Episode 352 Jack Ruby Miniseries Part 28 (Jolly West 2 of 2)

In this gripping twenty-eighth installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we finish out the two part story tell of Jolly West. We revisit the infamous late-night meeting on Saturday, November 23, 1963, at Simon's Garage between Jack Ruby, off-duty Dallas patrolman Harry Olsen, and Carousel stripper Kathy Kay (K. Helen Coleman). We contrast Jack Ruby’s later jailhouse claims—that Olsen explicitly prompted him to kill Oswald to save the Kennedy family further grief—with Olsen and Kay's flat denials and convenient claims of amnesia. We trace how defense attorney Melvin Belli later seized upon this parking garage caucus to argue police incitement, prompting the FBI to conduct extensive re-interviews of Olsen, Kay, and former Carousel bookkeeper Roy William Pike (alias Mike Ryan and Mike Pike) to determine whether Ruby was egged on by Dallas law enforcement.

We then step inside the Dallas County Jail for the dramatic June 7, 1964 cellblock interview between Jack Ruby and Chief Justice Earl Warren. We detail Ruby’s intense paranoia and isolation, including his insistence that a Jewish person be present in the room—leading to junior counsel Arlen Specter being brought in—and his desperate, repeated pleas to be transferred to Washington D.C., warning that his life was in mortal danger in Dallas and that American Jews were being slaughtered in retaliation. We analyze Chief Justice Warren's flat refusal to grant Ruby’s transfer request, writing off the prisoner's frantic appeals as the unhinged delusions of a broken, psychotic mind.

Finally, we examine the long-term shadow cast by Dr. Lewis Jolyon "Jolly" West’s psychiatric evaluations and his hidden ties to the CIA's top-secret MKUltra program. Following West’s follow-up June 1964 evaluation declaring Ruby’s psychosis chronic—which effectively neutralized the reliability of any lie detector test—we trace the decades-later revelations from the Church Committee, unsealed off-site MKUltra records, and investigative journalist Tom O'Neal's unearthing of West’s UCLA archives. Featuring insights from West’s long-time colleague Dr. J. Shirley, we explore how West's diagnosis permanently sidelined Ruby as a competent witness, closing the book on the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald and ensuring the case's most enduring secrets remained locked away.