Reclaiming History (390 page)

‡ Everything about Belli, his clothing, his words, his lifestyle (he was married six times), even his law office, fell into this category. About the last he said, “Some say my office at 722 Montgomery Street looks like a gold-rush whorehouse, but actually it’s a museum of my life and travels. San Franciscans love to gawk in the windows. And the Gray Line has the office on one of its tours” (Belli with Kaiser,
Melvin Belli
, photo section).

^*
Pronounced “Bell-eye” “not Belli” as in one’s belly, he would lecture any members of the media who, perchance, were among the few who hadn’t heard his name pronounced before.

†Belli, often called the “Father of Demonstrative Evidence,” started to popularize this method of presenting evidence to a jury in the early 1940s in San Francisco. His theory, undoubtedly true, was that in addition to
telling
a jury what the evidence was, if you could let them see and feel the evidence, even taste or smell it, your chances of favorably reaching the jury were enhanced.

^*
In fact, the
New York Times
had observed that Ruby’s shooting of Oswald “marked the first time in 15 years around the globe that a real-life homicide had occurred in front of live cameras…The Dallas shooting [was] easily the most extraordinary moments of TV that a set owner ever watched” (
New York Times
, November 25, 1963, pp.1, 10).

^*
Before Belli’s doctors examined Ruby, Dallas assistant DA Bill Alexander, who had known Ruby on a friendly basis for many years, took Dallas psychiatrist Dr. John Holbrook into Ruby’s cell the day after he shot Oswald to examine Ruby. At a later bail hearing for Ruby, Alexander testified that when Ruby asked him, “Shall I talk to him, Bill? What would you do?” he said, “Jack, all we want is a fair, square psychiatric evaluation of you. If you’re nuts, you ought to go to the state insane asylum, and if you’re all right, we are going to have to prosecute you. I would talk to the man.” In response to Ruby wondering if he was “getting into some kind of trap,” Alexander testified he said, “No, Jack. I wouldn’t let any friendship go down the drain just to mess you around.” (Belli with Carroll,
Dallas Justice
, pp.58–59) (Alexander told me that on the stand he had “cleaned up a little” what he told Ruby. He said he actually told Ruby, “Jack, if you’re crazy you need to go to the insane asylum. And if you’re not crazy, we’re going to try to burn your ass.” Alexander also denied telling Ruby of their friendship. “I knew Ruby for ten or twelve years,” he told me, “but we weren’t friends. Never had a cup of coffee with him. Never went to his club. I used to bump into him at sporting events and around town. What I told Jack was ‘I’ve known you too long to fuck you.’” [Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on December 11, 2001]) When Alexander was asked on the stand if, in fact, the very next day, after conferring with Holbrook and being assured that Ruby was not insane, he told the press that he intended to prosecute Ruby for murder and ask for the death penalty, Alexander answered, “I sure did.” (Belli with Carroll,
Dallas Justice
, p.59; after conferring with Holbrook: Kaplan and Waltz,
Trial of Jack Ruby
, p.60)
Was it duplicitous of Alexander to encourage Ruby to talk to Holbrook? Not if you know Alexander the way I think I’ve gotten to know him. He’s just a straight shooter who would prosecute his…well, you know whom I mean, if she ran afoul of the law. At the trial, Alexander, who once said that impeachment was too good for Earl Warren—he needed hanging—told reporters, “They want to examine Ruby’s brain? We’ll be glad to deliver it to them from Huntsville after we fry him.” (Gertz,
Moment of Madness
, p.6) Frontier lore and legend have invariably focused on the marshals and sheriffs of the lawless West, not the prosecutors, but the tall, rawboned Alexander, with his gallows humor told with a slight grin, would have fit the mold precisely.

^*
In another appearance on
The Merv Griffin Show
I won’t forget, this time with Belli, Griffin would ask Mel a question, he’d answer, then he’d ask me a question, and Mel would try to answer that question too. I’m pretty aggressive in a courtroom, but since this was not a trial or even a debate, I was more amused than anything else. I chuckled to Griffin during a break, “Merv, Mel loves the camera and I’m not going to compete with him for it. If you want me to be more involved you’ll have to be more insistent that you want to hear from me.” I forget just what happened during the next segment or two but my recollection is that I participated more.

^*
Indeed, in his daily diary, one of the jurors, J. Waymon Rose, wrote that Ruby “looks pitiful and alone, as though he is a head of cabbage.” Elsewhere, he referred to “the pitiful, lost look” Ruby had in his eyes. (
Dallas Morning News
, August 3, 2002, p.30A)

^*
Despite this critical testimony by Dean against Ruby (whose truthfulness was challenged by a Warren Commission assistant counsel—see endnote discussion), Dean, who admitted being a friend of Ruby’s and the recipient of a bottle of whiskey from him every Christmas, said that after the trial Ruby sent word he wanted to see him in his jail cell. “He hugged me and was glad to see me,” Dean recalled. “I saw he had a pair of broken glasses, so I got the prescription and bought him a new pair.” Eight months later Ruby gave Dean his copy of the Warren Commission Report with the inscription, “Your Buddy, Jack Ruby.” (Earl Golz, “Ex-Officer Fears ‘Set-up,’”
Dallas Morning News
, March 25, 1979, p.34A)

†In fact, although prosecutor Bill Alexander told me he did not believe that Ruby was insane or even mentally ill, he acknowledged to me that Ruby was “wired up different.” Of course, for even a straight shooter like Alexander, it would be mighty difficult for him, as Ruby’s prosecutor, to acknowledge that Ruby was mentally ill. (Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on December 11, 2001)
As part of Ruby’s insanity defense, Belli attempted to introduce at the trial certified copies of the hospital commitments for mental illness of Ruby’s mother, Fanny, one of his brothers, Earl, and one of his sisters, Eileen, on the ground that mental illness ran in his client’s family and was hereditary, but Judge Brown ruled the documents were “not admissible…under Texas law.” However, in his direct examination of Dr. Martin Towler, Belli did sneak into the record that Ruby’s mother had been hospitalized for mental illness. (Kaplan and Waltz,
Trial of Jack Ruby
, pp.214, 225, 242; Earl Ruby’s hospitalization in a psychopathic ward: 14 H 372, WCT Earl Ruby)

^*
The closest Belli came to establishing his point was not from the testimony by his psychiatrists and medical witnesses but from the testimony of one of Ruby’s strippers at the Carousel Club, Penny Dollar (true name, Patricia Ann Kohs). Kohs said that one of Jack’s fights at the Carousel Club was with a taxi driver. “Jack knocked him down the stairs,” she told the jury. “Then we came down…Jack was beating his head on the sidewalk. Then he stopped all of a sudden and said, ‘Did I do this?’” (Belli with Carroll,
Dallas Justice
, p.171)

^*
In the federal courts, as opposed to most states, when a defendant pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, the prosecution has the burden of proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant was
sane
at the time of his act. Most legal observers agree that this very high burden of proof in the federal courts was largely responsible for the not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict in the trial of William Hinckley for the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

†However, on cross-examination by prosecutor Alexander, Gibbs conceded he had “no opinion” as to whether Ruby was in the throes of an epileptic seizure at the time he shot Oswald that prevented him from knowing right from wrong or from understanding the nature and consequences of his act (Kaplan and Waltz,
Trial of Jack Ruby
, p.300).

^*
Many on the Ruby jury, after hearing all the evidence, came to the same conclusion. For instance, the wife of jury foreman Max Causey (deceased) said, “[My husband] really thought that Ruby thought he was going to be a hero because he was going to kill the guy who shot the president.” Juror Douglas Sowell said that “Ruby thought he’d be a hero in the public eye if he did it. I believe he thought that, I really do. I think that motivated him, that he thought that rather than being a murderer, he’d be a hero.” Juror R. J. “Bob” Flechtner said, “I think he just went down there and shot Oswald and thought he was going to be a hero. And he thought he was doing the right thing, and our society says he didn’t do the right thing.” (Dempsey,
Jack Ruby Trial Revisited
, pp.3–4, 159, 171) In a later, May 24, 1965, hearing in Dallas over Ruby’s legal representation, Ruby admitted as much, voluntarily taking the witness stand and saying, “I should have never tried to be heroic” (
Dallas Morning News
, May 25, 1965, p.1).

^*
Remarkably, Belli had neglected, in his summation, to do something that criminal defense attorneys do automatically (999 out of 1,000 times)—urge the jury, if they were disposed against Ruby on the facts and the law, to at least spare his life, which they had the power to do. In his summation, Belli did not have to put all his eggs in one basket and be imprisoned by his psychomotor epileptic defense. Not only didn’t Belli ask the jury to give Ruby life imprisonment instead of death if they found him guilty of murder with malice, but since Judge Brown gave the jury an instruction on “murder without malice,” where the punishment for a conviction thereunder was “no longer than five years” in prison, Belli had a fallback, alternative argument if the jury decided to reject the insanity defense. That he should have done so has been reflected upon by many, including the judge. “By [Belli’s] dependence on his single, daring defense, Belli neglected other legal avenues he might have followed to save Jack Ruby from the electric chair” (Holloway,
Dallas and the Jack Ruby Trial
, p.8). Instead, Belli asked the jury to exonerate Ruby completely. “If you put a felony brand of
any
kind on Jack Ruby, he won’t be eligible for Veteran’s Administration [benefits]. He
is
now, being an ex-serviceman,” he argued (Belli with Carroll,
Dallas Justice
, p.242). “Belli gave it to us by going for broke—all or nothing…,” Bill Alexander said. “He told the jury it was acquittal or nothing. You can’t give a jury that kind of dare. And all he had going for him was some fancy doctors’ talk and a few mildly abnormal squiggles on a piece of paper” (Wills and Demaris,
Jack Ruby
, p.123).

^*
And Ruby would launch an appeal, but not with Belli as his lawyer. Within a week after the verdict, a letter signed by Ruby, but with his two sisters and three brothers behind it, was on its way to Belli’s San Francisco law office firing him from the case. (“Good-by, Belli,” p.19) On June 7, 1964, near the beginning of his testimony before the Warren Commission, Ruby told Chief Justice Warren, “Mr. Belli evidently did not go into my case thoroughly, circumstantially. If he had gone into it, he wouldn’t have tried to vindicate me on an insanity plea to relieve me of all responsibility, because circumstantially everything looked so bad for me. It can happen—it happens to many people who happen to be at the wrong place at the right time. Had Mr. Belli spent more time with me, he would have realized not to try to get me out completely free” (5 H 182).
Mel Belli, according to his former law partner, Seymour Ellison, took his loss in the Ruby case, and then being fired by Ruby, “harder than anything else in his legal career. He literally went into a shell for about a month, very rarely even showing up at the office. He even turned down a big publicity case at the time involving an ax murderess named Jean Toman who insisted she would only be represented by Mel. It was the type of high-visibility case Mel would normally have a relish for trying” (Telephone interview of Seymour Ellison by author on October 7, 2006).

^*
In one of my capital cases, the defendant had left the military service and learned that his wife, a woman of rare beauty whom people came to court just to ogle, had had an affair. He stalked the man for two weeks and finally, after waiting in the backseat of the man’s car, shot him to death. It was a circumstantial-evidence case and after the verdict of guilty of first-degree murder, although my office wanted me to seek the death penalty, in my summation in the penalty trial (in contrast to Texas, the penalty trial, with the same judge and jury, is separate from the guilt trial in California) I went against my office—at least to the extent that I never pushed for or even affirmatively asked for death, instead telling the jury there were good arguments for life imprisonment as well as death. I learned later from a law student of mine whose spouse was on the jury that despite this, on the first ballot the majority of jurors voted for death, but because of the position I had taken, one by one they eventually came over to life imprisonment. For years thereafter, the defendant’s mother would write me a Christmas card always thanking me for saving, she felt, her son’s life.

†“You know what really made them [Dallasites] mad at me?” the fun-loving barrister, who traveled the world and stayed at its finest hotels with friends like actor Errol Flynn, would later ask. “My saying that they do not even know what to use a bidet [a low basin, used especially in France, for bathing one’s private parts] for—the one I saw in Dallas had flowers planted in it” (Wills and Demaris,
Jack Ruby
, p.82).

^*
“We didn’t buy” the psychomotor epilepsy defense from the “so-called expert witnesses,” Ruby juror J. Waymon Rose said. “It was ridiculous…It just didn’t impress us at all,” said another juror, Douglas Sowell. “That [psycho] motor epilepsy stuff didn’t make much sense,” added juror J. G. Holton Jr. (Dempey,
Jack Ruby Trial Revisited
, pp.139, 157, 183)