For one year after he shot Lee Harvey Oswald with a snub-nosed .38, Jack Ruby, a streetwise guy from Chicago, lived under the eye of a country boy from Lancaster, Texas.
Orville G. Smith, 72, says he`s never talked about his famous charge to anyone outside the family. But the movie ”Ruby,” which was filmed in Dallas last year and opened in theaters Friday, prompted the former Dallas County sheriff`s deputy to reminisce about the man he was ”locked up with” from the end of November 1963 to November 1964.
At home on a Lancaster street lined with blooming redbuds, Smith leafed through a scrapbook and talked about the year he shared meals and played dominoes and cards with the scrappy owner of the Carousel Club.
On the job, Smith says his duties were ”to stay right with him, eat meals with him at the table and make sure nobody would get around him. We took him to see a psychiatrist and we took him to the Warren Commission and we took him to trial.” Ruby was confined to a cell about 25 feet long and 12 feet wide.
To Smith, the man born Jacob Rubenstein in a Chicago ghetto seemed like just ”an ordinary person.”
If Ruby had mob connections, he didn`t talk about them. Nor did Smith see evidence of a conspiracy. He has several letters that Ruby tore from his typewriter and threw away. More than once, Ruby wrote authorities asking to take a polygraph test to help prove he wasn`t involved in an assassination plot.
Smith believes Ruby expected acclaim for shooting the president`s alleged assassin. ”Of course, I didn`t know he had cancer when he came in there. And I didn`t know it until I got off there. He never talked about it. As far as I was concerned, he was real healthy.” Ruby died of cancer in jail in 1967.
While confined, Ruby lived in 24-hour daylight. ”They had three big floodlights up there that were on around the clock,” Smith says. ”It stayed lit up all the time, so the guards could see.
”He`d holler at night sometimes. He wouldn`t cry. He`d just holler.”
Ruby had no special food and no special treatment, Smith says. No friends came to visit, but his brothers and sisters dropped by once or twice a week. He didn`t smoke, get phone calls or see other prisoners. Like the other inmates, he wore white cotton coveralls.
”He didn`t give me no problems,” Smith says. ”But two or three times he`d go over to the commode and get down on his hands and knees and wash his face in the commode. Then he`d turn around to see if I was lookin` at him. He wanted to use me as a witness” to prove he was mentally unstable, Smith says. But Smith doesn`t think Ruby, whose mother spent time in a mental hospital, was deranged. ”He wasn`t crazy. He was doing it for a cause. Maybe somewhere down the line he wanted a psychiatrist to say he was crazy. He was as sane as the guards were.”
Smith says he liked Ruby-or, at least, he didn`t dislike him.
But after a year, he was promoted to sergeant and moved to the criminal warrant division. He never saw Jack Ruby again. Smith retired with 30 years of service to the county in 1981.
