DPD Ruses, Part II: Sgt. "Slowmo" Hill takes some 15 minutes to get from one window to the next

[Donald Willis]

DPD Ruses, Part II: Sgt. "Slowmo" Hill takes some 15 minutes to get from one window to the next

Why would Sgt. Hill stick his head out a sixth-floor window and shout re discovering shells some 10-to-15 minutes after Mooney had found them?  He testified that--just after the finding of the shells--"I asked the deputies again to guard the scene".  Next, he testifies, he did his cry out the next window, bumped into Capt. Fritz, and ran downstairs "to make sure that the crime lab was en route".  "About the time I got to the street, Lt. Day from the crime lab was arriving." (v7p47)

Now, let's see if the summoned Day arrived at the depository as promptly as Hill suggests... Lt. Day: "Shortly before 1 o'clock I received a call from the police dispatcher to go to 411 Elm Street, Dallas... I arrived at the location on Elm about 1:12." (v4p249) In the time, then, that it took for Day to take the call and then travel from city hall to Dealey, Hill went from the sixth floor to the front of the building.  Talk about out-of-sync--a 10-minutes-plus gap between Mooney's cry, circa 12:58, and Hill's own.  Note how Day's "shortly before 1 o'clock" echoes Deputy Mooney's "approaching 1 o'clock" as the time that the latter found the hulls. (v3p285)

Adjusting the timeline:
Vincent Bugliosi pegs Hill's shout at 1:06 ("Four Days in November", p116), but even Hill disputes that.
According to Hill, he shouts from the 6th floor about 1:10 (just before, that is, Day arrives)
At 1:11, Sawyer radios re the 5th/3rd floor. (The Warren Report very mistakenly uses the time of Sawyer's transmission as the source for its "approximately 1:12pm" shell find. [p79]  The time gap between Mooney's shout and Sawyer's transmission suggests that Sawyer may indeed have still been upstairs at 1 o'clock.)
Hill's shout, then, had to have come after 1:11, or Sawyer would have hung fire, caught as he was between Hill's "6th floor" and his own information re "5th/3rd floor".
Out front, at 1:12, testifies Hill, he told both Day and Sawyer about "shots... fired from... the sixth floor" (v7p47).  But Hill could not have been in two places at once--upstairs, that is, shouting, as early as 1:12, and, downstairs, talking to Day and Sawyer, again about 1:12.  And Sawyer would have countered Hill's tale with his own, but Hill fails to mention such an exchange.  Meanwhile, Day testifies that he was "directed to the sixth floor" by Sawyer.  Not by Sawyer he wasn't--not around this time, (a) not having heard from Hill re the sixth floor and (b) having himself just radioed re the "3rd floor".  Hill's alert had to have come after 1:12.  And Sawyer, it seems, would have directed Day to a different floor.

Just as the time of Sawyer's entry into the building had to keep getting pushed later and later, the timing of Hill's shout, too, has to keep getting pushed ever later.  On YouTube, "No True Flags Here" says that the time of Hill's shout cannot be pinpointed.  However, it can be fairly accurately estimated, and in fact was--by those redoubtable DPD Homicide boys, Dets. Sims and Boyd.  They write that the "empty hulls were found about 1:15." (Sims/Boyd report p2)  Whence did they get that time?

They cite Mooney, but we know that that time was not from Mooney.  (The DPD radio logs confirm Mooney's "approaching 1 o'clock": At 12:58, Sgt. Harkness radios, "Give us the Crime Lab station wagon down to the TSBD" [CE 1974 p41])  Nor was it from Sawyer--his transmission was on the radio at 1:11.  Where did Sims and Boyd get "about 1:15"?  Where?  Yes!--although that could hardly have been the time that the shells were found, it could have been "about" the time that... fellow-officer Hill shouted.  Yes!--Hill is Mr. "About 1:15".  He's about the only possibility left, after Mooney, Bugliosi's phantom source, and Sawyer have been eliminated.  And Homicide would want to legitimatize and memorialize Hill's yesterday's-news flash.

But why 1:15?  That's so long after the shells were actually found that it's not even funny.  Well, maybe it is.  The usual point of reference for Hill's shout is naturally, but incorrectly, Mooney's shout.  It wouldn't have taken Fritz, Sims, and Boyd 15 minutes to get their act together to counter Mooney.  More likely it could have been implemented in about three or four minutes--say, after someone upstairs (through an open window) or downstairs--perhaps Hill himself--heard Sawyer's 1:11 reverberating radio bomb re the "third floor", and after the great minds of Homicide confabbed a bit re a counter-strategy.  "Okay, let's use you, Jerry."  "Great, Cap'n!  What do I say?"

Hill on his sixth-floor sound stage at 1:15 was hardly news.  At that point in time, he would be, simply, disinformation.  Hill's breathless, 15-minutes-late "Glory be!  We just found some empty shells, right there, to my left!" performance actually negates the idea that they were found on that particular floor.  Period.  Why else such a ludicrously tardy outburst?  The tardiness can't have had anything to do with *what* he was shouting.  After all, the shells *had* been found.  It had to have been about *where* he was shouting *from*.

Case, though, not closed.  Hill's phony photo op does not say on *what* floor the hulls were found, just on what floor they were *not* found.  Oddly enough, at 1:15, at least three photographers caught his epochal performance on film, yet no one, apparently, got a picture of Mooney, at another window, on another floor, 15 minutes earlier.  Where did all these suddenly swarming photographers come from, fifteen minutes too late to take Mooney's picture?  Dropped from the sky, right into Hill's lap, they were, apparently.