On October 3rd, 1963, just seven weeks before President Kennedy's planned visit to Texas,
Lee Harvey Oswald returned to Dallas.
With no place to call his own, he took a room at the YMCA.
He had no job and no means to support his family.
His wife Marina and his daughter June were living with their friend Ruth Payne in Irving,
a Dallas suburb.
Marina was expecting their second child.
Soon after Lee came back to Texas, it was perhaps a week later, I was having coffee
with Marina at a neighbor's house and we were talking about the fact that Lee hadn't
been able to get a job and he was looking for work and needed work.
And another neighbor there said that her brother worked at the Texas Schoolbook Depository
and she thought that they were still hiring people.
So I called the Schoolbook Depository to see whether there might be an opening there.
There was an opening and Oswald was hired as a warehouse clerk to fill orders for textbooks.
The job paid only $125 an hour, but Lee liked the idea he would be working with books.
He came out each weekend.
He and Marina did argue a good bit and I was somewhat impatient with him.
She was saying, you see, he doesn't love me.
All the time I knew her, she was worried about whether he loved her or not.
Well he came out on weekends.
I remember stepping over him one time as he was watching a TV, watching a football game.
His chin in his hands there and thinking, what a fine little revolutionary we have here
being snookered into the new opiate of the people football.
Michael Payne and Lee also talked politics on the weekends.
He thought capitalism was rotten, it was a fraud and it needed to be overthrown.
Lee wanted to be an active guerrilla in the effort to bring about a new world order.
We discovered we were both interested in the activities of right-wing groups in Dallas,
which were common, numerous at that time.
And I think he described his activities as spying on them and thought of himself as doing
that.
In that conversation, the name of General Walker was raised.
Oswald told Payne he had gone to a right-wing rally to hear General Edwin Walker, the same
man he had tried to assassinate a few months earlier.
There was no doubt in my mind that he believed violence was the only effective tool.
He didn't want to mess around with trying to change the system.
Oswald's return had not gone unnoticed at the FBI field office in Dallas.
The CIA had told the FBI of Oswald's trip to Mexico and his visit to the Soviet embassy.
I wanted to find out where Lee Oswald was.
I had determined from previous investigation that he was not living at the Payne residence,
but he had been seen visiting there.
I wanted to find out if he was in the Dallas, Fort Worth area and if so where and what he
was doing.
Oswald was staying at this rooming house in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.
Apparently worried about the FBI, he registered under a new alias, O.H. Lee.
And in these final days, many possible Oswald sightings have a sinister cast.
At a Lincoln Mercury Car Dealers, a man who called himself Oswald and said he'd been to
Russia test drove a car at crazy speeds.
He bragged about coming into money in three weeks.
It was three weeks before the assassination.
The manager of a parking garage says a man calling himself Oswald came looking for a
job.
He then asked if the roof had a good view of downtown Dallas.
President Kennedy's motorcade would pass within a block of the garage.
Just days before the assassination, there was another sighting.
A man resembling Oswald was seen target practicing.
He almost started a fight when he began shooting at other people's targets.
Well, this number eight target is the target that Oswald was supposedly shot at.
One witness has said he helped him sight a scope in and said he was real good, but I
don't know.
All of this testimony has to be taken very seriously.
All of it has to be taken with an enormous grain of salt.
These people who did not know Oswald and who are subsequently remembering, oh, the guy
involved in the assassination is the guy I saw weeks and months ago.
This is the least credible testimony unless it can be specifically corroborated.
In fact, most of Oswald's time in Dallas can be accounted for.
At the end of his working day, he rode the bus to the rooming house.
He spent weekends with his family.
There is no hard evidence that he was meeting with any possible co-conspirators, including
his mysterious right-wing associates from New Orleans.
When Lee Harvey Oswald returns to Dallas, he certainly has no contact with either Ferry
or Bannister in terms of letters, telephone records, or anything else.
So if he did know them, it had been in New Orleans and he had no contact with them when
Kennedy was coming to Dallas.
But two uncorroborated reports do hint at a continued connection to Cuban exiles.
One witness thought she saw Oswald at an anti-Castro gathering shortly before the assassination.
Another claims Oswald was in touch with an anti-Castro activist named Pedro Gonzalez.
Gonzalez strongly denies the allegation.
The story was uncovered by Earl Goles, then a Dallas reporter.
His source was Gonzalez' neighbor.
He saw a note that had been left in Mr. Gonzalez' mailbox by a person who signed his name as
Lee Oswald, and in an urgent tone left two Dallas telephone numbers for Mr. Gonzalez
to call.
This would have been about the 17th of November, a Sunday, the one day that no one had seemed
to know where Oswald was, either his wife, nor the rooming house in Dallas.
That day, Ruth Payne and Marina tried to call Oswald.
And I dialed the number, asked for Lee Oswald, and was told, no, Lee Oswald lives here, and
so I checked, is this the number?
Yes, it was.
And I really hung up in confusion and told Marina what had happened.
Then the next day when Lee called, as he normally did in the evening after work, Marina said
we had tried to reach him and that there was no one of that name there, and he balled her
out for trying to reach him.
When she hung up, she was very distressed, said that he was using an assumed name and
he's done this before and he lives in this fantasy and he has this idea about being a
great man.
And she was very worried about him, worried about his mental state, as I understood it
from her.
On Wednesday evening, two days before the assassination, one of the boarders at the
rooming house recalls Oswald intently watching a TV news story about President Kennedy's
visit to Dallas.
That week, Dallas newspapers published more details, including maps of the motorcade route.
The White House party would fly into Dallas and drive through the city.
The planned route would take the motorcade into Dealey Plaza and right by the Texas schoolbook
depository.
After work on Thursday, Oswald asked a co-worker to give him a lift to Irving.
Thursday, which was the night before the assassination, I came home from grocery shopping and Lee
was outside the yard.
I was surprised because it was the only time he came without asking.
And Marina thought he'd come to make up with her after a fight they'd had.
He tried to kiss her, she didn't let him.
And he said to her that she was getting spoiled, living with Americans.
And early that evening, he asked her on three separate occasions to join him in Dallas and
if she would, he would get an apartment the next day.
Marina was still angry and she said no.
Sometime that evening, Oswald entered the garage where he kept his rifle.
I went into the garage and the light was on, which surprised me because I knew Marina was
pretty careful turning the light out when she went in the garage for anything.
I hadn't been in the garage, so I assumed that Lee had been in there and forgotten to
turn the light out.
Lee woke up early the next morning.
Marina was still sleeping.
He made his own coffee.
Then he kissed his children and told Marina goodbye.
Later she found what he'd left on the bureau.
It was $170 and she thought to herself, that must be everything Lee had.
And she found something else.
It was Lee's wedding ring and he left it in a little cup that her grandmother had given
her.
When Oswald left the house, he was carrying an oblong package wrapped in brown paper.
He told the neighbor who gave him a ride to work that the package contained curtain rods
for his room in Oak Cliff.
Later that day, a long empty brown bag would be found on the sixth floor of the book depository.
President Kennedy was up early that morning as well.
In Fort Worth, the crowds were friendly.
A few years ago I said that I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who
had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris.
I'm getting somewhat that same sensation as I travel around Texas.
In Dallas, Oswald's co-workers were eagerly awaiting the motorcade.
We were looking out towards Elm Street.
So he walked up and asked us, what is everybody looking for?
What is everybody waiting on?
So we told him we was waiting on the president to come by.
He put his hand in the pocket and laughed and walked away.
So I don't know where he went or if he went upstairs or downstairs or wherever.
Oswald rode the elevator up to the sixth floor where he spent the morning filling book orders.
In Fort Worth, the president was headed to the airport for the short flight to Dallas.
About 12 o'clock, Oswald's co-workers went down to lunch.
Oswald shouted for them to send the elevator back up.
By now, President Kennedy and his wife had landed at Love Field.
The welcome was warm.
On the sixth floor of the depository, someone had screamed off a corner window with boxes.
Oswald's prints would later be found on some of them, including the boxes arranged to support
the sniper's rifle.
Two witnesses spotted a man with a rifle at the sixth floor window.
They assumed he was there to protect the president.
Oswald later claimed that at this time he was eating lunch with two fellow workers and
had then gone to buy a Coke.
But his co-workers denied having lunch with Oswald.
Some witnesses thought they saw two men on the sixth floor, evidence, if true, that there
was a conspiracy.
At 1223, amateur cameraman Charles Bronson panned across the depository.
Frontline had this footage scientifically enhanced to see if a second man could be seen
on the sixth floor.
Well, the left window, when you look at a single frame, appears to have a person standing
there.
You can see the shoulders and perhaps the arms, and some people said that in successive
frames somebody's walking back and forth.
But when we processed the image to reduce the grain noise, we found that all of the
images throughout the frame look approximately the same.
And so in that sixth floor window, that is not anybody walking around.
That's grain noise walking around.
And this film, shot by Robert Hughes, shows the motorcade approaching Dealey Plaza.
Hughes stops filming for a few seconds and then starts again just as the limousine passes
in front of the depository.
On the Hughes film, there are a lot of things to see.
And on the fifth floor in particular, we see an employee of the book depository, raises
right arm right there as he waves to the motorcade passing just under the building.
Now we move to the sixth floor and we observe in the arched window that is adjacent to the
sniper's nest, a form that some people have said is human-like in appearance.
And when we ran the enhanced film in motion, that human form disappears.
And we conclude there is no human form in that window.
We do also conclude that there is movement in the sixth floor corner window indicating
the presence of a person.
Just seven seconds before the first shot is fired, something moves in the corner window.
In the window below, Harold Norman raises his arm and waves to the president.
We were sitting on the fifth floor, right directly on the sixth floor, and the shots
came from above and that was a gun.
The shots were sounding boom, click, click, boom, click, click, boom, click, click.
So there was three shots fired right above us and we were sitting on the fifth floor.
Frame by frame, the tragedy unfolds in the 21 seconds of 8 millimeter film shot by Abraham
Zapruder.
As the motorcade rounds the corner, it slows.
In the background, a little girl runs beside the limousine.
Suddenly there's a gunshot.
Governor Connolly hears it and turns.
The little girl stops dead and looks around.
Three seconds later, a second shot.
A bullet has passed through the president's throat.
It hits Connolly in the back and he starts falling.
Mrs. Kennedy turns to her husband.
Something's wrong.
She looks into his face.
The fatal headshot.
The exact number and timing of the shots have been argued over endlessly, but there is a
growing consensus that the Zapruder film shows three shots were fired in about eight seconds.
Many believe a second gunman fired a fourth shot from the grassy knoll.
Shortly after the shooting, many people followed a policeman up the embankment.
But when police searched the area, they found no gunmen, no gun, no cartridges.
But years later, it was discovered that a motorcycle policeman's radio button had been
jammed open and that the gunshots in Dealey Plaza may have been accidentally recorded.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations used sound experts to listen to a Dallas police
dictabelt and they concluded with a 95% certainty that there was a fourth shot fired at Dealey
Plaza and it came from the grassy knoll.
The National Academy of Sciences reviewed their work and found a multitude of errors
and omissions, the most serious of which was that the time that the select committee experts
thought the shots were being fired was the wrong time.
It was actually one minute after the assassination had actually taken place.
And just now we've received reports here at Parkland.
In the chaos and confusion of that day, many mistakes were made in the autopsy on Kennedy's
body.
But the medical photographs and x-rays have confirmed that if there was a shot from the
grassy knoll, it missed.
There were only two shots that struck President Kennedy.
Both came from the rear.
Four government investigations all came to the same conclusion.
The Warren Commission in the 60s, in 1968 the Clark panel set by Attorney General Ramsey
Clark in the 70s the Rockefeller Commission and finally in the late 70s the House select
committee with the largest forensics panel reexamining the evidence.
Modern computer modeling is a technique that was not available to earlier investigators.
These three dimensional graphics of Dealey Plaza were produced by a specialist company
called Failure Analysis Associates on behalf of the American Bar Association.
By feeding data into the computer it is possible to model the trajectory of the so-called magic
bullet, the second shot fired from the sixth floor of the Texas school book depository.
Critics say that unless it pursued a bizarre zigzag trajectory it was impossible for one
bullet to pass through both men.
Four government commissions all concluded it was a straight line right through the two
men.
There's no question that a single bullet could inflict all seven wounds on both the
president and the governor and emerge in very good condition as it slowed as it moved through
the two men it moved fast enough to break bone but not fast enough to deform the bullet.
The computer technicians use reverse projection to go from the wounds on Kennedy and Connolly
and determine where the assassin had to be located to inflict those wounds and a cone
is splayed out from the wound and shows that the only area almost centers on the southeast
corner sixth floor Texas school book depository.
And if the three shots were fired in eight seconds this is the computer model of the
sniper's view.
After the third shot someone saw the sniper slowly withdraw his rifle.
Leaving three cartridges on the floor he made his way to the stairs.
The rifle with one shell still in the breach was later found behind some boxes.
Oswald was first seen 90 seconds later standing by the door of the lunchroom looking calm.
A policeman stopped him momentarily but let him go.
Within three minutes of the shooting Oswald walked out the front door.
He boarded a bus but jumped out and hailed a taxi when the bus got stuck in traffic.
He asked the taxi to drop him a couple of blocks away from his rooming house in Oak
Cliff.
Oswald hurried to his room.
This is the room for which Oswald said he needed curtain rods.
Oswald put a 38 revolver in his waistband took a light zippered jacket from his closet
and left.
His landlady last saw him standing by the bus stop outside the rooming house.
By now the Texas schoolbook depository had been sealed off and police had issued a description
of a suspect in the assassination.
A white male, brown hair, approximately 5'6 to 5'8, weighing 160 pounds had been seen
in the window of the depository and was believed to be the shooter.
Gerald Hill helped search the book depository.
It was dirty, it was dusty, it had an old wooden floor, it was an ancient building,
it had boxes of books stacked here and there.
There was a shield of boxes that were stacked in such a way that anybody coming off of the
elevator or coming out of the stairwell would not see anyone who was down in a firing position
between the barricade and the window.
They were still searching when the call came that there had been another shooting.
All we knew at that time was that it was an officer had been shot and they gave us a car
number and we knew it was Tippett based on the car number.
Officer J.D. Tippett had been patrolling in Oak Cliff when he was gunned down, killed
instantly next to his car.
Of the seven eyewitnesses to the shooting, the one with probably the clearest view was
Jack Tatum.
I was preparing to turn left on 10th Street from Denver.
I noticed an individual walking in my direction with a light zipper jacket on, darker pants,
and a squad car pulling over to the curb next to him.
As I approached the squad car, I noticed that that individual was leaning over talking to
the officer and he had both hands in the pockets of his jacket.
I continued through the intersection and about in the middle of the intersection I heard
three, maybe four shots.
If the man in the jacket was Lee Harvey Oswald, no one knows how he got here.
Researcher Dale Myers investigated the Tippett shooting.
He certainly couldn't have gotten here unless he got a ride.
Some people have conjectured that it was possibly a conspiratorial pickup.
Whether the driver was a co-conspirator or a casual passerby is still a mystery.
A lot of the witnesses first said that he was coming west and then he was seen walking
east as Tippett pulled to the curb.
I think what may have happened is Oswald truly was walking west, saw the police car approaching,
did a quick about face, and now was walking east.
This would be something that Tippett would spot and possibly cause enough suspicion to
pull over.
Killer gets to about this position on the sidewalk and Tippett's patrol car pulls to
the curb and either calls him over to the curb or the man comes over by himself and
leans to the window and talks to Tippett through the vent window for 10 or 20 seconds, very
short, and Tippett gets out of the patrol car and as he does the man steps over to the
front of the hood here and as Tippett gets opposite him, he pulls the gun from under
the jacket, fires three shots across the hood knocking Tippett to the pavement.
Then the man starts to leave, hesitates at the back of the car, walks around behind the
car, comes up to the front of the car, stands over Tippett, and shoots him in the head.
He then looked around, surveyed the situation, and started a slow run toward my direction.
I put my car in gear and drove forward and watched him through the rear view mirror.
I saw him very clearly and I realized that there was one thing that made him stand out
and that was his mouth that curled up.
I couldn't mistake that.
Kind of a smile.
Yes, kind of a smile.
And I was within 10, 15 feet of that individual and it was Lee Harvey Oswald.
After the shooting, police found shells at the scene.
They went on the radio and said there were 38 automatics.
Where Oswald's arrested was a revolver that fires 38 specials, a shell that's clearly
about a quarter inch longer, besides they're clearly stamped on the bottom.
One says 38 special, one says 38 automatic.
Automatic shells would mean Oswald was not there and that the evidence could have been
planted.
Did you actually pick up the shells yourself?
Yeah, I got a mark in them.
I put a mark in them.
But you still mistook the kind of shell it was.
Yes, I did.
In all the excitement that was going on then, you just looked to see if it was a 38.
And if he'd been using an automatic, they could have been ejected.
Nobody at this point had told the first officer to arrive that Oswald had stopped, deliberately
kicked out shells from a 38 revolver before he left that scene.
Later, the FBI crime lab found that Tippett was killed by bullets fired from a gun with
a bored-out barrel, a barrel just like Oswald's 38.
Ballistics tests on bored-out guns can never be completely conclusive.
However, marks on the cartridges, allegedly recovered at the scene, did match the hammer
on Oswald's 38 revolver.
Shortly after the shooting, several employees of a used car lot saw the killer come down
this street.
Ultimately, he came and he ducked behind this building, which used to be a Texas service
station.
In 1963, this was a parking lot.
And they found a jacket under this car.
And it was a light gray Eisenhower-type jacket, much like the one that Oswald was seeing
zipping up as he left his rooming house.
He's next seen without the jacket, kind of slinking down Jefferson, ducking in and out
of stores as police cars are roaring up and down with their sirens blaring.
As the police cars sped by the Texas movie theater, the cashier stepped out of her ticket
booth to see what was happening.
As she did, a man slipped past her without buying a ticket.
But someone saw him and called the police.
And so we converged on that location.
Hit the balcony first.
I did.
Because there was only one light on in the theater, we opened the side door to get some
more light.
We determined he wasn't in the balcony.
And I came downstairs.
As I got back to the lobby, I heard the sounds of a scuffle.
I immediately went into the theater.
I saw an officer scuffling with a suspect on the third row from the back of the theater.
It took seven of us to put him on the floor and restrain him until we could put cuffs
on him.
Once we had the cuffs on him, he started hollering, police brutality.
Is this America?
This kind of thing.
Outside the movie house, an angry crowd jeered as Oswald was bundled into a police car.
Immediately, as we pulled away from the curb, we got on the radio and said we were going
out to jail with our suspect.
And the next thing we was asked was what's your name?
And he wouldn't tell us.
And ask him, did he know why we had arrested him?
And he said, I haven't done anything.
I should be ashamed of it.
We continued to the city hall, pulled to the backside of the basement.
We formed up our wedge, walked him through the basement into the elevator up to the third
floor and into an interrogation room in the home side robbing house.
As Oswald was brought in for questioning in the tippet shooting, he was also becoming
a suspect in the Kennedy assassination.
Police had discovered he was the only employee missing from the school book depository.
Let's keep it quiet.
We're all getting it.
Pull it down.
Has the gentleman been identified?
Yes, sir.
He's been identified for killing the officer.
Right.
Has any identity been identified?
Right.
Has any identification been attempted for the killing of the president?
Not yet.
I was in the hallway with all the other reporters when Fritz came out and asked me if I'd come
in and sort of be the token reporter inside for a few minutes.
And I went in to see Oswald and I asked him about his eye and he said that was when he
was punched out and knocked down, you know, wrestled out.
The next question, why did you kill Officer Tippet?
And he threw the question right back at me.
He said, someone get killed, policemen get killed.
At that time, he had this little smirk on him and I wanted to hit him, but I didn't.
Then all of a sudden it dawned on me he wasn't sweating, not a drop of sweat on him.
He was cowering all the people around him, secret service, police, FBI, district attorney,
as everybody was in that office.
He didn't admit anything and didn't confess to anything.
He was the type of individual that you'd have to prove to him that we could make a case
on him.
And this is not unusual.
This is very common among people that commit the crime.
I don't think he would have broken and confessed.
I think he was playing a game.
He had the impression that he was smarter than everybody else and was going to sit back
there and play this for all it was worth.
The case against Oswald was building.
Police had recovered the rifle and the FBI had traced its purchase to an A. Hiddell.
The return address on this order letter was to the post office box in Dallas, Texas of
our suspect Oswald.
But it has definitely been established by the FBI that the handwriting is the handwriting
of Oswald.
He was asked if he had ever used the name of A. Hiddell.
He said no.
And he asked if he knew anybody named A. Hiddell.
He said no.
And then he was asked, is it true that when you were arrested you had a picture ID on
there with A. Hiddell on it?
He said, I believe that's correct.
And he asked, well, how do you explain that?
And he says, I don't.
He just cut it off like that.
Here comes Oswald down the hall again.
Did you buy that rifle?
You have dispatches, you people have been given, but I emphatically deny these charges.
What Oswald's interrogation shows is a very consistent pattern to hide a single fact through
lies.
That single fact was his ownership of the rifle.
When he lied about the backyard photograph, it was to hide the fact he had a rifle.
When he lied that he had ever used the alias Hiddell, it was to hide the fact that he had
ordered the rifle.
You could go through the interrogation point by point and see that Oswald will be truthful
up until it comes to the rifle.
Point at a rifle, he hides his ownership of it.
Now we're talking about the assassination weapon and lying consistently to hide that
shows in my opinion, a consciousness of guilt on Oswald's part.
I don't know what this is all about.
I'm just a black guy.
No sir, I didn't.
People keep asking me that.
Sir?
Did you shoot the president?
I work in that building.
Were you in the building at the time?
Naturally, if I work in that building, yes sir.
Back up man.
Did you shoot the president?
No, they're taking me in because of the fact that I live in Missouri.
What's wrong with you?
I'm just a patsy.
Did you shoot the president?
I'm just a patsy.
Did you shoot the president?
I'm just a patsy.
Did you shoot the president?
I'm just a patsy.
Did you shoot the president?
I'm just a patsy.
Oswald was interrogated for two days, but he never confessed.
I was allowed to visit with him approximately eight to ten minutes.
And I asked him, I said, Lee, what the Sam Hill is going on?
He said, I don't know what they're talking about.
I said, Lee, they've got you charged with the death of the president, shooting a police
officer.
They've got your rifle, they've got your pistol, and you don't know what the Sam Hill
is going on.
And I became kind of intense at that point in looking into his eyes, and he never did
answer, but he finally said, brother, you won't find anything there.
And before we could get back to discussing anything of substance and everything, he gets
tapped on his shoulder and told, that's the end of it.
It was a horrible day.
I started crying, and then after a while, the picture of the guy that shot the president
came on TV, and I knew right away that I had seen that guy before, but I couldn't remember
from where.
And he came into the room, she was quite excited.
About ten minutes after she had arrived, we saw the picture of Oswald on the television.
She screamed.
We looked at each other, we were terrified.
I said I'd also know him, Annie, and please don't say anything.
I also recognized him as the man who was standing at my door.
Around midnight on November 22, Oswald was paraded in front of the press.
He had just been charged with the murder of Officer Tippett, and he was about to be charged
with the assassination of President Kennedy.
You told the president?
No, I have not been charged with that.
In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.
The first thing I heard about was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that
question.
You have been charged with murder?
Nobody said what?
Sir?
Nobody said what?
At the back of the room that night was one man who was not a policeman or a reporter,
a man who carried a gun and had underworld connections.
His name was Jacob Rubenstein, known as Jack Ruby.
In less than 36 hours, he would murder Lee Harvey Oswald.
If the mob had a hand in the president's death, and I think they did, and they induced
Oswald to kill the president, it was terribly important that he be silenced, because eventually
Oswald, if alive, would testify as to who his associates were, or they ran the risk
that he would, and therefore, there's every indication that he would be stalked and killed
Oswald in an effort to silence him.
Jack Ruby was a police informer who owned a striptease club.
He made sure that policemen who came to his club were shown a good time.
What kind of a guy was Jack Ruby?
Impulsive.
He had a quick temper.
That's why they called him Sparky.
Loved to fight.
And if anybody was really out of line, he'd throw them out.
If Jack Ruby knew that you were a law enforcement officer, they always had plenty of liquor,
dancing girls, food, or anything else, because he always thought that we may be able to help
him.
Yeah, he did give some free drinks around, and of course when the police went down there,
you know, he discounted the drinks to them, and he was a fighter.
There's no question about that.
When we'd get a disturbance call down there, we'd just wait at the bottom of the stairs,
because just a few minutes, that guy or whoever was creating the disturbance was going to
come falling down the stairs.
Jack Ruby knew people who were members of the mafia.
He had acquaintances from his Chicago days, people that had long prison records, and there's
no question that he knew as many people in organized crime or who had criminal records
as he knew police on the other side.
In 1963, Sam and Joe Campisi were leading figures in the Dallas underworld.
Yes, Jack knew the Campisi's, and I was seeing them together on numerous occasions.
Jack ate out there at the Egyptian lounge, and he'd come in, and he'd shake his hand,
sit down, and sometimes Joe Campisi would sit with him.
And if I came in, you know, I'd sit with Jack Ruby and Joe Campisi, I knew we all knew
each other well.
The Campisi's were lieutenants of Carlos Marcello, the mafia boss who had reportedly talked of
killing the president.
The Campisi's did know Carlos Marcello, because one day I was in Joe Campisi's office, and
he called Carlos on the phone, and I talked to Carlos on the phone.
There's the odor of a mafia hit all around Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald until you
examine both Ruby and his actions over that weekend.
There is no credible evidence to show that Jack Ruby acted at the behest of anyone in
organized crime.
It was personally motivated from day one.
If Ruby was a hitman working for the mafia, he had already missed one perfect opportunity
to silence Oswald.
And I asked him if he was backing a pistol at that midnight press conference, and he
said yes.
And I said, then why didn't you plug him in?
And he says, I was afraid of hitting one of you guys.
After the assassination, Ruby closed the Carousel Club.
He spent much of Saturday hanging around Dallas Police headquarters.
That day, Oswald was taken from his cell several times to be interrogated and made to stand
in police lineups.
Ruby had no opportunity to shoot Oswald that day, but he was asking lots of questions about
when the police would transfer him to the county jail.
As he hung around the corridors of the police station that weekend, Ruby seemed distraught
over Kennedy's death.
I view Ruby as very agitated.
He gets very worked up into this very anti-Oswald feeling.
There are a number of events that take place that sort of seem to propel him at even a
faster rate into what I view as this emotional deterioration.
One of them is the belief that the Jewish community in Dallas is going to be blamed
for the assassination based upon an ad that had run the day the president arrived signed
by a Jewish name.
Signed by a Bernard Weissman, the right-wing ad in the Dallas Morning News had attacked
Kennedy for being soft on communism.
If Ruby was stalking Oswald, Sunday morning would be his last chance.
The police had announced Oswald would be transferred to the county jail at 10 a.m.
But at 10, Jack Ruby was still at home.
Jack Ruby takes over an hour and a half to leave his apartment.
He very leisurely goes to the Western Union office.
He doesn't appear to be rushed, says the clerk behind the counter, and he sends his $25 money
gram, he takes his change, and it's time stamped at 1117.
Oswald is shot by Ruby four minutes later at 1121.
I did a recheck on that myself from the date stamp time of 1117 on that telegram, and then
it took roughly 83 seconds because I walked at three different speeds, slow, fast, and
medium, and the average was 83 seconds from the front door of the Western Union to the
basement.
It is still unclear whether Ruby slipped into the basement through an unlocked door or just
walked down the ramp.
Upstairs, Jim Lovell was about to bring Oswald down in the elevator more than an hour late.
Well, I had no idea when I was coming down the elevator, and he certainly could not have,
and you had no way you could time that, where he would be in the basement right at the exact
moment that I came out of there, and he couldn't have been there more than a minute to 45 seconds
to a minute before I arrived with Oswald.
Wearing a light-colored suit and a Stetson, Lovell was Oswald's escort.
I put the handcuffs on him, and in the process of doing that, I wore ingest, kind of said,
Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they're as good a shot as you are, meaning, of course,
that they'd hit him and not me, and he kind of laughed, and he said, oh, you're being
melodramatic or something to that effect.
Nobody's going to shoot at me.
So we walked out, and I was momentarily blinded by those lights.
I couldn't see anything.
Oswald just groaned when he was shot, just, mmm, and went down, and that's the only sound
he made.
Ruby yells as he's shooting, you killed my president, you rat.
He's then tackled by the police around him, and in the few seconds after the shooting,
through the time he's taken into jail, he says a series of things.
You guys, meaning the police, couldn't do it.
I did it for you.
I had to show that a Jew has guts.
I'm happy that I got him.
There's a whole series of where Ruby believes they're going to clap him on the back and
say, nice going, Jack.
Was the shooting in the basement garage a carefully planned mafia hit, or did Sparky Ruby shoot
Oswald in a flash of violent rage?
I transferred Jack Ruby to the county jail, and when I asked him why he'd done a shooting,
he said he'd thought about it from the Friday night on, but a lot of people thought about
it.
I've had people tell me, oh, if I could have got to him on Friday afternoon, my anger was
such that I would have killed him without looking back.
I visited Jack in prison.
The first thing he said, he was smiling at the time, you know, and he looked at me and
he said, I got balls, ain't that, baby?
And I said, yeah, Jack, and they're going to hang you by them, too.
But Ruby had other, more sinister visitors.
Sam and Jojo Campisi would visit with Jack Ruby, and they always had privacy.
Those private meetings with the Campisis reawakened suspicions of a mob hit.
Yet even men who believe the mafia killed Kennedy and Oswald concede the evidence is
not conclusive.
If I posit the fact of a conspiracy, the one that is most plausible is that the mob had
a hand in it, is a probability judgment based on all the evidence.
It's not the kind of thing that you take into court and try to prove beyond a reasonable
doubt as a prosecutor.
When he spoke to the press after his trial, Ruby himself hinted at conspiracy.
But by now, his mental condition was deteriorating.
Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface.
The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives.
In Ruby's televised statement and in other statements, he did believe there was more
to the case than just his simple shooting of Oswald.
He thought there was a massive conspiracy, won by the district attorney and by right-wing
elements to frame him and to further embarrass the Jewish community in Dallas.
That is what Jack Ruby is talking about in this case.
Oswald never regained consciousness after Jack Ruby shot him.
Captain, where will he be taken?
I'm assuming Parkland Hospital.
Parkland Hospital, the irony of ironies, the place where President John F. Kennedy died.
The armored car now has been cleared out of the entrance way.
The ambulance is leaving Dallas Police Headquarters.
When I was riding in the back with him holding his hand, arm, trying to reach a pulse, the
doctor was massaging his chest trying to get him to breathe.
And he groaned and stretched a little bit and then just went completely limp.
And actually that's when I think he expired or is in, because I never saw him make another
move at all.
Oswald was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital.
His death meant the evidence against him would never be tested in court.
But 30 years later, the strength of that case continues to grow.
And evidence may have been overlooked by all the official investigations.
Soon after the shots were fired, Dallas Police dusted the murder weapon and found partial
fingerprints near the trigger guard and a clear palm print on the barrel.
At police headquarters, the palm print was lifted from the rifle for examination.
But when the FBI rushed the rifle to Washington, the palm print stayed in Dallas and a clear
chain of evidence was broken.
Amid 30 years of accusations that the police had planted the palm print on the rifle, the
latent fingerprints on the trigger guard have been largely ignored.
Vincent Scalise, a leading fingerprint expert, examined all the fingerprint evidence for
the House Assassinations Committee.
The FBI examined these latent prints and they determined that they were worthless for identification
purposes.
I re-examined the photograph of these latent prints again in 1978 for the Select Committee
on Assassinations and came to the same conclusion.
Due to the faintness of the prints, I determined that they were of no value for identification
purposes.
About 30 years ago, the Dallas police had evidence that might have changed that judgment.
Rusty Livingstone was on duty in the Dallas crime lab on November 22nd.
He developed pictures taken at the crime scene.
He also processed photographs of the rifle and of the latent fingerprints on its trigger
guard.
Livingstone made several sets of photographs, including one for himself.
But he didn't realize the significance of the fingerprint photographs until he began
working with his nephew, Gary Savage, on a book about the assassination.
The wonderful thing about this is this is first day evidence.
This is original evidence collected by the Dallas police.
This stuff didn't go through the Warren Commission.
It didn't go through the House Select Committee on Assassination.
The FBI says it never looked at the Dallas police photographs of the fingerprints.
And experts for the Warren Commission and the House Assassinations Committee never examined
all of the fingerprint photographs.
But this year, a local police captain, Jerry Poudrill, reexamined all the evidence.
He compared the inked fingerprints taken from Oswald in New Orleans with the pictures of
the fingerprints found on the trigger guard.
It appears that the fingerprints depicted in the photographs came from the right hand.
I found three points of identity and three possible points of identity during this comparison.
Law enforcement community uses six to ten points of identity for positive identification.
Poudrill's analysis was not conclusive, but he found nothing to indicate the prints were
not Oswald's.
A former high ranking FBI fingerprint expert who examined the prints for front line said
they were simply not clear enough to make any identification.
But Vincent Scalise, the House Assassination Committee expert, came to a very different
conclusion.
There were a total of four photographs in all.
When I began to examine them, I saw two faint prints.
And as I examined them, I realized that these prints had been taken at different exposures.
And it was necessary for me to utilize all of the photographs to compare against the
inked prints.
As I examined them, I found that by maneuvering the photographs in different positions, I
was able to pick up some details on one photograph and some details on another photograph.
Using all of the photographs at different contrasts, I was able to find in the neighborhood
of about 18 points of identity between the two prints.
Well, I feel that this is a major breakthrough in this investigation because we were able
for the first time to actually say that these are definitely the fingerprints of Lee Harvey
Oswald and that they are on the rifle.
There is no doubt about it.
The prosecution case against Oswald is open and shut.
If he'd shot his brother-in-law in the back seat of a convertible and not the President
of the United States, he would have been tried, convicted, and forgotten in three days.
But for the fact that it's the President, this is an easy case.
Three days after the assassination, Washington and the world mourned President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy.
In Dallas, the police honored Officer J.D. Tippett.
And on that same day in Fort Worth, the remains of Lee Harvey Oswald were laid to rest.
But the questions about his role in the assassination have lived on for 30 years.
True, no one saw him actually pull the trigger on the President.
But his rifle's there.
His presence in the buildings was there.
What he did after he left the building is known.
Bus ride, taxi ride, boarding house, pick up the pistol, shoot the police officer, eyewitnesses
there, five or six.
You can't set that aside just because he is saying, I'm a Patsy.
I'd love to do that, but you cannot, in my mind, set that aside.
The question is not did Lee Harvey Oswald shoot the President.
The question is, did he have help?
Within 30 hours of the assassination, that was the question.
30 years later, that remains to be the question.
John Kennedy had many enemies.
The mafia and many Cuban exiles celebrated his death.
And Lee Harvey Oswald's life may have intersected with those forces.
But there is no evidence that they changed the trajectory of his life.
And they cannot be found in Dallas influencing him to act.
In the end, there is only Oswald, a man who chose his own politics, invented his own secret
life and made himself into an assassin.
A man whose real life never measured up to the scale of his dreams until the day the
President of the United States passed right in front of him.
This is a struggle that has gone on with me for almost 30 years now.
It's his mind over heart.
The mind tells me one thing, the heart tells me something else.
But the facts are there.
And I say to people who wanted to start the facts and pick them out, I say, what do you
do with his rifle?
What do you do with his pistol?
What do you do with his general opportunity?
What do you do with his actions?
To me, you can't reach but one conclusion.
There's hard physical evidence there.
It's good that people raise questions and say, wait a minute, let's take a second look
at this.
I think that's great.
But when you take the second look, and the third, and the 40th, and the 50th, hey, enough's
enough.
It's there.
Put it to rest.
There will always be one final mystery.
Why did Oswald choose Kennedy?
But the solution cannot be found in the dark corridors of crime, espionage, and power.
That question can only be answered by one young man.
And his answer will always be silence.
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