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RIP Jim Leavelle, dead at 99 years old, the man handcuffed to Oswald

Hornius Emeritus

By Hornius Emeritus
in Daily Texan

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NowThis

NowThis 931

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seriously though, he was a part of our national history.  That moment is eternal, will survive for centuries, and he was living with us - which is pretty cool.  I'm in awe of people still alive who are WW2 vets, Holocaust survivors etc. who were part of monumental events. These are special people and their passing is a huge loss. 

Here is his interview from 5 years ago

 

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ConferenceRoom

ConferenceRoom 6147

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/us/james-leavelle-dead.html

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James R. Leavelle, the big man in the white Stetson who epitomized the horrors of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in one of the most famous photographs of all time — the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby — died on Thursday at a hospital in Denver. He was 99.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Karla Leavelle.

Mr. Leavelle, a veteran Dallas homicide detective who had survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, was handcuffed to Mr. Oswald and was leading him through a police station basement on Nov. 24, 1963, when Mr. Ruby, a nightclub owner, stepped out of the crowd and pumped a fatal bullet into the prisoner. The shooting, with Mr. Oswald’s pained grimace and Detective Leavelle’s stricken glower, was chillingly captured by Robert H. Jackson of The Dallas Times Herald in an iconic photograph that won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

Moments earlier, he and Mr. Oswald had had an eerie exchange, Mr. Leavelle often later recounted. “Lee,” he recalled saying, “if anybody shoots at you, I hope they are as good a shot as you.”

To which, he said, Mr. Oswald replied: “You’re being melodramatic.”

At the time, two days after President Kennedy had been gunned down in a motorcade through downtown Dallas, Mr. Oswald was a suspect in the killing of a Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippit, and had yet to be conclusively tied to the assassination. But after Detective Leavelle asked him whether he had shot the police officer, Mr. Oswald aroused the detective’s suspicions by insisting, “I didn’t shoot anybody,” as if, Mr. Leavelle later recounted, there had been another shooting as well. P

In the decades that followed, Mr. Leavelle was in constant demand as a speaker, invariably asked to recall the fateful moment. “I saw him, he was standing in the middle of the driveway,” he said of Mr. Ruby in an interview with The New York Times in 2006.
“He had a pistol by his side, I saw out of the corner of my eye,” Mr. Leavelle continued. “I jerked back on Oswald to get him behind me. I had my hand through his belt. All I succeeded in doing, I turned him so instead of dead center the bullet hit four inches to the left of his navel and two inches above.”

Another detective, L.C. Graves, on Mr. Oswald’s other side, grabbed Mr. Ruby’s pistol around the cylinder, preventing another shot, Mr. Leavelle recalled. “I could see Ruby’s fingers flexing on the trigger, trying to fire,” he said. He knocked Mr. Oswald to the floor, removed the handcuffs and got him loaded into an ambulance. “I tried to take his pulse but I never could detect any pulse,” Mr. Leavelle said. He remembered hearing a groan and sigh in the ambulance, which he said he later took as the moment of Mr. Oswald’s expiration, although he was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital, where President Kennedy had been pronounced dead two days earlier.

Mr. Leavelle joined the Dallas Police Department in 1950, but his life had hardly lacked drama before then. The son of farm parents, James Robert Leavelle was born on Aug. 23, 1920, and grew up in northeast Texas near Texarkana. He joined the Navy out of high school in 1939 and was stationed at Pearl Harbor. He was on a destroyer tender that carried supplies to other ships when the Japanese bombed the fleet about a mile away on Dec. 7, 1941. He was unhurt in the attack, but while at sea in the Pacific during a severe storm in 1942, he fell off a ship’s ladder and had to be evacuated to a naval hospital in California.

There he met a nurse who became his wife, Taimi, who died in 2014. They had three children, Karla, Tanya Evers and James Craig. His son died in 2009. He is survived by his daughters, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Unable to return to the fighting, Mr. Leavelle became a civilian employee of the Army Air Force, running a military warehouse in Riverside, Calif. He then became an auditor for the federal government, investigating colleges receiving money under the G.I. Bill.

He spent his first six years on the Dallas force in patrol before making detective in 1956, and worked his way up from the burglary and theft squad to homicide, where he was working when President Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. Mr. Leavelle retired in 1976 and founded a polygraph business, which he turned over to his daughter Karla in 1980. He underwent triple-bypass heart surgery in 2004.

Mr. Leavelle, who remained active into his late 90s, traveled with the help of a Dallas police officer to the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington in late 2018 to rerecord an oral history he had made several years earlier before the museum’s opening in October.

In his last years Mr. Leavelle served on the board of the Crime Stoppers organization in Garland, Tex., and continued giving talks to police and school groups, usually around the Nov. 22 commemorations. He was still making occasional appearances as late as 2018. He said that he received about 500 requests a year for his autograph — “more than I need” — and in a phone interview in December said he had “four or five on my desk” at the moment. He was particularly proud, he said, of an invitation to address the F.B.I.’s graduation of its October 2006 agent training class at Quantico, Va.

As late as January he lived alone and unassisted. At 98½, he fell while he was doing errands in Garland, but he got himself home and planned to see a doctor a few days later. “It’ll quit hurting in a little while,” he told a Times reporter by phone.

For years, the light-colored double-breasted suit that Mr. Leavelle wore in the famous photo gathered dust in his closet. He later lent it to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, in the former Texas School Book Depository, from where Mr. Oswald is believed to have fired the fatal shots. It is displayed behind glass with his original hat, tie and handcuffs.

The boots on display are a later addition. He had thrown out the pair he was wearing on Nov. 22, 1963.

“I didn’t realize they were worth something,” he said.

 

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ConferenceRoom

ConferenceRoom 6147

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2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The easiest and most likely answer about Oswald’s death is not a conspiracy but incompetency of the police force.

I wouldn't even put it down to incompetency. It was a perfect storm of emotions and opportunity and the bad luck of a police car leaving as Ruby arrived at the basement ramp, which occupied the attention of the guard officer for the briefest of moments. I don't think anyone could script those four days. Absolute insanity. 

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DaggerHorns

DaggerHorns 3086

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15 minutes ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:

Dont forget get mad at kids 20 years younger than us if they mess up in a game that we werent athletic enough to play in

I don’t get mad. I completely lose my fucking mind and insist that I wear the headset the very next drive and win a national title every year from here on out.

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michaelpshayes

michaelpshayes 417

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9 hours ago, ConferenceRoom said:

I wouldn't even put it down to incompetency. It was a perfect storm of emotions and opportunity and the bad luck of a police car leaving as Ruby arrived at the basement ramp, which occupied the attention of the guard officer for the briefest of moments. I don't think anyone could script those four days. Absolute insanity. 

back on 50th anniversary of the assassination one of the news stations in dallas put out their raw video of the police station from the morning of the oswald murder ....you could sync the video up to the testimony of the police detective who left the garage for just a second allowing oswald to get in the basement..his testimony matched up perfectly with the honks you could hear on the video from inside the garage and the movement of cars coming up from the garage ...Ruby had about 20 seconds or less to get in that garage...it's utter madness the number of things that had to happen for Ruby to get that chance 

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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A mob of law enforcement and press are clearly moving in one direction.  You can tell by the angle of the photographer, that all of a sudden...the entire mob mentality (RIP, Jim) became, "Hey there's a guy walking contra-flow...maybe he's late for an appointment.  Make a hole, make it wide!"  Most valuable prisoner in U.S. History and the prevailing wisdom was "Keep all exterior doors open and available for anyone that may have business in here today!  And be polite, we're Texans...allow folks to pass thru as needed."  Look at that fucking gaping egress, reminds me Chip Brown's mom.  

This man lived a great life.  Hope he is a peace.  And no fucking way LBJ didn't have something to do with this.  

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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No, I meant fixing things so that when Oswald was coming down the travel corridor, 20 "hardass" Texas LEO's all thought in unison, 'Hey a guy in the early 1960's in a hat and tie, he must mean business...let's get out of his way!'  I like the reporter in the far right in the customary eyeglass frames and microphone of the day, "This just in...the Democracy you're eating has been pissed in, Film at 11"  

Edited by Lobo
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Hagbard Celine

Hagbard Celine 10923

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2 hours ago, Lobo said:

And no fucking way LBJ didn't have something to do with this.  

From '94 to '96 i lived on the east side of the Saddlebrook apartments on Keller Springs just east of the tollway.  2nd-floor balcony looked due east at the Murchison place.  There's a cul-de-sac of mcmansions in between now.

So this hits close to home.

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ConferenceRoom

ConferenceRoom 6147

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No, I meant fixing things so that when Oswald was coming down the travel corridor, 20 "hardass" Texas LEO's all thought in unison, 'Hey a guy in the early 1960's in a hat and tie, he must mean business...let's get out of his way!'  I like the reporter in the far right in the customary eyeglass frames and microphone of the day, "This just in...the Democracy you're eating has been pissed in, Film at 11"  


Yeah, I knew what you meant.
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  • 1 year later...
NTVTXN

NTVTXN 1432

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On 8/30/2019 at 2:07 PM, BearSchlong said:

close to home and whatnot.

My 1st cousin's grandfather was Jack Ruby's lawyer. . .

And my FIL and Barry Katz made a movie about what REALLY happened. . .

 

I worked with a young woman who’s father was the neurosurgeon on call at Parkland on 11/22/63. 

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Armybrat

Armybrat 40911

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1 hour ago, deadshank said:

My dad worked for Jack Ruby at The Carousel. 

Your dad was the bouncer who kicked me & my buddies out in ‘62?

Edited to add.... I recall Chris Colt and Her 45s were the featured titties that night. 

Edited by Armybrat
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