Aug. 9, 2002, 9:15PM

Ringside seat to history
Juror makes public journal he kept during the 
1964 trial of Jack Ruby

By DAVID FLICK
Copyright 2002 Dallas Morning News

            DALLAS -- At the most famous courtroom drama in Dallas
history, Waymon Rose had one of the best seats in the house.

            Rose, 80, was a juror in the 1964 trial of Jack Ruby, where
each night he recorded his thoughts in a 25-cent spiral notebook.

            Last week, Rose, a retired furniture manufacturer
representative, donated his 47-page handwritten journal to the Sixth
Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Museum officials had been unaware of the
diary's existence until recently.

            "It's simple, real-world stuff, seen by ordinary people who
were caught up in an extraordinary event," said Gary Mack, the museum's
curator. "It just fascinates me."

            The journal begins in late February 1964 with Rose's
selection from a pool of 900 potential jurors in the trial of Ruby, who
killed Lee Harvey Oswald two days after the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy. The account ends a few weeks later, as the case is
turned over to the jury.

            The document concentrates less on trial testimony, which was
already being recorded in the court transcript, than on the daily life
and impressions of the jurors themselves.

            Each of the sequestered jurors, Rose wrote, was assigned to
a 6-by-6 1/2-foot room above the county jail. While in isolation,
according to Rose's journal, they fought boredom with games of Monopoly
and solitaire.

            Jurors eventually persuaded county authorities to give them
a television, but they were forbidden to watch virtually anything but
old movies and situation comedies.

            They could read newspapers and magazines, but only after the
publications had been heavily censored by Bo Mabra, a bailiff.

            The jurors sometimes amused themselves by looking out their
sitting room window, where they could watch couples being married on a
stairway in an adjacent building.

            The ceremonies, they learned, were performed by an elderly
retired minister, who would hang around the marriage license office and
offer to perform the nuptials immediately for whatever the couple cared
to pay.

            "The scene was really very touching," Rose wrote after one
such ceremony, "but as we caught the couple's attention after the
embrace, we all smiled and cheered. They smiled as if happy they had
some company."


            Alone at night, his thoughts turned to the duty at hand.

            "We will one day soon pass judgment on a human being and our
decision could mean his freedom -- or his death," he wrote. "This is the
sober thought I fall asleep with these nights."

            The journal offers thumbnail sketches of the principal
players -- folksy Judge Joe B. Brown matching wits with dapper defense
attorney Melvin Belli; famously fierce District Attorney Henry B. Wade
appearing genial during an interrogation; Joe Tonahill, a Ruby attorney,
"carelessly sprawled in his chair, much as a teenager might lazily take
notes in school on a late spring day."

            But Rose seemed most fascinated by Ruby.

            "I try to rationalize on the way he looks, and I'm trying
not to let the predicament he is in influence the interpretation of how
he looks," Rose wrote near the end of the trial. "But to me, he looks
pitiful and alone as though he is a head of cabbage."


            On March 14, 1964, the jury convicted Ruby of killing Oswald
and sentenced him to death. The conviction was later overturned, and
Ruby died Jan. 3, 1967, while waiting for a new trial.

            The journal does not document the jury deliberations. Jurors
promised each other that they would not reveal the discussions that led
to the unanimous guilty verdict -- a promise that Rose keeps to this
day.

            That promise is one reason why the diary was virtually
forgotten.

            Some time after the trial, a representative of Life magazine
offered Rose $25,000 for the diary, but only if he would flesh it out
with an account of the jury deliberations.

            "I told them I couldn't do it, and they said, OK, then, no
deal, and they gave my diary back to me and left," he said.

            In any case, he said, the diary was never meant for public
consumption.

            The diary was kept with other mementos of the trial --
including Rose's own diary and his wife's scrapbooks of newspaper
clippings.

            They allowed John Mark Dempsey, a nephew of jury foreman Max
Causey, to read Rose's diary, and he included portions of it in a book
published two years ago about Causey, who had also kept a trial diary.

            Mack, the museum's curator, said he was only vaguely aware
of the existence of Rose's diary until two months ago, when Rose
participated in an oral history project.

            Rose offered to donate his wife's scrapbooks and some other
relevant letters and photographs, but not their diaries -- until he saw
the disappointed look on Mack's face.

            "In the long run," Rose said, "giving it to the museum
seemed like the better thing to do."

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