Mr. Ruby. No, no; I wish he would have, because he hitchhiked all the way down there, and I was driving at the same time, but he didn’t know I lived there, and we——
Mr. Griffin. How was he notified to come to the trial?
Mr. Ruby. I don’t know. If I remember correctly he came on his own. He just thought that when all this came out about, you know, Jack getting him to take that picture of Earl Warren, he had the camera or something, I forgot the full details myself, but he is the one who took the picture, right, if I am not mistaken, and he just thought he should come down to help Jack as much as he possibly could.
Could I go a little further?
Mr. Griffin. I don’t really want to pry into this unless this is something you care to reveal.
Mr. Ruby. The most important thing is coming up now, I mean one of the most important things.
Mr. Griffin. All right. I do want to reflect this—that I don’t want to push you into saying things, talking about subjects that you would rather not talk about, and I realize that this in one of them. Now, if you do want to say something about it why, of course, we would be happy to hear anything you want to say.
Mr. Ruby. Well, I returned home, I went from L.A. to Dallas, I talked to Jack, I talked to Howard. We hadn’t hired Belli yet. He was going to go down and see Jack, and talk to him before he decided to come in, you know, and take over the case.
I went back to Detroit and in a couple of days I get another call, I get a call, from Woodfield. He is very upset. He just heard some news that he thinks I must know. However, it is so confidential that he can’t even tell it to me over the phone. And I talk to Mike Shore and between us—they couldn’t tell me on the phone, I had better go back to California.
So, I go out there again. The story he tells me is that, in the meantime he is trying to make contacts, this is about a week later. He is trying to make contact to sell the story to the different publications, to the Saturday Evening Post, you know, and other publications, and somebody from the Saturday Evening Post called him, I think—now this is what he told me—and said that Tom Howard was up to the Saturday Evening Post office in Dallas offering for sale a picture of President Kennedy with a piece of his head shot off, and so I immediately, or as soon as I could, when I left them, I called my sister Eva in Dallas and I said, “Get a hold of the agent that has been talking—that has been taking—your story there and tell them about this so they can check into it.”