Kitabı oku: «A bullet For The President: John F. Kennedy»

© Valeria V. Miller, 2026

ISBN 978-5-0071-1718-0

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Chapter 1: “The Call from the Club Girl”

“Sometimes history begins not with a gunshot, but with a telephone call.” — from the notes of Jim Garrison, New Orleans Archives

Karen Carlin, known as “Little Lin,” a 22-year-old dancer at the Carousel Club in Dallas, was one of dozens of girls who worked for Jack Ruby — the emotional, hot-tempered nightclub owner with close ties to the police, journalists, and the city’s underworld. Ruby ran the club in the spirit of cheap American decadence: red lights, dusty curtains, girls in feathers, whiskey, cigarette smoke, and police officers sitting at neighboring tables. Everyone crossed paths there — from late-night reporters to people it was better not to ask about where they got their money. Karen was one of the youngest. She lived in poverty and sometimes literally had to ask Ruby to lend her money for food and rent. He helped her, but not out of pity — for him, all the girls were part of his little empire, where he felt like the “boss.”

The Morning of November 24, 1963

It was Sunday, just two days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. America was seething. Karen woke up early. She had no money at all. She remembered that Ruby had promised to lend her $25 until the following week. She picked up the phone and dialed his number.

“I called Jack around ten. I told him we had no food. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll send the money.’ And that was it.” — from Karen Carlin’s testimony before the Warren Commission, Volume XV.

Everything that happened next seems like an incredible coincidence — or a perfectly scripted scenario.

10:19 a.m. — Karen calls Ruby.

11:17 a.m. — Ruby enters a Western Union office on the corner of Main Street, fills out a receipt, and sends the money to Karen. The clerk, Mary Lou Wilson, later produced the receipt bearing the signature “Jack L. Ruby.”

11:21 a.m. — Ruby leaves the office, turns the corner… and enters the basement of the Dallas Police Department, where, at that very moment, journalists are lining the walls, waiting for Oswald to be transferred. Four minutes after sending the money, on live television, Ruby pulls out a revolver and shoots Oswald in the abdomen.

The shot — 11:21:40 a.m.

The Western Union transfer — 11:17 a.m.

The difference — 4 minutes.

Even within the framework of the official Warren Commission investigation, many lawyers and investigators could not explain how a man could have happened to be in the police basement at precisely the moment Oswald was being transferred. Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, would later say:

“If Karen had not called, Ruby would not have gone to Western Union. If he had not gone there, he would not have been in that corridor. And Oswald would have lived and, perhaps, talked.”

After Ruby’s arrest, Karen Carlin was called in for questioning. She insisted:

“I just wanted twenty-five dollars. I had no food. I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

Investigators noticed that she had called at exactly the moment when Ruby was already dressed and near the club. He did not tell her that he would go personally — but he went anyway, rather than having an administrator handle the transfer. No one saw him pass security into the police basement, even though the entrance was normally closed.

Garrison and a number of independent journalists, particularly Penn Jones and Harold Weisberg, suggested that Karen’s call might have been a “trigger” — an element of a prearranged plan. She may have been asked to call at a specific time in order to set Ruby in motion along the necessary route — from Western Union to the police station. No direct order was required: it was enough to press one button in the chain.

Karen’s testimony before the Commission was brief and contradictory. Later, it was reported that she had changed her name and left Texas. Some researchers wrote that she lived under police protection; others said that she had been intimidated. She gave no further official interviews after 1964.

But if we assume that Ruby did not act spontaneously, Karen’s telephone call becomes an activation mechanism. Ruby may have received an unspoken signal: “It’s time.” He knew where Oswald would be. He knew how to get into the basement. Besides, no ordinary person takes a loaded revolver with him just to send $25 to a hungry dancer.

Yet on the morning of November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby left his home carrying a.38-caliber Colt Cobra revolver, and his official explanation to investigators was absurdly simple:

“I always carried a gun with me. It was a habit.”

But District Attorney Jim Garrison and independent investigators pointed out that Ruby was not going to the club or to work, but to a Western Union office, where there was no reason for him to need a weapon. That morning, he appeared composed but nervous — witnesses saw him enter his club several times, listen to the radio, check the newspaper, and then leave. The revolver was fully loaded with “Special” cartridges rather than the ordinary practice ammunition Ruby used for self-defense. This suggested that he already knew he might need a weapon. Garrison, during his investigation in the late 1960s, wrote in his notes:

“The idea that he happened to be there with a gun sounds like a fairy tale for children. He came into a police building where dozens of armed officers were on duty and somehow passed through without being searched. This was no coincidence. It was a script.”

Garrison advanced the hypothesis that Ruby had received an order or a hint to eliminate Oswald so that Oswald would not begin talking. According to one version of the theory, Oswald was preparing to reveal that he had been planted inside an anti-Castro group connected to the CIA and that he had been used as cover. If he began talking, “the entire operation would collapse.” Therefore, in Garrison’s view, Ruby was the intermediary, while Karen Carlin’s call was the trigger that put him in the right place at the right time, with a weapon in his possession.

Garrison suspected that Karen’s call was not spontaneous but staged. Someone had asked her to call that particular morning, possibly through intermediaries. Ruby understood the call as a coded signal — that “the time had come.” To make everything look ordinary, he really did go to send her the money, so that there would be an official cover story. He knew that Oswald would be transferred at precisely that moment. This information was not secret to journalists and police officers — the people “in the know” knew the transfer schedule. Ruby was one of them: he fed police officers free meals and entered the station without a pass. At that moment, he could go down into the basement without anyone questioning him — everyone considered him “one of the guys.”

At the time of his arrest, he had no holster in his pocket — the weapon had already been drawn. He did not take his dog Sheba with him — the beloved companion of Jack Ruby, whom he normally never left at home — even though he supposedly intended to be gone only briefly. Everyone who knew Ruby said that he was crazy about his dog. He took her with him to restaurants, to the club, even to the dancers’ rehearsals. Neighbors said that Ruby talked to her as if she were a person, fed her only the best meat, and whenever he needed to go somewhere, always took her with him. Journalist Hugh Ainsworth, one of the few people who saw Ruby in his everyday life, wrote:

“He was paranoid and a tough man, but he was touchingly gentle with his dog. It seemed that Sheba was all he had.”

But on November 24, 1963, everything changed. That morning, when he supposedly went simply to send Karen Carlin $25, Ruby left Sheba at home, locked inside without food or water. This was a sharp departure from his usual behavior. His neighbor, Mary Lou Williams, later testified that he always took the dog with him, even when he was going out “for ten minutes.” But that day, he did not take her.

He also left the radio on, the newspaper open, and his keys on the table — like a man who did not expect to return. If the official account is to be believed, Ruby spontaneously went to send money to a dancer, happened to end up at the police station, happened to encounter Oswald, and, in a burst of “patriotism,” pulled the trigger. But then why did he leave the dog when he normally took her even when he went out for cigarettes? Why did he take a loaded weapon without a holster and leave at precisely the time when the “insiders” knew Oswald was being transferred?

Ruby knew he would not return.

In the testimony of his friends and colleagues, contained in the Warren Commission materials, Volume XX, there is a direct quotation:

“He used to say that Sheba was his family. He would never leave her for an hour. Unless… unless he thought it was the end.”

Several months after his arrest, when Ruby was already in prison, he asked for the dog to be brought to him. He desperately wanted to see her, and when he was refused, he cried for a long time — so his prison chaplain, Father Eliot, later recounted.

Jim Garrison saw this as a symbolic but extremely important detail:

“The abandoned dog is not some trivial domestic detail. It is a psychological marker. A man leaving, knowing that he will not return.”

He left the money and keys on the table, which looked like the behavior of a man heading not out on an ordinary errand, but toward something final. When he was arrested after the shooting, he did not resist and said:

“I saved Mrs. Kennedy from a trial.”

But Garrison saw these words as a diversionary statement, intended for the cameras. He wrote:

“He played the role of the patriotic avenger so that no one would ask who had sent him there.”

Garrison and his team found connections between Ruby and the anti-Islamic and anti-Castro networks in the American South. They also found connections to people in organized crime, particularly from Chicago and New Orleans, and to Dallas police officers who “protected” his club. One FBI agent mentioned in Garrison’s materials reportedly said off the record:

“Ruby was a gofer. They had been using him for years. When the time came, they simply told him — ‘It’s time.’”

According to Garrison’s theory, Karen may have been an unwilling participant, a “button.” Her call was the trigger in the chain, creating an alibi and setting Ruby in motion. If she had been called to testify before a jury with the right to cross-examination, her words might have shed light on who was behind the call. But she was not allowed to appear publicly. She gave brief testimony to the Warren Commission, without journalists present, and afterward disappeared from public view. Some reports mentioned that she feared for her life and asked that her name not be mentioned in the media.

In his book On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison wrote:

“Ruby did not kill out of patriotism. He killed because Oswald was going to talk. And the call from the girl at the club became the final line in the script.”

He saw in it a scene of controlled chaos: one call — one trip — four minutes — one shot. And the end of the story.

After the shooting, Ruby began to lose control. In prison, he repeatedly said, “They set all of this up for me,” and before his death from cancer in 1967, he told journalists:

“The truth will never come out. They’ll kill me, just as they killed him.”

Karen’s telephone call became the perfect lure. It provided a reason, a cover, and a precise connection to the timing. To an outside observer, it was simply a random call from a poor young woman. To those who had written the script, it was an activation signal.

Oswald’s death severed the only thread leading to the truth about Kennedy’s assassination. And it all began with a telephone call from a young woman at a cheap strip club.

“Sometimes history begins not with a gunshot, but with a telephone call.” — from the notes of Jim Garrison, New Orleans Archives.

When Jim Garrison began examining the final hours of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life, he discovered that Karen Carlin, whose real name was Karen Bennett, was not simply a dancer, but one of the women at Ruby’s club who were used not only for entertainment, but also for “surveillance” and the transmission of information. In Garrison’s files, there was a theory that the CIA used establishments like the Carousel Club as cover operations — places where prostitutes and dancers could be recruited to observe customers, including police officers, military personnel, and Cuban émigrés. The reports contained the names of women connected to the Cuban underground, while Ruby frequently appeared at parties in the company of people who had direct connections to CIA operations in New Orleans and Miami. Carlin knew quite a lot — which Cubans came into the club, who paid in cash, and what conversations took place about “patriotic missions against Castro.” Garrison reconstructed the events minute by minute.

10:00 a.m. — Carlin calls Ruby and asks for money.

10:15—10:20 — Ruby leaves his house, carrying a weapon, leaving his dog behind.

11:15 — he is already in the police basement.

11:21 — Oswald is shot.

According to Garrison, Carlin’s call was not a request for money, but a coded signal. It was possible that someone among Ruby’s contacts was using Carlin as an instrument to bring him to the right place at the right time.

“If you want to make someone act, you use familiar connections. No one is going to go kill someone on the orders of a stranger. But if the signal comes from someone you are accustomed to helping, you don’t ask questions.” — Garrison.

At first, she said that she had called around 9:00, then around 10:30. At times, she claimed that she “did not remember who had suggested that she call.” In the materials of Garrison’s investigation, he noted that Ruby frequently traveled to New Orleans, where agents and counterintelligence officers working for the CIA on the Cuban front were active at the same time. Oswald was also carrying out his strange “activities” in support of Castro there, although many considered him a double agent. According to Garrison’s theory, Ruby and Oswald may have been links in the same operation, while Carlin was merely an “accidental” channel for transmitting the signal. Garrison later wrote:

“Ruby was not a pimp, but a courier. His club was a communications channel in which women played the role of messengers.”

After Oswald’s murder, several dancers from the Carousel Club disappeared. Beverly Oliver, known as the “Lady in White,” claimed that she had seen Ruby and Oswald together several weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. She insisted that Ruby and Oswald had known each other long before Kennedy’s assassination. She later disappeared and did not reappear until the 1970s, when she openly spoke about it on television. Kathy Brown, the club cashier, was killed in a car accident one month after Ruby’s arrest. Nancy Gamble, one of Karen Carlin’s close friends, moved to Houston and never gave another interview. To Garrison, all of this looked like a cleanup of witnesses — careful, systematic, and without leaving traces.

In CIA archives declassified in the 1990s, the use of strip clubs and prostitutes to gather information about attitudes within the police and among Cuban émigrés was indeed mentioned. Similar operations were conducted under code names such as “Project Midnight” and “Operation Tick-Tock,” in which women served as “companions” for drunk officers and agents. Garrison believed that the Carousel Club was part of precisely such a structure. Women like Karen Carlin could have passed information through Ruby, who maintained connections with the police, Cuban émigrés, and people from the FBI.

“Ruby was a man who knew everyone who knew something. That is the ideal figure for those who want to control the flow of rumors.” — J. Garrison.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Ruby did not leave, although he could have. He remained at the club, was nervous, made phone calls, drank coffee, and kept asking, “Where is Karen?” Some female witnesses, including bartender Georgia Smith, claimed that Ruby also received a strange telephone call that night, before Oswald’s murder, after which he suddenly became calm. Garrison noted that this call was not recorded in the police reports. He suspected that it involved the transmission of the final signal — not a signal to act, but a signal for the elimination. When Garrison requested a list of all the women who worked at the Carousel Club, it turned out that some of the documents had disappeared. Those that remained looked falsified — the names did not match the tax records. For example, Karen Carlin appeared under the pseudonym “Little Lynn,” but her name had been crossed out on the November 1963 payroll list. This had been done after Ruby’s arrest. For Garrison, this was a key point: someone had altered the club’s records after the fact in order to remove the names of women connected to the events of November 22—24. When Karen was later questioned by representatives of the Warren Commission, she appeared depressed and repeated the same phrase over and over:

“I just called him because I didn’t have any money.”

But Garrison understood — in cases like these, there is no “just.”

After Ruby’s arrest, the Carousel Club was closed. The women were questioned, but most of their testimony did not make it into the commission’s final report. Some materials were classified for decades. When Garrison requested that they be declassified, he was refused. He then uttered the phrase that became a symbol of his investigation:

“They killed not only the president in Dallas. They killed the truth there.”

But two days before the shots rang out in Dallas, one woman claimed that she had overheard a conversation about the impending assassination of the president. To Jim Garrison and many researchers of the Kennedy case, she became a symbol of the fact that the truth had been nearby, but was deliberately ignored. Rose Cheramie (real name — Melba Christine Youngblood) was born in 1929. Her life was difficult and dramatic: drug addiction, prostitution, and constant problems with the law. She lived on the edge of society and crime. Despite this, her voice became one of the first warning notes in the case of Kennedy’s assassination.

Cheramie claimed that two days before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, two men gave her a ride. During the trip, she overheard their conversation, in which they discussed a plan to assassinate the president. They named details, the date, and even the place where everything was supposed to happen. According to Cheramie, she tried to warn the police and the public, but her words were ignored. She claimed that after accidentally overhearing dangerous information, one of the men threatened her and literally threw her out onto the side of the road.

Garrison wrote in his materials that Rose Cheramie’s story was not ignored by accident. According to his version, it was part of a system: remove a witness who could shed light on the conspiracy. Her reputation as a prostitute and drug addict became a convenient pretext for discrediting her testimony. The police did not take her seriously, and the case disappeared into the bureaucratic system. Despite the fact that her words were not included in the official reports of the Warren Commission, Jim Garrison incorporated her testimony into his investigation, considering it one of the most important links in the chain of the conspiracy.

“Rose Cheramie heard what we were not supposed to hear. That night, she was thrown not only out of the car, but out of history.” — Jim Garrison.