Kennedy's Avenger by Dan Abrams

Author:Dan Abrams [Dan Abrams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2021-03-22T13:22:12+00:00

* * *

As Senator stepped down he was greeted publicly, reported the Chronicle, by two “friendly IRS agents who wanted to talk to him about returns of recent years.” Perhaps just a reminder exactly the type of people with whom Ruby hung around.

Jack Ruby’s world fascinated the still conservative Dallas community at large. The cast of witnesses brought this nighttime world, and the people who lived and worked in it, onto the front page. The next witness was Patricia Ann Kohs, who had briefly danced in Ruby’s strip club, mostly on amateur nights, under her stage name, Penny Dollar. Perfectly in character, according to the New York Times, “She was demurely clad in a plaid jumper and a powder-blue blouse with long sleeves,” and a floppy little-girl bow pinned at her throat. Although that paper’s Homer Bigart added, “She is currently under arrest on charges of possessing dangerous drugs.”

No one was surprised that Belli, given his reputation as a man who enjoyed talking to attractive women, did the questioning. He asked her specifically about one incident in which Ruby had fought with a taxi driver. “It was closing time at the club,” she remembered. “The cab driver had come to get someone and evidently that person had left and Jack knocked him down the stairs. I didn’t hear exactly what started it. He knocked him down the stairs and out the door…and when I got there Jack was beating his head on the sidewalk.

“…and then he stopped all of a sudden, and he said, ‘Did I do this? Did I do this?’ He acted like he didn’t know that he had done it.”

“What was the cab driver doing?”

“Nothing. He was groaning.”

And what happened after that? “I don’t know. It was confusing and I was upset. It just struck in my mind the way he could do that, and didn’t even realize…he acted like he didn’t realize he had done this.” This was arguably the most relevant witness for the defense thus far. She wasn’t just saying that Ruby was volatile and odd, but that he seemed to not recall a violent incident immediately after it happened. Precisely what the defense was arguing here.

Once again, Bill Alexander asked the questions for the prosecution. And once again he attacked Ruby’s character, claiming the witness had told the FBI she had seen Ruby “shove a woman down those stairs and struck her escort, who was a much smaller person than him.”

“No,” she insisted. He repeated the question several times, and always got the same response: No.

When that failed, he went after Ruby’s vanity. “He was proud of his physical build, wasn’t he?” He was. “He used to come back in the girls dressing room and show off his muscles…he liked to take off his shirt to show his chest?” Yes.

Belli’s first question on his redirect picked up Alexander’s theme: “Did you think he was mentally sick, Penny?”

“Well, I’m not a doctor,” she said in a slight, breathless Marilyn Monroe–like voice, “but in my personal opinion I think there was something wrong with him, yes.

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