On January 3, 1967, Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner
who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F.
Kennedy, dies of cancer in a Dallas hospital. The Texas Court of Appeals had
recently overturned his death sentence for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and
was scheduled to grant him a new trial.
On November 24, 1963, two days after Kennedy's
assassination, Lee Harvey 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 he was distraught over the president's
assassination. Jack Ruby, originally known as Jacob Rubenstein, operated strip
joints and dance halls 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 charge, maintaining that he was acting out of
patriotism. In March 1964, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. 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 the findings of the Warren Commission, continue to be widely disputed.
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