Strip club owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald is focus of new ex

DALLAS -- He might have more instant recognition than the man who killed President Kennedy 41 years ago.

After all, strip club owner Jack Ruby was caught on live TV and in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph firing the shot that killed presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963, two days after Kennedy was gunned down in a Dallas parade.

Yet there is much the public doesn't know about Ruby, and in an effort to set the record straight on his life, crime and trial, a new exhibit at the Sixth Floor Museum opened last week.

"Jack Ruby: Voices from History" debuts as the nation prepares to mark the anniversary Monday of Kennedy's assassination.

The temporary exhibit, separate from the permanent exhibit on Kennedy's assassination, is expected to run at least six months, organizers said. It's a patchwork of photos, newspaper pages, artifacts and quotes from witnesses, key players, Ruby's acquaintances and Ruby himself.

"Every time we talk to people about Jack Ruby, we find that not many people know much about him," said museum curator Gary Mack.

For example, Ruby died an innocent man -- in the eyes of the law at least.

A jury convicted Ruby in 1964 of murder with malice and sentenced him to death. But an appeals court reversed the verdict because a police sergeant gave false and inadmissible testimony, and because the trial should have been moved outside Dallas County. Ruby became ill and died in January 1967 -- a month before his new trial was set to begin.

The exhibit shows how the man who has been portrayed as a gangster with mafia ties and a shrewd killer who conspired to kill Oswald was actually a stocky, balding, publicity-seeking name dropper who couldn't be trusted with friends' secrets, let alone an intricate conspiracy.

The 52-year-old former high school dropout from Chicago had worked as a door-to-door salesman, singing waiter and ticket scalper before moving to Dallas in 1947 and running a series of unsuccessful clubs and dance halls. He often hung out at the police station and offered officers free food at his clubs.

The day Oswald was shot, Ruby had just wired $25 to one of his strippers when he joined a crowd outside the Dallas police station and slipped into the basement, where a handcuffed Oswald was being transported to another jail.

By shooting Oswald, Ruby fed the intrigue and suspicions surrounding Kennedy's death.

"He's a spoiler. He spoiled it all," Mack said. "He ruined any possibility of learning more about the assassination from the top suspect."

Ruby's story on why he shot Oswald was shifty. Some believe he was greatly distressed at the president's killing and that his actions were consistent with Ruby's hotheaded, impulsive personality. Others say Ruby was driven by a desperation to validate himself and his dreams of heroism.

"I think that he felt that ... the grand jury would say, 'Jack, this is a bad thing you've done, but since Oswald needed killing anyway, well, we're going to turn you loose this time,"' homicide detective Jim Leavelle is quoted saying in the exhibit. "Then he could stand there at the front door of the Carousel Club, and people would come from afar to shake the hand of the man that killed the assassin of the president."

Ruby was a hero to some, receiving hundreds of telegrams and letters of praise from all over the world after his arrest.

In the end, Ruby's defense, claiming he had a rare form of epilepsy that caused him to shoot Oswald subconsciously, failed. He maintained until his death that Oswald's death was no conspiracy.

"People still wonder what might have been if Jack Ruby had not gotten into that basement," Mack said.