Sunday 9 December 2012

Ruby shoots Oswald


Daily Mirror dated Monday November 25th 1963
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About 40 minutes after the assassination of John F Kennedy on November 23rd 1963 a police officer, J D Tippit, stopped his patrol car to question a man he had seen walking along Tenth Street in Dallas. As Tippit got out of his car the man shot him 4 times and the police officer died immediately. The man ran off.
A short while later a shoe store employee saw a man who he recognised as a recent customer acting suspiciously in the entrance to the store. He appeared to be hiding from the police cars that had been called to Tippit’s murder scene. The store man followed the suspicious character to the Texas Theatre cinema and watched him go in without paying. He got the manager to call the police and on their arrival pointed out the man, who turned out to be Lee Harvey Oswald. He was arrested for Officer Tippit’s murder. A witness later claimed that Jack Ruby was among the people in the cinema during the arrest.
Oswald was taken to the Dallas Police Department and questioned. It is not clear when or how the police decided that they had JFK’s assassin but 10 hours after being arrested for Tippit’s murder he was charged with Kennedy’s.
The following day the police decided to move Oswald from the police station to the County Jail. A handcuffed Oswald was led into the basement car-park flanked by detectives Jim Leavelle and L C Graves and past a large crowd of journalists, TV cameras and on-lookers. Suddenly Jack Ruby stepped out and, holding a revolver in his outstretched right hand, shot Oswald once in the stomach. An hour and forty-two minutes later he died.


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Did Jack Ruby kill Oswald because, as he claimed, he ‘did it for Jackie’ or was he eliminating Oswald before he could reveal anything about a conspiracy to murder JFK? 


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Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married John F Kennedy in 1953, became his widow in 1963 and married Greek Shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1968. She and JFK had 4 children, 2 of which died in infancy – one only 2 months before the assassination. Their son JFK Jr died in a plane crash at the age of 38. Daughter Caroline is still alive. Jackie Kennedy Onassis died in 1994.


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Kathleen Heathcote’s killer, Ronald Evans, was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment but in 1975 he was released ‘on licence’. In 1978 Bristol was being terrorised by a rapist nicknamed the ‘Beast of Bristol’.  He was caught by a police woman decoy and turned out to be Evans. He was given a further 9 years on top of his life sentence.  

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Harold Challenor was a Detective Sergeant in the CID in 1963 and was known for planting evidence and beating up suspects. He met his match when he planted a half brick on a journalist for Peace News in order to charge him with carrying a weapon. Other cases then became public knowledge and Challenor appeared at the Old Bailey in 1964, charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, he was deemed to be unfit to plead and was sent to Netherne Mental Hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia

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On several occasions, when I worked in Essex Street in London in the late ‘60’s, I saw Rupert ‘Maigret’ Davies parking his 1930 racing green ‘blown’ Bentley in the road outside our offices.
No Hiding Place’ lasted from 1959 until 1967 With Raymond Francis as DCI Lockhart. When Eric Lander left Johnny Briggs, who is now best known as Mike Baldwin in ‘Coronation Street’, took over as the co-star. 

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I thought the sick joke was a modern phenomenon. Canadian presenter and actor Bernard Braden was a popular figure on TV in the early ‘60’s and always quite outspoken.  The usually very outspoken ‘That Was The Week That Was’ team was uncharacteristically reserved in their tribute to the murdered President.





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Burley has a car-park now. I know because a friend of the family lives there. I don’t think she is related to Lord Shackleton.


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A 1963 newspaper wouldn’t be complete without a Beatles item. 5000 queued all night outside the theatre for tickets for the Beatles Xmas Show. This was before Internet and phone ticket sales, so at least the little darlings weren’t ripped off for using a credit card or having the tickets posted to them.


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The Perishers comic strip was created by cartoonist Maurice Dodd in 1959 and lasted until 2005 although reprints are still being published. 


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It’s always fun to look back at future predictions from the advantage point of that future. I’m still waiting for a home free of plugs and wires and for an end to washing up, ironing and dirty clothes. As for microwave food that ‘tastes good but looks raw’ we’re almost there with ‘looks cooked but tastes like cardboard’.

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