Thursday, March 12, 1964 University Daily Kansan
Page 9
Ruby Defense Calls 'Ambush Witness'
By H. D. Quigg
DALLAS — (UPI)— Jack Ruby's defense planned to use its "ambush witness" today to fire a final burst of expert opinion declaring that Ruby was legally insane when he gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald.
He is Dr. Walter Bromberg, New York psychiatrist, who has said he believes that when Ruby saw the man charged with assassinating President Kennedy, there were unconscious factors forcing an irresistible impulse in an unstable man.
HOWEVER, the prosecution planned to counter Bromberg with Dr. Robert S. Schwab, of Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
This may be the final skirmish in the battle of technical opinion among mental, behavioral, and nervous-system experts.
Belli, a man of many surprises, has said previously of Bromberg: "I'm catching on to Texas customs; I'm keeping him for ambush."
The Ruby murder-with-malice trial was expected to go to the eightman, four-woman jury sometime Saturday.
Chief Defense Counsel Melvin Belli said he planned to end his rebuket by noon, and rest with Bromberg as the final witness.
Belll said he planned to use Bromberg as the final part of the defense surrebuttal case. Surrebuttail witnesses are recalled to rebut state rebuttal witnesses. But the state is also entitled to sur-surrebuttal (Dr. Schwab and others were standing by), and the process can be carried to infinity.
"This is an aggressive psychopath with definite anti-social feelings. He suffered an episodic psychosis at the time of the crime. It was of a depressive type. His act was in response to an irresistible impulse.
BROMBERG ONCE WROTE, after an eight-hour interview with Ruby:
"The eruptions of violent emotions disrupted his ego to the point that his knowledge of right and wrong were obliterated at the time of the crime. He suffered from a fugue state during which he did not know the nature and quality of his act."
The right-and-wrong, nature-and-quality statements are the classic definition of legal insanity. Each of the jurors has said there would be no hesitation in voting the chair for the 52-year-old former strip-joint boss if the facts warranted. But each also has said that if the preponderance of the evidence showed him insane when he pulled the trigger, there would be no hesitation in acquitting.
Bromberg in his report called Ruby a psychopathic personality.
THAT PHRASE first fell heavily on American minds during the two 1949 trials of Alger Hiss. A psychiatrist and psychologist both reported Hiss's accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was a psychopathic personality. Hiss had a hung jury on the first trial and was convicted of living under oath in the second.
Bromberg interviewed Ruby along with Dr. Manfred Guttmacher, the Baltimore psychiatrist who became the star defense witness when he testified he believed Ruby cracked under an insufferable emotional load and was legally insane when he shot Oswald.
The state yesterday produced re-
buttul witnesses who not only contradicted Guttmacher's opinion but offered opposing views to defense testimony that Ruby was suffering a "psychomotor variant" type of seizure, probably was suffering psychomotor epilepsy, and had organic brain damage.
DR. SHEFF OLINGER, a Dallas neurologist, testified that the electroencephalograph (eeg) brain-wave tests on Ruby did not show organic brain damage or psychomotor epilepsy.
Dr. Robert Stubblefield of Southwest Medical School and a court-appointed member of a panel that studied Ruby, contradicted Guttmacher by answering a hypothetical question. If all the things the state has entered in evidence about Ruby were true, he said, he would consider Ruby legally sane when he fired.
Dr. John T. Holbrook, phychiatrist, disagreed "very strongly" with a defense psychologist's opinion that Ruby suffered organic brain damage. Peter Kellaway, a Baylor professor and president of the American Electro-encephalographic Society, said Ruby's EEG chart did not warrant a diagnosis of organic brain included Mrs. Eleanor Pitts, Ruby's damage.
The defense surrebuttal witnesses included Mrs. Eleanor Pitts, Ruby's apartment cleaning woman, who said she phoned Ruby on the morning of the Oswald shooting and noticed he was "talking strange." She said she was coming to clean before 2 p.m., and he told her to "call me" so he could tell her where the key would be. The Oswald shooting took place at 11:20 a.m.
ATHENS, Greece — (UPI)—Royalty, heads of state and an estimated half million Greek citizens today paid their last respects to King Paul of Greece in a solemn funeral ceremony followed by a procession through the streets of Athens.
Following the service, the long cortex formed to follow the King's coffin on foot through the streets of Athens, where an estimated 500,000 persons stood silently, many of them weeping, to say farewell.
THE ONLOOKERS, many of whom had been waiting for hours, lined the funeral route up to 20 deep in some places. Police and soldiers, standing at attention, formed a double line all along the broad streets where the official mourners passed.
Standing with Queen Mother Frederika, King Paul's widow, was their son, former Crown Prince Constantine, 23, who became the world's youngest monarch upon the death of his father.
Former President Harry S. Truman and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson headed the United States delegation at the ceremony in the dimly-lit Cathedral of the Annunciation.
KINGS AND queens, princes and princesses, presidents and premiers stood with heads bowed as the arch-bishop of Athens, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, gave final blessings to the ruler who died a week ago at the age of 62.
King Paul's Funeral Attracts Notables
The coffin was torne on a horse-drawn gun carriage, preceded by the Athens police chief, 50 policemen and 18 other groups, including aides bearing the many medals King Paul won during his lifetime.
Walking in a large group after the royal family were the official representatives, including seven kings or ex-kings, three queens, more
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than two dozen princes and princesses and such notables as Truman, Mrs. Johnson and West German President Heinrich Luebke.
ON THE HILL
THE LONG cortege streched out so far behind that the first marchers had finished the half-mile walk long before those towards the end even left the cathedral. The official program listed more than 125 official groups, ranging from Boy Scouts to the Royal vacht club.
Chrysostomos, the 84-year-old archbishop of Athens and head of the Greek Orthodox church, led his
attendants in singing the 18 verses from psalm 19 which begins the burial service.
THERE, the coffin was placed aboard a hearse and taken the 20 miles to the Tatoi summer palace outside, where the burial was to take place. Only the royal family attends the burial itself.
The procession's end was the junction of Queen Sophia Avenue and King Constantine Avenue—directly across the street from the modern Hilton Hotel.