Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (22 page)

One of the first indications that Ruby knew Oswald prior to the assassination came at a press conference given by District Attorney Henry Wade in the Dallas Courts Building on Saturday, November 23, 1963, at 12:30 a.m., almost precisely twelve hours after the assassination. Remarkably, the suspect for both the Tippit murder and the JFK assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been in police custody since approximately 2:00 p.m., within an hour and a half of the shooting. Jack Ruby attended Wade’s midnight press conference. News film footage shot within the Dallas Police Department offices showed Jack Ruby, the owner of a well-known downtown strip joint and nightclub named The Carousel, had been present in Dallas Police headquarters continuously since shortly after the assassination, mixing freely with the news reporters and Dallas police as if he had an official purpose being present. At the press conference, Wade was asked about Oswald’s motive, whether he belonged to any Communist organizations. Wade answered, “Well, he was a member of the Free Cuba movement.” From the back of the Assembly Room, standing among the press, Ruby corrected Wade, shouting, “No, Henry, that’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”
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Beverly Oliver, a performer in Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club who also turned out to be the long-unidentified “Babushka Lady,” an eyewitness to the JFK assassination taking photographs of the JFK limo as it traveled along Elm Street in Dealey Plaza, described in her 1994 book,
Nightmare in Dallas,
an occasion in 1963 when Jack Ruby brought Oswald into the Carousel Club. Here is how Oliver described the encounter, writing in the third person:

“Beverly. This is my friend Lee Oswald. He’s with the CIA.” Jack [Ruby] said, nodding his head toward the man on his right, who was sitting at the table in his own cloud of detachment. Beverly tried to extend a simple hello to acknowledge Jack’s friend but he seemed as if he could care less about meeting anyone. She quickly assessed that he wasn’t worth the bother—to her anyway. He was a “dark” person. When Beverly met people she saw them as having either light or dark personalities, and this man disturbed her. Not that he said anything to warrant that impression, it was an unsolicited gut-feeling she had. Oswald was dressed in casual drab; he was slouched in his chair, his arms folded defiantly across his chest. His eyes were narrow and fixed on Jack as though he was not pleased. Jack, however, was spirited when he introduced Oswald as if he was proud to know someone with the CIA. Beverly didn’t know what the CIA was but she thought it must be important or Jack wouldn’t have brought it up. She wondered if Lee Oswald really was a friend, or if Jack was once again a little loose with his terminology.
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She also described an incident a few days later when Oswald stood up in the club and verbally assaulted a comic named Wally. As Beverly described the incident, Ruby became incensed at the commotion and he unceremoniously threw Oswald out of the club, saying, “I told you little creep—don’t ever come back to my club again.”
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Oliver was also suspicious when a dancer at the Carousel Club named “Jada” disappeared after telling reporters that Ruby had introduced her to Oswald at the club a couple of weeks before the assassination. Oliver was doubly suspicious when she found out Jada had disappeared leaving part of her wardrobe at the club. “Beverly was immediately suspicious that the lack of Jada’s presence might have something to do with her statement about Jack and Oswald knowing each other,” she related in her book.
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The FBI turned over to the Warren Commission an eight-page letter that Dallas attorney Carroll Jarnagin wrote to document a conversation he overheard on October 4, 1963, at the Carousel Club where a man using the name “H. L. Lee” was talking with Jack Ruby about plans to kill the governor of Texas, John Connally. When Jarnagin saw Oswald’s picture in the newspaper after the JFK assassination, he realized that “H. L. Lee” was Lee Harvey Oswald. Jarnagin, in his cover letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, noted he had passed this information on to the Texas Department
of Public Safety on October 5, 1963, by telephone. Jarnagin related that he heard Oswald ask Ruby for money because he just returned from New Orleans where he got put in jail over a street fight. This appeared to coincide with Oswald’s arrest in New Orleans on August 16, 1963, when Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace in an incident that developed out of his distributing leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. “You’ll get the money after the job is done,” Jarnagin wrote he heard Ruby say. FBI Special Agents Ralph Rawlings and Bardwell Odum interviewed Jarnagin and filed a report on December 19, 1963.

The FBI report documents that Jarnagin, interviewed at the Dallas office of the FBI, related once again the same details of the conversation he overheard between Ruby and Oswald on October 4, 1963, at the Carousel Club when Jarnagin was in the company of a striptease dancer he identified as Robin Hood, plotting to kill the governor of Texas. The FBI report noted the Texas Department of Public Safety had no record of any call being received from Jarnagin or anyone else regarding an alleged attempt to assassinate Governor Connally; the report also indicates the FBI tracked down Shirley Ann Mauldin, the dancer known as Robin Hood. She admitted to being at the Carousel Club with Jarnagin and meeting Jack Ruby there, but denied overhearing any conversation about a plan to assassinate the governor.
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One additional witness provided an important testimony that Oswald and Ruby knew each other before the assassination. At approximately 11:00 a.m. on the day of the assassination, Julia Ann Mercer claimed she was driving west on Elm Street when she was brought to a stop just beyond the triple underpass because a green Ford pickup truck, with a Texas license plate and the words “Air Conditioning” painted on the side, was parked and blocking her lane, sitting partly on the curb. She noticed the pickup was driven by a heavyset middle-aged man. She waited approximately three minutes as a younger man in a plaid shirt got out of the passenger side of the truck and went around to the rear. From the tailgate of the pickup truck, the younger man opened a long tool compartment in the back of the truck and removed a package she believed was a rifle case. The
young man walked up the embankment with the package in the direction of the grassy knoll area. This was the last time she saw the young man. As she moved her car to get around the green truck, her eyes locked with those of the man driving the truck. Miss Mercer said she was able to see him very clearly, identifying him as heavy built with a round face.

Officers from the Dallas Sheriff’s office and the FBI interviewed Mercer the night of the assassination. On November 22, 1963, Mercer signed an affidavit at the Dallas County Sheriff’s office that described her sighting of the green Ford pickup truck. In the deposition she said, “A man was sitting under the wheel of the car and slouched over the wheel. This man had on a green jacket, was a white male and about in his 40’s and was heavy-set. I did not see him too clearly.”
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She also described what the younger man took out of the back of the truck as a “gun case.” On Sunday morning after the assassination, she was watching television with friends and saw Ruby shoot Oswald. Instantly, she recognized these two men as the ones she had identified for the FBI on Friday. She realized she had seen Ruby as the driver and Oswald as the young man with the rifle.
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Investigative journalist Henry Hurt tracked down and interviewed Julia Ann Mercer in 1983, after the House Select Committee on Assassinations had attempted but failed to find her. When Hurt showed Mercer a copy of her FBI affidavit, she was “aghast.” She could not believe it included a statement attributed to her that said she did not see the driver clearly enough to identify him. “Miss Mercer adamantly denounces the reports as corruptions and fabrications by the FBI and the sheriff’s department of her actual experiences,” Hurt wrote in his 1985 book,
Reasonable Doubt
. “Perhaps Mercer forgot that her affidavit given to Dallas police on the night of the assassination described only the physical appearance of the two men she observed in the green Ford pickup truck earlier that day but that her recognition of them as Ruby and Oswald did not occur until she was watching television on that Sunday and saw Ruby shoot Oswald. Miss Mercer is one of many other witnesses who claim discrepancies between what was told to the authorities and what later appeared in the official reports.”
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The House Select Committee on Assassinations was much less convinced than the Warren Commission that Oswald, Tippit, and Ruby had no prior connections to one another. In sharp contrast to the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee’s final report noted:

The scientific evidence available to the committee indicated that it is probable that more than one person was involved in the President’s murder. That fact compels acceptance. And it demands a re-examination of all that was thought to be true in the past. Further, the committee’s investigation of Oswald and Ruby showed a variety of relationships that may have matured into an assassination conspiracy. Neither Oswald nor Ruby turned out to be the “loners,” as they had been painted in the 1964 investigation. Nevertheless, the committee frankly acknowledged that it was unable firmly to identify the other gunman or the nature of the conspiracy.
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The scientific evidence mentioned in the above quote involved acoustics evidence obtained from a police dictabelt believed to contain sounds of the shooting recorded in Dealey Plaza that recorded a channel of police transmissions due to a microphone switch stuck open on a motorcycle in JFK’s police escort. The point is that the House Select Committee on Assassinations realized the minute scientific evidence challenged the assumption Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. As noted in
chapter 1
, if all the damage done to JFK, Governor Connally, and witness James Tague could not be done by three shots from a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in the time span available for the shooting, then one or more additional gunmen were involved. If Oswald did not act alone, JFK’s assassination was a conspiracy. If there was a conspiracy to shoot JFK, was there also a conspiracy to silence Oswald? If Oswald was merely the fall guy or the patsy he insisted he was, Oswald had to be silenced. The risk was that if Oswald began talking, he knew enough to implicate those in the conspiracy above him. If Oswald, Ruby, and Tippit all knew one another, then why and how precisely was each involved in the conspiracy to assassinate JFK? As important as that question is, the bigger question remains: Who at the higher levels were conspiring to assassinate JFK?

As much as the Tippit murder looks like a gangland slaying, the Oswald murder looks even more so. From the moment Oswald was captured on Friday, November 22, 1963, Jack Ruby began stalking him in the halls of the Dallas Police and Courts Building. News film taken within
the Dallas Police Department shows numerous clear and unmistakable views of Ruby mixed in with police and reporters. While in polite Dallas society, the Carousel Club might have been called a nightclub, a more correct designation would have been to characterize the establishment as a strip joint. A holdover from the 1930s and 1940s burlesque theater, strip joints in America in the 1960s were typically connected to the underworld. Second-rate comics mixed openly with striptease dancers, a free flow of alcohol, and relatively cheap but passable food. Police mixed with businessmen, lawyers, and laborers in a smoke-filled atmosphere of live entertainment that for the day was considered risqué. If Jack Ruby had lacked underworld connections, it is unlikely he would have been the proprietor of the Carousel Club in downtown Dallas in the 1960s.

Once in police custody, Oswald was subjected to a rigorous schedule of questioning by seasoned police detectives accompanied by FBI, all without legal representation. When Dallas police apprehended Oswald at the Texas Theater, Oswald had $13.87 in cash on his person, a paltry sum for a man who planned in advance to make a run for it. How was Oswald going to evade police captivity for any length of time with only $13.87 in his pocket? In custody, Oswald called for “someone to come forward,” suggesting he expected that possibly a lawyer or maybe even some official in the government would come forward to explain he was not an assassin. When Oswald was told by reporters at a press conference held in the Dallas Police Department that he had been charged with the JFK assassination as well as the Tippit shooting, Oswald appeared shocked. That’s when he protested that he was just a patsy.

Clearly, the post-assassination get-away was not going as planned, at least not as far as Oswald was concerned. Once Oswald realized fully that he had been set up as the fall guy, his silence was not likely to last. Under police questioning, Oswald displayed a calculating intelligence and a wry wit. In his few brief televised press conferences or in his off-the-cuff responses to questions reporters threw him in the halls of the Dallas Police Department, Oswald was clearly continuing to think and calculate. Oswald appeared after his arrest to be a highly intelligent individual who was doing his best to cope with a near impossible situation. His face showed signs of having been beaten, a fact he confirmed when answering a reporter’s question: “A policeman hit me.” Observed closely, Oswald’s
patience appeared to be running thin in the short time he was held under arrest before he was murdered. How much longer would he continue to parry off law enforcement questions before he broke down and began explaining what had really happened?

Viewed from an underworld or intelligence agency perspective, the only way to protect other conspirators higher up was to silence Oswald permanently. This assignment fell to Ruby.

A bizarre incident ties Jack Ruby and New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello to the Marseilles heroin trade through New Orleans and Texas that in the 1960s was known as the “French Connection.” On Wednesday, November 20, 1963, a woman named Cheramie was brought to a local hospital by one Frank Odum after he hit her on Highway 190 near Eunice, Louisiana. When sedated in the hospital, Cheramie predicted that JFK would be assassinated in Dallas that coming Friday.