Donald Willis

I don't know if Jack White posted here or not. But in 1998, he and I exchanged posts on alt.conspiracy.jfk re witnesses who were reluctant to come forward for fear of their lives. (Shades of Howard Brennan.) One witness, whom he called Beta, "was ordered by the Secret Service to destroy and fabricate evidence", and he stipulated that tapes of his confession not be made public until he died. 25 years on... does anyone here know of any follow-up to Mr. White's post?

Can't say I blame you for not trusting accounts popping up some 50 years later. I myself discount recent witness reports re the Texaco end of the story. Oh, and Virginia Davis's story of finding yet another shell many years later, recounted in I believe the first edition of the Myers... And don't get me started on Jack Tatum...

If 1:10 is established as the time of Tippit's death, I think it will have to be by means other that the "1:10"s printed on page 19 of CE 705. I think they were indeed just typos--actually altering that page would have entailed also altering page 18, at least, and it doesn't seem to have suffered any emendations. As I say, 1:10, though, would be preferable to me, too, with my scenario re Oswald on the bus to Marsalis arriving there about 1:20. Even further outside the margin for error... That said, I have found the first full-length DPD transcription of the logs, the Sawyer Exhibits, as transcribed by DPD Sgt. Henslee, to be fraudulent, at least at key points. However, like 705, it also has "1:19" (on page 395) for "What's that address on Jefferson?", etc., and down to "This officer on 10th..." That transcription was done on 12/3/63. Right now, I'm working on a comparison of early Tom Alyea statements to later ones. But after that, maybe I could take up the taping project with Michael. I assume that the resultant tapes would be ordered directly from him rather than go through the extra step of having them sent to me first. And we'd have to know how many tapes to make. And what kind of packaging should I do for the tape I send him? I've had packages damaged in transit before!

Of course. Because that would contradict his insistence that they lost the suspect because Scoggins was so nervous. Callaway was playing the hero, and downgrading other witnesses, like Scoggins and Benavides. Scoggins of course was induced to downplaying himself--his first, false, statement re returning to the scene with Callaway and directly returning then to cab HQ was supplanted later in his testimony by his testifying that he left the Tippit scene with the police. Clearly, he was suborned to make that first statement in order to cover for the fact that he not only talked to police at the scene, he left with them, or one of them. Why would Fritz & co. not want Scoggins to admit that he was in very close contact with police from the get-go? Because then his failure to attend any of the Friday lineups & ID Oswald would have been inexplicable. Pretty obviously, Scoggins did not believe that Oswald was Tippit's killer. He knew Tippit, thus it's not surprising that he would go on two or three hunts for the perp. Oh--I say that his second statement re his actions after returning to the scene was the correct one because FBI agent Barrett (I think that's the name) told Dale Myers that he saw Scoggins' cab still at the scene when HE arrived, at about 1:40. Almost 20 minutes after Scoggins & Callaway returned. Myers scrupulously fails to mention Scoggins' second, correct take on the subject, and otherwise ignores Barrett's quietly explosive observation in his Tippit narrative. But it's there in his book, if he'd only take the trouble to read it...

I hear the second mention as "488", which I had previously noted on my copy of 705. Do not hear an earlier "488". Right after the "488" is a "599". Then the time "1:08".

1:20. If Oswald took the bus all the way to Oak Cliff, he would have arrived about 1:20, according to Joseph Backes, in his article "Oswald and McWatters' Bus". I forget if he explained how he got that time. At any rate, the principal evidence for Oswald's too-late arrival in Oak Cliff are the measures which were taken to discredit pretty much every word in McW's affidavit. One of his statements in his 11/22 affidavit, however, still stands, to this day: "I picked up a man on the lower end of town on Elm around Houston." In his testimony he couldn't explain that, he could only deny it: "I didn't pick up no man... I must not have read that very good when I signed that." (p282) He couldn't explain, that is, why he said "Elm around Houston" or, for that matter, "man", not "boy".

I'm open to the prospect of Tippit having been shot earlier than 1:15. It would help my own timeline for Oswald's arrival in Oak Cliff. Heaven and earth (or at least earth, or parts of Dallas) were moved to discredit McWatters' original affidavit, in which McW has O on the bus all the way to Marsalis, in Oak Cliff. Why would DPD discredit McW unless that meant that O got to Oak C too late to have shot Tippit? Yes, this eliminates Whaley from the picture, and puts O's return to the boarding house forward maybe 20 minutes.

Something like that. I'd say definitely post-murder, when I think that Markham & the Davises first saw him. Unlike most CTs, that is, I think that Markham got to the scene a bit later than she was supposed to have, not a bit earlier. And she saw Scoggins bending over Tippit's body to pick up the gun, and she thought he was the perp checking on his handiwork. With all the covering-up and confusion, though, can hardly say for sure... By the time, though, that Scoggins & Callaway were leaving the scene, the latter may have had the pistol.

I should add that Armstrong's article is beautifully reasoned, as far as it goes, which wasn't quite far enough...

i might have been able to help you out there. I had two copies of the tapes, but the one I started using again today started coming out of its cassette. So now I have only one. And my recorder is breaking down too--it won't fast forward or rewind... I was lucky my 2nd tape worked, but for how long? I got both of them from Dave Dix, in Minneapolis, about 25 years ago. I see that he died in 2007. He got them from a public library. All bad news. Minor: Bowley's "1:10" County affidavit (not a DPD report) was made out on Dec. 2nd, not that same afternoon. All those "1:10" to "1:18" "changes were really just the two dispatcher-noted time changes on the page. That is, every transmission on page 19 is, yes, in effect, "changed" by those two time changes, including innocuous ones like "What's that address on Jefferson?" That is, the time of each transmission was not changed, individually--just the dispatcher's time notifications, the two of them. And if you accept that the two changes on page 19 were not just typos, then Bowley's call to the dispatcher ends at about 1:10 and begins--on page 18, about 1:16. That is, if actual changes were made on page 19, changes would also have to have been made on page 18, and there's still a "1:16" there. Finally, if disk-to-tape-back-to-disk alterations had been made here, why didn't the DPD/SS make alterations in transmissions like the 12:37 "second window from the end" one? They could have changed "second window" to "end window" and the call number of the cop who sent it ("22") to the number of the cop who falsely claimed to have sent it ("127" I think). And Sgt. Hill's call from Oak Cliff re an automatic is still there for all to hear...

I was excited by this article, at first. Because I saw on my copy of page 19 of CE 705, two handwritten corrections: After "10-4, 603 and 602", "1:19" is the first correction--the "0" becomes a "9". The second correction is on the last line of page19: "10-4, 605, 1:19" is how it is again corrected, by hand--the "9" over the apparent "0". Big trouble in Trinity River City... Fortunately or unfortunately, I have a tape of the radio logs. And in both instances, the dispatcher clearly says "1:19". As Rankin guessed, they were, then, apparently just typographical errors. If David Von Pein had done a little research, then, he could have eschewed his usual All Arrows Point to Oswald at 10th & Patton pontificating and cut to the chase. I still firmly believe--based mainly on the treatment of witnesses WW Scoggins and Cecil McWatters and, lesserly, Mrs M & the Davises--that Oswald did not shoot Tippit. (JFK is another matter.) I'm afraid the only way out (or in) on this particular (radio log) evidence would be to show that the logs themselves were doctored, and I'm afraid, again, that the actual logs (not the transcriptions) are, I believe, about the only trustworthy pieces of evidence re 11/22/63...

I gotta go with Sgt. Croy, who heard that a cab driver had picked up the gun. Scoggins was the posse commander, I believe...

Vary good. A missing piece of the Oak Cliff story found...

Just want to add: Looking at the Hill/Walker transmissions from the viewpoint of the suborners... Hill's was a big deal. The suborners (I like that designation) did not just have him mis-identify his witness, they had him, implicitly, deny that he even had a witness and made a call re same. Why would a transmission from 12th & Beckley seem so potentially explosive? Depends on the particular witness. Nothing explosive re Harold Russell. Nor, I think, Benavides--surely, the suborners would like to have had the latter looking down Jefferson rather than 10th to the ALT. But Scoggins' first take on what he did after he & Callaway returned to the scene (left immediately for taxi HQ) would have been exploded by being exposed as Hill's witness. (If he hadn't exploded it himself by his 2nd take (got in a car with cops). And Brock's parking-lot story would have been exploded, too, with perhaps an even louder bang. So, as I've said, I think it comes down to... Scoggins or Brock. Nuff said for now.

You're the first person I know of (besides myself, that is) who gives the WFAA footage the weight it deserves. Most researchers (including Myers) go on as if it didn't exist, and keep giving a pass to the Brocks, Patterson, & Reynolds. I think it was mainly Callaway who exaggerated Callaway's importance. For instance, he bad-mouthed Scoggins, saying the latter's nervousness was the reason that they lost the suspect. But Scoggins, in a later I think it was FBI report, told them that cops or security officers stopped the two & took over. And an added passage in Myers' revision of "With Malice" confirms the latter version of the Scoggins/Callaway story--it was in fact two security officers, Holmes & Wheless, who headed off S&C. There are of course two conflicting Benavides stories--in, first, his WC testimony, and, then, in that found in early police reports by Poe/Jez and Leavelle. In his own testimony, he says that he last saw--around the corner of the Davis house--the suspect traveling on the east side of Patton, toward "the office". But that seems to be as close as he got to Jefferson (in the hearings version). In the earlier 11/22 version, he winds up at the ALT. You can't square those two versions, and I have to go with the early reports, since Benavides' affidavits & statements seem to have disappeared, leaving the way open for him to say anything the next year. Either way, though, he seemed not to have gone in a southwest direction at all, toward the Texaco area. Unless he really did see a suspect going west on Patton, and later followed up on that... But, as I've said, the main thing here is that we now know that no known witness saw a suspect headed towards or though the parking lot. (Yes, I'm discounting more recent reports of fresh Texaco witnesses!) That doesn't rule out that the perp dropped the jacket there. Perhaps the DPD simply wanted a witness or two, and manufactured three of them. On the other hand, that certainly doesn't rule out that the jacket was planted.

Hill and the FBI-report Brock can't be reconciled. Hill & his witness are up on Beckley. Brock has the suspect going "into the parking lot". Brock & the TV-footage Reynolds also can't be reconciled. The man they saw did NOT go into the lot, he went into the old house, as per the footage. The TV Reynolds trumps the parking-lot Reynolds and Brock. Thus there were no witnesses that we know of who saw the suspect headed towards the lot. I think that that's the most important point here. Who and what Hill's witness was is, yes, open to debate. He could be--as I used to maintain--Scoggins. Or even--long shot--the person that Myers says he was--Harold Russell. But as far as we know, the Brocks were in the best position to see someone heading up the next block, towards Beckley. However, after the fact, Scoggins and Callaway drove up to Beckley, but seemed to go north there, rather than south, where Hill reported from 12th & Beckley. So, yes, I could accept Scoggins again as Hill's witness. And the Brocks were simply roped into the Reynolds story--like him, switching the site from the old house to the parking lot.

I had thought, previously, that it was Scoggins with Hill--the former did testify that he went with cops. Maybe it was Scoggins. But probably not Benavides--he was up north, by the temple, not south, near Jefferson. Whoever it was was political dynamite, or Hill wouldn't have disassociated himself altogether from the 1:26 transmission. It was nice that the cover-up crew made it so obvious that there was a serious problem there. But it's up to us to figure out what exactly that problem was. Hill and Owens, in testimony, hint that whoever it was ran into the two of them at the Tippit site after coming down from the Texaco area. That fits Brock, but could also, yes, fit Scoggins. I now favor Brock because he and the missus went along with Reynolds' false testimony (and statements) that he saw the suspect going towards the parking lot. That was dynamite which blew up in the faces of Reynolds, Brock, Brock, and Patterson, when the WFAA-TV footage was resurrected.

I see one reason why CT-leaning folks (like myself) might scorn Aynesworth. Here, he tries to wriggle out of writing that Mrs. Markham used the phrase "bushy haired" in describing a Tippit suspect: "Hugh Aynesworth... stated that the word, 'bushy-haired', was his interpretation of what she had said. 'She might have said something like, "His hair was messed up", or "He was running and his hair was blown about", Aynesworth recalled. 'But I know that the word "bushy-haired" was not hers exactly.'" Oh, but it apparently was. The 11/22/63 Poe-Jez report to Chief Curry also states that Markham used the phrase "bushy hair" (With Malice p487). Aynesworth's hapless protest re that one word, or phrase, suggests that the other two words which Mark Lane used for her description of the suspect were spot-on, too: "short, stocky". Further, one of Dale Myers' updated sections in his revised "With Malice" suggests that the man she thought was the killer was either WW Scoggins or Ted Callaway, who were in the taxi which (the update says) an hysterical woman was pointing out and screaming at as it left the Tippit scene, with, she reportedly said, the killer on board. A photo in WM on page 227 shows a relatively short and stocky Scoggins. (Short compared to William Whaley, seen in the same photo.) Finally (Aynesworth is so inspiring), DPD Sgt. Croy testified, "There was a report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit..." (v12 p202 WC hearings) There's a frame grab of Croy with Markham (WM p110) at the Tippit scene. Apparent consilience between a DPD report, a Dallas security agent (the original source for the Myers update), and a police sergeant. Hardly conspiracy buffs...

If that's where the DPD originally got that description, then they really screwed up. Because an FBI dispatch to Gordon Shanklin connected that physical description to a report from DPD Insp. Sawyer that a suspect so described was seen running from the depository "shortly after the shooting... Approximately 30, slender, 5'10", 165 lbs..... [carrying] a 30/30... Winchester." So much for the rifle found upstairs later in the building!

The 1:22pm DPD radio message translates as The jacket was planted and the witness transplanted (revision) It seems that all I'm doing these days is correcting myself. James DiEugenio caught me in a blatant error on another thread. I caught myself re another error on the first version of this thread. I trusted a DPD transcription of their own radio logs (CE 705). But, digging out my old tape recording of said logs (provided about 25 years ago by Dave Dix, from I believe, the Minnesota Public Library), I found that the 1:22 transmission did NOT say just "300 E. Jefferson", but "300 block of E. Jefferson". I have incorporated the new (old) information accordingly and made the necessary changes... 1:22pm DPD radio message translates as The jacket was planted and the witness transplanted (revision) First faint clue: DPD Sgt. G.D. Henslee transcribes the first line of the transmission thusly: "Have a description of the suspect on Jefferson." Actually, the transmission runs, "We have a description on this suspect over here on Jefferson." The omitted "over here" makes it sound like the sender, Officer Roy Walker, is actually on Jefferson. Is there a problem with that? Oh, yes. Second faint clue: But, first, continuing the text of the 1:22 transmission: "Last seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson. He's a white male, about 30, 5'8", black hair, slender, wearing a white jacket, white shirt, and dark slacks". (DPD radio-logs tape) And note that the dispatcher, at 1:26, has the suspect "going west on Jefferson from the 300 block". (CE 705 p22) Third faint clue: At 1:19:05, the dispatcher tells Walker to check out 501 E. 10th at Denver (WMp105). Then, at 1:19:59, he tells Walker "The suspect's running west on Jefferson from the location" (DPD radio logs/WMp109). When, at 1:21:37, Walker radioes "I haven't seen anything on Jefferson yet" (DPD radio logs), the dispatcher again directs him to "501 E. 10th at Denver" (CE 705p20/WM p113). Finally, at 1:22:36, Walker radios his "over here" description. From his 1:21:37 transmission, we know that Walker was, at the time, on Jefferson. But we don't know, from his radio transmissions, whether he was ever at 10th & Patton. He doesn't correct or follow-up the dispatcher's "10th at Denver", after either of the latter's advisories. 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.

'tis. I meant Ford, not Bush.

Bush did, however, stop Bob Jackson's testimony at an interesting point. Jackson: "I stayed in the car.... We were moving fast and went on under the underpass." Bush: "That is all, Mr. Chairman." (v2p164) Richard Trask, "Pictures of the Pain", p427: "Jackson and [Mal] Couch [who were both in camera car 3] shouted at their driver to stop at the underpass, and both men ran back to the knoll area." Read Jackson's testimony, then, and it sounds as if he did not get out of the car in Dealey. Why would he (or Bush) want to avoid that part of Jackson's story? This little mystery, perhaps. complements another Dealey mystery. At 12:37, Patrolman L.L. Hill radios, "Get some men up here to cover this building, this Texas School Book Depository. It is believed that them shots came from, as you're facing it on, I believe, Elm, looking towards the building, it would be the upper right hand corner, at the second window from the end." (DPD radio logs) Hill was calling from the knoll area. This "second window" witness was never officially identified. Jackson, who was, it seems, in that area, might be the link between these two mysteries...

Thank you, Greg. That clears that up.

Still trying to square Kinsley's suspect with Walker's, at 1:22. (Walker's was still wearing a jacket, so he wouldn't have come out from behind the Texaco.) Guess there could have been a 2nd suspect running down Jefferson, but I doubt it. More likely, the 2nd man was Benavides' church guy, running north rather than south.

No one seems to have responded here to the claim that a defective firing pin would have made it impossible for the gun to have been used in Tippit's murder. Or are we to assume that this problem was addressed long ago and is no longer a problem?