Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (21 page)

In one of the more bizarre aspects of the Tippit shooting, there is credible evidence that a wallet belonging to Lee Harvey Oswald was found by police at the scene of the Tippit shooting. Near the puddle of blood in the street where Officer Tippit lay slain, Dallas Police Captain Westbrook found a man’s wallet that contained IDs. What murderer is so careless as to drop their wallet at the scene of the crime? If any clue suggests the Tippit murder was done in a fashion so as to frame Lee Harvey Oswald for the shooting, that detail was the wallet found on the scene. This “evidence” is so preposterous, we must ask additional questions. What exactly is the sequence of events in which Dallas police found the wallet? What was the chain of evidence for the wallet? What is the proof the wallet left at the scene of the Tippit shooting belonged to Oswald? And finally, what was the proof Oswald was the person who dropped the wallet?

FBI Special Agent Bob Barrett and Dallas Police Captain Westbrook were investigating at the Texas School Book Depository when word came on the police radio that a police officer had been shot in Oak Cliff. They both raced to the scene at 10th and Patton. Westbrook called Barrett over to talk with him. “It hadn’t been very long [after arriving at 10th and Patton] when Westbrook looked up and saw me and called me over,” Barrett recalled. “He had this wallet in his hand. Now, I don’t know where he found it, but he had the wallet in his hand. I presumed that they had found it on or near Tippit. Westbrook asked me, ‘Do you know who Lee Harvey Oswald is?’ And, ‘Do you know who Alex Hidell is?’ And I said,
‘No, I never heard of them.’”
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Had the FBI agent on the scene of the Tippit murder been James P. Hosty, Jr., instead of Bob Barrett, Westbrook might have learned about Lee Harvey Oswald immediately. Hosty, the FBI agent assigned by Washington to keep track of Oswald in Dallas, had held repeated meetings with Oswald prior to the assassination. Hosty discussed the wallet incident in his 1995 book,
Assignment: Oswald
, saying:

Near the puddle of blood where Tippit’s body had lain, Westbrook had found a man’s leather wallet. In it, he discovered identification for Lee Oswald, as well as other identifications for Alek J. Hidell. Westbrook called Barrett over and showed him the wallet and identifications. Westbrook asked Barrett if the FBI knew anything about Oswald or Hidell. Barrett shook his head. Westbrook took the wallet into his custody so that it could be placed into police property later. Barrett told me that if I had been at the scene with Westbrook, I would have immediately known who Oswald was.

Although official police reports would later state that Oswald’s wallet and identification were found on Oswald’s person when he was arrested in the movie theater, Barrett insists that Westbrook found them near where Tippit was slain. I have to speculate that at the theater, Westbrook had handed the wallet to a lower-ranking officer, and in the confusion it was assumed that wallet had been retrieved from Oswald’s person. The FBI decided to go with the official police version, even though Barrett’s version was further proof Oswald had in fact gunned Officer Tippit down. As Barrett said, the case against Oswald was a “slam-dunk.”
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Photographer Ron Reiland of WFAA-TV was on the Tippit murder scene as police were investigating. In news footage Reiland took immediately after the Tippit shooting, Dallas Police Sargent Calvin “Bud” Owens is seen holding Tippit’s service revolver in his left hand and a man’s leather wallet in his right. Owens then shows the wallet to Dallas Police Captain George Doughty, who is standing to his left. As Owens holds open the wallet and Doughty examines an item in the wallet in a plastic sleeve, a third person approaches Owens and Doughty. Presumably this third person is Westbrook in plainclothes. Reiland narrated the film sequence during its first showing on television. When the close-up of Tippit’s revolver and the wallet were shown, Reiland reported, “This gun
you see in the background here in [Officer Owens’s] hand is the one that was allegedly used to shoot the police officer. This is the officer’s billfold that was found lying on the ground right alongside the car.”
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Reiland was helpful in documenting that a wallet was picked up at the crime scene but he was wrong in his identification of both the weapon and the billfold. The weapon turned out to be Tippit’s weapon, and although the wallet was positively identified as Oswald’s, its origins are questionable. If Owens found the wallet himself or whether the wallet was handed to Owens by a bystander has never been determined. In his sworn testimony to the Warren Commission, Westbrook said nothing about finding a wallet belonging to Oswald at the scene, although Westbrook gives extensive testimony about finding a jacket.

At the Tippit murder scene, Tippit’s service revolver was reported to be found, but no mention was made in the police reports of finding a wallet belonging to Oswald. Ambulance attendants Eddie Kinsley and J. C. Butler confirmed that a police service revolver was found near Tippit’s body. All Tippit’s personal items, including his wallet, were removed from his pockets at Methodist Hospital after his death. A list of Tippit’s personal effects prepared by the Dallas Police Crime Scene Search Section lists one “black billfold” as among Tippit’s personal effects at the time of his death. The only item brought to the Methodist Hospital and added to Tippit’s personal effects after his death was his service revolver, which by all accounts was left behind at the murder scene, most likely in the possession of Captain Westbrook. The wallet found loose at the crime scene was believed to have belonged to Oswald.
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A wallet planted by the assailant was certain to end up identifying Oswald as the shooter and establishing Hidell as an Oswald alias, linking the mail-order purchase of the weapon to Oswald. At the Texas Theater, it is debatable whether or not Oswald paid for a ticket prior to entering the theater, but it is well established that Oswald bought popcorn before sitting down. If Oswald lost his wallet at the scene of the Tippit murder, how did he pay for the popcorn? After apprehending Oswald, Dallas Police reported he had $13.87 on his person at the time of arrest. It strains credibility that Oswald bought refreshments at the Texas Theater with loose change, not realizing he lost his wallet. Ultimately, the FBI catalogued three wallets for Oswald: a brown billfold (FBI Exhibit 114), a red billfold (FBI Exhibit 382),
and Oswald’s arrest wallet (FBI Exhibit B1).
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If an assailant planted a wallet containing identity information for Oswald at the scene of the Tippit murder, the intended goal appears to have been accomplished. The police on the scene began looking for Oswald as a cop-killer. Once Oswald’s employment at the book depository was established, police would naturally link Oswald to the JFK assassination. The Tippit shooting then would be the key to establishing Oswald’s guilt. Whoever planned the JFK assassination knew the police would immediately conclude Oswald killed Tippit because he was on the run and he wanted to avoid arrest. The Tippit killing could not have been scripted better. But the script only worked if Tippit had not read it in advance. If Tippit had stopped Oswald, he did not follow Dallas Police Department procedure. Tippit did not radio to the police dispatcher that he had identified a suspect. Tippit did not draw his weapon before getting out of the car. Why would Tippit do these things unless he felt safe taking steps to talk with the man more directly? If Tippit had suspected the man he encountered had a weapon and that his life was in danger, he did not act like it.

David Belin, assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, characterized the Tippit killing as the Rosetta Stone to the JFK assassination. Belin is right, but not because the Tippit murder proves Oswald was JFK’s assassin. The Tippit killing is the Rosetta Stone to the JFK assassination, because it proves the gunman who killed Tippit set Oswald up as the killer. In the ballistic evidence, the JFK entrance wound in the neck was sufficient evidence to prove JFK was killed by a conspiracy, every bit as much as finding Oswald’s wallet at the scene of the Tippit murder proves there was a gunman complicit in the plot who got away. However, it is hard, if not impossible, to shake the suspicious nature of the evidence. The Oswald wallet was one of three Oswald wallets positively identified in the case. The wallet was dropped in the lap of the Dallas police and the FBI and conveniently contained documents linking “Lee Harvey Oswald” to “Alex James Hiddel,” the alias used to purchase via mail order the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle identified as the assassin’s weapon. The only problem was there was no evidence to establish that Lee Harvey Oswald had ever owned this wallet or created the ID papers found in the wallet Like much of the evidence in the case against Lee Harvey Oswald, the wallet was just too good and too conveniently found to be believable.

Julia Postal was the Texas Theater ticket taker the afternoon that JFK was murdered. In her testimony to the Warren Commission, Postal explained that from 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, the time the movie theater ticket box opened, until 1:15 p.m., a total of twenty-four persons bought tickets and were in the theater.
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When Postal was asked if Oswald bought a ticket, she explained that Oswald had “ducked into” the ticket box office when he saw a police car go by with its siren on. Postal was not certain the man had paid before entering the theater. Postal had testified to the Warren Commission that both she and Warren “Butch” Burroughs, the ticket taker who also worked the concession stand inside the movie theater, were both preoccupied, listening on a transistor radio to early news report about the JFK shooting.

Objectively viewed, we have to ask why Oswald decided to go to the movies. Was he hiding from police? Or, was he following instructions to head to this movie theater after the assassination to meet a contact that would provide him money, his next instructions, and possibly a plan to get out of Dallas. Going to the movies has to be seen as reflecting a desire to drop from public view, at a time when Oswald had to know police all over the city were looking for JFK’s killer. Whatever Oswald’s motivation to go to the movies may have been, it is hard to understand why he would have wanted to draw attention to himself by sneaking into the movie theater without paying the ninety cents for a ticket when he had nearly $15.00 with him.

Once inside the theater Oswald first sat next to Dallas Evangelist Jack Davis, during the opening credits for the first movie of a double feature, the 1963 Korean War movie,
War is Hell
, narrated by World War II Congressional Medal of Honor veteran Audie Murphy.
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Shortly thereafter, at approximately 1:15 p.m., Oswald got up and went to the lobby where he bought some popcorn. Butch Burroughs sold Oswald the popcorn without confronting Oswald about not paying for a movie ticket. Returning to the theater, Oswald picked a different seat and sat next to a pregnant woman sitting alone in the mid-seat section of the movie theater’s lower floor. Minutes before the police arrived, this woman got up and moved to a seat in the balcony, and Oswald moved to a seat alone
in the center section three rows from the back, in the second seat from the aisle. This is where Oswald was found when a small army of Dallas police and sheriff’s deputies stormed the Texas Theater.

What was Oswald doing moving from seat-to-seat sitting next to people he apparently did not know in a largely empty movie theater? One possible explanation is that Oswald had been instructed that after the assassination he would meet a person who would give him an airplane ticket or a car ride out of Dallas, some much needed cash, and instructions regarding what he should do next. Very likely, Oswald had nothing to do with the Tippit murder and was never at the Tippit murder scene. The Dallas police made a complete list of everyone who was in the Texas Theater at the time. That list, however, had disappeared by the time the Warren Commission began taking testimony in 1964. Note also that Oswald had been in the Texas Theater for some fifty minutes before police apprehended him at approximately 1:51 p.m., less than an hour-and-a-half after JFK’s fatal shooting.

FBI Agent Barrett and Dallas Police Captain Westbrook both rushed to the Texas Theater when the Dallas police radio call went out, and were both in the theater standing in the aisle when a police rush subdued Oswald following the scuffle with Dallas policeman McDonald. Having examined the photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald on the identification papers found in the wallet at the Tippit murder, Barrett and Westbrook immediately identified the man apprehended in the Texas Theater as Oswald. When Oswald screamed “police brutality,” Westbrook had a ready response: “You just had an officer killed in cold blood without even getting his gun out,” Westbrook shot back to Oswald. “I don’t think there could be any such thing as police brutality to a mad dog like that!”
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Interestingly, in that moment when emotions were running raw, Westbrook accused Oswald of “having Tippit killed,” not precisely of killing Tippit himself.

It is interesting to surmise that the possibility that one or more of the officers had missed an assignment. Was the assassination a success right up until the moment Oswald was taken into police custody alive? Had the plan been for Officer Tippit to swing by Oswald’s rooming house after the assassination to arrest Oswald and then shoot him, claiming Oswald resisted arrest?

Oswald had to have been startled in the Texas Theater when the movie stopped and the house lights went on. Seeing police move into the seating area from various directions, Oswald must have quickly figured out the police were after him. Drawing a gun on officer McDonald, Oswald had to have been prepared for his life to end, right then and there. If it had, the course of history would have changed—at least for Jack Ruby. With Oswald dead, there would have been no need for Jack Ruby to kill him. With Oswald alive, Jack Ruby could no longer sit on the sidelines.