Jim Leavelle, Dallas detective handcuffed to history, dies at 99

James Leavelle, the Dallas police detective wearing a white Stetson while handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald in one of the most dramatic news photographs ever taken, capturing the moment when the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in 1963, died Aug. 29 at a hospital in Lakewood, Colorado. He was 99. His daughter Tanya Evers said he broken his hip earlier in the week while visiting another daughter in Colorado. He died of a heart attack after surgery.

On Nov. 24, 1963, two days after the Kennedy assassination, Leavelle was escorting Oswald through the basement of the Dallas police station, in preparation for a transfer to the county jail. Leavelle was on Oswald’s right, with his left wrist handcuffed to Oswald’s right wrist. Oswald’s hands were secured by a second pair of handcuffs. Another detective, L.C. Graves, was on Oswald’s left, gripping his upper arm.

“I told him, ‘Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they are as good a shot as you were,’” Leavelle said in 2005, “meaning, of course, that they would hit him and not me. He kind of laughed and said, ‘You’re being melodramatic. Nobody is going to try and shoot at me.’”

As they walked past a group of reporters and photographers, nightclub owner Jack Ruby stepped out of the crowd with a pistol and fired a single shot into Oswald’s midsection.

In a moment captured by Dallas Times Herald photographer Robert H. Jackson, Ruby’s hand is extended, holding the gun, as Oswald grimaces in pain. Leavelle, wearing a light-colored suit, leans back, startled by the gunshot, looking directly into Ruby’s face.

Millions of people watched the shooting on live television, but Jackson’s photo, which won the Pulitzer Prize, remains one of the most indelible images of the 20th century.

Leavelle, who had his left hand around Oswald’s belt, saw Ruby approaching but was too late in jerking his prisoner out of the way.

“I tried to pull him behind me,” Leavelle said in a 2002 oral history for the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, “but all I succeeded in doing was turning his body, so that instead of hitting him dead center, it hit him just about four inches to the left of the navel.”