by his psychiatrists and medical witnesses but from the testimony of one of Ruby’s strippers at the Carousel Club, Penny Dollar (true name, Patricia Ann Kohs). Kohs said that one of Jack’s fights at the Carousel Club was with a taxi driver. “Jack knocked him down the stairs,” she told the jury. “Then we came down…Jack was beating his head on the sidewalk. Then he stopped all of a sudden and said, ‘Did I do this?’” (Belli with Carroll, Dallas Justice, p.171)

  * In the federal courts, as opposed to most states, when a defendant pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, the prosecution has the burden of proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant was sane at the time of his act. Most legal observers agree that this very high burden of proof in the federal courts was largely responsible for the not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict in the trial of William Hinckley for the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

  †However, on cross-examination by prosecutor Alexander, Gibbs conceded he had “no opinion” as to whether Ruby was in the throes of an epileptic seizure at the time he shot Oswald that prevented him from knowing right from wrong or from understanding the nature and consequences of his act (Kaplan and Waltz, Trial of Jack Ruby, p.300).

  * Many on the Ruby jury, after hearing all the evidence, came to the same conclusion. For instance, the wife of jury foreman Max Causey (deceased) said, “[My husband] really thought that Ruby thought he was going to be a hero because he was going to kill the guy who shot the president.” Juror Douglas Sowell said that “Ruby thought he’d be a hero in the public eye if he did it. I believe he thought that, I really do. I think that motivated him, that he thought that rather than being a murderer, he’d be a hero.” Juror R. J. “Bob” Flechtner said, “I think he just went down there and shot Oswald and thought he was going to be a hero. And he thought he was doing the right thing, and our society says he didn’t do the right thing.” (Dempsey, Jack Ruby Trial Revisited, pp.3–4, 159, 171) In a later, May 24, 1965, hearing in Dallas over Ruby’s legal representation, Ruby admitted as much, voluntarily taking the witness stand and saying, “I should have never tried to be heroic” (Dallas Morning News, May 25, 1965, p.1).

  * Remarkably, Belli had neglected, in his summation, to do something that criminal defense attorneys do automatically (999 out of 1,000 times)—urge the jury, if they were disposed against Ruby on the facts and the law, to at least spare his life, which they had the power to do. In his summation, Belli did not have to put all his eggs in one basket and be imprisoned by his psychomotor epileptic defense. Not only didn’t Belli ask the jury to give Ruby life imprisonment instead of death if they found him guilty of murder with malice, but since Judge Brown gave the jury an instruction on “murder without malice,” where the punishment for a conviction thereunder was “no longer than five years” in prison, Belli had a fallback, alternative argument if the jury decided to reject the insanity defense. That he should have done so has been reflected upon by many, including the judge. “By [Belli’s] dependence on his single, daring defense, Belli neglected other legal avenues he might have followed to save Jack Ruby from the electric chair” (Holloway, Dallas and the Jack Ruby Trial, p.8). Instead, Belli asked the jury to exonerate Ruby completely. “If you put a felony brand of any kind on Jack Ruby, he won’t be eligible for Veteran’s Administration [benefits]. He is now, being an ex-serviceman,” he argued (Belli with Carroll, Dallas Justice, p.242). “Belli gave it to us by going for broke—all or nothing…,” Bill Alexander said. “He told the jury it was acquittal or nothing. You can’t give a jury that kind of dare. And all he had going for him was some fancy doctors’ talk and a few mildly abnormal squiggles on a piece of paper” (Wills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, p.123).

  * And Ruby would launch an appeal, but not with Belli as his lawyer. Within a week after the verdict, a letter signed by Ruby, but with his two sisters and three brothers behind it, was on its way to Belli’s San Francisco law office firing him from the case. (“Good-by, Belli,” p.19) On June 7, 1964, near the beginning of his testimony before the Warren Commission, Ruby told Chief Justice Warren, “Mr. Belli evidently did not go into my case thoroughly, circumstantially. If he had gone into it, he wouldn’t have tried to vindicate me on an insanity plea to relieve me of all responsibility, because circumstantially everything looked so bad for me. It can happen—it happens to many people who happen to be at the wrong place at the right time. Had Mr. Belli spent more time with me, he would have realized not to try to get me out completely free” (5 H 182).

  Mel Belli, according to his former law partner, Seymour Ellison, took his loss in the Ruby case, and then being fired by Ruby, “harder than anything else in his legal career. He literally
went into a shell for about a month, very rarely even showing up at the office. He even turned down a big publicity case at the time involving an ax murderess named Jean Toman who insisted she would only be represented by Mel. It was the type of high-visibility case Mel would normally have a relish for trying” (Telephone interview of Seymour Ellison by author on October 7, 2006).

  * In one of my capital cases, the defendant had left the military service and learned that his wife, a woman of rare beauty whom people came to court just to ogle, had had an affair. He stalked the man for two weeks and finally, after waiting in the backseat of the man’s car, shot him to death. It was a circumstantial-evidence case and after the verdict of guilty of first-degree murder, although my office wanted me to seek the death penalty, in my summation in the penalty trial (in contrast to Texas, the penalty trial, with the same judge and jury, is separate from the guilt trial in California) I went against my office—at least to the extent that I never pushed for or even affirmatively asked for death, instead telling the jury there were good arguments for life imprisonment as well as death. I learned later from a law student of mine whose spouse was on the jury that despite this, on the first ballot the majority of jurors voted for death, but because of the position I had taken, one by one they eventually came over to life imprisonment. For years thereafter, the defendant’s mother would write me a Christmas card always thanking me for saving, she felt, her son’s life.

  †“You know what really made them [Dallasites] mad at me?” the fun-loving barrister, who traveled the world and stayed at its finest hotels with friends like actor Errol Flynn, would later ask. “My saying that they do not even know what to use a bidet [a low basin, used especially in France, for bathing one’s private parts] for—the one I saw in Dallas had flowers planted in it” (Wills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, p.82).

  * “We didn’t buy” the psychomotor epilepsy defense from the “so-called expert witnesses,” Ruby juror J. Waymon Rose said. “It was ridiculous…It just didn’t impress us at all,” said another juror, Douglas Sowell. “That [psycho] motor epilepsy stuff didn’t make much sense,” added juror J. G. Holton Jr. (Dempey, Jack Ruby Trial Revisited, pp.139, 157, 183)

  * Although Belli was the most famous trial lawyer in America at the time, he had achieved his fame in the practice of civil law, while Darrow had achieved his in criminal law.

  * See endnote discussion for possibility that if I had waited to interview Marina, as I was going to do, I may not have gotten to interview her.

  * On September 9, 1964, Marina told the Warren Commission, “I have no doubt that he did kill the president” (5 H 608). As late as November 23, 1980, she told Dan Carmichael of United Press International that her husband was “not innocent” of Kennedy’s murder. But I knew Marina had come a long way since she told Dallas Morning News reporter Hugh Aynesworth a few months after the assassination how “ashamed and sorry” she was for what her husband had done (Dallas Morning News, March 7, 1964, sect.4, p.1).

  The first time Marina publicly asserted a change in her position was in a November 1988 interview in Ladies’ Home Journal, and she had only come three-quarters of the way to where she is today. “It was a very complicated plot, brilliantly executed,” she told the Journal. “Could any intelligent person believe that that kind of thing was organized by one man? When Lee was arrested, I remember he said, ‘I’m a patsy.’ I strongly believe that with all the evidence that has come to light, he probably was telling the truth…I don’t think that all this was about John F. Kennedy. It was more about Robert, who was going after organized crime, and who would not be attorney general anymore if his brother was killed. When I was questioned by the Warren Commission, I was a blind kitten. Their questioning left me only one way to go; guilty. I made Lee guilty. He never had a fair chance…I buried all his chances by my statements…But I was only twenty-two then, and I’ve matured since. I think differently. [I’m sure you do, Marina, but I didn’t know that all the things you told the Warren Commission and FBI you saw with your own eyes and heard with your own ears actually never happened. Your eyes and ears hadn’t “matured” yet at the tender age of twenty-two? In any event, and this is a critical point that has to be noted, other than her belief in her husband’s guilt, Marina has never retracted any of the testimony she gave to the Warren Commission and later to the HSCA.] Only half the truth has been told. I want to find out the whole truth. It may be a bitter truth at the end for me. But I want the truth. In America, a wonderful country, you should get the truth.” (Blythe and Farrell, “Marina Oswald, Twenty-five Years Later,” pp.183, 237) By 1992, Marina told Time that “Lee simply did not shoot anybody,” adding, “I do believe it was a conspiracy, carefully orchestrated and covered up” (“Marina’s Turn,” p.71).

  * Indeed, the only compliment that Marina would accept from me in our two conversations was when I told her she was “a down-to-earth person.” “Thank you,” she said.

  * The late Mary Ferrell, a conspiracy researcher from Dallas, said she had books in her collection saying that the Martians and Venusians were responsible for the assassination (Dallas Morning News, November 20, 1983). Ferrell is believed to have had the largest private collection of JFK assassination–related documents ever, but sold it to an individual named Oliver Curme from California for a sum in excess of $1.5 million (JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, January 2003, p.35).

  * At least one writer (not even a confirmed conspiracy theorist, but obviously eager to join in the confirmed silliness) posits the possibility that two assassins fired from virtually the same spot. “Even if it were determined,” Edward Jay Epstein says, “that all the bullets fired came from the same rifle—and microballistic analyses of the fragments recovered indicated they were fired from Oswald’s weapon—it would still be at least theoretically conceivable that the rifle was passed from the hands of one sniper to another between shots” (Epstein, Legend, p.334). Yes, and it is also theoretically possible that the assassin was a robed nun whose eyes were closed and who used her Catholic prayer book as a gun rest.

  * No, really. Per Newsweek, someone at the November 1991 Assassination Symposium in Dallas argued that “Kennedy was shot by LBJ himself, who concealed his six-guns under a cape” (Gates with Manly, Foote, and Washington, “Bottom Line: How Crazy Is It?” p.52).

  * After all, as early as 1947, an English physician diagnosed JFK’s Addison’s disease during his trip to Ireland, and when Kennedy returned to the states from London in September of 1947, “he was so ill that a priest came aboard the Queen Mary to give him extreme unction [the “last rites” of the Catholic Church] before he was carried off the ship on a stretcher” (Dallek, Unfinished Life, p.153).

  †A variation of this notion is that spun by Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, to author Jean Stafford. Although she told Stafford her son had been “framed” for Kennedy’s murder, she allowed, “Now maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. But does that make him a louse? No. No! Killing does not necessarily mean badness. You find killing in some very fine homes for one reason or another. And as we know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.” (Stafford, Mother in History, pp.12, 18)

  * Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, did not free a single slave since almost all the slaves at that time, close to four million, were in the South (all were below the Mason-Dixon line), which was then under the control of the Confederate Army.

  †Though it is frequently stated in the many lists of Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences that Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy, his main secretary was John G. Nicolay. Lincoln’s only other secretary was John Hay.

  ‡ Nearly all Lincoln-Kennedy coincidence lists say that “Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, shot Lincoln in a theater, then fled to a warehouse. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater.” Bu
t Booth fled on horseback to the Maryland home of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, who treated Booth’s broken left leg. Booth was shot to death by a Union sergeant while hiding in a burning barn in Virginia twelve days after he shot Lincoln.

  § Contrary to what some lists say, Mrs. Lincoln was seated to Lincoln’s right, while we know Mrs. Kennedy was seated to Kennedy’s left.

  * Though it is frequently stated in the lists of Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences that Booth was born in 1839 and Oswald in 1939, Booth was born in 1838. Also, it is frequently stated that Booth and Oswald were southerners. But though Booth clearly was on the side of the South during the Civil War, he was born in Maryland, the northernmost of the slave states that was nevertheless a part of the Union during the Civil War. Indeed, one of the biggest defeats suffered by the Confederate forces of General Robert E. Lee in Lee’s move north was the battle of Antietam in Maryland in 1862, when the Union Army repulsed the Confederate advance in what may have been the bloodiest single day (September 17) of the entire Civil War, with 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers being killed or wounded. Although Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon line, causing some people to consider Maryland a southern state, the famous line separated the free states from the slave states, not the North from the South. Maryland was and is a “border state” between the North and the South, but I don’t believe it is considered a southern state in the public consciousness.