1st Bail Hearing
George Senator, Ruby’s room-mate, ran to a lawyer-friend named Jim Martin the moment he heard (on a café radio) that Jack had shot Oswald.
Martin was the first to reach Ruby, but Jack’s other friends were also rushing legal aid to him.
Joe Cavagnaro, of the Statler Hilton, tried to reach him and recommend Charles Tessmer, a highly respected defense attorney; but the police would not let him in.
Nonetheless, five lawyers were soon on hand to arrange bail for Ruby.
Jack himself followed Ralph Paul’s advice, and put Tom Howard in charge of his case, with Jim Martin to assist him.
Tom Howard is a Stetson-wearing, rough speaking Texan, without a law library, without a secretary—definitely without “class.” But Howard is a good local lawyer who develops Ruby’s defense.
The angle: murder without malice which carries a penalty of 2-5 yrs, as opposed to life or death.
He plans on doing this by having Ruby talk to a few local psychiatrists.
Then have friends talk about how emotional he is – especially over the death of President Kennedy- which they do.
And then the idea is to put Ruby on the stand to talk about the “sudden passion” he has when he sees Oswald’s smirk and why he killed him.
He would minimize the case, ingratiate himself with Dallas by keeping the publicity low-key, say he lost control of himself from grief, did a bad thing and is very sorry and please-don’t-kill-me.
Since it was completely an impulsive act (as he consistently claims and as both documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony supports), all of his later explanations are, to some extent, after-the-fact rationalizations.
The amiable Judge Joe Brown must agree with this view—he grants Tom Howard, a writ for his release on bond.
When the prosecution’s Assistant District Attorney, Bill Alexander hears this, he hit the ceiling and instantly gets Brown to change it to a “dry writ”—one that demands a hearing before the prisoner can be let out.
Second Bail Hearing
Bill Alexander is the most energetic prosecutor in an active District Attorney’s office, a man widely feared and hesitatingly respected—as a ticking bomb commands respect.
Alexander is also known as “The Burner” because of his record of sending more than 20 men to the electric chair.
He is the main reason Henry Wade gets all those death penalties that leaders of Dallas are convinced will deter crime.
Alexander sees Ruby soon after his arrest, and says, “He thinks we are just going through the motions with him.”
“Jack actually thinks he might come out of this as a hero of sorts,” says Alexander. “He thinks, he had erased any stigma the city had by knocking off Oswald.”
The misconception continues for some time.
Though defense attorney Tom Howard has a track record of winning all 26 death penalty cases he has represented, the Ruby family doesn’t think he can handle such a big case.
Tom Howard’s clientele is, on the most charitable reckoning, a seedy one (though Judge Jim Bowie, then on Henry Wade’s prosecuting team, rightly said, “They forgot, that even though Tom Howard defends whores and pimps, he does it damn well”)
So when Earl RubyM Jack’s brother goes to California to meet with a publisher about Jack’s story, the publisher mentions he should try a personal injury lawyer called Melvin Belli.
“The mad genius of the San Francisco bar” … ”a court jester” … ”a publicity-mad pettifogger” … ”the S. Hurok of the legal profession”—these are among the kinder things said about San Francisco attorney Melvin Mouron Belli.
Alex Haley Interviews Melvin Belli ,Playboy 1965
Melvin Belli, “Ole Doc”, one of America’s most spectacular lawyers, who acts in Ruby’s defense and is known for his innovative courtroom tactics.
This legal cockatoo is not subtle by any means.
Once he wins a mjor case, he flies a Jolly Roger over his roof and fires blank cannonballs off the roof.
However, when Belli appears in the Dallas jail, in resplendent tailoring- suits all interlined in red, he seems the apotheosis of all things Ruby admired.
Only one thing gives Ruby a momentary bit of doubt.
“He doesn’t know what to make of my boots,” Belli says.
“He asks if I think those were the right things to be wearing.”
I explain to him, I wear them because my father always wore them.” He does not explain that their high heels gave him an inch or two on Jack, whom he refers to as “that little fellow.”
Jack’s apprehensions are well-founded: Belli’s footwear became famous during the trial as prosecuter Bill Alexander keeps referring to them as “fruit boots.”
Still, he accepts to represent Ruby. The catch, he’s writing a book.
Melvin Belli wants to change the plea .
Belli’s defense: insanity.
He asserts, Ruby has brain damage called psychomotor epilepsy which causes him to lose control during highly emotional situations , which most in the court finds hilarious.
However, Belli feels strongly that rather than a bargain for plea, Ruby will face a sympathetic jury for exacting vigilante justice against an assassin and either be awarded a short sentence or permitted to seek psychiatric care.
The defense’s Belli and the prosecution’s Alexander do not address each other outside the courtroom or the judge’s chambers.
Their styles are in every way at odds, as are their characters.
At his desk in Bill Alexander, stands will his coat off, pistol visible, elbows on the chair pushing his shoulders high in a buzzard hunch, and speaks with Esquire magazine.
Alexander says Belli makes things so easy for the prosecution, at first they think it is a trap. We keep wondering when he will drop this psychomotor stuff and spring his real case on us. But he never does.”
“Then at the first step in the process —the bond hearing—he throws away the chance to pump our witnesses.
Since at the time we don’t have ‘discovery’ of prosecution material to the defense, our defense lawyers around here use the hearing as an exploratory gimmick—they get our witnesses up in the box and swab them out.
Belli puts on a few police and asks a few questions; but he is so anxious to start teaching us backwoods boys about psychiatry that he lays his whole case in our lap.
Now we know where to do our homework, and at the trial we are ready for him.”
Belli, far from thinking he fails to use the bond hearing to explore the prosecution’s case, seems to believe he introduces this ploy to Texas:
“In California the prosecution has to reveal its case beforehand, but not in Texas, so we use the bond hearings for that purpose.
Wade and those other guys don’t know what we were doing. If you were going to hide a secret message so that Wade and Alexander will never find it, all you have to do is put it in the book of Texas penal law.
But most of all, we use the bail hearings to educate the community, change its sentiment, acquaint it with our sophisticated defense.”
He admits this gave away certain things to the prosecution:
“along the way, this process would provide for the prosecution some of the discovery that we were seeking for ourselves. I believe in practicing what I preach.”
Melvin Belli
He is also supplying the thing he had relied on when accepting the case.
“This was a big trial that could focus worldwide attention on mental health and its unsatisfactory, archaic relationship to the law.
Dallas, I was confident, was a sophisticated city. I knew it had good medicine. I assumed it would have a district attorney who knew medicine.”
Melvin Belli
As he ventures out onto the minefield, he thinks he is entering a classroom.
He is assisted by Joe (Bullmoose) Tonahill, a Texan who at six-foot-four and 260 pounds, who has all the elegance of a longhorn steer.
“Mel thinks we have to do something right away to get on top,” Tonahill says.
Like his client, he believes in “taking the play away.”
Phil Burleson is a highly skilled more modern lawyer from Dallas, who also joins the Ruby defense.
When these dramatic lawyers Tonahill, and Belli, entered the case, Jim Martin and, later, Tom Howard are eased out.
Bustled in and out of bond hearings in December and January, Ruby veers as far off course as his escorts will allow him, toward serpenting microphones that sway out at him in corridors and anteroom.
Before he goes out past the tangle of microphones, he asks Tonahill, “How do I look, Joe? Is my hair straight? How are my clothes?”
He delivers rambling homilies against hate, assesses crackpot literature being sent him, delivers garbled messages to “the right-thinking people of America.”
He tells one of his guards he hopes to go on a lecture tour after he is released, drawing on his experience to teach men how to love one another.
Buoyed up by the appearance of Belli in his corner, he in fantasy becomes another Belli—teacher, lecturer, man of the world.
He starts studying the Bible, his fan mail, and the dictionary—he surprises guards with his large vocabulary when he wins at Scrabble.
Though he has always preferred being seen without his glasses, now he copies Belli’s professorial stage business—dangling his bifocals from their right hinge, chewing meditatively upon an ear clasp.
He thinks this infusion of legal class will win him acceptance in his chosen city.
Belli says: “I guess at the beginning he did feel that he had joined Texas. . . . I tried to persuade him not to trust the D.A., but he always felt that Alexander was his friend.
Jack kept talking to his guards about the case until I convinced him they were taking advantage of him.” Tonahill adds.”
Gradually, Jack begins to give up old friends in the comforting dazzle of these new ones.
The choice begins to take shape when people begin saying that Dallas is against him.
If he can not be a Dallasite, if it has all been a terrible misunderstanding—well, all right.
He can take them all on with giants by his side like Mel Belli and Joe Tonahill.
Perhaps his two giants are not enough.
After the second bail hearing, he begins to think better of the advice Joe Cavagnaro and others had given him—maybe he should have Charlie Tessmer in the case.
He asks his friend Tony Zoppi to see Tessmer. But Tessmer recounts what happens:
“When Zoppi mentions the fact to Belli that Ruby wants him to contact me, Belli blows his top. ‘Hell no! Not another Texas lawyer. I’m already saddled with three of them!’”
(Tonahill; Tom Howard, who had not yet been nudged out; and young Phil Burleson, the “bookman.”)
It was one of the last efforts Jack made, under Belli, to act on his own behalf.
The busy Californian ignored the snowfall of notes fluttering down the table at him. Jack learns not to bother writing them.
Later he tells Chief Justice Warren, “Had Mr. Belli spent more time with me, he would have realized not to try to get me out completely free.”
Reporters note Jack grows visibly dimmer as the trial wears on, less involved, a distant figure.
Even his skin sank and blanched, giving his quicksilvery eyes even greater prominence. Alexander is watching him, deciding how he can use this physical change for his own purposes.
Change of Venue
While Belli’s legal strategy may raise some questions there is no second-guessing the ferocity and sheer competency of his defense.
His first punch is a Motion to Change Venue, a relatively novel legal strategy and amply justified by the emotional maelstrom centered in Dallas following the President’s assassination.
If Jack does not know his hero’s strategy is to make him an object of pity, not respect, he certainly does not realize the Belli plan involved an assault on Dallas.
He intends to prove that the citizens of Dallas must, as he put it, “convict Ruby to acquit the city.”
Belli issues more than 150 subpoenas to people such as the mayor of Dallas, Stanley Marcus, and even the president of SMU.
When Mayor Cabell gets on the stand and says Jack couldn’t get a fair trial in Dallas because he had hurt Dallas so badly by his action, it hit Jack like a ton of bricks.
Ruby loved Dallas. He never dreamed he was hurting the city.
From that time on, the disillusioning blows come at Ruby faster and faster, as the “good guys” he chatted with so charmingly made it clear they meant to see him fry.
Gary Cartwright , Texas Monthly 1975
Jack Ruby had to believe that he was guilty of premeditated, calculated murder. The alternative—to admit he was crazy—was too awful to contemplate.
Bill Alexander brings a psychiatrist to Jack Ruby the day after his arrest an says:
“Jack, if you’re crazy, you should be in the insane asylum; and if you’re not, we’re going to burn your ass.”
When Ruby asks, “What should I do, Bill? You won’t gin me, will you?”,
Alexander replies, “I won’t let thirteen years’ friendship go down the drain just to f—k you around.”
Garry Willis, Ovid Damaris ,Esquire Magazine ,1967
Melvin Belli, colorfulest blur in the kaleidoscope of Ruby’s lawyers, argues his client is “buttered up and disarmed” by this exchange.
However, Change of Venue is Denied. Next the case moves to Voir Dire
Voir Dire
Tuesday, February 18, 1963 the choice of a jury begins and drags on for weeks, far longer than the trial itself.
Juck Ruby is brought before them.
The state’s attorney take their places at the counsel’s table.
Melvin Belli arrives with a flourish tosses his famous red velvet briefcase on the table and places a box of cough drops beside it- ready for war.
Belli, is still fighting for a change of venue, alienates those jurors who make it past his unremitting criticism of any Dallas panel.
Because most jurors had seen the assassination on tv of Oswald, Belli moves on to challenge the jurors themselves on the ground that the “jurors were witnesses” and “thus disqualified to serve.”
In one grandstanding episode, Belli had a potential juror served with a subpoena while sitting in the jury box. Belli maintained Ruby’s defense with great vigor.
But Belli’s assistant, Joe Tonahill is more entertaining than Belli when questioning prospective jurors.
However, Ruby probably begins to suspect he has not got the class he bargained for when, during the choice of jurors, Tonahill angrily throws his pencil at Judge Brown.
Judge Brown then charges Tonhill $25 for contempt.
He is fond of asking them: “Would yuh like to be a member of the first Texas jury to send an ex-G.I. (Ruby) to the ‘lectric chair for killin’ a dirty Communist?
He wants people who can understand his fancy psychological talk, so he chooses people who are educated, middle-class, never been to clubs like Jack’s, and cannot sympathize with his world.
“Belli picks a perfect jury—perfect for us, say’s Bill Alexander for prosecution.
Alexander says on jury selection, we have file cards for all the prospective jurors, and we get together and shake our heads over people we really want—or Henry will pass one we didn’t want without any real needling questions—and Belli falls for it.
He wastes one of his challenges doing our work for us.
Once Wade even told them a boy has a policeman for his father, and they strike on him, though we know the boy is a rebel against his father’s ideas.
Next Belli tries to beat Dallas, he tries to get people from outside the city limits.
He doesn’t realize some of the little towns around here are the really straitlaced fundamentalist areas.
I can tell by a juror’s accent what area he comes from, and when Belli starts picking, I know we have him. Belli’s tone-deaf.
From the first juror, I knew Jack would get the death penalty.”
Belli finally, accepts the first juror Max Causey. He later becomes foreman and Belli tells reporters , Jack Ruby himself, wanted Causey.
“In my thirty-five years on this planet, I had never been exposed to a more devastating shock than at that moment. I suddenly felt as though the ceiling and all the upper seven floors of the Records Building had collapsed on my head.”—
Max Causey, upon being selected as the first juror in the Jack Ruby trial
Belli likes to lecture—even to those who drop in for an interview. He spells out words like a schoolmarm: “Jack has a ferret- (f-e-r-r-e-t) like quality.”
He also likes to use medical terms, and condescendingly defines even the simplest of them:
“Then there is hyperventilating (over-breathing). . . . Jack looks as if he has arteriosclerosis (high blood pressure [sic]) and has been drinking too much coffee.”
His subordinates obligingly call him The Doctor; he tells Sam Bloom in Dallas that he knows more about medicine than his own experts.
He gives lectures in his own field too—like this protreptic exercise on jury picking:
“A juror who says he can vote death and keep his hands steady when he says it, is a juror who can honestly make such a vote.
If he twists his hands, that means he won’t vote death. Take my word for it. This is the experience of thirty years as a lawyer and of many, many capital cases.”
Then, Belli has inkblots all ready in the courtroom for repeated attempts (quashed each time by Judge Brown) to give prospective jurors the Rorschach test, thus (like The Shadow) exposing what he calls in his book “the feelings that lurk in the subconscious minds of the Dallas citizenry”—though earlier in the same book he deplores attempts to establish “‘scientific’ selection of jurors.”
Ruby, still alert at the defense table, listens uneasily, whispers back and forth with Tonahill, passes Belli notes:
“Don’t fight with them today, because I’m sure they have something up their sleeve.”
“Don’t make me more hated in Dallas than I am already.”
Jack Ruby Notes to Melvin Belli
Belli says in his office: “The whole jury panel looks like they came out of insurance companies.
I decided if I couldn’t get warm people—waitresses, etc.—and I have to have cold fish, at least I wanted to be intelligent cold fish.
We got a couple of people who should be tolerant—some divorcées—but I guess there is no way in God’s world to get to these little mean insurance-company minds, especially with such a sophisticated defense.”
Murray Kempton, reporting the trial for the New Republic, took it as a mark of Belli’s skill that Dallas
“spares him [Ruby] a trial by a jury composed entirely of his peers.”
Alexander, looking at the same group, merely grins—“a perfect jury.”
In his book he gives a different theory to account for the jury’s unresponsiveness to his own mesmerism:
“In some fashion, as in that movie I have seen about the man brainwashed by Moscow, the people in whatever passes for the Kremlin of Dallas can figuratively press a button and, as if it has signaled transistors in their brains, direct the thinking of this great city’s people.”
(Actually, the oligarchy can function so easily because it does not, have to, mesh with the ordinary citizens.)
At any rate, Belli gets his bright classroom of twelve students.
As February goes past, the confidence of the New Year was daily seeping out of Ruby.
At the jury selection, one note to Belli read:
“I will never have a real chance to prove myself.”
Trial of the Century
The Ruby trial is now pure showbiz.
Judge Brown is on the bench—to the consternation of all Dallas.
Judge Joe B. Brown’s legal education before he was elected to the bench consisted of three years of night school 35 years earlier.
In Dallas he is known as Necessity – “because Necessity knows no law.”
Typical episodes included Judge Brown’s confusion over Ruby’s roommate who referred to the five dachshunds Ruby owned, which he referred to as his “children”.
“I thought you said he didn’t have children”, the judge said, puzzled. “They weren’t children, they were dawgs”, the witness replied.
“Then why did he call them children?” the judge asked, as the confusion escalated.
One day as a stripper who worked at Ruby’s nightclub called Little Lynn (who was over nine months pregnant at the time), was waiting to testify, seven prisoners in the connecting county jail grabbed a woman hostage and fled.
They had fashioned a pistol of soap, pencils and shoe polish, persuaded guards that it was real, and made their break, witnessed by some 100 million viewers.
Little Lynn fainted and Belli prepared to play midwife.
A BBC reporter on the phone to his office was describing the action and repeatedly swore to his editors that he was neither kidding, nor had he been drinking.
“Listen, you bloody fools, this is America, this is Texas … any bloody insane thing is possible here!”
The next day, the New York Daily News ran an eloquent black headline: “Oh, Dallas!”
By the time Little Lynn tried to testify, she was promptly arrested for bringing a pistol into which she had forgotten was there.
For the prosecution, trying a case before Judge Brown has a discouraging air due to his large amount of cases reviewed in appellate court which have been reversed for judicial error
Fully aware of Dallas’s tainted reputation, City leaders hope Ruby’s 1964 murder trial would be handled with far more decorum and security, but fear it won’t be .
Locals shuddered every time he appeared on TV.
No one can guess what he will do in Dallas’ “trial of the century.”
So Sam Bloom a former reporter for the Dallas Morning News, was sent over to handle the publicity of the trial.
And good news Bloom is not only a PR man , but he also happens to be a member of the Citizens’ Council.
It is unprecedented for a PR firm to represent a judge, and Bloom faces direct criticism when he testifies at a change-of-venue hearing prior to the trial.
After, more than 300 requests for only 48 seats reserved for media, Defense attorney Joe Tonahill accuses Bloom of favoring reporters “sympathetic to Dallas.”
Bloom denies this, noting that his firm merely handles logistics and credentials.
Melvin Belli questioning PR executive Sam Bloom on the witness stand.The Dallas Morning News Collection/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza Donated by The Dallas Morning News in the interest of preserving history
However, Bloom employee Helen Holmes does advise Judge Brown and draft his public statements.
But others insist that the news is just as carefully sifted, for the corporate good of Dallas.
The media pressure ultimately leads Brown to use a larger courtroom for the trial where at least 150 reporters can be seated.
The Dallas Morning News reported that the courthouse has “an international flavor,” with Swiss, French, Swedish, British, Polish, German, Australian, Bulgarian, Mexican and Canadian press mingling with local and national journalists in the press room.
There is a definite distinction between the relaxed informality of Dallas reporters accustomed to covering the courthouse and those who fly specifically to cover the Ruby trial, sometimes arriving with negative preconceived notions about the city.
Some national and international reporters push the boundaries of professionalism during the trial.
Defense attorney Phil Burleson often receives phone calls in the middle of the night from reporters needing to confirm information for pressing deadlines.
Defense investigator Bob Denson abandons his Dallas office to work out of his home because reporters consistently stopped by with questions.
Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander was vocally critical of what he considered “unfair, sloppy” news stories.
Echoing some of the sentiments expressed by Dallas D.A. Henry Wade, in a talk given two weeks after the verdict, he laments, “they reported what they wanted to see and what they wanted to hear rather than the events that happened.”
There is a stampede the day press credentials are issued.
For added security, journalists are required to wear photographic identification badges, though only the largest news organizations can quickly produce small ID photos for their reporters.
The courthouse arranges a checkpoint where everyone, including the press, is searched before entry. This type of security is new in 1964.
What’s My Line? TV star and investigative reporter columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, finds the whole process comical, at first.
Dorothy Kilgallen and her 18-month investigation of the Dallas tragedies, includes her being the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby at his trial.
During one of her visits – sometime in March, before the verdict – she prevails upon Joe Tonahill to make arrangements through Judge Brown for a private interview with Jack Ruby.
Brown, awestruck by Dorothy, accedes readily to Tonahill’s request- to the intense anger of the hundreds of other news people present.
The meeting room in the jailhouse is bugged, and Tonahill suspects that Brown’s chambers were as well.
So, Brown and Tonahill choose a small office off the courtroom behind the judge’s bench.
They ask Ruby’s ubiquitous flank of four sheriff’s guards to consent and remain outside the room.
Dorothy is standing by the room during a noon recess.
Ruby appears with Tonahill.
The three enter the room and close the door.
Ruby and Dorothy stand facing each other, speak of their mutual friend, and indicate they want to be left alone.
Tonahill withdraws.
They are together privately for about 8 minutes, in what may be the only safe house Ruby has occupied since his arrest.
Dorothy mentions the interview to close friends, but never the substance.
Not once, in her prolific published writings, does she so much as refer to the private interview.
Whatever notes she takes during her time alone with Jack Ruby in the small office off the judge’s bench are included in a file she assembles on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
She dies a suspicious death not long after.