The J.D. Tippit Murder Case in the New Millennium
Our Hidden History Interviews
mp3 embed from archive.org
OHH: All right. We're here with James DiEugenio. He is the publisher and editor of KennedysAndKing.com and he's also the author of The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about this new book, Jim?
DiEugenio: Yeah. Sure, Dave. The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today is an updated and revised edition of Reclaiming Parkland. Most of the additions to it are in part three in which I talk about mainly the influence of Tom Hanks and Spielberg on some of the products that are coming out and how they are so disappointingly disjointed with what we know to be historical facts. The three films I concentrated on are Charlie Wilson's War, Parkland, and The Post. Those are really, I believe irresponsible films.
The MSM goes after Oliver Stone. Compared to Oliver Stone, Tom Hanks is a sixth grader. He simply doesn't have a very sophisticated view of contemporary history but somehow he thinks he does and so therefore him and to a lesser degree Spielberg, make a movie like The Post in which I don't even think they understood the Pentagon Papers case or knew anything about it. To give you an example, I talked to the in-house attorney at The New York Times at the time of the Pentagon Papers case, he told me, "Jim, you think what's there now is bad." In the first draft of the script, Daniel Ellsberg was in this movie for one scene and The New York Times was not there at all. I couldn't believe it. The Pentagon Papers case essentially is Daniel Ellsberg. Without him, there wouldn't have been no smuggling the papers out of the RAND Corporation.
Now, the other two parts of the book deal with Vincent Bugliosi and the second part of the book deals with an analysis of the evidence in the Kennedy case today and how it compares with Bugliosi's presentation was in Reclaiming History. That part of the book, the second part of the book, that's where I really go in to what we know about the JFK case today.
DiEugenio: Now, what we're gonna talk about tonight is a little bit different because what we're gonna talk about is an essay I did at my website KennedysAndKing.com and as you know, David, although I write something about the Tippit case in The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, this particular essay, I borrowed a lot from a lot of different people to try and coalesce what the evidence in a Tippit case is today. You've read the essay right?
OHH: Yeah. It was a really interesting amalgamation of all of the different authors I've heard that have written about it by Joseph McBride, Bill Simpich and many others, so it was really interesting to see it all laid out together.
DiEugenio: What I did and I'm glad you gave those other writers credit. I tried to do it from … It begins with a historical point of view. In other words, this is what the Warren Commission said. Then I expand out to what authors like Henry Hurt in his book Reasonable Doubt and then Jim Garrison in his book, On The Trail of the Assassins. I summarized their work on the Tippit case, and I guess the best way to deal with that is to say that both Henry Hurt and Jim Garrison felt that there were problems with what's commonly called core evidence or hard evidence or ballistics evidence in that case and there is. There most definitely is.
DiEugenio: Anybody who knows a JFK case, will understand these issues. For example, the bullets could not be matched to the gun that Oswald allegedly used to shoot Tippit and this was because the chambers in the gun had been altered to accommodate something called 38 special ammunition which is a 38 packed a little bit more gunpowder to make it more powerful. When the bullet is dislodged through the chamber, it doesn't make the proper markings in order to be identified. Now, what makes that so odd is that the Dallas Police only sent one bullet up to the FBI to be examined but there were at least three other bullets that hit Tippit.
DiEugenio: Why would you only send one bullet up? Warren Commission sent down to the FBI Cortland Cunningham to find the three bullets and so he found the other three bullets and they didn't match either. Now, everything was relying upon these shells but here's the problem with the shells. The shells were not even listed on the police report on the first day. In fact, they didn't enter into the report until six days later. What makes that even worse is that the first police reports said that they were automatic shells. Automatics of course are different than revolvers. The Warren Commission decided Oswald used a revolver but anybody can see in a comparison that automatic shells looked different than the kind of ammunition used in a revolver.
DiEugenio: They also are stamped at the bottom, A-U-T-O, so it's very hard to believe that Jerry Hill who was the guy who radioed in that they were automatic could mistake an automatic shell for a revolver shell because he'd been a veteran in the force for a number of years. The delay in getting the other bullets and the delay in getting the shells up to the FBI building for testing made a lot of people suspect something was funny with this and in fact Jim Garrison in his book, On the Trail of Assassins strongly suspected that the evidence was switched that once they didn't get the bullet match that they went ahead and fired the gun they had in possession to get the shells to match. Don't you, that because it was a six-day delay, it wasn't on the original inventory? One would have to think that is justified isn't it, that kind of suspicion?
OHH: We'll talk alter about the Dallas Police reputation at that time. I really want to cover that a little bit so it's definitely …
DiEugenio: We can definitely talk about that later. It's completely justified in light of those facts that will come out later in this interview. Now, another problem with the Tippit case was the timing. What I mean by that is that the Warren Commission said that Oswald after the shooting of Kennedy left work, was driven by a taxi to his rooming house in Oak Cliff that he was only at the rooming house for a short period of time that he picked up his revolver and walked outside and went to a corner across the street. That corner by the way accommodates a bus line that if you get on board the bus, it goes the wrong way from 10th and Patton which is the scene of the Tippit shooting.
DiEugenio: Anyway that's the last time the landlady saw him. She said that he was there at about 1:04. Well, the Warren Commission tells us that Oswald then walked from that corner to 10th and Patton and Tippit was killed at about 1:15 and of course they say Oswald did it. Now, the problem with this is additions of about nine-tenths of a mile. That creates a problem because it's hard to believe somebody can walk nine-tenths of a mile in something like 11 minutes. By the way, and I know two researchers who did walk that route and they were both much taller than Oswald and they said "we power walked it. We didn't just normally walked it." He said "we didn't come close to 11 minutes."
OHH: All right.
DiEugenio: All right. This begins to be a problem. The time of 1:15 for the shooting of Oswald is simply not supported by the weight of the evidence. There's several witnesses like Mrs. Donald Higgins and for example Helen Markham, Roger Craig, TF Bowley who all say that the shooting occurred a few minutes before that. For example, TF Bowley had a watch on. Roger Craig had a watch on. These witnesses placed at the shooting of Tippit much closer to about 1:06 or 1:07. Now, the problem with that of course is that if it's hard to believe Oswald could have gotten to the Tippit shooting at 1:15 it's simply not possible to believe that he could have got there at 1:07 or even 1:08.
OHH: Right.
DiEugenio: Like I said in my article, Roger Bannister nine years before was the first guy to break the record of four minutes, the four-minute barrier in the mile so it's simply not possible to imagine Oswald even running that distance in four minutes.
OHH: Yeah. In the military, I think that's about an eight-minute mile is very good to run.
DiEugenio: Yeah, right. Now, the clincher for this of course is what I have listed in my article is the Tippit death certificate executed by Dr. Richard Liguori at Methodist Hospital. It places his death at 1:15 pm is the time of death. Now, considering that the ambulance had to go out and get the guy and then bring him back at a hospital and he looks up at the clock and it says 1:15 then how could he be killed … It makes no sense. As we go here in the caption, it actually looks like the 1:15 is typed over an even earlier time of 1:09, but we'll accept 1:15.
DiEugenio: Now, with those factors into the record then you get the problem with the witnesses. Domingo Benavides was allegedly the closest witness to the crime scene back then in 1963, '64. He failed to identify Oswald. Warren Reynolds was also an eyewitness, saw the guy running away from the scene, said he would not commit to identifying Oswald then he was shot through the head and he changed his mind, and now he said he would identify Oswald.
DiEugenio: Helen Markham has so many problems that in the literature she's legendary. I don't even want to deal with her but I will just say as I wrote in my essay that the lawyers on the Warren Commission didn't even want to use her and I quote Joseph Ball and Wesley Liebler as lawyers who did not want to use her because she had so many problems as a witness. The reason they had to use her, you had people like Scoggins who didn't really see the scene unobstructed and had a hard time picking out Oswald after a set of pictures were shown to him. Actually, he picked the wrong guy. Then you had Ted Callaway who said that he saw the guy running from the scene but then he asked Benavides "which way did he go?"
DiEugenio: Well, if Callaway had to ask Benavides which way did he go, how did he see him? Also, I go in to the problem with the lineups. The lineups at Dallas Police Department were very unfair, to say the least. I quote William Whaley, the cab driver who said, "You could have picked out Oswald without identifying him by just listing to him because he was balling out to policeman telling that it wasn't right to put him in line with these teenagers." Then he says, "Anybody who wasn't sure, could have picked him out the right one just for that." Further, when asked their names and occupations, the other people in the lineup who were policemen gave fictitious answers. Oswald said his real name and said he worked at Texas School Book Depository. What the heck kind of lineup is that? It's just a joke.
DiEugenio: Now, we go to what I like to call one of the most interesting aspects of the Tippit case is that the bullets don't match the shells. In other words, what I mean by that is that as other people have pointed out before, the bullets taken from Tippit's body, three are Winchester Western manufactured copper coated. The last is a lead bullet made by Remington Peters. As Garrison noted, this seemed to suggest that two men may have fired at Tippit but the shells of course did not match the bullets. Two of the shells were by Remington and two by Winchester.
DiEugenio: This had led some people to think that maybe there was a shot that missed and a shell that was not recovered. The House Select Committee on Assassination suggested this but labeled in a speculation. According to the Warren Commission Oswald took the time to actually empty the revolver, so when you empty a revolver manually there's not … Unless you're gonna say he was running, there's not much of a space for the guy to go ahead and disperse of all those bullets. Now, the idea though is that the authorities like I said only sent one bullet up and then they sent the other three.
DiEugenio: Then they sent the shells and I talked about the delay in that but just when you think that things can't get any worse … And by the way, as I quote in the article, it's not just the critics who have said that there's a problem with the chain of possession. Hale Boggs himself one of the Warren commissioners said, "What proof do you have that these are the bullets?" Now, further complicating that, Jerry Hill said he told an officer, JM Poe to mark the shells. His marks were not evident when the policemen inspected the exhibits for the commission. Further, when the witnesses who found the other two shells were asked by the FBI to identify them as the ones they originally recovered, they could not.
DiEugenio: Now, just when you think it can't get any worse. Joe McBride who wrote a book on the Tippit case, Into the Nightmare said he talked to Detective Jim Leavelle in 1992 and Leavelle makes everything a little worse by saying that nobody actually really did mark the shells at all. What he's doing is he calls Poe a liar, that's what he's saying and now he says that there really isn't a problem with the substitution of evidence but was McBride noted what he had really done is it makes the whole chain of evidence custody on the shells very highly suspect. In other words, nobody knows what happened with these shells. It's such a mess today.
OHH: Do you want to just briefly talk about what the chain of custody means?
DiEugenio: Chain of custody is very important when you're talking about a homicide case because what that means is that the investigating officers should clearly mark and make reports of all the evidence found at the scene and for a long, long time and even the Dallas Police will tell you this, they were given carving pens in which they were supposed to use those to mark the evidence at the scene and then when they turned it over to someone, that person was supposed to put his initials on the evidence [bullet shells, typically]. Then there's supposed to be a report saying that so-and-so picked this up at the scene, carved his initials into it at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a time on such-and-such a day. He brought it down to the station, turned it over to this guy and his initials are on it.
DiEugenio: He gave him a receipt, he wrote a report and then he checked it in into the evidence room. Then whoever checks it in the evidence room, signed his name on the ledger and then the guy collecting the evidence goes ahead and marks it in that ledger that the evidence was marked by such-and-such a person and a second person and they turned it to me at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a day. See, that way which is standard procedure, that way, and the defense attorney cannot question whether or not somebody or more than one person substituted the evidence. But with what you have in this case, it violates all of those rules that police officers are taught from the beginning with the whole thing about there being no shells on the report for six days that they only sent one bullet to the FBI, that Hill told Poe to go ahead and carve his initials into it but somehow Poe can't find it and then Leavelle, this giant curve ball saying, "No, they didn't mark it at all." Why they wouldn't mark it at all that just completely eludes me.
DiEugenio: Now, because of the problems with the shells and bullets, and because of a witness named, Acquilla Clemons who worked as a caretaker about a block away. She heard the shots, run down the street. She said she saw two men at the scene. One was tall and slender. The other one was a short guy and then the tall guy waved at the shooter and told him to go on and they run off in different directions. There was also a letter to Playboy Magazine in the January 1968 issue where an anonymous person agreed with Clemons, he had been at the scene of the crime and he saw two men run off in different directions, neither one of them being Oswald.
DiEugenio: Now, if this isn't bad enough, if this isn't pretty bad if you ask me, now we come to the radio transcripts. The Warren Commission was delivered three different versions of the police transcripts. Sylvia Meagher pointed out the first transcript the police turned over did not include what was perhaps the most important instruction given to Tippit that day. That was the order for him to move into central Oak Cliff at 12:45. That was about 15 minutes after Kennedy was killed but there was a problem with this order. First of all, three officers who said they heard the transcripts said that they did not refer to this order during their testimony before the Warren Commission.
DiEugenio: Also right before this order, the radio dispatcher had said, "Attention all squads. Report to downtown area. Code three." That means sirens blaring and red light flashing to Elm and Houston with caution which of course makes perfect sense. You want as many cars as you can down there in Dealey Plaza so why would you send not one but two officers to Oak Cliff which is away from Dealey Plaza? The question then became was that order genuine or was it planted on the second version of the radio transcripts.
DiEugenio: Now, the Warren Commission didn't suspect any chicanery because they were just happy to find a way to get Tippit into Oak Cliff. By the way out of his territory at that time. And secondly, what was so important about central Oak Cliff anyway because nobody radio in any disturbance to that area. Now, with the Warren Commission, things always get worse and now it's about to get worse. There is no acknowledgement of this order even though it was given to policemen, Tippit and RC Nelson. To top it off, the police already had a guy in Oak Cliff. His name was William Mentzel.
DiEugenio: In other words when cars are coming in from the outer most areas, to the Dealy Plaza area, not one but two cars are being directed to Oak Cliff when in fact they already have a guy there and further there's no contact between the dispatcher, Murray Jackson and Mentzel to check on where he is but, and like I said, it always get worse, Nelson didn't go to Oak Cliff. He went to Dealy Plaza as many others like Henry Hurt noted. The Warren Commission never made anything out of this paradox. In other words, why did Tippit go to Oak Cliff but Nelson did not? In fact neither the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee called Nelson as a witness.
DiEugenio: See, that is the kind of thing that makes people suspect that that order was added later. Now, at 12:54, Tippit say that he was at Lancaster and 8th and then Murray Jackson, the dispatcher replies with one of the strangest radio instructions one could imagine for that time. Jackson told Tippit to, "Be at large for any emergency that comes in."" Be at large for any emergency that comes in". Now, we've to the message at 1:08. Between 12:45 and 1:08 there were four messages involving Tippit. Three went from the dispatcher to Tippit. One came in from Tippit at 1:08.
DiEugenio: In one version of the message, Tippit called the dispatcher twice and got no answer. In the FBI version though, Tippit's call number at that time which was 78 I missing from the radio tapes. It's assigned to a guy at number 488. The FBI noted the sound was garbled and number 488 is not identified by his name and there was no other message assigned to whoever this person is. Bill Drenas who researched the Tippit case and wrote an essay on it did a thorough examination of the tape and the transcripts. He also concluded that the voice is not Tippit's at 1:08.
DiEugenio: In other words, what the Dallas Police look like they were trying to do was … In other words to put this message at 1:08, they were trying to put it in there in order to go ahead and move the time of the shooting forward in time. This is very, very, let's say, intriguing. It's very, very intriguing because Mrs. Higgins one of the women who was a witness right across the street said the murder was at 1:06. She ran outside, and she's another person who saw someone leaving the scene and it wasn't Oswald. Now, what I've done so far with this is I've tried to summarize the evidence in the case before Oliver Stone's 1991 film, JFK came out.
DiEugenio: As everyone knows, that movie created a mini-earthquake throughout the land and it created a lot of other people writing books making documentaries, et cetera. One of these authors who's James Hosty, the FBI agent who was assigned to the Oswald case in 1963 in Dallas. He wrote a book called Assignment Oswald. In that book which was published in '95, he revealed and utterly fascinating piece of information, one that had been concealed for 32 years.
DiEugenio: He said that his FBI colleague, Bob Barrett was at the scene of the Tippit murder. Barrett said that Captain William Westbrook asked him, "Have you ever heard of a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald?" Barrett said no. Westbrook then asked him, "How about Alek Hidell?" Barrett now turned around and he saw that Westbrook was leafing through somebody's wallet at the scene. Now later on, this remarkable development was fortified by the release of a film from TV station WFAA. In that film you can actually see the police handling the wallet. I actually have pictures of this, interspersed article and then I have a link to a local ABC news feature in Dallas from 2013.
DiEugenio: In other words, the evidence is that there really was an Oswald wallet found at the scene of the Tippit shooting. Now the problem with this is that is the official story has always said that the police took the wallet from Oswald in the car after they picked him up at the Texas Theater and drove them to the station. That responsibility was given to an officer named Lieutenant Bentley but further there was also a wallet found at the home of Ruth and Michael Payne where Lee Harvey Oswald has spent the night with his wife, Marina. The question then becomes, well, just count them. Who the heck carries three wallets? David, how many wallets do you have?
OHH: Just the one.
DiEugenio: Same here. I only have one. Who the heck carries three? This is really, really bizarre. People like Bugliosi in his book tried to say that it was actually Tippit's wallet. That's simply not true because the police went … After they took his body to the hospital, they picked up his effects and among the effects was a wallet and they transferred it back to the police station. That was development number one. Development number two about this wallet was that nobody saw it on the ground which indicates a possibility did someone bring the wallet to the scene and this began to focus attention on three people and that would be Westbrook, Reserve Officer Ken Croy and a witness named Doris Holan.
DiEugenio: Doris Holan was one of these witnesses like Acquilla Clemons, like Mrs. Higgins, and some others who were at the scene who were at the scene of the Tippit shooting but were never interviewed by the Warren Commission. There isn't even any evidence that she was interviewed by the Dallas Police or the FBI which is really weird because her house, her apartment is on the second floor of a house right across the street from where Tippit was shot and there's a diagram in my article which shows that but being on the second floor of that house when she was finally discovered by local Dallas researchers Michael Brownlow and Bill Pulte. She had some very interesting information to convey to them.
DiEugenio: She said that as she looked out her second floor window upon hearing the shots, she saw second police car at the scene. It was in the driveway before 404 and 410 East 10th Street. This was adjacent to the spot where Tippit's car stopped. So knowingly or unknowingly Tippit blocked the driveway which led to an alley at the middle of the block behind. She said that a man got out of the car, looked at Tippit's body and went back down the driveway. He was alongside the car which is retreating back towards the alley. She also saw a man fleeing the scene in a different direction.
DiEugenio: Now it's a good thing they got her on the record because she passed away in the year 2000 and Brownlow got some corroborating evidence for what she saw which I list in the article here. Sam Guinyard who worked at a used car lot also said that he saw that second police car and so this gets very, very interesting now because now, the question became who was in the car? Now, people began to focus on Westbrook and Kenneth Croy because Westbrook is a guy who talked to Barrett about the wallet. Ken Croy was a guy who's supposed to discover the wallet.
DiEugenio: This gets interesting because Westbrook was not a detective, he was not a patrolman. He worked in the personnel department. In other words, he interviewed applicants for jobs and he investigated complaints. When you read these two guy's testimony in the Warren Commission you really wonder just how bad the Warren Commission really was. Westbrook said that he let his men go to Texas School Book Depository and he was the only one left in his office.
DiEugenio: He said he got antsy and then he said believe it or not he decided to walk to the depository alone which is about a mile away. He said he would stop every few minutes and when he saw somebody with a radio to understand what was happening in the investigation even though of course he had his own police radio. This would consume probably about 20 minutes so in other words, his whereabouts are unexplained for that 20 minutes. Now, Westbrook testified that once he got there, he heard that an officer had been shot in the Oak Cliff area. Now listen to this. He said that since he was in personnel, he thought he should investigate the murder. Does that make any sense to you? Does that make any sense to you, David?
OHH: No.
DiEugenio: A guy in the personnel department felt he had to investigate a homicide? Now, although Westbrook mentioned Barrett in his commission testimony, he never told the commission about the wallet in his conversation with Barrett. Well, that's a scene at the Tippit murder. Westbrook said that word about a suspect at Texas Theater came over the radio. He got a ride to the theater, someone tipped him off as to where the suspect was sitting, he witnessed the arrest and directed that the suspect be escorted out to theater and to the station.
DiEugenio: He then went back to his work desk in the personnel department. In other words, it's supposed to be on a day's work for a personnel officer. Westbrook just happened to be at the Texas theater, at the murder scene for Tippit and at Dealy Plaza but he's also credited with finding that Tippet killer's jacket and he also went to a nearby library to investigate a false alarm about the assailant of Tippet being there. Funny thing about the jacket. Although he's credited with finding the jacket, he says he didn't really find it. He said somebody gave it to him but he didn't remember who the officer was. Isn't that kind of weird?
OHH: Right. You'll go over later that that's not the only thing that he was not able to remember when he got a piece of importance evidence.
DiEugenio: All right. We're gonna find that that is gonna be parallel with Ken Croy because Croy-
OHH: We want to throw one thing in. I think you mentioned it but the personnel department, it doesn't sound like much but for somebody who wants to be in control... the personnel department is the guy who handles a hiring, the firing or the disciplinary matters. If someone like the CIA or whatever had key position in the Dallas Police Department. You mentioned this because I don't want to talk about it but he's definitely in a key position even though it's definitely not an investigative position or a street cop position.
DiEugenio: Yeah. You're exactly right. He would know everybody in the whole department and he would have the background stories on all of them so you're exactly right about that. Now, in addition to Westbrook not knowing who gave him the jacket, Croy who was the first person at the Tippit shooting scene was supposedly the first person to handle the wallet and guess what, he says, "Geez, I don't remember who gave me the wallet either." The Dallas Police really had a sure funny way of handling evidence, didn't they?
DiEugenio: Now, first of all, Croy was not a regular officer, he was a reserved officer. He said he drove patrol car duty maybe once a month and in one of the really funniest parts of this whole story, he says, that at the time of the assassination he was just a few blocks away from Dealy Plaza. He drove to the nearby Courthouse to see if the police might need some help. Now, the nearby courthouse, I have a map of this in my article is a block-and-a-half away from Dealy Plaza. Now, imagine the mayhem that's going on in Dealy Plaza at this time.
DiEugenio: You got people running around like a chicken with their head cut off. You got people running around behind the grassy knoll at the overpass. People are starting to go to the parking lot. There's dozens of cops, FBI guys there all within a block-and-a-half of where he is. What does he say then? He said he saw a cop at the courthouse, he asks them if he needed some help. Evidently the cops said, "No, everything is fine." Croy said that he decided that he was gonna go home when he heard a call about a cop being shot. If you can believe it, Burt Griffin who was asking the questions didn't bat an eyelash at that story, didn't ask them any questions, didn't challenge them, didn't even say, "Who was the cop we told you that you could go home?" None of that matter.
DiEugenio: In other words, like with Westbrook, there isn't really any way to corroborate Croy's whereabouts at this time and we're gonna get in to a really funny thing about that later also. Once he hears this thing about a cop being shot, he drives out he says to 10th and Patton, the scene of the murder. From his description, he said he interviewed Helen Markham but when Griffin asked him about his interview with Helen Markham, Croy said something really, really incredible. I mean really something. Now, imagine what's happened so far.
DiEugenio: First you have the president being shot in Dealy Plaza. Croy is a block-and-a-half away at that time. He asked the guy, "Do you need me?" The guy evidently said no, so he's gonna go home and he hears a radio about Tippit being killed. Of course his name wasn't Tippit. Nobody knew who he was. He was a cop being killed. He now drives out to 10th and Payton. He's the first guy there. A witness starts talking to him. He's the first person to see the witness or take her testimony. He tells Burt Griffin that he didn't file a report on his activities that day. Again, Griffin didn't bat an eyelash.
DiEugenio: I would have been jumping out of my seat. I said, "Wait, a minute. You're the first guy at the scene where this guy was killed and you saw his body laying in the street in a pool of blood? A witness comes up to you, starts telling you what happened and you don't file a report? You didn't even write her name down?" Very, very, very weird I think. Croy said he was in 10th and Patton for about 30 minutes, maybe a little bit more when Griffin asked him what he did after he left. He said he went to get something to eat.
DiEugenio: He also said that he stayed home the rest of the day. Again, Griffin let this pass. There wasn't any question by Griffin. Well, why didn't you go to the police station and write a report, and if you didn't want to write a report why don't you give him a verbal report. None of that was in there. He said he saw several officers there that he knew but he didn't know them by name. He said he only knew them by sight so we're led to believe that even if Croy had written a report he wouldn't have been able to name anybody in our officers there.
DiEugenio: Now, as Croy left the scene, he drove near to Texas Theater. He saw squad cars around the building. He decided not to stop since he felt the situation was well in hand. After first telling Griffin, he was going to get something to eat and go home, he then said he's actually met his estranged wife at Austin's BBQ. This is where Croy's story gets even more bizarre. He now added towards the end of his testimony that right after Kennedy's assassination and the cop he talked to said he was not needed, his wife, his estranged wife drove up next to him and he asked her if she want to get something to eat.
DiEugenio: Now, consider this. Croy was in uniform. He was just off Dealy Plaza. You can literally see Dealy Plaza plain as day from that site. Somehow he asks his estranged wife if she wanted a hamburger. I wrote in this map underneath this map diagram. Don't you think this would make for a good Saturday Night Live skit?
OHH: Incredibly incurious guy, I guess.
DiEugenio: Really! This stuff is it's too funny to be true. Now, again, there's no record if Griffin checked this out like I couldn't find anything where Griffin checked this out with a cop who's supposedly told to go home or if his wife actually pulled alongside him within a block-and-a-half of Dealy Plaza. Now, Croy is important because when the story about the wallet finally did break, he was a policeman whose credit was handling it. His story that he was handed a wallet by a civilian and of course Croy never asked the name of the witness who gave it to him. Its like this guy was operating in a fog. The question is was the fog designed or was it accidental. I think that's a natural question to pose.
DiEugenio: Now, this new evidence that we have now that is with Barrett's testimony with the television film of the wallet, with Doris Holan, with what we can discern from Westbrook and Croy, you have to wonder what would a real investigator do with this kind of thing? I think there's a lot of things he could have done with it which I described in the article because the question has always as Bob Tannenbaum once said who was a deputy counsel for the House Select Committee on the Kennedy side.
DiEugenio: He said at a speech he gave in Chicago in 1993, I like to get down to fundamentals. My opening question for an investigation would be, "Why did Tippit stop Oswald?" Which is an interesting question because the original story on this was that the description of Oswald came through a guy named Howard Brennan. We're suppose to believe that from a hundred feet away and six stories up that he managed to convey a description of the guy's height and weight even though the fact the window was only partly open and as Tannenbaum said, "It's not a floor to ceiling window." How could the description be accurate? The description to be able say that he was 5-foot-10, about 165 pounds.
DiEugenio: If you've ever been to that window which the first year I was there, they didn't have it blocked off. I could actually go to the window. It's very difficult to believe that you get that kind of description, a full body description from that window. The official story says that he gave this description to police inspector Herbert Sawyer but Sawyer did not confirm that it was Brennan who gave him that information. The other side can say what they want and I critique Gerald Posner because he's the one who says in his book that Brennan gave the story but there's no information in his footnote that such is the case.
DiEugenio: In fact the footnote he uses said that the information came from a man who said that the guy was on the fourth or fifth floor or might not even be in the building so how could that be Brennan? The FBI investigated this. In other words, how did the description get to the Dallas Police? They investigated this for months on in. They finally gave up. About a year after [FBI] investigator Richard Rogge wrote a memo saying that he could not find who this person was and the FBI was gonna label it as an identified citizen. The House Select Committee decided not to use Brennan but also what makes this interesting is in the description that went out over the police radio, it said that the suspect was armed with a rifle namely either 33 or some type of Winchester.
DiEugenio: Why would Tippit stop someone clearly armed without calling for a backup first? Of course, we know whoever who shot Tippit did not likely have a rifle. Again, why did Tippit stop this person? It's a real, real mystery so what happens is that the other side has come up with a thing that somehow Oswald changed direction when he saw the car and this is what made him suspicious but Mike Griffith who's a very good researcher and writer has blown that up and said, "You can only say that if you use people who changed your story." If you look at the initial reports by the witnesses to the police and the secret service nobody says that that happened.
DiEugenio: They all said that Oswald is going in one direction towards the police car. In other words, the distinct possibility is that Tippit did not pull over whoever this guy was because of the radio message. If Doris Holan was correct, Tippit stopped this car almost right in front of the driveway where that second police car she saw was situated which would leave open the suggestion that Tippit was being lured not just out of the proper area but to some kind of disguise trap door. Now, this is a very good point which I'm sure you're familiar with, David about what Tippit was doing the last hour of his life.
OHH: Right. I've heard about where he was and things like that.
DiEugenio: Now, this is very interesting. I took this information because of course it's not in the Warren Commission so I took this information from Joe McBride's book, Into the Nightmare. Between noon and 12:35, Tippit was most likely on a shoplifting call and then home for lunch. At approximately 12:40, he was seen in his car by five witnesses at a GLOCO filling station. Those witnesses said that he was looking at the Houston viaduct which crosses over from Dealy Plaza about 90 seconds on that viaduct near at Dealy Plaza. Now, just a few moments after this, Tippit pulled over a car driven by insurance agent, James Andrews. He pulled him over, got out of his police car and then started to look in the back of the car like he was looking for somebody.
DiEugenio: Andrews was very puzzled. He looked at the officer's nameplate. He said Tippit seemed to be very upset and agitated. His next stop is the Top Ten record store at 338 West Jefferson. Louis Cortinas said who knew Tippit barely well said Tippit came in, commandeered the phone, called someone, apparently did not get an answer, hung up and walked off looking worried or upset. Now, it seems logical to assume from that set of events of course, and I think you probably agree with me it looks like Tippit was looking for someone to cross over the bridge by either car, bus when that person did not arrive, he actually pulled over a car looking for someone.
DiEugenio: Frustrated, he then went ahead and tried to get somebody on the phone and then he proceeded to his death at 10th and Patton, driving the car very slowly like he was looking for someone. Now, this is a completely different perspective we now have thanks to this new evidence in what Henry Hurt had on the Tippit case. Now in McBride's book he interviewed a guy named Edgar Lee Tippit, JD Tippit's father and he found out some interesting things that are not in the Warren Commission and that nobody else have.
DiEugenio: Edgar talked to Tippit's widow and he said that according to her they called JD, another policeman, and said that Oswald was headed in that direction and this is what the other policemen told Marie, but he also added that the other boy stopped, "he would have got there but he had a little accident, a wreck". They both started out JD made it. He's been expecting something. The police notified them that Oswald was headed that way. Now, that has to be William Mentzel who as I said earlier was already in the area. Nelson had left. Now, Mentzel verified some of the facts in this because he told the HSCA he had responded to an accident a little bit after 1:00 and as we've seen, we know that Tippit did use a phone that day and Mentzel also reported he contacted the station by phone, not by police radio.
DiEugenio: An interview McBride gave with Gary Revel, he stated further, Wade told him that somebody reported to me that the police already knew who Oswald was and they were looking for him at that time. Now, this is all … I'm happy to tell you how fascinating it is. If that's true, then what that means is whoever put together the wallet at the scene of the Tippit murder, a small special part of the Dallas Police had been alerted to who the patsy was earlier. When Gerry Hill announced on the radio at 1:52, Oswald had been apprehended at the theater. He was only to the Tippit case not the JFK case because the information in the wallet did not become known until the mid '90s neither Henry Hurt of Garrison mentioned Westbrook or Croy, but they did mention Hill.
DiEugenio: Again, Hill like Westbrook was at the three major scenes: The Texas Theater, Dealy Plaza and at 10th and Patton. In addition, he was in the unmarked car that escorted Oswald to the police station. Hill was a policeman who first reported from the Tippit scene that the shells were automatic. Now, when Henry Hurt confronted him with discrepancy along with the fact that even though Hill instructed Poe to mark the shells with his initials, the markings have disappeared. Hill responded with one of the most farcical comments available in the literature. Hill said he could not imagine any kind of evidence manipulation because the police department was so clean, it scared him.
DiEugenio: Now, as you know that is so wrong and so false that it really lends suspicion to Jerry Hill because as I wrote in my book, no other county in America and almost no state for that matter has freed more innocent people from prison in recent years than Tarrant county which is where Dallas is, where Mr. Wade was a DA from 1951 through 1986. Of course, Wade as a DA who supervised the Kennedy and Tippit cases. What makes that fact even worse how dirty the Dallas Police were is that none of this would have come out unless there was a power shift in the city in 2006. The city elected its first African-American district attorney in over a half century.
DiEugenio: Craig Watkins was not from the good old boy's network. He never worked for Wade or met Wade and he's criticized Wade by saying there was "a cowboy kind of mentality and the reality is that kind of approach is archaic, racist, elitist and arrogant". He began to review private convictions literally dozens of innocent people were now set free. In three cases, the charge was murder. He said, Wade's cases were "riddled with shoddy investigation, evidence was ignored and defense lawyers were kept in the dark". In other words, the combination of Wade with homicide detective Will Fritz made for a thoroughly corrupt local law enforcement system. In pure numbers, the worst in America at that time.
OHH: I think it' such an important point because when you takeaway the fact that it's Kennedy and that it's a case that everybody's looked at, Oswald is just another guy in Dallas who's been railroaded by bad police work and a corrupt system there. It's not out of character for Dallas when you take away the fact it's the president. It's just another day in Dallas.
DiEugenio: Right. Exactly correct. Now in October of 1963, and this is I think really interesting, Hill went on what he called a special assignment. He was detailed over to the personnel division to work under Westbrook. There was never any question by the Warren Commission as to why that transfer happened at that time or once before the assassination especially in light of the fact that Westbrook already had six people working for him. It was Hill who had possession of the handgun taken from Oswald upon the arrival of suspect at the police station. Although there is some confusion about who actually did have possession of that handgun but when Hill arrived at the station, he placed the gun in Westbrook's office while he wrote a report.
DiEugenio: We're talking about personnel office. It should have gone to homicide, right? This was so odd that Westbrook himself admitted to the commission that the gun should not have been here. One last thing about this, according to one report, the 38 Smith & Wesson was ordered by Oswald and was delivered not by the post office but a private company called Railway Express Agency. This was a forerunner of federal express and to order a handgun, you had to have an ID and what they call a character reference. They would go ahead and ship the handgun to you at your PO box and you would have a car there and you would go to their REA office, produce the ID and the character reference, pay for the revolver, get a receipt and they will record the transaction.
DiEugenio: To make a long story short, there is no proof to any of that ever happened. In other words, there's no paper trail that leads from the car being picked up to Oswald going to the REA office and a transaction being processed by REA. In fact, there isn't even any proof the FBI ever went to the railway express agency in Dallas to check out the transaction and of course why would Oswald order the weapon under an alias which is of course Hidell knowing that someone's card by REA had to go to a PO Box under his real name?
DiEugenio: See the Warren Commission never asked those questions let alone answer them. Now, as he was making out his report, he says Westbrook told him to alter the report to say that Oswald was a suspect not just in a Tippit case but also in the murder or President Kennedy. Again, when Hill said that there was no question by the Warren Commission at all as to, "Well, wait a minute. Did you ask him what he based that on? How would you know that early that he was also a suspect in the Kennedy case? By the way, there was no … In checking to Westbrook's testimony, there's nothing near that says they crossed checked it.
DiEugenio: In other words nobody said, "Did you tell Jerry Hill to add to his offense report that Oswald was also a suspect in the Kennedy case?" Nobody asked that question because the obvious thing you want know is what did you base that on at that time at 4:00 in the afternoon? Now at 5:00 pm, Hill did an interview on the radio that went national. Hill was a very experienced print and TV journalist who covered the Dallas Police beat out of an office at the station before joining the force. During that interview with the Sacramento radio station, Hill did about everything he could to incriminate Oswald in the public mind.
DiEugenio: This was before Oswald had been arraigned on either charge, before the FBI had linked him to the weapons, before the bureau had test it for fingerprints or ballistics. Hill accused Oswald of being a violent person who may have shot another policeman previously which if course he just made that up out of thin air. Hill also said Oswald would not admit that he pulled the trigger on the gun in the theater which of course he did not because the FBI confirmed that the firing pin never hit the bullet. He said Oswald admitted during interrogation he was an active communist. Hill talked about Oswald's time in Russia. How he knew that is just unbelievable at that time and that was of course the beginning of a motive what Oswald did what he did.
[The following is a portion of Gerald Hill's radio interview]
Gerald Hill: The boy that we apprehended for shooting Officer JD Tippit is an employee of the book factory where the shots that killed the president were fired from. He was seen on the floor below, the window where the shots were fired from 15 minutes prior to the shooting. He was a former US Marine marksman who defected to Russia in 1957 and returned to the United States approximately a year ago with a Russian bride, I understand.
Gerald Hill: He did admit in interrogation a while ago he was an active communist. He has not admitted the shooting of the president, of the governor, of the police officer but a gun was found on the sixth floor where he did the shooting that I have been told and I can't verify it either way [inaudible] was made in Argentina. The man I understand has resorted to violence before and possibly shot another policeman somewhere. Also, he wouldn't admit anything other than he was a communist. He started screaming "brutatlity" as soon as we got the handcuffs on him and when he got [inaudible 01:02:21] the only thing he said is, "When I told you I was a communist I told you everything I'm going to tell you" or words to that to that effect. I want a lawyer. I demand my rights."
DiEugenio: Hill said that he had gotten most of this stuff from Westbrook.
OHH: Wow. [crosstalk 01:02:40] at 5:00 pm, four hours-
DiEugenio: Yeah.
OHH: Five hours after the fact?
DiEugenio: Yeah.
OHH: Four-and-a-half hours?
DiEugenio: I think Oswald was taken down to the station about 2:00 pm and he's writing a defense report saying that Westbrook told him to put him in there for the Kennedy case. Then he goes on the air just a couple hours later and he broadcast to the world all this incriminating evidence that it's Oswald. Now there's usually-
OHH: This is …
DiEugenio: Go ahead.
OHH: This is basically the first time. I think I remember Bill Simpich saying this is basically the first time had said this publicly, right?
DiEugenio: I wouldn't say that for sure but I would think that that's probably the case, yes.
OHH: Wow.
DiEugenio: Now, as most people are familiar with the JFK case understand there's usually a punch line with these weird and mysterious matters. This one is the following: Within one year the publication of the Warren report, Westbrook resigned the Dallas Police Department. He later became an adviser to the security forces in Saigon. That assignment was handled through the [United States] Agency for International Development and those who followed JFK case know that AID often work under the auspices of the CIA.
DiEugenio: In light of these later revelations, I think the JD Tippit case takes on a new significance. As Deputy Bill Alexander once said to Henry Hurt he knew that the man who killed Tippit had killed Kennedy. As Evan Marshall, a former 20 years homicide and investigator told the late Harry Livingstone, "The Tippit shooting has always been to me a red herring of the first order. As somebody who spent 20 years as a big city cop, I can assure you that nothing affects a cop like the murder of a brother officer. Perhaps the hope was that the officers would respond to the Texas Theater, would kill the suspect there."
DiEugenio: When Joe McBride was doing his book, Into The Nightmare, he talked to Jim Leavelle who said, "The Kennedy killing wasn't really a big deal to us when you get right down to it because it was just another murder inside the city limits of Dallas that we would handle. It was just another murder to me and I've handled hundreds of them so it wasn't any big deal. What people don't understand," Leavelle continued, "is that a police officer, his murder takes precedence over the shooting of a president because that's close to home."
DiEugenio: This is what I believed what happened here. This is what seemed to have happened. Whoever planned this thing understood that the Dallas Police will go crazy when they found out that Tippit had been murdered and they would instantly relate that case to the Kennedy case that they both must have been at the hands of the same man. Now, I can't prove that. I can't come close to the reasonable doubt standard but I have very little doubt that somebody like Dick Sprague, the first chief counsel of the HSCA had this evidence in his hand. He would have investigated this happening. He would have investigated Westbrook, Croy, and Hill. He would have found Doris Holan. He would have tried to find out who really gave the information of that description, the 5' 10" 165 lb. armed with a weapon to the Dallas Police.
DiEugenio: He would have gone to the post office. He would have gone to Railway Express to figure out how the heck did Oswald get that handgun if there is no trail that he did so. That and much more would have all been part of a real investigation of the Tippit case which is not at all even in the same universe with what happened and as a result the people who arranged for and I believe actually killed Tippit succeeded tactically in a spectacular way. In 30 minutes after the ambulance carted Tippit's body away, more than a half a dozen police cars descended on Texas Theater in response to a reported infraction. Six cruiser cars drive up in the front and back because somebody didn't pay to get into the movie and that was enough to lower the noose around Oswald's neck.
DiEugenio: Once apprehended and handcuff, Westbrook ordered the arresting officers to get Oswald in the car and take him to the station. At 1:52, Jerry Hill made the announcement that they had their man and the murder of Officer Tippit and as we have seen Westbrook, the guy would be soon working with the CIA then told Hill to add President Kennedy as the other victim and that was that. In other words, Dave, in the space of something like a little bit more than two-and-a-half hours, the Dallas Police manage to solve two murder cases all because the ticket taker at the Texas Theater said somebody walked into the show without paying. Pretty good police work.
OHH: Yeah, for a police department that never writes down where they get evidence. Pretty effective.
DiEugenio: Right. Garrison said … I don't know if it's on his book or not but he found out that Hoover had actually put out a list on the Tippit case of who not to talk to and that's what he thinks happen which would be look you've got a police force that's corrupt as the Dallas Police then you got Edgar J. Hoover who hated the Kennedys running the thing in Washington so there was no chance this case was gonna be solved neither Tippit or Oswald.
OHH: Right. Let me ask one thing about Tippit. Specifically in all of the literature on him, what's the idea of his background? Was there any evidence that maybe he was a dirty copy? Is there any reason that he specifically will be sacrificed in this sort of way?
DiEugenio: This article was pretty long to begin with. That's something I've decided not to really go into because it would have probably been about seven pages longer and I think it's 20 pages all right. McBride did try and dig some of that stuff up and there's a possible connection between Tippit and Ruby because Tippit was a security guard at Austin's BBQ. A part owner of that was Ralph Paul. Ralph Paul was also the guy who financed Ruby's purchase of his two strip clubs in Dallas, so there is a possible connection.
DiEugenio: Ruby's sister actually said that Tippit had been in the Carousel Club more than once so there's a possible connection there between Ruby and Tippit. Also if you can believe this, he was also at one time a security guard at the Texas Theater which is a place where Oswald was arrested at. Again, maybe that's just a coincidence but I find that kind of interesting. He was having an affair with a woman who was a waitress from Austin's BBQ and she happen to live in the Oak Cliff area. According to McBride who interviewed her, she said that their affair had ended a few months before Kennedy's assassination.
DiEugenio: Those are all kind of interesting things and course as McBride found out in his book, there was an inordinate number of racist and even Klan members in the Dallas Police. McBride, the whole section of his book a couple pages is on that particular subject. Dallas Police did not get that reputation for being so terrible and corrupt because there were really good people on that police force because they couldn't have been. The thing is like you said earlier, because Westbrook had the files on everybody... because Tippit never got a promotion in 11 years yet he was a patrolman. I'm only throwing this out as a suggestion, speculation. Maybe they told him this is gonna be your way to become an officer. We're gonna give you the goods on Oswald. Then what happened of course is they turned it around on him.
DiEugenio: Now again, as I said in the article, I can't prove any of this but all I can say is that it's really weird that none of this evidence was out there until the '90s which shows you how bad the Warren Commission was because that film of the Oswald wallet, that was there, a TV station. There's no reason the Warren Commission could not have gotten it.
OHH: You would think that would be one of the first things that they would do is to gather up all of the film especially of the Tippit … A specific location like the Tippit murder scene. That wallet to me was that's some pretty heavy duty evidence and to have the actual film of it, it's clear that it's not just a story or you can't say it's just hearsay.
DiEugenio: By the way, it's not just Barrett who certified that as being Oswald's wallet, Lieutenant Jez as I wrote in my article who I think was the second or third person at the scene of the Tippit killing told Martha Moyer who's a very good researcher in Dallas, he told her, "Don't let anybody bamboozle you. That was Oswald's wallet." In my opinion, it's very hard to dispute today that somebody brought that wallet to the scene of the Tippit shooting and it really looks today like somebody in the Dallas Police, a small little sector of it, somehow knew that Oswald was the guy that they were gonna frame.
OHH: You don't have to go … The connections are so immediate between Allen Dulles to Charles Cabell, Dulles' deputy, to Cabell's brother, the mayor of Dallas right into the …
DiEugenio: His brother, Earle Cabell is the mayor and the declassified documents now say that Earle Cabell was a CIA asset from 1959. Then we got this other guy, Westbrook who's gonna join up with the CIA after he resigns the force in 1964. Some people can say, "Well, those kind of things happen." Well, when they happen over, and over, and over, and over, and over, I'm sorry, it's not a coincidence.
OHH: Yeah. This was great. Thank you very much for doing this. I look forward to your … Is the book out? Can people get it on Amazon?
DiEugenio: Yes. The book is out. You can order it now, yes.
OHH: It's got a foreword by Oliver Stone. That looks great.
DiEugenio: Correct.
OHH: Okay, cool. Well, thanks a lot for doing this and people should go read the full article. There's a lot more there if they go to Kennedysandking.com and thanks a lot, Jim.
DiEugenio: Okay. You're welcome, David.