Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (19 page)

Mr. Ball
: Did you recognize anyone in the lineup?

Mrs. Markham
: No, sir.

Mr. Ball
: You did not? Did you see anybody—I have asked you that question before—did you recognize anybody from their face?

Mrs. Markham
: From their face, no.

Mr. Ball
: Did you identify anybody in these four people?

Mrs. Markham
: No. I had never seen none of them, none of these men.

Mr. Ball
: No one of all four?

Mrs. Markham
: No, sir.

Mr. Ball
: Was there a number two man in there?

Mrs. Markham
: Number two is the one I picked.

Mr. Ball
: I thought you just told me that you hadn’t—

Mrs. Markham
: I thought you wanted me to describe their clothing.

Mr. Ball
: No. I wanted to know if that day when you were in there if you saw anyone in there—

Mrs. Markham
: Number two.

Mr. Ball
: What did you say when you saw number two?

Mrs. Markham
: Well. Let me tell you. I said the second man, and they kept asking me which one, which one. I said, number two. When I said number two, I just got weak.

Mr. Ball
: What about number two, what did you mean when you said number two?

Mrs. Markham
: Number two was the man I saw shoot the policeman.

Mr. Ball
: You recognized him from his appearance?

Mrs. Markham
: I asked—I looked at him. When I saw this man I wasn’t sure, but I had cold chills just run all over me.
²⁴²

Sylvia Meagher commented that when reading the testimony about the “identification” on which the Commission relied for determining Oswald killed Tippit, she felt a few cold chills too.
²⁴³
Still, the Warren Commission report relied on Helen Markham’s identification of Oswald, with her vague recognition she was by no means the best witness. On
page 167
of the Warren Commission Report, we find the following:

At about 4:30 p.m., Mrs. Markham, who had been greatly upset by her experience, was able to view a lineup of four men handcuffed together at the police station. She identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man who shot the policeman. Detective L. C. Graves, who had been with Mrs. Markham before the lineup testified that she was “quite hysterical” and was “crying and upset.” He said that Mrs. Markham started crying when Oswald walked into the lineup room. In testimony before the Commission, Mrs. Markham confirmed her positive identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as the man she saw kill Officer Tippit.
²⁴⁴

We should also note that in an affidavit Markham signed on November 22, 1963, she placed the time of the Tippit shooting at 1:06 p.m.—a fact the Warren Commission omitted in the final report.
²⁴⁵
Also, Mark Lane in testifying to the Warren Commission described his interview with Markham. “[Helen Louise Markham] said [the man who shot Officer Tippit] was short, a little on the heavy side, and his hair was somewhat busy,” Lane testified. “I think it is fair to state that an accurate description of Oswald would be average height, quite slender, with thin and receding hair.”
²⁴⁶
Lane tape-recorded his conversation with Markham, providing documentation that proved important when Markham tried to convince the Warren Commission she had never spoken with attorney Lane.
²⁴⁷

Taxicab driver William Scoggins, was eating his lunch at the corner of 10th and Patton when Tippit was killed. He cannot truly be considered an eyewitness because his view was obstructed by shrubbery. Scoggins claims to have caught a glimpse of the assailant’s face as the assailant looked back over his shoulder while running from the scene through some shrubbery about twelve feet away from where Scoggins was sitting in his cab. Scoggins testified to the Warren Commission that as the man ran by he heard him mutter something like “poor damn cop” or “poor dumb cop.”
²⁴⁸
Scoggins picked Oswald from a Dallas Police lineup attended by another cab driver, William Wayne Whaley, the cab driver that took Oswald from the Greyhound bus terminal to North Beckley, as Oswald was trying to get out of downtown after he walked out the front door of the book depository. Whaley’s description of the lineup makes clear picking Oswald out was not a difficult task, whether or not a positive identification could be made.

Mr. Whaley
: … Then they took me down in their room where they have their show-ups, and all, and me and this other taxi driver 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 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 policemen, telling them it wasn’t right to put him in line with these teenagers and all of that and they asked me which one and I told them. It was him all right, the same man.

Mr. Ball
: They had him in line with men much younger?

Mr. Whaley
: Not much younger, but just young kids, they might have got them in jail.

Mr. Ball
: Did he look older than those other boys?

Mr. Whaley
: Yes.

Mr. Ball
: And he was talking, was he?

Mr. Whaley
: He showed no respect for the policemen, he told them what he thought about him. They knew what they were doing and they were trying to railroad him and he wanted his lawyer.

Mr. Ball
: Did that aid you in the identification of the man?

Mr. Whaley
: No, sir; it wouldn’t have at all, except that I said anybody who wasn’t sure could have picked out the right one just for that. It didn’t aid me because I knew he was the right one as soon as I saw him.
²⁴⁹

Interestingly, Whaley testified that after Oswald got in the front passenger seat of his cab, an elderly lady stuck her head down past Oswald in the door and asked, “Driver, can you call me a cab down here?” Seeing that this woman wanted a cab, Oswald opened the door like he was going to get out and said, “I will let you have this one.” The lady declined, happy to catch the next cab. But the interesting point is that Oswald’s action in offering to give up the cab is not consistent with the behavior that might
be expected from a vicious criminal who had just assassinated the president of the United States and was desperate to escape capture.
²⁵⁰

The Warren Commission never interviewed two neighbors who told private investigators two men were involved in the Tippit shooting. Mrs. Acquilla Clemons claimed to have seen two assailants flee the scene after the shooting. Mrs. Clemons described the shooter as short and stocky. She saw a second taller thinner man across the street who looked like he was giving a “go-ahead” sign to the shooter. After the shooting, the taller-thinner man went in one direction while the shorter-stocky man went in the other. Frank Wright, who lived nearby, went to his front porch on hearing the shooting. He described the shooter as being of medium height and wearing a long coat. Wright claimed the shooter made a fast getaway in a 1950 or 1951 gray car that he thought might have been a Plymouth coupé.
²⁵¹

In 1978, Anthony Summers, a former investigative journalist for the BBC, had William Alexander, an assistant Dallas district attorney in 1963, drive him around the area of the Tippit shooting. Alexander told Summers that Dallas police had measured the routes Oswald might have taken, interrogated bus drivers, and examined taxicab records, but still were unable to determine how precisely Oswald got to the scene of the Tippit shooting or what he was doing there. “I feel like if we could ever find out why he was there, then maybe some of the other mysteries would be solved,” Alexander said. “Was he supposed to meet someone? Was he trying to make a getaway? Did he miss a connection? Was there a connection? If you look at Oswald’s behavior, he made very few non-purposeful motions, very seldom did he do anything that did not serve a purpose.” Summers reported Alexander slapped the dashboard and repeated, “Oswald’s movements don’t add up then, and they don’t add up now. No way. Certainly he must have had accomplices.”
²⁵²

In 1968, during the criminal investigation into the JFK assassination conducted by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, an anonymous letter surfaced with information that ended up proving Officer Tippit was not the long-time good cop and family man just doing his job that the
Warren Commission assumed in 1964. The letter indicated that Tippit had been having an affair with a “small blonde waitress” who worked at Austin’s Barbecue Drive-in, a Dallas restaurant where Tippit moonlighted as a security officer on weekends. The anonymous letter continued: “[A friend] told me of a friend telling her the story that on the morning Officer Tippets (sic) was killed and on the day of the assassination, Mrs. Tippets (sic) had coffee with a neighbor and was crying because on that morning Officer Tippets (sic) had told her he wanted a divorce to marry someone else.”
²⁵³

On November 22, 1963, Tippit evidently knew the waitress was pregnant with his child. On August 6, 1963, the former waitress was granted a divorce by the court, giving her custody of her four children; the woman’s husband evidently did not show up at court to contest the divorce. Assassination researcher Dale Myers, in a 702-page investigation into the Tippit murder in 1998, noted the husband of the waitress, divorced again in 1968, continued to believe that the child born in 1964 was fathered by J. D. Tippit.
²⁵⁴
Marital problems and the prospect of a divorce could easily have created for J. D. Tippit the type of financial problems that could send him in the direction of Jack Ruby and the Dallas underworld, making Tippit a candidate for the role of “corrupt policeman” who author Thomas Buchanan speculated was involved with gangsters attempting to get Oswald out of town following the assassination.

On the morning of November 22, 1963, Tippit hugged his oldest son, Allen, and said, “No matter what happens today, I want you to know I love you.”
²⁵⁵
The cryptic remark may have been less a premonition of the JFK assassination than the fallout from asking his wife for a divorce. Another issue may have been that the former husband of the waitress evidently had a history of stalking Tippit and his wife when they went out together, leading some to speculate the Tippit murder may have been simply an act of revenge by a jealous husband.
²⁵⁶

Tippit’s movements in Oak Cliff on November 22, 1963, are also suspicious. At approximately 12:45 p.m., about a half hour before he was killed, Tippit was observed in his police car on the Oak Cliff side of the Houston Street viaduct. He sat in his car at a GLOCO gas station and observed traffic crossing the bridge for about ten minutes. There are no police dispatches sending Tippit to this location. Tippit suddenly sped out
of the gas station and headed south on Lancaster. At 12:54 p.m., Tippit answered his dispatcher and said he was at “8th and Lancaster,” about a mile south of the GLOCO gas station. He then turned right on Jefferson Boulevard and stopped around 1:11 p.m. at the Top Ten Record store at Jefferson and Bishop and ran inside.

According to storeowner J. W. “Dub” Stark and his clerk, Louis Cortinas, Tippit asked several customers to step aside as he made his way to a telephone mounted on the end of the sales counter. Tippet let the number he dialed ring seven or eight times, and hung up without saying a word. Without speaking to Stark or Cortinas, Tippit rushed out of the store, jumped in his squad car, and sped north across Jefferson Boulevard, where he ran a stop sign, turned right on Sunset, and was last seen by multiple witnesses speeding east, one block from North Beckley, the location of Oswald’s rooming house.
²⁵⁷

The story takes another weird twist when a person identified as John D. Whitten called the Dallas FBI office twelve days after the assassination and reported that Oswald had also been in the Top Ten Record store the day of the assassination. The FBI disregarded the story because Oswald was supposed to have been at work in the book depository all day on November 22, 1963. The story also conflicts with the Warren Commission narrative that had Oswald spending the night of the twenty-first in Irving, Texas, with his wife and daughters, who were then living with Ruth Paine. The Commission had reported that Oswald returned to the Paine home on Thursday night, November 21, 1963, to pick up “curtain rods,” a cover story for what the Commission maintained was in reality the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle hidden in a crudely constructed paper bag container. When Oswald left the Paine residence at 7:15 a.m. the morning of the assassination, his wife, Marina Oswald, was still in bed. The Commission reported Oswald was driven to work on November 22, 1963, by Buell Wesley Frazier, a neighbor of Ruth Paine.
²⁵⁸
But in 1997, former storeowner J. W. Stark confirmed that Oswald was waiting at the store around 7:30 a.m. when Stark arrived the day of the assassination. Stark recalled that Oswald bought a ticket to the
Dick Clark Show
and left by bus. Stark did not know anyone by the name of Whitten and did not believe there was a Whitten who had a connection to the store.
²⁵⁹
As we shall see at the end of this chapter, credible evidence exists establishing
that “the Oswald identity” was being used by two different people, one of whom was known as “Lee” and the other as “Harvey.”

No one has established the identity of the person Tippit called from the record store moments before he was shot to death. Nor is it clear why police dispatch assigned Tippit to patrol Oak Cliff, an area Tippit did not normally patrol, when police units around the city were being called downtown to assist in the assassination investigation. Dallas Police dispatch records show that when Tippit called at 8th Street and Lancaster, he was told to stay at large for any emergency that came in. But then, around 1:06 p.m., when Tippit was at either the GLACO gas station or the Top Ten Record store, police dispatch called for Tippit but received no answer.
²⁶⁰
This may have been the time when Tippit stepped into the record store to make the phone call. Tippit had stepped away from his patrol car without notifying the dispatcher, a habit Tippit evidently had developed over the last few years.
²⁶¹
The next mention of Tippit in the Dallas Police dispatch records is when a citizen calls in saying, “We’ve had a shooting out here,” at what appears to be 1:16 p.m.
²⁶²