The detective handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was fatally shot has died aged 99.
James Leavelle was with the Kennedy assassin when he was killed by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963.
The picture of that killing was on every front page in the world and for a time “Big Jim” Leavelle was the best-known detective on the planet.
Leavelle died while on a trip to Colorado, US, this morning, according to NBC.
When Mr Leavelle first came face to face with Oswald two days earlier he had no idea he’d just arrested history’s most famous assassin.
Oswald had just murdered a Dallas police officer during a routine stop and Mr Leavelle was the man who brought him in for that shooting.
For a few hours no one knew the skinny cop killer was also the man who had fatally shot President John F Kennedy from a sixth floor window at the Dallas book depository.
“One of the first words he uttered to me was, ‘I didn’t shoot anybody’,” said Mr Leavelle.
“It was such an odd thing to say because I had asked him about shooting the police officer. His answer was so vague, so generic, I didn’t realise at the time he had also killed the President.
“There were only the two of us in the room. I tried to build up a rapport but he didn’t seem to have a care in the world. He was very calm and collected. Not the actions of someone who just killed the most powerful man on the planet.”
Oswald, 24 years old and the father or two young daughters, was a former US Marine from New Orleans who four years earlier had defected to the Soviet Union thanks to his Communist sympathies. But he got bored there and came back to America with a Russian wife, Marina.
After firing the three rifle shots which killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 – 50 years ago this month – Oswald jumped on a bus and headed back to his lodgings.
He picked up a pistol, went out on foot and had walked almost a mile before he was stopped by patrolman JD Tippit, probably because he matched a police description of the Kennedy suspect.
Asked to produce his ID, Oswald panicked and killed the cop with four shots at point-blank range. Then he fled into a nearby theatre where he was cornered by police and arrested.
