Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

I am getting to the bottom of the situation about the Letter to Caroline. I found the November 24 edition of the Dallas Times Herald on EBAY. It's available for bidding on auction. The seller sets the minimum bid, and in this case, it was $100. I saw a minimum bid as high as $225 for this. That seems awfully pricey to me. I bought on EBAY the LIFE magazine from October 1964 which covered the release of the Warren Report and which included the Altgens photo and a closeup of the doorway. And that was $15. 

But, if we blow this up, we can see that it says at the top Sunday Morning. 

Therefore, Jack Ruby could have had it and read it. Nonetheless, I still have a bad feeling about that Letter to Caroline, that it was put there specifically for him. 

The letter was said to be very moving, that it had an emotional effect on Ruby. "You will cry." ??? This was Sunday, two days after the tragic event. So, hasn't Caroline and many others been crying for two days? So, why say that she WILL cry when she's been crying? 

I'm telling you: this is bad writing. It's so bad, that I have to wonder how it could have any emotional impact at all. 

Writing shares something in common with humor. I am the author of two screenplays, and I am going to tell you something that I figured out early-on. And that is, that any time you write something that anyone could have thought of, that anyone could have written, it's not going to have any emotional impact. You have to catch people off-guard, surprise them with something unexpected, to impact them emotionally. 

With a joke, if they see it coming, if they anticipate the punchline, it's not that it won't be very funny. It's that it won't be funny at all. They have to be surprised in order to be tickled. And it's the same way with good dialogue in a movie. 

And , if this was dialogue in a movie- you will cry, you will miss him, you will be lonely for him- the movie would stink. People would be turning to each other and saying, "Who wrote this shit? I could have written that." And anybody could have.

So, I'm not surprised that the Letter to Caroline never got any traction. It didn't survive like the Letter to Virginia about Santa Claus. But, it's really so bad, I don't see how anyone, including Jack Ruby, could be moved by it even at the time. 

Of course, I don't know for sure, but I assume that the letter is in there. I'm just unwilling to spend that kind of money to find out. If I could buy it for $15, like the LIFE magazine, I would. 

But regardless, I really do think, if it's there, that it was put there to specifically embellish Jack Ruby's story, to give it some back story. In other words, it's part of the framing of Jack Ruby. 

By the way, the paper has Chief Curry saying the case is closed. And it states something that I didn't realize that Oswald was going to be charged with the attempted murder of Connally as well. Then why not for the attempted murder of Officer Nick McDonald?  Just sayin'.