On November 22, President Kennedy was
fatally shot while riding in an open-car motorcade through the streets of
downtown Dallas. Less than an hour after the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald killed
a policeman who questioned him on the street. Thirty minutes after that, he was
arrested in a movie theater by police. Oswald was formally arraigned on
November 23 for the murders of President Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippit. On
November 24, Oswald was brought to the basement of the Dallas police
headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail. A crowd of police and
press with live television cameras rolling gathered to witness his departure.
As Oswald came into the room, Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally
wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver. Ruby, who was
immediately detained, claimed that rage at Kennedy's murder was the motive for
his action. Some called him a hero, but he was nonetheless charged with
first-degree murder. Jack Ruby operated strip clubs in Dallas and had minor
connections to organized crime. He also had a relationship with a number of
Dallas policemen, which amounted to various favors in exchange for leniency in
their monitoring of his establishments. He features prominently in
Kennedy-assassination theories, and many believe he killed Oswald to keep him
from revealing a larger conspiracy. In his trial, Ruby denied the allegation
and pleaded innocent on the grounds that his great grief over Kennedy's murder
had caused him to suffer "psychomotor epilepsy" and shoot Oswald
unconsciously. The jury found him guilty of the "murder with malice"
of Oswald and sentenced him to death. In October 1966, the Texas Court of
Appeals reversed the decision on the grounds of improper admission of testimony
and the fact that Ruby could not have received a fair trial in Dallas at the
time. In January 1967, while awaiting a new trial, Ruby died of lung cancer in
a Dallas hospital. The official Warren Commission report of 1964 concluded that
neither Oswald nor Ruby were part of a larger conspiracy, either domestic or
international, to assassinate President Kennedy. Despite its seemingly firm
conclusions, the report failed to silence conspiracy theories surrounding the
event, and in 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in a
preliminary report that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of
a conspiracy" that may have involved multiple shooters and organized
crime. The committee's findings, as with those of the Warren Commission,
continue to be widely disputed.
Visit Michael Thomas Barry’s official
author website – www.michaelthomasbarry.com
& order his true crime bookMurder & Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked
Early California 1849-1949, from Amazon or Barnes & Noble through
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