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But the rifle was gone from the Paine garage.
All Over. At 12:30 that afternoon, just as President Kennedy's car passed by the Texas Book Depository, that same rifle was poked out of a sixth-floor window. A bystander spotted it. "Boy," he said, "you sure can't say the Secret Service isn't on the ball. Look at that guy up there in the window with a rifle."
Seconds later, three shots were fired —and President Kennedy was dead or dying. Lee Oswald slipped out a rear entrance of the building, walked six blocks, returned to Elm and boarded a bus. The bus bogged down in traffic. Oswald got off, walked a few blocks, got into a cab, ordered the driver to drop him on the 500 block of North Beckley—five blocks beyond his room. He paid the 950 fare, gave the driver a nickel tip, hurried to his room, ran out again with a windbreaker.
"Those Poor Kids." By this time, the warehouse employees had been assembled and Oswald's absence noted.
A police call was already on the air. As Oswald walked along East Tenth, Patrolman J. D. Tippit pulled up, got out of his car and started toward him.
Oswald whipped out a .38-cal. revolver, pumped three bullets into Tippit and killed him. Minutes later, he was cornered in a movie house.
At the Paine home, even before she knew that her husband was implicated, Marina Oswald watched the TV news casts in horror. "What a terrible thing this is to Mrs. Kennedy," she said. "Now the children will have to grow up without a father!" That, of course, was the reaction of millions of people—notably including a balding saloonkeeper, Jack Ruby. "Those poor kids," he moaned when he heard the news.
The Busybody. Ruby was another unlovable character. He had knocked around with some tough boys in his home town, Chicago, now prided himself on running one of the most popular striptease joints in Dallas. He carried a gun, was a cop buff, and loved to visit police headquarters. Medical reports later noted that Bachelor Ruby contracted gonorrhea no fewer than four times; he checked negative for syphilis. "He denies homosexuality, but is extremely sensitive should anybody accuse him of that and is very defensive," said a psychiatrist at Ruby's bond hearing. "He admits that he must adopt at times the feminine position during intercourse. His handling of sexuality is flippant, more the nature of a bragging youth." The psychiatrist described Ruby, 52, as a "hyperactive busybody," sexually and socially.
Whether or not Ruby, as his lawyer claims, went temporarily insane at news of Kennedy's assassination, there seems little doubt that he suffered a severe emotional trauma. On Sunday morning, as police prepared to transfer Lee Oswald from headquarters to the county jail, Ruby eased himself into a crowd of newsmen, waited till Oswald was brought down from his fourth-floor cell. Then he stepped up, stuck out his revolver and, as millions of televiewers watched, killed Oswald with one shot. That act, he said later, made him think he was "looking on history." He told his examiners that he thought: "I am above everybody. They cannot move me." He had, for the first time in his long and scruffy life, become "a big guy."