Trivia

Is mentioned by name in Irish singer Paul Brady's song, "Nobody Knows" (1992) ("...nobody knows what Ruby had to hide...").

On the morning of November 24, 1963, while being transferred from a jail cell to an interrogation office, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, allegedly acting out of rage and anguish over the death of the president. Ruby was tried and found guilty of murder (March 14, 1964) and was sentenced to death. In October 1966 a Texas appeals court reversed the conviction, but, before a new trial could be held, Ruby died of a blood clot, complicated by cancer (Jan. 3, 1967).

Earned the nickname "Sparky" due to his famous violent temper.

At his trial he claimed that he killed Lee Harvey Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the anguish of having to testify at her husband's murder trial. Later he recanted the statement, saying that his lawyer had put him up to it. On March 14, 1964, he was convicted of Oswald's murder and sentenced to death. That conviction was later overturned but he died of lung cancer in 1967 before he could get a new trial.

He opened The Carousel Club in 1954 and kept ownership until he went to jail in 1963. He built up a friendly relationship with the Dallas police chiefly because he was running an establishment that they could easily close down, one of the reasons being Ruby's alleged ties to organized crime figures. This relationship allowed him access to come and go at police headquarters and is how he was able to have access to the garage on the day he murdered Lee Harvey Oswald.

Though he died in prison in Dallas, Texas his body was flown back to his birthplace of Chicago, Illinois. He is interred there at Westlawn Cemetery.

He was taken ill in prison, and died at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, the same hospital where President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald died.

After his conviction in 1964, he was kept in a prison cell that overlooked Dealey Plaza where President Kennedy was shot.

After being taken into custody after shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, he was taken to the same cell that Oswald occupied while at the Dallas jail.

When the Warren Commission came to Dallas, Ruby asked on eight occasions to be taken to Washington to testify, to no avail.

During his trial, the head of his team of defense lawyers was the San Francisco-based Melvin Belli. One of Belli's assistants was Sam Brody, who switched his focus from murder to divorce, handling the divorce proceedings of Jayne Mansfield and Matt Cimber that began on July 20, 1966 (when Ruby was still alive). The famous couple's divorce was still pending on June 29, 1967 when Brody and Mansfield, romantically involved, died in a car accident that also killed a 20-year-old African American man named Ronnie Harrison. Harrison was driving the couple and three of Mansfield's children, including Mariska Hargitay, from Biloxi, Mississippi to New Orleans where Mansfield was scheduled to appear on a locally broadcast TV show. An urban legend has Sam Brody bringing with him in the car a briefcase filled with secrets about the JFK assassination. That is false.