West kept meticulous notes on the Ruby case, all dutifully filed. As investigators, scholars, and journalists struggled to piece together the puzzle, he watched from afar, compiling records for his own book about Ruby. He never ended up writing it, but he paid close attention to an exhaustive 1965 volume, The Trial of Jack Ruby, by John Kaplan and Jon R. Waltz. They wrote, “The fact is that nobody knows why Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald—and this includes Jack Ruby.” Jolly West had jotted down that line with a note to himself: “good quote.” It was, until now, the closest he ever came to
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