Joseph McBride

The Hickey theory is preposterous on its face and is merely a distraction.

On the legal concerns of Warren Commission staff member Alfredda Scobey, etc., from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: A SHAM INVESTIGATION The Warren Report, which devotes much of its space to Lee Harvey Oswald’s biography, material largely irrelevant to the actual case, is devoid of much detail about J. D. Tippit or any real probing of the highly confusing and incomplete physical and eyewitness evidence surrounding the officer’s shooting. Sylvia Meagher refers to the commission’s “profound lack of interest in Tippit” and adds in her 1967 book, “We know strangely little about Tippit.” The commission’s lack of curiosity can be explained, at least in part, by its preordained conclusion that Oswald shot both men and by the fact that the Tippit killing was treated as one of the primary pieces of evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy. The reasoning was so circular it could cause vertigo. The extent to which the commission was reluctant to conduct a genuine investigation of the Tippit killing is revealed in some of its unpublished documents. It was not until May 8, 1964 -- five months after the commission was formed and more than halfway through its investigation -- that a staff member, Alfredda Scobey (a protégée of Georgia senator and commission member Richard Russell), wrote a memo to General Counsel J. Lee Rankin stating, “As far as I can tell, none of the areas is responsible for handling any of the background or connections of Officer Tippit. Since he has been linked to both Oswald and Ruby by various rumors and since he was a principle [sic] figure in the events of November 22, I was wondering if any investigation of him has been undertaken.” Rankin handwrote a note on her memo to assistant counsel Howard P. Willens: “Mr. Willens -- Please follow up.” Willens had been responsible in December 1963 for drawing up the areas of investigation that teams of Warren Commission lawyers would pursue, and came up with six such areas. As Edward Jay Epstein notes in Inquest, “This plan, it should be noted, did not provide for a separate investigation into the murder of Dallas Policeman J. D. Tippit. Instead, the Tippit investigation was considered to be part of the Area II investigation of the identity of the President’s assassin.” Thus, it was decided ahead of time that Tippit would be viewed only as having being slain by Oswald, the primary, if not sole, focus of the commission’s sham “investigation.” Rankin also responded to Scobey’s memo of concern by writing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover on May 11 to request that the Bureau conduct “a limited background investigation” of Tippit, including investigation of his record in the Dallas Police Department and interviewing of his family and his associates in and outside the police force. Rankin concluded, however, by stressing: In the course of each of these interviews, as well as any others which you believe are appropriate, we would like the Bureau to inquire whether Officer Tippit had any associations with Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack L. Ruby. As I am sure you are aware, this request is designed to obtain certain basic information which can be relied upon to refute unfounded allegations which have developed in the course of this investigation. In other words, the commission didn’t want to be told any bad news about Tippit. The slain patrolman had, after all, been given a hero’s funeral televised live in Dallas, and both Robert Kennedy and President Johnson had called his widow to express their condolences and admiration for what was then thought to be his bravery in confronting the fleeing assassin. Jacqueline Kennedy also exchanged warmly emotional correspondence with Marie Tippit and sent her an inscribed photo of the Kennedy family. Hoover replied in kind to Rankin’s request for a sham investigation, filing a nineteen-page report submitted by the Dallas FBI office eight days later. The report was published in Volume XXVI of the commission’s supplementary materials. (This is how the request and the report are reassuringly described, apparently without consciously facetious intent, by Bugliosi in Reclaiming History: “Because the Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination was so very comprehensive, it even included a ‘limited background investigation’ of Officer J. D. Tippit and found nothing suspicious.”) The FBI report indeed gives the appearance of thoroughness in its coverage of the basic biographical data on Tippit and his family members but is superficial and scanty on the question of whether Tippit could have been involved with Oswald and Ruby, relying on predictable denials by Tippit’s widow and his fellow policemen. Tippit was dutifully described by his immediate supervisor for the last ten years of his life, Sergeant Calvin Bud Owens, as a morally upright person and a person about whom he had never heard anything derogatory. Sergeant OWENS rated TIPPIT as an average officer in work performance, who was well-liked, used good common sense and, as such, was a “good officer.” According to OWENS, TIPPIT had off-duty, part-time jobs [as a security guard] at Austin’s Barbecue and Stevens Park Theatre and, because of this, “didn’t have time to do any wrong.” TIPPIT was a devoted family man, who spent what free time he had either at home or with relatives. TIPPIT was well-liked by all the other officers. . . . OWENS described TIPPIT as a quiet, shy person. These generally rosy descriptions do not match evidence subsequently developed suggesting that Tippit was a policeman of below-average rather than average performance (in eleven years on the force, he had never received a promotion) and other evidence that Tippit had been carrying on an extramarital affair and appeared to be chronically overextended financially, working the extra jobs to help pay the mortgages on two houses. The FBI reported Owens told them that “TIPPIT appeared to be resigned to the fact that, because of his limited education, he would be unable to advance very far within the Police Department, and TIPPIT appeared satisfied with his work. OWENS stated he believes TIPPIT took promotional examinations, but had no information as to the results, but believes that the lack of promotion was due to a lack of education.” Dallas Police Detective Morris Brumley, a boyhood friend of Tippit’s who attended school with him in Clarksville, told the FBI in 1964 that Tippit was “not ‘sharp enough’ to pass promotional examinations given by the Police Department.” Rio Sam Pierce, a lieutenant in the patrol division who “knew him fairly well,” told Larry A. Sneed for No More Silence, “Tippit was just a plain home boy who shuffled as he walked and seldom made eye contact. After many years as a patrolman, he was never promoted because of that inability to make eye contact and because he couldn’t do well on tests. Promotion required a written exam and an interview. In both cases, he would have failed.” The Warren Report describes Tippit as “an officer with a good record during his more than 11 years with the police force” and quotes Chief Curry’s testimony that Tippit was “a very fine, dedicated officer.” Curry went on to paint a slightly qualified portrait of a rather quiet, serious-minded young man. He seemed to be very devoted to his family, and he was an active church man. . . . He was not a real aggressive type officer. In fact, he seemed to be just a little bit shy, if you were to meet him, I believe, shy, retiring type, but certainly not afraid of anything. I think in his personnel investigation it showed that during, as he was growing up, sometimes his shyness was mistaken for perhaps fear, but that it only took a time or two for someone to exploit this to find out it wasn’t fear. It was merely a quiet, shy-type individual. In light of the myriad problems with the physical and witness evidence, it is unlikely that if Oswald had lived, he could have been convicted of the Tippit killing or, indeed, in the assassination of the president. Scobey admitted as much when she offered her own partial dissent from the Warren Commission’s sloppy case in her article “A Lawyer’s Notes on the Warren Commission Report” in the January 1965 issue of the American Bar Association Journal. The former commission staff member, who had resumed her distinguished career in the Georgia bar, writes that a defense attorney, had Oswald lived, would have been able to exclude a great deal of evidence from a trial. She points out that many pieces of evidence had been improperly obtained or otherwise made known by the police in a manner prejudicial to Oswald. Furthermore, many of the links allegedly connecting him with various criminal activities, including both the assassination and the April 10, 1963, attempt on the life of Major General Edwin Walker, only existed in the accounts of Oswald’s widow, Marina, who could not have testified against her husband in court. (Scobey hints at the elements of coercion Marina faced from authorities but does not discuss how the widow’s cooperation had been obtained partly through threats of deportation to her native USSR. Marina’s many conflicting statements over the years, as she came to change her public views as to whether her husband was guilty of killing Kennedy, render her various accounts of the case and her husband’s character virtually unusable for the historical record.) As for the Tippit murder, Scobey writes: There remains the question of whether the Tippit murder would be admissible. As a subsequent similar offense it would be excluded. As part of a subsequent escape attempt it could not be shown until it first had been shown that an effort was being made to arrest him. Here the prosecution might succeed, on the proposition that the description being circulated of the President’s assassin was sufficient to raise an inference that Tippit intended to hold Oswald for questioning. However, the testimony of Mrs. Helen Markham, an eyewitness standing on the street corner, was merely that after the men talked, Tippit got out of the car on one side and Oswald walked forward on the other and shot him. This witness was hysterical. Her initial description of Oswald, as well as facts she stated regarding the time of the occurrence, was inaccurate [Scobey’s point about the time discrepancy is dubious; see Chapter 13]. Her original identification of Oswald in a line-up occurred after she had been given sedatives, and she remained hysterical for several hours after the event. The admissibility of the Tippit murder, accordingly, is at least arguable. Assuming it to be admissible, however, as part of the general flight picture, the transcripts show the usual contradictions which arise to plague the prosecution. Domingo Benavides, the eyewitness closest to Oswald, refused to identify him. . . . [Scobey goes on to discuss problems with the witness accounts given by Barbara Jeanette Davis and Virginia Davis, William W. Scoggins, and William Whaley, and with the police line-ups.] Oswald’s remonstrances against being placed with other persons in the line-up were so pronounced that any person could have picked him out as the accused without ever having seen him before. There are, however, a number of other witnesses who, while they did not see the actual shooting, did see Oswald leave the scene, and who would not be easy to attack. Though Scobey tries her best to prop up the Warren Report’s case against Oswald, her honesty in admitting its flaws makes her sporadic efforts on behalf of the commission seem labored (her reference to witnesses who saw Oswald leave the scene, for instance, fails to note that their identifications of him were as tainted as those by Scoggins and Whaley). Indeed, it is hard to argue with Meagher’s conclusion in Accessories After the Fact: “In an adversary proceeding, the prosecution would have been hard put to sustain the validity of any of the arguments posed in the Warren Report, and defense counsel would have delighted in demolishing the so-called evidence, point by point.”

Detective Jim Leavelle, the lead detective in the Tippit case, told me it had nothing to do with the assassination. Well, it did, partly in the sense that the DPD twisted and falsified it to make Oswald seem guilty of both crimes. He was arraigned only for the Tippit murder, not for the murder of President Kennedy, although he was charged with both crimes and was guilty of neither. Also, Leavelle's statement was what would be called in Watergate terms a "modified, limited hangout," because Tippit was lured into a police trap while he and fellow Officer Mentzel were hunting down Oswald as the patsy in the assassination, from over an hour before the DPD apprehended Oswald and at a time when they allegedly did not know his identity. But in fact they knew who he was and where he lived (and so on). There is more than one reason that could have led the DPD to set up that trap. I discuss these in INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

I watched IN THE LINE OF FIRE again last night. At one point the would-be presidential assassin played by John Malkovich, who calls himself "Booth," while taunting the Secret Service agent played by Eastwood (modeled to some extent on Clint Hill) about the failure to save Kennedy, repeats the lie about Kennedy supposedly telling the agents to get off the back bumper of his limousine (even though Hill rode on it part of the time in Dallas). Even in plot terms it makes no sense for the Malkovich character to use this to make Eastwood's agent feel even more guilty, since it is the lie some agents use to blame JFK for his own death, as Vince Palamara has demonstrated.

About Mary Ferrell from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: THE GATEKEEPER After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened. According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on his newsletter The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events. Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly self-effacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to the HSCA. As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Agency of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.” Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a German-born Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.” It was at a February 22, 1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt, that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a poopoo”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” [italics in original]. Mary Ferrell was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy (Lowrey put it more strongly: “She hated John Kennedy; it was no secret”), and she admitted in 2000, “I didn’t even care enough to go down on Elm Street to watch the motorcade.” A feature on Ferrell in the Dallas Morning News on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983 mentions that she was downtown that day “but didn’t bother interrupting her lunch” to see Kennedy. The writer, Brad Bailey, hinted at the strangeness of this paradox in her career: “Mrs. Ferrell didn’t particularly like Kennedy as a president or as a fellow Catholic. . . . So she has a hard time explaining the fireproof library building in her Oak Lawn backyard with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing virtually every document ever published on the assassination. Nor can she easily explain the additional 25,000 pages of FBI documents spread across her living room floor or the clippings and papers that fill another room.” The most I could get from Ferrell when I asked about her motivation, a question that seemed to momentarily take her aback in our last conversation in December 1992, was the vague response, “I just didn’t think they went to Oak Cliff and picked up the man who did it in a darkened theater. Somehow it just didn’t make sense.” Ferrell was surprisingly equivocal on some of the most-discussed topics surrounding the assassination. She said she refused to see Oliver Stone’s JFK because when reporters called her, “I was really glad I didn’t have to lie and say I didn’t like it or I did like it.” As for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison himself, she told me, “I loved Jim Garrison -- I wavered between thinking he’s insane and thinking he’s a genius.” And as for Oswald, she said that if people “come to me and say, ‘I think Oswald acted alone, and do you have documentation?,’ I just politely say, ‘Go somewhere else.’ Everything I do is based on Oswald did not act alone. Not that he didn’t act. I don’t know.” And the Morning News reported in 1983 that despite all her research, she had “given up hope of deciding what really happened that day in Dallas. ‘We have now had about four major investigations, and I consider that the truth is still hidden from us,’ she says.” Some of the explanation for what that newspaper described as Ferrell’s “compulsion” to serve as a repository and clearing house for assassination research can be found in another paradox about Ferrell. Her obituary in the Morning News referred to how she “worked more than thirty years as a legal secretary for a law firm and also in the Governor’s office in Austin.” She was a conservative who kept close to the power center of that era in Texas by working for Democrats, including Governor Dolph Briscoe in 1973-74, and she was “a close personal friend” of John Connally, Lowrey noted. Ferrell was even closely connected to those who determined the route of the Dallas motorcade. It was in 1964, soon after the assassination, according to Lowrey, that Ferrell became a legal secretary in downtown Dallas to Eugene M. Locke, who headed the law firm of Locke, Purnell, Boren, Laney and Neely and was also the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas. (Ferrell claimed on various occasions that she did not start working for Locke until 1967 or 1970. Locke died in 1972.) In addition to heading a major law firm and having oil, land, and construction interests, Locke in his official position with the state party helped plan the presidential trip to Dallas. A crucial meeting that helped decide on the route of the motorcade -- violating Secret Service regulations by causing it to make a sharp turn from Houston onto Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository, slowing the motorcade to eleven miles an hour in the kill zone -- was held in Locke’s office, although Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell apparently was responsible for the final decision that determined the route. (See more on Locke and that meeting in Chapters 15 and 16.) Lowrey suggested, though without having proof, that Ferrell could have helped her soon-to-be-employer Locke with those arrangements. That seems more of an educated guess when one considers that her husband, Hubert (Buck) Ferrell, who worked for Eagle Lincoln-Mercury in Dallas at the time of the assassination, supplied some of the cars for the motorcade, and that Mary Ferrell said her own car was used in the motorcade when “They quickly ran out of cars.” According to assassination researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, who interviewed both Ferrells, Mary supplied her own recently purchased 1964 Ford Mercury Colony Park station wagon for the motorcade, and it was used as one of the “VIP” cars. My dealings with Mary Ferrell in 1985-86 were what made me aware of her duplicity. I first called her to ask her confidential advice about a previously unknown FBI document I had found that seriously undermined the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory, and she betrayed my trust (see Chapter 15). After being thus alerted to her dishonest modus operandi, I began delving into her dubious background and concluded that after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation. As a result of her clever application of spycraft and her faux-motherly act, many researchers naively regarded her as a guru with a disinterested dedication to the truth. When I called her again in 1992 to request an in-person interview about her background and involvement in the case, she pressed me hard to find out what aspects of the assassination I was researching, and when I carefully gave her only general answers, saying that my areas of interest included the roles played by researchers, she refused to meet with me and said she didn’t want to be interviewed about her own background. Lowrey said, “Mary stays in the shadows. Her agenda is subtle and devious: ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Penn Jones gave me some good advice: “Stay away from her.” Ferrell’s production to the HSCA of the tape made that allegedly contains audio impulses demonstrating that four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza seemed suspiciously timely to me. It seemed to buttress the notion of conspiracy but more likely was cleverly orchestrated by Ferrell to discredit it in due course, like a planted mine sure to go off and destroy everything that surrounded it. Anomalies and ambiguities surrounding the tape itself made the HSCA’s belated “discovery” and endorsement of four shots dubious. That was probably seen by Blakey and others on his staff as a convenient late-arriving fig leaf with which to cover themselves by suggesting a conspiracy while not investigating its participants fully and honestly. The problems surrounding the tape were manifold, including debatable photographic evidence of the police motorcycle with a stuck microphone that supposedly recorded the sounds, claims by some skeptics that the tape actually was recorded about a minute after the assassination, and above all the inherent difficulties of interpreting the sound impulses allegedly found on the tape and synching those impulses with films of the assassination (including the altered Zapruder film). These problems would keep various experts, conspiracy theorists, and lone-nutters alike busy for years of debate, sometimes switching sides back and forth to add to the confusion. That may have been the point of the whole exercise initiated by Mary Ferrell with the collusion of Gary Mack. In the process, many studies were made, and much ink was consumed, but the subject only became more intractable, as, indeed, it seemed to me almost from the beginning, given the near-impossibility of reconstructing credible gunshots from a belatedly produced Dictabelt recording made in part with a police microphone of uncertain location. By so badly muddying the waters, the claim by the HSCA about shots being recorded on the tape most probably was intended to distract attention from the actual likelihood that more than four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. This was among the more sophisticated and effective disinformation ploys launched against the finding of the truth of what happened in November 1963, but just one of the many obfuscatory maneuvers that began the first day and continue to the present. “All this stuff that went to the HSCA from the nucleus of people revolving around Mary Ferrell probably was concocted by mixing it with half-truths,” Lowrey noted. “Their MO is propping up a story and then shooting it down -- damn effective.” The HSCA Report, while saying that there were two gunmen, nevertheless claims that a single shot from the Grassy Knoll, the closer of the two alleged firing locations, missed, and blames Oswald (who was in the second-floor lunchroom of the Depository at the time) for firing all the shots that hit Kennedy, Connally, and bystander James Tague. Researcher Jack White, who continued to believe that “shots are recorded on the tape,” nevertheless aptly called the HSCA Report “a half-horse, half-zebra, half-assed kind of report.” The HSCA, in my view, largely succeeded in disproving the (naive) notion that this case could be investigated fairly by a government up to its eyes in direct involvement in the planning, execution, and coverup of the crimes themselves. Like the Warren Commission investigation before it, the HSCA investigation also turned up a wealth of evidence and fresh leads that, ironically, cast doubt on its own conclusions. A further problem was that some of the HSCA’s work product, including reports of witness interviews, did not reach the public until the 1990s, delaying both its utility and its ability to cast doubt on the HSCA’s own conclusions. The material was sealed until after the film JFK helped provide the impetus for the establishment of the ARRB, which helped free six millions of pages of previously classified material in U.S. government files. That material has proven invaluable in filling in some of the important gaps in our information about the case and in calling attention to previously hidden aspects of these events. Despite the flaws of the HSCA investigation, with all the genuine revelations that were being made about the case in the 1970s, as well as all the controversy engendered by true and false leads, the seeds of doubt were being widely sown again throughout the land. If I had been led astray from the initial evidence I heard with my own ears on the afternoon of November 22 and from my sense that first evening that Oswald was telling the truth in denying involvement in the killings of Kennedy and Tippit, I was now beginning to reclaim my first impressions as the truth.

About Mary Ferrell from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: THE GATEKEEPER After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened. According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on his newsletter The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events. Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly self-effacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to the HSCA. As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Agency of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.” Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a German-born Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.” It was at a February 22, 1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt, that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a poopoo”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” [italics in original]. Mary Ferrell was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy (Lowrey put it more strongly: “She hated John Kennedy; it was no secret”), and she admitted in 2000, “I didn’t even care enough to go down on Elm Street to watch the motorcade.” A feature on Ferrell in the Dallas Morning News on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983 mentions that she was downtown that day “but didn’t bother interrupting her lunch” to see Kennedy. The writer, Brad Bailey, hinted at the strangeness of this paradox in her career: “Mrs. Ferrell didn’t particularly like Kennedy as a president or as a fellow Catholic. . . . So she has a hard time explaining the fireproof library building in her Oak Lawn backyard with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing virtually every document ever published on the assassination. Nor can she easily explain the additional 25,000 pages of FBI documents spread across her living room floor or the clippings and papers that fill another room.” The most I could get from Ferrell when I asked about her motivation, a question that seemed to momentarily take her aback in our last conversation in December 1992, was the vague response, “I just didn’t think they went to Oak Cliff and picked up the man who did it in a darkened theater. Somehow it just didn’t make sense.” Ferrell was surprisingly equivocal on some of the most-discussed topics surrounding the assassination. She said she refused to see Oliver Stone’s JFK because when reporters called her, “I was really glad I didn’t have to lie and say I didn’t like it or I did like it.” As for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison himself, she told me, “I loved Jim Garrison -- I wavered between thinking he’s insane and thinking he’s a genius.” And as for Oswald, she said that if people “come to me and say, ‘I think Oswald acted alone, and do you have documentation?,’ I just politely say, ‘Go somewhere else.’ Everything I do is based on Oswald did not act alone. Not that he didn’t act. I don’t know.” And the Morning News reported in 1983 that despite all her research, she had “given up hope of deciding what really happened that day in Dallas. ‘We have now had about four major investigations, and I consider that the truth is still hidden from us,’ she says.” Some of the explanation for what that newspaper described as Ferrell’s “compulsion” to serve as a repository and clearing house for assassination research can be found in another paradox about Ferrell. Her obituary in the Morning News referred to how she “worked more than thirty years as a legal secretary for a law firm and also in the Governor’s office in Austin.” She was a conservative who kept close to the power center of that era in Texas by working for Democrats, including Governor Dolph Briscoe in 1973-74, and she was “a close personal friend” of John Connally, Lowrey noted. Ferrell was even closely connected to those who determined the route of the Dallas motorcade. It was in 1964, soon after the assassination, according to Lowrey, that Ferrell became a legal secretary in downtown Dallas to Eugene M. Locke, who headed the law firm of Locke, Purnell, Boren, Laney and Neely and was also the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas. (Ferrell claimed on various occasions that she did not start working for Locke until 1967 or 1970. Locke died in 1972.) In addition to heading a major law firm and having oil, land, and construction interests, Locke in his official position with the state party helped plan the presidential trip to Dallas. A crucial meeting that helped decide on the route of the motorcade -- violating Secret Service regulations by causing it to make a sharp turn from Houston onto Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository, slowing the motorcade to eleven miles an hour in the kill zone -- was held in Locke’s office, although Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell apparently was responsible for the final decision that determined the route. (See more on Locke and that meeting in Chapters 15 and 16.) Lowrey suggested, though without having proof, that Ferrell could have helped her soon-to-be-employer Locke with those arrangements. That seems more of an educated guess when one considers that her husband, Hubert (Buck) Ferrell, who worked for Eagle Lincoln-Mercury in Dallas at the time of the assassination, supplied some of the cars for the motorcade, and that Mary Ferrell said her own car was used in the motorcade when “They quickly ran out of cars.” According to assassination researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, who interviewed both Ferrells, Mary supplied her own recently purchased 1964 Ford Mercury Colony Park station wagon for the motorcade, and it was used as one of the “VIP” cars. My dealings with Mary Ferrell in 1985-86 were what made me aware of her duplicity. I first called her to ask her confidential advice about a previously unknown FBI document I had found that seriously undermined the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory, and she betrayed my trust (see Chapter 15). After being thus alerted to her dishonest modus operandi, I began delving into her dubious background and concluded that after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation. As a result of her clever application of spycraft and her faux-motherly act, many researchers naively regarded her as a guru with a disinterested dedication to the truth. When I called her again in 1992 to request an in-person interview about her background and involvement in the case, she pressed me hard to find out what aspects of the assassination I was researching, and when I carefully gave her only general answers, saying that my areas of interest included the roles played by researchers, she refused to meet with me and said she didn’t want to be interviewed about her own background. Lowrey said, “Mary stays in the shadows. Her agenda is subtle and devious: ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Penn Jones gave me some good advice: “Stay away from her.” Ferrell’s production to the HSCA of the tape made that allegedly contains audio impulses demonstrating that four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza seemed suspiciously timely to me. It seemed to buttress the notion of conspiracy but more likely was cleverly orchestrated by Ferrell to discredit it in due course, like a planted mine sure to go off and destroy everything that surrounded it. Anomalies and ambiguities surrounding the tape itself made the HSCA’s belated “discovery” and endorsement of four shots dubious. That was probably seen by Blakey and others on his staff as a convenient late-arriving fig leaf with which to cover themselves by suggesting a conspiracy while not investigating its participants fully and honestly. The problems surrounding the tape were manifold, including debatable photographic evidence of the police motorcycle with a stuck microphone that supposedly recorded the sounds, claims by some skeptics that the tape actually was recorded about a minute after the assassination, and above all the inherent difficulties of interpreting the sound impulses allegedly found on the tape and synching those impulses with films of the assassination (including the altered Zapruder film). These problems would keep various experts, conspiracy theorists, and lone-nutters alike busy for years of debate, sometimes switching sides back and forth to add to the confusion. That may have been the point of the whole exercise initiated by Mary Ferrell with the collusion of Gary Mack. In the process, many studies were made, and much ink was consumed, but the subject only became more intractable, as, indeed, it seemed to me almost from the beginning, given the near-impossibility of reconstructing credible gunshots from a belatedly produced Dictabelt recording made in part with a police microphone of uncertain location. By so badly muddying the waters, the claim by the HSCA about shots being recorded on the tape most probably was intended to distract attention from the actual likelihood that more than four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. This was among the more sophisticated and effective disinformation ploys launched against the finding of the truth of what happened in November 1963, but just one of the many obfuscatory maneuvers that began the first day and continue to the present. “All this stuff that went to the HSCA from the nucleus of people revolving around Mary Ferrell probably was concocted by mixing it with half-truths,” Lowrey noted. “Their MO is propping up a story and then shooting it down -- damn effective.” The HSCA Report, while saying that there were two gunmen, nevertheless claims that a single shot from the Grassy Knoll, the closer of the two alleged firing locations, missed, and blames Oswald (who was in the second-floor lunchroom of the Depository at the time) for firing all the shots that hit Kennedy, Connally, and bystander James Tague. Researcher Jack White, who continued to believe that “shots are recorded on the tape,” nevertheless aptly called the HSCA Report “a half-horse, half-zebra, half-assed kind of report.” The HSCA, in my view, largely succeeded in disproving the (naive) notion that this case could be investigated fairly by a government up to its eyes in direct involvement in the planning, execution, and coverup of the crimes themselves. Like the Warren Commission investigation before it, the HSCA investigation also turned up a wealth of evidence and fresh leads that, ironically, cast doubt on its own conclusions. A further problem was that some of the HSCA’s work product, including reports of witness interviews, did not reach the public until the 1990s, delaying both its utility and its ability to cast doubt on the HSCA’s own conclusions. The material was sealed until after the film JFK helped provide the impetus for the establishment of the ARRB, which helped free six millions of pages of previously classified material in U.S. government files. That material has proven invaluable in filling in some of the important gaps in our information about the case and in calling attention to previously hidden aspects of these events. Despite the flaws of the HSCA investigation, with all the genuine revelations that were being made about the case in the 1970s, as well as all the controversy engendered by true and false leads, the seeds of doubt were being widely sown again throughout the land. If I had been led astray from the initial evidence I heard with my own ears on the afternoon of November 22 and from my sense that first evening that Oswald was telling the truth in denying involvement in the killings of Kennedy and Tippit, I was now beginning to reclaim my first impressions as the truth.

Mary Ferrell told me she thought Lattimer's book the best on the medical evidence. That gives you one of the reasons not to trust Mary Ferrell.

Thanks for your kind words about INTO THE NIGHTMARE, Jim. I appreciated your letting me write a response to that other author on your website. I usually avoid what Orson Welles called "that odious thing, 'a reply to the critic,'" but made an exception in this case because that author maligned a good source of mine, Edgar Lee Tippit, falsely claiming he was suffering from dementia. In fact, he was a vigorous and lucid 90 when I interviewed him, and he was still working every day as a farmer. https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/myers-dale-with-malice-lee-harvey-oswald-and-the-murder-of-officer-j-d-tippit

Mary Ferrell was downtown that day and didn't bother going to see the motorcade because she was not a fan of JFK. But her car was in the motorcade. And Hosty's book claims he thought Marina was his primary target of concern as a likely agent.

Thanks for the question, Anthony. I recommend the many authoritative books on 9/11 by David Ray Griffin, as well as the works of Peter Dale Scott. In POLITICAL TRUTH, I deal with and attempt to summarize what I see as the arc of American history from 1960 to November 22, 1963, and up to January 6, 2021, and beyond. The book was published in December 2021, and the January 6 hearings make it even more timely. Along the way, I discuss the impact of such upheavals as Vietnam, Watergate, Iran/contra, the Gulf War, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 9/11. I show how the the successful coup of 1963 and its continuing coverup by the government and the mainstream media helped lead inexorably to the failed coup attempt of January 6. To borrow the remark attributed to the Duke of Wellington about the Battle of Watterloo, that was "a damn close-run thing." In POLITICAL TRUTH, I study, among other things, the Orwellian denial of coups by the mainstream media. Orwell's classic essay "Politics and the English Language" (available online) is a key text for understanding our world today. And now I note that even the Washington Post is having to call Trump's coup attempt for what it was (and, as others have said, his attempt is still ongoing), but hell will freeze over before the Post and the New York Times will tell the truth about the coup of 1963.

Mary Ferrell was downtown that day and didn't bother going to see the motorcade because she was not a fan of JFK. But her car was in the motorcade.

Here's the Dallas Morning News article on Bowley from 2010: Dallas to Honor T.F. Bowley-Man Who Radioed Police After J.D. Tippit Murdered (Video) Friday, November 19, 2010 Temple F. Bowley's life changed forever when he came upon a Dallas police officer lying dead in an Oak Cliff street on Nov. 22, 1963. "You don't run upon a dead man every day," Bowley said. J.D. Tippit was the dead officer. His killer was Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy 45 minutes earlier. Bowley was on the way to pick up his wife from work when he discovered Tippit's body face down in the middle of East 10th Street. Without hesitation, he climbed into the officer's car and used the police radio to report the shooting. Officers poured into Oak Cliff and quickly arrested Oswald at the Texas Theatre. On Monday, 47 years after the most chaotic day in Dallas history, Bowley will be recognized for the small role he played in it. Dallas Police Chief David Brown will welcome Bowley into his office and present him with a Citizen's Certificate of Merit. "I don't deserve the recognition," said Bowley, now an 82-year-old retiree living in East Dallas. "It was just the thing to do. The radio was there and it was connected to the Police Department, and that's who I needed to talk to." The story of Bowley's connection to the JFK assassination saga ends with Tippit's murder. But that's not where it begins. It turned out that Bowley had spent several years in the 1950s moonlighting as a doorman for Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby, who made history when he shot Oswald to death on live television two days after the Kennedy assassination. "I knew Jack well, but half the people in Dallas knew Jack," he said. "He was a tough little cookie, but he would give you the shirt off his back." Bowley can't recall how many years he worked for Ruby at the Silver Spur over on South Ervay Street, or exactly which years he worked there. But ever since Nov. 22, 1963, he has worried that the connection somehow might cast suspicion on him. "It crossed my mind, yes," he said. 'We've had a shooting' In 1963, Bowley's main job was supervising a crew of telephone installers for Western Electric Co., which manufactured communications equipment. On Friday, Nov. 22, he and his family were about to head to San Antonio for vacation. He planned to go deer hunting in South Texas and was carrying three rifles in the back of his 1961 Pontiac Tempest station wagon. First, he picked up his 12-year-old daughter, Kathy, from school. Then, he headed to pick up his wife at her office in Oak Cliff. The car radio crackled with news about shots fired at the presidential motorcade as it passed through Dealey Plaza, on the western edge of downtown Dallas. Kennedy was dead, the reports said. Bowley was nearing his wife's office when he saw Tippit's parked car pointed toward him – the driver's door wide open and the officer's body lying next to the driver's-side front tire. "I stopped maybe 30 to 50 yards away and told Kathy to stay in the car," he said. Oswald was long gone by then. But Domingo Benavides had seen the shooting a couple of minutes earlier and remained at the scene. As Bowley approached Tippit's car, he instinctively knew the officer was dead. Later, an autopsy found four gunshot wounds – three in the chest and a kill shot in the right temple. Benavides was in the patrol car, frantically trying to call for help on the police radio. Instead of running to a nearby house to use a landline, Bowley saved precious minutes by taking control of the radio immediately. "He couldn't figure out how to key the mike," Bowley said. "I was familiar with the equipment, so I took it and made the call." A recording of the conversation between Bowley and dispatcher Murray Jackson was preserved for investigators. "Hello, police operator!" Bowley begins. "Go ahead. Go ahead, citizen using the police ...," Jackson says before Bowley interrupts. "We've had a shooting out here." "Where's it at?" Bowley looks around to get his bearings. "The citizen using the police radio ...," Jackson starts to say. "On 10th Street," Bowley responds. "What location on 10th Street?" "Between Marsalis and Beckley. It's a police officer. Somebody shot him. What? What's this?" Somebody at the scene tells Bowley the exact address. "404 East 10th Street," he tells the dispatcher. Kathryn Bowley Miles, now 59, remembers the excitement of that day – seeing the body on the street, her father's admonition to stay in the car and the subsequent frenzy around the scene. It surprises her, she said, that he is now willing to talk about the incident. "He didn't even want to talk to his friends about it," she said. "He just never talked about it." And he had never returned to the spot on East 10th until last week, when The Dallas Morning News asked him to be photographed for this story. "Maybe this will finally be the end of it," he said, while posing for the cameras in the middle of the street. 'I just caught a glimpse' History records the time of JFK's murder as 12:30 p.m. Investigators would later say the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked. Oswald had left the building shortly after the shooting and caught a bus to Oak Cliff. He was walking down 10th Street when Tippit drove up next to him. Investigators believe Tippit had heard a description of the Kennedy murder suspect on his police radio, and the man on the sidewalk fit the description. Witnesses said Oswald leaned down to talk to Tippit through his passenger-side window. Oswald must have said something to arouse suspicion. Tippit got out of the car and was gunned down about 1:15 p.m. "By the time we got there, Oswald had already fled," Bowley said. When police arrived at the Tippit murder scene, Bowley told them what he had seen and what he had done. Officers took his information and sent him on his way, saying he could be interviewed in depth later. But Bowley didn't head to San Antonio immediately. He heard police sirens screaming and drove west on Jefferson Boulevard to investigate. "I wanted to see what was going on like any other nosy person," he said. The commotion in front of the Texas Theatre drew his attention. He parked and got out of his car just in time to see officers bringing the handcuffed Oswald out of the theater. "I just caught a glimpse of them putting him in the squad car," Bowley said. 'His role is huge' When you add it all up, what significance can historians place on Bowley's role in the assassination story? A life of 82 years consists of 29,930 days, or 718,320 hours. He spent 30 minutes of that life dealing with the Tippit murder on Nov. 22, 1963. And, yet, in some way, it has dominated everything else. "I'm just damn tired of it," he said. Farris Rookstool III is a former analyst for the FBI and a self-described expert on the Kennedy assassination. He campaigned for more than a year to get the Dallas Police Department to award Bowley its Citizen's Certificate of Merit. Rookstool characterizes the Tippit murder as "the Rosetta Stone" that tied Oswald to the Kennedy assassination. "The whole component of Bowley getting on the radio is what got the police headed in that direction and allowed them to close in on Oswald quickly," Rookstool said. "His role is huge, in my opinion. And it's the right thing to do to honor him."

I interviewed T. F. (Temple Ford) Bowley at his home in Dallas. He said it was the first interview he had given since speaking to the authorities earlier. He was forthcoming except on the full extent of his involvement with Ruby. Jerry Rose theorized that the unusually large number of Tippit witnesses connected to Ruby could have been evidence that Ruby set up the Tippit crime scene. But Bowley and Markham (two of those connected with Ruby) gave reports inconsistent in some regards with the official theory. Here is the section on my Bowley interview from INTO THE NIGHTMARE: Further verification of the actual time frame of the Tippit shooting came from Temple Ford (T. F.) Bowley, who was described by Meagher as “the only known witness who deliberately checked the time.” Bowley, who said he came upon the scene at 1:10, shortly after Tippit was shot, was not called to testify before the commission, and though he had talked with the police at the scene and gave an affidavit to the DPD on December 2, 1963, when we spoke at his Dallas home in December 1992, he had never before seen his affidavit. He also spoke to HSCA investigators, but he said our interview was the only one he had ever given in person to anyone else. (Bowley since then has become more visible, and in 2010 was honored by the DPD with a Citizen’s Certificate of Merit for his actions in reporting the Tippit shooting.) Bowley told me that on November 22, 1963, he had just turned west onto East Tenth Street approaching the scene of the Tippit shooting after having picked up his twelve-year-old daughter, Kathryn, at school. They were headed toward a nearby telephone company office where his wife was working. He was driving to pick her up for a family vacation in San Antonio. He said he stopped his station wagon several houses down when he saw the officer lying on the street, “because I didn’t want my little girl to see all of it.” Kathryn Bowley Miles recalled in 2013 that she did see part of the crime scene and seemed to indicate that their car was closer to Tippit than her father remembered: “It was disturbing for a young girl to see a man lying in the street. As we pulled up to the police car I remember my daddy saying to me, ‘Stay in the car.’ I did stay in the car but we had pulled up just in front of the police cruiser so I was witness to this event and it has stayed with me all these years. My father NEVER talked about it and when asked about it his answers then (and even now) were terse.” T. F. Bowley was familiar with first aid from working as an installer of business systems for telephone companies (he was an employee of Western Electric at the time), so he went to see if he could help the officer. He gathered that he had arrived “just momentarily” after the shooting but said that Tippit “was laying there when I turned the corner, so he may have been there five minutes, for all I know. I didn’t see him fall. People had already gathered, so some amount of time had elapsed. Now how much is anybody’s guess -- a couple of minutes at least. And then it took me a little bit of time to walk up there. “I didn’t see the guy [the gunman] or hear any shots or anything. I just noticed the [squad] car was parked, and [Tippit] was laying beside it, and some other people had already got there before I did. I know [Tippit] hadn’t been there long, because people were still millin’ around like a bunch of startled goats. They said they’d seen the guy run down the street.” Asked in which direction he was told the man had run, Bowley said, “There were quite a few people saying different things at the time. All I remember is that it seemed like they said he had a tan jacket on and he run down the street thataway [i.e., going west down East Tenth]. I don’t recall any conversation other than that one guy had run.” Bowley remembered ten or twelve people being at the scene, including ones who fit the descriptions of two other important witnesses, Helen Markham and Domingo Benavides. Bowley said, “At that time, of course, there was no association with what was going on downtown in my mind; it didn’t occur to me. The officer was lying by the left front wheel of his car. He was laying face down. We [he and another unidentified man] turned him over.” The other people “looked like they were all scared to touch him. In the excitement, I didn’t really notice wounds. I don’t recall seeing any wounds or blood. His eyes were open.” But Bowley could see that Tippit (who had been shot in the head and chest) was “beyond help” and appeared to be dead. He and other witnesses found Tippit’s service revolver lying under him, out of his holster, which made Bowley think “It looked like he had attempted to draw it.” Greg Lowrey, who talked with numerous witnesses, disputed the claim that Tippit had pulled his gun out of his holster, and pointed out that if the officer had not drawn his gun, it could indicate he was not wary of his killer when he left the car to talk with him. Bowley told me it was he who put Tippit’s gun on the hood of the car and then moved it to the car seat. Another witness, Ted Callaway, a used-car salesman who was at his lot a little more than a block away when the shooting occurred, arrived after Bowley and also claimed to have removed the gun from under Tippit’s body and put it on the hood of the car. Callaway’s subsequent actions are, to say the least, questionable. According to a written statement Callaway signed for the police, he took the gun, commandeering a cab to go off in an unsuccessful pursuit of the gunman, thus breaking the chain of official custody on Tippit’s revolver. This is an incident Bowley did not remember witnessing; he expressed surprise when I showed him his police affidavit with his account of that incident with Callaway. Also differing from Bowley’s later recollection of picking up Tippit’s pistol and placing it on and then inside the car, the affidavit states, “As we picked the officer up, I noticed his pistol laying on the ground under him. Someone picked the pistol up and laid it on the hood of the squad car. When the ambulance left, I took the gun and put it inside the squad car. A man took the pistol out and said, ‘Let's catch him.’ He opened the cylinder, and I saw that no rounds in it had been fired. This man then took the pistol with him and got into a cab and drove off.” After reading the affidavit, Bowley told me, “I don’t remember that part about the pistol, I really don’t.” But he also told HSCA investigators in 1977 that he had picked up the pistol: “Recognizing the [dead] man as being a police officer Bowley stated he found the officer’s revolver on the ground under him. The weapon was out of its holster and near the officer’s right hand. Bowley picked the weapon up and placed it on the front seat of the scout [sic] car.” The report of that interview does not mention Callaway or his taking off with the gun, as Callaway himself admitted doing. Bowley told the police on December 2, 1963, that he checked his watch when he left his car to go to the scene and that the watch read 1:10. The affidavit begins, On Friday November 22, 1963 I picked up my daughter at the R. L. Thornton School in Singing Hills at about 12:55 pm. I then left the school to pick up my wife who was at work at the Telephone Company at Ninth Street and Zangs Street. I was headed north on Marsalis and turned west on 10th Street. 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. In our interview, Bowley reiterated that he looked at his watch upon arriving at the scene of the shooting and saw that it read 1:10. But he was less certain about when he had looked at his watch. After reading what his affidavit said about the watch, he said, “I don’t recall that part of it, but I’m sure I did, if that’s what the statement said, because I gave that when it was fresh in my mind.” As for why he checked his watch, “Only reason I did that,” he told me with a laugh, “I was supposed to pick up my wife at a certain time, and I wondered if I was late.” He thought had been expected to pick her up at about 1 p.m., but added, “It seemed like I was supposed to pick her up at 1 o’clock, but then maybe it wasn’t. Shortly after 1 would have been right in the ballpark.” After attending to the officer, Bowley found Domingo Benavides -- the closest witness to the actual shooting, who saw it from his pickup truck stopped across the street, fifteen feet from Tippit’s squad car -- trying to call in a report of the shooting on the radio in Tippit’s squad car. Benavides, an auto mechanic, was having difficulty doing so, and since Bowley had a professional familiarity with radios, he took charge. His report was recorded on the police radio at 1:16 p.m.: “Hello, police operator . . . We’ve had a shooting out here. On Tenth Street. Between Marsalis and Beckley. It’s a police officer. Somebody shot him . . . what’s this? . . . 404 Tenth Street.” Bowley estimated that he stayed at the shooting scene for no more than ten minutes, although that estimate appears to be a few minutes short. He said he was there when the ambulance arrived (at 1:19) from the Dudley M. Hughes Funeral Home at 400 East Jefferson Boulevard, only two and a half blocks from the scene of the crime, to pick up Tippit to take him to Methodist Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The first police unit reached the Tippit murder scene at 1:22; Bowley said he stayed and talked with officers for a few minutes before leaving to pick up his wife. [Later research shows that police officers may have been on the scene when it occurred and shortly thereafter. -- JM] Alterations appear in the records of Tippit’s official time of death, further complicating the question of the time of his shooting. At 3 p.m. on November 22, DPD Officer R. A. Davenport and Captain George M. Doughty signed a receipt for a slug and a uniform button removed from Tippit at the hospital at the department’s request; the slug and the button (which had been impacted by that bullet) were given to Davenport as evidence and transferred by him to Doughty. The document has a handwritten notation reading, “Dr. Paul Moellenhoff /Removed at 130/PM/ Methodist Emergency/ Dr. Richard Ligouri Pronounced DOA @ 115/PM.” The “AUTHORIZED PERMIT FOR AUTOPSY” signed by Justice of the Peace Joe B. Brown, Jr., at 3 p.m. also lists Tippit as having been DOA at Methodist at 1:15. But the DPD Homicide Report against Oswald in the Tippit shooting typed at 5 p.m. on November 22 has the time the officer was pronounced DOA by Dr. Ligouri as 1:30. An undated “Supplementary Offense Report” by Officers Davenport and W. R. Bardin seems to show the time of Tippit being pronounced dead by Dr. Ligouri as 1:00 or 1:06 but with the time being typed over to look like 1:16; none of those times appears plausible, given the other records. A November 29, 1963, FBI report of an interview with Dr. Ligouri by Special Agent Robert C. Lish has Tippit being pronounced dead at 1:25, but the “2” is higher than the other numbers and appears to have been typed in separately. (This was one of numerous such alterations that appear in significant documents pertaining to events involving Tippit, Oswald, and Kennedy. The Tippit Homicide Report has the “Time Reported” listed as “1:18pm” but appearing to be typed over a time of “128pm,” apparently to conform with that document’s listing of the time the event [supposedly] occurred, 1:18.) When Dallas Morning News reporter Earl Golz interviewed Lottie Thompson, an emergency room nurse at Methodist Hospital who was present when Tippit was pronounced DOA, she said the FBI had contacted Dr. Moellenhoff repeatedly about the discrepancy in the report of the time of the pronouncement. Thompson claimed that the large clock in the emergency room, which she said was used to mark the time Tippit was DOA, was fifteen minutes slow, and the hospital maintenance department had not gotten around to fixing it. While it is possible that the clock may have been off, a fifteen-minute discrepancy sounds suspiciously extreme and suggests that the hospital personnel may well have been pressured to change the time (much as the doctors at Parkland Hospital were pressured to change their initial report of Kennedy’s throat wound being a wound of entrance). The time recorded by the police dispatcher when Bowley called in the report of the Tippit shooting (1:16) makes a later time than 1:15 for Tippit being DOA likely, but Bowley’s call and the time of the ambulance arrival and its quick departure from the scene suggest that the officer was pronounced DOA closer to 1:25 than to 1:30. According to Myers’s book, Mary (Mrs. Frank) Wright, who lived on the block where Tippit was shot, also called in a report of the shooting by telephone to the DPD at 1:18, which was relayed to the Dudley Hughes Funeral Home. The ambulance attendants (Jasper Clayton Butler and William [Eddie] Kinsley) who picked up Tippit reported on the police radio that they arrived on East Tenth Street at 1:19, only about thirty seconds after the call was recorded. But the trip ticket at the funeral home, with a time stamp reportedly showing the call at 1:18, has disappeared. Butler, who drove the ambulance, said in a 1977 interview with HSCA investigators that the last time the ticket was seen was in about 1965, and that in 1964, he had copied it for representatives of Life magazine. Butler said, “I was on the scene one minute or less. From the time we received the call in our dispatch office until Officer Tippit was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital was approximately four minutes.” That would make the time he was pronounced DOA about 1:22 or perhaps within a couple of minutes later. On the police radio at 1:26, an officer says, “NBC News is reporting DOA,” to which the dispatcher replies, “That’s correct.” In the midst of some confusion, when the dispatcher is asked to clarify whether that NBC report meant Tippit or Kennedy was DOA, he replies, “J. D. Tippit.” Kennedy’s death, although widely rumored for some minutes on network radio reports, was not officially announced until 1:33 by White House Assistant Secretary Malcolm Kilduff at Parkland Hospital and was given as “approximately one o’clock,” although he probably had died ten minutes before that. It strains credibility that NBC could have learned that Tippit was DOA within only one minute of the officer being pronounced dead, so that also makes a time earlier than 1:25 more likely for when the doctor at Methodist Hospital pronounced him DOA. After Bowley said in our interview that he looked at his watch upon arriving at the scene of the Tippit shooting and saw the time as 1:10, he seemed to reconsider the sequence of that memory, saying that he might have checked the watch a few minutes after his arrival, which would make the time of the shooting even earlier than 1:10, as another witness originally reported. Bowley said he may have looked at the watch “I guess when I radioed in . . . because I was really concerned, you know, because I had to pick up my wife. That’s how the time got involved, because I was supposed to pick her up. I may have looked at it when I stopped my car. I just honestly don’t remember. Well, you know you don’t place much importance on things like that.” Asked if his watch was reliable, Bowley laughed and said, “Best I remember. I usually have pretty good watches.” But he conceded that “it could have been five minutes off.” When I told him that his observation of his watch was important because there is dispute about the time of the shooting, he admitted, “I had never heard there was. As a matter of fact, I have never heard the time mentioned before.” Despite Bowley’s honest confusion after the passage of twenty-nine years about when he had checked his watch, it seems likely that his account given in December 1963, that he did so shortly after leaving his car, is the most reliable version. Bowley’s concern about meeting his wife would have made it natural for him to check his watch when he experienced the initial delay caused by seeing the officer lying in the street. If he checked his watch at 1:10, and the officer had just been shot, that would be in approximate range with another eyewitness report of the time of the shooting as being about 1:06 or 1:07 (probably a couple of minutes too early; see below) as well as with the last reported transmissions by Tippit from his squad car shortly after that. The delay of several minutes between Bowley checking his watch and calling in the report at 1:16 is consistent with Bowley’s explanation of how he had to come to the aid of Domingo Benavides. Benavides told the Warren Commission that he had “set there for just a few minutes” in his pickup truck after the shooting because he was afraid the gunman might come back and “might start shooting again.” After he left his truck, Benavides had trouble trying to operate the radio in Tippit’s squad car, so Bowley made the transmission. Tippit’s last two transmissions on the police radio were both reported to have been at 1:08 and probably were further evidence of the approximate time of the shooting. He was attempting to reach the dispatcher, who did not respond to his call number, “78” (78 was his assigned district, four miles from where he was shot). Greg Lowrey, who has studied the case on the scene as thoroughly as anybody else, told me he believed Tippit was shot at 1:08. Another key Tippit researcher, Larry Ray Harris, allowing a brief time for Tippit to get out of his car and confront the pedestrian, told me he thought the shooting probably occurred at 1:09. Tippit’s calls around that time (which were unacknowledged by the police dispatcher) could have been to try to report that he was getting out of the car to investigate a suspect, although it is unclear how Tippit could have recognized Oswald as a suspect from the conflicting and generalized physical descriptions earlier broadcast on the police radio.

In that post, I must have erred on adding Fritz to Wade being involved in the Adams case, sorry and thanks, Steve, but later DA Watkins found about 300 cases worth investigating in which Wade was dubiously involved and cleared about 30 of the convicted people before the voters kicked him out of the office. Errol Morris found the evidence in Wade's files after Wade let him rummage through them. That is what led to exonerating Randall Dale Adams of his false conviction for a cop-killing. Wade saved DNA evidence in many cases. Maybe he subconsciously wanted to be exposed. In my 1993 interview with Wade, I found Wade a curious combination of stonewalling, caginess, real or feigned ignorance, and surprising revelations. I deliberately started with some softball questions before leading up to the controversial ones, and about the half-hour mark, Wade actually asked me if I didn't have any more interesting questions, so I then cross-examined him bluntly on a number of key topics, and he was fairly forthcoming. He and Leavelle both made it clear that they knew the case against Oswald for the assassination was flimsy and that they needed to try to pin the Tippit killing on him (based largely on what Fritz was telling them). By the way, in regard to mistakes we all make in this highly complex case despite our best efforts, and I check my books many times over for veracity and have rarely found errors in them, I always think of what President Kennedy said in 1961 on that subject of correcting errors before they turn into mistakes. That's what responsible researchers do as a matter of course. As I write in INTO THE NIGHTMARE, in the section titled, WHEN AN ERROR BECOMES A MISTAKE Perhaps because of his genuine loyalty to Kennedy’s memory, Sorensen was an honorable exception to most historians’ obstinate refusal to reconsider their initial orthodoxies about the case and to risk their reputations by questioning the official lies. While historians, with their longer perspective, have even less of an excuse to overlook the truth than journalists do, it may not be surprising that many journalists still cling so stubbornly to the disproven lies and myths of a story the media blew so badly fifty years ago; admitting to grave errors is no more common in the media than it is in government. President Kennedy, a former journalist himself, did not labor under that deficiency: He told the American Newspaper Publishers Association after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, “This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for, as a wise man once said: ‘An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’ We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.” (The wise man Kennedy quoted was the chemist and author Orlando A. Battista.) What is continually surprising, at least to someone well-versed in the case, is how blatantly false references to the assassination in articles, books, and television documentaries can sail through without being corrected, no matter how often and how thoroughly they are refuted by assassination researchers, and how a basic ignorance about the facts of the case can be maintained with such an utter absence of shame. It is as if we live in two parallel universes where this event is concerned: There is a narrative believed by the mass media and most mainstream historians, and a wholly different narrative believed by genuine scholars of the case and most of the American public. Factual accuracy is beside the point for many who write about the case, as Sylvia Meagher pointed out in the sixties: “What is noteworthy about the advocates of the Report is that they defend their position largely by rhetoric, asking how anyone can possibly question the probity of Chief Justice Warren or Senator Russell (much as one may disagree with his views on race) or even Allen Dulles. They do not argue on evidence, because frequently they are uninformed.” Nor, she added, was the Warren Commission itself on a genuine fact-finding mission: "Indeed, although the evidence showed that Oswald had no motive, no means (marksmanship of the highest order), and no opportunity (his presence on the second floor of the Book Depository little more than a minute after the shooting, which to the men who encountered him at that time eliminated him from suspicion, constitutes an alibi), there is no indication in the vast collection of documentation that the Commission at any time seriously considered [as a body] the possibility that Oswald was not guilty, or that he had not acted alone." . . . Some in this forum pounce on the occasional mistake while ignoring the many they make without apparent compunction. It is healthy to have fact-checking by serious researchers.

You can choose to consider what JP Johnston said on Nov. 23, that he WOULD read the complaint about the assassination to the suspect, as a fait accompli, which it was not. Captain Will Fritz on Nov. 25 told the FBI's James Hosty that (in the words of the FBI document), "No arraignment on the murder charges in connection with the death of President KENNEDY was held inasmuch as such arraignment was not necessary in view of the previous charges filed against OSWALD [on the Tippit murder] and for which he was arraigned." Since Fritz was not always reliable (see THE THIN BLUE LINE for how he and the DPD helped frame an innocent man for killing another Dallas police officer), you might read Summers's book, which reports that "Officer J. B. Hicks was on duty in the relevant office [on Nov. 23, 1963] until aafter 2:00 A.M. and is certain Oswald was not arraigned at 1:35." The Warren Report states that the time Fritz signed the complaint charging Oswald with murdering Kennedy was "shortly after 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 23." At Oswald's midnight press conference, when he said he didn't know he had been charged with murdering the president, a reporter angrily said he had. But Detective Jim Leavelle, who was involved in the interrogations of Oswald, told me Oswald was telling the truth that he hadn't been informed of that charge by the authorities. Naturally, anything the DPD said, or the Warren Report claimed, has to be taken with a large grain of salt, but you can watch the press conference and see that Oswald appeared genuinely surprised. You might also not believe Hosty and the FBI, with good reason. But the way to study any facet of this case is to assess all the reports and draw conclusions of your own, doing so without preconceptions.

An FBI document says Oswald was never arraigned for the murder of JFK, only for the murder of Tippit, although he was charged with both murders. And a point about Calloway -- his escapade taking Tippit's service weapon and joyriding with it broke the chain of custody on that particular gun.

It seems that trolls are trying to take over the forum.

A podcast panel on the JFK assassination and Lee Oswald et al with host Robbie Robertson and fellow panel members, esteemed assassination researchers Joe Green and Richard Bartholomew.

I second what Jim DiEugenio says about Robbie Robertson -- he's a young JFK assassination/other political topics researcher who has gotten up to speed quickly and well. I enjoyed talking with him and will happily do so again.

See Warren Commission Exhibit 1054 in Vol. XXII ("Photographs of individuals present in lineups with Oswald") for two photos of the participants in the lineups, Dallas Police vice squad detectives William Perry and Richard Clark and jail clerk Don Ables (I would have posted these photos but wasn't able to do so). The two detectives at left are wearing suits and ties in these two photographs. The man at right, Ables, is wearing a checked short-sleeve shirt over an undershirt. Oswald was disheveled in the lineups and wearing only an undershirt with his pants. He also was bruised. Joseph Ball asked Detective Jim Leavelle in his WC testimony, "Is it unusual to use officers in the showup?" Leavelle replied, "Yes; we don't normally do it. . . . I know in all cases we usually try to have them dress as alike as possible, the same as each other." That clearly was not the case with these lineups. Although the detectives are wearing suits and ties in the photos, Captain Will Fritz said the officers took off their coats and neckties for the lineups; but Perry said he took off his coat and tie but put on another sport coat, and Clark said he took off his coat and tie but put on a red vest.

From Helen Markham's testimony before the Warren Commission: . . . Mr. [Joseph A.] BALL [assistant counsel]. Did anybody tell you that the man you were looking for would be in a certain position in the lineup, or anything like that? Mrs. MARKHAM. No, sir. Mr. BALL. Now when you went into the room you looked these people over, these four men? Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir. 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. I didn't know nobody. Mr. BALL. I know you didn’t know anybody, but did anybody in that lineup look like anybody you had seen before? Mrs. MARKHAM. No. I had never seen none of them, none of these men. Mr. BALL. No one of the four? Mrs. MARKHAM. No one of them. Mr. BALL. No one of all four? Mrs. MABKHAM. No, sir. Mr. BALL. Was there a number two man in there? Mrs. MARKHAM. Number two is the one I picked. Mr. BALL. Well, 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 anybody 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. Mr. BALL. When you saw him? Mrs. MARKHAM. When I saw the man. But I wasn’t sure, so, you see, I told them I wanted to be sure, and looked,at his face is what I was looking at, mostly is what I looked at, on account of his eyes, the way he looked at me. So I asked them if they would turn him sideways. They did, and then they turned him back around, and I said the second, and they said, which one, and I said number two. So when I said that, well, I just kind of fell over. Everybody in there, you know, was beginning to talk, and I don’t know, just -- . . .

Max Good will be talking about his documentary with Donald Jeffries on I PROTEST tomorrow, July 8, at 5 p.m. Eastern at https://www.rokfin.com/americaunplugged.

I posted on the RFK section of this site a new podcast interview I did with the rarely interviewed Scott Enyart, the only person taking pictures during the shooting. He discusses what happened, what he saw, and his Kafkaesque ordeal after the LAPD, to which he lent the photos, failed to return the ones he took during the shooting, only those he took during RFK's speech and in the ballroom after the shooting. This podcast is Bob Wilson's I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU. https://ochelli.com/rfk-assassination-witness-54-years-after/?fbclid=IwAR1U9eJGgaKdZbr01Yobf7KFgr2SdULQiqE-7Acw5emN8jJTpHmNTsCT9tA

RFK assassination witness Scott Enyart is the only person who took photographs in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen during the shooting. He also took pictures in the ballroom during the senator's victory speech and after the shooting. Enyart let the Los Angeles Police Department have the photos on the agreement that they would return them, but he never received the ones taken during the shooting. He tells that Kafkaesque story in this podcast discussion with me and host Bob Wilson on I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU. https://ochelli.com/rfk-assassination-witness-54-years-after/?fbclid=IwAR3tLkqNN7QG8U94Re0r4oftS-k1rkX69T2DFriKiogThR69R8cDstQQLFI