Jack Ruby

Veteran newsman, Seth Kantor, an eyewitness to the execution of Lee Harvey Oswald, spent four years finding answers to the numerous questions regarding Jack Ruby, and now throws new light into the JFK assassination. -- amazon.com

What really (might have) happened when Jack Ruby, nightclub owner, brass knuckle-slinger, and inveterate fan of Corbusier, decided to kill the killer of JFK? In this first-ever trade publication of Bob Trammell’s work, Jack Ruby mythos loops between fact, fiction, and spectacle to satirize Dallas’ place on the world stage. Jack Ruby & The Origins of the Avant-Garde in Dallas caricaturizes everyone from Bob Thornton to Joseph Beuys; fodder for JFK conspiracy theorists, innuendo-readers, ingenious speculators, and pursuers of The Truth About Dallas At Large. With an introduction by Ben Fountain and afterword by David Searcy, this volume also includes Trammell’s “Quiet Man” story cycle from over the course of his long, countercultural writing career, lamenting a generation that lost much by embarking on a search for themselves in a city—and world—unwilling to support its brightest artists.

"You all know me, I'm Jack Ruby." That's what the killer shouted when police grabbed him a split second after he had pumped a bullet into the stomach of Lee Oswald. Who was Jack Ruby? Madman? Superpatriot? Conspirator? Two top writers achieve a gripping portrait of the complex and contradictory character of Jack Ruby - a man who grew up in an immigrant home with a drunken father and an insane mother, who climbed out of the ghetto to become the owner of a popular Dallas nightclub. The authors let his friends and employees describe the Jack Ruby they knew. He was a punch-happy scrapper who fought before he thought because "I might lose my nerve." Ruby could "cuss straight on like saying his prayers" but didn't allow dirty talk in front of his lady strippers. He could fire an employee seventeen times and pay for her kid's operation. A bachelor, he "respected" his fiancee of twelve years too much to marry her. He sought the company of cops, newsmen, anyone he thought important. Jack Ruby had many acquaintances but his only real friends were his dogs. Living in the fringe-society of hucksters and hustlers, Jack Ruby longed to be a big man in Dallas. Until the day he died he had a childlike awe of "class," respectability, and the law. Wills and Demaris get completely inside the mind of this complex man. They recreate the day Jack Ruby woke, got an SOS call from one of his girls, shaved, dressed, said good-bye to his dogs, drove downtown, parked his car illegally, walked over to the crowd and shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. The reader understands. He did it "for Jackie and the kids" and because he was Jack Ruby.

The question of why Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald was the central issue of his trial by Judge Joe B. Brown, Sr. With compelling immediacy and exhaustive detail, the judge's memoir is a vital contribution to the quintessential murder mystery of the 20th century. Here for the first time, we get to know what really went on in Ruby's trial and in his mind. Judge Brown had access to previously unpublished facts involved in the "trial of the century", as it was called. His memoir has been combined with the Warren Commission interrogation of Ruby and with Ruby' polygraph conducted by the F.B.I., accompanied by enlightening psychological commentary. With a selection of previously unpublished photographs, this is a brilliant, illuminating new view of the event that has dominated the consciousness of the American public as no other ever has.

When Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, he did more than silence the mysterious young man who had killed the President of the United States.

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.