November 24, 1963: Jack Ruby kills Lee Harvey Oswald.
Two days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the assassin himself was shot down as he was being transported from the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters to a nearby county jail. As Oswald and the policemen accompanying him passed through a crowd of reporters, Jack Ruby, a nightclub operator, emerged from the group and fired at Oswald with a revolver; his fatal wounding of Kennedy’s killer was broadcast on live television, and he was arrested immediately afterward.
Ruby’s motives remain unclear, but the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that, at the very least, the murder “involved at least some premeditation”. The Warren Commission found no connection between Ruby, Oswald, or any larger conspiracy, and Ruby himself claimed that he ”did it for Jackie and the kids”, and that his actions helped “redeem” Dallas in the eyes of the rest of the nation. Others believe that his murder of Oswald was part of a cover-up of a larger conspiracy, especially given his (alleged) connections to the Mafia and other organized crime groups. Ruby was convicted in 1964 of murder with malice. He was granted a new trial in 1966, this time held in Wichita Falls rather than in Dallas, but he succumbed to cancer before he could be retried.