Henry Wade was born in Rockwell County, Texas, on 11th November, 1914. All eleven children did well at school and six of the eight sons became attorneys. This included Henry Wade who graduated from the University of Texas.

In 1939 Wade became special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and investigated espionage cases for four years on the East Coast and in South America. He served in the US Navy during the Second World War and took part in the invasions of the Philippines and Okinawa.

Wade joined the Dallas County District Attorney's office in 1947. Four years later he became District Attorney. He held this position at the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Cliff Carter, on behalf of President Lyndon B. Johnson, phoned Wade three times on the night of the assassination. According to Wade, Carter said that "any word of a conspiracy - some plot by foreign nations - to kill President Kennedy would shake our nation to its foundation. President Johnson was worried about some conspiracy on the part of the Russians… it would hurt foreign relations if I alleged a conspiracy - whether I could prove it or not… I was to charge Oswald with plain murder."

Wade was cheated from prosecuting Lee Harvey Oswald after he was murdered by Jack Ruby on 24th November, 1963. However, he was responsible for the prosecution and 1964 conviction of Ruby.

In 1964 Wade produced a screenplay on the assassination entitled "Countdown in Dallas". The script suggested that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were involved in a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy. The film was never made.

In 1970 a pregnant woman challenged the Texas law that prohibited abortion except to save a woman's life. Wade's office defended the state law at trial, where the law was declared unconstitutional. The Supreme Court affirmed a woman's right to abortion.

In 1995, the Henry Wade Juvenile Center in Dallas was named in Wade's honour. In 2000 he was named by the Texas Lawyer as one of 102 most influential attorneys of the 20th century.

Henry Wade died of as a result of complications from Parkinson's disease on 1st March, 2001.

On 18th February, 2008, The Houston Chronicle announced that several items owned by Henry Wade had been found in a locked safe: "The items include a purported transcript between Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer, nightclub owner Jack Ruby; a leather gun holster that held the gun Ruby used to shoot Oswald; brass knuckles found on Ruby when he was arrested; and a movie contract signed by then-Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade."

Henry Wade, who in nearly four decades as district attorney of Dallas County, Tex., became the very symbol of law and order there and is perhaps best remembered for the prosecution of Jack Ruby and as the Wade in Roe v. Wade, died yesterday at an assisted-living center in Dallas. He was 86.

Mr. Wade's cigar chewing, his drawl, his love of dominoes and his puttering around his farm near Dallas gave him an artfully deceiving image. His folksy manner masked a keen legal mind, a fiercely competitive streak and a relentless faith in the efficacy of punishment.

He was district attorney from 1951 to 1987, and during the early years, when his office was relatively small, he often prosecuted cases himself. When he did, he never lost a single one. As a prosecutor in those years, and earlier during three years when he was assistant district attorney, he asked for death sentences on 30 occasions, and got them on 29. As a whole, defense lawyers engaged against his prosecutors achieved one of the lowest acquittal rates in the country.

Mr. Wade's office was itself sued in 1970 by a pregnant waitress, Norma McCorvey, identified at the time only as Jane Roe. (The plaintiff in a companion suit had already taken the name Doe.) Ms. McCorvey, a resident of Dallas, sought to keep the district attorney from enforcing a Texas law that prohibited abortion except when a woman's life was at stake.

At trial, where one of Mr. Wade's assistants argued his case, the law was declared unconstitutional. The case ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court, which in 1973 issued the landmark decision affirming a woman's right to abortion.

Mr. Wade had previously come to national attention in 1964, when he led the prosecution of Jack Ruby. Mr. Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy's assassin, and it took a jury less than two hours to convict him and sentence him to death. A Texas appeals court overturned the conviction in 1966, citing reasons that included failure to move the trial from Dallas, but Mr. Ruby, by then suffering badly from cancer, died before a new trial could be held.

The trial that led to Mr. Ruby's conviction was punctuated by testy exchanges between Mr. Wade and the defendant's lawyer, Melvin Belli. Mr. Belli called Mr. Wade ''a country bumpkin.'' Mr. Wade, for his part, insisted on pronouncing Mr. Belli's name BELL-ee rather than BELL-eye, until the judge put a stop to it.

What proved to be one of Mr. Wade's less welcome forays into the national spotlight involved the case of Lenell Geter, a young black engineer with no previous criminal record who was serving a life sentence for robbery. Mr. Geter was freed in 1984, having served two years behind bars, after the Dallas prosecutors conceded that he had not committed the crime.

Henry Menasco Wade was born on Nov. 11, 1914, in Rockwall, Tex., near Dallas, the son of a judge. He graduated from the University of Texas, received his law degree with highest honors there and was admitted to the Texas bar.

After serving as an F.B.I. agent, he was named an assistant district attorney in Dallas in 1947. He ran for district attorney three years later, and was elected. Having held the office for 36 years, he retired in 1987 and became of counsel to a Dallas law firm.