JFK assassination shocker—The secret they kept under wraps for 24 years
JACK RUBY IS STILL ALIVE
By Kenn Harrell
(This is an article from the tabloid Globe, dated November 15, 1988)
JACK RUBY, who murdered President John F. Kennedy’s assassin 25 years ago, is still alive, says a woman who describes herself as a retired government agent.
Ruby, says the ex-agent, helped to plot the assassination and has lived for more than two decades under the protective custody of CIA agents also involved in the JFK shooting. The Dallas nightclub owner, she says, was given a new identity—and a new face.
“He’s not dead—but he wishes he was,” the ex-agent told GLOBE in a series of exclusive interviews conducted during three days of mysterious, cloak-and-dagger meetings in Georgia.
Ruby officially died of cancer in a prison hospital in 1967 while awaiting a new trial two years after his conviction and death sentence for murdering Lee Harvey Oswald was overturned by an appeals court on technical grounds.
But Vergie Lunsford, 77, a tiny, silver-haired widow, says she worked as a spy with Ruby for 13 years and knows where he is today—and it’s not in a cemetery.
Lunsford says Ruby confessed to her that he helped plan the assassination and stood next Lee Harvey Oswald in the window of the Texas Book Depository while Oswald fired one shot that struck the President in the head.
She says he told her: “I was there with him until the rifle was fired, and then left,” adding that two other agents on the grassy knoll also shot Kennedy.
Lunsford says she agreed to talk with GLOBE only after Jack Ruby okayed the meeting.
She arranged for me to be taken to a soundproof room to hear a tape recording of a conversation with Ruby in which the gravelly voiced mystery man directs her to “get the truth out.”
Secret code
Lunsford says she has known Ruby for more than half a century. Under the name of Gene Dunbar, he was her contact from 1933 to 1945 when she was a secret government. “He was one of the best agents in the business,” she says.
“I believed he was dead until he contacted me, using our secret code word, in 1980.
“Jack Ruby has been brainwashed. He’s undergone numerous electric shock treatments in an attempt to make him forget the past. And now he is a tired, tortured man who wishes he had really died of cancer—instead of having to live as someone else for all these years.”
Lunsford says she and her late husband, Leon, also an agent, met the man who claimed to be Ruby at an inn in Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta.
“We were suspicious of this man,” she recalls. “His face had been redone.
The real Ruby
“To my surprise, he grabbed a wrought-iron chair and swung it around backward and straddled it—exactly the way he always sat when we knew him. I looked at Leon, and he lifted his eyebrow. It was the first sign that this was Gene Dunbar, the real Jack Ruby.
“When he began to talk, the language, the swear words that he always used, spilled out. He carried a tape recorder and flicked it on—to play music like we did in the old days, to drown out the conversation. Also, his terrible table manners had not improved.” Lunsford, who has written an unpublished book about Ruby, says she first me him in Atlanta in 1933, when she was engaged to marry Leon.
She delivered a package to the man she would know as Gene Dunbar. He recruited her to work for a government intelligence agency, she says.
“I took the name of Annabel Mills,” she recounts. “My husband was already working under the name of Leo Leach. Gene and my husband carried guns. I never did. To my knowledge Leon never shot anyone. I only know of one man Gene shot—and that was Lee Harvey Oswald.”
In a few years, Lunsford and her husband became the parents of two children, and in 1945, she says, they retired from counter-intelligence work. “The next time I saw Gene Dunbar was on television, and when he shot down Lee Harvey Oswald,” she says. “I was shocked, but I knew that for whatever reason he was doing this, it was government work.
Like the rest of America, Lunsford believed the reports of Ruby’s death in 1967—until, in 1980, she received a bizarre letter without a return address.
“When I opened the letter, chills ran up and down my body,” she says. “The letter was typewritten. It read ‘Gen Dunbar, Jack Ruby. Real name Jacob Rubenstein.’ Then it gave a secret code word that we had used for 12 years.”
The letter was postmarked Chicago, so Lunsford ran a discreet ad in a Windy City newspaper. A few days later, her phone rang. “At first, I didn’t believe it was him,” she says. “I tested him on things that only he and I and Leon would know. His mind was fuzzy. He groped for answers. There were long pauses on the phone. He told me that he had been brainwashed, that he had undergone so much hell with electric shock treatment that it had taken all these years to remember who I was.”
Face-to-face
Lunsford was still suspicious, so she traveled to Chicago to meet the man face-to-face.
“I was surprised when the address he gave me turned out to be a nursing home,’ she says. “An old man came down the hall calling ‘Virginia,’ the name he always called me when we were alone. I didn’t know the face, but I knew the walk. His hair was long and scraggly. He was wearing a shabby bathrobe and was in his stockinged feet. The only thing halfway recognizable about him was his nose.”
After the visit, Lunsford says Ruby telephoned her often, and in August, 1982, came to Georgia to visit her. “It was on top of Stone Mountain that he told me about the assassination,” she says.
He also described how fellow agents had whished him away from the prison hospital where he had been treated for stomach problems.
Plastic surgery
“They took him to Mexico where he underwent plastic surgery and was given the identity he now uses,” she says. “The man buried in Ruby’s grave was an unknown prisoner who actually did die of cancer.
“Gene says he was kept under virtual house arrest for years. He went through a period of brain washing where his mind was altered so that he would forget details of the events.
“He vaguely remembers being taken to a Mexican prison where the brainwashing took place. At least he thinks it was a prison.
“For years, he says, he has lived with a blurry past. But in recent years, somehow, it was all coming back—piece by piece. He wanted to tell his story after his arrest, but they didn’t let him.
“He did get to talk to Washington correspondent Dorothy Kilgallen, but she died at here desk while writing the story. She was one of many who died in those early days after Kennedy was killed.”
(Sidebar to story:)
The Ruby tape—an amazing real-life cloak-and-dagger drama
My meetings with self-described intelligence agent Vergie Lunsford were like something out of a spy movie. In one weekend, she moved between three “safe houses,” phoning me from each of them in turn.
“I never stay in the same place twice,” she said. “No one knows where I live. I can’t be traced.”
One meeting took place in a moving cable car on Georgia’s Stone Mountain, where we couldn’t be bugged. On another occasion we met in a crowd to drown out voices. To hear the recent taped conversation supposedly between Lunsford and Ruby, I was instructed to go to a remote country mansion and ushered into a soundproof basement room by a man who held his hand in his pocket the whole time I was there—as though he had a gun in it.
Frankly, I was nervous.
Lunsford explained the reason for Ruby’s breaking his silence was a story in GLOBE on September 6 this year.
In the story, Esther Ann Mash, Ruby’s ex-girlfriend, told of meetings between the two and identified Ruby as the sniper on the grassy knoll who fired the lethal bullet into JFK’s head.
The tape played to me in the soundproof room was chilling.
In it, the man said to be Ruby calls Esther Mash a foul name, says he was never in love with her and accuses her of lying about his shooting JFK.
“Esther can say anything she likes because I’m classified in the grave,” the voice says on the tape. Lunsford replied: “Well, she’ll be surprised to know you’re still alive.”
“How is she going to know?” says the gravelly voiced man. “She don’t know I’m alive. I can’t let anybody know that because I don’t want to be bust off, because that is what would happen to me for sure if it got out.
“That’s why they gave me plastic surgery, a new identity. No one knows what I look like today—except you.
“ I remember the first time I ever took a life,” the man adds. “I felt awfully bad the first time. But after a while, I got used to it. It’s either them, you or I. That’s the way it works.”
Lunsford: “Mash says you blew the president’s head off.”
The man replied: "You know where I was . You saw the photograph. You could see me up in the window right after the shot. That was not me on the grass knoll. (He laughs.) That’s … that’s the man I told to be there. I knew who he was from the photo they gave me the day before the assassination.”
JACK RUBY IS STILL ALIVE
By Kenn Harrell
(This is an article from the tabloid Globe, dated November 15, 1988)
JACK RUBY, who murdered President John F. Kennedy’s assassin 25 years ago, is still alive, says a woman who describes herself as a retired government agent.
Ruby, says the ex-agent, helped to plot the assassination and has lived for more than two decades under the protective custody of CIA agents also involved in the JFK shooting. The Dallas nightclub owner, she says, was given a new identity—and a new face.
“He’s not dead—but he wishes he was,” the ex-agent told GLOBE in a series of exclusive interviews conducted during three days of mysterious, cloak-and-dagger meetings in Georgia.
Ruby officially died of cancer in a prison hospital in 1967 while awaiting a new trial two years after his conviction and death sentence for murdering Lee Harvey Oswald was overturned by an appeals court on technical grounds.
But Vergie Lunsford, 77, a tiny, silver-haired widow, says she worked as a spy with Ruby for 13 years and knows where he is today—and it’s not in a cemetery.
Lunsford says Ruby confessed to her that he helped plan the assassination and stood next Lee Harvey Oswald in the window of the Texas Book Depository while Oswald fired one shot that struck the President in the head.
She says he told her: “I was there with him until the rifle was fired, and then left,” adding that two other agents on the grassy knoll also shot Kennedy.
Lunsford says she agreed to talk with GLOBE only after Jack Ruby okayed the meeting.
She arranged for me to be taken to a soundproof room to hear a tape recording of a conversation with Ruby in which the gravelly voiced mystery man directs her to “get the truth out.”
Secret code
Lunsford says she has known Ruby for more than half a century. Under the name of Gene Dunbar, he was her contact from 1933 to 1945 when she was a secret government. “He was one of the best agents in the business,” she says.
“I believed he was dead until he contacted me, using our secret code word, in 1980.
“Jack Ruby has been brainwashed. He’s undergone numerous electric shock treatments in an attempt to make him forget the past. And now he is a tired, tortured man who wishes he had really died of cancer—instead of having to live as someone else for all these years.”
Lunsford says she and her late husband, Leon, also an agent, met the man who claimed to be Ruby at an inn in Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta.
“We were suspicious of this man,” she recalls. “His face had been redone.
The real Ruby
“To my surprise, he grabbed a wrought-iron chair and swung it around backward and straddled it—exactly the way he always sat when we knew him. I looked at Leon, and he lifted his eyebrow. It was the first sign that this was Gene Dunbar, the real Jack Ruby.
“When he began to talk, the language, the swear words that he always used, spilled out. He carried a tape recorder and flicked it on—to play music like we did in the old days, to drown out the conversation. Also, his terrible table manners had not improved.” Lunsford, who has written an unpublished book about Ruby, says she first me him in Atlanta in 1933, when she was engaged to marry Leon.
She delivered a package to the man she would know as Gene Dunbar. He recruited her to work for a government intelligence agency, she says.
“I took the name of Annabel Mills,” she recounts. “My husband was already working under the name of Leo Leach. Gene and my husband carried guns. I never did. To my knowledge Leon never shot anyone. I only know of one man Gene shot—and that was Lee Harvey Oswald.”
In a few years, Lunsford and her husband became the parents of two children, and in 1945, she says, they retired from counter-intelligence work. “The next time I saw Gene Dunbar was on television, and when he shot down Lee Harvey Oswald,” she says. “I was shocked, but I knew that for whatever reason he was doing this, it was government work.
Like the rest of America, Lunsford believed the reports of Ruby’s death in 1967—until, in 1980, she received a bizarre letter without a return address.
“When I opened the letter, chills ran up and down my body,” she says. “The letter was typewritten. It read ‘Gen Dunbar, Jack Ruby. Real name Jacob Rubenstein.’ Then it gave a secret code word that we had used for 12 years.”
The letter was postmarked Chicago, so Lunsford ran a discreet ad in a Windy City newspaper. A few days later, her phone rang. “At first, I didn’t believe it was him,” she says. “I tested him on things that only he and I and Leon would know. His mind was fuzzy. He groped for answers. There were long pauses on the phone. He told me that he had been brainwashed, that he had undergone so much hell with electric shock treatment that it had taken all these years to remember who I was.”
Face-to-face
Lunsford was still suspicious, so she traveled to Chicago to meet the man face-to-face.
“I was surprised when the address he gave me turned out to be a nursing home,’ she says. “An old man came down the hall calling ‘Virginia,’ the name he always called me when we were alone. I didn’t know the face, but I knew the walk. His hair was long and scraggly. He was wearing a shabby bathrobe and was in his stockinged feet. The only thing halfway recognizable about him was his nose.”
After the visit, Lunsford says Ruby telephoned her often, and in August, 1982, came to Georgia to visit her. “It was on top of Stone Mountain that he told me about the assassination,” she says.
He also described how fellow agents had whished him away from the prison hospital where he had been treated for stomach problems.
Plastic surgery
“They took him to Mexico where he underwent plastic surgery and was given the identity he now uses,” she says. “The man buried in Ruby’s grave was an unknown prisoner who actually did die of cancer.
“Gene says he was kept under virtual house arrest for years. He went through a period of brain washing where his mind was altered so that he would forget details of the events.
“He vaguely remembers being taken to a Mexican prison where the brainwashing took place. At least he thinks it was a prison.
“For years, he says, he has lived with a blurry past. But in recent years, somehow, it was all coming back—piece by piece. He wanted to tell his story after his arrest, but they didn’t let him.
“He did get to talk to Washington correspondent Dorothy Kilgallen, but she died at here desk while writing the story. She was one of many who died in those early days after Kennedy was killed.”
(Sidebar to story:)
The Ruby tape—an amazing real-life cloak-and-dagger drama
My meetings with self-described intelligence agent Vergie Lunsford were like something out of a spy movie. In one weekend, she moved between three “safe houses,” phoning me from each of them in turn.
“I never stay in the same place twice,” she said. “No one knows where I live. I can’t be traced.”
One meeting took place in a moving cable car on Georgia’s Stone Mountain, where we couldn’t be bugged. On another occasion we met in a crowd to drown out voices. To hear the recent taped conversation supposedly between Lunsford and Ruby, I was instructed to go to a remote country mansion and ushered into a soundproof basement room by a man who held his hand in his pocket the whole time I was there—as though he had a gun in it.
Frankly, I was nervous.
Lunsford explained the reason for Ruby’s breaking his silence was a story in GLOBE on September 6 this year.
In the story, Esther Ann Mash, Ruby’s ex-girlfriend, told of meetings between the two and identified Ruby as the sniper on the grassy knoll who fired the lethal bullet into JFK’s head.
The tape played to me in the soundproof room was chilling.
In it, the man said to be Ruby calls Esther Mash a foul name, says he was never in love with her and accuses her of lying about his shooting JFK.
“Esther can say anything she likes because I’m classified in the grave,” the voice says on the tape. Lunsford replied: “Well, she’ll be surprised to know you’re still alive.”
“How is she going to know?” says the gravelly voiced man. “She don’t know I’m alive. I can’t let anybody know that because I don’t want to be bust off, because that is what would happen to me for sure if it got out.
“That’s why they gave me plastic surgery, a new identity. No one knows what I look like today—except you.
“ I remember the first time I ever took a life,” the man adds. “I felt awfully bad the first time. But after a while, I got used to it. It’s either them, you or I. That’s the way it works.”
Lunsford: “Mash says you blew the president’s head off.”
The man replied: "You know where I was . You saw the photograph. You could see me up in the window right after the shot. That was not me on the grass knoll. (He laughs.) That’s … that’s the man I told to be there. I knew who he was from the photo they gave me the day before the assassination.”
posted by gary at 12:57 PM
3 Comments:
You won't be surprised at all to find plenty of freshly painted cars at used cars Chicago lots but you should never be fooled with this. You always need to check what's under the hood as well as the car's records if you wish to get yourself a car which would last for a lifetime.
Jack died in the Mid-South US in 2014.
He came out to me about 4 years before his death. His real identity was known to about 15 people in the particular area to which he'd been relocated(his 2nd relocation actually). I even know where he buried his dogs Sheba and(cant remember others name). I took him there twice over a 2 yr period to put flowers on their graves. He had a handwritten letter of appreciation from Fidel Castro(framed and hanging on his wall)for his help in teaching Castro to fly light aircraft and his overall assistance to and support of The Revolution. Jack was the other pilot who had parachuted into the Escambray Mountains with Willian Morgan in 1959 to fly Fidel and Che around to their various mountain camps on the island where short runways had been cut into the mountaintops. Jack and Fidel had known each other for several years at that point, having first met when Jack would bring Castro guns and ammo in return for drugs. It was at that time that Jack first began to teach Castro how to fly. The story pertaining to Jack being in a nursing home in Chicago is false, but I recognize the story as being the womans efforts to keep Jacks actual whereabouts at the time a secret. Jack told me that The Zionists were ultimately responsible for JFK's death as Kennedy absolutely refused to supply Zionist Israel with any nuclear capabilities. According to Jack, the 2 part contract on President Kennedy originated then with the Mossad, part 1 being handed to the KGB(enemy of my enemy is my friend)to sheep-dip Oswald, and part 2(planning the actual mechanical aspects of the hit)was given to the CIA(again, the enemy of my enemy...)who then delivered their plans to the US Mafia by way of the Cuban Exile Community in Miami(yet more enemy of my enemy games...)who then(unknowingly)placed the actual responsibility for pulling the triggers in Dealey Plaza with 2 Mossad assassins(part-time CIA assets loaned to the exiles some months earlier as "advisers"). The purpose of the convoluted obsfucation was to keep The Zionists in a position of plausible deniability(though some astute folks saw their fingerprints all over it early on)while enabling them to retain final control over the outcome, at the same time casting suspicion on the Cuban exiles due to their hatred of JFK over The Bay of Pigs failure. Not to mention that a dark skinned Israeli could easily be mistaken for a dark skinned Cuban, at least to the untrained eye. Pretty slick, all things considered...convoluted, confusing, compartmentalized, all the earmarks of an intel op. Jack was Jewish through and through, and like and true Jew he despised the Zionist Movement. There you have it.
btw, an interesting sideline to all of this pertains to the eventual executions of Wm. Morgan and Che Guevara. Morgan was imprisioned in Cuba by Fidel in early 1960 when Fidel realized that Morgan had turned Che against him, and Morgan was executed sometime thereafter. Perhaps not coincidentally, during the time Morgan was imprisioned so was Santo Trafficante, in the very same cell block....food for thought there. On with the story though. The divide between Che and Fidel actually began as soon as Jack and Morgan landed in the Escambry Mts. Morgan; big he-man, imprortant spy, soldier of fortune type thought that he would pilot the #1 man Fidel around. Fidel and Che jeep in to pick them up and Fidel spots Jack, his old flight instructor who let him do most of the flying once he became proficient, and Fidel thinks: allright!! more flying time for me....and taps Jack as his pilot, leaving an incredulous and angry Morgan with #2. As soon as Morgan got Che alone he started in on him, according to Jack. Fidel this n that...youre the real revolutionary...in general blowing enough smoke up Che's a$$ to give him rectal cancer. And it worked. When Fidel later sent Che off to Central America it was his last act of kindness to Che instead of executing him for treason for aligning himself with Morgan. Jack said he saw all of this developing and got out of Cuba soon, maybe 3-4 months after La Revolucion, lest he suffer the same fate, regardless of his loyalty to Castro, who by then was quite paranoid about loyalty. Jack saw it as a no-win situation, so he begged out, asap and returned to Dallas. No matter though, Morgan implicated Jack as a perp in the subjugation of Che's allieiance to Fidel and Fidel took out a hit on Jack through the Cuban Secret Intel community. After Jack shot the Oswald proxy(but didn't kill him) and was jailed Jack really feared for his life at the hands of Fidels emissaries. Once Jack was relocated in '68(to the Philly area) he felt a bit more secure, but lapsed his vigilance on the idea of purchasing a nightclub in Utica, NY. The add for the club's sale was a clever plant that the Cubans set up as a dangle to see if their bobber would go down. Well, Jack bit, and upon the morning he went to the club with enough cash on his person to buy the place outright, he was informed that the guy who agreed to sell him the club was a night janitor who hadn't shown up for work the night before. Jqack smelled a rat, and upon exiting the club he saw a Plymouth Sattelite w/2 Cubans in it parked 1/2way down the block, looking right at him. Quick thinkg, he jumped in his closely parked ride and drove to a nearby bank, got out and ran inside yelling: "this is a stickup...I have no gun"....he wanted to get caught and detained by the local police to avoid a bullet or more to his person from said
Cuban hitmen. Well, he ws arrested and placed his one phone call to his FBI contact in charge of his relocation, who then, much to the chagrin of local LE sent a Bureau plane to the Utica airport and met Jack and his LE escort at the Natl. Guard hangar. After that Jack was located to the Mid-South where he lived until 2014.
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