Read Reclaiming History Online
Authors: Vincent Bugliosi
The case was remanded back to the trial court for a new trial, with instructions to transfer it “to some county other than Dallas.”
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On December 5, 1966, the new trial judge, Louis Holland, transferred the retrial to Wichita Falls, Texas, approximately 150 miles northwest of Dallas. Although one of Ruby’s lawyers, Elmer Gertz, would later write that Wade and Alexander again said they would seek the death penalty against Ruby,
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this was so only, apparently, because Ruby intended to plead not guilty again and go to trial. District Attorney Wade told the media after the reversal of Ruby’s conviction that he might go along with a sentence of life imprisonment for Ruby if Ruby would be willing to plead guilty to murder.
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Looking back, Phil Burleson said, “I had been court appointed as lead counsel for the retrial in Wichita Falls, and my argument was going to be murder without malice, which under the law at that time meant…that he acted in the heat of sudden passion. And the maximum sentence at that time…was five years, and Jack had already…served three and a half, four years.”
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In other words, Burleson intended to present the same defense that Ruby’s first lawyer, Tom Howard, wanted to use, one that even the lead prosecutor, Bill Alexander, believes would have worked. Why didn’t Mel Belli do what would appear to be the obvious, and instead seek an outright acquittal, walking Ruby out of court a free man? Seymour Ellison, a longtime law partner of Belli’s, told me that “Mel was obsessed with the thought of walking Ruby out the door when millions of people had seen his client kill Oswald. He told me, ‘Sy, if I can do that I’ll be right up there with Clarence Darrow.’”
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While some would say that if this was really the main motivation behind Belli’s legal strategy at Ruby’s trial, then Belli had committed the ultimate sin of a trial lawyer, putting his interest before that of his client, particularly serious when Belli was playing with Ruby’s life (not just a routine sentence in prison, the result in 99 percent of criminal cases). But that would presuppose that Belli believed he had very little chance of securing a not-guilty verdict. And we don’t know that. Two points have to be noted in this regard. Mel Belli had a great passion for the law and fought hard for hundreds of clients through the years, particularly the poor and unpowerful against major corporations. Perhaps more importantly on this issue, most of Belli’s civil cases involved medical evidence, and it was often said that he knew as much about medicine, even autopsies, as did the doctors he called to the witness stand, people sometimes lightly calling him “Dr. Belli.” And although Belli’s defense of Ruby was in a criminal trial, he was using a medical defense, albeit a novel one at the time in the criminal law. What I am saying is that Belli, now deceased, may have sincerely thought he would be able to secure a not-guilty verdict for Ruby, in which case illusions of being the equal of Darrow would be irrelevant.
Before a new trial date could be set, Ruby died at Parkland Hospital in Dallas on January 3, 1967, the same hospital in which Kennedy and Oswald had died, and his autopsy was conducted that same day by Dr. Earl Rose. Under “Cause of Death,” the autopsy report reads, “Pulmonary emboli immediate cause of death secondary to bronchiolar carcinoma of the lungs.”
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Dr. Rose said the “embolism had come from Ruby’s legs.”
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Ruby was buried January 9, 1967, in his hometown of Chicago. Two of Ruby’s appellate lawyers who got his conviction reversed, Elmer Gertz and William Kunstler, served as pallbearers.
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That same day in Dallas, four doctors, including Dr. Rose, sectioned Ruby’s brain and concluded he had “multiple metastatic neoplastic lesions.”
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“Ruby had cancer of the brain,” Dr. Rose said, “and it was the same cancer that was in his lungs. It had spread.”
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My friend David Phinney, a longtime student of the assassination, and someone with a keen sense of history, had been urging me for some time to interview Marina Oswald. I told him I had Marina on my list of people to talk to but I was in no rush to do so since she had already been interviewed countless times in great depth and I knew there was nothing new I could learn from her. I also knew that although in the early years her credibility was good, in recent years she has hitched her wagon to all the goofy conspiracy theories that have proliferated. But since she is, after all, the widow of Kennedy’s assassin, and derivatively a historic figure in her own right, I took Phinney’s advice and paid Marina a visit earlier than I had intended during a trip to Dallas on November 30, 2000.
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When I walked, midafternoon, into the Army-Navy Surplus Store in Dallas where she was working full-time as a clerk, my Fort Worth friend, lawyer Jack Duffy, who had made several calls to locate the low-profile Marina for me, introduced me to her. Marina, unsmiling, said to Duffy crisply, “I know who he is. I’ve seen him many times on TV.” I interjected lightly, “I’ve been on a few times.” “Are you proud of it?” Marina asked in a challenging way. I won’t say that my meeting with Marina went downhill from that point, but it never got too much better either. Pulling up chairs outside the back of the store, and accompanied by her friend and store manager Linda Wilson, who drove Marina to and from work each day, Marina proceeded to tell me that she had already heard I was writing a book about the assassination and asked me not to write it. When I asked her why, she told me, “Because I know you won’t be fair. You’re not interested in the truth. I’ve already been told what you’re going to say—that Lee is guilty.” I told her I would be scrupulously fair and would include opposing views in my book, including hers. She brushed this off, saying that “people listen to you. No one cares what I say.” She said that any book by me saying her late husband killed Kennedy would cause further harm to her, her two daughters by Lee, and her son by the man she divorced but still lives with on a seventeen-acre farm in a small town just east of Dallas. I told her that she and her children were all innocent victims, but in writing my book I had no choice but to discuss the facts as I knew them to be. She told me I didn’t know all the facts, that there were “many documents” I’ve never seen. When I asked the chain-smoking woman with the blue, intelligent eyes what those documents were, she just dismissed my question with a wave of her hands.
Marina, wearing very light makeup, was dressed in the most inexpensive of slacks and a pullover sweater. There was no sense of the modern woman about her, and her clothing and demeanor still spoke of the old country to me. She told me she feels “very strongly” that her former husband did not kill Kennedy. When I reminded her that she told the Warren Commission that she believed he had killed Kennedy, the essence of her long, rambling explanation was that “all that they showed me against him led me to believe it.” I asked her if the authorities ever told her what to say or threatened her in any way. She said they never told her what to say, but “they kept talking to me over and over again. I was exhausted, and had a four-week-old child, and at one point I didn’t want to answer—the word, I think, is
tattle on
—my friends and relatives in Russia. And I felt their questions about them were not relevant, but they told me if I wanted to stay here in this country, I’d have to answer all their questions.”
At what point in time, I asked her, did she come around to the belief that her husband was innocent? “About fifteen to twenty years later,” she said,
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when she started to see things more clearly and do more reading on the subject. She said she realized she had been “lied to.” What lies? I asked. She answered curiously, “You’re catching me off guard,” and she could not tell me. But she was sure of one thing—“Lee was set up as a patsy.” She doesn’t specifically know by whom, but they were connected, she said, to the U.S. government. Who then, I asked, did kill Kennedy? “Cubans,” she replied. “Pro-Castro or anti-Castro Cubans?” I asked. “Anti-Castro Cubans,” she assured me. Who covered this fact up? I asked. “The CIA covered it up,” she said, because the anti-Castro Cubans had been working for the CIA, and the CIA was afraid that if they didn’t cover up the assassination for the anti-Castro Cubans, the latter would let it be known that they had tried to kill Castro for the CIA.
“Lee,” she said, worked “undercover for someone in the American government,” but when I asked her whom, she said she did not know. She believes he knew the assassination was going to take place and told the FBI about it, but doesn’t know why the FBI didn’t stop the assassination. She also believes that LBJ and the CIA, along with the FBI, knew the assassination was going to take place, and later, the Mafia “ordered Ruby” to kill her husband. When I told her she was implicating quite a few groups, she replied that “they all work together.”
When I asked her why, if her husband knew the assassination was going to take place, yet was innocent himself, he didn’t tell the authorities after his apprehension about what he knew, she said, “Lee didn’t want to come forward. He didn’t want to betray the people he was loyal to.” But why, I asked, would he feel any loyalty to those who had betrayed him by setting him up as a patsy? She said she didn’t know the answer to that question, and could only repeat “that Lee was very loyal to these people.” Who were these people? I once again asked Marina, and Marina, who till this day still speaks slightly broken English, again said she did not know.
Although, as indicated, I did not come to interrogate Marina about the facts of the case, since this had already been done ad nauseam, a few references to factual matters were made. When she insisted on Oswald’s innocence, suggesting he would never do such a murderous act, I reminded her that he had, in fact, attempted to murder Major General Edwin Walker, and she readily admitted he had, telling me she knew this because “Lee told me he did.” But she hastened to add that the president was different because “Lee liked Kennedy.” And Jack Duffy, who has studied the assassination for many years and leans toward the conspiracy theory, asked Marina if she had taken “the backyard photos” of Oswald holding the Carcano rifle. “Yes,” she answered evenly, “I did.” “That settles that issue,” Duffy said.
My sense of Marina after meeting her is essentially the same as it was before, with the exception that she was a little more feisty and intense than I had anticipated. Although her mind has clearly become addled by the impregnation of all the conspiracy theories she has heard and read about, I feel that as to matters about which she has personal knowledge, she is a truthful person—easily as truthful as the average person, perhaps more so.
In parting, she said that the previous thirty-seven years had been terrible, but told me she had “a favorite motto” that applies to her life: “Tragedy does not always come to harm you.” By that she meant that my assessment of her as being a victim was wrong. “I have been victimized, but I have not become a victim,” she told me. The experience, she said, had caused her to learn about herself. And what had she learned? I asked. For the first time in our forty-to forty-five-minute conversation, a very slight smile crossed her face. “There are certain things for only me to know,” she said. I bid her good-bye and told her I would be kind to her in my book and I had one bit of very good advice to give her. “What?” she asked eagerly. “You should stop smoking,” I said with a smile to soften my injunctive words, whereupon she proceeded to point to the cigarette in her hand and say that at the time she started smoking years ago, “They [the tobacco manufacturers] didn’t tell us about all the bad ingredients in their cigarettes.” I told her that that was one conspiracy to cover up the truth that I agreed with her on.
In a follow-up telephone conversation on December 5, 2000, Marina, expressing concern about the privacy of her children, said her daughter June had been the valedictorian at the University of Texas with a straight-A average and now has an excellent job with a business corporation in Texas that takes her around the world. Her other daughter, Rachel, also has a college degree and is a registered nurse married to a prominent Austin physician. When I told her that her children doing well was a testament to the job she had done in raising them, she said she did not need my compliments,
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and refusing to take any credit, said that sometimes children do well because of what’s inside of them, not because of their rearing. The father of her son, Mark, is Dallas carpenter Kenneth Porter, whom she married in 1965 and divorced in 1974. The two worked out their differences and have continued to live under the same roof, Marina keeping his last name. Mark, she says, is the only child of hers who does not have a college degree. She said he has a blue-collar job, but “he’s not a garbage collector.” When I asked Marina, who became a U.S. citizen in 1991, what she enjoyed doing in her leisure moments, she said she reads a lot, all nonfiction, and is interested in philosophy. We finished our conversation by her telling me that “although I’ve been polite to you today [I hadn’t sensed any difference in our two conversations] doesn’t mean I like you.” I chuckled, telling her that I felt she had a good sense of humor.
When I placed the December phone call, Linda Wilson, Marina’s supervisor, answered. Before turning the phone over to Marina, she told me, “Marina is one of the sweetest, most kind and generous persons you could ever be around. She’s a very, very fine person.” As an example of Marina’s generous ways, she said, “Anyone at the store who comes up short for a purchase, like the kids, or needs a dollar for the bus, or whatever, Marina is always the first one to reach into her purse.”
The reader has learned by now that according to the conspiracy community, much of the world was out to get President Kennedy, and that the people and groups out to kill him were apparently literally fighting among themselves over who got to fire the first shot. And, of course, ever since the murder, virtually the whole world, even those who weren’t involved in the murder, has eagerly participated in the cover-up for those who did conspire to murder Kennedy.
When longtime conspiracy theorist Penn Jones Jr. passed away in 1998, there were several tributes to him in a conspiracy theorist publication. One read, “The research community has lost one of its best-loved and most influential figures. But at least we know that Penn Jones Jr. is now in a better place, a place where he can
at least learn the truth
about what happened in Dealey Plaza all those years ago.”
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A joke told in the comparatively small anti-conspiracy community about the conspiracy buffs’ belief that just about everyone was involved in the cover-up of the assassination has them lined up in front of God at the end of time asking him, “Tell us, God, who really killed President Kennedy?” When God replies, “Listen, I’m just going to tell you one time and one time only, and then I want you to forget about this matter—Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy and he acted alone,” the buffs, in terrible angst, nudge each other nervously and say, “This is a lot bigger than we thought.”
As we’ve seen, the heart of a criminal conspiracy is two
or more
people getting together and agreeing to commit a crime. But with conspiracy theorists, “or more” is never enough. What follows are three lists (not complete ones, I must add) of groups, countries, and people allegedly involved in the murder of JFK. The first list is of groups and countries believed by one or more conspiracy theorists to be behind the assassination (sources for the accusation are given only for the most obscure and far-out groups).
Although the number of co-conspirators who would have had to participate in the conspiracy as members of the groups allegedly behind the assassination—such as the CIA, organized crime, and military-industrial complex—would necessarily be very high, the following is a partial list of those co-conspirators who have been specifically named and identified by one or more conspiracy theorists as being members of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. (The reader should not conclude that every person on this list is believed by all or even most conspiracy theorists to have been a member of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. If just one conspiracy theorist, at any time, accused this person of complicity, the person’s name appears on this list.)
The following is a partial list of assassins—that is, those whom one or more conspiracy theorists have actually named and identified as having fired a weapon at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza (or as being part of the assassination group) from locations including the second and sixth floors of the Book Depository Building, the Dal-Tex Building, the County Records Building, the grassy knoll, the railroad overpass, the area around the pergola, the presidential limousine itself, a manhole on Elm Street, and a storm drain near the north end of the Triple Underpass.
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Other conspiracy theorists have named some of these people as only being a member of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, not an assassin. Apparently, so many people wanted to kill Kennedy that they had to draw straws to get the best firing positions, and from the main assassination location they must have been standing shoulder to shoulder. At least we haven’t reached the situation,
yet
, where they are perched on top of each other’s shoulders. But the century is still young.
With at least eighty-two gunmen shooting at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza that day, it’s remarkable that Kennedy’s body was sufficiently intact to make it to the autopsy table.
T
o reemphasize, the above three lists are only partial. And they don’t even include those involved in the cover-up of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, which virtually all buffs say the entire Warren Commission was guilty of. The alleged cover-up participants also include,
among a great many others
, the HSCA staff, Marina Oswald, the three autopsy surgeons, and “the remainder of the [federal] government” that was not behind the assassination (per New Orleans DA Jim Garrison). Indeed, conspiracy theorist E. Martin Schotz says the president’s own brother, Robert F. Kennedy, knowingly participated in the cover-up.