Episode 344 Jack Ruby Miniseries Part 20

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 344 and it's part 20 of the Jack Ruby miniseries. Today is Sunday and we all know what happened on Sunday. It wasn't temple and it wasn't church. It was one of the lowest moments of that weekend. So without further ado, let's listen to Episode 344 of JFK, the Enduring Secret. It's now Sunday morning, November 24th, 1963. In Dallas, the sun is rising over a city that was

1:11paralyzed by tension. At the Central Police Station, a massive restless crowd is gathering. Reporters are setting up television cameras, detectives, or checking their weapons. Everyone is waiting for the big moment. The public transfer of Leiharvi Oswald. The Dallas Police Department had announced the schedule to the world. The transfer would take place between 10 o'clock AM and 1030 AM. But if you look at the physical evidence, a bizarre paradox emerges. At 10 o'clock AM, Jack Ruby is not standing in the police basement. He is not positioned in the crowd. In fact, he's still fast asleep in his apartment on South Ewing Street. He isn't rushing. He isn't even panicking. If Jack Ruby had followed the publicly available transfer schedule for Oswald, he would have missed Leiharvi Oswald by over an hour. Yet, at exactly

2:1511.21 AM, Jack Ruby will step out of the shadows and shoot Leiharvi Oswald in the abdomen. Oswald will die a short time later. This timing was not just close. It was mathematically perfect. How did an erratic, hyperactive club owner pull off the most precise, high-profile execution in modern history? In parts 1718 and 19, we methodically peel back the layers of Friday and Saturday night. We exposed what was really a crumbling alibi of patrolman Olsen and Kathy Kay. We laid bare the midnight caucuses in the Phantom Probe to state. And today, we carry that same forensic lens directly into Sunday morning. We dismantle the myth of a miraculous split-second coincidence. And we expose the reality of a two-step decision process when it comes to figuring out

3:17the timing of when Oswald was going to be transferred. For decades, mainstream documentaries have argued over a single, frustrating question. Did Jack Ruby receive a last-minute phone call, tipping him off? Or was he just the luckiest guy in the world? But when we put all the evidence on the table, we realized maybe we were asking the wrong question. Maybe. The transcripts of police chief Jesse Curry, those of Captain Wilfritz and deputy chief George Lumpkin expose a critical fact. The transfer was not a single, spontaneous event. It actually was a two-step decision process. Step one happened late Saturday night, behind closed doors. And that's when Dallas police officials realized that their 10 o'clock AM public schedule was completely dead.

4:23There were all sorts of things that were impacting that. The ongoing FBI and interrogations. There were problems with armor, car logistics. There was security bottlenecks that clearly were going to add to the delay. And this delay was not kept a secret. It actually became what I'll term ambient chatter among the officers and the reporters that were sitting there. And also some of them sleeping in the third floor hallway. I mean, they weren't sleeping when they were chattering, but you know what I mean. They were all camped out there. And Jack Ruby, who was hovering in that press room until the early hours of Sunday morning, well, he was absorbing that chatter most likely. He most likely knew that the 10 o'clock AM schedule was a phantom. Now some might say that's why he was able to oversleep. But without knowing the exact time, you still have to be on your toes. And step two of the decision didn't happen until Sunday morning. And at 11 o'clock AM, captain Wilfritz and chief Jesse Curry huddled in the homicide bureau.

5:28The armor car decoy had finally arrived on commerce street. It was backed onto the incline. But it didn't have sufficient clearance. It was literally too large for the basement ramp. Fritz made the last minute executive decision. He rejected the armor car for Oswald. And he decided to transfer Oswald in a regular detective sedan. And this was the exact moment in some ways that the clock starts running. Oswald's movement was set for exactly 11.21 AM. Now some researchers claim Jack Ruby did not need to know this exact minute. They claim he only needed to know step one that the transfer was pushed to late morning. Now the idea that Jack Ruby simply drove downtown, walked up and happened to hit a 60 second window by pure coincidence. Well, I'm a numbers guy and that's pretty mathematically absurd.

6:36If Ruby had been delayed by a single traffic light, a slow pedestrian or a long line, he would have missed Oswald completely. To pull this off without inside help or an active signal requires a belief in miracles. I'm sorry. I'm just saying. And we're not in the business of miracles. So let's look at the exact trigger perhaps that started his Sunday morning. And I know stranger things have happened in the JFK case. So I don't know exactly what version of all this is true. I just know the mathematical possibilities of that happening randomly. At 10 a.m. the telephone rings in Jack Ruby's apartment. The calls from Fort Worth. And on the line is Carousel Stryper, Karen Carlin. That's right. She's known professionally as Little Lynn. Little Lynn is a constant source of frustration for Jack. She's financially erratic.

7:42And just the night before Jack had to advance her $5 at Nichols Garage, just so she could get home. Now she's begging for more. Her landlord is threatening eviction. Ruby's annoyed, but his emotional, paternalistic nature overrides all that. Overrides his business sense. So he agrees to help. And he makes a specific condition. He tells Lynn he will not let her come to his apartment to collect the cash. He dislikes her husband and he wants to keep his private life strictly separate from his strip club employees. At least that's what he tells her. And instead he tells her he will drive downtown and wire her a $25 advance via Western Union. Ruby hangs up the phone. Now his roommate, George Senator, is watching him when all this is going on. And Senator later testified that Jack seemed deeply disturbed and emotional at that moment. He was mumbling,

8:42pacing back and forth between the living room and the bedroom. Well, Jack gets stressed. He grabs his weekend receipts and a massive watt of cash that was meant for his federal excise tax deposit, by the way. And then he reaches for his gun. He pockets his loaded snub-nosed 38-college co-brant revolver. And he later told the FBI that he almost carried his gun when he was carrying large sums of cash on his person. He walks out the door, leaving George Senator behind. But he doesn't go alone. He loads his favorite doxan Shiba into the back of his White Olesmobile. At around 10.45 a.m. Jack Ruby drives out of his driveway. He stops briefly to chat with the neighbor. Yes, I know folks, you can't write this stuff. The father-in-law of a Dallas police officer. What do they talk about? There's some fences. He really is at this

9:46moment acting completely normal. And he drives toward downtown Dallas. And he bypasses his usual direct highway route. One moment manic or emotional. And then the next quite normal. That's our Jack. Now, as I said, he bypassed his usual direct highway route. And instead, he drove down industrial boulevard in Main Street. He wants to pass the memorial wreaths left at Deely Plaza. He drives past the Dallas County jail. And he sees the massive crowds. And he assumes Oswald has already been moved. That's what he says. And he keeps driving up Main Street. At exactly 11.15 a.m. he pulls his oldsmobile into the parking lot directly across for the Western Union office. He leaves poor Shiba in the car. But he walks across the street. And he steps up to the telegraph counter.

10:53Inside the Western Union office, the clerk on duty is Doyle Lane. Lane knows Jack Ruby. He has waited on him several times over the past year. Ruby is standing at the counter. He fills out the money order form, interesting it to Karen Bennett in Fort Worth. Ruby hands Doyle Lane the $25. Lane processes the transactions, stamps the receipt, and hands Jack is changed. And this is the single most critical moment of the entire weekend because the mechanical timestamp on that Western Union receipt is indisputable. It reads 11.17 a.m. The math of this moment is clear. Lee Harvey Oswald is shot in the basement of City Hall at exactly 11.21 a.m. That's a gap of precisely four minutes. This four minute margin is the ultimate weapon for Jack Ruby's defense team. Melvin Belli would argue to the jury that this time stamp completely destroys any theory

11:57of a pre-planned conspiracy. If Jack Ruby was a hired mafia hitman operating on a split second coordinate, he would never have stopped to fill out a routine, registered money order, four minutes before the shooting. Melvin, you have a point there. If Jack Ruby was a hired mafia hitman operating on a split second coordinate, he would never have left a paper trail with his name in a physical timestamp. One thing it's for certain, he wouldn't have left his beloved dog, Shiba, locked in a hot car with the windows rolled up. If you knew he was going to jail for the rest of his life, there are so many anomalies in this, it's hard to fathom. At 11.18 a.m., Jack Ruby stuffs the receipt and it was pocket and it walks out of the Western Union office. He's exactly one long block away from the police station. That's a distance of about 339 feet and six inches. We know because the

13:02authorities measured it afterward. He begins walking west down the south side of Main Street, taking his sort of natural, unhurried strides. But as he approaches the police station, we must confront the central unsolved mystery of this entire case. How did he enter that basement? As Jack Ruby walks down Main Street, the physical security at the central police station is while it's breaking down. At the top of the Main Street ramp was an officer named Roy Vaughan. He was standing guard there. His orders were strict. It meant no unauthorized persons, period. Standing next to Vaughan is Napoleon Daniels. He's a former Dallas patrolman. At approximately 11.18 a.m., a black unmarked police squad car occupied by Lieutenant Rio Pierce.

14:06There were two other people in the car, Sergeant Maxi and Sergeant Putnam. They prepared to exit the basement. And the car begins to drive up the Main Street ramp. To block the pedestrian traffic and allow the squad car to merge onto Main Street, officer Roy Vaughan steps away from his post and he walks out onto the curb. For roughly 15 to 20 seconds, the Main Street ramp is left completely unguarded. And this is where the official story falls apart under some forensic examination. The Warren Commission claimed that during this 15 second window, Jack Ruby walked past Vaughan's back and strided directly down the ramp. But let's look at the physical reality of that ramp. Sergeant Putnam and Lieutenant Pierce both testified under oath that the Main Street ramp was a tight squeeze. It was barely wide enough for

15:07a police sedan to pass. Now they were driving up the ramp. At the exact second, the Jack Ruby was supposedly walking down the ramp. I don't think so. Yet all three officers in that squad car testified that they saw Officer Vaughan on duty, but they did not see Jack Ruby on the ramp. So how is it physically possible for a pedestrian to squeeze past an exiting squad car in a narrow concrete tunnel in broad daylight without any of the three officers noticing him? How could that have happened if that was the way it happened? Well, the answer lies perhaps in records related to Napoleon Daniels. The day after the shooting a panicked officer Roy Vaughan called Daniels at home, begging him to confirm if he saw anyone slip down the ramp. And on the phone, Daniel said, no, to protect his former colleague. But when the Dallas police and the FBI questioned Daniels

16:11under oath, well, guess what? He cracked. Imagine that. He admitted that he had seen an intruder sneak down the unguarded ramp. And indeed it had happened while Vaughan's back was turned. Yet during his December 11 polygraph test, Daniels dropped a bombshell. That the Warren Commission quietly buried. During his pre-test interview, Daniels swore under oath to polygraph operator detective Bentley that the man he saw sneak down the ramp was not Jack Ruby. Oh, this just keeps getting more puzzling. When showed a photograph of Ruby though, Daniels stated the intruder looked well completely different with a different physical build and an entirely different clothing. How could that be? But then they hooked Daniels up to the polygraph machine and detective Bentley asked him the critical question, do you think the person you

17:17stated that you saw enter the basement at that time was Jack Ruby? Daniels answered no. And the mechanical pens traced the physiological reactions on the chart. The official polygraph report reads, indication, true. It wasn't Ruby, according to Napoleon Daniels. The line detector confirmed that Napoleon Daniels was telling the absolute truth. As long as you can believe a polygraph test, the man who snuck down the ramp was not Jack Ruby. Now, if the officers in the exiting squad car didn't see Jack Ruby on the ramp, and if the only eyewitness swore that the ramp intruder wasn't Jack Ruby, well, there's a couple of questions here. Why didn't they see whoever went down that ramp? And then how did Jack Ruby himself get into that basement? In trial notes that were later disclosed, the assistant district attorney

18:20Bill Alexander thundered to the jury. There was no humanly possible way for Ruby to time this execution by pure random chance. And I think Alexander was right. But maybe not in the way he intended. Because if it wasn't a mathematical miracle of time, well, then there really seems to be only one other simple Occam's razor type explanation. It had to be an inside job. And some of the physical evidence points to a much darker alternative. Jack Ruby didn't walk down that ramp. He was let in through one of the secure locked interdoors of the police department. So what if the entire Main Street ramp walk-in story was just a fabricated alibi, concocted after the shooting to protect the police accomplices who opened the door for a future

19:22assassin? How far up did all of this go? Exactly 1121 AM, the heavy double doors of the jail office swing open. Captain J. Will Fritz steps out into the basement hallway first. Behind him, flanked by detectives Jim LaValle and LC Grey's is the handcuffed suspect Lee Harvey Oswald. The reporters shout questions. The television cameras are broadcasting live to millions of homes across America. Oswald takes a few steps forward. And then from the front row of the press crowd, Jack Ruby surges forward. He takes two rapid steps and he reaches into a right side pocket and he pulls his Colt Cobra 38 out. And he thrusts it directly towards Oswald's ribs.

20:22A single, deafening gunshot rings out. It echoed in the concrete of that basement. There were screams and of course immediate chaos erupted. And as detectives tackle Ruby to the concrete floor, he screams the words that would define his protective reflex. You killed my president, you rat. I'm Jack Ruby. You all know me. The clock on the wall stopped. So to speak. Lee Harvey Oswald was mortally wounded. And the timeline of the weekend, well, it was now officially complete. From the midnight caucus of patrolman Olsen to the mathematical obsession of the birch codes to the late night press room chatter. And finally to the four minute Western Union margin, Jack Ruby's frantic loop had finally closed. The clown had become the courier. The eccentric promoter had become the ultimate silencer.

21:28And in the smoke-filled paranoid shadow of that Dallas basement, the enduring secrets of the JFK assassination were officially locked away forever. The entire set of events that began on Friday and ended with Oswald's death on Sunday morning is undoubtedly a low point in American history. Without anyone in our government doing one thing nefarious after the fact, Jack Ruby's actions that Sunday morning did more to fuel a basic question around conspiracy than almost anything else could have in the early goings of the investigation. My God, what was happening to our government at that moment? What was happening to our country? And while it might seem like it's a fitting place to end the story of Jack Ruby, well, in some ways the story is just getting started.

22:34Yesterday began on a numbing note of horror with millions of Americans as spectators. It built to a moment of intense grief and heart-tugging emotion and continued on a high emotional note throughout the evening in the morning hours of today, Monday. It began with the fatal shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of John Kennedy by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Here's how it looked and sounded on live nationwide television. The voice is that of NBC reporter Tom Pettit. There is Lee Oswald. He's been shot. He's been shot. The Oswald has been shot. I saw Ruby, he was facing me about five or six feet away and he had the pistol in his left hand holding it against his left leg. Of course, I knew immediately what was going to happen when I saw that. I walked in and he made two quick steps, brought him into arms linked to me. He had switched the pistol over to his right hand and shot. Of course, I jerked

23:39Oswald back trying to pull him behind me. When I jerked back on him, I turned his body still at the bullet that hit him dead center. It hit him about four inches to the left of the neighbor on the left side, called an ambulance right away. When I got him to the hospital out there and rolled him into the operating room, the doctors were already there. I told him, I said, before you do anything else, I want that bullet out of him. Because you and I, somewhere down the line, it's going to be testifying that that's as a bullet come out of Oswald. Thank you for listening to episode 344 of JFK, The Enduring Secret.