Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (17 page)

According to the Warren Commission reconstruction, Oswald left the Texas School Book Depository building approximately three minutes after the assassination. He was headed home, but the question was why? If Oswald had just shot JFK, why wasn’t he escaping, as fast as he could?

According to the Warren Commission, Oswald was in no hurry. Leaving the Texas School Book Depository by the front door, the Warren Commission has Oswald walking east on Elm Street for seven blocks, to the corner of Elm and Murphy, where he boarded a bus heading back toward the book depository, on the way to the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Why Oswald walked away from the book depository to get a bus when he could have easily walked home is not known. In a reconstruction of the bus trip, Secret Service and FBI agents walked the seven blocks from the entrance of the book depository to the corner of Elm and Murphy, averaging six and a half minutes. A bus moving through heavy traffic on Elm from Murphy to Lamar was timed as taking four minutes. The Warren Commission calculated that if Oswald left the Book Depository at 12:33 p.m., and walked seven blocks directly to Elm and Murphy to board a bus that left almost immediately, Oswald would have boarded the bus at approximately 12:40 p.m., and departed it at Lamar at approximately 12:44 p.m. From there, Oswald walked to the Greyhound Bus Terminal at Lamar and Jackson Streets, where he entered a taxicab at 12:47 or 12:48 p.m. The cab ride to Neely and Beckley in Oak Cliff took approximately
six minutes, placing Oswald there at approximately 12:54 p.m. Walking from Neely and Beckley to his rooming house, the Warren Commission calculated Oswald arrived there about 12:59 to 1:00 p.m., approximately one-half hour after the assassination.
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The Commission stated that about 1:00 p.m., Oswald entered “in unusual haste” 1026 North Berkley, where he rented a room.
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Mrs. Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper at 1026 North Berkeley, testified to the Warren Commission in Dallas on April 8, 1964, that she rented a room on October 14, 1963, to Oswald, who registered under the name “O. H. Lee.” Under questioning by Commission assistant counsel Joseph A. Ball, Mrs. Roberts described what happened when Oswald came home on the day of the JFK assassination:

Mr. Ball
: Can you tell me what time it was approximately that Oswald came in?

Mrs. Roberts
: Now, it must have been around 1 o’clock, or maybe a little after, because it was after President Kennedy had been shot—what time I wouldn’t want to say because—

Mr. Ball
: How long did he stay in the room?

Mrs. Roberts
: Oh, maybe not over three or four minutes—just long enough, I guess, to go in there and get a jacket and put it on and he went out zipping it up.

Mr. Ball
: You recall he went out zipping it—was he running or walking?

Mrs. Roberts
: He was walking fast—he was making tracks pretty fast.
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Mrs. Roberts testified she couldn’t remember the color of the shirt Oswald put on and she couldn’t remember if it was long sleeve or short sleeve. Her testimony that she saw Oswald zipping up the jacket as he left was significant because she did not report noticing a gun stuffed in Oswald’s pants. Mrs. Roberts testified that she cleaned Oswald’s room and she did not recall ever seeing a gun, but she also clarified that it was “against the rules” to go through the belongings of a roomer. She also
acknowledged that when police searched Oswald’s room, they found a gun holster she had never seen before.
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Journalist Joachim Joesten, in conducting the research for his 1964 book,
Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?
, personally went and viewed Oswald’s room at 1026 North Berkeley. “It would be difficult to hide a revolver in that room, a cubicle
five feet wide and twelve feet long
,” he wrote. “I stood in it and surveyed the sparse furniture—a bedstead, an old vanity dresser, and a small clothes-hanger—as I casually asked the landlady standing next to me: ‘Where did he keep the gun, Mrs. Johnson?’” Joesten wrote that Mrs. Johnson fairly exploded, answering, “Oswald never had a gun in this room!”
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Here is how Joesten described her reaction:

Her voice was trembling with the indignation of a law-abiding, respectable landlady who had told the police there had not been a gun in the room only to have her words disregarded. Yet as I stood there it was obvious that
there was absolutely no hiding place in that room
unless there was some elaborate cavity in the floor or in the walls which certainly would have been discovered and would also militate against the account that Oswald ran in and out of his room. There were only a couple of drawers in the room and Mrs. Roberts, in cleaning, had looked into them.
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Joesten concluded this discussion by emphasizing the Dallas Police Department presented absolutely no evidence that Oswald was carrying a gun that day, either before he got to the rooming house, or after he abruptly left after changing clothes.

Her testimony also produced something that has yet to be explained. Mrs. Roberts said that in the three or four minutes Oswald was in his room, a police car drove up and stopped in front of the house, with the police in the car tapping the horn, as if signaling Oswald before driving off.

Mr. Ball
: Did a police car pass the house there and honk?

Mrs. Roberts
: Yes.

Mr. Ball
: When was that?

Mrs. Roberts
: He came into the house.

Mr. Ball
: When he came into the house?

Mrs. Roberts
: When he came into the house and went to his room, you know how the sidewalk runs?

Mr. Ball
: Yes.

Mrs. Roberts
: Right direct in front of that door—there was a police car stopped and honked. I had worked for some policemen and sometimes they come by and tell me something that maybe their wives would want me to know, and I thought it was them, and I just glanced out and saw the number, and I said, “Oh, that’s not their car,” for I knew their car.

Mr. Ball
: You mean, it was not the car of the policemen you knew?

Mrs. Roberts
: It wasn’t the police car I knew, because their number was 170 and it wasn’t 170 and I ignored it.

Mr. Ball
: And who was in the car?

Mrs. Roberts
: I don’t know—I didn’t pay any attention to it after I noticed it wasn’t them—I didn’t.

Mr. Ball
: Where was it parked?

Mrs. Roberts
: It was parked in front of the house.

Mr. Ball
: At 1026 North Beckley?

Mrs. Roberts
. And then they just eased on—the way it is—it was the third house off of Zangs and they just went around the corner that way.

Mr. Ball
: Went around the corner?

Mrs. Roberts
: Went around the corner off of Beckley on Zangs.

Mr. Ball
: Going which way—toward town or away from town?

Mrs. Roberts
: Toward town.
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She said this happened while Oswald was yet in his room and she confirmed there were two uniformed policemen in the car.

After Oswald went out the front door, Mrs. Roberts looked out the window and saw Lee Harvey Oswald standing on the curb at a bus stop. She said she did not know how long Oswald stood there or what direction he went when he left.
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How long Oswald waited, Mrs. Roberts did not know. Nor did she know whether he took a bus, whether the police car returned to pick him up, or if someone else picked him up. Oswald could have hailed a cab, or simply walked away. Mrs. Roberts did not know. She did not continue watching Oswald long enough to know how much time he spent there waiting, or how precisely he decided to move on. “Exhaustive investigations have virtually established the only police car officially in the vicinity was that of Officer J. D. Tippit,” observed experienced journalist Henry Hurt who spent years with a research team sifting through JFK assassination data, cross-checking and corroborating facts, and tracking down participants and witnesses to interview.
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Possibly, when Mrs. Roberts observed Oswald standing at the bus stop, Oswald was simply waiting for Officer Tippit to come around and pick him up, as had been pre-arranged.

The Warren Commission concluded that if Oswald left his rooming house a few minutes after 1:00 p.m., he needed to have reached 10th and Patton before 1:16 p.m. The timing was important because Tippit’s murder was recorded on the police radio tape at 1:16 p.m., when a citizen witness to the shooting went into Tippit’s patrol car and used the police radio in Tippit’s patrol car to let Dallas Police know Tippit had been shot. The JFK assassination occurred at approximately 12:30 p.m., and in the following forty-six minutes, Oswald had to have had sufficient time to walk leisurely out of the book depository’s front door, walk to a bus stop, get stuck in traffic, exit the bus, walk to the bus terminal, grab a cab, ride a short distance to his rooming house, change clothes, walk to the bust stop, stand for a while, and then walk down 10th just as Tippit was driving by—all within the span of no more than forty-six minutes.

The Warren Commission’s reconstruction of the Tippit killing on East 10th Street near Patton Avenue in Oak Cliff had Tippit’s patrol car pulling up on Oswald, who stopped casually, bended by resting both his elbows on the passenger door so he could see Tippit through the passenger
window, and spoke to Tippit through the open window vent. The conversation was not described as heated or strained. For some reason, Tippit decided to get out of his car. Oswald then stepped back from the car and shot Tippit three times in the chest, as Tippit got level with the car windshield on the driver’s side of the car, before Tippit ever reached for his gun. After Tippit fell to the pavement, Oswald moved around the front of the car to shoot him in the head, execution style. Only then did Oswald turn to hurriedly leave the scene.

Witnesses gave conflicting testimony over whether Oswald was walking east or west when Tippit’s patrol car came up on him. There was also conflicting testimony over whether Tippit’s patrol car first passed Oswald, or whether Oswald turned and went the opposite direction when he saw Tippit’s patrol car approaching. What was a consensus was that Tippit stopped and Oswald, or whoever the person was, approached the car from the passenger’s side to begin what seemed at first to be an amicable conversation. Suddenly, when Tippit got out of the car, everything changed. Again, there was conflicting testimony whether Tippit was reaching for his gun after he got out of the patrol car, but what was clear was that the assailant opened fire suddenly, pumping three shots into Tippit’s chest with a revolver held casually at hip level. Once Tippit fell, why didn’t the assailant run? Instead, the assailant acted as if he had all the time in the world. Calmly, the assailant pumped one more round into Tippit—a headshot on a severely wounded man lying helpless and bleeding on the pavement—just to make sure he was dead. Then, walking away, the assailant reloaded, casually tossing the spent shells away at the scene of the crime, seemingly unconcerned about witnesses the assailant knew were watching.

What was going on? If Tippit stopped his patrol car because he felt Oswald met the radio description of the suspect in the JFK assassination, why didn’t Tippit radio for help, wanting to make sure headquarters knew the danger he might be taking in detaining the man? If Tippit suspected the man was the assassin of JFK, why didn’t he pull his weapon immediately, or certainly before he got out of the car? If Tippit’s assailant was Oswald, why did Oswald move toward the patrol car in such a friendly manner? Was Oswald clever and cool enough to think if he acted innocent he could lure the officer out of the car without drawing his weapon? Or
did Oswald believe he was really innocent and had no idea police were looking for someone who met his description?

Journalist Joachim Joesten thinks there is only one premise that explains the event: “Patrolman Tippit and his killer knew one another!” Here is Joesten’s analysis:

We surely cannot believe that Tippit, presumably alerted that a presidential assassin was on the loose, would have given an unknown suspect the chance to draw first. Would not any competent police officer—and Tippit, a former paratrooper, had been with the police force for nearly 12 years—have drawn his own gun under the circumstances? Would he not, at the first suspicious look or gesture, have followed the old police maxim: “Shoot first, ask questions later”?
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In Joesten’s analysis, only if Tippit and his killer knew one another can we explain the free and easy way the unknown killer approached the car and struck up a conversation with the policeman, and the way the policeman behaved, getting out of the car with his guard down, to casually walk over as if to continue the conversation face-to-face. But if the two knew one another, what went wrong?

The manner of shooting—three shots to the chest, followed by a shot to the head after the man was already down—bear all the earmarks of a cold-blooded, professional, gangland slaying, not the nervous or impulsive reaction of a person like Oswald who had no prior history of ever having shot or killed anyone.

Eva Grant, Jack Ruby’s sister, told the
New York Herald Tribune
in a telephone interview that her brother and Officer Tippet knew each other well. “Jack knew him and I knew him,” Grant said. “He used to come into the Vegas Club and the Carousel Club. He was a fine man. Jack called him ‘buddy.’” According to Buchanan, Eva Grant also told the pro-Gaullist weekly
Candide
that Ruby and Tippit were “like two brothers.”
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At the time, Eva Grant ran the Vegas nightclub in Dallas that Jack Ruby owned. In her testimony to the Warren Commission, Grant said that one of her coworkers at the Las Vegas Club, Leo Torti, showed her a magazine photo
of Tippit after he was killed and Grant remembered that Tippit had been in the Vegas Club around a month prior to his murder.
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The
New York Herald Tribune
published a story on December 5, 1963, with the headline, “Ruby Knew Slain Dallas Policeman.” The story left no doubt: “Jack Ruby, the strip-joint proprietor who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald … knew the dead patrolman, J. D. Tippit, well.” Journalist Joachim Joesten also confirmed Ruby knew Tippit as part of Ruby’s policy of working with the cops. “The picture of Ruby’s relations with the Dallas police—fixing them up with wine, whiskey and girls—and with Tippit—in and out of his clubs all the time—is not an unfamiliar picture in large American cities,” he noted. “It is a picture of a half-underworld of shady characters, of men carrying guns illicitly—and using them.”
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