Donald Willis

The missing documents are an indication that we don't know the real story re both Benavides & Scoggins. Good work, Michael!

Sorry, I should have said the suspect, not The One Oswald. The One and Only Oswald would have been almost to the theatre by that time...

Glad to add to the confusion😉. Actually, neither Scoggins nor Benavides would have been The One Oswald spotted as far west as the 300 block of Jefferson (in Officer Walker's transmission at 1:22). Scoggins might have been the one spotted by some of the 7 or so witnesses (as per Poe) running down the alley, though.

Don't get me started on the Davises and doors...

I think that the "second" Oswald may simply have been Benavides, along with Scoggins, the first and only two to witness the shooting. The former went off towards the temple area; the latter, towards the alley and Jefferson, both looking for the one Oswald.

I'm afraid I have to keep Sgt. Hill at the depository scene until about 1:14, to make his spurious, very belated ID of the 6th floor as the site of the shells.

My scenario is simply that no one saw the gentleman doff the jacket, whoever or whatever he was. Having witnesses see someone headed towards the lot was apparently intended to quell suspicions that the thing was planted. But having one "witness" (Reynolds) discredited unquells suspicions...

I think I've seen that scenario played out in a mystery movie or two. But what if the "38 auto" was not a blunder? I've been on both sides of this issue...

The most famous of such 550/2 transmissions was the 1:41 "shells at the scene" one. In "With Malice" (p260), Dale Myers writes, "In a 1986 interview, Hill admitted being the cop behind the strange broadcast."

You say that Brock was not at the Tippit scene. Here's an excerpt from my earlier "1:22pm DPD radio message...": "Fourth (getting somewhere) clue: Dale Myers insists that Walker met and talked to Warren Reynolds at the murder scene: "Reynolds returned to 10th & Patton at about [1:20], despite Reynolds' testimony to the contrary" (p112). True, in 1983, Walker told Myers that he did meet Reynolds, about 1:22. However, he adds, "One of the used car lot operators saw the incident... Warren Reynolds" (p114). The latter never said that he saw the shooting--Walker's memory fails him here. And Reynolds would hardly have been the one to tell Walker, "Last seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson". Ruinously for him, Walker told Myers that it was "Reynolds [who] gave me the description of the gunman" (p114). Walker was apparently unaware that TV film footage has turned up showing Reynolds telling police at the scene that he last saw a suspicious man going into the back of an old house near the Texaco station (WM p131). Reynolds, then, could not have been Walker's "300 block of E. Jefferson" witness. (Reynolds' suspicious man may not have been the gunman at all, but a vigilante trailing the gunman.) Myers, then, with one hand, was simply extending Walker's witness-identity deception, despite his own text and frame grabs which, with the other hand, expose said deception! Myers giveth and Myers taketh away. Fifth (gathering steam) clue: Myers then "buttresses" the invented Walker/Reynolds confab with yet another out-of-thin-air incident, based on the word of... no one at all: "Warren Reynolds, who had come with [Sgt. Bud Owens & Assistant DA Bill Alexander] from 10th & Patton, pointed to an old house near the Texaco station..." (p120) Alexander did not testify to the Warren Commission, and Owens, in his Commission testimony, did not mention bringing along a witness to the Texaco area. None of the principals, then--Reynolds, Walker, Alexander, Owens--can support Myers' two little vignettes re Reynolds going to and leaving the scene of the crime circa 1:20 and 1:22. Thin air. Sixth (Eureka!) clue: Relocation, relocation, relocation. Why would Walker and Myers go to so much trouble to falsely identify and relocate a witness? Well, what other witness or witnesses were "over here on Jefferson"? (Pat Patterson was with Reynolds, so he was most probably an old-house witness, too.) Robert and Mary Brock were, in effect the gatekeepers of the parking-lot suspect. Mary Brock was the only witness who clearly stated that she "last observed [the suspect] in the parking lot directly behind" the service station. (WM p551) They may have seen the suspect, but not in the parking lot, and certainly not doffing his jacket. Because at 1:22, he was reported "seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson", still wearing his "white jacket". Certainly worth Walker's false identification of his witness, and Myers' subsequent, false relocation of him elsewhere. Two wrongs and no right. And the first transmission--at 1:21--re the Texaco location was the dispatcher's "Subject just passed 401 E. Jefferson" (CE 705p21), the last address, going west, before the 300 block. One of the Brocks must have been its source, as well as the source for "300 block of E. Jefferson". Seventh clue: At 1:26, Sgt. Gerald Hill reported from 12th & Beckley, "Have a man in the car with me that can identify the suspect if anybody gets... one." (CE 1974 p63) About 1:23, at the Tippit scene, according to Hill's testimony, "Another person came up [and] told us the man had run over into the funeral home parking lot", which was opposite the Texaco station (v7p48). Sgt. Bud Owens similarly testified that, at the "scene of the shooting... we were informed by a man whom I do not know that the suspect that shot Officer Tippit had run across a vacant lot toward Jefferson" (v7p79). Someone, then, from the Texaco area--Hill and Owens both garbled the where of it--had run down to where the police were first congregating. And Hill, clearly, immediately, took this man near to where the man had last seen the suspect, the 300 block of E. Jefferson. Eighth clue: But there must have been a big problem--retrospectively--with this witness. In fact, there is, in Hill's testimony, an implicit, hapless denial that he even had a witness or that he had even radioed from 12th & Beckley, even though it's on the record. On the record, Gerald! Both the FBI transcription (see above) and Myers (p124) acknowledge that Hill sent the 1:26 message. Hill testified, falsely, that, about 1:25, he left the Tippit scene and "whipped around the block. I went down to the first intersection east of the block where all this incident occurred and made a right turn and traveled one block and came back up on Jefferson", where he met Owens at the Texaco/old-house site (v7p48). The harried Warren Commission did not have time to check out every DPD-spun tale. Who was Hill's radioactive witness, whom, figuratively, he dare not touch, or acknowledge, let alone name? Myers apparently knew, hence his totally unsupported relocation of that witness (as well as Officer Walker) from Crawford & Jefferson to 10th & Patton. This is called throwing the hounds off the scent. But by fallaciously drawing a witness away from the Crawford area, Myers unintentionally draws attention to that area. And Hill and Owens suggest, clumsily, but perhaps basically accurately, that a person from Texaco ran down to 10th & Patton. Reynolds was looking east from Crawford area. But Hill's witness was looking west, towards Beckley. Now who could have gotten a pretty good look at the fleeing suspect, good enough to have estimated height, weight, race, and age, and described the man's clothing? Who could have seen him that closely--seen him as, say, he passed the Texaco station? Robert and/or Mary Brock, of course. Walker doesn't indicate the sex or number of his witnesses ("We have a description"), so it could have been either of the Brocks who contacted the dispatcher about the same time as did Walker. And, just as the WFAA-TV footage of Reynolds exposes the Walker lie, so it exposes the Brocks' lies. As noted above, Mrs. Brock stated that she informed Reynolds that "she last observed [the suspect] in the parking lot directly behind Ballew's Texaco Service Station". Clearly, she did *not* so inform him, not without some strong input from Reynolds, who had his own story to tell and was telling it to the cops, that day, and would have told it to her. But she failed to give herself and her husband a lifeline out of the Reynolds morass. A frame-grab is worth a thousand words. Moral: Don't hitch your wagon to Warren Reynolds. Despite their apparent proximity to the suspect, neither Brock was invited either to attend a lineup or to testify for the Commission. It might have been too easy, then, for people to connect the dots: "over here on Jefferson", "300 block of E. Jefferson", the Brocks. As the witnesses closest to both the 300 block of E. Jefferson and to the parking lot, the Brocks had to be downplayed, had to be weaned off Jefferson and weaned onto the parking lot. (Sgt. Hill didn't just downplay them--he vaporized them, or one of them.) More publicity would have meant more scrutiny, prickly questions. (On that same day--Jan. 21, 1964--Reynolds himself was slipping further into the morass: For his part, he misleadingly told the FBI then that he "last observed the individual to turn north" by the service station: "[The Brocks] informed him the individual had gone through the parking lot." [FBI interview report/WMp544] Naively, he apparently thought that the WFAA footage had been deep-sixed.) In sum: The jacket was planted, the Texaco jacket witnesses were transplanted, Oswald was, beyond doubt, being framed for Tippit's murder, and Dale Myers was last seen imploding.

You forget that he was asked about the "auto 38" transmission, and that he palmed that off on Stringer: "That probably is R.D. Stringer" (v7p57) In other words, he's passing on his embarrassing error to Stringer. Sweet guy, Hill. As Michael Kalin noted, above, I've argued for one of the Brocks as Hill's mobile witness, and still would--insert a Brock here as saying he or she last saw the perp heading up (or down) Jefferson, and you've got problems galore with the jacket story. There already were problems with the Reynolds end of it--his WC testimony was undercut by the same-day WFAA-TV film footage of Reynolds telling the cops that he last saw the supposed jacket man heading into an abandoned house. And the Brocks went with the Reynolds/parking lot fiction...

I have occasionally wondered about that revolver. At one point, I think I maintained that he had it on him when he left the depository.

I'm okay with most of that, until it gets to the subject of the witness. First, you assume--as most (including me, at one time) do--that it was a "crime scene witness", say, Benavides, Scoggins, or Callaway. (At that one time, I vacillated between Benavides & Scoggins.) Second, you assume that his ID is a "minor mystery". It shouldn't be any kind of mystery now. Dale Myers interviewed Hill, but apparently did not bring up the subject of his 1:28 witness. He relies on his choice for that witness, Harold Russell, based only on the latter's FBI interview saying that he went with the cops, at one point. But Hill never confirmed this, to my knowledge. Myers apparently blew his chance to solve this problem. He didn't even acknowledge that there was a problem, that Hill neglected to mention the subject in his WC testimony. The silence of Hill and Myers re the former's omission at the hearings begins to turn this into a major mystery...

Greg -- Your scenario tallies with neither Hill nor Russell. Hill testified that he met Owens at the Texaco/old-house area, then "went back around to the original (Tippit) scene". (p48) Nothing about going from the Texaco scene to 12th & Beckley. Nothing about ferrying a witness from either the Texaco or Tippit scene at all. In neither his 1/21/64 FBI interview nor his 2/23/64 FBI interview did Russell say that he went to the Texaco/old-house area. And if , as you posit, Hill picked up Russell there, why would he take a separate car (Poe's) from 10th & Patton, and not continue travelling in Owens' car? As I said, Hill's testimony effectively atomized his witness.

Contrary to some others, I don't see any cause to suppose Hill was a liar in a wilful or premeditated sense that day. Perhaps another example of Hill's "dissembling" will make it clearer that he was not so innocent. At 1:23pm, on 11/22/63, Sgt. Owens & Sgt. Hill arrive at 10th St. & Patton [CE 1974 p59: Owens radios dispatcher, "Out at destination"/also see With Malice p385] At 1:27, Hill radios, "I'm at 12th & Beckley now. Have a man in the car with me that can ID the suspect." [CE [1974 p63] At 1:28, Owens radios from "here at the service station..." [CE 1974 p64] So, it's documented that, within 3 or 4 minutes, both Owens and Hill left the scene of the shooting, going their separate ways. Curiously, Hill testifies otherwise: "I took the keys to Poe's car,,,, I went around and met Owens . I whipped around the block. I went down to the first intersection east of the block, where all this incident occurred, and made a right turn, and traveled one block, and came back up on Jefferson. And met Owens in front of two large vacant houses..." [v7p48] 12th & Beckley is some 6 blocks from 10th & Patton. Hill didn't go to Beckley to meet Owens. Beckley is 3 blocks from Crawford, where the vacant houses were, where Owens was. Hill must have felt pretty safe testifying falsely here. The hapless Commission was using the Sawyer Exhibit A transcription (page 396) of the police radio logs, which identified "Westbrook-Batchelor", not Hill, as the source for Hill's 1:27 transmission. "Whipped around the block" he did. Not. How crucial was Hill's fabricated story? We can't know unless we know the identity of his 1:27 witness, whom Hill's testimony essentially atomized. Dale Myers took a guess: Harold Russell: but Russell had no information (that we know of) which would have required such blatantly false testimony from Hill.