Murder {of Lee Harvey Oswald}

See also: Jack Ruby



Ruby about to shoot Oswald, who is being escorted by Dallas police. Det. Jim Leavelle is wearing the tan suit. Det. L. C. Graves is wearing the dark suit. Ruby is approaching Oswald from the side, where he is unnoticed by anyone in the photograph.

On Sunday, November 24, detectives were escorting Oswald through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters toward an armored car that was to take him from the city jail (located on the fourth floor of police headquarters) to the nearby county jail. At 11:21 a.m. CST, Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby approached Oswald from the side of the crowd and shot him once in the abdomen at close range. As the shot rang out, a police detective suddenly recognized Ruby and exclaimed: "Jack, you son of a bitch!" An unconscious Oswald was taken by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital — the same hospital where Kennedy was pronounced dead two days earlier. Oswald died at 1:07 p.m; Dallas police chief Jesse Curry announced his death on a TV news broadcast.

At 2:45 p.m. the same day, an autopsy was performed on Oswald in the Office of the County Medical Examiner. Dallas County medical examiner Earl Rose announced the results of the gross autopsy: "The two things that we could determine were, first, that he died from a hemorrhage from a gunshot wound, and that otherwise he was a physically healthy male." Rose's examination found that the bullet entered Oswald's left side in the front part of the abdomen and caused damage to his spleen, stomach, aorta, vena cava, kidney, liver, diaphragm, and eleventh rib before coming to rest on his right side.

A network television pool camera was broadcasting live to cover the transfer; millions of people watching on NBC witnessed the shooting as it happened and on other networks within minutes afterward. In 1964, Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his image of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.

August 29, 2019: Jim Leavelle, Dallas Detective Cuffed to Oswald Dies at 99

{snip}