Dale Meyers on the exact location where someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald murdered Officer J.D. Tippit at 1:06 or 1:07PM on November 22, 1963 -Robert Morrow agrees on the location.
Web link:
https://jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2022/10/where-was-jd-tippit-shot.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR1p7MPinA1vP4ZF0CEYAqYNZvwWfzV65AIn6tTeMgHlH_5JkL4lmKpdWmAHelen Markham affidavit given to Dallas police within 90 minutes of Tippit’s slaying
She said Tippit was shot at 1:06PM! Helen Markham was walking to her 1:12PM bus (source on that bus time is JFK researcher Matt Douthit)
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12745
Alaric Rosman:
This is the first of a series of three Forum postings, dealing with what I call “Document 106'' (or simply '106').
'106' is the affidavit that Helen Markham gave to the Dallas Police within 90 minutes of Tippit's slaying (1)
From the Warren Commission's perspective, ‘106’ was a threat because of its assertion that Tippit was shot at "approximately 1:06" (hence my title '106'), whereas the Commission was arguing for 1:16. (2) This later time, as we shall see in my third article, was essential to the Commission's purpose.
The second posting will consider all the supportive evidence for Mrs. Markham's "approximately 1:06", limiting itself to what actually was (or could have been) known at the time.
The third posting will assesses the Commission response to '106'. It concentrates on Commission lawyer Joseph Ball, who 'evasively' examined the testimonies of Helen Markham, Ted Callaway and Earlene Roberts.
'106' says
"At approximately 1:06 pm, November 22, 1963 --- I was standing on the corner of E.10th and Patton Street, waiting for traffic to go by when I saw a squad car stop in front of 404 E. 10th Street about 50feet from where I was standing. I saw a young white man walk up to the squad car opposite the driver's side, lean over and put his arms on the door of the car for a few seconds, then straighten up and step back from the car two or three feet. At this point the officer got out of his squad car and started around in front of the car and just as he got even with the left front wheel this young white man shot the officer and the officer fell to the pavement. I screamed and the man ran west on E. Tenth across Patton Street and went out of sight."(3)
Three reasons why this document is important.
(I) Mrs. Markham's status as a witness. She is the only witness we know of who saw the incident in its entirety (4)
In ‘106’ Mrs. Markham interprets the stopping of Tippit’s car by reference to house 404 (an interpretation which she maintained at her Hearings (5) She does not see Tippit as stopping to speak to the gunman --- she reports the gunman as initiating the interaction. (6)
(II) ‘106’ has the ring of truth. Five facts support this assertion.
(1) The statement was made to the Dallas police about 90 minutes after Tippit's death at a time when his death was a total mystery. Their minds were like blank pieces of paper on which Mrs. Markham, within reason, could write what she liked. The Dallas Police were at that time --- but later on, as I'll submit, only at that time -- passive receptacles into which she could do the pouring.
(2) She was in emotional shock ---- really frightened --- and certainly in no frame of mind to fabricate or consciously exaggerate (7)
(3) Her statement was to the point, unambiguous, and she claimed to have witnessed nothing that she could not have reasonably been expected to have seen. Her vantage point would have given her an unobstructed view, situated only about 150 ft (8) from the incident.
(4) She wasn't influenced by the opinion of other witnesses. She was the first witness.
(5) Of all those who gave evidence to the Warren Commission on Tippit's slaying, only Helen Markham was conscious of the time.
(3) ‘106’ contributes (more so than any other affidavit) to an assessment of when Tippit died--- an issue central to whether Oswald was Tippit’s murderer.
Because of its controversial time-check, '106' has been elbowed into the margins. Dale Myers (“With Malice”) does not include it in his Selection of Documents, nor is it referred to in his text.
There are key points in Dale Myers’ book --- his discussion of Mrs. Markham's movements (p60), and the time of Tippit's death (p86/87.) --- where reference to ‘106’ is essential, but nothing appears (9). More on this in the third posting.
Another thing that makes '106 'interesting is the way it gives its time-check: "approximately 1:06" --- a ‘precise approximation’ (very rare) --- which indicates that Mrs. Markham looked at her watch at 1:06, and that Tippit’s death was moments later. What occasioned the time-check?
I infer that Mrs. Markham's time-check was the outcome of a four-link chain of events: -
(i) Mrs. Markham, on Assassination day, was carrying out a routine schedule, the only exception to which was that on that particular day she wanted to phone her daughter.
As a waitress, she had to be at the Eat Well Restaurant by 2.35 It was her custom to leave her house at 1 pm (10)
(ii) The walk to the bus stop would have taken her 5 minutes, ensuring that she would have arrived 6/7 minutes before the bus's scheduled time (1:12pm), and about 10 minutes before the its modal time (1:15) (11)
Why so early? The most likely answer is that Mrs. Markham suffered from punctuality anxiety: a fear of being late. For this reason she left her house earlier than she need.
(iii) In her March '64 affidavit to the FBI, she remembers, that keen to phone her daughter, on this particular day, she dropped off at the nearby washateria (which was on the first floor of her block of flats)(12), but unable to get a reply to her call, she departed quickly, noting, as she left, that the washateria clock said 1.04 (13)
If she left her flat at one o'clock, and was able to depart from the washateria, after attempting a ‘phone call, by 1:04, she was obviously a fast mover. This reinforces the idea that she was anxious --- her mind was possibly gripped by the fact that she had a bus to catch.
(iv) Therefore she would have moved quickly to her bus stop at the south-west corner of Jefferson and Patton, but there was a delay (she says so in ‘106’) --- her anxiety would have increased.
The path to her bus stop required her to cross over 10th Street, southwards along Patton to the intersection at Jefferson, where the bus stop was.
The delay arose from the fact that she couldn't cross over. There was too much traffic.
Given her character, how would she have reacted? I would say in the same way that she reacted when she was delayed (and frustrated) at the washateria: she would --- surely? --- have taken an immediate time check.
She would have looked at her watch the moment she reached the corner and found that she couldn't cross over. And it said 1:06.
She then would have averted her eyes and lowered her wrist, and immediately afterwards she would have seen the gunman and then Tippit's approaching police car. The killing would have been less than a minute away
That's probably why she said "approximately 1:06". It wasn't exactly at 6 minutes past that Tippit was killed, but just after --- may be one minute later, say 7 minutes after one o’clock.
Well, that's what she was obviously struggling to tell Mr Ball at her Hearing, (14) but he cut her short. I wonder why?
Endnotes
M denotes Dales Myers, “With Malice”
(1) 7H, 251/2. Detective L.C. Graves was the man on Oswald’s left when Oswald was shot
(2) WR. 165, 651, CE1974
(3) 24H, 214 (CE 2003, p37)
(4) Scoggins didn’t see the gunman walking (implication 3H, 325). His assertion about the gunman moving west (Secret Service Affidavit, 2/12/63; M 522) was based on an erroneous inference. I am preparing a detailed submission on this.
(5) 3H, 307,314,317
(6) 6H, 457. 3H, 325. M534.If Tippit was a frequent visitor to 404, perhaps on Assassination day he was merely paying a routine call?
(7) 7H, 251/2. M 215. Whatever one may think of Mrs. Markham’s honesty, she had on this occasion neither the motive nor the calmness of mind to fabricate.
(8) M 62,161.Mrs Markham’s estimate was in error. She probably meant yards.
(9) ‘106’ is not even listed in the asterisked footnote on P 64, nor on ps 214,220, where Graves is mentioned.
(10) M 59
(11) M 60, 597
(12) M 59
(13) M 60, 61. Myers’ claim that Mrs. Markham left the washateria at 1.11 (so essential to his Commission-bound timing) ignores ‘106’, the document he doesn’t mention. Furthermore is it likely that Mrs. Markham, who routinely allowed herself so much time, would have cut things that fine?
(14) See Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment, Ch 14, 187
Helen Markham left the laundry room at her building at 1:04 p.m. and the FBI determined that it would take 2-3 minutes to walk to Tenth and Patton where she witnessed Officer J.D. Tippit being murdered
QUOTE
Markham was consistent in the time estimates that she gave. In an interview with the FBI on March 17, 1964 (prior to her Warren Commission testimony), Markham stated that she left the house at 1:00 p.m. and went to the payphone of the laundry place located in her building. She tried to call her daughter, but the line was busy. Markham said that she left the “washateria” at 1:04 p.m., which she noted from the clock on the wall. She then started to walk toward Jefferson Boulevard in order to catch the 1:15 p.m. bus. The FBI walked the distance from Markham’s apartment to the corner of Tenth and Patton Streets. They determined it took two and a half minutes. Note in her Warren Commission testimony, Markham stated that the time she reached Tenth and Patton was not more than 1:06 or 1:07 p.m..
UNQUOTE
[James Kelleher, He Was Expendable, pp. 98-99]
Helen Markham bio – Spartacus Educational
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmarkhamH.htm
Helen Markham, the daughter of a farmer, was born in Dallas. When she was six years old her mother died and went to with her aunt. She married young but the marriage was not a success. After her divorce she became a waitress in Dallas.
On 22nd November, 1963, Markham was in the Oak Cliff area when she saw Officer J. D. Tippit killed. She later described the killer as being short and somewhat on the heavy side, with slightly bushy hair." Later, Markham identified Lee Harvey Oswald in a police lineup, but this was after she had seen his photograph on television.
Although considered the star witness, her testimony was full of mistakes. She said he was alive when the ambulance arrived, but the other witnesses say he died immediately. She also falsely claimed that for the first twenty minutes she was the only person to attend the body. Once again, the other witnesses disagreed with her.
1) Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980)
The star witness to the shooting was Mrs. Helen Markham, a Dallas waitress. She was supposedly the only person to see the shooting in its entirety. The official version accepted her as "reliable" and credited her with watching the initial confrontation between Tippit and his murderer peeping fearfully through her fingers as the murderer loped away and thus being able to identify Oswald at a police lineup. Yet this "reliable" witness made more nonsensical statements than can reasonably be catalogued here. She said she talked to Tippit and he understood her until he was loaded into an ambulance. All the medical evidence, and other witnesses, say Tippit died instantly from the head wound. A witness who also saw the shooting - from his pickup truck - and then got out to help the policeman, put it graphically: "He was lying there and he had - looked like a big clot of blood coming out of his head, and his eyes were sunk back in his head.... The policeman, I believe, was dead when he hit the ground." Mrs. Markham said it was twenty minutes before others gathered at the scene of the crime. That is clearly nonsense. Within minutes men were in Tippit's car calling for help on the police radio, and a small crowd was there when the ambulance arrived three minutes later, at 1:10 p.m. Mrs. Markham is credited with recognizing Oswald within three hours at the police station. It turns out that she was so hysterical at the police station that only after ammonia was administered could she go into the lineup room. When she appeared before the Commission Mrs. Markham repeatedly said she had been unable to recognize anyone at the lineup and changed her tune only after pressure from counsel. The star witness in the Tippit shooting was best summed up by Joseph Ball senior counsel to the Warren Commission itself. In 1964 he referred in a public debate to her testimony as being "full of mistakes" and to Mrs Markham as an "utter screwball." He dismissed her as "utterly unreliable," the exact opposite of the Report's verdict.
(2) Ian Griggs, Fair Play Magazine, Did Howard Leslie Brennan Really Attend an Identification Lineup? (May, 1999)
The first lineup was convened less than three and a half hours after the murder of Patrolman J D Tippit. Its purpose was to give 47-year old Dallas waitress Mrs Helen Louise Markham the opportunity to pick out the man she claimed to have seen shoot the officer. I will point out here that there are problems establishing the exact times of all these lineups. In each case, I will use the time given in the official DPD investigation file 15. According to that document, this lineup was held at 4.35pm.
As on all three lineups on Friday 22nd, Oswald selected the no. 2 position in the four-man lineup and was handcuffed to the man on either side of him. His companions were Acting Detective Perry (no.1), Detective Clark (no. 3) and Jail Clerk Don Ables (no.4).
When Mrs Markham had been brought in and was in position on the other side of the one-way nylon screen, each man was asked to step forward and state his name and place of employment. Perhaps significantly, only Oswald was truthful here. The three DPD employees (by their own admission in their later sworn testimony), each gave fictitious answers. Oswald was the only one of the four with facial injuries; he had been named and shown on TV that afternoon and it had also been broadcast that his place of employment was believed to be the source of the attack on Kennedy. In view of those facts, it cannot be claimed that everything was being arranged with scrupulous fairness to the suspect!
As for the witness, she was hardly in a fit state to undertake the responsible task of identifying (or not identifying, as the case may be) the killer of Patrolman Tippit. Homicide Detective L. C. Graves, one of those organising the lineup, said that she was "quite hysterical" and "crying and upset" and there was even talk of her being sent to hospital. In his testimony, Captain Fritz stated: "We were trying to get that showup as soon as we could because she was beginning to faint and getting sick. In fact I had to leave the office and carry some ammonia across the hall, they were about to send her to the hospital or something and we needed that identification real quickly, and she got to feeling all right after using this ammonia."
According to the Warren Report, Mrs Markham "identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man who shot the policeman" 18. The Report also stated that "in testimony before the Commission, Mrs Markham confirmed her positive identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as the man she saw kill Officer Tippit".
Sylvia Meagher, in Accessories After the Fact, argued that the testimony of this alleged eyewitness to the shooting of Tippit by Oswald, lacks any semblance of credibility 20. Several members of the Warren Commission staff have subsequently voiced their opinions of Mrs Markham's value as a witness. Assistant Counsel Liebeler has described her testimony as "contradictory and worthless" 21, whilst Assistant Counsel Ball described her as "an utter screwball".
Norman Redlich, another Warren Commission staff member, is quoted as saying "The Commission wants to believe Mrs Markham and that's all there is to it." 23. I think this remark is very important since Mrs Markham was the only witness who ever claimed to have actually seen Tippit being shot. Like it or not, the investigators were stuck with her! If she had announced that the Earth was flat, they would have been hard-pressed not to believe her!
What the Warren Report does not divulge about the testimony of its star Tippit witness is the fact that she required considerable prompting concerning her identification of Oswald. In her testimony, she initially stated six times that she recognised nobody in the lineup. Tiring of this, Assistant Counsel Ball unashamedly produced one of the most amazing leading questions ever asked: "Was there a number two man in there?" After a few similar questions, he managed to get her to say "I asked... I looked at him. When I saw this man I wasn't sure but I had cold chills run all over me ... when I saw the man. But I wasn't sure."
(3) Helen Markham interviewed by William Ball for the Warren Commission (26th March, 1964)
William Ball: What did you notice then?
Helen Markham: Well, I noticed a police car coming.
William Ball: Where was the police car when you first saw it?
Helen Markham: He was driving real slow, almost up to this man, well, say this man, and he kept, this man kept walking, you know, and the police car going real slow now, real slow, and they just kept coming into the curb, and finally they got way up there a little ways up, well, it stopped.
William Ball: The police car stopped?
Helen Markham: Yes, sir.
William Ball: What about the man? Was he still walking?
Helen Markham: The man stopped.
William Ball: Then what did you see the man do?
Helen Markham: I saw the man come over to the car very slow, leaned and put his arms just like this, he leaned over in this window and looked in this window.
William Ball: He put his arms on the window ledge?
Helen Markham: The window was down.
William Ball: It was?
Helen Markham: Yes, sir.
William Ball: Put his arms on the window ledge?
Helen Markham: On the ledge of the window.
William Ball: And the policeman was sitting where?
Helen Markham: On the driver's side.
William Ball: He was sitting behind the wheel?
Helen Markham: Yes, sir.
William Ball: Was he alone in the car?
Helen Markham: Yes.
William Ball: Then what happened?
Helen Markham: Well, I didn't think nothing about it; you know, the police are nice and friendly, and I thought friendly conversation. Well, I looked, and there were cars coming, so I had to wait. Well, in a few minutes this man made--
William Ball: What did you see the policeman do?
Helen Markham: See the policeman? Well, this man, like I told you, put his arms up, leaned over, he just a minute, and he drew back and he stepped back about two steps. Mr. Tippit..
William Ball: The policeman?
Helen Markham: The policeman calmly opened the car door, very slowly, wasn't angry or nothing, he calmly crawled out of this car, and I still just thought a friendly conversation, maybe disturbance in the house, I did not know; well, just as the policeman got
William Ball: Which way did he walk?
Helen Markham: Towards the front of the car. And just as he had gotten even with the wheel on the driver's side...
William Ball: You mean the left front wheel?
Helen Markham: Yes; this man shot the policeman.
William Ball: You heard the shots, did you?
Helen Markham: Yes, sir.
William Ball: How many shots did you hear?
Helen Markham: Three.
William Ball: What did you see the policeman do?
Helen Markham: He fell to the ground, and his cap went a little ways out on the street.
William Ball: What did the man do?
Helen Markham: The man, he just walked calmly, fooling with his gun.
William Ball: Toward what direction did he walk?
Helen Markham: Come back towards me, turned around, and went back.
William Ball: Toward Patton?
Helen Markham: Yes, sir; towards Patton. He didn't run. It just didn't scare him to death. He didn't run. When he saw me he looked at me, stared at me. I put my hands over my face like this, closed my eyes. I gradually opened my fingers like this, and I opened my eyes, and when I did he started off in kind of a little trot.
William Ball: Did anybody tell you that the man you were looking for would be in a certain position in the lineup, or anything like that?
Helen Markham: No, sir.
William Ball: Now when you went into the room you looked these people over, these four men?
Helen Markham: Yes, sir.
William Ball: Did you recognize anyone in the lineup?
Helen Markham: No, sir.
William Ball: You did not? Did you see anybody - I have asked you that question before did you recognize anybody from their face?
Helen Markham: From their face, no.
William Ball: Did you identify anybody in these four people?
Helen Markham: I didn't know nobody.
William Ball: I know you didn't know anybody, but did anybody in that lineup look like anybody you had seen before?
Helen Markham: No. I had never seen none of them, none of these men.
William Ball: No one of the four?
Helen Markham: No one of them.
William Ball: No one of all four?
Helen Markham: No, sir.
William Ball: Was there a number two man in there?
Helen Markham: Number two is the one I picked.
William Ball: Well, I thought you just told me that you hadn't...
Helen Markham: I thought you wanted me to describe their clothing.
William Ball: No. I wanted to know if that day when you were in there if you saw anyone in there...
Helen Markham: Number two.
William Ball: What did you say when you saw number two?
Helen Markham: Well, let me tell you. I said the second man, and they kept asking me which one, which one. I said, number two. When I said number two, I just got weak.
William Ball: What about number two, what did you mean when you said number two?
Helen Markham: Number two was the man I saw shoot the policeman.
William Ball: You recognized him from his appearance?
Helen Markham: I asked - I looked at him. When I saw this man I wasn't sure, but I had cold chills just run all over me.
William Ball: When you saw him?
Helen Markham: When I saw the man. But I wasn't sure, so, you see, I told them I wanted to be sure, and looked, at his face is what I was looking at, mostly is what I looked at, on account of his eyes, the way he looked at me. So I asked them if they would turn him sideways. They did, and then they turned him back around, and I said the second, and they said, which one, and I said number two. So when I said that, well, I just kind of fell over. Everybody in there, you know, was beginning to talk, and I don't know, just...
William Ball: Did you recognize him from his clothing?
Helen Markham: He had on a light short jacket, dark trousers. I looked at his clothing, but I looked at his face, too.
William Ball: Did he have the same clothing on that the man had that you saw shoot the officer?
Helen Markham: He had, these dark trousers on.
William Ball: Did he have a jacket or a shirt? The man that you saw shoot Officer Tippit and run away, did you notice if he had a jacket on?
Helen Markham: He had a jacket on when he done it.
William Ball: What kind of a jacket, what general color of jacket?
Helen Markham: It was a short jacket open in the front, kind of a grayish tan.
William Ball: Did you tell the police that?
Helen Markham: Yes, I did.
William Ball: Did any man in the lineup have a jacket on?
Helen Markham: I can't remember that.
William Ball: Did this number two man that you mentioned to the police have any jacket on when he was in the lineup?
Helen Markham: No, sir.
William Ball: What did he have on?
Helen Markham: He had on a light shirt and dark trousers.
William Ball: Did you recognize the man from his clothing or from his face?
Helen Markham: Mostly from his face.
William Ball: Were you sure it was the same man you had seen before?
Helen Markham: I am sure.
An original DPD police transcript shows the time of the T.F. Bowley call into DPD that an officer had been shot as 1:10PM! Not 1:16PM as the Warren Commission stated
https://harveyandlee.net/November/TippittMurder.html
QUOTE
Witness Helen Markham told the WC that Oswald was "wearing a light gray looking jacket and kind of dark trousers" and said the shooting occurred at 1:06 PM. T.F. Bowley was driving west on 10th Street and did not see the shooting. He arrived at the scene and used the police radio to report the shooting. Bowley looked at his watch--the time was 1:10 PM (CE 2003). An original DPD police transcript, found in the National Archives, lists the time of transmission as 1:10 PM. (Image at left shows Tippit's car at the murder scene. The white car on the left side of the photo is at the approximate location of Benavides during the shooting.)
UNQUOTE
Brian Stevens (9-1-2022) on Quora on the Tippit murder:
QUOTE
Helen Markham had the clearest view of any of the witnesses. She placed the time of the murder at 1:06 PM to 1:07 PM. Domingo Benavidez was the closest witness to the murder. He saw the suspect shoot Tippet, watch the suspect walk away, and waited a few minutes for safety. He got out of his vehicle, tried to assist Officer Tippit, and then tried to use Tippets radio to call for help. C F Browley saw the shooting from a distance. Drove up, parked his vehicle, checked his watch, and it showed 1:10 PM. He got out of his vehicle and then made an effort to assist Tippett. After that, he took over Tippet’s radio from Domingo Benavidez and was successful at requesting assistance. The police station radio call logs show C F Browley’s Radio calls at 1:15 - 1:16 PM. This means that the murder took place minutes before 1:15 PM. Exactly bearing up the 1:10 PM time of the shooting. Probably even a minute or two earlier because of Mr. Browley first seeing the shooting, then pulling up and parking his vehicle, then checking his watch.
UNQUOTE
Brian Stevens (9-13-2022) on Quora –
QUOTE
Robert, using testimony and statements from the Warren commission itself, places the time of officer Tippetts murder at 1:10 PM or a few minutes earlier. Since CF Bowley did not witness the shooting, when he pulled up and parked, his watch said 1:10 PM. And he did not see the killer. He got out of his vehicle, tried to help Officer Tippit, then was able to call the police station over JD Tippit‘s radio. Between the police station radio: logs, the testimony of Helen Markham, Domingo Benavides, and Mr. Bowley, everything matches that Officer Tippit was killed at or before 1:10 PM.
The inescapable conclusion is that President Kennedy and Dallas police officer JD Tippit were killed as part of a conspiracy.
if Oswald was JD Tippit‘s murderer, someone gave him a ride to near the scene. That means conspiracy. If there were someone else that killed officer Tippit, that also spells conspiracy.
I have yet to hear from anyone that can discredit the timing of JD Tippit‘s murder. As a sidenote, the single assassin believers like to use only those portions of testimony from Markham, Benavidez, and Mr. Bowley that support the single assassin theory. At the same time, they tend to ignore the testimony from those witnesses that point towards a conspiracy.
UNQUOTE
Brian Stevens on Quora on the time of the Tippit murder
QUOTE
I agree with you Robert. I went with the 1:10 PM time of Tippit murder to give Oswald as much time as possible to get to the murder scene. Like you, I believe the murder was at 1:06 PM to 1:07 PM. Either way, he could not have been the shooter. As I said in an earlier post, when Mr. Bowley pulled up to the scene, Tippet was already down. Mr. Bowley‘s watch said 1:10 PM. Then, he spent a few minutes trying to help officer Tippett, before making the radio call.
UNQUOTE
Domingo “Donnie” Benavides was 10-15 feet away from the slaying and he gave a description of the killer of Officer Tippit which clearly did not match with Lee Harvey Oswald. Name is in fact spelled Benavides and Benavides was born on April 9, 1937 in Texas County #057.
Matt Douthit post on 10/14/2022 in J.D. Tippit: Searching For The Truth
In honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month, I would like to acknowledge Domingo “Donnie” Benavidez, the closest eyewitness to Patrolman Tippit’s murder—“I was ten or fifteen feet away.” He gave the most detailed description of the slayer, which 100% did not match Lee Oswald. He refused to identify Oswald as the killer. Then his brother Eddy, who closely resembled him, was shot dead. Donnie quit his job and was replaced by another Hispanic bearing a resemblance to him, and within weeks, THAT MAN was shot! Donnie’s father-in-law began to investigate, and HE TOO was shot!! All of this, coupled with constant hounding by the Dallas Police, led Donnie to do a 180° and publicly say in 1967 that Oswald was definitely the killer. He then fled Texas. He died in Nevada in 2005 at the age of 68. I feel sorry for Donnie. Hell, history even misspelled his name—it’s “Benavidez”, NOT “Benavides”. Acknowledging him here during National Hispanic Heritage Month is the least we can do for him. I’m sorry you and your family had to go thorough what you went through. Rest In Peace.
Robert Morrow on the Tippit murder scene and why Oswald was not there:
QUOTE
The reason Helen Markham was so COCKSURE about the TIME of the Tippit murder was because her apartment complex’s laundry room clock read 1:04 PM and the FBI timed her walk to the murder scene and it was 2–3 minutes. She is walking to her her 1:12PM bus (can’t be late ….), so I think the Tippit murder was closer to 1:06PM than 1:10PM. Add to that in the machine-gun riddled WARREN REPORT the government insists Oswald was waiting outside his house at 1:03PM and Oswald’s boarding room is 9/10ths of a mile away from the Tippit murder scene. OSWALD WAS NOT THERE!! I have super speed walked the distance twice - one time it took 11 minutes and 5 seconds and the second time, walking back to the boarding house and maximum speed walking speed was 10 minutes and 35 seconds. (Not running, speed walking as fast as I could, not regular walking - and walking through red lights and traffic and not stopping.)
UNQUOTE
Jim Marrs: Oswald’s Pistol Had A Bent Firing Pin: so how could he have shot anyone with that pistol on 11-22-63?
Oswald's Pistol Had A Bent Firing Pin (rumble.com)
“Jim Marrs talks about the FBI document he found in the Warren Report that states that Oswald's Pistol had a Bent firing pin and had to be repaired in order to be tested for ballistics. In other words he could not have shot Officer JD Tippit with it.”
By Izraul Hidashi post on 7/18/2022 in Facebook group JFK: Nothing But The Truth: On How Oswald did NOT kill Tippit
FACT: THE NUMBER OF WITNESSES WHO SAW OSWALD SHOOT TIPPIT IS ZERO.
Fact: The WC concluded that there were 12 witnesses who either saw Oswald shoot Tippit or flee the scene with a gun in his hand.
Fact: Only 2 were used, Domingo Benavides & Helen Markham.
Fact: Only Markham was taken to a lime up (sour line up) & testified to the WC.
Fact: Benavides was the closest witness to the killing and the only one who clearly saw the Killer enough to describe in detail what he did. Yet he was never taken to a line up or called to testify in front of the WC. Instead he was deposed in private on April 2, 1964.
Fact: Benavides gave the description of the killer to both police and WC counsel. Both had that description but never revealed or mentioned it. Benavides saw Oswald on t.v. and in papers yet refused to pin him as the killer.
But Markham was the only witness of 12 the DPD & WC used. She never described what the killer did in detail, only that he was short & heavy set. (Sorry LN's the evidence is on tape).
Fact: Benavides clearly saw the killer shoot Tippit, take a few steps, dump 1 shell, take 6 or 7 steps, throw another shell, then go around a house. He waited a few minutes before getting out of his truck because he was afraid the killer was at the back of the house and might start shooting again.
When he finally got out to check on Tippit, he found him dead. Then he tried to use Tippit's radio to call for help. The call, made, either by him or another man, was alleged at 1:16 pm, 1 minute after the WC claimed the murder happened, 1:15 pm.
Does it only take 1 min to pull up next to someone. Talk. Get out of the car. Then get shot 4 times?
Did other witnesses really see Oswald walk down the street with a gun after taking a back route behind a house? Did that route lead to an alley or a street?
Why did the WC conclude Benavides quickly rushed to Tippit's side & promptly call for help? Because it's a deception that changes the murder time from the reliable witnesses 1:06 to the unreliable WC 1:15.
Unfortunately the WC report was intended to manipulate facts & deceive the public with conclusions of fantasy, which have now become the main source of factual research for the Lone Nut community.
Those who base research on WC conclusions are easily duped into believing lies, like Helen Markham chose Oswald as Tippits killer based on her own eyewitness account of his actions.
Therefore Oswald must be guilty of killing Tippit. Case closed. Therein the purpose of the WC.
We clearly see the secret to changing time frames, obstructing justice, evidence tampering & withholding facts. But what's the secret of turning a short heavy set killer into a slim one?
More of the same...
CONSPIRACY 101 -- TRICKERY & DECEIT
Captain Fritz: "We were trying to get that showup as soon as we could because she was beginning to faint and getting sick. In fact I had to leave the office and carry some ammonia across the hall, they were about to send her to the hospital or something and we needed that identification real quickly*, and she got to feeling all right after using this ammonia."
"REAL QUICKLY..." DPD forced 1 of 12 alleged witnesses to a line up in order to "real quickly" pin Tippit's murder on Oswald based solely on the word of 1 dizzy witness high on ammonia?
Sounds like real legit police work, right? 11 other witnesses and this is the most legitimate way to "real quickly" assure a positive ID of a cop killer. Uh huh
How positive was that ID of Lee "the paper bag sniper" Oswald, professional cop killer extraordinaire...?
LN FACT: MARKHAM PICKED OSWALD IN A LINE UP BECAUSE SHE SAW HIM KILL TIPPIT.
ACTUAL FACT: MARKHAM'S TESTIMONY
Q. Now when you went into the room you looked these people over, these four men?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Did you recognize anyone in the lineup ?
A. No, sir
Q. You did not? Did you see anybody—I have asked you that question before*—did you recognize anybody from their face ?
A. From their face, no.
Q. Did you identify anybody in these four people ?
A. I didn’t know nobody
Q. I know you didn’t know anybody, but did anybody in that lineup look like anybody you had seen before ?
A. No. I had never seen none of them, none of these men.
HOW DID LN RESEARCHERS MISS THIS? JUST TO BE CLEAR...
Q. No one of the four ?
A. No one of them.
Q. No one of all four ?
A. No, sir.
C'mon Mr. Lead the Witness. She saw the killer, she should know what he looks like. Obviously the real killer wasn't in that room. But no problem because the rules say she can randomly pick anyone she wants. How did the random pick turn out be Oswald?
TESTIMONY CONT.
Q. Was there a number 2 man in there ?
A. Number 2 is the one I picked.
Q. I thought you just told me that you hadn't--
A. I thought you wanted to me to their clothing.
Q. You recognized him from his appearance ?
A. I asked--I looked at him. When I saw this man I wasn't sure, but I had cold chills just run all over me.
Ah, well there you have it. She saw Dracula and got cold chills. Absolutely a legitimate reason to pick any random innocent person and accuse him of him cop murder.
She didn't pick Oswald because he killed Tippit, she picked him because "I didn't like they way he looked! He frightened me." Uh huh. You poor woman. I'm sure with plenty of help from the DPD too.
So how could fact expert LN's be so wrong? Maybe because the GODS of their truth decided to change real FACTS into LN FACTS, like this...
Mrs Markham "identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man who shot the policeman" and also stated "in testimony before the Comm., Mrs Markham confirmed her positive identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as the man she saw kill Officer Tippit".
Whoa...! Was that impressive or what?
Almost as impressive as the number of LN's who use the word "FACTS" like it's some sort of magic spell that turns them into experts.
What did WC counsel say about their reliable witness Markham later on? "She's an "utter screwball" whose testimony was "full of mistakes.," and dismissed her as "utterly unreliable."
Whaa....? That's the exact opposite of the WC findings. I thought they deemed her reliable? She said the murder was at 1:06. They deemed it unreliable and changed it to 1:15. They had her on tape describing the killer as "short & heavy," even got her to admit it, yet that too was unreliable. So they changed it to Oswald.
More proof FACTS are not LN FACTS. No matter how hard they try to convince you otherwise. They should all be deemed unreliable.
But who could the short heavy killer be? Someone familiar with the area maybe, who possibly lived around the corner & owned a .38 revolver? Someone like Jack Ruby, who had Tippit in his club the night before and killed Oswald 3 days later with a .38.
Was Ruby's gun ever tested for ballistics? It should be. Then we can see if a .38 or .32 killed Tippet. You know... since Oswald's alleged .38 shells never matched... oh, sorry, more factually correct, tested "inconclusive."
If only Benavides had been willing to lie about the facts... he could have saved that poor woman from an ammonis overdose.
Please forgive my joking but this whole thing was a joke. The WC. The DPD. And the LN's who have to try really hard not to see it.
Jeff Whitfield Facebook post in JFK assassination discussion group on 4-9-2021 on Oswald NOT shooting J.D. Tippit
The Warren Commission version of the Tippit shooting said that Oswald alone killed Tippit at about 1:15 PM. After President Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald departed work at the Texas School Book Depository and took a taxi to his boarding house. The official story then has Oswald walking to the crime scene at 10th and Patton from his rooming house at 1026 North Beckley in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, a distance of around 9/10 of a mile. In itself, as everyone must note created a problem. It began with Oswald’s landlady testifying that she had seen him standing on the corner across the street from the rooming house waiting for a bus after he went into his room at about 1:00 PM. When asked what time she saw him there—waiting for a bus that would take him in the wrong direction from 10th and Patton—she replied it was about 1:04. The idea that someone could traverse the nearly one mile distance from the rooming house to the crime scene in something like 11 minutes is hard to swallow. No one saw Oswald running that distance, or walking for that matter. Recall, this is about a half hour after President Kennedy’s assassination. If Oswald had been running, wouldn’t someone have noticed him?
The idea that Tippit was shot at the 1:15 PM time is not supported by the weight of the evidence. For instance, Mrs. Donald Higgins was later interviewed by Barry Ernest for his book, The Girl on the Stairs. She told Barry that the time of the shooting was 1:06. And she lived only a couple of doors down from the crime scene. Roger Craig said that, when the news of the shooting came over the radio, he looked at his watch, which said 1:06. Even Helen Markham, the WC's star witness, who became hysterical after the shooting, said Tippit was shot at the latest about about 1:07 PM. T. F. Bowley came on the scene after the shooting, with Tippit’s body lying in the street. He had to stop his car, and then walked over to the abandoned Tippit car, and he then picked up the radio. He said that the time on his watch after he arrived at the scene and stopped his car was 1:10. It is important to hold in mind that the Warren Commission did not interview either Mrs. Higgins or Mr. Bowley. In fact, the Warren Report actually says that another witness, Domingo Benavides, made the call to the police that Bowley actually made. (WR, p. 166)
This, of course, is a key evidentiary point. Because if it is hard to believe that Oswald was at the scene at 1:15, it is not possible to think he could be there at 1:08 PM—that is, unless someone drove him there, and no evidence of that has surfaced in over fifty years. Further, the legal death certificate document pronounced Tippit dead at 1:15. This was done by Dr. Richard Liquori at Methodist Hospital. If one allows for the time for the ambulance to get to the scene of the crime and return, this would appear to back up Mrs. Higgins’ claim that the shooting occurred at 1:06 PM.
What made the situation worse was this: the witness who was closest to the actual shooting scene could not identify Oswald as the shooter. This was Domingo Benavides. (Hurt, p. 145) This is compounded by the fact that the Dallas Police never even took Benavides to a lineup in order to identify Oswald. (WR, p. 166) One witness who said he saw Oswald fleeing the scene was Ted Callaway. The problem with his testimony is that Benavides worked for him at a car lot. Callaway asked Benavides if he saw the man escaping. Benavides said he did. Before he took off looking for him, Callaway asked his employee: Which way did he go? As Meagher asks, is not Callaway’s testimony therefore paradoxical? Why did he have to ask his employee where the guy went if he already saw him? (Meagher, p. 258) In addition to that, before Callaway viewed the lineup, he was given some input by Leavelle. He was told that the police wanted to wrap up the Tippit case real tight since they thought the man who killed Tippit also killed Kennedy. Time after time, witnesses to a man fleeing the scene were not questioned until late January. And at that late date they were only shown one photograph: Oswald’s. This was two months after the media had begun its daily pounding of the public consciousness with the FALSE idea that Oswald was Kennedy’s killer. And then there is further questions that need answering with regard to the fishy ballistics of the Tippit murder not to mention the wallet that Oswald allegedly left at the scene. There is no doubt whatsoever that Oswald did not shoot Officer Tippit and that's final and LNs can shout whatever they want from the rooftops. No one is listening. Oswald did not shoot Tippit. Once more so that it sinks in OSWALD DID NOT SHOOT TIPPIT.
Matt Douthit: Tippit witness Jack Tatum said the Tippit killer had a Pompadour. Oswald definitely did not have that hairstyle.
MATT DOUTHIT (Facebook Post)
EVEN MORE EVIDENCE
Alleged witness Jack Tatum said the Tippit killer “had black hair brushed up in front to form a pompadour (a common hairstyle among men in those days).” (William Weston, The Fourth Decade, Nov. 1998)
This proves even more that Oswald wasn’t the killer, for he had brown receding hair.
(I’m not going to repeat the same errors he made in the past, so see my previous two fact checks)
- Dealey Plaza to the rooming house is 2 miles—NOT 3.
- Roberts said “Oh, you are in a hurry” when Oswald CAME IN (R 163)—NOT when he left! This is a basic fact!!
- Oswald was 150 pounds at autopsy (R 144)—NOT 135.
- Bill said: “...the garbage that Mark Lane threw out there about Helen Markham’s description.” This is a zombie lie. There’s NO “garbage”—Markham simply told Lane the killer “was short” and his hair was “just a little bit bushy.” (20 H 573-574) And when Lane asked if he was “a little heavy”, Markham replied: “Uh-huh.” (20 H 578) This couldn’t have been Oswald.
- Bill said something SHOCKING: Leavelle told him they “did everything right in the lineups”! Folks with even a cursory knowledge about the lineups would leap off their chairs at this outrageous comment! Larry Ray Harris: “In 1979, I asked Dr. Robert Buckhout—who is a leading US expert on eyewitness testimony and identification procedures—to evaluate the Dallas Police lineups. He did so and concluded: ‘By any stretch of the imagination, virtually every rule in the book was violated in the conduct of these lineups. The results of any of the lineups, conducted as poorly and under its hysterical circumstances as they were, should be regarded as utterly worthless.’” (1993 ASK Conference)
- Benavides did NOT say the jacket was “light-blue”—Bill is thinking of Scoggins.
- As usual, Bill says Brewer testified he saw Oswald with no jacket—but as I recently pointed out, if you sit down and talk with Brewer he’ll tell you that he never read his testimony until 1991 and that actually Oswald WAS IN FACT wearing a jacket! (JFK: The Book of the Film, pp. 173-174) This proves he didn’t kill Tippit. Never take at face value what a document says. Always double check things with the actual eyewitness!
- Bill ignores Bowley’s other actions which show several minutes elapsed before he made the radio call.
- The police did NOT have “reel-to-reel recorders”—they of course had the dictabelt.
- Bill said Marina ID’d the revolver in her testimony—but IGNORES her ORIGINAL account where she said she never saw the revolver! (CD 344, p. 24)
- Bill avows: “Nobody’s ever come forward with one piece of physical evidence to point anywhere other than Lee Oswald!” Fake news! The prints lifted from the car where the killer placed his hands DO NOT MATCH OSWALD!! (With Malice, p. 340)
- Burroughs was NOT “the assistant manager of the theater”.
- Bill parrots Myers’ lame excuse that Barrett “could’ve confused about when he was asked by Westbrook about the two names [in the wallet]”—but this is IMPOSSIBLE, for as Barrett told Myers himself: “The only time I spoke to Westbrook at anytime was at the murder scene.” (With Malice, p. 366)
- Bill mentions Kinsley, Butler, and Callaway not seeing a wallet on the ground—this is misleading since Sgt. Croy said a civilian had approached him and handed him the wallet.
- Bill incorrectly says Sgt. Croy arrived after the body was gone.
- Bill incorrectly claims Officers Poe and Jez said they never saw the wallet—Poe simply couldn’t recall, and Jez in fact told two researchers at a 1999 conference that the wallet was identified at the murder scene as belonging to Oswald! He explained he “does not want to be formally interviewed on the subject”, hence him denying it to Myers in 1996. Also, Bill incorrectly called Jez a “lieutenant”—he was actually a patrolman.
- Bill says: “If Oswald’s wallet was found at the scene, don’t you think the whole world would’ve known it that afternoon?!”—well, it WAS on the news that day, hence the NEWS FOOTAGE of it! Also on that day—and many don’t know this—the news did indeed report that it WAS Oswald’s wallet!!! “...checking the wallet...from the suspect Oswald...” And so it is. On November 22, 1963 it was called Oswald’s wallet.
- Bill brought up Barrett not mentioning the wallet in his report—but Barrett explained more than once why!
Matt Douthit Fact Checking Bill Brown on the Tippit slaying – May 2, 2021
- Bill says Croy and Barrett didn’t mention the wallet “for literally over 30 years.” This is a lie. Croy told Jones Harris about the wallet in 1990, and Barrett told Hosty about it way back in 1978!
- The FBI DID question Mrs. Clemmons! (“The Other Witnesses”, The New Leader, 10/12/64)
- Bill claims the Warren Commission didn’t know Clemmons’ identity—but Marguerite Oswald had telephoned the Commission in June 1964 and told them all about her! (KTVT, Sept. 1964)
- Mark Lane did NOT discover Clemmons in April 1964—Vincent Salandria, Harold Feldman, and Marguerite Oswald did in June 1964.
- Mark Lane NEVER said there were “two shooters”.
- Bill says “if you listen to Shirley Martin’s interview with Clemmons, Clemmons doesn’t make it sound like these two men were together at all.”—but I simply quote Clemmons verbatim from that interview: “IT WAS TWO MEN.”
- Bill says “it’s questionable whether she was even outside when the shooting occurred”—but again, I simply quote Clemmons verbatim: “I got tired, COME OUT HERE and sit down here [on the porch]...I was just SITTING OUT HERE.” (ibid.)
- Bill: “All she said is that she heard the shots.”—Clemmons: “I SAW SOME SHOTS.” (3/23/66 filmed interview with Mark Lane)
- Markham was 47—NOT 42.
- 21 people saw the killer—NOT 13.
- Bill lies again when he claims Burt never said it wasn’t Oswald—Burt told reporter Al Chapman and researcher Larry Harris that it was NOT Oswald.
And all the other errors he made I‘ve covered in my previous two fact checks.
J. D. Tippit: Searching For The Truth | Facebook
Matthew Douthit: doing some fact check on Jerry Dealey’s book,
8-11-2022 post in November 1963: JFK Balanced (Civil Discussion) Facebook group
QUOTE
I got bored so I decided to FACT CHECK “fence-sitter” Jerry Dealey’s new eBook. Here’s what he said regarding Tippit...
- It’s Callaway—NOT Calloway.
- Callaway never said he saw the man “reloading his revolver”.
- Callaway never said he “let [the man] pass” by him because he “raised the pistol” in the air!
- 4 allegedly identified Oswald at lineups—NOT “13 or so”.
- Dealey claims that Oswald’s alleged route “can be done without running in about 12 ½ minutes.” But he blatantly leaves out that that’s walking East, and all the witnesses said the man was actually walking WEST (16 min).
- Roberts never said she last saw Oswald “in front of the house at the bus stop at about 1:00 PM”—she actually said it was “several minutes” after 1:04-1:05. (CD 5, p. 355; 24 H 871)
- Bowley made the 1:16 radio call—NOT Benavides. This is a basic fact!
- Scoggins NEVER said the man was “walking east”! The complete opposite is true.
- Tippit, of course, talked to the man through the open vent window—NOT “through the passenger window”!! Because, of course, the window was closed. This is the most basic fact!
- Dealey incorrectly says it was “Scoggins and Benavides” who “took the gun and went driving after him”. It was Callaway and Scoggins.
Jack Myers’ May 2021 post on the murder of J.D. Tippit – Excellent!
(1) J. D. Tippit: Searching For The Truth | Facebook
Let's talk jackets.
Okay, so Oswald shoots the President with a badly aligned $12 rifle, getting off three shots in six seconds with the outdated bolt-action weapon, and hits Kennedy twice, including the Governor with the so-called magic bullet. Then he ditches the rifle, which several lawmen soon identify as a Mauser, which later morphs into a Mannlicher-Carcano. Oswald is meanwhile wearing a long-sleeved brown shirt which he has been working in all day, with a white t-shirt underneath the brown shirt.
Oswald then descends several flights of stairs, and stops in the lunchroom to buy a bottle of soda. A cop sees Oswald in the lunchroom, soda bottle in hand, puts a gun in Oswald's belly, questions him, then lets Oswald go after the building manager vouches for Oswald. This is all 90 seconds or so following the assassination.
Oswald decides to leave the building, and retrieves a faded blue work jacket. He directs a reporter to a telephone before going out to catch a bus (or getting into a green Rambler in Dealey Plaza). Once on the bus, he is seen by witnesses wearing his dirty brown, tattered shirt and some kind of jacket, possibly faded blue. The bus gets stick in traffic, so Oswald departs the bus and catches a cab. The cabbie describes Oswald's dark pants, his brown long-sleeved shirt, and a faded blue work jacket. Oswald departs the cab several blocks south of his rooming house. The cabbie doesn't see which way Oswald goes. A few minutes later, Mrs. Roberts sees Oswald enter the rooming house in shirtsleeves (her words, meaning he wore no jacket). Oswald rushes to his room, comes out with a light-colored jacket, and walks out . . . in the direction of the bus stop and not towards 10th & Patton, which is in the opposite direction.
In the next few minutes, Oswald will be seen entering the Texas theater and observed buying popcorn, changing seats, and making himself quite visible to the small audience and staff in attendance, Meanwhile, out on 10th Street, most of a mile away, a man is seen walking west. He will later be identified by many as Oswald. "Oswald" will be stopped for unknown reasons, by a police officer far from his own district, and then without explanation or provocation shoot the policeman to death. Witnesses report the suspect to be wearing dark trousers, a white shirt, and a light-colored Eisenhower jacket. Nobody mentions anything about a brown shirt. Or a faded blue work jacket. The gunman flees and disappears behind a service station. Some time later, a light-colored Eisenhower jacket is discovered, supposedly thrown under a parked car. But we don't know who found it, or where it came from. Marina Oswald had never seen the jacket before, and it is not Lee's usual size. All efforts to connect the jacket to Oswald fail.
Johnny Brewer, the shoe store clerk, sees the suspect several minutes later enter his shoe store. He describes the man as wearing a brown shirt. Nobody at the Tippit scene mentioned a brown shirt. They mentioned an off-white or light colored jacket and a white shirt. In later years, Brewer will say that the man he saw in his store was wearing a jacket, but mention of the jacket does not appear in the initial report when Brewer was interviewed.
Based on calls initiated by Brewer, police enter the theater and arrest Oswald, who is wearing the long-sleeved brown shirt he was seen wearing all day. How did Brewer know for sure about the brown shirt? Because Brewer saw Oswald arrested. That is how Brewer could be so sure that Oswald was wearing a brown shirt. Oswald had a brown shirt at work, on the bus, in the cab, and at the theater. But not on 10th Street when Tippit was killed. Why not?
Cops find Oswald's wallet in his pocket, including two sets of ID. Which is interesting, because they allegedly had already found Oswald's wallet at the Tippit scene. But the 1st wallet disappears as soon as they discover the 2nd wallet on Oswald's person on his way to booking.
Hours after being booked, police mysteriously find live ammunition is Oswald's pocket. You mean to tell me they never searched this man?
Oswald never confesses. He is never given legal representation. Hours and hours of interrogation are never recorded. He says he is a patsy. All weekend he is stalked at the police station by a strip joint owner and friend to the cops who buys them drinks and sandwiches at his club. Less than 48 hours following Oswald's arrest, the armed strip club owner with an arrest record strolls down the supposedly guarded Dallas Police HQ ramp and, in front of more than 50 Dallas police who are standing there in order to keep the suspect safe, Oswald is assassinated before a national TV audience.
Oswald is buried the next day, and so is the Tippit case. The police never bother to do any serious investigation into the Tippit murder.
My guess is Oswald's faded blue jacket got hung up when he entered the theater. It was probably dumped in the theater's lost and found box, and eventually tossed out. No one ever associated it with Oswald, who we were all told was wearing a beige Eisenhower windbreaker that day, not a faded work jacket.
But Oswald was never allowed to explain any of this, or to retrieve his jacket. And if you question any of the WC narrative, which is totally bogus, you are the person who now gets labeled as someone who "has no credibility" and is living in fantasy land. It is appalling and I don't see how anyone stands behind it . . . unless the awful truth is just to difficult for them to contemplate. . . .
The Garbage Witnesses Against Oswald for the Tippit Murder
Matthew Douthit on Facebook on 11-10-2021, JFK Assassination Discussion Group: JFK Assassination Discussion Group | Facebook
Bugliosi on the Tippit murder: “Show me any other case where ten eyewitnesses were wrong.” (Reclaiming History, p. 961)
First off, 4 of those “identifications” are ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS because they (Russell, Patterson, M. Brock, W. L. Smith) were shown Oswald’s photo MONTHS after he was dead and nationally known. As for Markham, she testified she didn’t ID anyone. Moreover, there’s no document from that day that says she identified anyone. As for Scoggins, lineup participant Daniel Lujan testified that ACTUALLY there WAS NO Saturday lineup because once they were marched on the stage Oswald began complaining about the unfairness of it, and the police took them back outside and never brought them back in! So there was no lineup. And EVEN SO, Scoggins picked the wrong photo in a photo lineup, and could not ID Oswald as the killer when shown a photo by the FBI! This leaves us with 4 (B. J. Davis, V. Davis, Callaway, Guinyard). So Bugliosi’s question should INSTEAD be, “Show me any other case where FOUR eyewitnesses were wrong.” Okay, here we go...In 2012, SIX eyewitnesses misidentified a murderer!!!!!! Lydell Grant was exonerated by DNA in 2020. So there it is, Mr. Bugliosi. There it is.
Jack Myers also asks about J.D. Tippit Case:
“How do you explain the Tippit shells not matching the Tippit slugs? Leavell said the ballistics in this case were a “mess” as he put it.
Jack Myers article on the murder of J.D. Tippit
Kennedys And King - Why Officer Tippit Stopped His Killer
“THE ALL-IMPORTANT TIMING”
By Joseph McBride
[Into the Nightmare, pp. 244-252]
Oswald had been seen by his housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, entering the Oak Cliff rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Avenue at “around 1 o’clock, or maybe a little after” and staying in his tiny room for “maybe not over 3 or 4 minutes” before going outside and “standing on the curb at the bus stop.” So he probably left the rooming house around 1:04, and he then waited outside for an undetermined length of time. If he had caught the bus, it would have taken him back downtown, but he clearly was not there to catch a bus. And yet despite this time constraint presented by Roberts’s account, the official version of the shooting was that Tippit was killed at “approximately 1:15.” Even that generously late estimate would not have given Oswald sufficient time to reach that location on foot. Unless Oswald was given a ride to the Tippit killing site by some as-yet undiscovered accomplice or unwitting party, which might or might not indicate he was part of a conspiracy, clearly he could not have reached the site by the time the Warren Commission assigned to the shooting. If Tippit died several minutes earlier than the official version has it, as the evidence actually indicates, this would further serve to vindicate Oswald.
Was Oswald waiting at the bus stop near his rooming house for a ride from someone? No one knows for sure. Roberts testified that a Dallas police car had stopped outside about 1 p.m. when “Oswald came in the house and went to his room,” and that it honked its horn twice. “Right direct in front of that door -- there was a police car stopped and honked. . . . It was parked right in front of the house. And then they just eased on. . . . [I]t stopped directly in front of my house and it just ‘tip-tip.’ . . . Just kind of a ‘tit-tit’ -- twice.” She went to the door and looked and couldn’t see who it was; she was blind in one eye but thought two officers were in the car. Although some researchers indeed have speculated that it was Tippit driving that honking squad car -- Anthony Summers wonders in his 1998 book Not in Your Lifetime, “Can it be that Tippit drove Oswald to the spot where the policeman was murdered?” -- Tippit most likely was occupied elsewhere in Oak Cliff at the time the police car made what may have been some kind of as-yet-unexplained signal outside Oswald’s rooming house.
I’ve repeatedly walked possible routes from the rooming house to the site of the Tippit killing. The distance of nine-tenths of a mile between those locations is clearly a walk of about fifteen minutes. No one reported seeing a man running, or even walking, that route until the meeting between Tippit and his killer or killers moments before the shooting. David Belin himself timed the walk between those two locations at “17 minutes and 45 seconds at an average walking pace,” though he called that the “long way around route” and also described a more direct route without giving the timing. The Warren Report shaves time off Roberts’s recollections and Belin’s own pace in order to get Oswald there more quickly: “If Oswald left his roominghouse shortly after 1 p.m. and walked at a brisk pace, he would have reached 10th and Patton shortly after 1:15 p.m.” Assassination researcher Dave Perry, whose work largely has been devoted to debunking conspiracy theories, reported making the walk in between eleven and sixteen minutes, depending on the route and not including half a minute spent walking from the bus stop. That still wouldn’t get Oswald there in time to kill Tippit.
Further complicating the official account is that the initial Homicide Report filed by DPD patrol division Captain Cecil E. Talbert at 5 p.m. on November 22 states, “Deceased driving Squad Car #10 east on Tenth stopped to interrogate a suspect who was walking west on Tenth” (the report also misspells the dead officer’s name as “Tippitt”). Oswald would have been walking east if he were coming directly from his rooming house. But Armstrong in Harvey & Lee notes that four witnesses claimed to have seen Oswald walking west on Tenth Street shortly after 1 p.m., including a barber named Clark at a shop at 620 East Tenth, two blocks north of Ruby’s apartment. Ruby lived at 223 South Ewing Street.
What did witnesses say about the time of the shooting? We can begin with Helen Markham, who became the star witness of the Warren Commission in the Tippit killing despite numerous problems with her account. She said she was at the intersection of East Tenth and Patton, walking toward Jefferson Boulevard to catch a bus to work, when she witnessed the shooting (although, as we will later discuss, whether she actually was where she said she was in those moments is questionable). In the affidavit she signed for the police on November 22, Markham gave the time Tippit pulled over “a young white man” as “approximately 1:06.” She similarly told the commission in March 1964, “I wouldn’t be afraid to bet it wasn’t 6 or 7 minutes after 1” when she approached the intersection. Earlier that March she told the FBI that before she left the building where she lived at 328 1/2 East Ninth Street, she had been trying to reach her daughter on the pay phone from the washateria on the ground floor until she looked at the wall clock and saw that it was 1:04 and she had to leave to catch the bus. Markham worked as a waitress in downtown Dallas at the Eat Well Cafe (or Restaurant). She was regularly scheduled to begin work at 2:30 p.m., and the FBI reported that the bus she would catch at Patton and Jefferson was scheduled to arrive that Friday at 1:12. The FBI timed Markham’s walk from her residence to the corner of East Tenth and Patton at two and a half minutes. That would accord exactly with her recollection of the time of the shooting.
Further verification of the actual time frame of the Tippit shooting came from Temple Ford (T. F.) Bowley, who was described by Meagher as “the only known witness who deliberately checked the time.” Bowley, who said he came upon the scene at 1:10, shortly after Tippit was shot, was not called to testify before the commission, and though he had talked with the police at the scene and gave an affidavit to the DPD on December 2, 1963, when we spoke at his Dallas home in December 1992, he had never before seen his affidavit. He also spoke to HSCA investigators, but he said our interview was the only one he had ever given in person to anyone else. (Bowley since then has become more visible, and in 2010 was honored by the DPD with a Citizen’s Certificate of Merit for his actions in reporting the Tippit shooting.)
Bowley told me that on November 22, 1963, he had just turned west onto East Tenth Street approaching the scene of the Tippit shooting after having picked up his twelve-year-old daughter, Kathryn, at school. They were headed toward a nearby telephone company office where his wife was working. He was driving to pick her up for a family vacation in San Antonio. He said he stopped his station wagon several houses down when he saw the officer lying on the street, “because I didn’t want my little girl to see all of it.” Kathryn Bowley Miles recalled in 2013 that she did see part of the crime scene and seemed to indicate that their car was closer to Tippit than her father remembered: “It was disturbing for a young girl to see a man lying in the street. As we pulled up to the police car I remember my daddy saying to me, ‘Stay in the car.’ I did stay in the car but we had pulled up just in front of the police cruiser so I was witness to this event and it has stayed with me all these years. My father NEVER talked about it and when asked about it his answers then (and even now) were terse.”
T. F. Bowley was familiar with first aid from working as an installer of business systems for telephone companies (he was an employee of Western Electric at the time), so he went to see if he could help the officer. He gathered that he had arrived “just momentarily” after the shooting but said that Tippit “was laying there when I turned the corner, so he may have been there five minutes, for all I know. I didn’t see him fall. People had already gathered, so some amount of time had elapsed. Now how much is anybody’s guess -- a couple of minutes at least. And then it took me a little bit of time to walk up there.
“I didn’t see the guy [the gunman] or hear any shots or anything. I just noticed the [squad] car was parked, and [Tippit] was laying beside it, and some other people had already got there before I did. I know [Tippit] hadn’t been there long, because people were still millin’ around like a bunch of startled goats. They said they’d seen the guy run down the street.” Asked in which direction he was told the man had run, Bowley said, “There were quite a few people saying different things at the time. All I remember is that it seemed like they said he had a tan jacket on and he run down the street thataway [i.e., going west down East Tenth]. I don’t recall any conversation other than that one guy had run.” Bowley remembered ten or twelve people being at the scene, including ones who fit the descriptions of two other important witnesses, Helen Markham and Domingo Benavides.
Bowley said, “At that time, of course, there was no association with what was going on downtown in my mind; it didn’t occur to me. The officer was lying by the left front wheel of his car. He was laying face down. We [he and another unidentified man] turned him over.” The other people “looked like they were all scared to touch him. In the excitement, I didn’t really notice wounds. I don’t recall seeing any wounds or blood. His eyes were open.” But Bowley could see that Tippit (who had been shot in the head and chest) was “beyond help” and appeared to be dead. He and other witnesses found Tippit’s service revolver lying under him, out of his holster, which made Bowley think “It looked like he had attempted to draw it.” Greg Lowrey, who talked with numerous witnesses, disputed the claim that Tippit had pulled his gun out of his holster, and pointed out that if the officer had not drawn his gun, it could indicate he was not wary of his killer when he left the car to talk with him.
Bowley told me it was he who put Tippit’s gun on the hood of the car and then moved it to the car seat. Another witness, Ted Callaway, a used-car salesman who was at his lot a little more than a block away when the shooting occurred, arrived after Bowley and also claimed to have removed the gun from under Tippit’s body and put it on the hood of the car. Callaway’s subsequent actions are, to say the least, questionable. According to a written statement Callaway signed for the police, he took the gun, commandeering a cab to go off in an unsuccessful pursuit of the gunman, thus breaking the chain of official custody on Tippit’s revolver. This is an incident Bowley did not remember witnessing; he expressed surprise when I showed him his police affidavit with his account of that incident with Callaway. Also differing from Bowley’s later recollection of picking up Tippit’s pistol and placing it on and then inside the car, the affidavit states, “As we picked the officer up, I noticed his pistol laying on the ground under him. Someone picked the pistol up and laid it on the hood of the squad car. When the ambulance left, I took the gun and put it inside the squad car. A man took the pistol out and said, ‘Let’s catch him.’ He opened the cylinder, and I saw that no rounds in it had been fired. This man then took the pistol with him and got into a cab and drove off.” After reading the affidavit, Bowley told me, “I don’t remember that part about the pistol, I really don’t.” But he also told HSCA investigators in 1977 that he had picked up the pistol: “Recognizing the [dead] man as being a police officer Bowley stated he found the officer’s revolver on the ground under him. The weapon was out of its holster and near the officer’s right hand. Bowley picked the weapon up and placed it on the front seat of the scout [sic] car.” The report of that interview does not mention Callaway or his taking off with the gun, as Callaway himself admitted doing.
Bowley told the police on December 2, 1963, that he checked his watch when he left his car to go to the scene and that the watch read 1:10. The affidavit begins,
On Friday November 22, 1963 I picked up my daughter at the R. L. Thornton School in Singing Hills at about 12:55 pm. I then left the school to pick up my wife who was at work at the Telephone Company at Ninth Street and Zangs Street. I was headed north on Marsalis and turned west on 10th Street. I traveled about a block and noticed a Dallas police squad car stopped in the traffic lane headed east on 10th Street. I saw a police officer lying next to the left front wheel. I stopped my car and got out to go to the scene. I looked at my watch and it said 1:10 pm.
In our interview, Bowley reiterated that he looked at his watch upon arriving at the scene of the shooting and saw that it read 1:10. But he was less certain about when he had looked at his watch. After reading what his affidavit said about the watch, he said, “I don’t recall that part of it, but I’m sure I did, if that’s what the statement said, because I gave that when it was fresh in my mind.” As for why he checked his watch, “Only reason I did that,” he told me with a laugh, “I was supposed to pick up my wife at a certain time, and I wondered if I was late.” He thought had been expected to pick her up at about 1 p.m., but added, “It seemed like I was supposed to pick her up at 1 o’clock, but then maybe it wasn’t. Shortly after 1 would have been right in the ballpark.”
After attending to the officer, Bowley found Domingo Benavides -- the closest witness to the actual shooting, who saw it from his pickup truck stopped across the street, fifteen feet from Tippit’s squad car -- trying to call in a report of the shooting on the radio in Tippit’s squad car. Benavides, an auto mechanic, was having difficulty doing so, and since Bowley had a professional familiarity with radios, he took charge. His report was recorded on the police radio at 1:16 p.m.: “Hello, police operator . . . We’ve had a shooting out here. On Tenth Street. Between Marsalis and Beckley. It’s a police officer. Somebody shot him . . . what’s this? . . . 404 Tenth Street.” Bowley estimated that he stayed at the shooting scene for no more than ten minutes, although that estimate appears to be a few minutes short. He said he was there when the ambulance arrived (at 1:19) from the Dudley M. Hughes Funeral Home at 400 East Jefferson Boulevard, only two and a half blocks from the scene of the crime, to pick up Tippit to take him to Methodist Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The first police unit reached the Tippit murder scene at 1:22; Bowley said he stayed and talked with officers for a few minutes before leaving to pick up his wife.
Alterations appear in the records of Tippit’s official time of death, further complicating the question of the time of his shooting. At 3 p.m. on November 22, DPD Officer R. A. Davenport and Captain George M. Doughty signed a receipt for a slug and a uniform button removed from Tippit at the hospital at the department’s request; the slug and the button (which had been impacted by that bullet) were given to Davenport as evidence and transferred by him to Doughty. The document has a handwritten notation reading, “Dr. Paul Moellenhoff /Removed at 130/PM/ Methodist Emergency/ Dr. Richard Ligouri Pronounced DOA @ 115/PM.” The “AUTHORIZED PERMIT FOR AUTOPSY” signed by Justice of the Peace Joe B. Brown, Jr., at 3 p.m. also lists Tippit as having been DOA at Methodist at 1:15. But the DPD Homicide Report against Oswald in the Tippit shooting typed at 5 p.m. on November 22 has the time the officer was pronounced DOA by Dr. Ligouri as 1:30. An undated “Supplementary Offense Report” by Officers Davenport and W. R. Bardin seems to show the time of Tippit being pronounced dead by Dr. Ligouri as 1:00 or 1:06 but with the time being typed over to look like 1:16; none of those times appears plausible, given the other records. A November 29, 1963, FBI report of an interview with Dr. Ligouri by Special Agent Robert C. Lish has Tippit being pronounced dead at 1:25, but the “2” is higher than the other numbers and appears to have been typed in separately. (This was one of numerous such alterations that appear in significant documents pertaining to events involving Tippit, Oswald, and Kennedy. The Tippit Homicide Report has the “Time Reported” listed as “1:18pm” but appearing to be typed over a time of “128pm,” apparently to conform with that document’s listing of the time the event [supposedly] occurred, 1:18.)
When Dallas Morning News reporter Earl Golz interviewed Lottie Thompson, an emergency room nurse at Methodist Hospital who was present when Tippit was pronounced DOA, she said the FBI had contacted Dr. Moellenhoff repeatedly about the discrepancy in the report of the time of the pronouncement. Thompson claimed that the large clock in the emergency room, which she said was used to mark the time Tippit was DOA, was fifteen minutes slow, and the hospital maintenance department had not gotten around to fixing it. While it is possible that the clock may have been off, a fifteen-minute discrepancy sounds suspiciously extreme and suggests that the hospital personnel may well have been pressured to change the time (much as the doctors at Parkland Hospital were pressured to change their initial report of Kennedy’s throat wound being a wound of entrance).
The time recorded by the police dispatcher when Bowley called in the report of the Tippit shooting (1:16) makes a later time than 1:15 for Tippit being DOA likely, but Bowley’s call and the time of the ambulance arrival and its quick departure from the scene suggest that the officer was pronounced DOA closer to 1:25 than to 1:30. According to Myers’s book, Mary (Mrs. Frank) Wright, who lived on the block where Tippit was shot, also called in a report of the shooting by telephone to the DPD at 1:18, which was relayed to the Dudley Hughes Funeral Home. The ambulance attendants (Jasper Clayton Butler and William [Eddie] Kinsley) who picked up Tippit reported on the police radio that they arrived on East Tenth Street at 1:19, only about thirty seconds after the call was recorded. But the trip ticket at the funeral home, with a time stamp reportedly showing the call at 1:18, has disappeared. Butler, who drove the ambulance, said in a 1977 interview with HSCA investigators that the last time the ticket was seen was in about 1965, and that in 1964, he had copied it for representatives of Life magazine. Butler said, “I was on the scene one minute or less. From the time we received the call in our dispatch office until Officer Tippit was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital was approximately four minutes.” That would make the time he was pronounced DOA about 1:22 or perhaps within a couple of minutes later.
On the police radio at 1:26, an officer says, “NBC News is reporting DOA,” to which the dispatcher replies, “That’s correct.” In the midst of some confusion, when the dispatcher is asked to clarify whether that NBC report meant Tippit or Kennedy was DOA, he replies, “J. D. Tippit.” Kennedy’s death, although widely rumored for some minutes on network radio reports, was not officially announced until 1:33 by White House Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff at Parkland Hospital and was given as “approximately one o’clock,” although he probably had died ten minutes before that. It strains credibility that NBC could have learned that Tippit was DOA within only one minute of the officer being pronounced dead, so that also makes a time earlier than 1:25 more likely for when the doctor at Methodist Hospital pronounced him DOA.
After Bowley said in our interview that he looked at his watch upon arriving at the scene of the Tippit shooting and saw the time as 1:10, he seemed to reconsider the sequence of that memory, saying that he might have checked the watch a few minutes after his arrival, which would make the time of the shooting even earlier than 1:10, as another witness originally reported. Bowley said he may have looked at the watch “I guess when I radioed in . . . because I was really concerned, you know, because I had to pick up my wife. That’s how the time got involved, because I was supposed to pick her up. I may have looked at it when I stopped my car. I just honestly don’t remember. Well, you know you don’t place much importance on things like that.”
Asked if his watch was reliable, Bowley laughed and said, “Best I remember. I usually have pretty good watches.” But he conceded that “it could have been five minutes off.” When I told him that his observation of his watch was important because there is dispute about the time of the shooting, he admitted, “I had never heard there was. As a matter of fact, I have never heard the time mentioned before.”
Despite Bowley’s honest confusion after the passage of twenty-nine years about when he had checked his watch, it seems likely that his account given in December 1963, that he did so shortly after leaving his car, is the most reliable version. Bowley’s concern about meeting his wife would have made it natural for him to check his watch when he experienced the initial delay caused by seeing the officer lying in the street. If he checked his watch at 1:10, and the officer had just been shot, that would be in approximate range with another eyewitness report of the time of the shooting as being about 1:06 or 1:07 (probably a couple of minutes too early; see below) as well as with the last reported transmissions by Tippit from his squad car shortly after that. The delay of several minutes between Bowley checking his watch and calling in the report at 1:16 is consistent with Bowley’s explanation of how he had to come to the aid of Domingo Benavides. Benavides told the Warren Commission that he had “set there for just a few minutes” in his pickup truck after the shooting because he was afraid the gunman might come back and “might start shooting again.” After he left his truck, Benavides had trouble trying to operate the radio in Tippit’s squad car, so Bowley made the transmission.
Tippit’s last two transmissions on the police radio were both reported to have been at 1:08 and probably were further evidence of the approximate time of the shooting. He was attempting to reach the dispatcher, who did not respond to his call number, “78” (78 was his assigned district, four miles from where he was shot). Greg Lowrey, who has studied the case on the scene as thoroughly as anybody else, told me he believed Tippit was shot at 1:08. Another key Tippit researcher, Larry Ray Harris, allowing a brief time for Tippit to get out of his car and confront the pedestrian, told me he thought the shooting probably occurred at 1:09. Tippit’s calls around that time (which were unacknowledged by the police dispatcher) could have been to try to report that he was getting out of the car to investigate a suspect, although it is unclear how Tippit could have recognized Oswald as a suspect from the conflicting and generalized physical descriptions earlier broadcast on the police radio.
The number of known witnesses to all or part of this event (at least twenty whose names have been recorded) was fairly large considering the setting of a quiet suburban neighborhood on an early Friday afternoon. But nearby Jefferson Boulevard was a major thoroughfare, and Lowrey said he had spoken with even more witnesses; he said others may have seen all or part of the events surrounding the Tippit shooting, including the flight of the gunman or gunmen. “Eyewitnesses said that one to five minutes after the shooting, there were probably a few dozen people there or within a block.” But, as we will see in Chapter 12 when the events at the shooting scene are closely scrutinized, the eyewitness reports from those whose names have entered the record were extremely confused and contradictory, even by the usual standards of witness contradictions.
Former DA Henry Wade said when I asked how sure he was about Oswald killing Tippit, “Well, I was sure as you could be, because when I talked to [the police], they showed three eyewitnesses that identified him or more, at least three, some saw him after and one was there and saw all of it. I think he got killed in an accident or something. [Wade did not identify that alleged witness when I asked.] They’ve had a rash of ‘em were killed, you know, or died. But that’s all. You don’t need any more than that. And he killed him with a pistol, and they identified, they had the gun, he had the gun over there in the theater, a pistol.” I asked Wade about the serious problems with the ballistics evidence in the case (see the next section). Wade said, “I ran into Officer [Lieutenant J. C.] Day, who was the ballistics man up there. Only thing I know about it is he said we got the ballistics that have been identified as coming from his gun.” I reiterated the problems with the ballistics, to no avail.
Wade replied, “You see, what an ordinary person doesn’t realize is we’re sitting there, Oswald gets killed. As far as my office having anything further to do with it [the murder of Officer Tippit], it is really nothing. Because we started getting ready to try Ruby. [The Tippit case] was dropped because Oswald himself had been killed. I had a lot of people write me [asking] why don’t you try Oswald then for murder and have a mock trial for Tippit, which was silly. But I thought we had our hands filled and our backs to the wall trying Ruby. You see, I was always worried about the Ruby trial. There wasn’t any question he’s the one that shot Oswald, but I was wondering what a juror or his reaction’d be to [someone] killing a man that killed the president. A hundred million people see Ruby kill Oswald on television, and he might get five years’ probation or something. That wasn’t what I had in mind. He might get a life sentence. But we got death.” (Ruby’s death sentence was later reversed by an appellate court, which agreed with his lawyers’ argument that he should have been granted a change of venue. He was awaiting a new trial when he died of cancer on January 3, 1967, at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy and Oswald had also died and the autopsies were performed on Oswald and Tippit.)
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