Fourth Reich Archaeology - You Don't Know Jack (Ruby), pt. 5

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

This week, we are back with the fifth installment in our miniseries about that amateur dog breeder and professional weirdo turned assassin–Jack Ruby. Having set the table in episodes one through four about the events leading up to Ruby’s big day in court, the time has now come for the trial of the century. And you know we’ve got to don our noided lawyer hats for this one. As always, we take a more expositional approach rather than a bare recitation of the facts and chronology of Ruby’s trial. We do so by doing what we do best—studying the people involved. Because we ended episode four with a focus on Ruby’s defense team, we pick things up in this episode by taking a good, long look at both the district attorney who prosecuted Ruby and the judge who presided over the trial. We also take a look at the witnesses each side decided to put up–a colorful cast of characters that included cops, strippers, and Ruby’s rabbi. With cameras flashing, mics hot, and all of America watching, the Jack Ruby trial was set to be a spectacle for the ages. In the end, the trial was a shit show. And in this episode, we go deep into that shit to bring us all one step closer to knowing Jack.

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America.

America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mom. He knows so long as a guy, afraid of we'd never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is the idea. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology.

And I'm Don. Welcome back to our returning listeners, and welcome to our first timers. We are so glad to have you here with us. We've got a great show in store for you today. Before all of that, I want to thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has subscribed on Patreon. You can, if you are so enthused by our program, you can give us a donation at patreon.com slash 4th Reich Archaeology. And if you can't quite swing the donation, don't worry, keep listening, enjoy the program.

We will, of course, rely on you to spread the word. however, if you do enjoy our program, please, please tell your friends, tell your family, tell your coworkers. If you're having dinner with a distant relative, maybe mention that you've been listening to this brand new podcast. Well, I shouldn't say brand new. We're a year in. You know, spread the word because really we are relying on all of you to spread the word about this project. We are so grateful for all of the positive feedback. We are especially grateful for all of those who write us at forthrightepod at gmail.com. We love hearing from you. So please, please, write us. We will do our best to respond, truly. Now, we are also on social media. Don, of course,

at Angleton's Orchids on X, the Everything app, and the podcast is at Fourth Reich Pod. We're also on Instagram, same handle. Now, this week we are returning to that series, within a series, within a series, you don't know Jack, where we cover the story of Jacob Rubinstein, a.k.a. Jack Ruby, the man who is propped up as the assassin's assassin. We're returning this week with our fifth installment. Don, I wonder maybe if you could give us a little bit of a recap of. where we are so that we can get settled into today's episode.

I sure can do that. In this series, we have covered a lot of ground. So we started out kind of big picture, talking about who Jack Ruby was, his background, his extensive, extensive mob connections, dating all the way back to his childhood in Al Capone's Chicago, and we traced those mob connections, and we traced indeed Jack Ruby's personal migration story in the context of the larger mafia migration story and the story of the mafia's

westward and southern expansion after World War II, where you may recall the markets had really opened up, you know, after World War II, and this is something we've not yet gotten super deep into on this show, but if you are sort of generally aware of the noided history of the 20th century, you'll be aware of the absolute explosion in drug trafficking and the explosion in the economies of the post-war western United States, every place from California to Las Vegas, which was almost not even a thing before World War II, and really blew up in a major way afterwards, to the south and places like Dallas, Texas, that were undergoing their own period of urbanization and renaissance. And within that context, the Chicago outfit in

particular, as well as the New York mob bosses, sponsored a number of representatives making moves and getting their rackets set up in these growing metropolises. And so it was in that context that Jack Ruby as not the smartest guy, not the handsomest guy, not the smoothest operator, but nevertheless an eager beaver, especially when it came to, to making that sweet cash, he went down to Dallas, really representing the interests of the Chicago Syndicate and maintained those connections throughout his career as a nightclub owner and operator. You know, we talked about how, in addition to running his clubs, he was also on the

potentially selling or overseeing and taking a cut of the sales of drugs, of pornography, and even though he was very much opposed to his strippers hooking on premise, he was allegedly also taking a piece of some of the prostitution rings that were running in Dallas at the time as well. And so in that context, we then moved into the events leading up to and including November 22nd through the 24th when JFK is assassinated in Dallas and Ruby in almost a 72 hour. manic state or 48 hour plus at least begins to frantically put the pieces together figure out his role and then carry out what we believe was his assignment that he was given by some of his mob handlers in exchange for a promise that his extreme money problems,

he was in the equivalent of about a half a million dollars debt to the IRS alone, well, only doing something really big for some very powerful interests could get a problem like that resolved back in 1963. And so that has comprised the first three parts of our series within a series within a series. And the fourth part, we began taking the turn towards the post-killing denouement of Jack Ruby's life. Of course, in hindsight, we know that he would have a very short rest of his life ahead of him, ultimately to die incarcerated in the 1960s. But we discussed in our last installment with Max Arvo the formation of the legal and psychological

teams around Jack Ruby's defense with plans to, on the one hand, you know, ostensibly defend him on his murder charge and seek to get him off and the more covert motive behind all of this was really for very, very involved deep state operators like Lewis Jollyan West and Hubert Winston-Smith, a character who Max Arvo has really been the first one to dig deep on and expose for all of his ties, and these guys had a real ulterior motive in controlling both Ruby himself, as well as the people around him and the narratives that were able to emerge from his famous deed caught on film on November 24th, 1963. And that all brings us to today where we're giving Max a break because this is lawyer time, baby, we are going to cover the trial of the century,

Jack Ruby's murder trial for the killing of Lee Harvey Osse. I leave anything out, Dick? No, I think you got it all, but I do want to just add. As you were talking, it was so beautiful. When you're mentioning the expansion into cities like Las Vegas, I couldn't help but think about the pioneers and their covered wagons, moving out west, expanding. so too did the mob with people, with families, like the Rubenstein's.

It wasn't Jack, it was just going down to Dallas. He had his sister with them too, right? And these were people that really bought in to this. And to me, it's like so beautiful how it's just the same things happen. over and over again. And really, these cities, like Vegas, like Dallas, so much of their economy, so much of the boom was a result of people like Jack Ruby. For sure. It's repeat of the westward settler colonial expansion that had happened a century earlier with a whole new frontier, this frontier being the elite.

illicit economy. Right, exactly. It's like a video game. You have the mafia skin over the code of the Oregon Trail or whatever. But it was, you know, you really crystallized that. And I think that's really part of this greater story, right? Where you have Jack Ruby thinking that he is a connected guy and that he's got a network. and the sad truth of ultimately what happens is he sort of just hung out.

That's all. I guess we should get going. So you want to do the honors or should I? Do it. The courthouse in Dallas is only a short distance from the spot where President Kennedy was assassinated. That spot is still marked by floral arrangements placed there by unidentified mourners, three months. after the sniper shots were fired from the six-floor window of the Texas book depository building, a crime which saw Lee Harvey Oswald held as the accused assassin and himself shot

to death 48 hours later. And now through courthouse corridors jam-packed with newsmen and photographers, comes the man accused of shooting Oswald, Jack Ruby, 52 years old, on trial for his life. His trial makes the halls of the old Dallas County Criminal Court building, the mecca for the press of the world. And this is only the beginning. When testimony actually begins, new waves of newsmen will flood the court. The big story unfold. The big story unfold. The big story unfold. The big story unfold. All right. All right. You want to set the scene here for the trial of the century, Dick? Yeah. And this is a little disclaimer. So there's an, I think, a pretty good podcast.

that does a day-by-day coverage of the trial. It's called Jack Ruby, the trial of the century. I say it's good because it's pretty bare-bones. It's sort of like news flashes and sort of bare-bones transcript recitations of the trial. And it lays out, I think, a good chronology of just sort of bare-bones facts. And that's not what we're going to do here. we will obviously cover some of the sort of highlights and major events, but that isn't really how we're going to cover this thing.

We're going to cover this thing as lawyers. We will cover some of the chronology, but really just as it bears on the yarn that we're going to try and spin here. Yeah, that's right. And I think, you know, in the Fourth Reich archaeology brand or identity, I think there's a lot about the way that the legal system works. And especially when it comes into direct conflict or intersects directly with these deep historical events that it's not always evident to the layperson to the non-lawyer what's going on or why did they do this and not this or why didn't the lawyers do this so we're going to try to have that hat on as we look at this trial and

unpack a little bit about for example big question why didn't the idea of a conspiracy involving Ruby really come up at all throughout this trial. That would be a question I would certainly have. Totally. Either side, right? For both sides of the bar, you would think that this would be a thread to pull on. In fact, maybe we should just start there. Yeah, yeah, let's start there. And maybe I'll tee us up and then you can take it away. But up until now, it's been pretty clear our take. right just listen to the first four episodes like jack ruby was mobbed up um he was also in with the cops and also the cops were mobbed up and jack knew that the cops were mobbed up and the mob knew that jack knew the cops were mobbed up everybody was dirty and everybody was in on some sort of

seedy illegal activity and the sort of timeline of events leading up to the day of the deed Ruby was really networking with his mob pals he was on the phone he went of course to the Thunderbird in Vegas, and anyone looking at that, you would at least want to pull a little on that thread. But there are plenty of reasons you wouldn't. I don't know, Don. What do you think? Yeah, I think that from the defense perspective, you know, obviously there's a vested interest

in avoiding the characterization of Ruby as a mob guy and in fact we talked in the last episode about this guy Billy Woodfield of Los Angeles who was like a PR hack and Ruby did hire him to write It was supposed to be a book, but I don't know if it ever got that lengthy, but it's basically a short biography of Ruby as told by this Billy Woodfield. And the entire purpose of that writing was to make Jack out to not be a mob guy and to characterize him, of course, as a hustling, Businessman, right? Of course. If you're the defense, you're not going to want Jack Ruby to go out and say, hey, I was, this was, this bigger than me and there's the mob involved. Because that puts Jack Ruby's life at risk.

I mean, this is an infamous thing about the mob. You don't talk about them in court or you end up sleeping with the fishes. Right. And so the defense in, I got to think in some respect, they're thinking probably not going to touch that rail, right? Right. For maybe partly at least for Jack's own well-being. Yeah. And the flip side for the prosecution, and I just, this is just, you know, one part of it, maybe, it's you don't want to go down that road because you don't know what you're going.

going to dig up right you don't know how deep it's going to go maybe you're investigating the mob today but what if you start pulling in police officers what if you start pulling in local officials what if it gets bigger than you really need it to get in order for you to get your conviction so those are like just my I think initial takes is like from like a metaphysical standpoint like why wouldn't

either side want to touch this mob conspiracy thing yeah something that had been bothering a lot of people was the question of whether or not there was any link whatsoever between Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald this wasn't clarified in court

could you clarify for us Well, it's one of those things that you can't prove, as a matter of fact, if we had anybody that we thought could establish it, we'd put them on the stand. I will say we had 10 or 12 witnesses that were willing to testify that they had seen them together, but I didn't leave any of the witnesses. Some of them were given lie detectors and showed they were telling the truth. I, there's nothing, we had nothing where we could legally prove that he was. As far as you are concerned, then, from your investigation, Ruby was acting alone and Oswald

was acting on. That's the theory we tried the case on entirely. We had no, uh, whether there's a connection, not, we don't know. We have no proof of it, and we assume that there was not. Yeah, and remember that both Melvin Belli and Joe Tonehill were experienced representing mob-affiliated defendants. And so they would have been pretty hip to the game and how they have to play it. So they're not rubs in this whole thing. They know what they're doing. And more generally, you know, a legal trial is a contained universe, right? When you go into the trial process, the whole idea is that there's not really going to be any surprises once you're in front of the jury.

the evidence is all prearranged beforehand the judge rules what's coming in what's not coming in your witnesses are identified to your opposing counsel on both sides it really is like a theatrical production and that's one thing i think maybe people that are used to just uh tv shows about the legal process process don't quite click with because in fictionalized renderings most of the time, you know, the drama is greater than it otherwise is in real life. So when you are preparing your case, you are making decisions and you're locking down certain positions that you're going to take beforehand with an eye towards just winning the case. You know, in that respect also, the trial of the century, it may well be the trial of the century, but that doesn't mean that it's going to expose or investigate or cover at all the context surrounding who ruby really is and what his life story is and all of this kind of stuff

and the reason why in this case everything was so narrow well we're going to get into that in just a minute so i think we've sufficiently introduced our cast of characters so we've got on the defense side, Melvin Belli of San Francisco, the King of Torts, a very publicity, thirsty guy, loves the camera, and he is very flamboyant in his courtroom manner. This is colorful West Coast attorney Melvin Belly who heads up the defense. He makes headlines with a motion for a direct verdict of acquittal, which is overruled. Can you take a case when you don't believe in someone?

Oh, sure, sure. You're waiting for the time When you're through the case, you believe in it. Really? Yeah, you convince yourself on it You work so hard on it. But if you're going to make it subjective And get into your case,

you're going to drive yourself nuts or you're going to do a bad job for your client. You've got to take the case as it comes, just like the internal medicine man or someone comes with a venereal disease. You don't say, where did you get it? You said about trying to cure it. And you can't look at a causation other

than within the framework of evidence and in the law. We all feel that way. And we don't know if a man is guilty or not. Someone comes to me, if I were to ask him, are you guilty? He should turn right around. go out the door because that'd be a very poor lawyer he's not guilty until the jury says he's guilty because guilt is a mixed sociological finding done by a microcosm of the community the jury

his co-counsel joe tonnehill massive dude over 300 pounds very tall texas born in bread and you know a tough courtroom fighter I feel that there was no motive in Jack Rubber's mind when he shot Oswald. He was a sick man. He had no motivation or ability to motivate. But the idea of the loss of the husband and father and the assassination of Kennedy entered into it and is one of the many bricks in the wall that caused Jack River to do what he did. Nobody planted any particular seat in Ruby's mind.

He had a combination of problems. And then on the prosecution, we've got Bill Alexander, who is a very racist guy. And Dick, I know you were digging up some more about Bill. You want to talk about him? Old bare-knuckle Bill. Amazing nickname. Yeah, bare-knuckle Bill Alexander, prosecutor in Dallas County. He has been described as equal parts.

prosecutor, cop, and pit bull. And this is the guy, as you said, essentially a Klansman on Chief Justice Earl Warren. He says, Earl Warren doesn't need impeachment, but hanging. So this is a guy who would get along great with someone like Dick Russell. they maybe were even pen pals who knows enjoying their mutual hatred of Earl Warren but so that puts him in that camp right just an awful terrible racist

and it's funny he mentioned that he would want to hang Earl Warren funny he went there as a prosecutor because he actually quite often would go there in the courtroom. And this was no different, right? He had made it known that he was going for the death penalty for Jack Ruby. He would do anything to get it.

And fun fact, I don't know if there's any record of this, but in this law.com article I'm reading right now, there's a unofficial record. and Bill Alexander, the bare-knuckle brute, he holds the record for prosecuting the greatest number of capital cases in the state of Texas. So this is a man who is nasty. By the way, when he was presented with that, the folks told him, you know, you have the record, you may have the record for the number of capital cases. He goes, I never did keep

score. I thought that was unbecoming. And I think that's part of, it shows part of his personality too, because he was this commanding force in the courtroom. He, of course, was not afraid to play a little dirty, and we're going to get into a lot of that today, but he was also very well spoken and sort of knew how to distill a case for the jury. So that's our DA, going out for blood. Yep. Yeah. And his boss was Henry Wade, and Henry Wade, of course, is the Wade. of the famous Roe v. Wade case who was prosecuting the woman under the pseudonym of Roe for getting an abortion against the Texas law that led to the Supreme Court decision that, of course, at least for a period of about 50 years, guaranteed a right to abortion.

in the United States until it was reversed in 2022 and so you know Henry Wade also another guy who had a profile and who was well known and did not shy away from the spotlight in his own career And I think both of those guys had known, at least casually, Jack Ruby, before this case, and they knew him thanks to what we've talked at great length about, namely Ruby's reputation as basically an entertainer of cops. I got that as soon as I got down there. very adroitly, all was it cutely dumb. It was so cutely dumb when I got into the airport the first time there.

The newspapers came up, and Mr. Wade, the district could turn, he said, oh, I know this fellow, Belly. He's quite a lawyer. He's an international lawyer. He wrote a book about Russia, and that international and that Russia down on the Dallocene was all that was necessary and was a Latin name, a name like Belli. From the start, when this happened, I thought it was a case where he should have the death penalty. I said that all along, told the jury that, and we asked...

Henry Wade to District Attorney. And we asked for it. I think the facts fully warned you. One time they pointed to Ruby and they interjected this, that something about Jew boy, maybe he weighs his hands when he's talking a little bit more than the... little bit more than the people of the northern climbs and I said read that back again then jew boy came out then jewish boy j-e-w-i-s-h jewish boy i think it was a assassination in itself of a man handcuffed in police custody and i think it went actually deeper than that than

who the person was killed I think it was more of a you might say a murder or killing of our government by law rather than men. I could feel, I could feel the hate losing out, just like I could see. I think it actually is a step, it even advances civilization quite a bit, I believe, by this person. mentioned a little bit about the judge in this case but we should probably do a little more on him and his name is judge joe brown although not to be confused with the tv judge joe brown my favorite not for lack of trying exactly exactly and i'll turn it over to you in a second but I just wanted to share my favorite little Judge Joe Brown anecdote,

which is that he had been the presiding judge in the marijuana trial for Candy Bar. Remember, Candy Bar was mobster Mickey Cohen's girlfriend, a fairly famous stripper in the South who would travel around to different clubs and, you know, have her name on the marquee as a performer. And she was, of course, known to Jack Ruby, whom she became good friends with, such good friends that Jack gifted her some of his prized doxent puppies. And during Candy Bar's trial with Melvin Belli as her lawyer,

I think it was in 1959, Joe Brown brought candy into his chambers alone, this attractive young woman whose profession was exotic dance, and he, there in his own judicial chambers, took prurient photographs of her. So, guy who is not really a play by the rules, of a guy, I think in fact, he didn't even graduate from college, let alone law school. They do things a little differently down to Dallas County.

Yeah, he had been appointed a Justice of the Peace somewhere that's just like a, you know, a local type of an appointment. And from there moved up to, I believe it was an elected position as the judge in state court. And so, yeah, this guy who's just like a total goofy asshole gets a judge ship and presides over the fucking trial of the century. Go figure. Very late in Belize's life, he had some really hilarious comments about Judge Brown. Judge Brown, who was a decent guy, didn't know much law, but was a decent guy. Judge Brown, you know the terrible thing.

They called him Necessity Brown. Why necessity? Necessity knows no law. They thought that was very cute. And this is a good point, I think, to just call that out a little bit, right? These state court judges of the time and even today, where they'll have these essentially fiefdoms in their courtrooms, and they run their courts however they want.

So you have this guy. doing all sorts of crazy shit in effectively the judicial branch of the state. He is the decider. This guy has, you know, Jack Ruby's fate is in some part in this man's hands. Of course, there's the jury that's going to, you know, obviously come to the deliberation. But in a lot of ways, the judge is making those big decisions and very much so frames what, indeed does frame what the jury can and cannot hear. So that this guy is behind the wheel is, would concern me to say the least. Yeah.

And there's a lot of judicial decisions that get made before the trial, which have a huge. huge impact on how the case eventually plays out, you know, one of those, the biggest one being that Beli was very insistent from the jump that he wanted a change of venue and he wanted to have the trial somewhere outside of Dallas. But the decision rests with the judge himself. And so Joe Brown was not having any of it and put the kibosh on that real quick. Yeah, and I look, this is me speculating, but you mentioned the photographs. This guy loved the camera and he was very open with the press. And I think it's a good time to point out that indeed this was the first televised.

shooting of another man, a murder on TV, if not the very first, one of the first. And the trial, although not on TV itself, was gaining national coverage. There was cameras everywhere. And Judge Brown, he was very open to the idea of, having the media around. And he was even so open to it that he hired the Sam Bloom Agency to coordinate press registration and to serve as the media liaison for his chambers. Now, ironically, the Bloom Agency also did the public relations for President Kennedy's visit

in November 1963. But all of this to say Joe B. Brown he loved the cameras, he wanted the media attention, and he wanted all of that to happen in his courthouse, in his kingdom,

in Dallas. Yeah, and we might have mentioned this last time, but Joe Brown authored and marketed a book about the Ruby trial within a reasonably short period of time thereafter. So he was very quick to capitalize on that decision to keep the case in his courtroom and in front of him and make a little cash on the side because that's another thing about these local judges. is that they, in many cases, especially back in those days, they were not that restricted from having side gigs,

and certainly he was aware of ways that he could profit, apart from and in extreme excess of his little municipal salary. So with that, I think we're, ready to get into the stakes and the first place to stop on that road is to take a good look at what the defense was looking to establish in the case right because that's kind of the decisive point from which everything else that happens in the trial is downstream. And there, it comes back to what we were covering last time, the key to the way to defend this case,

where you do have a murder committed on television, on camera. There is no doubt but that Jack Ruby was the one, that pulled the trigger on the gun that fired the shot that killed Lee Harvey Oswald. And so you can't very well say that somebody else did it. So what can you say? Well, there's really two options that the defense had for its strategy. One of those options, which was favored by Ruby's first lawyer, Tom Howard, who we talked about last. time and Tom Howard favored what's called a murder without malice defense. It's kind of similar to the murder of passion or manslaughter for lack of a criminal intent or something of that sort

the way that it comes down to the American system from the old Anglo common law is through the paradigm of the cuckold, right? This is essentially a defense that's designed for cuckolds to walk in on their wife getting dirty with another man and to kill that man. And in England where, you know, the wife was the property of the husband back in those days, it was justified. And this was happening a lot. Yeah, exactly. So it was justifiable, you know, and it would still involve some punishment,

but for the key purpose in Texas, it would preclude a, penalty of death if you were to prevail on that charge and meanwhile the other opportunity the other possibility was not guilty by reason of insanity and i think we talked a little bit about the basic contours of that, but the key piece of it for our purposes is that to prevail on that defense, you must establish that he did not know the difference between right and wrong at the time of the act. That was the rule then in place, and that was the burden on the defendant to prevail on this defense to the charge of murder in the first degree. And of course, Melvin Beli, unlike Tom Howard, put all of his eggs into the not guilty

by reason of insanity defense. In fact, there was even a colloquy in one of Beli's first appearances where Jack Ruby is being arraigned, that arraignment is, you know, when you put in a plea. The judge reads the charge and you put in a plea. And at the arraignment, the judge asked, how do you plead? Jack Ruby said, not guilty. Belli made this big speech of not guilty by reason of insanity. And Joe Brown was like, yeah, just say guilty or not guilty. I I don't care. Tell us what you're trying to do here. As I said this morning, this was on the question of whether there would be the capacity for intent,

the capacity for malice or any capacity whatsoever. Capital punishment can't be probable consequence of an act. Man doesn't know he's committed. In other words, if you are insane at the time, if you're not competent at the time, if you're in one of these fugue or one of these Sakamoto epileptic states, you're unknowledgeable of what you do, then certainly there can't be capital punishment now. So in that spirit, Beli brings in the team of psychiatrists, Guttmacher, Bromberg, and Schaefer, and they all explore and study what they called the condition of psychomotor epilepsy.

Now, Dick, before the Jack Ruby case, had you ever heard of psychomotor epilepsy before? I hadn't heard of it before, and I haven't heard of it since. And it, to me, sounds made up. Well, that's the thing. It is made up. It is totally just not real disease. nothing whatsoever to do with epilepsy and yet in the scientific and legal community of that time there was at least a few authors of some articles and actually max arvo his articles do a really good job

of digging into kind of the literature and the bibliography on psychomotor epilepsy and just how thin the sourcing for this made-up condition was even at the time that it was considered to be a real thing. But it basically contends that if a person has some organic damage to their brain, that it can bring on this condition where you enter into a fugue state, you don't make any memories, and your muscles can act out in an uncontrollable way. And that's what they said happened to Jack Ruby.

And, of course, that contradicts the diagnosis from the state's psychiatrist, who was the first to examine Ruby after the commission of the crime. But nevertheless, they examined him for several hours, you know, each one of them spending like, I don't know, eight to ten hours apiece. They hooked him up to an EEG to look at his brain function, and they came up in due course with their spiel. It really failed spectacularly to make a long story very short.

The jury didn't buy it at all. There was a good deal of evidence to undermine the existence of this disease, and Max includes a lot of this in part two of his series of articles, including some statements dated 1983 from the New York. Epilepsy Institute, essentially tearing down and calling out the lawyers for Jack Ruby and the legal profession more broadly for slinging mud at epileptics and implying that epilepsy is somehow affiliated with criminality because epilepsy is, and I am not a doctor, but as I understand it, basically the electric signals in the brain just go haywire

and cause you to lose control of your motor functions, but they don't cause you to perform specific tasks like pulling out a gun, aiming it, and pulling the trigger. In fact, it's the opposite, right? If I was in the room, I would say, hey, guys, why are we calling it psychomotor epilepsy? I got a better one. The Manchurian candidate effect. All right.

So that is their defense. Their case strategy is Jack Ruby is a nut job, and it totally fails. What about the prosecution? Yeah, I mean, the prosecution, when the stakes of the trial boil down to simply the question of whether or not he knew at the time the difference between right and wrong,

you know, it becomes a lot easier for the prosecution. And so what they focus on are Ruby's actions around that time, that suggested either that he had been planning to kill Oswald since before Sunday or that he was in charge of his mental faculties at the time of the shooting and his arrest. So those are really the two things that the prosecution tries to zero in on and should have mentioned that for the defense also in setting up this story where in the act of shooting itself was a totally impulsive non-premeditated act that they also focused of course on ruby's presence at the western union to send that money order to little lynn the stripper on sunday morning

And as we said in part three, the difference in time between the money order itself and the shooting was only something like four minutes. But in our view, we discussed how, in fact, the movement of Oswald in all likelihood was linked by co-conspirators in the Dallas police department with Jack Ruby's arrival on the scene, rather than it being this beautiful, tragic coincidence that Jack Ruby and all of the lone nut theorists ascribe to. So on the prosecution side, you know, as the trial proceeds, right, each side gives an opening statement, which is not argumentative. It is a preview of what the evidence will show. That's why, you know, when you hear opening statements on TV or whatever, that classic opening line, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence will show that, and then you just say your

theory of the case. And then the prosecution puts on, their case in chief because of course the first burden is on the prosecution to prove that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crime. And not surprisingly, the prosecution's main witnesses came from the Dallas PD. You want to talk a little bit of bit about some of these coppers that they brought on the stand? Yeah, and it plays into their case theory, right? The prosecution is pretty much laser focused on the issue of premeditation. They already have Ruby at the scene with the gun and the murder and all of that. If video evidence was shown to the jury, it might have been the first time for that too. What the prosecution wants, what

DA Alexander wants is to show premeditation. So how does he do that? He has to get witnesses to testify about what they saw and heard Ruby do and say in the moments leading up to the murder and the moments following the murder. And so what the DA does is it lines up a list of police officers and they all get up and they all pretty much do that thing that cops do called test a lying where they spin a yarn on the witness stand and just make stuff up. The biggest liar of them all was Sergeant Patrick Dean who was in charge of basement security on the day of the 24th and among the lies he testified that Ruby admitted to entering the basement through the ramp.

Now we discussed in part three why that's unlikely to have been the case and as you mentioned Don why that doesn't even matter and that Ruby conceived the plan or admitted conceiving the plan to kill Oswald the night after

seeing Oswald at the police lineup the Friday night before. Now we know Oh, this is a lie. Yeah. So basically what Dean said was Ruby confessed on Sunday, right after his arrest, he confessed. I was planning to kill Oswald ever since I saw him on Friday night at the lineup there or at the, you know, the press conference. And the reason why it's important that he testified that he made that statement,

immediately is because the Texas Criminal Code at the time, and maybe the case still today, prohibited the admissibility of any confession given in police custody that was not spontaneous. In other words, there's a statutory protection against coerced confessions while a person is detained. by the cops, as Jack Ruby, of course, was. And in the immediate aftermath of Ruby's shooting Oswald and his arrest by the Dallas PD, those statements would be eligible for admission only if they were spontaneously made. So what the Court of Appeals eventually did was it looked at how much time had Jack been in custody. I think it was like upwards of 40 minutes. And was he in an excited state or was he

calm? And his other statements indicated that he was calm. And so in some, Ruby's statements were not spontaneous, but Joe Brown sided with the version given by Dean and by the prosecutors. It turns out that Dean just made that shit up, probably in collusion with the prosecutors, because not only did Sorrells not support the statement and not agree with Dean that Ruby had said that at that time, but also it wasn't even written in Dean's contemporaneous written report of his interrogation of Ruby. So it's like there's a lot of reasons to believe that Dean made this fact up.

And therefore, on appeal, one of the reversible errors that the Court of Appeals found was to admit this evidence from Dean. The Court of Appeals found that it was a coerced statement that was given in custody in police custody and it was neither spontaneous nor voluntarily made by Ruby. And so for that reason, they threw out his conviction. They also said that it was error for Judge Brown to deny the motion for a change of venue and to hold the trial in Dallas. And so those are some of the reasons just to kind of give.

of a sense of how poorly conducted this trial was by Joe Brown, kind of giving a long leash to the Dallas PD and to the prosecution to get away with this sort of blatant testifying. But, you know, if you are paying close attention listener, you might be scratching your head right now and saying, well, if Sorrells didn't say, support Dean's testimony, then why didn't he testify at the trial to perjure Patrick Dean? Well, it's because, as we all know here, Ruby was actually planning to kill Oswald from before that fateful moment on Sunday morning. And Forrest Sorrels happened to have evidence that. would indicate as much if he were called by the defense to testify.

So if Sorrels were called as a witness, then he would be able to testify that in his presence, Ruby called Oswald a son of a bitch, and that he also said to Soros, I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts. Ah, yes. And that would indicate to the jury, of course, that he knowingly and willfully committed the act rather than, you know, psychomotor epileptic fit. Right. That's that malice aforethought.

Yep. And it's a good example, too, of, you know, lawyerly choices that get made in the course of a trial that you see and hear a lot of like armchair lawyering and there are strategic reasons much of the time if not all the time but much of the time for decisions like this and that's not to let mel Belli off the hook entirely because you know the psychomotor epilepsy defense was a fucking dog it was not any good well he's got limited options right i think it's what are you going to do it as a defense attorney you got this guy who's tied up in this murders on camera and like we say the options are you can maybe try and throw the prosecutors a bigger fish in order for

lesser you know lesser charge or a plea bargain which we know is not going to happen yeah Because Ruby's mobbed up. Or you either say he lacks the capacity, or you say it's this crime of passion. You can't really go at it any other way. And when you're lining up witnesses, you've got to think, like, okay, well, is this witness going to harm us more than they're going to help? There's more test to lying that maybe we could quickly cover before we move on. The testimony of Lieutenant Archer. Yeah.

So Lieutenant Archer is the cop that arrested Ruby right after the shot. And as he's doing it, Ruby allegedly, or according to Lieutenant Archer, Ruby looked him in the eye and said, I intended to shoot him three times. It's pretty convenient. And I got to think, like, I'm sure the cop, Lieutenant Archer, was not. thinking at the time when he's making this up that well there's a million cameras and a million microphones in this room right now and if ruby's saying something maybe surely it would show up on an audio recording and of course it doesn't so you have archer saying i intended to shoot him three

times archer saying that ruby said that saying it live right after the shooting and yet it doesn't show up on any of these recordings and I think the recordings actually picked up quite a bit right I think famously the recording has that little bit where Ruby says you know you know me

or it's Ruby yeah what does he say it's like it's Jack you know me you all know me yeah yeah exactly as the cops are I think they like ripped open his shirt and they were you know having a go at him with fisticuffs and he's like it's me jack ruby you all know me right and so surely if

at that point ruby was also going to say i intended to shoot him three times we would have picked something yeah yeah that one was another example and i mean that's just scratching the surface really there's so much dishonest testimony from the talus p.d But yeah, this archer guy, his statement didn't make it into that first, his initial report either, right? Just like Dean, it's something that he jinns up after his official statement. And I think the defense actually pointed this out in their case. Yeah. Yeah, he didn't gin it up until February of 64.

So he had, you know, made a report contemporaneously and probably had had occasion between November 24th, but he doesn't go on record with this till February, which coincides with, you know, the late stages of the DA's office coming up with their litigation strategy. Yeah, and it's coming, you know, at the point where they're at least have some strong signals of what the defense strategy is, and they're trying to cut that off, right? They need a shore shot, and what better way than having Ruby say that he intended to shoot him three times?

Yeah, that it also reminds me of one of the really funny witnesses that the defense called that, you know, most of the defense witnesses were like strippers from the carousel to testify about ruby's character or you know friends from his childhood there was some woman that he had dated for a while a long time ago his quote unquote boyfriend george senator also testified for him but my favorite of the ruby witnesses was one of these strippers had testified that one time Ruby was beating up a guy outside of the club, you know, some patron that got rowdy or whatever to show that he was capable of doing these psychomotor epileptic fits, and she testified that he

was bashing the guy's head into the sidewalk, and then he looked up with like a blank stare and said, did I do that? Am I doing this? What's happening? As though he was. were disoriented and I just think about Ruby as kind of like a Joe Pesci character. Like, you don't mean to be at order. She says, good. You don't mean to be at order, sign. You call embarrassed to me in front of my friends and all like to call me a fucking deadbeat. You know, you know, son of you're a real fucking mutton. You know the money we spend on his fucking fucking, come on. Come on. Don't be like that. What do you mean don't be like? With that scene, assuming that it really did happen, as she said it did,

that it just like, oh, who's doing this to you? Who's doing this to you? Couldn't be me. Yeah, fuck. Yeah, and I think that it's like your point, like, about how the defense just totally crashed and burned with their case, you got to think, you know, For a jury that is largely going to be layman, they're not, for as much as lawyers like to make really technical arguments

and put up a technical case or whatever, the jury is a lot of the times they're just going to be sort of vibe-based. In my experience, it's like the jury will, first of all, it's really hard to see a head. It's really hard to project where the jury's head's going to be at. And I've seen plenty of folks try and predict where the jury's going to land and fail miserably because you really can't. Oh, there's like a whole industry of jury consultants, yeah. Right. There's a whole industry.

But like one of the things they tell you, right, juries are unpredictable. And I think of what. the witness list was for the defense versus what the witness list was for the prosecutors. And, you know, as a jury sitting there, you're like, okay, well, this Ruby's guy, the Ruby guy's got a colorful cast of characters coming to his rescue. Yeah, and to go back to the George Senator thing and the insinuations of homosexuality, you know, bare-knuckle bill was apparently making insinuations during, his questioning and was gesturing and we just threw out the whole thing try to mind fuck

with the witnesses for the defense and with the lawyers for the defense like making anti-Semitic remarks under his breath to try to piss off beli because beli came in there guns ablazing that you know jack ruby wasn't going to get a fair trial because he was a Jew in Texas. And Alexander just kept on needling and needling him to blow up about that stuff and get into his head. And seems like he really succeeded a great deal. And another, I mean, in case it's not clear, right, I think there's a lot of coordination

among the cops who are the star witnesses for the prosecution. And we have been pretty up front all along of our very strong belief, conviction, conclusion based on the evidence that there were multiple members of the DPD that had some role at the very least in the killing of Oswald, who remember to them was a cop killer. allegedly um and so these guys were making these statements and they were criss-crossing each other all the time but whenever they ran into something they couldn't talk their way out of like there's this one guy uh lc graves he was the officer who was holding oswald's arm when he got shot and he was asked about the possibility of Dallas police being somehow in cahoots with Jack Ruby and I think this was by the Warren Commission not at the trial but he or it might have been by the FBI it was it was in the evidence of the Warren Commission and he

responded personally there was no connection between me and Jack Ruby as to his getting into the basement, as far as anybody else concerned, I cannot say. So they had that thin blue line of silence and painted pretty thick around their little outfit. And there's also quite a lot of indications that witnesses were tampered with or threatened or intimidated. some of the witnesses who were later contacted by Seth Cantor when he was researching for his book they told him that they were personally threatened that they received phone calls saying that if they testify at the Ruby trial that they would be hurt or killed like one guy C.A. Dolson who was like a fixer talent agent guy in Dallas

and knew all about Ruby's mob connections, and he was told to keep his mouth shut. Also, George Senator, who was one of the earlier witnesses for the defense, he had a couple of IRS agents waiting for him in the courtroom after he testified. He stepped down from the stand, and everybody saw him like taking him, like, taken away for questioning by men in black basically uh so the what you said about the vibes based it's really true on all the roles here like it's the thing comes together in such a manicured and stage managed way that it's almost unbelievable but then you

realize, like, this is the first trial of the century of its kind in the television era. And as we said last time, like, especially the CIA and all of its private sector accomplices in fronts, like, they've got more practice with this media game than anybody around like they have that mighty whirlitzer as frank whizner called it humming humming along and the end to to keep the spectacle nice and tight you got a couple of mob goons making some blind phone calls easy peasy i remember we also heard from one of the lawyers that was thinking about getting involved in the last episode that there was that clip of that lawyer telling a journalist that his wife was receiving threatening phone calls at their house. So it was quite a vibe.

Yeah. And it's funny how the case does not even, you know, we mentioned, does not even get into, doesn't even dip his toes. The case does not even dip its toes in. to the potential of a conspiracy, even though we've now spent four episodes sort of painstakingly covering that. What it really turns on is whether Jack Ruby even cared about the president. And one of the chief sort of case strategies,

case approaches that the DA has this argument that Ruby could not have been that torn up about what had happened because he actually didn't even give a shit about the president. And I think, you know, many witnesses get up there and they talk about how Ruby was not even interested in going to the parade on the day of the parade. and it turns into this side show. That's so funny to think of, like, asking that question. Yeah.

You didn't even go to the parade, did you? Right. It's like a Simpsons episode. Although, of course, Ruby didn't testify, to be clear. No, no, of course. I don't know if I said that. I shouldn't have said that. No, no, you didn't imply it, but it was what you might call a permissible.

inference left on the table but yeah do you maybe maybe now we should get to the jury deliberations and tie this one off it was a trial marked by flamboyant theatrics on the part of the chief defense attorney melvin bell-eye who tried unsuccessfully to have the case moved from Dallas with the jury once more in the box there comes the climactic moment of the drama that began in Dallas last November. Judge Brown, after warning against demonstrations, calls on the jury. Yeah, so the case,

the trial comes to a close. They do their, each side does their closings. March 14, 1964, the jury goes in for deliberation, and they render a verdict with minimal deliberation. Of course, Ruby is found guilty

and given a sentence of death. Yep. And the ranting and raving Melvin Belli beats his fists against the injustice carried out by the barbaric city of Dallas to his client, Jack Ruby. Gentlemen, you have reached the verdict in this case. May I have it, Sheriff, please. We did jury find the defendant guilty of murder with malice as charged in the indictment and assess his punishment at death. Sign Max E. Causey Foreman. Is that your unanimous verdict? All right, Sheriff, he's your present.

I hope the people of Dallas are proud of this jury that was shoved down our throat. One juror before he sat down our throat. Before he sat on that jury, told his employee that if he got on the ruby, jury he'd vote the death penalty. Another juror waved up the policeman when they were on the witness stand. Her nephew does the public relations work for the police department. How do you feel about Judge Brown? How do you think he handled the case? He went down the line for every motion that the district had turned. attorney made and they led him into some 30 errors.

And every Texas jurist knows this thing was the greatest railroading kangaroo court disgrace in the history of American law. Why, in a civilized country in the heart of darkest Africa, you wouldn't argue a man's life starting at 12 o'clock in the morning. When I think we're coming into Holy Week and Good Friday, to have a sacrifice like this, I think we're back 2,000 years. And the blight that's on Dallas,

with those 12 people who announced a death penalty in this case, they'll make this a city of shame forevermore. And I'm going to participate in the two when I write this appeal. Mr. Tonohill, your associate is a Texan, what's your reaction to it? It's a violent miscarriage of justice. Anything else bad for that, Mr. Donahill? I'm about to throw up, throw up, throw up, throw up, throw up, throw up, throw up, throw up, throw up. Of course, as we already explained, Belai would be vindicated on,

appeal, get the conviction thrown out, the case was set for a retrial in, I believe, Wichita Falls, but Jack unfortunately died before that retrial could take place. And Beli was actually fired immediately after the verdict was rendered. He took credit for winning the appeal, but was, as I understand it, not all that involved in writing the appeal. And, you know, the Ruby family was not impressed with his services. And he was not impressed with them either

because they didn't pay him anything. and his only hope was to sell a bunch of copies of his book. I think to close the book on Ruby, though, I really, the part of it that really hits me is, so his new trial is set for February of 1967 in Wichita Falls, Texas. But in December, just a couple months before that, he goes to the hospital. He is admitted to Parkland Hospital with a sudden

bout of pneumonia, and it's there that they discover that he has a rapidly progressing cancer in like his lungs, in his brain, and several other organs, and not too long after he succumbs to that. Yeah, and Dick, I wouldn't go and close the book on Jack just yet because Dear listener, there is one more chapter of this story that has yet to be told, which culminates in Ruby's untimely death, but it passes through his deepening psychosis, which may have been induced or exacerbated thanks to the handiwork of Jollyon West, who becomes Ruby's main contact from April 1964 until his death

and really takes control of the situation under the guise of treating Jack Ruby. That conversation will have. need our pal Max Arvo with us once more, having recently returned from another trip to the Jolly West Archives, and we'll save that for another day. For now, I'm done. saying farewell and keep on digging. message to where they hide in Hoffa. Eye author it is leaper than the warring commission.

The mission overthrow the government system. Assisting mobs getting jobs done right in the public. They're gonna love it when I pop lead right in the stomach. A 38 revolve it does it for a reasonable budget. So film it and distributed. Let Oliver Stonecutter. Seriously cold-blooded. In prison, you get gutted.

The gutterest motherfuckers don't always appear rugged. They regal and equally lethal or even as evil as some of the wickedest people you believe would deceive you. It's slank. ass and blasted blood baths and basket in the glory of a story so gory like i walk up on the motherfucker at a press conference 38 pop put a stop to the nonsense round like a circle and a spiral like a wheel it's in a wheel never ending or beginning born and never spinning real my 38 revolved like the earth like the earth revolve all around the sun like who jack jack jack ruby

You pay the wine. Reporters were asking questions. Newspaper photographers were hustling for better angles. Television cameramen were feeding pictures. And one interested bystander was just looking on that Friday night. His name, Jack Ruby.