Tenth & Patton witness reportedly said she saw killer of Tippit at a building on Patton before the shooting

[Greg Doudna]

Tenth & Patton witness reportedly said she saw killer of Tippit at a building on Patton before the shooting

This is a witness that has received no prior notice or attention. This witness is unknown in Myers' book.

From pages of a typed document entitled "E. 10th Street Memo" in a Dallas Police Department file (the file is at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-Gig-Pi9TEQZWh8obarl2tM8s8mOuLjc/view ) . Underlining is original and bold is added.

"Re: Residents, Tenth Street, Oak Cliff, Dallas, Area of Tippitt [sic] Murder and the Abundant Life Temple

"1. Attached is a Xeroxed copy of the Dallas City Directory for 1964, which would have been compiled from persons living in subject area during the fall months 1963.

"2. Especially note: (. . .) c. North of E. 10th and Patton street intersection, at 117-119 and 121-123 North Patton, are two duplex apartments. They constitute the houses at one of which, a teen-aged girl reported at the scene of the Tippit killing seeing a bushy-haired man with a gun. (This report was relayed to me by George C. Haskins, in 1963 as well as now a resident of 426-1/2 E. 10th street). This girl accompanied another W/FM teenager who lived in one of the four apartments at 404 E. 10th street, and who was the girl who ran into her home and returned with a pink blanket to cover the slain officer's body. Haskins witnessed this girl's going for the blanket and stated that it was while she was in the house procuring the blanket that her 14 or 15-year-old girl friend told [Haskins] of seeing the man at the vacant duplex around the corner on N. Patton street just before the shooting. She said the man had been coming from one of the duplexes which was vacant. (Both duplexes are now vacant, and both have open front doors). This young witness would have been the friend of a girl living with one of the four families shown on attached street guide at 404 E. 10th street. She had not been further identified or located."

The vacant duplexes on Patton in one of which this witness saw the gunman are identified in this report as likely 117-119 and 121-123 Patton.

I believe this witness, never found at the time nor was there any attempt on the part of the Dallas police to find her at the time, was found in 2020 by Dale Myers, though Myers showed no realization of this report of the witness he had found. The witness Myers found in 2020 was 70-year old Mary J. Little, then 12 years old (not 14 or 15 as Haskins estimated), who lived with her parents and family at 111 Patton, same side of the street as the vacant duplexes which immediately adjoined her house. 

From reading Myers' 2020 account of Mary Little and the juxtaposition of the street addresses there can be hardly any doubt that this is her, that that is who the above witness was. However, in her decades-later account to Myers, Mary denies to Myers that she saw the gunman, nor does she mention what Haskins says she told him at the scene). Here is Myers relating what Mary Little, at age seventy, told him of that day, after Mary and her father inside their house heard shots (https://jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2020/11/emory-austin-his-daughter-mary-and.html ) :

 "Mary ran out the front door and saw a black maid [Acquila Clemmons] approaching the northwest corner of Tenth and Patton from the west. Mary ran up to her. She was bawling and taking the white apron she was wearing and wringing her hands with it, saying, 'Oh my god! What's happening? First the president and now this!' This was the first Mary heard that the president had been shot.

"Mary told me that she looked to her left and saw a police car. The door of the squad car was wide open and a policeman was laying near the left front tire. She later said that once she arrived at the corner of Tenth and Patton, she was focused on the police car to her left and that had she simply turned to look south down Patton, she might have seen Lee Harvey Oswald making his escape.

"Mary walked toward the police car parked further down Tenth Street, adding that the black main never crossed Patton to get any closer to the car but instead remained on the northwest corner of Tenth and Patton.

"As the twelve-year-old approached the fallen officer, she saw a bullet wound in his right temple, but no other wounds. The wound in the temple had a trickle of blood coming from it.

"A lady came out of a white, wooden two-story house, located directly across the street from the police car, carrying a blanket. She said, 'Oh my god! Oh my god! Just throw this over him! Throw it over him!' The woman then retreated to her home.

"Suddenly a white man appeared on the scene, coming from the east end of the block, but that was all she remembered about him. She didn't see anyone using the police radio or any other people at the scene other than the three she described--the black maid, the woman with the blanket, and the man. Mary believed she was the third person to arrive on the scene."

Myers does not appear to have been aware of this obscure report of a witness at the scene, George Haskins, who told decades earlier of having talked to this girl, Mary Little, at the scene, and the difference in the stories.

Which is correct? The earlier second-hand account that 12-year old Mary Little claimed, moments after the shooting, to have seen the gunman, and even claimed to have seen that gunman at one of the two vacant duplexes next to her house before he shot Tippit? Or the decades-later account of Mary Little herself?

I think I can report something, a third item, which may tilt the balance on this question in favor of Mary Little did see the gunman, notwithstanding she said nothing of it to Myers in 2020. For I remember reading somewhere else in Dallas Police documents--though unfortunately I cannot at this moment identify or link, but I remember it and will attempt to re-find it--in which I saw another Dallas Police document, some kind of police notation of witness leads or something, and reference is made to Mary Little (or someone I recognized as Mary Little on the basis of the Myers story, one or the other), as having claimed she saw the gunman. I remember when I saw that I noted that Myers had not seemed to be aware of that earlier detail in that document concerning Mary Little when he wrote of his interview with Mary Little.  

A witness that important at the time, missed all these years, unnecessarily in light of the document known to the Dallas Police citing the Haskins information all this time. Myers in 2020: "Mary [Little] told me that prior to my call [in 2020] she had only talked to three people about what she saw"--a German photographer the evening of Nov 22, and two men writing a book "between the early 1970s and 1980s", only those in all those years--no memory of ever having been interviewed by the Dallas Police or any other investigation.

But Myers found this witness in her old age, bringing an unknown witness to life like Rip Van Winkle so to speak, and now I have identified this witness that Myers found as known to and could easily have been found by law enforcement long ago, who evidently just couldn't be bothered to go find her and talk to her based on Haskins' information, or provide that information to another of the investigations so they could.  

Edited August 1, 2022 by Greg Doudna