Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (18 page)

On page 651, the Warren Commission report concluded Oswald and Ruby were total strangers: “Investigation has revealed no evidence that Oswald and Tippit were acquainted, had ever seen each other, or had any mutual acquaintances. Witnesses to the shooting [of Officer Tippit] observed no signs of recognition between the two men.”
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Yet that conclusion is belied by evidence the Warren Commission had, but refused to consider seriously. Commission Exhibit 3001 is an FBI report filed by Special Agent James W. Swinford, dated July 30, 1964, that documented Oswald, Jack Ruby, and Officer Tippit all frequented the same restaurant, Dobbs House Restaurant in Oak Cliff. Here is what Agent Swinford reported concerning Mary Adda Dowling, a waitress who served Oswald and Tippit at the Dobbs House Restaurant:

She [Mary Adda Dowling] related she recalled the person now recognized as Oswald was last seen by her in the restaurant at about 10:00 AM, Wednesday, November 20, 1963, at which time he was “nasty” and used curse words in connection with his order. She went on to relate Officer J. D. Tippit was in the restaurant as was his habit at about that time each morning and “shot a glance at Oswald.” She said there was no indication, however, they knew each other. Miss Dowling professed not to have known Jack Ruby as a customer, but she said she had heard from another employee he was a night customer.
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Sylvia Meagher took the Warren Commission to task for what she termed a “well-defined pattern” in the Commission’s “fact-finding” in
which the Commission first discounted information inimical to its thesis Oswald was the lone assassin, and then followed by proclaiming that such information did not exist. “Time and again, the Commission’s own documents give the lie to its Report and outrage the handful of students who have ventured into the neglected pages of exhibits and testimony,” she wrote. “In light of Mary Dowling’s report and the total deafness with which it was greeted, the Commission’s disclaimer of any link between Oswald and Tippit and its apocryphal version of the encounter in which Tippit was shot to death can hardly be regarded as the last word.”
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One of the first books to appear questioning whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of JFK was a book entitled
Who Killed Kennedy?
that first appeared as a series of articles written in
L’Express
in Paris, authored by Thomas G. Buchanan, an American journalist who was fired in 1948 from the
Washington Evening Star
because of allegations he was a member of the American Communist Party. Buchanan was exploring a hunch that the JFK assassination was carried out “by gangsters with the aid of a corrupt policeman, who was meant to help Oswald get out of town by hiding him in his patrol car, double-crossed him and attempted to arrest him, and was consequently shot by Oswald.”
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The idea is that Tippit, married with a wife and three small children, found “the lure of money was an irresistible temptation,” such that Tippit agreed to help someone escape from Dallas who was described to him as merely a member of the underworld, possibly a bank robbery fugitive. But when Tippit realized that JFK had been assassinated and that he had been set up to help the assassin escape, Tippit changed his mind. “Impelled by patriotic indignation, or by mere desire to win himself a medal and promotion, [Tippit] decided he would not help Oswald to escape but would arrest him, single-handedly,” Buchanan speculated.
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What Buchanan argues is that Oswald was expecting Tippit on 10th Street at Patton that afternoon. Oswald, pleased to find Tippit, was relaxed as he approached Tippit’s patrol car, as indicated by Oswald leaning against the passenger door with both forearms and speaking to Tippit though the window vent. What surprised Oswald was that Tippit was not reacting according to how the script had been written. Tippit was being aggressive, acting as if he intended to arrest Oswald—something that took Oswald completely by surprise. “The effect of lunging from the car and
rushing after Oswald was precisely what the least experienced policeman on the force could have predicted,” Buchanan wrote. “It provoked Lee Oswald to do what he had not yet been doing—to resist arrest. What Tippit did not know, however, is that Oswald would out-draw him.”
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Buchanan also played with the theory that Oswald was actually headed to Ruby’s apartment, and he had almost arrived at that destination when Tippit intercepted him. Buchanan notes Jim Lehrer, then reporting for the
Dallas Times Herald
, wrote on December 20, 1963, that Ruby had made five reservations on a plane leaving for Mexico.
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The suggestion here is that Tippit was set up to play the role of Boston Corbett, the Union army soldier who shot John Wilkes Booth to prevent Booth from exposing at trial a highly-placed Confederate government conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. “But Policeman Tippit bungled his assignment,” Buchanan concluded. When Oswald turned the tables and killed Tippit, the most upset was Oswald. “He had been so close to safety, only to be thwarted by what must have seemed to him to be bad luck, and nothing more than that,” Buchanan wrote.
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Mark Lane argued in his book,
Rush to Judgment,
that the timeline established by the Warren Commission for Oswald’s movements immediately after the JFK assassination did not permit Oswald enough time to get to the location where Tippit was killed by 1:16 p.m. “Just about eight minutes after Oswald is seen at the bus stop, Tippit was shot to death nearly one mile away,” Lane wrote. “As we shall see, the Commission not only neglected to explain how Oswald could have covered such a distance on foot in the time available to him without running all the way but also failed to investigate the minor point of why when last seen Oswald was apparently waiting for a bus that would have taken him in the opposite direction.”
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And, again, Lane wrote: “I believe that the Commission found it imperative to conclude that Oswald chose the shortest possible route between his rooming house and the intersection of East 10th Street and Patton Avenue near where Officer Tippit was shot. If Oswald had approached the scene of the killing by any other route, he might not have arrived in time to see the ambulance taking Tippit’s body away.”
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Lane also noted a witness, never called to testify, whose affidavit placed the Tippit shooting earlier than 1:16 p.m. Bowley, then a thirty-five-year-old Dallas resident, was driving on 10th Street when he noticed Tippit’s patrol car and Tippit lying in the street injured. Here is Bowley’s sworn statement:

I traveled about a block and noticed a Dallas police squad car stopped in the traffic lane headed east on 10th Street. I saw a police officer lying next to the left front wheel. I stopped my car and got out to go to the scene. I looked at my watch and it said 1:10 pm. Several people were at the scene. When I got there the first thing I did was try to help the officer. He appeared beyond help to me. A man was trying to use the radio in the squad car but stated he didn’t know how to operate it. I knew how and I took the radio from him. I said, “Hello, operator. A police officer has been shot here.” The dispatcher asked for the location. I found out the location and told the dispatcher what it was. A few minutes later, an ambulance came to the scene. I helped load the officer onto the stretcher and into the ambulance. As we picked the officer up, I noticed his pistol laying on the ground under him. Someone picked up the pistol and laid it on the hood of the car. When the ambulance left, I took the gun and put it inside the squad car.
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When the police arrived, Bowley explained he did not see the shooting. Assuming Bowley’s watch was accurate, this would place the Tippit shooting at a few minutes before 1:10 p.m., making it impossible for Oswald to be the shooter. Lane noted that the police radio broadcast log for November 22, 1963, substantiated Bowley’s affidavit, with the log showing a citizen call over the police radio to the dispatcher was responsible for notifying the Dallas Police Department that Tippit had been shot.
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The Warren Commission credited Domingo Benavides, an eyewitness to the Tippit shooting, as being the citizen who used Tippit’s radio to call in at 1:16 p.m. the information that Tippit had been shot.
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Reading Bowley’s testimony clearly, Benavides had been having difficulty using the police radio, lending support for Bowley’s placement of the shooting at around 1:10 p.m.

Benavides testified to the Warren Commission that he was driving in his 1958 Chevrolet pickup truck on 10th Street about fifteen feet from Officer Tippit’s stopped police car when he saw the first shot. Benavides
stopped his truck and ducked down to avoid being seen. He heard but did not see two more shots being fired. Benavides testified that after the shooting, he remained in his pickup truck for a few moments:

Mr. Belin
: All right, after you saw him [the shooter] turn the corner, what did you do?

Mr. Benavides
: After that, I set there for just a few minutes to kind of, I thought he [the shooter] went in back of the house or something. At the time, I thought maybe he might have lived in there and I didn’t want to get out and rush right up. He might start shooting again.
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Benavides testified that a man he did not know helped him call the shooting into police headquarters using Tippit’s radio in the squad car:

Mr. Benavides
: Then I don’t know if I opened the car door back further than what it was or not, but anyway, I went in and pulled the radio and I mashed the button and told them that an officer had been shot, and I didn’t get an answer, so I said it again, and this guy asked me whereabouts all of a sudden, and I said on 10th Street. I couldn’t remember where it was at the time. So I looked up and I seen this number and I said 410 East 10th Street.

Mr. Belin
: You saw a number on the house then?

Mr. Benavides
: Yes.

Mr. Belin
: All right.

Mr. Benavides
. Then he started to—then I don’t know what he said; but I put the radio back. I mean, the microphone back up, and this other guy was standing there, so I got out of the car, and I don’t know, I wasn’t sure if he heard me, and the other guy sat down in the car.

Mr. Belin
: There was another passerby that stopped?

Mr. Benavides
: Yes, sir.

Mr. Belin
: Who was he, do you know?

Mr. Benavides
: I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know who he was.

Mr. Belin
: Was he driving a car or walking?

Mr. Benavides
: I don’t know. He was just standing there whenever I looked up. He was standing at the door of the car, and I don’t know what he said to the officer or the phone, but the officer told him to keep the line clear, or something, and stay off the phone, or something like that. That he already knew about it.
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Again, Mark Lane focused on the timeline. “Although the radio call was recorded on tape between 1:15 and 1:16 p.m., it is certain that several minutes elapsed between the murder and the time when the radio was first used to contact the police, whether by Benavides or Bowley, as the testimony of both clearly indicates.” Lane estimated that Earlene Roberts saw Oswald standing at the bus stop at 1:04 p.m. He calculated that the testimony of Benavides and Bowley put the Tippit murder at no later than 1:12 p.m. The distance between the bus stop and the 10th Street Tippit shooting was just under one mile. “The Commission should have concluded that the slaying took place between 1:08 and 1:12 p.m., but biased as I believe the Commission was toward reaching a finding consistent with Oswald’s guilt, it set the time of the murder forward to 1:15 or 1:16 p.m.”
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Sylvia Meagher, in her 1967 book,
Accessories After the Fact
, is also very critical of the Warren Commission regarding the Tippit murder timeline. “If the shooting of Tippit took place at 1:06 or 1:10 p.m., Oswald would have to be exonerated on the grounds that he could not possibly have walked the nine-tenths of a mile from his rooming house, which he departed a few minutes after 1 p.m., in time to reach the scene,” she noted. “The Commission has estimated Oswald’s other walks (from the Book Depository to the bus and from the bus to the taxi) at one minute per block. At that rate, Oswald would have required 18 minutes to walk from his rooming house to the spot where Tippit was shot.”
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Meagher further noted that no witness had come forward who saw Oswald walk from his rooming house at 1026 North Berkley to the East 10th Street and Patton Avenue location where Tippit was shot. There is no evidence Oswald took the shortest route; Warren Commission counsel David Belin re-enacted the route, with a stopwatch in hand, taking what he described
as the “long way around route,” finding the walk took 17 minutes and 45 seconds.
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Meagher also noted the Warren Commission ignored the question where Oswald was going when he left the rooming house. “Indeed, the Commission has ignored the question of where Oswald was heading—if it
was
Oswald—when he was stopped by Tippit,” she wrote. “He had no known social or business contacts in that immediate area, but, as many critics of the Report have pointed out, Jack Ruby’s apartment was in the direction in which ‘Oswald’ was walking and only a few short blocks from the scene of the Tippit shooting.”
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Even though he was the closest to the Tippit shooting, Benavides told police he could not identify the shooter; as a result, Benavides was never taken to Dallas Police headquarters to view Oswald in a line-up.
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The only other eyewitness was Helen Markham, a waitress on her way to work when she saw the Tippit shooting. Sylvia Meagher pointed out that Markham lacked credibility, noting: “[Helen Markham] said that she was alone with Tippit for twenty minutes before an ambulance arrived, and that Tippit—who is said to have died instantaneously—tried to talk to her; she was in hysterics and somehow managed to leave her shoes on top of Tippit’s car; sedatives had to be administered before she was taken to view the line-up at about 4:30 p.m. on Friday.”
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Here is how Markham described the line-up in which she identified Oswald as Tippit’s shooter: