Jack Ruby: Voices From History The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza presents a new exhibit, Jack Ruby: Voices From History. The exhibit, featured in the Museum's Visitor's Center, is free to the public. Using sworn testimony, autobiographies, diaries and written excerpts from The Sixth Floor Museum's Oral History Collection, Voices From History offers visitors a compelling look at the story of Jack Ruby from the people who knew him and who witnessed the trial and the events that followed.
“The trial was the number one story to come down in America at the time; it was a continuation of the story that began November 22, 1963. The media wanted to show the emotions of what was going on during a world-wide story, and we did just that,” Murphy Martin, an ABC News correspondent who covered the Ruby trial, stated in an recent interview.
Ruth Ann Rugg, Acting Executive Director, said, “The Museum has been looking for the right opportunity to highlight the many Ruby artifacts and oral histories we have collected over the years. Voices From History provides a great showcase to educate our visitors about an often overlooked part of the assassination story.”
The exhibit includes photos of Jack Ruby at his club with his dancers, the multitude of media covering the story and a surprising mug shot of Ruby crying.

“A lot of people forget that Ruby died an innocent man because the verdict was overturned. Ruby thought that he would be a big hero when he shot Oswald. It came as a big shock to him when he was not portrayed as that,” added Martin.
Others highlighted in the exhibit include:

·Melvin Belli, a flamboyant and successful attorney from California, who led Ruby’s defense team.

·Judge Joe B. Brown, who presided over the Ruby trial. He was known as the “hanging judge” after the jury delivered a death sentence to Ruby.

·Ike Pappas, a reporter with radio station WNEW in New York City, who was one of the closest bystanders to the shooting of Oswald and made an audio recording of the event

·Douglas Sowell and J. Waymon Rose, who were two of the jurors selected in the Ruby trial

·Joe Tonahill, a trial lawyer from Jasper, Texas, who was personally selected by Melvin Belli to be part of the Ruby defense team

·Breck Wall, an entertainer in Dallas in 1963, who was reportedly one of Ruby’s best friends at the time of the assassination. He visited Ruby in jail shortly after the Oswald shooting

·Tony Zoppi, a nightclub editor at The Dallas Morning News in 1963, who knew Ruby for more than 12 years and continued to maintain contact with Ruby during and after the trial.