tt with a handgun. Arrested at a theatre and put in the city jail on Friday, November 22, Oswald was to be transferred to Dallas County Jail on Sunday, November, 24. As police led Oswald through the city jail basement and as television cameras rolled, a man later identified as nightclub owner Jack Ruby lunged through the crowd of onlookers in front of Oswald and shot once into his abdomen. Oswald was rushed to Parkland, where he died. Ruby was immediately arrested and later sentenced to death, but he died in prison in 1967. The WCR's most important conclusion was that Oswald acted alone in planning and executing the assassination and that he killed Tippitt during his attempted flight. Similarly, Ruby, distraught over the event and acting alone, betook himself and his gun to the city jail basement.
From November 1963 onward there arose in the culture for a host of reasons questions and speculations about whether, on one hand, Oswald had been the assassin, and on the other, whether, if he was guilty of JFK's murder, he had been part of a conspiracy. One review of the 1991 motion picture JFK illustrates emergence of something of an assassination cottage industry when it declares that director Oliver Stone "dust[ed] off an accretion of well-worn conspiracy theories, most of which have been in circulation since the days following the assassination itself." An Internet (Google) search of the phrase "JFK assassination" for this research yielded 20,400 "hits," or discrete Internet sites, where the phrase occurs.
Among the multiplicity of critics and theorists of the assassination emerging since 1963, two lines of inquiry have persistently served as benchmarks against which and resources from which have derived most criticisms of the official story. One was Mark Lane's best-seller Rush to Judgment, an early refutation of WCR conclusions. The other, which provided context for the film JFK, was an investigation headed by New Orleans Dist...