Category: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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Part 2: Oswald Double and How the Weapon was Purchased

In the days, weeks, months, and perhaps even years leading up to November 22, 1963, there is no question that someone had been impersonating Lee Oswald. We have numerous instances on record of the real Oswald being in one place while many miles away a second “Oswald” was seen involved in strange and provocative behavior that would portray Oswald as being a highly dangerous and/or mentally unstable individual.

Here is just a sampling of those inexplicable sightings of a “second” Oswald:

• June 3, 1960 — F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo stating that someone in the United States may be using defector Lee Oswald’s birth certificate and impersonating the ex-Marine while he is in the Soviet Union.
• January 20, 1961 — Two men visited the Bolton Ford dealership in New Orleans and indicated their intent to purchase 10 Ford Econoline trucks for the Friends of Democratic Cuba. One of the men who identified himself as JOSEPH MOORE wrote out a bid form. Moore’s friend, who identified himself as LEE OSWALD, told the assistant manager that he would be responsible for payment.
• November 1963 — “Oswald” walked into the Downtown Lincoln Mercury dealership to inquire about purchasing an automobile. A salesman accompanied Oswald for a test drive, during which Oswald drove at high speeds on the Stemmons Freeway, making the salesman very uneasy. Afterwards he told the salesman he wasn’t ready to buy, but would be coming into a considerable amount of money shortly. The salesman wrote down the man’s name, LEE OSWALD, for future reference.
• November 16, 1963 — “Oswald” is seen at the Sportdrome Gun Range in Oak Cliff. He is boasting about his Italian-made carbine with its power scope to other patrons and firing at their targets, causing a scene.
• November 20, 1963 — The real Lee Oswald was known to be a regular “coffee customer” at the Dobbs House Restaurant just a short walk from his rooming house. Lee would read a book while drinking his coffee. However, at 10 a.m. on the Wednesday before the assassination, and while the real Lee was working at the book depository, a man came in and ordered eggs. He soon began cursing at the waitress, and complaining loudly that his eggs were runny. Officer J.D. Tippit was said to have been in the restaurant at this time. The owner and several employees identified the unruly individual as Lee Harvey Oswald.
• November 22. 1963 —On the morning of the assassination, while Oswald had already reported for work at the book depository, a young man purchased two bottles of beer at the Jiffy Store on Industrial Boulevard. The store is located just a short walk from Dealey Plaza. When asked to present ID, the customer showed store clerk Fred Moore a Texas driver’s license for a Lee Oswald, birthdate October 1939. An hour later, the same individual returned to buy some peco brittle, which is a special peanut and coconut type brittle. Moore remembered the purchases because he thought the combination made for one very unusual breakfast.
• November 22. 1963 — Just a few minutes after the assassination, Lee Oswald departed the TSBD, walked several blocks east, and boarded a city bus. A transfer issued by the driver of that bus would later be found on Oswald’s person. However, at about the same time Oswald was boarding the bus on Elm Street, more than one witness— including a deputy sheriff — saw another “Oswald” run down the Grassy Knoll next to the TSBD and jump into a light green Nash Rambler station wagon driven by a Latino man, possibly Cuban. The vehicle then headed west under the triple underpass.

Who Purchased Oswald’s .38 Revolver?

Authorities maintained that Lee Oswald had purchased the .38 Smith & Wesson pistol found in his possession when the suspect was arrested at the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff on November 22, 1963. However, there is scant proof that Oswald ever purchased that WWII-era handgun…and what measly proof offered is suspect.

First, if Lee Oswald had wanted to purchase a weapon for nefarious purposes, he could have simply walked into any sporting goods store or hardware store in Texas, paid cash, and walked out with an untraceable gun. In 1963 guns could even be purchased at flea markets and yard sales — no license was necessary to sell guns. The only time purchasing a gun in Texas required paperwork and left a trail of evidence was in the case of the sale of weapons though the mail. Naturally, safeguards had been put into place to prevent juveniles from ordering deadly weapons through magazines and comic books.

Oswald allegedly ordered a .38 pistol through an advertisement placed in an April, 1963 men’s adventure magazine by Seaport Traders of Los Angeles. Oswald supposedly sent an order form and $10.00 in cash or money order to Seaport, requesting that a pistol be shipped via Railway Express Agency to Lee’s post office box registered to his name in Dallas, Box 2915. Inexplicably, the coupon order form was dated 1/27 even though the order form was not published in True Adventures until March.

The U.S. Post Office would not handle private cargo for a private shipping company such as REA. The gun could not be shipped directly to a P.O. Box. Instead, the gun would be sent via Railway Express Agency–an early version of FedEx (Federal Express–to REA’s facility in downtown Dallas. The Dallas REA office would then send a notice by postcard to the buyer’s post office box that the package could be picked up at the REA facility.

For this to happen, however, certain rules and regulations needed to be followed first:

• The REA postcard had to be sent by REA to the buyer’s P.O. Box.
• The buyer had to bring the postcard to REA’s office in Dallas.
• The buyer had to present a certificate of good character to REA signed by a justice of the peace, county judge, or district judge from the buyer’s county of residence.
• The buyer had to provide to REA proof of ID submitted on Form 5024 required for all pistols and small firearms.
• The buyer had to pay the balance owed to REA.

However, is there any evidence that these rules were followed in the case of the Smith & Wesson .38 allegedly purchased by Lee Oswald? No. All that the Warren Commission provided was a copy of a receipt, not even the original. And that receipt was signed by neither Oswald nor A.J. Hidell, Oswald’s supposed alias.

• There is no evidence REA ever sent a postcard to Oswald’s P.O. Box.
• There is no evidence that Oswald or anyone else brought the postcard into REA.
• There is no evidence of a certificate of good character.
• There is no 5024 form with proof of ID.
• There is no witness saying Oswald or anyone else picked up the pistol, or when.
• There is no evidence of payment of the balance owed, $19.95.
• There is no evidence of remittance of payment from REA to Seaport Traders.

Basically, there are no Department of Public Safety, police, or clerk records of Lee Oswald ever obtaining this handgun. We have no evidence of Oswald obtaining a certificate of good character from a judge or justice of the peace. Without the accused having followed any of the Texas laws on purchasing mail order firearms, how was he able to get this Smith & Wesson revolver? How is it possible nobody remembered seeing Oswald or anyone else pick up the handgun? Where’s the beef?

We are supposed to believe that Oswald rented a P.O. box under his own name, sent in a coupon to Seaport Traders under the alias A.J. Hidell, had no ID or certificate of good character, and then signed the receipt using the name of Paxton or Patton ( see below). Then walked away with the gun with nobody witnessing this unlikeliest of transactions?

It would seem rather that someone else ordered this weapon and created a paper chase to make it appear the “patsy” Lee Oswald ordered a mail order pistol through Seaport Traders.

The evidence does not support that Lee Harvey Oswald ever purchased this gun from Seaport Traders, an accusation he denied before his untimely death at the hands of Jack Ruby in the basement parking garage of Dallas Police headquarters. The pistol apparently did wind up in his possession at the theater, but that is no proof he ordered the weapon. The origin of the S&W .38 Victory model pistol, serial number V510210, remains an unsolved mystery.

Who Stashed a Jacket Behind the Texaco?

The case against Lee Oswald having been the murderer of Officer Tippit rested partially on the notion that Oswald’s Eisenhower style light-grey jacket was found along the gunman’s escape route. However, not only did investigators fail to connect the jacket conclusively to Oswald, they also failed to connect the jacket conclusively to the individual who shot and killed Patrolman Tippit. The only piece of circumstantial evidence put forward was that Marina Oswald, Lee’s wife, said she recognized the jacket as belonging to Lee. Marina said, though, that both of Lee’s jackets had come from and were purchased in the Soviet Union. The jacket found two blocks from the Tippit crime scene was a brand that had been sold in clothing stores in Los Angeles and Philadelphia — it clearly had not originated in Russia.

In fact, the Eisenhower jacket is the weakest link in the government’s shaky chain of evidence against Oswald in the slaying of Officer Tippit.

Warren Commission exhibit 162 was allegedly found partially hidden underneath a 1954 Oldsmobile in parking space 17 behind Ballew’s Texaco and service station at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Crawford Street. It was allegedly stashed there as the killer made good on his escape by foot. No one saw the killer put it there, however, and no one knows who found the jacket. Officially, DPD Captain William “Pinky” Westbrook was supposed to have found the jacket, but that’s not the story Westbrook told the Warren Commission in 1964. “Some officer, I feel sure it was an officer, I still can’t be positive, pointed this jacket out to me,” stated Captain Westbrook for the record. Dallas police radio logs indicate that an Officer 279 first mentions the jacket at about 1:25 p.m. — however Capt. Westbrook did not arrive on scene until 1:40 p.m. The identity of “Officer 279” remains a mystery, as does the origin of the jacket.

The jacket was described as a light grey man’s jacket, size M (medium). Oswald weighed 130 pounds at the time of his death, and all his other clothes were men’s size small.

Laundry marks and cleaning tags present in the jacket indicated the garment had been professionally cleaned on multiple occasions. Marina Oswald, however, claimed that she had always hand washed Lee’s jackets and other clothes. Despite their best efforts, investigators could not trace the laundry tags to any specific cleaning establishment. No evidence of professional cleaning was found on any of Lee Oswald’s other garments.

Witnesses who saw the gunman fleeing from 10^th & Patton generally disagreed the found jacket was the same as that worn by the killer. Some seven witnesses either failed to identify the jacket, or straight out said the found jacket did not match the jacket worn by Officer Tippit’s killer. Because the Tippit witness descriptions of the jacket worn by the killer were so wide-ranging, the Warren Commision was forced to officially state that “the eyewitnesses vary in their identification of the jacket.” This hardly supports a convincing identification of the garment allegedly discovered behind the Texaco station.

Authorities tried to connect the jacket to Oswald by saying some fibers found on the mystery jacket were “consistent” with the brown shirt Lee Oswald had been wearing when arrested at the Texas Theater. What those same authorities fail to mention, however, is that one of the few details the Tippit witnesses agree upon is that the gunman had been wearing a white shirt, not a brown one.

Interestingly, the Warren Commission insisted on describing the found jacket as being light-grey, although descriptions from November 22, 1963 refer to the garment as being white. However, modern color photographs of the evidence reveal the jacket to be tan or beige.

Effectively, the Eisenhower jacket found almost two blocks from 10^th & Patton was a prosecutorial dead end. It was likely not related to the homicide. If it was, in fact, the killer’s jacket, the shooter almost certainly was not Lee Oswald. And if the jacket was Oswald’s, the possibility it was a throwdown or plant would have to be seriously considered — especially in light of a piece of astounding evidence that was revealed in 1996.

Retired FBI agent James Hosty, the man once tasked with keeping tabs on Soviet “defector” Lee Oswald while he was in Dallas, published a book titled Assignment: Oswald. In Hosty’s retelling of events, he would release a tidbit of information that would impact the Tippit case like a bombshell. Hosty described how fellow FBI agent Bob Barrett had been present at 10^th & Patton for the initial investigation of J.D. Tippit’s murder. While the scene was still being processed, Captain William Westbrook of the DPD showed Special Agent Barrett a man’s billfold and asked if he’d ever heard of a character named Alek Hidell. Agent Barrett had gone to 10^th & Patton at the request of Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker.

Barrett told Westbrook no, he never heard of this Hidell person. And Lee Oswald? No, Barrett couldn’t remember anybody by that name either.

Mention of this incident in Hosty’s book set off a firestorm in the JFK critical community. It had been well known that Dallas Police Detective Paul Bentley had removed a billfold from Oswald’s back pocket after the suspect’s arrest at the Texas Theater. While in custody and en route to police headquarters in the back seat of Westbrook’s unmarked police car, Oswald had famously refused to give detectives his name. Bentley, noticing that Oswald had a billfold bulging from his back pants’ pocket, reached over and removed it. Discovering ID for two separate individuals inside the billfold, Bentley asked the suspect if he was Alex Hidell or Lee Oswald.

“You’re the detective,” Oswald had reportedly replied defiantly: “You figure it out.”

Detective Gerald Hill later testified to the Warren Commission regarding this incident. Officially, Oswald’s wallet had been taken from his person after his arrest. So how could his wallet possibly have been found at the Tippit murder scene?

Dallas Police officials tried to explain the anomaly by saying that after the passage of so many years, Agent Barrett’s memory must have become muddled. Barrett saw the wallet at police headquarters, not at Oak Cliff. The retired FBI agent was simply mistaken. The official police report on Tippit’s murder made no mention of any billfold being discovered at 10^th & Patton.

‘Why would they be asking me questions about Oswald and Hidell if it wasn’t in that wallet?’ an angry Bob Barrett observed. “They said they took the wallet out of his pocket in the car? That’s so much hogwash,” Barrett fumed. “That wallet was in [Captain] Westbrook’s hand.”

A check of raw news footage from that day proved retired Agent Barrett’s version of events to have been accurate and truthful. There, in black & white, Westbrook could clearly be seen handling a man’s wallet and showing it to other law enforcement personnel. Could the wallet have been Officer Tippit’s wallet? Absolutely not. Tippit’s wallet was black, the wrong color, and was still on his person when the deceased’s body was transported to Methodist Hospital.

Lieutenant Kenneth Croy, the reserve Dallas cop who had appeared so quickly on scene after Tippit’s slaying, was also still alive in 1996 when the wallet controversy first erupted. Asked about the alleged Oswald wallet, Croy explained that yes, someone in the growing crowd had handed him a wallet, which he later turned over to Captain Westbrook. Croy failed, however, to get the name of the individual who had supposedly discovered and handed him the wallet. Croy, in fact, had failed to record anything that day, for despite being the first policeman to have arrived on scene at the murder of a fellow officer, Croy neglected to even file a report.

When testifying before the Warren Commission, Lt. Croy said he knew and recognized several of the officers who were present at the scene that afternoon — but he couldn’t remember the name of any of them, not one. The mystery wallet was never listed in Captain Westbrook’s report. After being shown to Agent Barrett and others at the Tippit scene, the billfold simply disappeared. Once Oswald’s wallet had been taken from his person upon arrest, the second Oswald wallet had to disappear. Two Oswald wallets that day were simply one too many.

Before his death, Dallas Police Sergeant Leonard Jez was asked to comment on the presence of Oswald’s wallet at 10^th & Patton. Jez had been one of several officers officially present at 10^th & Patton, and whom Lt. Croy could not recall. Jez verified the existence of the wallet at the murder scene, he had seen it with his own eyes

“Don’t let anybody bamboozle you,” stated Jez flatly. “That was Oswald’s wallet.”

Photographic comparisons between the wallet in the news footage and Oswald’s wallet stored in the National Archives proves they are similar in style but in fact undoubtedly two separate wallets.

So, if the second Oswald wallet that mysteriously appeared and then disappeared on E. 10^th street was very likely a plant or thrown down, and if the dubious grey/white/tan Oswald jacket found by a person or persons unknown behind Ballew’s Texaco was possibly a throw down…is it possible any other evidence left at the Tippit murder scene was not what it appeared to be? To find out, dear reader, keep on reading…

Why Did the Killer Leave Four Empty Shells Behind?

Of all the pieces of evidence the authorities claimed to have against Lee Oswald in the murder of Officer Tippit, the four hulls or shells were by far the most probative. The forensic examination of the .38 caliber cartridge cases found at the scene of the shooting determined them to have been fired from the revolver in Oswald’s possession to the exclusion of all other weapons.

Oswald had that pistol on his person in the darkness of the Texas Theater less than a mile from the Tippit murder. Had Lee Oswald lived to stand trial, how could any defense attorney possibly have explained that fact away? TO THE EXCLUSION OF ALL OTHER WEAPONS.

Apologists for the Warren Commission Report who continue to believe that Lee Oswald committed these murders will often bend regarding the other points of evidence against the accused:

• Yes, eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, especially if suspect Oswald had a so-called double.
• Undoubtedly the paperwork linking Oswald to the .38 Smith & Wesson was flimsy and incomplete at best.
• For sure the finding, chain of custody, and identification regarding the alleged Oswald jacket was dubious.

But the shells, found at 10^th & Patton, matching the pistol in Oswald’s possession to the exclusion of all other pistols? That sounds like slam dunk, case closed, throw the book at Oswald type of evidence.

Maybe, but not so fast…

Now, believers in Oswald’s innocence have offered several various scenarios to explain away the ballistics match to Oswald’s Smith & Wesson .38:

• Tippit was killed by at least one, and possibly two killers armed with automatic pistol, not revolvers. This was why initial police reports described the suspect as being armed with an automatic, not a revolver.
• The Dallas Police Department later switched the shells before handing them over to the FBI for closer inspection.
• Captain Westbrook, once back at his desk at police headquarters, later switched the killer’s pistol for Oswald’s pistol.

I don’t believe any of these things happened. Oswald was already framed for the Tippit murder by the time the killer disappeared somewhere behind Ballew’s Texaco. The wallet, the shells, the jacket…they all spelled game, set, and match for the blaming of the patsy.

The killer of J.D. Tippit and the conspirators who plotted to assassinate JFK framed Oswald. Oh yes, the four shells recovered from along the corner house at 10^th & Patton were most definitely fired from Oswald’s gun…which at the time of Tippit’s slaying was in Oswald’s possession at the movie theater. The plan was ingenious and has gone undetected until now — nearly 60 years later. We might all agree that 60 years was more than good enough for government work. As it was, the patsy Oswald didn’t even last 60 hours.

The secret to the frameup lies in the special type of revolver given to patsy Oswald — and used by the professional assassin who ended Officer Tippit’s life, as Helen Markham so aptly described, “in the wink of your eye.” Oh, these guns were nothing outwardly special…World War II surplus models purchased for $29.95 apiece. But they featured one unusual characteristic that made the frameup work. These revolvers, actually the entire lot of some 500 of them, were modified and rechambered for sale back in the United States. It was the use of rechambered .38 revolvers that made the simple but effective Oak Cliff deception possible.

The Smith & Wesson .38 “Victory” model was manufactured in the U.S. for homeland defense use during World War II. The handgun found on suspect Oswald was part of a shipment originally sent to Great Britain. Luckily, though the Nazis did considerable damage by dropping bombs and missiles on our island nation ally, they were never able to mount a troop invasion across the English Channel. So, the .38 Victory models remained in storage in Britain for the duration of the war. Many years later, an enterprising sporting goods company repurchased the war surplus weapons and reimported them back home to America.

Post WWII a newer type of ammunition was becoming popular and in increasing demand for use with .38 revolvers. Known as the .38 special round, the new ammo had more proven stopping power than the traditional .38 S&W bullets. By comparison, the .38 specials were much longer than the .38 regular ammo (which became known as .38 shorts)…but the .38 special cartridges were also slightly thinner or smaller in diameter than the .38 S&W “short” ammo.

As the .38 special ammo became more widely used by police and military units, civilian gun owners also started to favor the newer ammo that packed a bigger punch.

Therefore, to make these reimported old revolvers more marketable to the public, the seller had a gunsmith (L.M. Johnson of Van Nuys, CA) make certain modifications to the weapons. First, the barrels of these handguns were cut down from 5 inches to 2¼ inches, making them “snub nose” revolvers for easier concealment. Second, the revolvers were “rechambered” by having the old cylinders swapped out for new cylinders designed to accept the more popular .38 special ammo with more stopping power — but also with slightly different dimensions.

However, since the .38 special bullets are only slightly narrower than the standard .38 S&W cartridges, the guns were never re-barreled. This left the barrels for these handguns slightly oversized for the new ammo being used. Again, close enough for government work!

These modified guns functioned just fine and were well suited and modestly priced for someone looking for a handy, dependable self-defense weapon. But the slightly oversized and shortened barrel left the revolvers with one highly unusual characteristic — as the slugs were fired and traveled through the barrel, they each took an “erratic” passage. Basically, the slugs would wobble slightly and would not contact the barrel the same way each time the weapon was discharged. The result? The oversized barrel would impress upon the lead bullets inconsistent individual microscopic characteristics. This made identification of a specific revolver that fired a specific bullet impossible once the weapon had been rechambered in this way.

In the words of the HSCA firearms panel tasked with examining the Oswald revolver against the four lead slugs taken from Officer Tippit’s body, the panel found that, “Due to the inconsistent markings on the recovered bullets and on all the test-fired bullets, the panel concluded that the CE 602 through CE 605 bullets (the slugs recovered from Tippit’s body) could not be conclusively identified or eliminated as having been fired from the CE 143 revolver (the handgun allegedly in Oswald’s possession at the Texas Theater).”

Had Lee Oswald been carrying a revolver that had not been modified and rechambered, then the four bullets taken from J.D. Tippit’s body would likely have been either positively matched or positively eliminated as having been fired from the gun allegedly in Oswald’s possession.

But wait…didn’t the killer so conveniently leave four shells at the scene of the murder? Why yes, he did! But wait again, only automatic pistols eject the empty shells as the weapon is fired. Shells from a revolver such as the S&W .38 special must be manually unloaded — which is exactly what witnesses at the scene said the killer did.

When Detective Gerald Hill arrived at 10^th & Patton and heard that several shells had been recovered by witnesses, he logically assumed the killer had been armed with an automatic which had ejected the shells. Had Hill personally inspected the shells, he would have seen they were labeled .38 SPL and had come instead from a revolver. But who murders a cop and then stops mid-flight to dispense highly incriminating shells? It made absolutely no sense.

“Now there’s a dumb crook,” quipped Texas JFK researcher Jim Marrs.

Was the killer just plain crazy…or crazy like a fox?

At approximately 1:40 p.m. Hill radioed the following message…“The shell found out the scene (of the shooting) indicates that the suspect is armed with — an automatic .38 rather than a pistol.”

This incorrect broadcast has fueled speculation for years that Tippit was slain with an automatic pistol or pistols. But the slugs recovered from his body — and the shells dropped at the scene — indicate otherwise. Something else was afoot.

Patrolman J.M. Poe caused a bit of a stir with his testimony before the Warren Commission when he stated he could not find the ID marks he had allegedly placed on two of the shells (hulls) recovered at 10^th & Patton by witness Domingo Benavides. This led some critics to surmise that the shells had been switched. But under direct examination, Poe hesitated to definitively confirm that he had marked those two shells. “I couldn’t swear to it, no sir.” Later, in an interview granted to JFK researcher Joseph McBride, Detective Jim Leavelle, who headed up the Tippit investigation, scoffed at the idea Poe had ever marked the shells. “Actually, they never marked ‘em. There wasn’t no point in it. We don’t mark’em.”

Leavelle, who was the homicide detective wearing the Stetson and handcuffed to Oswald when he was shot by Ruby, admitted the ballistics on the Tippit case were frankly “a mess.”

Rep. Hale Boggs from Louisiana, the youngest member of the Warren Commission, became so frustrated with the ballistics in the Tippit case that he asked directly, “What proof do you have that these are the bullets?” Apparently, Boggs never received a satisfactory answer.

Yes, Tippit’s killer and the conspirators behind him had been clever, but perhaps a tad too clever for their own good. You see, the cartridge cases — two Western-Winchester and two Remington–Peters — did not match up with the fatal bullets— which were three Western-Winchester and only one Remington-Peters. “The last time I looked,” noted Jim Garrison wryly, “the Remington–Peters Manufacturing Company was not in the habit of slipping Winchester bullets into its cartridges, nor was the Winchester–Western Manufacturing Company putting Remington bullets into its cartridges.”

It is important to note that the HSCA firearms panel found the components (recovered shells and slugs) of these cartridges were all consistent withfactory loaded ammunition. There should have been no discrepancy (2-2 vs. 3-1) between the shells and the fatal lead slugs. This was not home-loaded ammo. Something was clearly wrong.

The panel tried to explain this show-stopping mismatch by offering the following two solutions:

1. One Western-Winchester cartridge case was not recovered or is missing, and one Remington-Peters lead bullet missed Officer Tippit and also was not recovered.
2. One Western cartridge case was not recovered or is missing, and one fired Remington-Peters cartridge case was in the revolver prior to the Tippit shooting.

Since the escape route of the gunman was witnessed by several people, it seems hard to believe that a shell would have gone unrecovered along such a narrow pathway. And as far as a possible fifth shot was concerned, that idea was largely unsupported by the earwitness testimony.

The witnesses within direct earshot of the murder, along E. 10^th Street, all heard between two and four shots. That the shots were fired in such quick succession probably meant that some witnesses perceived multiple adjacent loud reports as a single gunshot.

Warren Reynolds, located relatively far to the south of E 10^th across Jefferson Boulevard, thought he heard maybe four, five, or possibly even six shots. Ted Callaway, located closer to E. 10^th just off Patton Avenue, thought he heard five shots. These “earwitnesses” however, would have been blocked from directly hearing the gunshots by the houses situated at 400, 404, and 410 E. 10^th. What Messrs. Callaway and Reynolds likely confused with additional shots were echoes bouncing off surrounding structures.

Even the HSCA firearms panel agreed these two theories were speculation, not supported by the available evidence. The available evidence indicates four shots. If only four shots were fired, and the slugs and shells do not match, then Lee Oswald’s handgun did not kill Officer Tippit. Someone else with some other gun did.

But the shells…they were proven to have been fired from “Oswald’s” gun to the exclusion of all other weapons!

Yes, they were. But the shells weren’t fired at 10^th & Patton, or from the handgun that killed Officer Tippit. They were fired sometime before November 22 — before the revolver was in all probability given to Oswald by those involved in the plot. Recall, there is no proof Oswald ever picked up that weapon. Which happens to correspond to the DPD issue.

The shells that held the bullets that killed J.D. Tippit remained in the handgun that the killer carried with him as he made his escape from 10^th & Patton. That’s why the shells left on the ground didn’t match the bullets in Tippit’s body. The conspirators, in their zeal to frame Oswald with slam dunk evidence, decided to mix the ammo in an exotic blend of Remington-Peters and Western cartridges. They were going for a 360° windmill slam dunk. Only problem was, while the killer counted out the correct number of shells — four — in the excitement he got the exact brand mixture wrong.

There’s a time-tested adage concerning the successful completion of difficult tasks…KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. Had the conspirators stayed with all Western or all Remington-Peters cartridges, this colossal mistake would never have been made. Oswald had no ammo amongst his possessions, and no gun-cleaning paraphernalia. The idea of framing him with mixed ammo was really an overreach.

The conspirators purchased at least two Smith & Wesson 38 Special Commando snub-nose revolvers from Seaport Traders and created a paper chase leading to the Oswald-Hidell P.O. Box for one of them. Same manufacturer, same lot, same modifications, same gunsmith. Wallet, shells, jacket…game, set, and match.

Only rechambered revolvers would have filled the bill. Had it never been modified, the “Oswald” gun could have been excluded from firing the bullets that killed Tippit, based on the unique microscopic characteristics each gun barrel leaves on each bullet. But with a rechambered gun, the “Oswald” gun could neither be identified nor excluded as the murder weapon. It could only be characterized as being “consistent” with having fired the fatal shots.

The shells, which contained unique breach face marks and firing pin marks, conclusively linked “Oswald’s” revolver to the shooting — even though the weapon was most of a mile away when Tippit was murdered, stuffed in Lee Oswald’s waistband as he ate popcorn purchased from Texas Theater manager Butch Burroughs.

Knocking empty shells out of a Smith & Wesson revolver is not that difficult of a task. The killer basically overplayed his hand. Each cylinder comes with a hand ejector, a small rod which, when depressed, releases all the shells at once from the open cylinder. According to one write-up on the Victory model Smith & Wesson .38, you “press the cylinder release forward, swing out the cylinder and load six rounds of fun into the cylinder. When done, you again release the cylinder; tilt the gun to the rear, press the cylinder rod down and the extractor will do the rest.”

The empty shells should all fall into your hand. Tippit’s killer made a show of “unloading and reloading” as the Tippit witnesses described. And instead of leaving a pile of empty shells, the killer tossed them one-by-one along a path like so many Reese’s Pieces candy in Steven Spielberg’s hit movie ET. The murder was scripted, and the witnesses (and later the investigators) entirely bought the killer’s deft but simple sleight-of-hand.

• From witness Domingo Benavides: Then I seen the man turn and walk back to the sidewalk and go on the sidewalk and he walked maybe five foot and then kind of stalled. He didn’t exactly stop. And he threw one shell and must have took five or six more steps and threw the other shell up, and then he kind of stepped up to a pretty good trot going around the corner.
• From witness Sam Guinyard: He came through there (the hedges at 400 E. 10^th along Patton Ave.) running and knocking empty shells out of his pistol…he was rolling them with his hand — with his thumb…checking them, he had his pistol up like this [indicating].
• From witness Virginia Davis:Oswald carefully left the shells for me to find.

When the Smith and Wesson .38 Special revolver allegedly in Oswald’s possession in the theater was checked, it contained four live .38 rounds — two Western-Winchester cartridges and two Remington-Peters cartridges. If Oswald had been the shooter at 10^th & Patton, and had reloaded, shouldn’t the revolver have contained six cartridges, not four? And had Oswald been the shooter and hadn’t reloaded, shouldn’t the revolver have contained only two cartridges?

The suspect was officially taken into custody at the Texas Theater at 1:51 p.m. and brought into police headquarters at about 2 p.m. Oswald was soon after ushered into Captain Will Fritz’s office for the first of several interrogations by Fritz and other law enforcement officials. Then, sometime after 4 p.m., suspect Oswald was brought down to the basement assembly room for his first lineup. It was at this time that Dallas officers supposedly searched Oswald and, surprise, surprise, found five additional Western-Winchester .38 Special live rounds in his trousers pocket.

Not long ago I reached out to Frank Griffin, author of the book Touched by Fire. Griffin was a young man in 1963 who, from his vantage point at 10^th & Denver, heard the shots nearly a block away that took Officer Tippit’s life. Griffin stepped quickly onto the sidewalk, glanced to the west, and spotted Tippit’s killer walking away from the patrol car and escaping south on Patton Avenue. Griffin maintains that he was able to identify Oswald as the shooter even though he was at least 300 feet away and Griffin never saw the killer from the front. “I had exceptional vision,” Griffin explained, and was a crack shot in the military. Well, at that same age, I was a fit, competitive runner who had completed the open mile at the Junior Olympics in just over 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Had I finished the mile in just over 2 minutes and 20 seconds, I would have not been human — I would have been a horse. And if Frank Griffin or anyone else can make a positive identification on a stranger at 300 feet or farther, they aren’t human either — they must be an eagle.

Was Frank Griffin not telling the truth? No, not really. Not at all, in fact. That is how the human mind works. Our memory is not like some videotape that can be endlessly played back, over and over, such as the Zapruder film. Instead, our minds tend to edit and distort memories over time. Mr. Griffin’s mind, and other folks’ minds, have taken the repeated image of Lee Oswald and, over the months and years, superimposed it on the memory of the figure they saw for but a moment the day JFK and Officer Tippit were killed. It is called by some the power of suggestion, and it is a force that is wholly underestimated by most.

I did ask Frank one more important question. While too far to have positively ID’d Tippit’s killer, Mr. Griffin was still standing in a direct line of sight (and sound) from the incident. So, I asked Griffin how many pistol shots he had heard.

“Four,” was the witness’s reply. “I clearly heard four shots.”

And if Franklin (Frank) Griffin is correct, and he heard four and only four pistol shots on E 10^th Street that day, then Lee Oswald is very clearly innocent of the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit.

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Introduction

On Friday November 22, 1963, a pair of mysterious murders were committed in the city of Dallas, Texas. At 12:30 p.m. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in an open motorcade through Dealey Plaza on his way to give a speech at the Dallas Trade Mart. Some 35-45 minutes later, Dallas patrolman J.D. Tippit was fatally shot on a residential block of Oak Cliff, an inner ring suburb located just across the Trinity River from Dealey Plaza and the downtown area. Authorities would quickly charge 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine and employee of the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, with both murders. After his arrest in Oak Cliff’s Texas Theater, Oswald would vociferously maintain his innocence until his own baffling homicide at the hands of nightclub owner Jack Ruby just two days later — nationally televised in the basement parking garage of the Dallas Police Headquarters.

The horrific events of that unforgettable weekend would shake our nation to its core and usher in the rest of what would arguably be the most tumultuous and pivotal decade in American history. Sixty years later, the festering, burning question remains…did Oswald do it? Dallas Police and the Dallas District Attorney’s office were fully preparing to try Lee Oswald and Oswald alone for the crimes. After the suspect’s murder while in police custody, the subsequent Warren Commission, empaneled by incoming President Lyndon Johnson, found in the following year that Lee Oswald alone had murdered both President Kennedy and Officer Tippit with no assistance from any accomplices…foreign or domestic.

During the 1970s, as public doubts about the veracity of the so-called Warren Report grew, Congress decided to take a second look at the controversial, problem-filled case. After having been locked away in a vault for some 11+ years, a copy of the “Zapruder” home movie of the assassination was finally shown in 1975 on ABCs’ Good Night America to a shocked national audience. Rumors of shots being fired from the legendary “Grassy Knoll” to the front of the Presidential limousine had persisted since the day of the assassination. Now, as citizens watched the home movie footage on TV for the first time, they could clearly see for themselves the President’s head being thrown violently back and to the left. The Zapruder film seemed to plainly indicate that one or more of the shots had come from the front. Not solely from the rear and the Texas School Book Depository where Lee Oswald had allegedly fired a cheap, misaligned World War II surplus rifle from the sixth floor. As a result of the political pressure that ensued, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was convened in 1976 to study the JFK assassination…as well as the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The conclusion of the HSCA members and their investigation was that there had been a “probable conspiracy” in the JFK assassination. But they were unable to determine its nature or participants (other than that Oswald was still deemed to have fired all the successful shots). Regarding Tippit, the HSCA still believed that Lee Oswald had gunned down the officer near 10^th & Patton in Oak Cliff. This was likely because of the appearance of a new Tippit witness, Jack Tatum, whose testimony helped to bolster the heavily damaged credibility of the Warren Commission’s star witness in the Tippit case, waitress Helen Markham.

In the years immediately following the assassination, some 87% of the American public believed that Lee Oswald had acted alone. Today, over 60% believe that JFK and Officer Tippit were killed as part of a conspiracy. As more details and statements have been released in the new millennium, a growing number of citizens, though still a minority, have come to believe that Lee Oswald was being truthful when he claimed he hadn’t shot anyone that day — that the New Orleans-born young man was “just a patsy” in this unthinkable national nightmare.

So, what reasons did the government offer for naming Lee Oswald as the killer of Officer Tippit? The official case against Oswald rested on the following:

1. Two eyewitnesses saw the Tippit shooting. Seven more witnesses heard the shots and saw the killer fleeing the Tippit murder scene with gun in hand. All nine witnesses positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man they saw.
2. A .38 Smith & Wesson revolver was purchased by Oswald and was in his possession at the time of the suspect’s arrest in the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff — less than a mile from the location where Tippit was slain.
3. Lee Oswald’s “Eisenhower” style jacket was found along the path of the gunman’s flight.
4. The four .38 caliber cartridge cases (shells) found at the scene of the Tippit shooting were fired from the revolver in Oswald’s possession to the exclusion of all other weapons.

This article will deal with each accusation and show how the preponderance of evidence now points to the probable innocence of Lee Oswald in the murder of Officer Tippit.

Part 1: The Witnesses

The eyewitness testimony against Lee Oswald for the murder of JD Tippit was never as strong nor as solid as the authorities led the public to believe. As Tippit researcher and author Joseph McBride has so cogently stated, “the eyewitness evidence is so contradictory that it seems as though there were two sets of witnesses” at 10^th & Patton in Oak Cliff on November 22. 1963. One set of witnesses, those who got to testify for the Warren Commission and later HSCA, said Lee Oswald was the man they saw at or near the Tippit murder scene with a gun. However, witnesses who were largely ignored by Dallas Police and the later subsequent federal investigations told an entirely different story. These individuals saw at least two suspicious men escaping the scene of the murder, with none of those persons being positively identified as Oswald.

To further complicate matters, there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that for weeks, perhaps even months prior to the murders of President Kennedy and Officer Tippit, an Oswald lookalike had been impersonating the ex-Marine in a concerted effort to draw attention to Oswald — to portray him as an unbalanced and highly dangerous individual. So, when witnesses claimed to have briefly seen suspect Oswald with a handgun in the vicinity of the Tippit murder, it is unclear whether they saw the real Lee Oswald, his well-documented and often-seen imposter, or someone else entirely.

New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, one of Lee Oswald’s earliest and most vociferous defenders, had long believed that the plot to kill Kennedy had been hatched in his city during the summer of 1963, and investigated accordingly. In October 1967, Mr. Garrison granted an interview to Playboy Magazine, during which he noted, “The evidence we’ve uncovered leads us to suspect that two men, neither of whom was Oswald, were the real murderers of Tippit.”

After DA Garrison’s interview hit the newsstands, the magazine received the following anonymous letter from Dallas:

I read Playboy’s Garrison interview with perhaps more interest than most readers. I was an eyewitness to the shooting of policeman Tippit in Dallas on the afternoon President Kennedy was murdered. I saw two men, neither of them resembling the pictures I later saw of Lee Harvey Oswald, shoot Tippit and run off in opposite directions. There were at least half a dozen other people who witnessed this. My wife convinced me that I should say nothing, since there were other eyewitnesses. Her advice and my cowardice undoubtedly have prolonged my life — or at least allowed me now to tell the true story…”

In my July 8, 2019 article Why Officer Tippit Stopped His Killer published on this web site I went into considerable detail in explaining the difficulties presented by the witness testimony in the Tippit case. For the sake of brevity, I will only summarize my findings here. The devil, of course, is often in the details, and so interested readers should go to this article.

First, it should be realized that many misidentifications have contributed to reversals eyewitness misidentification overwhelming majority of wrongful convictions, later overturned by post-conviction DNA testing. According to one peer-reviewed scientific study cited by the Innocence Project,the ability to correctly identify a suspect in a crime drops off dramatically once the witness’s location is 25 or more feet from the subject. After 25 feet, facial perception diminishes, and diminishes rapidly.At about 150 feet, accurate face identification for people with normal vision drops to zero.

Domingo Benavides

The only witness who was possibly within 25 feet of the Tippit shooting was Domingo Benavides, a young man driving west on E. 10^th Street in a pickup truck. Benavides saw Tippit talking to a young man across the hood of his patrol car. As Benavides was almost even with the stopped police car and preparing to pass, he heard three close by gunshots. Benavides ducked down behind his dashboard, turned his truck into the far curb, and hid out of sight for several seconds. He did not actually see the shooting. When Benavides finally peeked over his dashboard, he observed the killer walking west towards Patton Avenue. Benavides waited until the killer was well out of view before exiting his vehicle and checking on Officer Tippit. Tippit appeared to be deceased. Benavides would retrieve two shells discarded by the killer who had cut across the lawn on the corner property and fled south on Patton Avenue. Benavides told police he could not identify the shooter because the witness basically only saw the suspect from behind as he escaped. Benavides did not participate in any of the downtown lineups. The witness did note, however, that the suspect had a squared off haircut that ended on the back of the neck above the “Eisenhower” jacket. Photographs from that day clearly show that Oswald’s hair was tapered in the back and would have extended below the neckline on a similar jacket as seen.

Helen Markham

Helen Markham was the so-called “star” witness in the Tippit case as she was the only witness on the day of the murder to claim having seen the actual shooting. Mrs. Markham is “legendary” in this case because her testimony and statements were so confused, contradictory, and downright bizarre. Markham had been walking south on Patton Avenue — on her way to catch a bus on Jefferson Boulevard that would take her to her waitressing job in downtown Dallas. The witness said she saw a man walking east on 10^th Street who was soon stopped by a police officer in a patrol car. The two spoke briefly through the car window. Then the officer climbed slowly out of his car to question the man further. Just as Tippit neared the front of his car on the driver side, the killer pulled a handgun concealed under his jacket and shot the policeman several times across the car’s hood “in the wink of your eye.”

Critics of Helen Markham, and there are many, have noted an abundance of blatant mistakes in her story. Markham was the only witness who saw the killer walking east, while the other people along 10^th Street saw the killer walking west. Markham said the killer leaned into Tippit’s open passenger window, however only the vent window was cracked open. Most strangely, the witness says she was alone with the officer for a full 20 minutes before help came, and that Tippit had tried to hold a conversation with her while he lay dying. All other witness testimony and medical evidence indicates the policeman was likely dead before he hit the ground. As for the killer’s escape, only Markham saw him run down the alleyway between E. 10^th and Jefferson Boulevard. All other witnesses clearly said the killer ran past the alley and fled west on Jefferson Boulevard.

Several of the Warren Commission’s lawyers told their bosses that it would be a mistake to use Markham’s confusing rendition of events.

“Contradictory and worthless” was the description given by Assistant Warren Counsel Wesley Libeler regarding Mrs. Markham’s testimony. “The Commission wants to believe Mrs. Markham and that’s all there is to it,” added staff member Norman Redlich.

“She’s an utter screwball,” remarked Counsel Joseph Ball.

Markham had fainted more than once at the scene, her behavior was described as hysterical, and she later was administered smelling salts by the police before viewing a four-man downtown lineup. Although Markham was said to have identified Oswald, her later testimony put that ID much in doubt. Before the Warren Commission Mrs. Markham repeatedly said she didn’t know anybody in the lineup and didn’t recognize anyone. She didn’t pick the “Number Two Man” by his face, but rather because the man’s looks gave her chills.

“A rather mystifying identification,” quipped Warren Commission critic Mark Lane.

While talking to the press, Mrs. Markham had described the gunman as being short, a little chunky, and with bushy black hair. Suspect Oswald was 5’9”, noticeably underweight at 130 pounds, and had receding, thinning brown hair.

Mrs. Markham was never closer than about 90 feet to the gunman.

My own research has shown that Mrs. Markham’s story does not square with her stated timeline nor sightlines. The trim and fit waitress was hurrying to catch a bus, not standing idly on the northwest corner of 10^th & Patton watching as this drama unfolded. Markham should’ve already been past that intersection and headed for her bus by the time the killer shot Tippit.

Bill Scoggins

Cab driver William Scoggins was sitting in his vehicle just before the stop sign at the southeast corner of 10^th & Patton when the shots rang out. While eating his lunch, Scoggins had observed Tippit’s patrol car roll slowly through the intersection headed east. Some 100 feet from the corner, Tippit stopped and tooted his horn, beckoning a young pedestrian on the sidewalk to approach the car. Once the young man went to Tippit’s car, he disappeared from Scoggins’ view because of some hedges. Scoggins was positive that the young man had never passed in front of his cab, walking east. So, the pedestrian must have been walking west, although the witness thought he might have been in the process of turning around when beckoned by the policeman.

Suddenly, several shots rang out in quick succession. “They was fast,” the witness would later recall. A surprised Mr. Scoggins dropped his lunch and watched as a young man carrying a pistol came striding across the corner property’s lawn, directly adjacent to his cab. Scoggins scrambled from his cab but saw no avenue of easy escape. Hunkering down behind his cab’s driver side fender, the WWII veteran watched as the young man jumped through the hedges, ignoring his taxi, and proceeded south on Patton.

Scoggins thought he heard the gunman mutter either “Poor dumb cop” or “Poor damn cop.”

At a Saturday police lineup, Scoggins picked Oswald as the man he saw crashing through the hedges and carrying a pistol. However, cab driver William Whaley, who attended the same lineup as Scoggins to identify Oswald as the man he drove to Oak Cliff shortly after the assassination, made an interesting observation about this hastily arranged police procedure. This is what Mr. Whaley told the Warren Commission:

Then they took me down in their room where they have their showups, and all, and me and this other taxi driver (Scoggins) who was with me, sir, we sat in the room awhile and directly they brought in six men, young teenagers, and they all were handcuffed together. Well, they wanted me to pick out my passenger. At that time he had on a pair of black pants and white T-shirt, that is all he had on. But you could have picked him out without identifying him by just listening to him because he was bawling out the policeman, telling them it wasn’t right to put him in line with these teenagers…He showed no respect for the policemen, he told them what he thought about them. They knew what they were doing and they were trying to railroad him and he wanted his lawyer.

By Saturday November 23^rd just about every functioning adult in the Dallas metro area knew that shots had allegedly been fired from the Texas School Book Depository. Lee Harvey Oswald had already been announced as the suspect, and his face had been shown on television. During the lineup, while police employees standing in had been allowed to give false names and occupations, Oswald stated his correct name and identified himself as an employee of the Texas School Book Depository.

Worse yet, Scoggins later admitted to the Warren Commission he was not able to pick out Oswald during a separate photo lineup. Scoggins said that he was shown photos of different men by either an FBI or Secret Service agent.“ I think I picked the wrong one,” the cab driver testified. “He told me the other one was Oswald.”

Jack Tatum

Purported witness Jack Tatum never participated in a police lineup in 1963. That is because Mr. Tatum never came forward until almost 15 years later when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was convened in the late 1970s to reinvestigate the JFK case. By the time the HSCA was empaneled, the credibility of Mrs. Markham’s version of events had reached near zero — and Markham had been the only witness to say she saw the gunman shoot Tippit. Tatum told an incredible new story, how he had been driving west on E. 10^th Street and saw a young white man, hands in jacket pockets, leaning over to speak with a Dallas police officer through the passenger side window or vent of the patrol car. As Tatum proceeded to drive past the squad car and into the intersection of 10^th & Patton, he heard three loud bangs. Tatum hit the brakes and came to a stop in the intersection. Looking through his rearview mirror, Tatum saw the officer lying in the street, and watched as the gunman walked to the back of the police car, stepped into the street, and proceeded to walk around the trunk and up the driver’s side. When the gunman reached Tippit’s prone body near the front of the vehicle, he leaned over, took aim, and fired a fourth shot point-blank, execution style (supposedly the shot that went through the victim’s temple). The gunman then retraced his steps, stepped back onto the curb and onto the sidewalk, and then strode quickly west to make his escape.

Realizing the gunman was now moving in his direction, Tatum put his red Ford Galaxie in gear and eased forward into the 300 block of E. 10th, all the while keeping an eye on the approaching gunman in the rearview mirror. The witness continued to watch as the gunman cut across the lawn at the 400 E. 10^th corner property and turned south onto Patton Ave. The killer soon disappeared from Tatum’s view. Tatum said he next exited his vehicle to speak to other witnesses, and to calm the seemingly inconsolable Mrs. Markham. However, upon hearing the general description of the shooter (average white guy in his mid-20s), Tatum realized he also fit the overall characteristics of the shooter, and therefore he decided not to wait around for the police to arrive. The authorities would already have plenty of witnesses anyway. So, Jack Tatum hopped back into his Ford Galaxie and drove away from the scene.

Strangely, Tatum said that he later decided to drive back to 10^th & Patton to help poor Mrs. Markham, and that he drove Markham to the police station to give her statement. Only problem is, Dallas Police records show that Officer George Hammer drove Helen Markham to DPD headquarters, not Tatum. Dallas Police were not about to let their “star” witness, and only witness to the shooting itself, out of their sight until she could give a statement and attend a lineup.

Later, Jack Tatum would grant an on-site interview to Frontline the PBS long running prime time documentary series on American television. Two of the lead researchers on this program were Gus Russo, and Dale Myers.

While driving his car west on E 10^th Street and re-creating his alleged view of the Tippit murder, Tatum told his interviewer how he passed the stopped police car, saw the pedestrian and policeman conversing, and then heard three gunshots as he entered the intersection at 10^th & Patton. As Tatum, and Myers, continue his story, this is the capper: the gunman completely circled the police car to fire a fourth shot point-blank into Tippit’s skull.

The problem with Tatum’s story is that while the other eyewitnesses disagreed as to exactly what they saw, no one else disagreed much as to what they heard. While the number of shots is in dispute, every “earwitness” agrees that the shots were fired in rapid succession. There was no final shot separated by seconds from the initial shots.

Witness after witness described Tippit as being killed by a fusillade of shots. They all heard basically the same thing: Pow pow pow pow.

“They was fast,” remarked cabdriver Bill Scoggins, describing how the shots were fired extremely close together, in rapid succession.

What Jack Tatum said he saw, in all probability, never happened. Why he said it can be left to the reader’s imagination. But the HSCA bought it. Because they now had a new “eyewitness” to the actual shooting, and that person’s name was not the thoroughly discredited Mrs. Helen Markham.

Next, Tatum said that the killer came within 10-15 feet of his Ford Galaxie, and that man was Lee Harvey Oswald. Tatum claimed he could tell because the corners of the man’s mouth turned up into a distinctive smile. Sounds convincing, right? But a quick check of the murder scene and known escape path of the gunman shows clearly that the gunman never came closer than 100 feet to Jack Tatum. Tatum was also well over 100 feet away from Officer Tippit — and according to Tatum himself he was watching everything through his rearview mirror.

Why did PBS Frontline let Tatum get away with making such outrageous claims? How could Tatum possibly have seen the gunman’s lips curl up from that distance? The gunman came to within 10-15 feet of Tatum’s Ford Galaxie…seriously? That was your story, Mr. Tatum, and you were sticking to it?

Witness Domingo Benavides seemed to remember a newer red car, possibly a red Ford Galaxie, traveling west several car lengths ahead of his pickup truck. But no one remembered having seen Jack Tatum at 10^th & Patton. He was like a late arriving apparition: 15 years after the fact, telling a bizarre and likely false narrative. Yet it was accepted by the HSCA because it helped tie up many inconvenient loose ends left by the Warren Report. And PBS Frontline, a program that showcases documentary facts, didn’t bat an eye and never challenged a word.

Barbara and Virginia Davis

Barbara (22) and Virginia (16) Davis were sisters-in-law who lived on the bottom floor of the house at the southeast corner of 10^th & Patton. It was here, at 400 E 10^th, that the gunman cut across the front lawn, jumped through the hedges by Bill Scoggins’ cab, then headed off down Patton Avenue. The killer also discarded the final two of four total spent shells on this property. The first two shells had been found closer to the shooting site by witness Domingo Benavides, who had watched the shooter discard them as he quickly walked west on 10^th towards the corner at Patton Avenue. Barbara and Virginia would each respectively recover the third and fourth discarded shells at 400 E. 10^th later that afternoon — on the Patton Avenue side of the house.

The two testified they were awakened suddenly from a nap by what the women perceived to be at least two gunshots in quick succession. Barbara and Virginia, understandably confused, both ran to the front door that opens facing East 10^th Street. Through the screen door they soon witnessed a young man cutting through their front yard, seemingly unloading a handgun held in his right hand. As the man continued walking past their door, the sisters heard a woman shouting and pointing farther east on 10^th Street, “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s shot!” They would identify the person as Helen Markham, with whom Barbara was acquainted. The woman yelled for someone to call police, and Barbara quickly made the call.

Virginia, only 16, seemed somewhat confused by the sequence of events. In her original statement to police the young woman said she had gone to the side door, the one that faces Patton Ave., and watched as the gunman walked by towards Jefferson Boulevard. But during her testimony before the Warren Commission Virginia corrected herself and said she had been at the front door, where she had stood behind her sister-in law. The 16-year-old said she could not remember the exact corner (it was the northwest corner) on which Markham had stood. “I don’t remember too good,” was Davis’s explanation. She also thought her sister-in-law had called police before the gunman had cut across their lawn, a near impossibility. Virginia admitted she only caught sight of the killer’s profile and had identified him at the lineup based upon her glimpse of the killer through the screen door and from behind where Barbara stood.

The younger Davis woman said she could not have made a positive ID based on the images of the suspect she saw on television — only from the lineup, and only from the profile view. This, of course, had been one of the lineups where the disheveled and bruised Lee Oswald had chided the police for trying to “railroad” him and berated the cops in front of the witnesses.

Virginia Davis testified to two very strange things. First, she said that Officer Tippit’s patrol car was, “…parked between the hedge that marks the apartment house where he lives in and the house next door.” Why did Davis think J.D. Tippit lived at the house two doors away? Why did other witnesses also mention seeing Tippit in the neighborhood regularly when that was not his usual beat? Also, when asked how quickly the police arrived at the murder scene, Mrs. Davis answered in an amazing way: “Yes, they was already there.” “By the time you got out there?” the lawyer for the commission asked. “Yes, sir. We stood out there until after the ambulance had come and picked him up.”

How could any policeman have gotten there so quickly? Sergeant Kenneth Croy, the first Dallas Police officer on the scene, had said he arrived just as Tippit’s body was being loaded into the ambulance — already suspiciously fast. Now Virginia Davis was testifying that Croy was already there before the ambulance had arrived? Which barely came from more than two blocks away at the Hughes Funeral Home. So, the Davis sisters waited until the gunman was gone and out of sight before stepping outside, yet Croy somehow was already there?

Barbara Davis’s testimony was more succinct, as she seemed to get more of the basic details correct. However, Barbara testified that the shooter had worn a dark coat made of a rougher fabric, such as wool. This was in stark contrast to what all the other witnesses had described, including Barbara’s sister-in-law. She also remembered the killer’s shirt as being much lighter than Oswald’s shirt…which is interesting because Oswald wore his white undershirt at the lineup and not the brown, buttoned-down long-sleeve shirt he had been wearing all day since he left for work in Fort Worth with Wesley Buell Frazier. At one point Barbara says she was inside the house holding the screen door when she watched the suspect cut across her front lawn. Later she tells investigators she was standing on her front porch as the killer passed by. The older of the two Davis sisters-in-law also agreed that she had only seen the killer from the side, the profile view.

Finally, Mrs. Davis described how she and Virginia each found one shell. It was later that afternoon on the side of their house that faces Patton Avenue. These would have been tossed after the gunman jumped through the hedges and had passed Bill Scoggins’s cab — but before he had reached the location of witnesses Ted Callaway and Sam Guinyard farther south on Patton.

Ted Callaway and Sam Guinyard

When shots were fired on E. 10^th street, two of the employees of nearby Harris Motor Company, whose used car lot faced Patton Avenue north of Jefferson Boulevard, moved quickly to the sidewalk on Patton. Their attention turned north towards E. 10^th Street. Callaway was the car lot’s manager, and Guinyard was a porter who washed and detailed cars.

As Callaway and Guinyard watched, they observed Bill Scoggins hunched over and pressed against the driver’s side fender of his cab. Suddenly, a young white man carrying a pistol came crashing through the hedges. Paying no attention to the cab, the gunman headed south on the east sidewalk of Patton towards where Callaway and Guinyard were standing, wondering what the excitement was all about. Guinyard observed the young man toss what was the fourth of the four spent shells towards the side of Virginia Davis’s apartment.

As the gunman realized Callaway and Guinyard had stepped out and were now blocking his escape route, the young man crossed the street and proceeded south on the west side of Patton.

“Hey, man!” Callaway shouted to the killer as he was almost even with the two Harris Motors employees. “What the hell’s goin’ on?”

The gunman slowed almost to a stop, then mumbled something back to Callaway. However, the used car manager couldn’t make out what the man was saying. By this point the gunman was now carrying his handgun in what Callaway described as a raised pistol position, a technique Callaway had been taught in the military.

Other people were beginning to come out. So the killer picked up his pace and trotted quickly towards the intersection of Patton and Jefferson.

“Hey, somebody follow that guy!” Callaway called down the street. Callaway then turned and hurried in the opposite direction towards 10^th Street. Once up at the corner, the Harris Motors manager could see Tippit lying motionless on the ground and a crowd starting to form. Callaway went to the patrol car and tried to summon help on the radio, but was unsuccessful. A motorist named T.F. Bowley, who knew how to work the radio, would stop seconds later and summon help. Meanwhile, someone had already picked up Tippit’s service revolver, which had been lying on the street partially beneath his body, and placed it up on the squad car. Domingo Benavides, who worked as a mechanic at Harris Motors, was telling Callaway what he had just witnessed from his pickup truck.

Frustrated, ex-serviceman Callaway picked up Tippit’s revolver and told Bill Scoggins to quick get his taxi — he and Scoggins would drive off from 10^th & Patton in search of the officer’s killer. It is then that Callaway would ask Harris Motors employee Benavides a question that would continue to puzzle JFK researchers to this day.

“Which way did he go?”

If Callaway and Guinyard had just observed the gunman run past their position on Patton Avenue and turn west onto Jefferson Boulevard, why would the car lot manager need to ask Benavides which way the killer had fled?

Callaway and Scoggins did search the neighborhood, but failed to locate the gunman. They soon returned to the murder scene at 10^th & Patton to surrender Tippit’s revolver to arriving Dallas police officers. Years later, Scoggins would confess to an interviewer that he had stashed a .32 caliber handgun in his glove box for protection, but had totally forgotten about the weapon during the entire harrowing ordeal.

“I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” the cab driver remarked as way of explanation.

The FBI later took measurements on Patton Avenue and determined that the gunman had passed by some 55 feet from Callaway and Guinyard at the closest. Both men would later identify Lee Oswald as the man they had seen carrying the pistol, Had Oswald stood trial for Tippit’s murder, Mr. Callaway would perhaps have made the most convincing witness for the prosecution. In later interviews, the loquacious and confident manager expressed no doubt about his ability to positively identify Oswald as the person who had murdered J.D. Tippit.

However, during a 1986 televised mock trial held in London, England — The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald —star defense lawyer Gerry Spence cross-examined Ted Callaway on the witness stand. As Spence tried to introduce doubt concerning the Harris Motors manager’s ability to positively ID a running gunman glimpsed from more than 50 feet away, Callaway scoffed at Oswald’s “counsel” and reiterated that the accused assassin was the man he saw running from the Tippit murder scene with gun in hand. Spence appeared to be ready to dismiss the witness, then asked Callaway if he would kindly answer one more question.

“Can you identify the man in this picture?” Spence asked Callaway.

Suddenly, a black & white photograph appeared on the courtroom screen for everyone to see. It was a blown-up copy of a photograph taken by a news photographer at the moment of the assassination of JFK in Dealey Plaza. In the background the Texas School Book Depository can be clearly seen, along with some onlookers standing in the entranceway.to the TSBD. The image of one of the onlookers is enlarged:

Clearly confused, witness Callaway hesitates for a brief moment, knowing the tricky defense lawyer is up to something…but he replies anyway.

“Why…why that’s a resemblance of Oswald!”

“No further questions,” smiled Gerry Spence, knowing he had just elicited the exact response from the witness he had sought. Callaway had just confused the image of Oswald’s fellow TSBD co-worker Billy Lovelady for that of the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The implication of Ted Callaway’s misidentification of the so-called Altgen or “Door Man” photograph was obvious…

Warren Reynolds

Perhaps the most fascinating experience of any Tippit witness was that of car salesman Warren Reynolds. Reynolds sold automobiles for the lot across Jefferson Boulevard from Harris Motors where Domingo Benavides, Ted Callaway, and Sam Guinyard all worked. Like Callaway and Guinyard, Reynolds also heard the gunfire from up on 10^th Street. He emerged from his office onto a second-floor balcony to see what the matter was. Reynolds observed a young, average-sized white man running down Patton Avenue with a gun in hand. Acting quickly, Reynolds hustled downstairs and onto the lot owned by Johnnie Reynolds Motor Company.

As the suspect turned west onto Jefferson Boulevard, Reynolds (the owner’s brother) and some other employees from the used car lot followed the man by running down the south side (or opposite side) of the wide thoroughfare from the gunman. The gunman stuck his pistol in the waist band of his trousers and continued west. Reynolds said he and his fellow employees lost sight of the suspect when he appeared to duck behind some buildings.

Later that day, Warren Reynolds gave statements to both the news media and Dallas Police regarding what he had witnessed. It was Reynolds’ opinion that he had seen and followed Officer Tippit’s killer, but that Reynolds was never close enough to the gunman to have possibly made a positive identification. The car salesman was interviewed by the FBI in January 1964, at which time he told the FBI that he could simply not make a positive ID on Oswald. Two nights later, someone sneaked into the dealership’s basement with a rifle and waited for Reynolds to come downstairs to shut off the lights at closing. Despite suffering a gunshot wound to the head, Reynolds miraculously survived the vicious attack. In fact, his eyesight suddenly approved, as he now informed authorities that he could identify Oswald as the man he had seen across Jefferson Boulevard fleeing with a gun.

Dallas PD’s main suspect in Reynolds’ near fatal shooting was a local hoodlum named Darrel Wayne Garner, aka Dago. Garner was a known associate of nightclub owner Jack Ruby, and his girlfriend danced at Ruby’s club. Garner’s girlfriend would soon die under mysterious circumstances in a Dallas jail cell, allegedly committing suicide by hanging herself with her pants.

Dallas JFK researcher Michael Brownlow caught up with Warren Reynolds decades after the assassination and Tippit’s murder. The Warren Commission witness who identified Oswald as the man he had seen carrying a pistol on Jefferson Boulevard was asked why he had changed his story by the time he testified for the committee.

“Because I wanted to live,” Reynolds replied.

Acquilla Clemons, Frank Wright, and Doris Holan

Three witnesses who were ignored by Dallas Police and never testified before the Warren Commission were Acquilla Clemons, Frank Wright, and Doris Holan. These people told very different stories than the official Warren Report witnesses.

Mrs. Clemons was taking care of an elderly client in a house on E. 10^th Street just west of the intersection with Patton Avenue. Clemons saw the police car stop on the next block but said there were two persons in the vicinity of Tippit’s patrol car, not just the man who spoke with the officer.

After Clemons had stepped back into her client’s home, she heard gunshots. Hurrying back outside, Clemons saw Officer Tippit lying on the ground next to his squad car and two suspicious people running away in opposite directions. One man was tall and slender, while the other man she described as short and chunky. The shorter man was reloading his pistol and escaping south on Patton Avenue. Clemons said this man was not Lee Harvey Oswald.

Frank Wright lived at the corner of E 10^th & Denver, just east of where Tippit was slain. Wright said he was standing in his living room near the front door when he heard the gunshots. Wright opened the door and stepped onto his porch, just in time to see Tippit’s body roll over and come to rest in the street. Next Mr. Wright observed a man running west from the police car. This man jumped into the driver’s seat of an old, grey coupe and drove away going west on E. 10^th. A second man in a long-sleeved coat, possibly a trench coat, then stepped into the street. The man appeared to be standing over Tippit, looking down. This second individual then returned to the sidewalk and disappeared out of sight onto one of the properties on the south side of the block.

Doris Holan lived in a second-floor apartment directly opposite the scene of Tippit’s murder. Her front window afforded the Dallas hotel employee a commanding view of the tragedy. Just after 1 o’clock Holan, who had been sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette, heard the gunshots. Startled, Holan dropped her cigarette but picked it up and put the cigarette on an ash tray. She then hustled to her front window and pulled back one side of the curtain. Holan saw a young man who looked similar to Oswald beginning to walk west away from Tippit’s police car. The movement of Holan’s curtain caught the attention of the suspect as he began to walk away, because he paused for a moment and looked up at Holan’s window, then turned again and began hurrying toward Patton. Holan next saw a police car roll forward from the alleyway behind 10^th and move towards the street using a narrow driveway between the two houses. A man in a long coat got out, stepped into the street, looked down at Tippit’s body, then walked back up the driveway to the police car. The second police car then backed up out of sight into the rear alleyway. Holan knew this was a police vehicle because she could see the “cherry” on top. (Although Dale Myers has tried to discredit Holan, as Tom Gram has shown, he has not succeeded. Click here for that discussion)

Patton Avenue witness Sam Guinyard would later confide to researcher Michael Brownlow that he too had seen police activity in that alleyway at about the time Tippit was killed. The car lot where Guinyard worked sat adjacent to E 10^th Street’s rear alleyway. The problem is, according to Dallas Police records, no other Dallas police were known to be in that immediate vicinity.

Summary

The witness testimony in the Tippit murder case is so confusing and contradictory that it tends to exonerate Lee Oswald as much as it implicates him. Most witnesses were either too far away or had only a fleeting glimpse of the killer to make a solid identification. Oswald was wearing a long-sleeved brown shirt that day, which no one in the vicinity of 10^th & Patton remembered seeing. When we factor in the tainted police lineups as well as the seemingly impossible time element in getting Oswald to the crime scene in time to be the shooter, the case against the 24-year-old tends to fall apart. The Dallas Police Report had the killer walking west, not east, as did all that day’s witnesses except for the roundly discredited Mrs. Markham. Someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald almost assuredly killed Officer Tippit.

There can be little doubt that a person or persons unknown impersonated Lee Oswald leading up to the murders on November 22, 1963. How can anyone be positive that Lee Oswald shot Tippit at just after 1 p.m. when so many factors argue against it?

Meanwhile, two credible witnesses at the Texas Theater put the real Lee Oswald in the movie theater at the time J.D. Tippit was being slain several blocks to the east. We know the real Lee Oswald was in the movie theater because he was soon arrested there. Patron Jack Davis said Oswald was there at about the time the 1:15 movie began, and was oddly moving from seat to seat, as if looking for someone. He even briefly sat next to Davis. Theater manager and ticket-taker “Butch Burroughs” said Oswald came in between 1:00 and 1:07 p.m., and that he sold popcorn to Lee Oswald at nearly 1:15 p.m. If true, how could Lee Oswald have murdered J.D. Tippit?