Inside the Mind of Jack Ruby

[Fred Litwin]

Inside the Mind of Jack Ruby 

Just why did he shoot Lee Harvey Oswald?

[Michael T. Griffith]

Just why did he shoot Lee Harvey Oswald?

When are you going to address the disclosure, discovered by the ARRB, that Ruby had foreknowledge of the assassination?

The disclosure was made by a former informant for the Intelligence Division of the Dallas office of the Internal Revenue Service, Bob Vanderslice. When Vanderslice saw news reports in early 1977 that the HSCA was going to reinvestigate the JFK assassination, he decided he should tell his IRS contact about the incident. 

The Dallas FBI report noted that the IRS agent said Vanderslice was a reliable informant. The report also noted that Vanderslice’s undercover work involved gathering information on the “criminal element” in Dallas, and that he had known one of Jack Ruby’s nightclub strippers.

I discuss the Vanderslice disclosure at length in A Comforting Lie: The Myth that a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy (pp. 28-30).

"If there had been conspiracy, someone would have talked." A number of people did talk, including Bob Vanderslice.

[Mitch Todd]

When are you going to address the disclosure, discovered by the ARRB, that Ruby had foreknowledge of the assassination?

The disclosure was made by a former informant for the Intelligence Division of the Dallas office of the Internal Revenue Service, Bob Vanderslice. When Vanderslice saw news reports in early 1977 that the HSCA was going to reinvestigate the JFK assassination, he decided he should tell his IRS contact about the incident. 

The Dallas FBI report noted that the IRS agent said Vanderslice was a reliable informant. The report also noted that Vanderslice’s undercover work involved gathering information on the “criminal element” in Dallas, and that he had known one of Jack Ruby’s nightclub strippers.

I discuss the Vanderslice disclosure at length in A Comforting Lie: The Myth that a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy (pp. 28-30).

"If there had been conspiracy, someone would have talked." A number of people did talk, including Bob Vanderslice.

Vanderslice was one of those guys who had foreknowledge of the assassination.......15 years after the fact. At face value, his story deserves about that much consideration.

The FBIs account of The Venderslice Saga can be found here:

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32149267.pdf

Note that while Venderslice supposedly keeps agreeing to an interview with the FBI on the matter, he always fails to show up, can never be reached by phone, and generally behaves like an FBI interview is the last thing he wanted to try. Lawyers call this behavior "the actions of a guilty conscience."


 

[Jarrett Smith]

When are you going to address the disclosure, discovered by the ARRB, that Ruby had foreknowledge of the assassination?

The disclosure was made by a former informant for the Intelligence Division of the Dallas office of the Internal Revenue Service, Bob Vanderslice. When Vanderslice saw news reports in early 1977 that the HSCA was going to reinvestigate the JFK assassination, he decided he should tell his IRS contact about the incident. 

The Dallas FBI report noted that the IRS agent said Vanderslice was a reliable informant. The report also noted that Vanderslice’s undercover work involved gathering information on the “criminal element” in Dallas, and that he had known one of Jack Ruby’s nightclub strippers.

I discuss the Vanderslice disclosure at length in A Comforting Lie: The Myth that a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy (pp. 28-30).

"If there had been conspiracy, someone would have talked." A number of people did talk, including Bob Vanderslice.

Exactly, that's why Oswald was silenced. Ruby wasn't going to break omerta and tell the real truth no way. Two DPD officers watched the ramp and neither saw Ruby enter. Someone tipped Ruby off about Oswald's transfer and gave him entry to the basement.

[Lance Payette]

Let’s examine this “Ruby foreknowledge” CT bombshell:

1. Our hero was Robert Murray Vanderslice, born in 1926 and died (in Dallas) in 1979.

2. He was an IRS tax informant, focusing on bookies, from 7/23/76 to 2/18/77 (six months). He was paid $135 for his services and $2.89 for expenses.

3. His last contact with the IRS was on 1/24/77. The IRS special agent to whom he was assigned, Lawrence Sandri, said he had never mentioned Ruby or anything about the JFKA.

4. At a restaurant lunch with the IRS local Intelligence Division Manager, Arlen Fuhlendorf, early in 1977 (some 14 years after the JFKA), he started talking about stripper Candy Barr (who did have a non-romantic, non-employment relationship with Jack Ruby a decade before the JFKA).

5. This somehow led to a discussion of Ruby. Vanderslice told Fuhlendorf that on the morning of the JFKA, Ruby had contacted him to watch the motorcade and had asked if he’d like to “watch the fireworks.” In CT world, this remark can have no meaning other than Ruby’s foreknowledge of the JFKA.

6. They watched the motorcade together from a corner near the Postal Annex. Following the JFKA, Ruby left, without comment, for the Dallas Morning News.

7. At the same lunch, Vanderslice divulged that he had been arrested and incarcerated at the Dallas County Jail at the same time Ruby was there. As a jail trustee, he said, he got to know Ruby better – but he said nothing further about the supposed foreknowledge or motorcade incident.

8.  Fuhlendorf told the FBI that “as far as he knew” Vanderslice had been a reliable tax informant, but he did not know if he was truthful about Ruby. He initially reported the lunch conversation in a memorandum to the IRS national office for transmission to the HSCA, but the IRS returned the memo and told him to contact the Dallas office of the FBI. (The memorandum never surfaced.)

9. Vanderslice went to astounding lengths to avoid repeated efforts by both the FBI and IRS to contact him about his Ruby tale. Fuhlendorf thought he might have “been untruthful” or perhaps had “second thoughts” and had gotten “cold feet” after being told he might have to testify before the HSCA.

10. Because Vanderslice’s tale was inconsistent with Ruby’s WC testimony and that of a Dallas Morning News advertising department employee concerning Ruby’s activities on 11-22-63, and because Vanderslice was clearly avoiding both the FBI and IRS, the FBI abandoned further efforts to contact him.

11. On the last attempted contact, his wife said he was in Wichita Falls, “trying to make a buck here and there.”

Ho-hum, such is the stuff of which conspiratorial bombshells are made in MTG’s goofy end of the CT spectrum.

“Foreknowledge of the assassination.” BWAHAHA. 

Not exactly a major exercise in factoid-busting, I’ll concede, but an interesting 30 minutes of mental exercise for your intrepid Factoid Buster.

[Lance Payette]

Minor addendum: When the Vanderslice tale surfaced with the 2017 document release, it was of course of considerable news interest. THE VAST MAJORITY of news outlets, including major MSM, described Vanderslice - in headlines, no less - as an "FBI informant." Sexier than "small-time IRS tax informant," I guess. More like "FBI non-informant," as it turned out.

[Benjamin Cole]

LP--

One can fabricate any number of CT's, by the use on "links " or motivations.

The Vatican had huge reasons for wanting JFK out of the picture; they were the largest landowner in SV, and had 1.5 million adherents whose lives could be threatened in a communist takeover, one marked by extreme aggression.

CIA Director John McCone was a Knight of Malta, and Angleton had received the n 1946 th Grand Cross by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) from the Vatican, and he ran the "Vatican desk" at the CIA.

Jeff Morley dog whistles Mossad perped the JFKA, but if one wants to offer crackpot speculation, the Vatican is a tidy suspect.

And Madame Nhu was in the US when her husband and brother in law (the Diems) were assassinated by the Kennedy Administration. She vowed revenge. Ed Lansdale was her close friend....

[Tom Graves]

To be fair to those of the CT persuasion, Ruby is the perfect illustration of what we find at every twist and turn of the JFKA.

He could have been someone’s garden-variety grandfather who owned a laundromat, had an entirely ordinary background and nice family, simply lost it when JFKA was assassinated, shot Oswald in the hallway of the DPD, and was sentenced by a sympathetic jury to 15 years in prison. No mystery, just one of those things.

But noooo, Ruby is a shady character with DPD connections, mob connections and Cuban connections; his supposed motive for killing Oswald seems iffy at best; he enters the garage under mysterious circumstances that practically scream “he had help”; he murders Oswald on national TV while Oswald is shackled to Leavelle in circumstances that practically scream “how was that impossible?”; he quickly morphs into a bizarre psychotic who says all sorts of weird things; and he’s represented by a celebrity tort lawyer who’s interested mostly in self-publicity and pretty well mangles the defense.

Like almost every aspect of the JFKA, it almost seems to have been designed to be and to remain forever puzzling. Yes, CTers like MTG and many others turn these puzzles into scenarios Agatha Christie could never have imagined, but they are puzzles that have a strange, almost designed quality to them. Is it really possible that we "just happen" to have these puzzles at every twist and turn? I suppose it is, but it's ... puzzling.

Dear FPR,

A laundromat with a strip joint in the back?

Reminds me of the performance by an aging stripper I and the dressed-in-their-Sunday-Best, going-home-from-church families were subjected to on Kodiak in 1973 while chowing down on the all-you-can-eat buffet-style lunch in the [the name escapes me now] bar.

Thanks for jogging that memory.

I've led an interesting life, with alleged-by-you "OCD" and all.

That "OCD" must explain why I kept going back for more fried chicken that day.

I just had to do it.

-- Tom

I mean Tom ... Tom  ... Tom ... Tom ... Tom ... Tom ... Tom ..................