(COMMISSION EXHIBIT 2421)
COPY OF BACK OF WESTERN UNION RECEIPT GIVEN TO JACK RUBY ON NOVEMBER 24, 1963, STAMPED 11:16 A.M.
Ruby testified that he went home after speaking with Norton and went to bed about 1:30 a.m.[C6-1065] By that time, George Senator claimed, he had retired for the night and did not remember Ruby’s return.[C6-1066] Eva Grant testified that her brother telephoned her at about 12:45 a.m. to learn how she was feeling.[C6-1067]
Sunday morning.—Ruby’s activities on Sunday morning are the subject of conflicting testimony. George Senator believed that Ruby did not rise until 9 or 9:30 a.m.;[C6-1068] both Ruby and Senator maintained that Ruby did not leave their apartment until shortly before 11:00 a.m., and two other witnesses have provided testimony which supports that account of Ruby’s whereabouts.[C6-1069] On the other hand, three WBAP-TV television technicians—Warren Richey, John Smith, and Ira Walker—believed they saw Ruby near the Police and Courts Building at various times between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m.[C6-1070] But there are substantial reasons to doubt the accuracy of their identifications. None had ever seen Ruby on a prior occasion. None looked for an extended period at the man believed to be Ruby,[C6-1071] and all were occupied with their duties and had no reason to remember the man’s appearance until they saw Ruby’s picture on television.[C6-1072]
Smith, for one, was not entirely positive about his identification of Ruby as the man he saw;[C6-1073] and Richey was looking down from atop a TV mobile unit when he observed on the sidewalk the man he believed was Ruby.[C6-1074] In addition, Richey and Smith provided descriptions of Ruby which differ substantially from information about Ruby gathered from other sources. Smith described the man he saw as being an “unkempt person that possibly could have slept with his clothes on * * *.”[C6-1075] Ruby was characteristically clean and well groomed.[C6-1076] In fact, Senator testified that Ruby shaved and dressed before leaving their apartment that morning, and at the time Ruby shot Oswald he was dressed in a hat and business suit.[C6-1077] Richey described Ruby as wearing a grayish overcoat,[C6-1078] while investigation indicated that Ruby did not own an overcoat and was not wearing one at the time of the shooting.[C6-1079] (See Pappas Deposition Exhibit No. 1, [p. 356].) Although Walker’s identification of Ruby is the most positive, his certainty must be contrasted with the indefinite identification made by Smith, who had seen the man on one additional occasion.[C6-1080] Both Smith and Walker saw a man resembling Ruby when the man, on two occasions, looked through the window of their mobile news unit and once asked whether Oswald had been transferred. Both saw only the man’s head, and Smith was closer to the window; yet Smith would not state positively that the man was Ruby.[C6-1081] Finally, video tapes of scenes on Sunday morning near the NBC van show a man close to the Commerce Street entrance who might have been mistaken for Ruby.[C6-1082]
George Senator said that when he arose, before 9 a.m., he began to do his laundry in the basement of the apartment building while Ruby slept.[C6-1083] During Senator’s absence, Ruby received a telephone call from his cleaning lady, Mrs. Elnora Pitts, who testified that she called sometime between 8:30 and 9 a.m. to learn whether Ruby wanted her to clean his apartment that day.[C6-1084] Mrs. Pitts remembered that Ruby “sounded terrible strange to me.” She said that “there was something wrong with him the way he was talking to me.”[C6-1085] Mrs. Pitts explained that, although she had regularly been cleaning Ruby’s apartment on Sundays, Ruby seemed not to comprehend who she was or the reason for her call and required her to repeat herself several times.[C6-1086] As Senator returned to the apartment after the call, he was apparently mistaken for Ruby by a neighbor, Sidney Evans, Jr. Evans had never seen Ruby before but recalled observing a man resembling Ruby, clad in trousers and T-shirt, walk upstairs from the “washateria” in the basement of their building and enter Ruby’s suite with a load of laundry. Later in the morning, Malcolm Slaughter who shared an apartment with Evans, saw an individual, similarly clad, on the same floor as Ruby’s apartment.[C6-1087] Senator stated that it was not Ruby’s custom to do his own washing and that Ruby did not do so that morning.[C6-1088]
While Senator was in the apartment, Ruby watched television, made himself coffee and scrambled eggs, and received, at 10:19 a.m., a telephone call from his entertainer, Karen Carlin.[C6-1089] Mrs. Carlin testified that in her telephone conversation she asked Ruby for $25 inasmuch as her rent was delinquent and she needed groceries.[C6-1090] She said that Ruby, who seemed upset, mentioned that he was going downtown anyway and that he would send the money from the Western Union office.[C6-1091] According to George Senator, Ruby then probably took a half hour or more to bathe and dress.[C6-1092]
Supporting the accounts given by Mrs. Carlin and Mrs. Pitts of Ruby’s emotional state, Senator testified that during the morning Ruby:
* * * was even mumbling, which I didn’t understand. And right after breakfast he got dressed. Then after he got dressed he was pacing the floor from the living room to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the living room, and his lips were going. What he was jabbering I don’t know. But he was really pacing.[C6-1093]
Ruby has described to the Commission his own emotions of Sunday morning as follows:
* * * Sunday morning * * * [I] saw a letter to Caroline, two columns about a 16-inch area. Someone had written a letter to Caroline. The most heartbreaking letter. I don’t remember the contents. * * * alongside that letter on the same sheet of paper was a small comment in the newspaper that, I don’t know how it was stated, that Mrs. Kennedy may have to come back for the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald. * * *
I don’t know what bug got ahold of me. I don’t know what it is, but I am going to tell the truth word for word.
I am taking a pill called Preludin. It is a harmless pill, and it is very easy to get in the drugstore. It isn’t a highly prescribed pill. I use it for dieting.
I don’t partake of that much food. I think that was a stimulus to give me an emotional feeling that suddenly I felt, which was so stupid, that I wanted to show my love for our faith, being of the Jewish faith, and I never used the term and I don’t want to go into that—suddenly the feeling, the emotional feeling came within me that someone owed this debt to our beloved President to save her the ordeal of coming back. I don’t know why that came through my mind.[C6-1094]