Many Worlds Theory

“What you said was so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not.” —Wolfgang Pauli, to Lev Landau

On Friday, November 22, 1963, the perennial loser Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated the 35^th president of the United States.  That Oswald was the assassin is a certainty—the evidence is overwhelming.  That Oswald acted alone is almost as certain.  The Santamaria Commission Report (2015) laid most people’s doubts to rest, and conspiracy buffs receded into the woodwork like the cockroaches they are.

Two days later, Oswald himself was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.  The story is well known.  Ruby was also a loser, despite his love of dogs.  He had wanted to spare the first lady the discomfort of an Oswald trial circus.  So on Sunday morning Ruby cashed in on his connections and friendships with local policemen to saunter unnoticed into the Dallas police headquarters, whip out a .38, and plug Oswald in the gut.  Good riddance.  Ruby was promptly taken into custody.

Of course, it was now Ruby’s turn to be killed.  On Tuesday, Nov. 26, Ruby died in his jail cell after ingesting a poisoned corned-beef sandwich.  The sandwich had been tainted by deli owner Karel Hartka, who “didn’t like the look” of Ruby.  He had been watching the Oswald prison transfer live on TV.  Witnesses say that when Ruby shot Oswald, Hartka giggled like a schoolgirl.

The Dallas police were, of course, raked over the coals.  First Oswald is killed, then his killer is killed?  The press wondered, is the DPD a bevy of incompetence?  Do they have their heads up their asses?

Hartka’s role in Ruby’s death wasn’t discovered until Saturday, Nov. 30, when Hartka himself was found dead in a ditch in Plano, Texas.  Two kids walking to school found Hartka’s naked body, covered in flies, being gnawed on by a coyote.  When Sherriff’s deputies arrived they had to shoot the coyote for fear of being rabid.  Tissue samples confirmed: no rabies.  Toxicology confirmed: Hartka had been drunk.  No one in Dallas had seen him since Thursday (Thanksgiving) when he had walked home (tipsy) from having dinner with friends.  An autopsy found that Hartka had been killed that Thursday by blunt trauma to the head.

The Ruby connection was easy to piece together.  One, Hartka owned the deli that had sent sandwiches to police headquarters.  (A lot of policemen were friends with Ruby, and they indulged his requests: booze, cigarettes, food, even a jail cell visit from his dog Sheba).  Two, witnesses said that Hartka himself had made the corned-beef sandwich, Ruby’s favorite.  The other sandwiches sent to DPD were either chicken salad or muffuletta.  Three, several plastic sandwich bags filled with arsenic were found in Hartka’s apartment, and indeed it was eventually shown that Ruby had died from arsenic poisoning.  Four, Hartka was a real wanker.

The Ruby Chain was born.

Things were getting weird.  Someone had killed Hartka, who had killed Ruby, who had killed Oswald, who had killed JFK.  What’s more, each death was separated by exactly two days.  It seemed ridiculous, but as the Hartka murder investigation proceeded into December, most people expected Hartka’s murderer to have already died on Saturday, Nov. 30.  You see, it fit the pattern.

And that was, indeed, found to be the case.  Hartka was killed on Thanksgiving night by Shirley Ansley, a schoolteacher from Norman, Oklahoma who was in town visiting her sister.  Ansley had just walked up to Hartka on the street and bashed his head in with a bowling trophy.  She had then somehow dragged Hartka (did she have help?) into her 1962 Cadillac Coupe Deville and driven to Plano, where she threw him in a ditch.  Why had she driven to Plano?  We may never know.  Why had she removed his clothes?  As predicted, Ansley herself had been murdered on Saturday, Nov. 30, in Linneus, Missouri, forcibly drowned in a bathtub.  Linneus at the time had a population of 450 people.

The Ruby Chain was proceeding apace, two days per death, but investigations can take longer.  Hartka’s death wasn’t connected to Ansley until mid-December.  Ansley’s death on a farm in bumfuck Missouri wasn’t solved until January, 1964.  By then, there were over 30 people in the Chain.  But as more murders were investigated and the concept of the Ruby Chain became more widely disseminated, law enforcement began to catch up.

One thing that helped in the early days was the knowledge that whoever killed someone in the Chain was slated to die exactly two days later.  So, let’s say you have a murder on Monday, connect the murder to person X, but then person X shows up dead for totally unrelated reasons on Wednesday.  Your cases may be part of the Ruby Chain!  You make some calls.  Eventually, it’s all worked out.

It’s easy for Ruby Chain novices to lose the thread of the narrative.  Here are the first twelve people on the chain, along with Oswald (patient zero) who is not considered part of the chain since he did not himself kill an assassin:

[The entire Chain is updated every two days, if possible, at RubyChain.org.  If this website is inaccessible consult your internet provider.  Some places like China or California block such websites routinely.]

The Chain (as of the writing of this narrative, in the year 2018) is presumed to have 9,935 assassins, although many have not been identified.  There are, of course, gaps.  The most significant (the so-called Big Gap) occurred in July of 1973 when the n = 1757 assassin, Martin Boone, was found murdered (with a pencil through his neck) in Nairobi, Kenya.  There, the Chain went cold.  The thread was not regained until June 7, 1974, when n = 1909 (Turan Guliyev) was gunned down on the streets of Shamkhor in the U.S.S.R. (currently Shamkir, Azerbaijan).  His killing had multiple witnesses, and the killer (Ghislaine Williams) took refuge in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, where she was murdered two days later by a U.S. marine lance corporal (Bob Boyd).  The unusual circumstances of these killings eventually led investigators back to the Ruby Chain.

The Big Gap is typical of all gaps in the Ruby Chain.  Whenever a killer was not apprehended immediately, and then managed to either (a) get behind the Iron Curtain or (b) fade into the woodwork of a desolate country and/or wilderness (Mauritania, anyone?) the trail would go cold.  Inevitably, though, the random-walk of Ruby Chain killers would allow investigators to regain the thread.

The United States was the first country to form an organized bureau for investigating the Ruby Chain; this body was at first called the Ruby Chain Investigative Task Force (RCITF) but was later renamed the Ruby Chain Bureau (RCB) in 1986.  Other countries jumped on board when demanded by circumstance.  For example, when the Chain first appeared in Mexico, Canada, and/or the Bahamas at various times in 1964, local task forces were set up as needed to cooperate with the RCITF.  No global Ruby Chain bureau was created until the UN formed the FIPR (Fédération Internationale de la Progression Ruby) in 1998.  The FIPR coordinated efforts between individual agencies like the RCB, Interpol, and the United Kingdom’s MI18.

Now, in the early days of the Chain, murderers were apprehended and taken into custody, even if they were known to be part of the Chain.  Such behavior may seem naïve in retrospect, but the implications of the Ruby Chain had yet to be understood.  The Amarillo Incident of 1965 made such implications obvious.

On Valentine’s Day in 1965, Chip Fortenberry (n = 224) shot Lois Graham (n = 223) during a sermon at Bell Avenue Baptist Church in Amarillo, TX.  Fortenberry was quickly apprehended; several of the parishioners were Sheriff’s deputies.  It turned out that Graham herself was a suspect in a previous murder from two days earlier, but the deputies had not noticed she was there in the church with them!  The fact that she was now killed, inexplicably, two days later, marked this as a suspected Ruby Chain murder, and the RCITF was called in.

Proactive steps were taken to “break the Chain”.  Fortenberry was placed in solitary confinement, in the basement of the Justice Center, with a week’s supply of food (10 boxes of Frosted Flakes, a bag of apples, several boxes of crackers, and a jar of peanut butter) and plenty of bottled water.  The cell was then triple-locked and the men with the three keys went on “road trips” in three different compass directions.  The Justice Center itself was heavily guarded, but each guard was handcuffed to a partner so that none could “sneak off” and, say, set fire to the building.

None of it mattered.  Fortenberry, along with 38 other people, died on Feb. 16 when Julián Cavallería (n = 225), an airline pilot, crashed a Lockheed Constellation filled with women’s dresses into the Amarillo Justice Center at an almost 70° angle.  Besides the victims on the ground, there were two other casualties: Cavallería’s co-pilot and flight engineer, both of whom Cavallería had shot mid-flight shortly after take-off from Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City.  Despite all precautions, the Ruby Chain was unbroken.

Ah, but what of Cavallería himself?  Remarkably (although predictably) Cavallería somehow bailed out of the plane before impact.  No one knows exactly how he managed this, but in any case Cavallería made good his escape and was, of course, killed on Feb. 18.  The Ruby Chain cannot be denied!

Other attempts to break the Chain met similar tragic results—tragic, in the sense of innocent life being lost.  Remember the Hermosillo Prison Fire of 1982?  What about the 1991 Sri Lankan Missile Strike?  Eventually, the consensus became: track the killers, but let them go.  Justice will take care of itself.  After all, it’s just assassins killing assassins.  Why all the hassle in trying to prevent any of it?  Let the fuckers die.

Of course, in today’s era of iPhone videography and ubiquitous social media, the idea of a Ruby Chain reality show was inevitable.  What if you could find living member N of the Chain, and follow them after their murder of N – 1, but before they’ve been killed by N + 1 … the possibilities are endless!  What drama!  What exciting TV!  Who can forget that sublime moment when the famous YouTuber Jesse Maddox interviewed Paul Stull (n = 9582) in a WalMart parking lot?

Maddox: Hey Paul, what’s it like to know you’re part of the Ruby Chain?

Stull: What?  What?

Maddox: America’s watching, Paul.  We know you killed Krissy Wall in Salt Lake.

Stull: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Maddox: America’s watching!  And since that was two days ago, well, you know, Paul, today’s the day you die!

Stull: Fuck off.

Maddox: In fact— [draws a .38, just like Ruby, and fires it point-blank at Stull.]

Stull: Ooooohhhhhh!

[Maddox, now n = 9583, runs quickly to his car off-camera and peels out of the parking lot]

Not surprisingly, the Ruby Chain Channel (RCC) is now the 4^th most-watched channel in American households.

This is something that happened.

In some universe, this occurred.