Jack Ruby: Guilty
At the end of the winter in 1964, just four months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the nation’s eyes once again turned toward Dallas. On March 14, a jury there announced its verdict in the trial of Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who had shot the President’s assassin.
Just days after Kennedy’s killing, Ruby had walked into the garage beneath the jail where Lee Harvey Oswald was being held, while police prepared to transfer the prisoner to another facility. At 12:20 p.m., as Oswald walked through a crowd of 70 police officers and some 40 or 50 reporters, Ruby stepped out from the throng and fired a single shot from a .38 caliber revolver into Oswald’s stomach. The President’s assassin was dead within hours, and Ruby was in police custody. Now, only four months later, he faced the judgment of his fellow citizens. At the end of a public and highly contentious trial, the court’s verdict was fierce: Ruby was guilty, and he must die.
The man the Washington Post would later call the “executioner of the decade” had followed a strange path to the courtroom where he was sentenced. Born Jacob Rubenstein in Chicago, he had been raised by an alcoholic immigrant father and a mentally unstable mother. He had been temporarily placed in a foster home but eventually returned to his abusive first household. He had served in the armed forces during World War II, but without ever leaving the United States. After the war he had moved to Dallas, where he started operating a pair of strip clubs. He managed one of them, the Carousel, himself, sometimes with brutal violence, beating up offensive customers and throwing one man down a flight of stairs. Predictably for a man with such business interests and a predilection for violence, he became familiar with figures in the world of organized crime, in Texas and beyond.
The defense team for this “ferret of a man with a receding hairline and a thickening jowl,” as one obituary would describe him, seemed to have an impossible case to make. There could be no doubt that the defendant had committed the crime. He had shot Oswald before a battery of television cameras, and his actions had been witnessed by millions across the country. Yet he and his lawyers were determined not to give up without a fight. He engaged a celebrated trial attorney, Melvin Belli, and paid a steep price for his services. Ruby’s family raised money by setting up a legal defense fund and by selling his life story to domestic and international newspapers. Belli would argue before the court that his client could not be held responsible for his actions because he was suffering from “psychomotor epilepsy” at the time of the crime and couldn’t tell right from wrong.
Belli’s defense team met a worthy adversary in the Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade. Belli called Wade a “country bumpkin” and the other prosecutors “yokels,” but Wade was known in Dallas as talented and capable. His name would be made forever famous in the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, in which he defended his state’s abortion ban. He hadn’t attained such prominence yet, however, when he took on the job of prosecuting Ruby. It was a challenging task, to try the killer of the President’s killer in an atmosphere of national trauma.
The jury’s work ended up being fairly easy. Though Belli brought in several experts to testify that Ruby suffered from psychological abnormalities, Wade supplied a parade of specialists to contradict that testimony. The real surprise was not the guilty verdict but the death sentence. Dallas residents reacted to it with a mixture of relief and unease. Some had feared that Ruby would be acquitted and, as one remarked, end up with “a new strip-tease joint and . . . bragging about how he killed Oswald.” But others agreed with a Dallas Citizens Council member who told The New York Times, “This country is surfeited with death. Whether it’s official or unofficial, I don’t want to see another killing here.”
After an increasingly muddled series of appeals and court decisions, that Dallas Citizens Council member would get his wish. As the presiding judge at the trial predicted, Ruby never would be executed. In October of 1966, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously reversed the conviction, declaring that Ruby could not have received a fair trial in Dallas at the time. Justice W. T. McDonald, in a concurring opinion, expressed concern that vengefulness had contributed to the trial’s outcome: “The feeling had been generated that Dallas County’s deprivation of prosecuting Oswald could find atonement in the prosecution of Ruby.” Ruby should be retried elsewhere, the court ruled.
But just as Ruby had sabotaged Texas’s efforts to carry out justice against Oswald, he would also thwart the state’s prosecution against himself. On December 9, 1966, he was diagnosed with cancer, as doctors found extensive tumors throughout his lungs, lymph nodes, and liver. He died less than a month later, at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital. Both President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald had died at the same place. Ruby did not die in peace; he suffered from delusions that his crime had brought on pogroms against American Jews. Melvin Belli, vacationing in Europe, responded to his death with characteristic flair: “That poor little son of a bitch. Those goddamn Texans. They never gave him a chance.”
Ruby’s death left justice undone and many questions unanswered. He had claimed that his shooting of Oswald had been a foolhardy attempt at heroism. Many Americans were unsatisfied by that explanation, and many still are. Suspicions remained that he had been part of a conspiracy to murder the President and then cover it up. How could he have gained access to the Dallas police garage without help from co-conspirators? Might he have had a previous relationship with Oswald, through organized crime connections? If he was just a local criminal, why had he made three trips to Havana in 1959—and concealed two of them in his conversations with the Warren Commission? As with so many mysteries about the Kennedy assassination, we may never learn the full truth about Jack Ruby.
The great weight of evidence, though, suggests the dull conclusion that Ruby’s role in the Kennedy assassination was exactly as seedy and pitiable as he said. Perhaps he summed up his own life best: “I shouldn’t have tried to play the part of a hero. My background wasn’t clean enough.”