In '64, Ruby trial put shame on Dallas
Circuslike atmosphere remembered as creating one big judicial mess
10:13 PM CST on Friday, March 12, 2004
In the aftermath of the trial known as State of Texas vs. Jack Ruby, the defendant's rabbi, Hillel Silverman, sat alone in the courtroom. History had been made, he knew. But he couldn't stop staring at the ugliness in front of him: Mounds of clutter and debris, the insults and shouting gone.
Nothing but a mess left behind.
Forty years ago this Sunday, the jury rendered its verdict – guilty, Ruby sentenced to die in the electric chair. Having walked into the basement of the Dallas police station on Nov. 24, 1963, the portly strip-club operator gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald, suspected of killing President John F. Kennedy two days earlier.
Lost in the train of big events surrounding the president's death, Ruby's day of judgment is largely overlooked by historians and those who continue to puzzle over his motives. His trial took place in a circuslike atmosphere, fueled by a flamboyant attorney and a hostile national press that stuck Dallas with a new label:
"City of shame."
That and other such phrases spewed from the mouth of Ruby's lawyer, the late Melvin Belli of San Francisco, who decried the city for its "kangaroo railroad" of a jury and trial. But what Mr. Belli was saying was no worse than what out-of-town journalists by the hundreds were writing.
"The folks who came down to report on the trial, from New York and Washington and other places, had a certain mind-set," says John Mark Dempsey, 49, editor of The Jack Ruby Trial Revisited: The Diary of Foreman Max Causey. Mr. Dempsey was a nephew to the late Mr. Causey.
"And that came through in the coverage of the trial," says Mr. Dempsey, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of North Texas. "They wrote some really scathing articles about Dallas."
But with four decades to think it over, legal experts now agree that Mr. Belli staged a terrible defense in what was his first criminal trial. The jury never came close to buying his argument: that a condition known as psychomotor epilepsy had rendered Ruby momentarily insane.
Even so, the conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and a retrial ordered for a new venue – Wichita Falls.
Before he could plead his case anew, Ruby died of cancer on Jan. 3, 1967.
For Rabbi Silverman, who extended comfort and counsel to Ruby after his arrest, it was the sight of so much trash that lingers in the mind.
"I remember papers scattered all over the place, both inside and outside the courtroom," says Mr. Silverman, Ruby's rabbi at Congregation Shearith Israel. "Hundreds of media people had been there from all over the country, but they disappeared almost as quickly as the verdict came down. Jack was absolutely stunned. He couldn't believe what had happened. He actually believed he was a hero for killing Oswald."
Born Jacob Rubinstein, the defendant loved the limelight and clung to a lifelong fantasy of being idolized in the land he adored. So when he fired a single fatal shot with his .38-caliber Colt Cobra, gunning down a smirking Oswald, he bragged to friends and family members that he had snuffed out the life of the miserable little man who had killed "my president."
Ruby also single-handedly fathered the cottage industry known as Conspiracy.
"Jack Ruby eliminated the possibility of learning all of the facts about the Kennedy assassination," says Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. "Whether or not he was involved in a conspiracy, he created one. We're here because of Ruby."
Absent Ruby's involvement, Oswald would have been tried for the president's murder, and presumably, every question answered about who he was and why he did what he did. Instead, it was Ruby's trial that kept the eyes of the nation riveted to Dallas.
Symbolic of the mayhem that occurred during testimony was a jailbreak. One of seven fleeing prisoners brandished what appeared to be a gun – a bar of soap blackened with shoe polish – keeping it pinned against the neck of a female hostage as he scrambled for an exit.
In the eyes of the Eastern press, it could all be explained in a single word:
Dallas.Hugh Aynesworth, 72, author of the new book, JFK: Breaking the News, says the Dallas of the early 1960s was "rife with ugliness and far-right nut-ism. There was a cloud, an aura, over the city that was pretty horrible."
And the press ate it up.
Mr. Belli served as a lightning rod, fueling the passions of visiting journalists, leaving scars in a city he despised. Thundering into court each day, he carried a briefcase in the form of a red velvet carpet bag and wore a black cashmere topcoat over a Savile Row suit. William F. "Bill" Alexander, Dallas County's assistant district attorney in 1964 and a key player in prosecuting Ruby, says it was Mr. Belli's ill-conceived strategy that doomed his client.
"In his area of expertise, personal injury, Belli was good," says Mr. Alexander, 84. "But he was completely out of his league in trying his first criminal case. He was also from California. His social mores and ours were completely different, his style of living, his ideas of right and wrong ... He was a complete libertine, a [expletive] Californian!
"He was a very pompous little bastard, with very long, very finely sculptured hair. He wore a red cummerbund – in the daytime. He also wore ... ankle-high, high-heeled boots with zippers on the inside of the leg. He had the utmost contempt for us, and he and I did not hit it off at all."
At one point during the trial, Mr. Belli had grown so weary of Mr. Alexander addressing him as "Mr. Belly," that he admonished Judge Joe Brown to have his name pronounced correctly. So, before lunch one day, Mr. Alexander threw out a pointed reference to having some "spaghett-EYE or ravio-LIE."
Tom Howard, Ruby's first attorney, had expressed interest in striking a plea bargain. His idea? Murder without malice, which Mr. Alexander says would have resulted in a five-year suspended sentence – meaning no jail time.
"How mad can you get at the guy who kills the guy who killed the president?" says Mr. Alexander. "Belli parlayed a pretty good murder without malice case into the death penalty by daring the jury and being obnoxious."
In the diary written by his uncle, Mr. Dempsey says it was one witness in particular who stunned the jury: Mr. Belli's final witness and the cornerstone of his case, Dr. Frederic Gibbs of Chicago. He was the father of electroencephalography, or EEGs, used to analyze brain waves.
A seemingly simple question posed by Mr. Alexander in cross-examination stayed with the jury the longest. Asked if Ruby knew the difference between right and wrong, Dr. Gibbs looked surprised and said, "I have no opinion."
As foreman Causey wrote in his diary: "Dr. Gibbs' answer absolutely floored me ... I asked myself what had been the point, why had this eminent professional man traveled all this distance just to state that he had no opinion as to Ruby's sanity at the time of the shooting."
Closing arguments ended at 1 a.m. on a Saturday. The jury deliberated from 9 a.m. until 12:20 p.m., when the eight-man, four-woman panel found Ruby guilty of murder with malice and sentenced him to death. Surviving juror Waymon Rose says the "all-WASP" panel rejected the defense with little discussion.
Said a furious Mr. Belli regarding the jurors: "I just wonder when these people go to church tomorrow and take the Communion cup, whether it shouldn't curdle on their lips."
Though the trial was, at times, farcical and may have damaged the city, it also failed to provide insight into the strange little man known as Ruby and why he did what he did. No one closely connected to the trial – the rabbi, journalists, prosecutors or defenders – believes even remotely that Ruby was in any way part of a conspiracy.
Tough-talking owner of the Carousel Club on Commerce Street, he grew up in a gritty, often violent Chicago family. "He just couldn't stand anybody being a bad boy," says Andrew Armstrong Jr., 66, Ruby's bartender at the Carousel. "He didn't like bad boys. I think he was running away from his past, and he was trying so hard to be a gentleman in Dallas.
"He tried so hard to rub elbows with the right people. He just wanted to be an American boy. He just wanted to be a clean, clean, clean person."
Instead, he died in infamy.
"Jack Ruby was a very emotional person," says Mr. Silverman, who now lives in La Jolla, Calif. "And totally unable to control himself. He really believed he was doing the country a favor by killing the man who assassinated the president." Ruby said he wanted to spare Jacqueline Kennedy's having to come back to Texas to testify in a trial.
"Ruby had a terrible childhood. Born into poverty, he fought his way up. He was always searching for recognition and status. 'Class,' he called it. He thought this would give him recognition.
"But in the end, he was just a sad, impulsive man who couldn't control his emotions. It's a tragedy, and it never should have happened."
E-mail mgranberry@dallasnews.com
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