Oswald Shot Dead on Live TV: Justice Never Delivered

Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead in the basement of Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, during a live television broadcast on November 24, 1963. Millions of Americans watched it happen on their television screens. It was the first murder broadcast live on national television. Oswald had been arrested the previous day for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. He was being transferred from the city jail to the county jail when Ruby, who had walked into the basement unchallenged despite the building being supposedly secured, stepped forward and fired a single .38 caliber shot into Oswald's abdomen. Oswald died at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where Kennedy had been pronounced dead two days earlier. Born in New Orleans on October 18, 1939, Oswald had a troubled childhood, was assessed as emotionally disturbed by a juvenile psychologist, and dropped out of school. He joined the Marines at seventeen, where he qualified as a sharpshooter. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, lived in Minsk for over two years, married a Russian woman named Marina Prusakova, and then returned to the United States in 1962 with his wife and infant daughter. The ease of his defection and return has fueled conspiracy theories for decades. Ruby said he acted spontaneously, driven by grief over Kennedy's death and a desire to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a public trial. He was convicted of murder in March 1964 and sentenced to death. The conviction was overturned on appeal, but Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism in January 1967 before a new trial could be held. He was 55. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy." The two official investigations reached contradictory conclusions. Everything that happened after Dallas, every conspiracy theory, every investigation, every doubt, flows from the fact that Oswald died without a trial.