Episode 342 Jack Ruby Miniseries Part 18

0:00Welcome to JFK in the Enduring Secret. I'm your host, Jeff Crudell. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is Episode 342 and it's part 18 of the Jack Ruby miniseries. Boy have we got a doozy for you tonight. Have you been just a little bit confused about a certain number of things that you've heard that I don't know. May have been a little inconsistent in the testimony so far. Well, depending upon what you're confused about, all of it may just be cleared up in one swoop tonight. Well, I won't be willed or you anymore. Let's just get right to the episode and see what I'm talking about.

1:07In part 17, we went down to the corner of Jackson and Field Street. We reconstructed the late night meeting at Simon's garage between Jack Ruby, Patrolman Harry Olsen and Caricell dancer Kathy Kay. And we walked you through the story exactly as the official record tells it. We laid out the accepted surface narrative. And that's a story that Kathy Kay's Friday night shift had just ended. And that she walked a block down the street to meet her boyfriend at the garage exit. And that they ran into her boss, Jack Ruby, by pure random chance. That is the alibi that the Warren Commission accepted. It is the story that has sat on the surface for over 60 years. But that was only the first layer of the puzzle.

2:07And today we'll put just a little bit more evidence on the table and let you the jury decide for yourself. Because when you peel back that surface alibi and you look at the physical reality of that Friday night, the official story basically collapses. On Friday night, November 22nd, both of Jack Ruby strip clubs, the Vegas and the Caricell were completely dark. Jack had closed them early that afternoon out of respect for President Kennedy. That actually happened. He had even placed black, bordered, closed notices in the Saturday newspapers. This means that Kathy Kay did not have a shift that night. She was not working. She was not walking to Simon's garage after leaving her job. And when you strip away that convenient, manufactured pretext, the entire Jackson Street rendezvous takes on a much darker color. Why or a Dallas police officer in a strip club dancer caucusing in a dark parked car in the middle of a lockdown city?

3:14Well, I don't exactly know the answer to that, but I think I do. Man, I'm just saying. You know, in his sworn testimony, Jack Ruby insisted on a very specific detail. He claimed to be walked out of the K-O-I-F newsroom at exactly 2 o'clock AM. Now, why was he so obsessed with that 2 o'clock AM time stamp? Well, because two in the morning is a standard closing time. It's an hour when people are still moving. It's an hour when a random encounter on a street corner is still, well, barely within the realm of possibility. But the newsmen, on duty that night, Russ Knight and Joe Long flatly rejected his timeline. They testified under oath that Ruby did not leave at 2 o'clock. He stayed through the live newscast. He packed his things. He said his goodbyes. And they swore that Jack Ruby actually left the building between 220 and 230 AM.

4:19And that 30-minute discrepancy? Well, in some ways, it may very well be the forensic key that unlocks this part of a very dubious story. Because Jackson Street is just one block away from K-O-I-F. If Ruby leaves the station at 230, he walks over to Simon's garage and gets there probably at approximately 232 AM. Just a couple of minutes away. And this is where Petrolman-Hary Olson's idling car is waiting at the exit. And according to the night attendant, Johnny Simpson, they didn't just say a quick hello. Simpson testified that Jack Ruby climbed into the vehicle and the three of them sat there, caucosing for well over an hour. Do the math. That means an active duty police officer, his dancer, girlfriend, and a future assassin are sitting in a dark idling car from about 232 AM until almost 345 AM.

5:25Think about that scene. It's late November. The president of the United States has been assassinated in this very city just 14 hours earlier. And the streets of downtown Dallas are completely deserted. They're in a heavy military style police lockdown. The Carousel Club is closed. Kathy Kay has no work shift. She has no logical reason whatsoever to even be downtown. Yet the official record wants you to believe that in the dead of winter at 3 o'clock in the morning, these three people just randomly bumped into each other on a street corner. And then instead of driving home to get warm, they decided to sit at a garage exit for about 75 minutes in the freezing dark. Whispering to one another or wailing depending upon whose story you listen to. With every advancing minute, the idea of this being a casual serendipitous encounter becomes utterly preposterous to me.

6:29And I'm just saying. And of course, the utterly preposterous is sometimes true. So I'm not ruling it completely out. I'm just saying. But the timeline itself does not lie. The later Jack Ruby left that radio station, the more the alibi of random chance decays. And then there is the patrolman Harry Olson's own alibi. Olson claimed he spent the day guarding a wealthy estate on eight street in Oaklef. Kathy Kay claimed that she physically drove out there at noon to bring him lunch. But when you dig into the details behind all of this, the illusions somewhat vanishes. In 1967, Olson finally admitted to an independent investigator, William Turner, that he wasn't guarding a mansion. It was just a ramshackle house on eighth street. And a state, so to speak, wholly in the legal probate sense.

7:31But here's the catch. The guard shift has absolutely zero paper trail. Despite 60 years of research, no one has ever been able to find a single probate record for this guard. Or the guard job that he did that night. No deceased owner has ever been identified. No probate attorney has ever been located. Even the motorcycle cop who supposedly hooked Olson up with the shift remains a phantom. Even the 7-11 where Kathy claimed she stopped to buy Olson some milk at noon on Friday. Didn't open on that block until a year later. The Warren Commission never verified the address either. And the HSCA never checked the property records. They simply accepted the word of an active duty cop. An active duty cop who had placed himself on the lancing block of eighth street. Just blocks away from Lancaster in eighth where officer JD Tippett was idling at 12.54pm at the exact time of the shooting.

8:37Where officer Tippett was eventually murdered. And Olson was apparently over there guarding a house that officially had no reason to be guarded. Again, when you dig deeper beneath the surface cover story, the accidental garage meeting will just simply collapse. And we're left with a pre-planned deliberate midnight meeting. Now, for what reason we don't know, although you easily can jump to conclusions. And as the clock ticks past 3.45am, Jack Ruby finally climbs out of that park car and he drives home. Was his mind boiling? Probably. His Saturday morning run is just beginning. Some time around 4.30am, Jack Ruby's white olds mobile pulls up to the curb of his apartment building at 223 South Ewing Street.

9:41He walks into the dark apartment and he awakens his roommate, George Senator. Now, Senator can see that Jack is extremely agitated. He's trembling. He's manic. Ruby immediately starts talking about a full-page advertisement that had appeared in Friday morning's Dallas Morning News. It was a highly critical, it was a mocking ad directed at President Kennedy. And it was signed by a man named Bernard Weissman. Ruby points out the thick black border surrounding the ad. He tells Senator it looks like a death border. A coded warning and it was one that Ruby felt that whoever placed that ad knew that the president was going to be killed. To Jack, the name Bernard Weissman is a massive trigger. You see, Ruby is fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage. He's deeply offended that a Jewish sounding name was signed to such a hateful anti-Century ad. And he tells Senator it's a plot.

10:43He believes a right-wing group is trying to use a fake Jewish name to blame the assassination on the Jewish community. And then his rather active mind draws a while conspiratorial connection. He remembers a giant billboard he saw on the Dallas Expressway, a billboard reading, Save Our Republic, Impeach or O'Warrant. And Jack Ruby's mind, the billboard and the newspaper ad are part of the exact same conspiracy. He decides he needs physical proof. And he needs it before the sun comes up. Jack picks up the telephone. He calls the Carousel Club. He awakens Larry Crawford. Now, Crawford's a 22-year-old carnival worker, actually. And Ruby had hired him as a general handyman and a bartender.

11:43He sleeps in a back room at the club. Ruby's voice on the line is frantic. Larry, get dressed. Grab the club's Polaroid camera. Meet me downstairs in front of the club. Immediately. Crawford is completely bewildered. He doesn't know who O'Warrant is. He has no idea why they need a camera. He's gone. But he does what he's told. And Ruby and George Senator pull up in the olds' mobile. They pick up Crawford and the Polaroid land camera. They drive directly to the corner of Central Expressway and Ross Avenue. There, mounted on top of a potter steel company sign, stands the billboard. In bold letters, it reads, Save Our Republic, Impeach Earl Warren. Now, keep in mind it's pretty cold outside and it's pitch dark. Ruby tells Larry to take a photograph of the billboard. Crawford has to use bright popping flash bulbs in the chilly night air.

12:47He snaps three Polaroid pictures. And as the images develop, Ruby points at the bottom of the sign. In the corner, there's an address for the John Birch Society, post office box 1757, Belmont, Massachusetts. And Jack Ruby stares at that number 1757. And this is where we look directly into Jack Ruby's mysterious mind. Because what he saw on that sign, it was a secret code. He babbled to Crawford and the Senator that the numbers were highly suspicious. And he said that 1757 was scrambled, mathematical, safer for 175. And of course, we all know what 1775 is. Well, that's the year of Paul Revere's ride. Okay, to a normal person, this is a random mailing address. To Jack Ruby, it was a historical right-wing calling card.

13:51He believed the John Birch Society was signaling an active underground network that was operating in Dallas. And then he linked it back to the Bernard Weissman ad in the morning paper. That ad listed post office box 1792 in Dallas. Look at those two numbers side by side. Box 1757 in Massachusetts and Box 1792 in Dallas. Guess what? Both starting with 17. And in Ruby's fragile and at that moment, hyperactive mind, these weren't just random post office boxes. This was the Birch code. He believed that the John Birch Society, the far-right extremists, had plotted the assassination of President Kennedy. And because they wanted to cover their tracks, it placed a hateful ad under the distinctly Jewish sounding name Bernard Weissman.

14:53They wanted to spark a wave of anti-Semitism and frame the Jews for killing the President. And they left their post office box numbers as a coded signature of the plot there was. This is why Jack Ruby was standing in the cold right on a highway at five in the morning. He wasn't just taking photos. In his mind, he was a detective gathering physical evidence to crack the right-wing code, and save his people from a nationwide backlash. Well, once they were through, they stopped briefly at a waffle shop for a quick cup of coffee and a chance to warm up. And at 6.20am, Ruby dropped slurry crayford back at the Carousel Club. But Jack is unfinished. He and George Senator drive straight to the main Dallas Post Office. At 6.30am, Ruby's old mobile pulls up to the curb of the main Dallas Post Office on Irvay Street.

15:59Ruby and George Senator walk into the public lobby, and Ruby walks past the brass lockers until he finds Post Office box 1792. The box listed in the Bernard Weissman ad. He peers through the glass, and he notes that the box is stuffed with mail. Ruby spots the night clerk on duty on the other side of the counter, and he presses the call button, and he demands to know who owns that box. The clerk refuses to give him the name. He tells Ruby that only the Post Master has the authority to release registration information. Ruby is furious. He stands in the lobby arguing with the clerk protesting the hateful advertisement. He babbles that we are trying to find out who this Weissman really is. Finally, just before 7 o'clock AM, Ruby and Senator head back to their south-ealing apartment and fall into bed.

17:03But Ruby sleeps for only a few hours, and by Saturday afternoon his obsession has reached a fever pitch, and he's ready to take his new evidence out into the world. At 1.15 pm, Ruby gets back into his olds' mobile, and he drives to Saul's turf bar. That's on Commerce Street. The bar is packed. The patrons are angry. They're discussing the tragedy and arguing about the Bernard Weissman ad. Imagine that. Ruby walks in. He doesn't sit down. He stands near the bar, and he pulls the three Polaroid photos from his pocket, and he slaps them onto a table. Look, look at what I've got. Three pictures of the impeach-er-o-warren sign. They're trying to blame this on the Jews. And he shows the Prince to a Jewelry designer named Frank Blatio. Blatio looks at the photographs of the anti-warren sign, and he gets incredibly emotional.

18:12And he says, that's it. I'm quitting Dallas. This town is a breeding ground for hate. Ruby immediately tries to sue them. He tells Blatio that they cannot run away. They have to stay and defend the honor of Dallas. But Ruby's actions are increasingly frantic. At 2.30 pm, he calls his attorney Stanley Kaufman, and he tells Kaufman about the Polaroid photos. Stanley, I have these pictures. We need to do something. Did you see the Weissman ad? If it has a black border around it, that's a death border. Whoever placed that ad knew the president was going to be killed. Ruby asked Kaufman to contact the anti-defamation league to investigate who Weissman really is. Kaufman suggests that Ruby go to the public library first and do something simple. Check the city directory. And he tries to calm him down.

19:12But Ruby's voice is, well, it's just on fire. At 3.30 pm, Ruby calls his close friend and business partner Ralph Paul at the bullpen drive-in. Now Paul has been listening to Ruby Ramble all weekend, and he's completely exhausted by it. Ruby tells him he's closing both of his strip clubs for three whole days out of respect. And that's the moment when Ralph Paul lost his temper. Cashier rose Jackson standing nearby. Here's Paul screaming to the receiver. Are you crazy? Why are you closing the clubs? That's ridiculous. But Ruby doesn't care about the money. He's operating on a different manic frequency. And as the afternoon sun begins to set over Dallas, things are just set to continue to get crazier.

20:14Jack Ruby's Saturday afternoon run was over. He had taken his photographs, he had confronted the post office clerk, and he'd showed off his evidence to the patrons at Saul's turf bar. He wanted everyone to see how much he loved the president and how much he hated the haters. But his Saturday was far from over. On our next episode, we're going to continue to follow Jack Ruby through the rest of this critical Saturday. And we'll investigate his bitter late night anger toward his chief business competitors. A group of people who shamelessly kept their doors open while Jack sacrificed his own livelihood. And we follow him to a quiet Saturday night dinner. I guess where? Yep, the commander motel. And that was just hours before his fateful Sunday morning rendezvous with Lear Vioswold. And that's next time as we continue to document Ruby's movements on Saturday, November 23rd, here at JFK, the Enduring Secret.

21:20Thank you for listening to episode 342 of JFK, The Enduring Secret.