Ruby prosecutor put on spot 44 years later

DALLAS -- A longtime prosecutor agreed while he was in office to give filmmakers access to documents connected to President Kennedy's assassination and helped form a company to take part in the venture, a newspaper reported Sunday.

New details about District Attorney Henry Wade's involvement in the proposed project about the JFK assassination and the trial of Jack Ruby were contained in long-hidden files discovered in a courthouse safe, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Wade died in 2001.

Current Dallas County DA Craig Watkins announced the discovery of the files last Monday.

Items in the safe also included a purported transcript between Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer, nightclub owner Ruby; a leather holster that held the gun Ruby used to shoot Oswald; brass knuckles found on Ruby when he was arrested; and a 1967 movie contract signed by Wade, who prosecuted Ruby.

Wade, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry and Bob Denson, chief defense investigator in the Ruby trial, had formed a company that would act as a "vehicle for this venture," according to a letter from the district attorney to film producer Robert Larsen.

The project apparently fell into financial trouble.

Robert Schuwerk, a law professor at the University of Houston, said he wasn't sure Wade's actions violated judicial ethics but said they seemed questionable.

"After you've left office and want to write your memoirs, that's one thing," he said. "But I don't think that while you're still in office you can profit from what is essentially exercising a part of your duties, and it seems to me that's what was happening here."

Ruby killed Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was arrested in the assassination of Kennedy. Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death the following year, then won an appeal of his conviction but died of cancer before he was retried.

The contents of the safe were likely Wade's personal files on the assassination, which researchers have long known that he kept. When he left office in the 1980s, Wade thought the files were taken to his home but they apparently weren't, said Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum, located in the former school book depository from which Oswald fired at Kennedy.