New Kennedy assassination documents unveiled

Perhaps the most intriguing item was what purports to be a transcript of a conversation Ruby had with Oswald at Ruby’s Dallas nightclub, the Carousel, in which they plot to kill Kennedy to satisfy organised crime bosses.

But the not-terribly-lifelike dialogue reads like a movie script and may well have been. For example, Ruby responds to Oswald’s suggestion that they kill the president by saying, “But that wouldn’t be patriotic.”

The trove of material connected to the assassination was collected by the former district attorney, Henry M Wade, who prosecuted Ruby and continued in office until 1987. Wade died in 2001.

One of the surprises in the collection was a contract for a movie deal about the killing, signed by Wade, said Craig Watkins, who became district attorney last year. Watkins said he did not know if the transcript was meant to be part of the film or why the film was never made.

An expert who has written a book on the assassination, Max Holland, said the transcript appeared to be based on a long-discredited claim by a Dallas lawyer named Carroll Jarnagin, who said he and a stripper had seen Oswald and Ruby together and overheard the discussion. “It’s a concoction,” Holland said, adding that Oswald and Ruby did not know each other.

The report of the meeting was debunked by the Warren Commission, he said, which after extensive investigation concluded that Oswald was a lone gunman, not a participant in a conspiracy.

The documents have not been examined by outside experts, and even his staff has yet to read most of the material, Watkins said. Once the material is cataloged and images scanned into computers, it will be donated to a museum and made available to the public, he said. The possibilities include the Smithsonian, in Washington, and the Sixth Floor Museum, in Dallas, in the former Texas School Book Depository, from which Oswald fired on Kennedy’s motorcade.

Although his predecessors had chosen to keep the material in a safe on the 10th floor of the Dallas County Courthouse for decades, Watkins said he saw no reason to do so. “We decided that this information is too important to keep secret,” he said.

Watkins, the first black district attorney in Texas, said he was releasing the material in part because of the window it provided on the racism of the past. The material “takes us back to 1960 and the climate not only of our criminal justice system, but of our country as it relates to race,” he said. He cited the official letterhead of nearby Hunt County, which claimed “the blackest land and the whitest people”.

In addition to the transcript, he displayed two sets of brass knuckles that belonged to Ruby, and a letter from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Dallas police chief, contending that Ruby’s sister said her family had somehow obtained a police report on the preparations for Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.

Oswald was arrested for fatally shooting the president on November 22, 1963. Two days later, Ruby shot Oswald to death. He was convicted of murder, but won an appeal. He died of cancer in 1967, before the case was retried.