Reclaiming History (70 page)

Dispatcher Hulse recalls that Michael Hardin and Harold Wolfe, another ambulance team from O’Neal’s, have just become available a short distance from downtown. The dispatcher contacts them via radio and orders them to report to the City Hall basement, Code 3. The ambulance driver switches on his red lights and siren and races toward Main Street.
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11:22 a.m.

Frederick A. Bieberdorf, a twenty-five-year-old medical student at Southwestern Medical School and the on-duty first-aid attendant for inmates at the city jail, frantically bangs on the door leading into the basement jail office, but the man standing guard, Detective Wilbur J. Cutchshaw, won’t let him in.

“I’m a doctor! Someone called me!” Bieberdorf cries.

Cutchshaw finally opens the door and quickly runs his hands down the young man’s coat. He discovers a stethoscope in his right coat pocket and lets him through.
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Bieberdorf dashes around the booking counter, and drops to his knees. Oswald’s pupils are slightly dilated. The young medical student is unable to detect a pulse, heartbeat, or any signs of breathing, although there is so much noise and confusion he’s not sure whether he’d be able to hear one anyway. Bieberdorf reaches around and feels the bullet bulging between the ribs on Oswald’s right side. He starts to massage Oswald’s sternum in an effort to get a heartbeat.
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Assistant Chief Batchelor makes his way over to where officers have Jack Ruby on the floor. Captain Talbert asks Batchelor for permission to put all the media in the assembly room for an immediate search when someone says, “Graves has the gun.”
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“Let’s get him onto the elevator and take him to the fifth-floor jail,” Captain Glen King roars. The detectives assist Ruby to his feet and march him past Oswald’s body toward the jail elevator.

“I hope I killed the son of a bitch,” Ruby hollers out again. “It’ll save everybody a lot of trouble.”
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As they crowd him into the elevator for the ride to the fifth floor, Ruby adds, “Do you think I’m going to let the man who shot our president get away with it?”
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Captain Talbert grabs a batch of memo pads from the jail office and begins passing them out telling officers to get the names, identification, and location of each person in the basement at the time of the shooting.
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Chief Batchelor checks with Lieutenant Wiggins to make sure an ambulance has been called,
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then orders Captain Talbert to go to Parkland Hospital immediately and secure it for Oswald’s arrival.
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Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels enters the jail office and sees Oswald on the floor, being attended to. Sorrels uses the Signal Corps security telephone mounted on the wall to call Secret Service deputy chief Paul Paterni in Washington and tell him of the shooting. Sorrels believes the assailant’s name is “Jack Rubin.”
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Paterni instructs him to get as much background information on the man as possible and report back immediately. Sorrels hangs up and takes the elevator back to the third floor, believing that “Rubin” has been taken to Captain Fritz’s office.
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Outside the basement jail office, the newsmen, desperate for any information at all, begin interviewing each other. Almost none of them actually saw what happened—all eyes were focused only on Oswald. They cluster around Francois Pelou, a French journalist, who excitedly tells them he saw the blue muzzle flash against the background of Oswald’s black sweater. Ike Pappas recalls seeing the flash too.
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Immediately after the shot, someone came running from the left of KRLD film cameraman-reporter George Phenix and nearly knocked him down. His eye came away from the eyepiece as his unipod slipped to a lower level, but he just kept shooting, not knowing whether he captured anything on film or not. He later learned he got it all—the shooting and the struggle for Ruby’s gun.
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John McCullough of the
Philadelphia Bulletin
was on the other side of the ramp from the action, but high enough to see Ruby’s sudden lunge toward Oswald. At first he thought it was just a photographer disobeying the instructions not to move toward Oswald when he came out. When Ruby’s right hand came up, he wondered for a fraction of a second whether he was going to shake hands with him. Only at the last instant did he see the gleam of metal in Ruby’s hand and the muzzle flash against Oswald’s sweater.
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The millions of viewers who were watching the event on television hardly fared better. Although the tape of the incident is already being rebroadcast over and over, the shooting lasts just a fraction of a second and all anyone can really see is Oswald’s grimace as the shot rings out.
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11:23 a.m.

Up on the fifth floor of the jail, Detectives Archer, McMillon, and Clardy push Ruby against the wall and tell him to “spread-eagle.” With help from the jail officer, they frisk him, tossing the items they find into Ruby’s hat, including a sizable roll of money. They remove the handcuffs and have Ruby strip down to his shorts, searching his clothes completely for weapons. In his underwear, Ruby no longer seems all that threatening.
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“Jack, I think you killed him,” Archer says, recalling the look on Oswald’s face as he lay on the jail office floor.
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“Somebody had to do it,” Ruby says. “You all couldn’t.”
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“Did you think you could kill the man with one shot?” someone says.

“Well, I intended to shoot him three times,” Ruby replies. “I didn’t think that I could be stopped before I got off three shots.”
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“How’d you get into the basement?” Detective Barnard Clardy asks.

“Rio Pierce drove out in the car,” Ruby says, referring to the Main Street ramp, “and the officer stepped out from the ramp momentarily to talk to Pierce, or said something to him, and I came in behind him right on down the ramp. When I got approximately halfway down the ramp I heard somebody holler, ‘Hey, you,’ but I don’t know whether he was hollering at me or not, but I just ducked my head and kept coming…It was one chance in a million…If I had planned this, I couldn’t have had my timing any better.”
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D
own in the basement, reporters wander about like sleepwalkers among the noise and chaos, trying to get some information, any information, that might make sense out of the past few minutes.

“How would it have been possible for him to slip in?” NBC’s Tom Pettit asks Sergeant Dean above the din. Dean, whose job it was to make sure that no one like Ruby could slip in, is wondering the same thing, but he isn’t about to discuss it on television. “Sir, I can’t answer that question.” Although Dean knows Ruby, he refuses to name him.
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Pettit manages to corner Captain Fritz next. “Do you have the man who fired the shot?”

“We have a man, yes,” Fritz replies tersely.
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Although the Dallas Police Department has just sustained the greatest blemish on its record ever in not protecting a presidential assassin for his historic trial, and the officers are visibly upset and humiliated, others aren’t upset at all. Outside the entrance to the Dallas county jail on Houston Street, several hundred people had congregated in a roped-off area across the street awaiting Oswald’s expected arrival. When Dallas sheriff Bill Decker walks out into the middle of the street and announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot and is on his way to Parkland Hospital,” very loud cheers and applause immediately erupt from the crowd of smiling faces.
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11:25 a.m.

It doesn’t take long for the ambulance to get to City Hall, arriving just four minutes after the shooting.
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Newsmen jump out of the way as the ambulance comes down the Main Street ramp into the basement garage, its flashing red lights sweeping over the concrete walls. Police scramble to move the two unmarked sedans still parked at the foot of the ramp.

Twenty-three-year-old ambulance driver Michael Hardin leaps from the station wagon and scurries toward the back of the wagon. A police officer shoves him back into the crowd of reporters, before realizing that he’s the driver. Hardin and assistant Harold Wolfe flop open the back hatch and roll the stretcher into the jail office. They find Oswald on the floor surrounded by officers. There is little they can do at the scene. It is long before the days of trained paramedics, and attendants Hardin and Wolfe are simply there to get the victim to a hospital as fast as possible, their ambulance being equipped with little more than an oxygen tank and a resuscitator cup. They pick up Oswald’s limp body and put him on the stretcher and within seconds are wheeling him out toward the ambulance, his left arm dragging along the floor.

Ike Pappas breathlessly describes the scene, his tape recorder capturing the chaos of the moment for posterity.

“Here is young Oswald now,” Pappas says in a rush of words. “He is being hustled in, he is lying flat, to me he appears dead. There is a gunshot wound in his lower abdomen. He is white.”

The attendants lift the stretcher and slide it into the back of the station wagon.

“Pull the truck out! Pull the truck out!” several anxious policemen yell, suddenly realizing that the armored truck is still blocking the Commerce Street exit.

“Let the driver by,” someone pleads to newsmen crowding around the ambulance. Detectives Graves and Leavelle, along with first-aid attendant Fred Bieberdorf, pack into the back of the wagon alongside the stretcher. The tail gate is slammed shut as an officer hollers again, “Get the truck out of the way!”

“Oswald—white, lying in the ambulance,” Pappas says into his microphone, now nearly shouting over the noise. “His head is back. He is out—unconscious! Dangling—his hand is dangling over the edge of the stretcher.”
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The armored truck crawls out onto Commerce Street as the ambulance slips up the ramp, turns left, passes the armored truck, and screams off to Parkland Hospital, sirens wailing.
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Captain Fritz, along with Detectives Beck, Montgomery, and Brown, follow in Beck’s car.
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The detectives are all talking about Jack Ruby.

“Who is Jack Ruby?” Fritz asks.

“He’s a man that runs the Vegas Club out in Oak Lawn,” Montgomery tells him.

“Do you know him?” Fritz wants to know.

“Yes,” Montgomery says, “I used to have a district for about four years out there.”
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11:27 a.m.

At the foot of the ramp, newsmen plead with police officials to allow them to leave the basement so they can file their stories.

“Who is he?” Pappas asks, as he slips his microphone into the group.

“Jack Ruby is the name,” a police official replies. “He runs the Carousel Club.”

“He runs the Carousel Club,” Pappas repeats into his mike.

The name rings a bell with several of the newsmen gathered there.

“He handed me a card the other day,” a reporter says.
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Suddenly, Pappas remembers a curious little man he met Friday night in the third-floor hallway of police headquarters.

Pappas was standing at a telephone, waiting for District Attorney Henry Wade to join him for an interview he had arranged with WNEW in New York. The line was open and Pappas was frustrated because Wade was tied up on another telephone interview a short distance down the hall. Just then a nattily dressed man in a gray fedora hat, who Pappas first thought was a detective, walked up and asked, “Where are you from?” Pappas told him he was a reporter from New York and was in town to cover the story. The man reached into his pocket and handed him a business card with the words, “Carousel Club, Jack Ruby your host” on it. Pappas asked if he was Jack Ruby and Ruby said, “Yes, come on over to the club if you get a chance and have some drinks. There are girls there.” Pappas slipped the card into his pocket and Ruby disappeared into the crowd. A short time later, Ruby passed him again, Pappas still waiting for Wade. The reporter must have looked cross because Ruby asked, “What’s the matter?” Pappas explained that he was trying to get Wade over to the phone. Ruby asked, “Do you want me to get him?” Pappas said, “Sure,” grateful for any kind of help. He watched as Ruby pushed through the crowd, said something to Wade, who was on another phone, pointed over at Pappas, and disappeared again into the crowd. Whatever he said worked, because a short time later, Wade finished his call and came over to be interviewed by Pappas.
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Now, Pappas reaches into his pocket and thumbs through a stack of business cards he’s been collecting all weekend.

“I know him,” Pappas announces. “Here it is.”

“I got a card from him the other day,” another reporter says. Apparently Pappas isn’t the only one Ruby gave a card to.

“Here he is,” Pappas says, fishing the Carousel Club card out and showing it to police officials. “Jack Ruby. Is this him? Carousel Club?”

“That’s him!” a reporter says.

“Yeah, yeah,” police officials agree.

“Jack Ruby,” another reporter says, “I seen him around several times.”

“Who’s going to give a complete briefing on this?” someone calls out.

“Chief Curry, at his office on the third floor as soon as we can get one set up,” a police official says with a thick Texas drawl.

Excited reporters repeat the name, Jack Ruby.

“Jack Ruby,” Pappas sputters into his microphone, “who we noticed the other day, he was hanging around police headquarters. Apparently he’s very well known here. And he was in the offices and mingling around and now, so we understand, he has shot Oswald.”

Pappas turns and starts sprinting up the basement ramp.

“Holy mackerel!” he says into his mike between breaths. “One of the most sensational developments in this already fantastic case.”
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11:28 a.m.

At the Executive Inn near Love Field in Dallas, Robert Oswald and Mr. Paul Gregory, the Russian language instructor, are trying hard to get Marguerite and Marina Oswald packed and into the car outside, where Secret Service agents Mike Howard and Charley Kunkel wait.