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Ruby was so crushed by the assassination, said Guttmacher, that he spoke of Kennedy "in terms that a person in love would use," saying again and again, "I fell for that guy." In his state of grief, said Guttmacher, Ruby blanked out, did not remember killing Oswald, recalled only being wrestled to the floor after the shooting. Said Guttmacher of Ruby's account of that moment: "He said, 'It flashed through my mind what are all these people jumping on me for? I'm a known person, not some kind of a screwball.' "
Belli was elated with Guttmacher's testimony, decided that other defense witnesses would be anticlimactic. The next morning he told Judge Brown: "The defense rests, Your Honor."
That was not, of course, the end of the Ruby case. Henry Wade had three topnotch medical experts of his own waiting to present rebuttal testimony. They were Neurologists Francis Forster of the University of Wisconsin, Roland Mackay of Northwestern Medical School, and Robert S. Schwab of the Harvard Medical School. Each testified that Ruby's electroencephalograph charts proved no markedly serious ailment in the defendant. When Forster was asked if the graphs supported a diagnosis of psychomotor epilepsy, he retorted: "They would not."
For surrebuttal, Belli summoned from Chicago Dr. Frederic A. Gibbs, a pioneer in electroencephalography. After a midnight flight to Dallas, Gibbs took the stand, said in precise and authoritarian manner: "I determined that Jack Ruby had a particular, very rare type of epilepsy, a type that afflicts .5% of epilepsy cases, a very distinctive epileptic pattern."
"Back to the Lynch Laws." Gibbs was the 66th—and last—witness in the trial.
Judge Brown had already framed his charge to the jury, explaining what choice of verdicts they had under Texas law. Court was recessed while defense and prosecution attorneys studied the charge. Before long, the defense was screaming about it. Tonahill told newsmen, "It's an instructed verdict of guilty." Cried Belli: "It's unsanitary, un-American and un-Texan." They tried for hours to get Brown to change it, lodged 137 separate exceptions to the charge. Unyielding, Brown left it about the same, finally got around to reading it to the jury after dinner that night.
Then, into the morning hours, came the summations—four for the prosecution, three for the defense. Belli began the defense's final oration shortly before midnight, walked slowly to the jury box and said softly: "Let us see in the small hours of the morning if we can discover something never lost in this great city of Dallas. I speak of justice." He reviewed the psychiatric evidence, thumped a green cardboard box containing the stack of charts tracing Ruby's brain wave. At the defense table, big Joe Tonahill wept. Jack Ruby, chalk-white, sat listless and still.