Jack Ruby

The Warren Commission established the timing to the minute. A Western Union money order Ruby sent to Karen Carlin, one of his dancers, was time-stamped at almost exactly 11:17 a.m.; the office was about 350 feet from the top of the Main Street ramp into the police basement. Ruby shot Oswald at 11:21. [1][2]

Ruby told police he walked down the ramp as a police car pulled out. The Commission said the evidence on his entry was not conclusive but pointed to the ramp; it found no evidence that police helped him. It criticized the Dallas police for letting reporters and others fill the basement after threats against Oswald. [1][2]

The House committee in 1979 took a darker view. It believed, on circumstantial evidence, that the shooting “was not a spontaneous act, in that it involved at least some premeditation,” and that it was “less likely that Ruby entered the police basement without assistance.” It noted that his close relationships with police officers may have been a factor. It did not identify who, if anyone, helped him. [3]

Supporters of the lone-killer view point to the money order: anyone planning to kill Oswald at a fixed time would not have been standing in line at Western Union minutes before a transfer that had already been delayed. Supporters of a plot answer that the transfer time was widely known in advance and Ruby had been near the police building over the weekend.

A Dallas jury convicted Ruby of murder on 14 March 1964 and sentenced him to death. On 5 October 1966 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed. It held that a police officer’s testimony about a statement Ruby made after his arrest should not have been admitted and that the trial should have been moved out of Dallas. That was a ruling on trial errors, not a finding about the assassination. [1]

On 7 June 1964 Ruby told Chief Justice Warren and Representative Gerald Ford in the Dallas jail that he could not tell the full story there and begged to be taken to Washington. He also insisted on a lie-detector test. [2] The FBI gave him one in July. J. Edgar Hoover advised that, given a psychiatrist’s testimony that Ruby was a “psychotic depressive,” no significance should be placed on it; the Commission published the transcripts and said it did not rely on the result. [3]

In April 1964 the psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West examined Ruby for the defense and announced that Ruby had suffered “an acute psychotic break” and was “now positively insane.” The author Tom O’Neill has documented that West had worked on CIA-funded mind-control research under MKULTRA, and argues that Allen Dulles, a Warren Commission member, and Richard Helms, the CIA’s liaison to the Commission, knew this and did not disclose it. That West had CIA research ties is documented; what, if anything, he did to Ruby is not. [4]

Ruby died of cancer at Parkland Hospital on 3 January 1967, before his retrial. [5]

Ruby ran the Carousel Club, a downtown strip club, and the Vegas Club. He knew many Dallas police officers, who drank at his clubs. The Warren Commission looked for links to organized crime and concluded there was no credible evidence he was part of a conspiracy. [1]

The House committee went further. A computer analysis of Ruby’s telephone records for the month before the assassination showed calls to or from a number of people “who may be fairly characterized as having been affiliated, directly or indirectly, with organized crime,” including the Chicago bondsman Irwin Weiner. It also faulted the Warren Commission for finding no connection between Ruby and organized crime. It did not find that the mob used Ruby to silence Oswald. [2][3]

His family and friends described an emotional, volatile man who idolized Kennedy. Both pictures can be true at once. See the Mafia file.