Dallas DA's office finds cache of JFK memorabilia

Documents may fuel new theories

Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. The transcript purports that Oswald and Ruby met before the Kennedy assassination. (Bob Jackson/Dallas Times-Herald/File 1963)

DALLAS - A transcript purportedly about John F. Kennedy's assassination has been discovered among boxes of memorabilia that were long forgotten in an old safe at the Dallas County district attorney's office.

While the transcript reads like a conspiracy theorist's dream - Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby plotting to kill the president - the district attorney's top assistant said it was probably material for a proposed movie that was never made.

Other items found in an old safe on the 10th floor of the county courthouse include letters to and from the late Henry Wade, a district attorney and the prosecutor in the Ruby trial, The Dallas Morning News reported in yesterday's editions. Ruby shot and killed Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, two days after the president's death.

There are also letters to Ruby, records from his trial, a gun holster, and clothing that probably belonged to Ruby and Oswald, said District Attorney Craig Watkins, who planned to discuss the find at a press conference today.

Much of the attention is bound to focus on the transcript purporting that Ruby and Oswald met at Ruby's nightclub on Oct. 4, 1963, less than two months before the Nov. 22 assassination. In it, they talked of killing the president because the Mafia wanted to "get rid of" his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

In the transcript, Oswald said: "I can still do it, all I need is my rifle and a tall building; but it will take time, maybe six months to find the right place; but I'll have to have some money to live on while I do the planning."

Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum near where the president was shot, has not seen the transcript but doubts it is real. It is well documented that Oswald was in Irving the evening of Oct. 4, at a home where his wife was staying, Mack said.

"The fact that it's sitting in Henry Wade's file, and he didn't do anything, indicates he thought it wasn't worth anything," Mack said. "He probably kept it because it was funny. It's hilarious. It's like a bad B movie."

Terri Moore, the top assistant to Watkins, said she believes the latest transcript is part of a movie Wade was working on with producers.

The former prosecutor wrote about the proposed movie, "Countdown in Dallas," in letters found in the safe.

"It's not real. Crooks don't talk like that," Moore said.