by Jim Marrs
All of this suggests yet another bullet was discovered but kept secret, since another bullet would have destroyed the lone-assassin theory, which already was being strained to the limit.
Further evidence that more than two bullets struck President Kennedy came in 1968 when then–attorney general Ramsey Clark gathered a panel of physicians headed by Dr. Russell Fisher, a Maryland medical examiner, to study the JFK autopsy photographs and X-rays.
In addition to noting that the rear head wound had changed both size and shape from its description by the autopsists, the Clark panel found at the base of Kennedy’s skull “a large metallic [bullet] fragment which . . . is round and measures 6.5 mm in diameter.”
This could be construed as strong evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald, since he reportedly used a 6.5 mm rifle. However, recall that the official version states that one bullet—the “Magic Bullet”—traversed the president’s neck, penetrated Connally, and was found intact at Parkland Hospital.
Since officially no large fragments had been noted by the autopsy doctors and no such fragments could have come from the whole bullet found at Parkland, it seems probable that either more than two shots struck Kennedy in the head area or that the autopsy materials viewed by the Clark panel were fraudulent.
Furthermore, yet another bullet base, about 6.5 mm in diameter, was said to be found in the front seat of the presidential limousine. All this goes far to prove that more than two bullets struck Kennedy.
A Navy officer who might have been able to clarify some of the questions about the president’s autopsy is unavailable. Bethesda television technician Lieutenant Commander William Pitzer, according to Chief of the Day Dennis David, may have surreptitiously taken both film and photos of the autopsy and participants. David later said these materials depicted an entry wound in Kennedy’s right temple area with a corresponding exit wound in the lower right portion of the skull. In October 1966, Pitzer was found shot in the head under questionable circumstances. The death was ruled a suicide due to self-inflected pistol wound but no nitrates or gunpowder were found on his hand. Among other oddities in the death was a claim in recent years by Special Forces Colonel Daniel Marvin that at that time he was approached by a CIA operative who wanted Marvin to “terminate” Pitzer.
Over the years, as attempts have been made to clarify and substantiate the medical evidence, the wounds seem to take on a life of their own.
The head wound as seen by the Dallas doctors consisted of a large blasted-out area in the right rear of the skull. Both medical and nonmedical persons in Dallas gave consistent descriptions of this wound.
Secret Service agent Clint Hill told the Warren Commission, “The right rear portion of his head was missing.”
Dr. Charles J. Carrico noted a large hole “in the posterior skull, the occipital region. There was an absence of the calvarium or skull in this area.”
Dr. Malcolm Perry: “I noted a large avulsive wound of the right parietal occipital area [the occipital is the large bone on the back of a human skull], in which both scalp and portions of skull were absent.”
Dr. William Kemp Clark: “I then examined the wound in the back of the President’s head. This was a large, gaping wound in the right posterior part, with cerebral and cerebellar tissue being damaged and exposed.” (The cerebellum controls muscle coordination and is located at the low rear portion of the head behind the occipital bone.)
Dr. Robert McClelland: “I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted.”
Yet the autopsy doctors saw a head wound that stretched from the upper side of the rear to the right front of Kennedy’s head.
The autopsy doctors said a small entrance wound was located in the back of the skull at about the hairline, while the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ medical panel placed the entrance wound four inches higher, near the top of the head.
Neither the Warren Commission nor the House committee spoke of a hole blasted out of the right rear portion of the president’s head. The House committee even produced a drawing reportedly made from an autopsy photograph that depicts the rear of Kennedy’s head. It is entirely intact except for what appears to be a small hole—the entrance wound—near the top.
Humes had problems with this drawing, stating he had never seen the small hole before. He suggested it might be dried blood. His thought was confirmed later when the actual photographs were released to the public. The photo clearly showed the hole as a spot of transparent dried blood with hair growing through it. Humes was certain he had seen no entrance wound in that location.
Robert Groden, photographic consultant to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, had a simple explanation for the mystery surrounding the autopsy photographs. After careful study, he agreed with photographer Floyd Riebe that the autopsy photos now available to the public are forgeries. After discovering evidence of retouching, Groden wrote:
The vital autopsy photos of the back of the President’s head were altered immediately after the autopsy in order to cover up the fact that the President received two bullets in the head, one from the rear and one from the front, and this second shot blew out the back of his head, as Jackie Kennedy testified to the Warren Commission.
X-rays and other autopsy materials such as photographs, tissue samples, and blood smears—including Kennedy’s brain, which was removed and preserved—could have provided definitive proof of the location of the wounds. However, much of this material is missing from the National Archives. The House Select Committee on Assassinations hinted that the brain may have been taken by Robert Kennedy to prevent future public display; however, this has not been proven and Kennedy is not alive to answer the charge.
It also should be noted that the Warren Commission—the group officially charged with finding the truth of Kennedy’s assassination—apparently never was allowed to view for themselves the president’s autopsy photographs and X-rays. Commission attorney Arlen Specter, in an October 10, 1968, interview in US News & World Report, stated:
The complete set of pictures taken at the autopsy was not made available to me or to the Commission. I was shown one picture of the back of a body which was represented to be the back of the President, although it was not authenticated. It showed a hole in the position identified in the autopsy report. To the best of my knowledge, the Commission did not see any photographs or X-rays. . . . The photographs and X-rays would, in the thinking of the Commission, not have been crucial, because they would have served only to corroborate what the autopsy surgeons had testified to under oath as opposed to adding any new facts for the Commission.
But they are crucial—if not in truthfully understanding Kennedy’s wounds, then in understanding the manipulations surrounding the medical evidence. Not studying the autopsy materials did not dissuade Specter from formulating the convoluted “single-bullet” theory.
Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, an experienced coroner and former president of the American Academy of Forensic Medicine, was blunt. He stated:
[Kennedy’s autopsy was] extremely superficial and sloppy, inept, incomplete, incompetent in many respects, not only on the part of the pathologists who did this horribly inadequate medical-legal autopsy but on the part of many other people. This is the kind of examination that would not be tolerated in a routine murder case by a good crew of homicide detectives in most major cities of America.
As Groden later wrote:
The key to understanding who killed Kennedy lies with the autopsy photographs. These photographs may tell us more about the assassination than all of the official investigations. Perhaps the single most important question in the investigation was never asked: Why were the autopsy photographs and X-rays never officially shown to the numerous doctors and nurses in Dallas who treated President Kennedy? Had this question been pursued, the true nature of the conspiracy would then have been exposed, because the crucial pictures allegedly of the back of the President’s head are forged! That forgery is one of the keys to the conspi
racy. Who would have had that kind of access to the evidence in order to alter it? Who had the capability to alter it?
Jack Ruby
On the day before Kennedy’s assassination there was a continuing parade of defendants, lawyers, and police officers in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. One officer, Dallas police lieutenant W. F. Dyson, later told the Warren Commission that it was here that he and other officers encountered a short, stocky nightclub owner who was going out of his way to make their acquaintance. Dyson overheard this man—Jack Ruby—tell the officers, “You probably don’t know me, but you will.”
The following Sunday the entire world knew Jack Ruby—the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald.
When on November 24, 1963, Ruby silenced the one man whom authorities blamed for Kennedy’s death, a rumble of discontent and suspicion began that persists even today. Many people could accept the idea of a “lone-nut assassin,” but balked at the idea of two such characters.
In the months following the assassination, the American public was told—first by news media accounts and then by the Warren Commission—that Ruby was a small-time Dallas nightclub operator with no significant ties to organized crime, to Dallas authorities, or to Oswald. It was said that his killing of Oswald was simply the spontaneous act of a man hoping to right the wrong of the president’s death.
Today there is evidence that Ruby, a fixture on the Dallas scene in 1963, was more intimately connected with organized-crime figures than earlier believed and that he in fact stalked Oswald throughout the assassination weekend. Furthermore, the evidence of an association between Ruby and Oswald prior to the assassination is substantial.
It also is now known that Ruby tried to tell what he knew about the plot to kill Kennedy but was shrugged off by both government investigators and the news media. To a radio news reporter, Ruby said, “I know there is a terrible conspiracy going on in the world right now. . . . I’m speaking the truth. . . . The world has the right to hear the truth.”
Shortly after Ruby was granted a new trial, he was filmed by a Texas television station stating, “Everything pertaining to what’s happened has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred—my motive, in other words. I am the only person in the background to know the truth pertaining to everything relating to my circumstances.”
Asked by the interviewer if this truth would ever come out, Ruby replied, “No. Because unfortunately these people, who have so much to gain and have such an ulterior motive to put me in the position I’m in, will never let the true facts come aboveboard to the world.”
“Are these people in high positions?” asked the interviewer. Ruby answered, “Yes.” In letters smuggled out of the Dallas County Jail, Ruby even named Lyndon Johnson as the person behind the assassination and called him a Nazi.
Jack Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein in 1911, the fifth of eight siblings. His exact birth date is not known. Various documents show different birth dates, although Ruby himself used March 25, 1911, most frequently. Despite several moves, the family always remained in what was described by one brother as a “ghetto,” complete with noisy streets filled with pushcarts and peddlers.
When Ruby was ten years old, his parents separated and he, along with his three brothers and four sisters, was placed in various foster homes by the Jewish Home Finding Society. During this time, young Rubenstein was learning more on the streets of Chicago than in the schoolroom. Like young Oswald, Ruby was caught by truant officers after skipping school. Unlike Oswald, who found diversion in the local library and zoo, Ruby gravitated toward street gangs and amusement parks.
On the streets, young Ruby was nicknamed “Sparky.” According to his sister Eva Grant, the name came from Ruby’s swaggering walk, which reminded some people of the wobbling gait of Sunday comic strip character Barney Google’s horse, “Sparkplug.” Others believed “Sparky” was a tag reflecting Ruby’s volatile temperament.
Young streetwise Sparky gained a reputation with his fists, although the accounts of his aggressiveness differed with those who knew him. Barney Rasofsky, who gained fame in the 1930s as World Welterweight Boxing Champion Barney Ross, in 1964 told the FBI that he and Ruby along with other young toughs were paid $1 per trip to deliver sealed envelopes for gangster Al Capone. If this information was passed along to the Warren Commission, it was never reported. Rasofsky also said Ruby was never a troublemaker, although he always was ready to defend himself against any attack. Others, too, recalled Ruby as one to avoid a fight if possible. These recollections clash markedly with those of others who recalled Ruby as a street brawler, eager to take up any challenge, even to the extent of aiding someone else in trouble.
Ruby was also militantly proud of his Jewish ancestry. Although not particularly devout, he had nevertheless received some instruction in Orthodox Judaism. In addition to fights with other street gangs because of racial and ethnic differences, Ruby reportedly joined with Jewish toughs in fights with the pro-Nazi group the German American Bund during the late 1930s.
In 1933 Ruby, along with several Chicago friends, went to Los Angeles and then San Francisco seeking employment. In 1936, he was still in San Francisco living for a brief time with his sister Eva and her husband.
Despite some evidence to the contrary, Ruby later told authorities he returned to Chicago in 1937—the same year his mother was committed to Elgin State Hospital with mental disorders. For more than twenty years, Fannie Rubenstein had frequented doctors and clinics reporting that a fishbone was lodged in her throat despite continuing reassurances that nothing organic could be detected.
Having returned to Chicago about 1937, Ruby began working for the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union, according to Social Security Administration records. Chicago attorney Leon R. Cooke, a close friend to Ruby, had founded the union and was financial secretary. When gangsters connected to the Chicago underworld began taking control of the union and its funds, Ruby went along. Union president John Martin, who earlier had been indicted along with a major Chicago mobster for withholding tax information, named young Rubenstein union secretary. However, according to a statement Ruby made to police at the time, he was little more than a bagman for union thugs.
On December 8, 1939, Martin fatally shot Cooke in the union’s offices after an argument over missing funds. Martin fled and Ruby was arrested. The incident was splashed all over the Chicago newspapers at the time. Although Cooke was shot in the back, Martin claimed self-defense and never served time for the murder.
While Ruby claimed such close friendship for the slain man that he eventually took the name Leon as his own middle name, he nevertheless stayed on with the corrupt union after Cooke’s brutal murder.
Following the bad publicity over Cooke’s killing, the union was reorganized as the Waste Material Handlers Union, Local 20467, American Federation of Labor. Martin was replaced and the reorganized union was dominated by its secretary-treasurer, Paul J. Dorfman, a man with long-standing connections to Chicago racketeers.
Several months after Dorfman took over, Ruby suddenly left the union. In 1964, Ruby told the Warren Commission, “I was with the union back in Chicago and I left the union when I found out a notorious organization had moved in there. . . . I have never been a criminal. . . . I am not a gangster. . . . I had a very rough start in life, but anything I have done, I at least tried to do it in good taste.”
By mid-1943, Ruby had found a permanent home—the US Army Air Corps. At the beginning of World War II, he had been granted a draft deferment for reasons not entirely clear. One version is that he feigned a hearing disability by wearing a hearing aid, while another is that he was granted an “economic hardship” deferment because he was the only Rubenstein child remaining at home. Whatever the reason, it was insufficient in 1943 when he was reclassified 1-A and, despite an appeal to his local board, inducted into the Army Air Corps on May 21.
Upon his discharge from the air force in February 1946, Ruby returned to Chicago,
where he entered an unsuccessful sales business with his three brothers, Hyman, Sam, and Earl. As in their childhood, the four Rubenstein brothers constantly argued with one another—this time over how to run the business. One of the few things they agreed on was the need to obtain a more “American” name. After Hyman left the business, Sam, Earl, and Jack all shortened their name from Rubenstein to Ruby. Their stormy partnership lasted only one year, and by 1947 Jack Ruby had left Chicago for Texas.
Shortly after Jack arrived in Dallas his name change was made official by a decree from the 68th Judicial District Court of Dallas on December 30, 1947.
Although the official story of Ruby’s move is that he went to help his sister operate a nightclub, several different sources—some within the mob—have claimed that Ruby was part of a plan to bring Dallas rackets under the control of the Chicago underworld. Shortly after the JFK assassination, Dallas businessman Giles Miller added support for this idea by telling the FBI that in 1959 Ruby had told him he wanted to go back to California in 1947 but “was directed” to go to Dallas.
But further evidence of Ruby’s move as part of a mob offensive into Texas came from former Dallas County sheriff Steve Guthrie. During the late 1930s and 1940s, Dallas gambling operations were virtually wide open under the control of homegrown bosses like Benny “Cowboy” Binion and Herbert Noble. However, by the late 1940s a bloody feud between these two top gamblers had resulted in Noble’s bombing death and Binion’s departure for the quieter environs of Las Vegas. It was then that the Chicago mob made its bid for a takeover in Dallas.
