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

I know it's hard for people to accept that Jack Ruby was innocent. Didn't millions see him do it on tv? No. Millions saw a short, pudgy, middle-aged white guy in a fedora hat do it, but his identification as Ruby came from what police said. And police said it so matter-of-factly and authoritatively that people just believed it. Even among those who were in the basement, no one except the police claimed to recognize Ruby in the garage. Even Hugh Aynesworth, who knew Ruby well and had lunch with him that very weekend, said that the only way he found out it was Ruby was from what police said. Even though the Shooter was close to him and darted right by him, Aynesworth did not recognize him in the garage as Ruby.  

But, didn't Ruby confess? No, he didn't. He accepted that he did it only because police told him that he did. But, he said that he NEVER had any thought to shoot Oswald, and he had no memory of doing it. His acceptance that he did it came entirely from what the police told him.

You need to understand how badly they needed Oswald dead. They certainly couldn't let him go to trial, but even before that, they couldn't let him see a lawyer. He begged and pleaded for a lawyer that whole weekend. At the MPP, Oswald implored the world to give him legal assistance. Ruby got a lawyer right away, so why not Oswald? The answer is that Tom Howard was seen talking to Will Fritz the night of the Midnight Press Conference. What was Howard doing there? He lived in Houston. And then he was there again on Sunday morning? At the time, he was NOT Ruby's lawyer.  He had done some legal work for Ruby years before, but he wasn't currently in Ruby's employ. So, they just told Ruby that his lawyer was there, and Ruby accepted it because Ruby accepted everything. He was very submissive to Authority and especially to the Dallas Police. 

But, getting back to Oswald, they couldn't let him see a lawyer, not even once. Because: if they did, this is what would have happened:

Lawyer: Take a look at this picture in the paper. Is this you?

Oswald: (looks puzzled) Yeah, that's me. That's where I was during the shooting. It looks like they altered my image, but yeah, it's definitely me. And I told the police that I was out in front with Bill Shelley during the motorcade. 

Lawyer: Did you order a rifle from Chicago? 

Oswald: No, absolutely not. Look: I make $1.11 an hour, and I have a family to support. I wasn't going to spend money on rifles. 

Lawyer: When your wife was asked if you owned a rifle, she said that you did back in Russia, but that it got sold. Is that true? Is that the last time you owned a rifle?

Oswald: Yeah, but it was a shotgun. That's the only kind of firearm they let you have in Russia. 

Lawyer: Did you shoot the President?

 Oswald: No! Of course not! What would I do that for? - even if I owned a rifle, which I don't. Why would I have anything aginast President Kennedy? He prevented a war with the Soviet Union, where I have friends and where my wife has all her family. We're grateful to him for that. 

Lawyer: So, you were in the doorway of the Book Depository during the motorcade. That is your alibi. Is that correct?

Oswald: Yes, it is. I was there. Bill Shelley was there. Billy Lovelady was to my left. Roy Truly was right in front of the doorway. There was this negro guy at the bottom of the steps to my right. I forget his name.

Lawyer: Why did you leave work? 

Oswald: I ran into So-and-so on the first floor, and he told me that I might be in trouble for having lived in the Soviet Union. He told me to go to the Texas Theater to meet So-and-so who was going to help me. 

Lawyer: So, you traveled home by bus and cab and by walking. And there, you changed your pants. All true?

Oswald: Yes.

Lawyer: Then how did you get to the theater?

Oswald: So-and-so drove me. 

RC: Note that I referred to So-and so when I didn't know or wasn't sure of the identity of the person. I don't claim to have all the pieces of the puzzle. But, I want you to hone-in on the fact that police never told us anything about what Oswald said about how he got to the theater.  But, it had to have been discussed. After he told them about going to his room and changing his pants, the next question would have been, "So, what happened next? How did you get to the theater?" And Oswald surely told them. But, they never told us. Why? It must be that what Oswald told them was extremely exonerating to him. He had to have rode to the theater. He could not have walked there. That's because Butch Burroughs, the popcorn man who sold Oswald popcorn, placed Oswald in the theater no later than 1:07. James Douglas, the author of JFK and the Unspeakable found Burroughs and interviewed him, and Butch told Jim that he was certain that Oswald was inside the theater by 1:07. The timeline had Oswald leaving his room at 1:03. It was a little over a mile from his boarding room on Beckley to the theater on Jefferson, and it was mostly a straight shot down Beckley. 

And John Armstrong made the very astute observation that if Oswald had walked that distance in broad daylight, that someone probably would have remembered seeing him. It was a busy streeet. Either a motorist or a pedestrian would likely have seen him and then reported it to police. 

He could not have ridden a bus because people on the bus would have seen him. He could not have taken another taxi. Someone must have driven him, and maybe it was a policeman. 

So, if Oswald told police that a policeman drove him to the theater, that would explain why they never passed along that information to us. And the truth is that no matter who it was, Oswald's driver would have destroyed the whole lone gunman hypothesis. 

But, let's consider what the lawyer would have surmised from what Oswald told him. He would have surmised, first, that Oswald was innocent. Oswald would have had no trouble being persuasive to his lawyer. But second, the lawyer would have realized that Oswald was being framed, that the Dallas Police and the FBI were up to no good. And armed with that information and that perspective, that lawyer would have become a lethal weapon. 

And remember that at that time, there was no restraining order preventing him from going to the press with everything Oswald told him. It would have been devastating to the authorities. The would have had to kill the lawyer. 

So, Oswald was clamoring for a lawyer. He devoted his entire MPP address to it. He did so much damage at the MPP, that the next day, they had to do damage control. They bamboozled Attorney H Lewis Nichols into thinking that he met with Oswald and offered to get him an attorney, and Oswald turned it down. It was NOT the real Oswald who met with Nichols. That was an Oswald double. It may very well have been "Lee" of John Armstrong fame. There is no way that "Harvey" would have turned down that offer. So, where was Harvey at the time? I can tell you. That was when he was being taken to Fritz' office in the Homicide bureau for his Saturday evening interrogation. 

So, they dodged a bullet on that one, but they knew that they couldn't go much longer without giving Oswald a lawyer. Soon, it was going to be obvious to everyone that they were stalling and denying him his Constitutional right to an attorney. And, it wasn't always considered an Constitutioal right. It was just that year, in March 1963, that the Supreme Court declared that the State had to provide lawyers to indigent defendants and in a prompt manner. 

So, they were in trouble. They couldn't give Oswald a lawyer. They KNEW that he would be convincing to a lawyer.  And they knew that Oswald would incriminate them to a lawyer. But yet, they couldn't not give Oswald a lawyer. So, there was only on solution before them: to kill Oswald. 

Now, keep in mind, that they very much hoped that he would die in a shootout with police in the theater. But, it just didn't work out that way. It was they who armed him with a pistol. Oswald never ordered a pistol. Maybe whoever drove him to the theater gave him the pistol. Here is John Armstrong's piece proving that Oswald never ordered a pistol:

https://harveyandlee.net/Guns/Pistol.html

There are several interesting speculations on why they killed Tippit and framed Oswald for it. One of them was to turn the Dallas Police venomously against Oswald for being a cop killer. But, after the theater debacle failed to get Oswald killed, they had to resort to Plan B. 

I sincerely believe that they hoped that they could pull off the killing of Oswald at the Midnight Press Conference. First, it was absurd to have it. Yes, defendants are entitled to lawyers, but they are not entitled to press conferences. Name me one other defendant, in the history of criminal justice, who was given a press conference. You can't. Well now, that Donald Trump has been criminally charged, he may have a press conference, but he won't be holding that press conference while in custody. Nobody but Lee Harvey Oswald has ever had a press conference while in custody. They took a big risk handing him the mic. And he did them a lot of damage. It's no wonder that they only let him speak for a minute. But, why did they take the risk? I think it's because they hoped that they could kill him. They had Jack Ruby there, but apparently, he wasn't in the room, or he wasn't in the right location in the room. All the images we have of Ruby at the MPP are phony. I could go into it, but I don't have time. 

So, killing Oswald at the MPP backfired too. So then, they moved it to Sunday morning. They announced the jail transfer for 10 AM Sunday morning.  They probably considered doing it on Saturday evening because Jim Leavelle wore his Easter suit to work on Saturday as well as Sunday. It was pretty ridiculous of him to dress in that festive color when two men, the President of the United States and a fellow police officer had just been killed. But, it was decided that he would be Oswald's escort, and they wanted as much color contrast between him and Oswald: therefore, Leavelle in beige and Oswald in black.  

Ruby's roommate George Senator was his handler. How Ruby got picked to be the patsy for this, I don't know. But, like Oswald, it probably went back many years. Ruby was being heavily drugged with amphetamines at the time. Ruby thought it was for dieting purposes. Who was Ruby's doctor who prescribed them? We don't know. 

That Sunday morning, Ruby took twice his usual dose of amphetamines and some other large tablets. That is in his chronicle. But, it doesn't make sense because surely he would have said why he did that. But, his chronicle was edited. I believe I know what the other large tablets were: Scopoloamine. It's a South American drug that the Nazis knew about, and they told Allen Dulles about it. Dulles got very friendly with Nazis the years he lived in neutral Switzerland during WW2. And he was very loyal to them, bringing over 2000 of them over to this country to have lush new lives, via Operation Paperclip. Scopolamine is known as the zombie drug because it takes away your free will. It makes you do whatever you are told. 

So, they got Karen Carlin to make the call to Ruby asking for the money wire. And after it was all over, she entered the Witness Protetion Program and lived the rest of her life in Michigan under a different name. Ruby said he got up early on Sunday morning. He said he got dressed; he ate breakfast. And then he left for Western Union. When he was done with WU, he was going to drop Sheba off at the Carousel Club where someone was going to look after her there. And then he was going to go the swank new apartment building that he planned to move into soon. He was stepping up in the world, and he was very excited about it.    

Do you know how long it took for him to drive from his apartment building to WU? 5 minutes, at the most. So, he got up early. He dressed. He ate breakfast. He spoke very briefly to Karen Carlin. And then he left. So, what time would he have gotten there? Long before 11. Try 10. He sent that money wire at 10:15, and that is what he told the Warren Commissioners. 

Meanwhile, preparations were underway at the PD. Reporters were gathering in the basement, but then, at 9:45, the police ordered everyone out. They cleared the basement. That's according to Dr. Fred Bieberdorf. They made him leave too. 

Ruby was just a block away at the WU. They had people gathered at the Main Street ramp. But why? It was an incoming ramp, so who were they expecting to arrive?  Nobody! That is, nobody except Jack Ruby. They were there to be a magnet for him, and that is all. 

So, with Ruby as high as a kite on Scopolamine, all they had to do was have someone at WU casually say to him, "Why don't you go over to the ramp and see what's going on? And he would have done it because of the influence of the drug. He did do it. And then when he got to the ramp, somebody just had to nudge him to go on down and check out what's happening, and he would have done it. He did do it.  They were waiting for him. They pounced on him; then dragged him upstairs; then told him that he shot Oswald. And in his deranged state of mind, he believed them. 

What about Roy Vaughn?  No, Ruby did not sneak past him. Ruby knew Vaughn. Vaughn had forgiven a traffic violation for Ruby once, since he was a "friend of the Department." You think Ruby would have forgotten that? Ruby did not recognize the officer on foot whom he saw. He was someone else. The fact is that they waited until Ruby was in custody, and then they assigned Vaughn to guard the Main Street ramp.  Vaughn was another victim that day.

Up on the 5th floor, Ruby was stripped to his underwear and held that way for over 3 hours. They needed his suit so that Bookhout could wear it, and they also needed his paperwork from WU, which was in his pocket, so that they could replace it with the phony one which said 11:15. They wove Ruby into the story by parading him around the PD starting at 3 pm. This image shows how high Ruby was. Look at those dilated pupils and glassy look. Compare his countenance to that of the policeman who are focused. Ruby was drugged, heavily drugged. And he did not shoot Oswald. He, like Oswald, was completely, totally innocent.