Finish The Sentence, Re: Tippit:

[Greg Doudna]

[deleted]

Edited January 15 by Greg Doudna

[Bill Brown]

11 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

If Craford was the gunman, all of the witness identifications of the gunman as Oswald go out the window as being determinative, in light of how known that particular identification confusion was to witnesses who did not know either individual well from prior knowledge.

We have Oswald not a match to the fingerprints from a right hand on the right front bumper, and right front passenger door. (Correct, fingerprints, not a palm print, on the bumper, the person was not putting weight on that hand while touching, perhaps more like resting fingers for balance.)

On Tatum driving by and seeing the killer standing with hands in pockets, that could well be true until after Tatum drove by and missed seeing the killer lean into the side of the car to speak through that open vent window. Tatum would not see that since he was facing forward looking where he is driving. 

Also, Helen Markham insisted and was very clear she saw the killer’s arms raised, both of them, as he leaned into and talked through the patrol car window. She would have been able to see that through the glass of the patrol car. You might say she imagined the arms raised, and that is possible. But that’s what she said, and she said it consistently and immediately starting within minutes of the crime to police (Tatum over a decade later). 

On the shell hulls match to Oswald’s revolver, the issue is the chain of custody. As I showed in my paper on this matter (linked earlier above in this thread), of the five DPD officers who marked one or more of the shell hulls at the scene, four of those five never stated any identification firsthand in their own signature or direct sworn or unsworn testimony, and the fifth who did so testified under oath to a shell hull identification of his own mark which was rejected by the Warren Commission as correct and laughed at by Leavelle who didn’t believe it.

Do you accept Barnes’ sworn WC testimony to his own shell hull mark identification that the Warren Commission rejected and Leavelle too with mockery? 

(Straight answer to this question requested please.)

(And bear in mind that Barnes’ rejected and dismissed ID in his WC testimony is the only one of those five who swore to a chain of custody identification of any of those four hulls.)

But back to Craford, if he was the gunman then the murder weapon becomes the paper-bag revolver which Craford had means, motive and opportunity to have ditched out the rear window of a car driven by Ruby a few hours later, ca 6 am the next morning, before Craford took flight from Dallas for Michigan. 

And as shown on the other thread, the testimony from witnesses inside the theater, three out of three who gave information on this point, put Oswald in that main seating area on the ground level in the 1:15-1:20 pm time frame, meaning Oswald was not the man who ran into the balcony at 1:35, and means Oswald could not have been the killer of Tippit at Tenth and Patton at 1:15 pm since he was in the theater at that time. 

And the WC testimony of one of those three witnesses to Oswald’s alibi, Burroughs, who, in answer to WC counsel questioning, sounded like Burroughs identified the balcony man as Oswald, even though Burroughs insisted later that is not what he meant and that is not what happened, becomes explained by the reason brought out by Joe Bauer: Burroughs had failed a mental test in the Army and was no match for experienced WC counsel manipulative questioning. But Burroughs in his own voice later told that Oswald was in that theater before the movie started, as a paid-ticket customer. 

Even the claim of an “Oswald ID” wallet found somewhere at or close by the crime scene may need revisiting if Craford is a suspect. For Craford appears to have at times falsely claimed he was Oswald. The WFAA-TV wallet is a puzzle. I have thought it was Callaway’s but what if it was a wallet left behind by Craford who independently had occasionally impersonated Oswald. I have accepted Myers’ argument that the Barrett story of that wallet was mistaken and that may still be right, but if a gunman suspect is independently established to have elsewhere impersonated Oswald that is a bit of a coincidence. 

 

"If Craford was the gunman, all of the witness identifications of the gunman as Oswald go out the window as being determinative, in light of how known that particular identification confusion was to witnesses who did not know either individual well from prior knowledge."

 

If Crafard was the gunman?  No.  Crafard was not the gunman; Oswald was.  How do we know this?  Easy.  Of the 13 REAL witnesses, 9 said the man was Oswald and 4 chose to not say one way or the other.  Zero said the man was not Oswald.  Also, Crafard was not the owner of the revolver which was linked (through ballistic testing) to the shell casings found at the scene.  How is Crafard the shooter when nine different witnesses said the man was Oswald?  Of the witnesses who said the man was Oswald versus saying the man was not Oswald, what are the odds that nine witnesses out of nine would identify Oswald as the man if the killer was Crafard?  How is Crafard the shooter when the revolver taken from Oswald 35 minutes after the shooting was responsible for firing off the shells found at the scene?

 

"We have Oswald not a match to the fingerprints from a right hand on the right front bumper, and right front passenger door. (Correct, fingerprints, not a palm print, on the bumper, the person was not putting weight on that hand while touching, perhaps more like resting fingers for balance.)"

 

Okay and if you don't mind, please stop saying that a palm print was lifted from the patrol car by Barnes.

Regarding the partial fingerprints lifted, they are completely irrelevant.  They mean nothing.  Nearly anyone in South Oak Cliff could have touched the patrol car in those spots in the previous 12 to 24 hours.

Greg, Crafard joined the military and entered in Salem, Oregon.  You're out that way.  Why not make an attempt to locate Crafard's fingerprints?  They'll show that the prints lifted by Barnes will not be a match to Crafard's prints and then you'll have to cease with this Crafard stuff.

 

"On Tatum driving by and seeing the killer standing with hands in pockets, that could well be true until after Tatum drove by and missed seeing the killer lean into the side of the car to speak through that open vent window. Tatum would not see that since he was facing forward looking where he is driving. 

Also, Helen Markham insisted and was very clear she saw the killer’s arms raised, both of them, as he leaned into and talked through the patrol car window. She would have been able to see that through the glass of the patrol car. You might say she imagined the arms raised, and that is possible. But that’s what she said, and she said it consistently and immediately starting within minutes of the crime to police (Tatum over a decade later)."

 

Tatum has Oswald with his hands in his jacket pockets.  Markham (from her position, having no view of the passenger side of the patrol car) is not a witness to be relied upon, re: whether or not Oswald touched the patrol car on the passenger side.  That's just how it is, Greg.  Markham was over 150 feet behind the patrol car and on the driver's side.  She could see the full length of the driver's side of the patrol car and she could not see the passenger side at all.  Also, unless you're standing at Markham's corner and you have a replica patrol car in place, you have no idea what Markham could and couldn't see through the glass of the patrol car.

Burt was over 300 feet away and also more toward the driver side of the patrol car than the passenger side.  From Burt's position, the killer leaning over to talk could certainly give the appearance of touching the car even though he may not be.  This would be a natural assumption to make, if you're Burt, though an incorrect one.  Burt simply is not reliable, regarding whether or not the killer touched the patrol car at all.

Do you disagree, Greg?  Do you find Burt reliable from over 300 feet away?

 

"On the shell hulls match to Oswald’s revolver, the issue is the chain of custody. As I showed in my paper on this matter (linked earlier above in this thread), of the five DPD officers who marked one or more of the shell hulls at the scene, four of those five never stated any identification firsthand in their own signature or direct sworn or unsworn testimony, and the fifth who did so testified under oath to a shell hull identification of his own mark which was rejected by the Warren Commission as correct and laughed at by Leavelle who didn’t believe it."

 

The two shells that Benavides found and gave to Poe, let's call them shells #1 and #2.  Let's call the shell found by Barbara Davis (and turned over to Captain Doughty) shell #3.  Let's call the shell found by Virginia Davis (and turned over to Detectives Brown and Dougherty) shell #4.  Set aside shells #1 and #2 for a moment (since Poe couldn't be certain that he marked them or not).

Let's concentrate for a moment on shell #3.  The FBI visited Captain Doughty in June of '64 and presented him with all four shell casings.  He looked them over, found his mark on one of them and identified that shell casing that he handled that day.  So we have a shell casing found at the scene linked through ballistic testing to the revolver taken from Oswald when he was arrested inside the theater, to the exclusion of every other weapon in the world.  Since all four shell casings were fired from the same weapon, then all four shell casings were fired from Oswald's revolver (even if we cannot establish a chain of custody for the other three shells, which we can indeed, in my opinion).  Just the one shell casing (shell #3) would be enough to send Oswald to death row for killing a cop.

 

"Do you accept Barnes’ sworn WC testimony to his own shell hull mark identification that the Warren Commission rejected and Leavelle too with mockery? "

 

First, if you don't mind, please cite for Leavelle mocking Barne's identification.  I know Leavelle "mocked" Poe, saying that Poe never marked the two Benavides shells (#1 and #2).

 

"But back to Craford, if he was the gunman then the murder weapon becomes the paper-bag revolver which Craford had means, motive and opportunity to have ditched out the rear window of a car driven by Ruby a few hours later, ca 6 am the next morning, before Craford took flight from Dallas for Michigan."

 

There's that "if he was the gunman" again.  Again, he was not the gunman.

Of the 13 REAL witnesses, 9 said the man was Oswald and 4 chose to not say one way or the other.  Zero said the man was not Oswald.  Also, Crafard was not the owner of the revolver which was linked to the shell casings found at the scene.  How is Crafard the shooter when nine different witnesses said the man was Oswald?  Of the witnesses who said the man was Oswald versus saying the man was not Oswald, what are the odds that nine witnesses out of nine would identify Oswald as the man if the killer was Crafard?  How is Crafard the shooter when the revolver taken from Oswald 35 minutes after the shooting was responsible for firing off the shells found at the scene?

A revolver was found inside of a small paper bag lying along a curb on a Dallas street.  How does that automatically mean that Crafard threw this particular revolver out of a car window when he was riding around town with Jack Ruby in the wee hours of Saturday morning?  You're making quite the reach, especially since we know this revolver is NOT the one linked to the shells found at the Tippit scene.

It should also be noted, for those who may be unaware, that Crafard was sleeping inside the Carousel Club when the President was assassinated and was awakened by bartender Andy Armstrong AFTER the assassination.  Crafard says this.  Armstrong says this.  Sleeping and UNEXPECTEDLY being woke up after the assassination is hardly what one would be doing if he were to be involved in whatever shenanigans were to take place just a few short minutes later over in Oak Cliff.

 

"And as shown on the other thread, the testimony from witnesses inside the theater, three out of three who gave information on this point, put Oswald in that main seating area on the ground level in the 1:15-1:20 pm time frame, meaning Oswald was not the man who ran into the balcony at 1:35, and means Oswald could not have been the killer of Tippit at Tenth and Patton at 1:15 pm since he was in the theater at that time. 

And the WC testimony of one of those three witnesses to Oswald’s alibi, Burroughs, who, in answer to WC counsel questioning, sounded like Burroughs identified the balcony man as Oswald, even though Burroughs insisted later that is not what he meant and that is not what happened, becomes explained by the reason brought out by Joe Bauer: Burroughs had failed a mental test in the Army and was no match for experienced WC counsel manipulative questioning. But Burroughs in his own voice later told that Oswald was in that theater before the movie started, as a paid-ticket customer."

 

While inside the theater and during the short search for the suspicious man out in the lobby, Burroughs was asked by the police if he had seen the guy at all.  He told them No.  Burroughs told the Warren Commission that he hadn't seen Oswald enter the theater at all.  There is nothing to suggest that Oswald was inside the theater at 1:15.  Oswald certainly was the man who entered around 1:35 as pointed out by Johnny Brewer.  Johnny Brewer, moments later, identified Oswald as the man he saw at the theater entrance around that time.  Brewer pointed out the man he saw at the theater entrance as being Lee Oswald, not any particular man who was already inside the theater at 1:15.

Or, is Brewer yet another witness we can add to the long list of those not knowing the difference between Lee Oswald and Larry Crafard?

Burroughs in his own voice?  So you choose to ignore what he said (and did not say) when it counted versus something he said to a conspiracy author (Marrs in 1987) and also when he was interviewed for The Men Who Killed Kennedy (1988)?  Why discount what he said and didn't say in 1964 in favor of what he said roughly twenty-four years later?

 

I appreciate the back and forth, Greg.  I will await your responses.

 

 

[Greg Doudna]

4 hours ago, Bill Brown said:

If Crafard was the gunman?  No.  Crafard was not the gunman; Oswald was.  How do we know this?  Easy.  Of the 13 REAL witnesses, 9 said the man was Oswald and 4 chose to not say one way or the other.  Zero said the man was not Oswald.  Also, Crafard was not the owner of the revolver which was linked (through ballistic testing) to the shell casings found at the scene.  How is Crafard the shooter when nine different witnesses said the man was Oswald? 

Bill you will admit that witnesses post-Nov 22 who had seen Craford were saying "that was Oswald" in a number of instances unrelated to the Tippit case. The only issue is whether that known phenomenon is applicable in this case.

The reason the 9 who said the killer was Oswald and not Craford is not determinative is because Craford was never offered to those witnesses's awareness as a choice between Oswald or Craford. Craford was not in those lineups. Craford's photo was not, to my knowledge, shown to any of those witnesses (do you know differently on that?). Oswald in those lineups stood among others who did not look like him or Craford. Picking Oswald would be an easy mistake for a witness to make in that context, because we know witnesses did make exactly that identification mistake.

Innocence Project exonerations in which persons convicted by juries of serious crimes such as murder, subsequently proven innocent by DNA testing, sometimes decades later, involve positive eyewitness identifications as part of the evidence which wrongly convicted those innocent persons in over half the cases. 

The sad fact is eyewitness identifications are not infallible, and not all eyewitness identifications are created equal.

In the Tippit case there is the illusion of strength in those identifications because of their number. But they are all the same in kind, and therefore piling on a few more more weak or dicey identifications to an original set of weak or dicey identifications is not changing much. 

Lets go down the line. Helen Markham was a mess (even though she is one of the most important witnesses). Her identification is questionable credibility. She saw Callaway and Scoggins take Tippit's revolver and drive away and her first claim, to Croy, was that one of those was the gunman. You yourself have just got through saying she is not credible in claiming what she saw of the killer on the other side of the patrol car. She said she covered her face with her hands part of the time when the killer left the patrol car and went west in her direction. She said she "picked" Oswald out of the lineup a few hours later because of all the men in the lineup he gave her cold chills looking at him. According to her memory (not that this is necessarily what happened literally) police kept asking her "which one is it?" "which one is it?" of the ones in the lineup until she "picked" Oswald among what she thought were her choices, which she did guided by her cold-chills reaction basis.

Scoggins identified Oswald out of a lineup. But when he was shown photos by police he said he picked the "wrong" police photo. (Bill, do you know whose photo Scoggins picked who he got "wrong", ie other than Oswald?)

Callaway claimed total certainty from fifty feet away of his Oswald lineup identification. He also testified that Leavelle told him prior to the lineup that they wanted to wrap up Oswald real tight on Tippit since they believed he had killed the president too which might be a tougher case to prove. Callaway was gungho to help police nail the bastard that shot Tippit.

Virginia and Barbara Davis seeing the gunman out their front door on the sidewalk go by, not much to go on there. One said she was going by a glance of a side view only. Another thought her "Oswald" was wearing a black coat (!) (Is it certain she was even identifying the gunman?) But its easy to express confidence months later to the Warren Commission when everyone else is saying a suspect "is the one".

Warren Reynolds wasn't willing to express certainty the man he saw running was Oswald until he got shot in the head and almost killed. He was reported to privately say afterward that he wanted to live, which is why he was expressing certainty in his identification of Oswald in agreement with what he believed was wanted.

Guinyard, the African American in 1963 Dallas, deep south before there was a Civil Rights Act, said it was Oswald who went by him on Patton, though there is some discrepancy on which side of the street, but again, there is no way of knowing Guinyard is different from witnesses who saw Craford and said "that was Oswald". 

And so on. And yes, I include Brewer too. He viewed the man in front of his store (which I stipulate with you was the same killer of Tippit seen by the earlier Tenth and Patton witnesses headed in that direction), not directly but through a glass door, not lengthy period of time, not up close. Then Oswald in the partly-darkened theatre got Brewer's attention by standing up in the back, and Brewer told police "that's him!" Then police arrested Oswald who it turns everyone was saying had killed JFK. Brewer sold shoes to Oswald at some earlier time, not extremely recent, those shoes have been verified. But his identification of the man in front of his store is not infallible, compared to Craford having been the man momentarily acting suspiciously standing in front of his store's front glass window door.  

As the narrative solidified within hours, of Oswald implicated for both JFK and Tippit, every witness who identified Oswald as the Tippit killer was reinforced by the news and by knowledge of the other witnesses' similar identifications, a possible groupthink phenomenon reinforcement effect. 

The question is basic: if it was not for other information such as the shell hulls match to Oswald's revolver, would the eyewitnesses alone be sufficient to know that was no mistaken identification of Oswald, instead of Craford, as the actual gunman those witnesses saw?

And we know honest witnesses (witnesses attempting and believing they were telling the truth) all over Dallas were repeatedly making this specific mistake, having seen Craford with Ruby and telling family and friends post-assassination, "I saw Oswald! I recognize him!", etc. And this happened with others than Craford, but Craford is the highest incidence of all, I believe, simply in numbers for mistaken Oswald identifications. It is not very relevant that you or I may say we don't think the photos look alike. The fact is witnesses who did not know either of these before were confusing these two, even though there are several real differences in physical description (height, hair, complexion).

Your citing nine is quantitative. Lets turn to the more important qualitative, because not all witness identifications are equal. The single most credible and strongest witness qualitatively to an identification of the killer was Benavides because he was the closest, only ca. 15 feet away, and said he got a very good look at the back of the killer's head. Nobody equals Benavides for quality and credibility of his witness of the killer. He described a block cut hairline in the back of the killer's head. I know you dispute this and parse him differently but he just did, described a block cut. That was not Oswald who had a taper cut. And Benavides said the killer was not light-skinned like Oswald and stereotypical white people; he said the killer was a little darker in complexion than that, which is in agreement with the FBI description of Craford as "medium", not light, complexion. And perhaps evocative of Helen Markham, and Julia Postal, who each separately said the killer's skin color looked "ruddy".

Yes Benavides in later years said he assumed the killer was Oswald, because that is what smart people had concluded, he never is known to have taken any position against that. But he did take a hard position on that block cut rear hairline description, and he was the single best witness of the gunman, and what he saw and what he reported is not consistent with Oswald. It is not unreasonable, in qualitative terms, that one Benavides could be stronger than nine Virginia Davises or Callaways.

Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid. And Acquila Clemons, who was a witness of the killer as much as the others, can fairly be said to appear to be describing someone who does not sound quite like Oswald. Acquila's description in fact is similar to the earliest description given by Helen Markham which differs from Oswald in the direction of Craford who was an inch or two shorter and maybe 10-20 pounds heavier than Oswald, darker complexion than Oswald, darker hair than Oswald, and fuller head of hair than Oswald. 

Helen Markham: the gunman had "bushy" hair (reported by newsmen who heard her telling police that within minutes at the crime scene). Oswald's hair was not "bushy". Craford however had a full head of hair that could prompt such a description.

The killer had a jacket which was off-white light tan in color and which was not the gray jacket of Oswald known to Buell Frazier and Oswald's other coworkers at the TSBD where Oswald wore his gray jacket to work. (The only reason for thinking so is Marina said so for the first and only time under questionable circumstances in her Warren Commission testimony.) In fact Oswald wore his gray jacket to Irving Thursday night (even Marina indicated that), seen by Frazier worn by Oswald Fri morning Nov 22, and that means the jacket Oswald newly put on and left going out the door of the rooming house at 1 pm seen by Earlene Roberts was his other jacket, his heavier blue one, as color-blind Earlene said, it was "dark" in color. It was not the off-white light tan jacket of the killer, CE 162.

The Tippit killer's jacket was off-white light tan, seen by the witnesses, found at Ballew's Texaco, today in the National Archives, C162, exact color and similar kind of jacket worn by Craford about a week later in Michigan in the FBI photographs of him after they tracked him down and found him.

I think Craford post-Nov 22 intentionally bought another jacket as closely similar to the one he abandoned in Oak Cliff as he could find, in order to distance suspicion from himself as having left C162 in that parking lot of Ballew's Texaco after killing Tippit. I make my arguments on the jackets, which you have probably never read, at https://www.scrollery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/T-Jackets-112.pdf (117 pages).

Edited December 18, 2023 by Greg Doudna

[Bill Brown]

50 minutes ago, Greg Doudna said:

Bill you will admit that witnesses post-Nov 22 who had seen Craford were saying "that was Oswald" in a number of instances unrelated to the Tippit case. The only issue is whether that known phenomenon is applicable in this case.

The reason the 9 who said the killer was Oswald and not Craford is not determinative is because Craford was never offered to those witnesses's awareness as a choice between Oswald or Craford. Craford was not in those lineups. Craford's photo was not, to my knowledge, shown to any of those witnesses (do you know differently on that?). Oswald in those lineups stood among others who did not look like him or Craford. Picking Oswald would be an easy mistake for a witness to make in that context, because we know witnesses did make exactly that identification mistake.

Innocence Project exonerations in which persons convicted by juries of serious crimes such as murder, subsequently proven innocent by DNA testing, sometimes decades later, involve positive eyewitness identifications as part of the evidence which wrongly convicted those innocent persons in over half the cases. 

The sad fact is eyewitness identifications are not infallible, and not all eyewitness identifications are created equal.

In the Tippit case there is the illusion of strength in those identifications because of their number. But they are all the same in kind, and therefore piling on a few more more weak or dicey identifications to an original set of weak or dicey identifications is not changing much. 

Lets go down the line. Helen Markham was a mess (even though she is one of the most important witnesses). Her identification is questionable credibility. She saw Callaway and Scoggins take Tippit's revolver and drive away and her first claim, to Croy, was that one of those was the gunman. You yourself have just got through saying she is not credible in claiming what she saw of the killer on the other side of the patrol car. She herself said she covered her face with her hands and did not look when the killer left the patrol car and came west in what looked like her direction. She said she "picked" Oswald out of the lineup a few hours later because of all the men in the lineup he gave her cold chills looking at him. According to her memory (not that this is necessarily what happened literally) police kept asking her "which one is it?" "which one is it?" of the ones in the lineup until she "picked" Oswald among what she thought were her choices, which she did guided by her cold-chills reaction basis.

Scoggins identified Oswald out of a lineup. But when he was shown photos by police he said he picked the "wrong" police photo. (Bill, do you know whose photo Scoggins picked who he got "wrong", ie other than Oswald?)

Callaway claimed total certainty from fifty feet away of his Oswald lineup identification. He also testified that Leavelle told him prior to the lineup that they wanted to wrap up Oswald real tight on Tippit since they believed he had killed the president too which might be a tougher case to prove. Callaway was gungho to help police nail the bastard that shot Tippit.

Virginia and Barbara Davis seeing the gunman out their front door on the sidewalk go by, not much to go on there. One said she was going by a glance of a side view only. Another thought her "Oswald" was wearing a black coat (!) (Is it certain she was even identifying the gunman?) But its easy to express confidence months later to the Warren Commission when everyone else is saying a suspect "is the one".

Warren Reynolds wasn't willing to express certainty the man he saw running was Oswald until he got shot in the head and almost killed. He was reported to privately say afterward that he wanted to live, which is why he was expressing certainty in his identification of Oswald in agreement with what he believed was wanted.

Guinyard, the African American in 1963 Dallas, deep south before there was a Civil Rights Act, said it was Oswald who went by him on Patton, though there is some discrepancy on which side of the sidewalk, but again, there is no way of knowing Guinyard is different from witnesses who saw Craford and said "that was Oswald". 

And so on. And yes, I include Brewer too. He viewed the man in front of his store (which I stipulate with you was the same killer of Tippit seen by the earlier Tenth and Patton witnesses headed in that direction), not directly but through a glass door, not lengthy period of time, not up close. Then Oswald in the partly-darkened theatre got Brewer's attention by standing up in the back, and Brewer told police "that's him!" Then police arrested Oswald who it turns everyone was saying had killed JFK. Brewer sold shoes to Oswald at some earlier time, not extremely recent, those shoes have been verified. But his identification of the man in front of his store is not infallible, compared to Craford having been the man momentarily acting suspiciously standing in front of his store's front glass window door.  

As the narrative solidified within hours, of Oswald implicated for both JFK and Tippit, every witness who identified Oswald as the Tippit killer was reinforced by the news and by knowledge of the other witnesses' similar identifications, a possible groupthink phenomenon reinforcement effect. 

The question is basic: if it was not for other information such as the shell hulls match to Oswald's revolver, would the eyewitnesses alone be sufficient to know that was no mistaken identification of Oswald, instead of Craford, as the actual gunman those witnesses saw?

And we know honest witnesses (witnesses attempting and believing they were telling the truth) all over Dallas were repeatedly making this specific mistake, having seen Craford with Ruby and telling family and friends post-assassination, "I saw Oswald! I recognize him!", etc. And this happened with others than Craford, but Craford is the highest incidence of all, I believe, simply in numbers for mistaken Oswald identifications. It is not very relevant that you or I may say we don't think the photos look alike. The fact is witnesses who did not know either of these before were confusing these two, even though there are several real differences in physical description (height, hair, complexion).

Your citing nine is quantitative. Lets turn to the more important qualitative, because not all witness identifications are equal. The single most credible and strongest witness qualitatively to an identification of the killer was Benavides because he was the closest, only ca. 15 feet away, and said he got a very good look at the back of the killer's head. Nobody equals Benavides for quality and credibility of his witness of the killer. He described a block cut hairline in the back of the killer's head. I know you dispute this and parse him differently but he just did, described a block cut. That was not Oswald who had a taper cut. And Benavides said the killer was not light-skinned like Oswald and stereotypical white people; he said the killer was a little darker in complexion than that, which is in agreement with the FBI description of Craford as "medium", not light, complexion. And perhaps evocative of Helen Markham, and Julia Postal, who each separately said the killer's skin color looked "ruddy".

Yes Benavides in later years said he assumed the killer was Oswald, because that is what smart people had concluded, he never is known to have taken any position against that. But he did take a hard position on that block cut rear hairline description, and he was the single best witness of the gunman, and what he saw and what he reported is not consistent with Oswald. It is not unreasonable, in qualitative terms, that one Benavides could be stronger than nine Virginia Davises or Callaways.

Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid. And Acquila Clemons, who was a witness of the killer as much as the others, can fairly be said to appear to be describing someone who does not sound quite like Oswald. Acquila's description in fact is similar to the earliest description given by Helen Markham which differs from Oswald in the direction of Craford who was an inch or two shorter and maybe 10-20 pounds heavier than Oswald, darker complexion than Oswald, darker hair than Oswald, and fuller head of hair than Oswald. 

Helen Markham: the gunman had "bushy" hair (reported by newsmen who heard her telling police that within minutes at the crime scene). Oswald's hair was not "bushy". Craford however had a full head of hair that could prompt such a description.

The killer had a jacket which was off-white light tan in color and which was not the gray jacket of Oswald known to Buell Frazier and Oswald's other coworkers at the TSBD where Oswald wore his gray jacket to work. (The only reason for thinking so is Marina said so for the first and only time under questionable circumstances in her Warren Commission testimony.) In fact Oswald wore his gray jacket to Irving Thursday night (even Marina indicated that), seen by Frazier worn by Oswald Fri morning Nov 22, and that means the jacket Oswald newly put on and left going out the door of the rooming house at 1 pm seen by Earlene Roberts was his other jacket, his heavier blue one, as color-blind Earlene said, it was "dark" in color. It was not the off-white light tan jacket of the killer, CE 162.

The Tippit killer's jacket was off-white light tan, seen by the witnesses, found at Ballew's Texaco, today in the National Archives, C162, exact color and similar kind of jacket worn by Craford about a week later in Michigan in the FBI photographs of him after they tracked him down and found him.

I think Craford post-Nov 22 intentionally bought another jacket as closely similar to the one he abandoned in Oak Cliff as he could find, in order to distance suspicion from himself as having left C162 in that parking lot of Ballew's Texaco after killing Tippit. I make my arguments on the jackets, which you have probably never read, at https://www.scrollery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/T-Jackets-112.pdf (117 pages).

 

"The reason the 9 who said the killer was Oswald and not Craford is not determinative is because Craford was never offered to those witnesses's awareness as a choice between Oswald or Craford. Craford was not in those lineups. Craford's photo was not, to my knowledge, shown to any of those witnesses (do you know differently on that?). Oswald in those lineups stood among others who did not look like him or Craford. Picking Oswald would be an easy mistake for a witness to make in that context, because we know witnesses did make exactly that identification mistake."

 

That's not how it works.  The nine witnesses said the man was Oswald because they felt the man they saw was Oswald.  That Crafard was not in the lineups doesn't change the fact that the witnesses believed the man they saw was Oswald.  If the man they saw was Crafard, then maybe one or two of them may have chose Oswald (in a lineup with no Crafard) but what do you think the odds are that nine out of nine would pick the wrong guy?

Yes, Oswald stood out from the others alongside him.  But witnesses are allowed to say that none of the men in the lineup resemble the man they saw.  However, that's not what happened.  They picked Oswald because they felt strongly enough that Oswald was the guy they saw.

You're acting like the witnesses were forced to pick the man who most resembled the man they saw, even if the man they saw was not among those in the lineup before them.  That's not the case, though.

 

[Bill Brown]

57 minutes ago, Greg Doudna said:

Bill you will admit that witnesses post-Nov 22 who had seen Craford were saying "that was Oswald" in a number of instances unrelated to the Tippit case. The only issue is whether that known phenomenon is applicable in this case.

The reason the 9 who said the killer was Oswald and not Craford is not determinative is because Craford was never offered to those witnesses's awareness as a choice between Oswald or Craford. Craford was not in those lineups. Craford's photo was not, to my knowledge, shown to any of those witnesses (do you know differently on that?). Oswald in those lineups stood among others who did not look like him or Craford. Picking Oswald would be an easy mistake for a witness to make in that context, because we know witnesses did make exactly that identification mistake.

Innocence Project exonerations in which persons convicted by juries of serious crimes such as murder, subsequently proven innocent by DNA testing, sometimes decades later, involve positive eyewitness identifications as part of the evidence which wrongly convicted those innocent persons in over half the cases. 

The sad fact is eyewitness identifications are not infallible, and not all eyewitness identifications are created equal.

In the Tippit case there is the illusion of strength in those identifications because of their number. But they are all the same in kind, and therefore piling on a few more more weak or dicey identifications to an original set of weak or dicey identifications is not changing much. 

Lets go down the line. Helen Markham was a mess (even though she is one of the most important witnesses). Her identification is questionable credibility. She saw Callaway and Scoggins take Tippit's revolver and drive away and her first claim, to Croy, was that one of those was the gunman. You yourself have just got through saying she is not credible in claiming what she saw of the killer on the other side of the patrol car. She herself said she covered her face with her hands and did not look when the killer left the patrol car and came west in what looked like her direction. She said she "picked" Oswald out of the lineup a few hours later because of all the men in the lineup he gave her cold chills looking at him. According to her memory (not that this is necessarily what happened literally) police kept asking her "which one is it?" "which one is it?" of the ones in the lineup until she "picked" Oswald among what she thought were her choices, which she did guided by her cold-chills reaction basis.

Scoggins identified Oswald out of a lineup. But when he was shown photos by police he said he picked the "wrong" police photo. (Bill, do you know whose photo Scoggins picked who he got "wrong", ie other than Oswald?)

Callaway claimed total certainty from fifty feet away of his Oswald lineup identification. He also testified that Leavelle told him prior to the lineup that they wanted to wrap up Oswald real tight on Tippit since they believed he had killed the president too which might be a tougher case to prove. Callaway was gungho to help police nail the bastard that shot Tippit.

Virginia and Barbara Davis seeing the gunman out their front door on the sidewalk go by, not much to go on there. One said she was going by a glance of a side view only. Another thought her "Oswald" was wearing a black coat (!) (Is it certain she was even identifying the gunman?) But its easy to express confidence months later to the Warren Commission when everyone else is saying a suspect "is the one".

Warren Reynolds wasn't willing to express certainty the man he saw running was Oswald until he got shot in the head and almost killed. He was reported to privately say afterward that he wanted to live, which is why he was expressing certainty in his identification of Oswald in agreement with what he believed was wanted.

Guinyard, the African American in 1963 Dallas, deep south before there was a Civil Rights Act, said it was Oswald who went by him on Patton, though there is some discrepancy on which side of the sidewalk, but again, there is no way of knowing Guinyard is different from witnesses who saw Craford and said "that was Oswald". 

And so on. And yes, I include Brewer too. He viewed the man in front of his store (which I stipulate with you was the same killer of Tippit seen by the earlier Tenth and Patton witnesses headed in that direction), not directly but through a glass door, not lengthy period of time, not up close. Then Oswald in the partly-darkened theatre got Brewer's attention by standing up in the back, and Brewer told police "that's him!" Then police arrested Oswald who it turns everyone was saying had killed JFK. Brewer sold shoes to Oswald at some earlier time, not extremely recent, those shoes have been verified. But his identification of the man in front of his store is not infallible, compared to Craford having been the man momentarily acting suspiciously standing in front of his store's front glass window door.  

As the narrative solidified within hours, of Oswald implicated for both JFK and Tippit, every witness who identified Oswald as the Tippit killer was reinforced by the news and by knowledge of the other witnesses' similar identifications, a possible groupthink phenomenon reinforcement effect. 

The question is basic: if it was not for other information such as the shell hulls match to Oswald's revolver, would the eyewitnesses alone be sufficient to know that was no mistaken identification of Oswald, instead of Craford, as the actual gunman those witnesses saw?

And we know honest witnesses (witnesses attempting and believing they were telling the truth) all over Dallas were repeatedly making this specific mistake, having seen Craford with Ruby and telling family and friends post-assassination, "I saw Oswald! I recognize him!", etc. And this happened with others than Craford, but Craford is the highest incidence of all, I believe, simply in numbers for mistaken Oswald identifications. It is not very relevant that you or I may say we don't think the photos look alike. The fact is witnesses who did not know either of these before were confusing these two, even though there are several real differences in physical description (height, hair, complexion).

Your citing nine is quantitative. Lets turn to the more important qualitative, because not all witness identifications are equal. The single most credible and strongest witness qualitatively to an identification of the killer was Benavides because he was the closest, only ca. 15 feet away, and said he got a very good look at the back of the killer's head. Nobody equals Benavides for quality and credibility of his witness of the killer. He described a block cut hairline in the back of the killer's head. I know you dispute this and parse him differently but he just did, described a block cut. That was not Oswald who had a taper cut. And Benavides said the killer was not light-skinned like Oswald and stereotypical white people; he said the killer was a little darker in complexion than that, which is in agreement with the FBI description of Craford as "medium", not light, complexion. And perhaps evocative of Helen Markham, and Julia Postal, who each separately said the killer's skin color looked "ruddy".

Yes Benavides in later years said he assumed the killer was Oswald, because that is what smart people had concluded, he never is known to have taken any position against that. But he did take a hard position on that block cut rear hairline description, and he was the single best witness of the gunman, and what he saw and what he reported is not consistent with Oswald. It is not unreasonable, in qualitative terms, that one Benavides could be stronger than nine Virginia Davises or Callaways.

Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid. And Acquila Clemons, who was a witness of the killer as much as the others, can fairly be said to appear to be describing someone who does not sound quite like Oswald. Acquila's description in fact is similar to the earliest description given by Helen Markham which differs from Oswald in the direction of Craford who was an inch or two shorter and maybe 10-20 pounds heavier than Oswald, darker complexion than Oswald, darker hair than Oswald, and fuller head of hair than Oswald. 

Helen Markham: the gunman had "bushy" hair (reported by newsmen who heard her telling police that within minutes at the crime scene). Oswald's hair was not "bushy". Craford however had a full head of hair that could prompt such a description.

The killer had a jacket which was off-white light tan in color and which was not the gray jacket of Oswald known to Buell Frazier and Oswald's other coworkers at the TSBD where Oswald wore his gray jacket to work. (The only reason for thinking so is Marina said so for the first and only time under questionable circumstances in her Warren Commission testimony.) In fact Oswald wore his gray jacket to Irving Thursday night (even Marina indicated that), seen by Frazier worn by Oswald Fri morning Nov 22, and that means the jacket Oswald newly put on and left going out the door of the rooming house at 1 pm seen by Earlene Roberts was his other jacket, his heavier blue one, as color-blind Earlene said, it was "dark" in color. It was not the off-white light tan jacket of the killer, CE 162.

The Tippit killer's jacket was off-white light tan, seen by the witnesses, found at Ballew's Texaco, today in the National Archives, C162, exact color and similar kind of jacket worn by Craford about a week later in Michigan in the FBI photographs of him after they tracked him down and found him.

I think Craford post-Nov 22 intentionally bought another jacket as closely similar to the one he abandoned in Oak Cliff as he could find, in order to distance suspicion from himself as having left C162 in that parking lot of Ballew's Texaco after killing Tippit. I make my arguments on the jackets, which you have probably never read, at https://www.scrollery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/T-Jackets-112.pdf (117 pages).

 

"Innocence Project exonerations in which persons convicted by juries of serious crimes such as murder, subsequently proven innocent by DNA testing, sometimes decades later, involve positive eyewitness identifications as part of the evidence which wrongly convicted those innocent persons in over half the cases."

 

So because sometimes a suspect can be wrongly convicted means all suspects are wrongly convicted?  Come on, now.

A thousand men can be wrongly convicted but that doesn't mean that man #1001 is innocent.

 

[Greg Doudna]

4 hours ago, Bill Brown said:

Greg, Crafard joined the military and entered in Salem, Oregon.  You're out that way.  Why not make an attempt to locate Crafard's fingerprints?  They'll show that the prints lifted by Barnes will not be a match to Crafard's prints and then you'll have to cease with this Crafard stuff.

Well I'm about 400 miles away, not sure when I'll be down that way next, but if I have the chance I might ask the local police if they have any fingerprints from what I believe was at least one arrest of Craford post-1963. I have no experience in this nor do I have police contacts apart from an 80-year old retired federal marshal friend of my father in Ohio. I have just assumed police would not give out fingerprints to me but I don't know.

Paging @Gil Jesus--you have been a police officer, could you possibly be of help in obtaining fingerprints of Craford, or if such were obtained, in getting them run through whatever national database now exists to attempt to identify who left those prints on the Tippit patrol car? 

I believe it was Stuart Wexler at the recent Lancer conference who made a public appeal in his talk for anyone in a law enforcement position with access to a fingerprints national database, or anyone who knew someone who was, to run the Tippit patrol car fingerprints (among maybe a half dozen similar evidence items Wexler listed). 

It is ironic, pangs of regret in retrospect, but I lived in and spent much time in Oregon--Ashland, Eugene, Portland--in the late 1970s through the early 1990s. All that time Craford was in Dallas, Oregon. If I knew then what I know now, I could easily have gone to Dallas, Oregon and tried to find him. A college roommate when I was in east Texas had grown up in Dallas, Oregon (the location stuck with me because memorable name). 

From what I can see online, although Craford had a daughter, there are no living descendants of Craford today. I don't know about nephews or nieces or if any extended family relatives alive today knew him well. I wonder if Craford ever wrote private memoirs--who knows.  

And to think he was easy to find in the late 1970s, his location right there in published Warren Commission testimony, and HSCA claimed they couldn't locate him. Maybe they thought there was nothing new to ask him that his lengthy WC questioning had not covered?

HSCA had no clue to even the existence of the paper-bag revolver found and turned in to Dallas Police Nov 23, 1963. There is no sign it occurred to HSCA to try to have the Tippit patrol car fingerprints identified.

FBI, which has some of the best expertise in the nation on fingerprints, never bothered with, no record ever was asked, to run the Tippit patrol car fingerprints.

To paraphrase the supposed LBJ phone call Fritz is alleged to have said privately he received, "You have your man", in the murder of Tippit they had their man, who conveniently was dead and could not dispute the point, a satisfactory closure to the case, no further evidence needed or wanted.  

[Bill Brown]

1 hour ago, Greg Doudna said:

Bill you will admit that witnesses post-Nov 22 who had seen Craford were saying "that was Oswald" in a number of instances unrelated to the Tippit case. The only issue is whether that known phenomenon is applicable in this case.

The reason the 9 who said the killer was Oswald and not Craford is not determinative is because Craford was never offered to those witnesses's awareness as a choice between Oswald or Craford. Craford was not in those lineups. Craford's photo was not, to my knowledge, shown to any of those witnesses (do you know differently on that?). Oswald in those lineups stood among others who did not look like him or Craford. Picking Oswald would be an easy mistake for a witness to make in that context, because we know witnesses did make exactly that identification mistake.

Innocence Project exonerations in which persons convicted by juries of serious crimes such as murder, subsequently proven innocent by DNA testing, sometimes decades later, involve positive eyewitness identifications as part of the evidence which wrongly convicted those innocent persons in over half the cases. 

The sad fact is eyewitness identifications are not infallible, and not all eyewitness identifications are created equal.

In the Tippit case there is the illusion of strength in those identifications because of their number. But they are all the same in kind, and therefore piling on a few more more weak or dicey identifications to an original set of weak or dicey identifications is not changing much. 

Lets go down the line. Helen Markham was a mess (even though she is one of the most important witnesses). Her identification is questionable credibility. She saw Callaway and Scoggins take Tippit's revolver and drive away and her first claim, to Croy, was that one of those was the gunman. You yourself have just got through saying she is not credible in claiming what she saw of the killer on the other side of the patrol car. She herself said she covered her face with her hands and did not look when the killer left the patrol car and came west in what looked like her direction. She said she "picked" Oswald out of the lineup a few hours later because of all the men in the lineup he gave her cold chills looking at him. According to her memory (not that this is necessarily what happened literally) police kept asking her "which one is it?" "which one is it?" of the ones in the lineup until she "picked" Oswald among what she thought were her choices, which she did guided by her cold-chills reaction basis.

Scoggins identified Oswald out of a lineup. But when he was shown photos by police he said he picked the "wrong" police photo. (Bill, do you know whose photo Scoggins picked who he got "wrong", ie other than Oswald?)

Callaway claimed total certainty from fifty feet away of his Oswald lineup identification. He also testified that Leavelle told him prior to the lineup that they wanted to wrap up Oswald real tight on Tippit since they believed he had killed the president too which might be a tougher case to prove. Callaway was gungho to help police nail the bastard that shot Tippit.

Virginia and Barbara Davis seeing the gunman out their front door on the sidewalk go by, not much to go on there. One said she was going by a glance of a side view only. Another thought her "Oswald" was wearing a black coat (!) (Is it certain she was even identifying the gunman?) But its easy to express confidence months later to the Warren Commission when everyone else is saying a suspect "is the one".

Warren Reynolds wasn't willing to express certainty the man he saw running was Oswald until he got shot in the head and almost killed. He was reported to privately say afterward that he wanted to live, which is why he was expressing certainty in his identification of Oswald in agreement with what he believed was wanted.

Guinyard, the African American in 1963 Dallas, deep south before there was a Civil Rights Act, said it was Oswald who went by him on Patton, though there is some discrepancy on which side of the sidewalk, but again, there is no way of knowing Guinyard is different from witnesses who saw Craford and said "that was Oswald". 

And so on. And yes, I include Brewer too. He viewed the man in front of his store (which I stipulate with you was the same killer of Tippit seen by the earlier Tenth and Patton witnesses headed in that direction), not directly but through a glass door, not lengthy period of time, not up close. Then Oswald in the partly-darkened theatre got Brewer's attention by standing up in the back, and Brewer told police "that's him!" Then police arrested Oswald who it turns everyone was saying had killed JFK. Brewer sold shoes to Oswald at some earlier time, not extremely recent, those shoes have been verified. But his identification of the man in front of his store is not infallible, compared to Craford having been the man momentarily acting suspiciously standing in front of his store's front glass window door.  

As the narrative solidified within hours, of Oswald implicated for both JFK and Tippit, every witness who identified Oswald as the Tippit killer was reinforced by the news and by knowledge of the other witnesses' similar identifications, a possible groupthink phenomenon reinforcement effect. 

The question is basic: if it was not for other information such as the shell hulls match to Oswald's revolver, would the eyewitnesses alone be sufficient to know that was no mistaken identification of Oswald, instead of Craford, as the actual gunman those witnesses saw?

And we know honest witnesses (witnesses attempting and believing they were telling the truth) all over Dallas were repeatedly making this specific mistake, having seen Craford with Ruby and telling family and friends post-assassination, "I saw Oswald! I recognize him!", etc. And this happened with others than Craford, but Craford is the highest incidence of all, I believe, simply in numbers for mistaken Oswald identifications. It is not very relevant that you or I may say we don't think the photos look alike. The fact is witnesses who did not know either of these before were confusing these two, even though there are several real differences in physical description (height, hair, complexion).

Your citing nine is quantitative. Lets turn to the more important qualitative, because not all witness identifications are equal. The single most credible and strongest witness qualitatively to an identification of the killer was Benavides because he was the closest, only ca. 15 feet away, and said he got a very good look at the back of the killer's head. Nobody equals Benavides for quality and credibility of his witness of the killer. He described a block cut hairline in the back of the killer's head. I know you dispute this and parse him differently but he just did, described a block cut. That was not Oswald who had a taper cut. And Benavides said the killer was not light-skinned like Oswald and stereotypical white people; he said the killer was a little darker in complexion than that, which is in agreement with the FBI description of Craford as "medium", not light, complexion. And perhaps evocative of Helen Markham, and Julia Postal, who each separately said the killer's skin color looked "ruddy".

Yes Benavides in later years said he assumed the killer was Oswald, because that is what smart people had concluded, he never is known to have taken any position against that. But he did take a hard position on that block cut rear hairline description, and he was the single best witness of the gunman, and what he saw and what he reported is not consistent with Oswald. It is not unreasonable, in qualitative terms, that one Benavides could be stronger than nine Virginia Davises or Callaways.

Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid. And Acquila Clemons, who was a witness of the killer as much as the others, can fairly be said to appear to be describing someone who does not sound quite like Oswald. Acquila's description in fact is similar to the earliest description given by Helen Markham which differs from Oswald in the direction of Craford who was an inch or two shorter and maybe 10-20 pounds heavier than Oswald, darker complexion than Oswald, darker hair than Oswald, and fuller head of hair than Oswald. 

Helen Markham: the gunman had "bushy" hair (reported by newsmen who heard her telling police that within minutes at the crime scene). Oswald's hair was not "bushy". Craford however had a full head of hair that could prompt such a description.

The killer had a jacket which was off-white light tan in color and which was not the gray jacket of Oswald known to Buell Frazier and Oswald's other coworkers at the TSBD where Oswald wore his gray jacket to work. (The only reason for thinking so is Marina said so for the first and only time under questionable circumstances in her Warren Commission testimony.) In fact Oswald wore his gray jacket to Irving Thursday night (even Marina indicated that), seen by Frazier worn by Oswald Fri morning Nov 22, and that means the jacket Oswald newly put on and left going out the door of the rooming house at 1 pm seen by Earlene Roberts was his other jacket, his heavier blue one, as color-blind Earlene said, it was "dark" in color. It was not the off-white light tan jacket of the killer, CE 162.

The Tippit killer's jacket was off-white light tan, seen by the witnesses, found at Ballew's Texaco, today in the National Archives, C162, exact color and similar kind of jacket worn by Craford about a week later in Michigan in the FBI photographs of him after they tracked him down and found him.

I think Craford post-Nov 22 intentionally bought another jacket as closely similar to the one he abandoned in Oak Cliff as he could find, in order to distance suspicion from himself as having left C162 in that parking lot of Ballew's Texaco after killing Tippit. I make my arguments on the jackets, which you have probably never read, at https://www.scrollery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/T-Jackets-112.pdf (117 pages).

 

"She herself said she covered her face with her hands and did not look when the killer left the patrol car and came west in what looked like her direction."

 

No.  Markham describes covering her eyes momentarily.  Then, she spread apart her fingers and looked at the killer and he looked at her.  This is almost a direct quote, Greg.

 

[Greg Doudna]

1 minute ago, Bill Brown said:

So because sometimes a suspect can be wrongly convicted means all suspects are wrongly convicted?  Come on, now.

Bill, try to represent accurately and not straw men. I know you can if you try. I never said, and do not for a moment believe, that "all suspects are wrongly convicted". Sheesh! Please stop that.

That was not the point. The point was to impeach your tone of certainty that those 9 witness identifications of Oswald were probative. 

No, those 9 are not necessarily, for reasons detailed. 

[Bill Brown]

1 hour ago, Greg Doudna said:

Bill you will admit that witnesses post-Nov 22 who had seen Craford were saying "that was Oswald" in a number of instances unrelated to the Tippit case. The only issue is whether that known phenomenon is applicable in this case.

The reason the 9 who said the killer was Oswald and not Craford is not determinative is because Craford was never offered to those witnesses's awareness as a choice between Oswald or Craford. Craford was not in those lineups. Craford's photo was not, to my knowledge, shown to any of those witnesses (do you know differently on that?). Oswald in those lineups stood among others who did not look like him or Craford. Picking Oswald would be an easy mistake for a witness to make in that context, because we know witnesses did make exactly that identification mistake.

Innocence Project exonerations in which persons convicted by juries of serious crimes such as murder, subsequently proven innocent by DNA testing, sometimes decades later, involve positive eyewitness identifications as part of the evidence which wrongly convicted those innocent persons in over half the cases. 

The sad fact is eyewitness identifications are not infallible, and not all eyewitness identifications are created equal.

In the Tippit case there is the illusion of strength in those identifications because of their number. But they are all the same in kind, and therefore piling on a few more more weak or dicey identifications to an original set of weak or dicey identifications is not changing much. 

Lets go down the line. Helen Markham was a mess (even though she is one of the most important witnesses). Her identification is questionable credibility. She saw Callaway and Scoggins take Tippit's revolver and drive away and her first claim, to Croy, was that one of those was the gunman. You yourself have just got through saying she is not credible in claiming what she saw of the killer on the other side of the patrol car. She herself said she covered her face with her hands and did not look when the killer left the patrol car and came west in what looked like her direction. She said she "picked" Oswald out of the lineup a few hours later because of all the men in the lineup he gave her cold chills looking at him. According to her memory (not that this is necessarily what happened literally) police kept asking her "which one is it?" "which one is it?" of the ones in the lineup until she "picked" Oswald among what she thought were her choices, which she did guided by her cold-chills reaction basis.

Scoggins identified Oswald out of a lineup. But when he was shown photos by police he said he picked the "wrong" police photo. (Bill, do you know whose photo Scoggins picked who he got "wrong", ie other than Oswald?)

Callaway claimed total certainty from fifty feet away of his Oswald lineup identification. He also testified that Leavelle told him prior to the lineup that they wanted to wrap up Oswald real tight on Tippit since they believed he had killed the president too which might be a tougher case to prove. Callaway was gungho to help police nail the bastard that shot Tippit.

Virginia and Barbara Davis seeing the gunman out their front door on the sidewalk go by, not much to go on there. One said she was going by a glance of a side view only. Another thought her "Oswald" was wearing a black coat (!) (Is it certain she was even identifying the gunman?) But its easy to express confidence months later to the Warren Commission when everyone else is saying a suspect "is the one".

Warren Reynolds wasn't willing to express certainty the man he saw running was Oswald until he got shot in the head and almost killed. He was reported to privately say afterward that he wanted to live, which is why he was expressing certainty in his identification of Oswald in agreement with what he believed was wanted.

Guinyard, the African American in 1963 Dallas, deep south before there was a Civil Rights Act, said it was Oswald who went by him on Patton, though there is some discrepancy on which side of the sidewalk, but again, there is no way of knowing Guinyard is different from witnesses who saw Craford and said "that was Oswald". 

And so on. And yes, I include Brewer too. He viewed the man in front of his store (which I stipulate with you was the same killer of Tippit seen by the earlier Tenth and Patton witnesses headed in that direction), not directly but through a glass door, not lengthy period of time, not up close. Then Oswald in the partly-darkened theatre got Brewer's attention by standing up in the back, and Brewer told police "that's him!" Then police arrested Oswald who it turns everyone was saying had killed JFK. Brewer sold shoes to Oswald at some earlier time, not extremely recent, those shoes have been verified. But his identification of the man in front of his store is not infallible, compared to Craford having been the man momentarily acting suspiciously standing in front of his store's front glass window door.  

As the narrative solidified within hours, of Oswald implicated for both JFK and Tippit, every witness who identified Oswald as the Tippit killer was reinforced by the news and by knowledge of the other witnesses' similar identifications, a possible groupthink phenomenon reinforcement effect. 

The question is basic: if it was not for other information such as the shell hulls match to Oswald's revolver, would the eyewitnesses alone be sufficient to know that was no mistaken identification of Oswald, instead of Craford, as the actual gunman those witnesses saw?

And we know honest witnesses (witnesses attempting and believing they were telling the truth) all over Dallas were repeatedly making this specific mistake, having seen Craford with Ruby and telling family and friends post-assassination, "I saw Oswald! I recognize him!", etc. And this happened with others than Craford, but Craford is the highest incidence of all, I believe, simply in numbers for mistaken Oswald identifications. It is not very relevant that you or I may say we don't think the photos look alike. The fact is witnesses who did not know either of these before were confusing these two, even though there are several real differences in physical description (height, hair, complexion).

Your citing nine is quantitative. Lets turn to the more important qualitative, because not all witness identifications are equal. The single most credible and strongest witness qualitatively to an identification of the killer was Benavides because he was the closest, only ca. 15 feet away, and said he got a very good look at the back of the killer's head. Nobody equals Benavides for quality and credibility of his witness of the killer. He described a block cut hairline in the back of the killer's head. I know you dispute this and parse him differently but he just did, described a block cut. That was not Oswald who had a taper cut. And Benavides said the killer was not light-skinned like Oswald and stereotypical white people; he said the killer was a little darker in complexion than that, which is in agreement with the FBI description of Craford as "medium", not light, complexion. And perhaps evocative of Helen Markham, and Julia Postal, who each separately said the killer's skin color looked "ruddy".

Yes Benavides in later years said he assumed the killer was Oswald, because that is what smart people had concluded, he never is known to have taken any position against that. But he did take a hard position on that block cut rear hairline description, and he was the single best witness of the gunman, and what he saw and what he reported is not consistent with Oswald. It is not unreasonable, in qualitative terms, that one Benavides could be stronger than nine Virginia Davises or Callaways.

Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid. And Acquila Clemons, who was a witness of the killer as much as the others, can fairly be said to appear to be describing someone who does not sound quite like Oswald. Acquila's description in fact is similar to the earliest description given by Helen Markham which differs from Oswald in the direction of Craford who was an inch or two shorter and maybe 10-20 pounds heavier than Oswald, darker complexion than Oswald, darker hair than Oswald, and fuller head of hair than Oswald. 

Helen Markham: the gunman had "bushy" hair (reported by newsmen who heard her telling police that within minutes at the crime scene). Oswald's hair was not "bushy". Craford however had a full head of hair that could prompt such a description.

The killer had a jacket which was off-white light tan in color and which was not the gray jacket of Oswald known to Buell Frazier and Oswald's other coworkers at the TSBD where Oswald wore his gray jacket to work. (The only reason for thinking so is Marina said so for the first and only time under questionable circumstances in her Warren Commission testimony.) In fact Oswald wore his gray jacket to Irving Thursday night (even Marina indicated that), seen by Frazier worn by Oswald Fri morning Nov 22, and that means the jacket Oswald newly put on and left going out the door of the rooming house at 1 pm seen by Earlene Roberts was his other jacket, his heavier blue one, as color-blind Earlene said, it was "dark" in color. It was not the off-white light tan jacket of the killer, CE 162.

The Tippit killer's jacket was off-white light tan, seen by the witnesses, found at Ballew's Texaco, today in the National Archives, C162, exact color and similar kind of jacket worn by Craford about a week later in Michigan in the FBI photographs of him after they tracked him down and found him.

I think Craford post-Nov 22 intentionally bought another jacket as closely similar to the one he abandoned in Oak Cliff as he could find, in order to distance suspicion from himself as having left C162 in that parking lot of Ballew's Texaco after killing Tippit. I make my arguments on the jackets, which you have probably never read, at https://www.scrollery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/T-Jackets-112.pdf (117 pages).

 

"Scoggins identified Oswald out of a lineup. But when he was shown photos by police he said he picked the "wrong" police photo. (Bill, do you know whose photo Scoggins picked who he got "wrong", ie other than Oswald?)"

 

I wish I could help ya, Greg.  But no, I sure don't know.

The important thing here is that Scoggins told Jim Leavelle that the guy (Oswald) can bitch and holler all he wants, but that is the guy he saw running from the scene. (Dale Myers interview with Jim Leavelle)

 

[Bill Brown]

1 hour ago, Greg Doudna said:

Bill you will admit that witnesses post-Nov 22 who had seen Craford were saying "that was Oswald" in a number of instances unrelated to the Tippit case. The only issue is whether that known phenomenon is applicable in this case.

The reason the 9 who said the killer was Oswald and not Craford is not determinative is because Craford was never offered to those witnesses's awareness as a choice between Oswald or Craford. Craford was not in those lineups. Craford's photo was not, to my knowledge, shown to any of those witnesses (do you know differently on that?). Oswald in those lineups stood among others who did not look like him or Craford. Picking Oswald would be an easy mistake for a witness to make in that context, because we know witnesses did make exactly that identification mistake.

Innocence Project exonerations in which persons convicted by juries of serious crimes such as murder, subsequently proven innocent by DNA testing, sometimes decades later, involve positive eyewitness identifications as part of the evidence which wrongly convicted those innocent persons in over half the cases. 

The sad fact is eyewitness identifications are not infallible, and not all eyewitness identifications are created equal.

In the Tippit case there is the illusion of strength in those identifications because of their number. But they are all the same in kind, and therefore piling on a few more more weak or dicey identifications to an original set of weak or dicey identifications is not changing much. 

Lets go down the line. Helen Markham was a mess (even though she is one of the most important witnesses). Her identification is questionable credibility. She saw Callaway and Scoggins take Tippit's revolver and drive away and her first claim, to Croy, was that one of those was the gunman. You yourself have just got through saying she is not credible in claiming what she saw of the killer on the other side of the patrol car. She herself said she covered her face with her hands and did not look when the killer left the patrol car and came west in what looked like her direction. She said she "picked" Oswald out of the lineup a few hours later because of all the men in the lineup he gave her cold chills looking at him. According to her memory (not that this is necessarily what happened literally) police kept asking her "which one is it?" "which one is it?" of the ones in the lineup until she "picked" Oswald among what she thought were her choices, which she did guided by her cold-chills reaction basis.

Scoggins identified Oswald out of a lineup. But when he was shown photos by police he said he picked the "wrong" police photo. (Bill, do you know whose photo Scoggins picked who he got "wrong", ie other than Oswald?)

Callaway claimed total certainty from fifty feet away of his Oswald lineup identification. He also testified that Leavelle told him prior to the lineup that they wanted to wrap up Oswald real tight on Tippit since they believed he had killed the president too which might be a tougher case to prove. Callaway was gungho to help police nail the bastard that shot Tippit.

Virginia and Barbara Davis seeing the gunman out their front door on the sidewalk go by, not much to go on there. One said she was going by a glance of a side view only. Another thought her "Oswald" was wearing a black coat (!) (Is it certain she was even identifying the gunman?) But its easy to express confidence months later to the Warren Commission when everyone else is saying a suspect "is the one".

Warren Reynolds wasn't willing to express certainty the man he saw running was Oswald until he got shot in the head and almost killed. He was reported to privately say afterward that he wanted to live, which is why he was expressing certainty in his identification of Oswald in agreement with what he believed was wanted.

Guinyard, the African American in 1963 Dallas, deep south before there was a Civil Rights Act, said it was Oswald who went by him on Patton, though there is some discrepancy on which side of the sidewalk, but again, there is no way of knowing Guinyard is different from witnesses who saw Craford and said "that was Oswald". 

And so on. And yes, I include Brewer too. He viewed the man in front of his store (which I stipulate with you was the same killer of Tippit seen by the earlier Tenth and Patton witnesses headed in that direction), not directly but through a glass door, not lengthy period of time, not up close. Then Oswald in the partly-darkened theatre got Brewer's attention by standing up in the back, and Brewer told police "that's him!" Then police arrested Oswald who it turns everyone was saying had killed JFK. Brewer sold shoes to Oswald at some earlier time, not extremely recent, those shoes have been verified. But his identification of the man in front of his store is not infallible, compared to Craford having been the man momentarily acting suspiciously standing in front of his store's front glass window door.  

As the narrative solidified within hours, of Oswald implicated for both JFK and Tippit, every witness who identified Oswald as the Tippit killer was reinforced by the news and by knowledge of the other witnesses' similar identifications, a possible groupthink phenomenon reinforcement effect. 

The question is basic: if it was not for other information such as the shell hulls match to Oswald's revolver, would the eyewitnesses alone be sufficient to know that was no mistaken identification of Oswald, instead of Craford, as the actual gunman those witnesses saw?

And we know honest witnesses (witnesses attempting and believing they were telling the truth) all over Dallas were repeatedly making this specific mistake, having seen Craford with Ruby and telling family and friends post-assassination, "I saw Oswald! I recognize him!", etc. And this happened with others than Craford, but Craford is the highest incidence of all, I believe, simply in numbers for mistaken Oswald identifications. It is not very relevant that you or I may say we don't think the photos look alike. The fact is witnesses who did not know either of these before were confusing these two, even though there are several real differences in physical description (height, hair, complexion).

Your citing nine is quantitative. Lets turn to the more important qualitative, because not all witness identifications are equal. The single most credible and strongest witness qualitatively to an identification of the killer was Benavides because he was the closest, only ca. 15 feet away, and said he got a very good look at the back of the killer's head. Nobody equals Benavides for quality and credibility of his witness of the killer. He described a block cut hairline in the back of the killer's head. I know you dispute this and parse him differently but he just did, described a block cut. That was not Oswald who had a taper cut. And Benavides said the killer was not light-skinned like Oswald and stereotypical white people; he said the killer was a little darker in complexion than that, which is in agreement with the FBI description of Craford as "medium", not light, complexion. And perhaps evocative of Helen Markham, and Julia Postal, who each separately said the killer's skin color looked "ruddy".

Yes Benavides in later years said he assumed the killer was Oswald, because that is what smart people had concluded, he never is known to have taken any position against that. But he did take a hard position on that block cut rear hairline description, and he was the single best witness of the gunman, and what he saw and what he reported is not consistent with Oswald. It is not unreasonable, in qualitative terms, that one Benavides could be stronger than nine Virginia Davises or Callaways.

Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid. And Acquila Clemons, who was a witness of the killer as much as the others, can fairly be said to appear to be describing someone who does not sound quite like Oswald. Acquila's description in fact is similar to the earliest description given by Helen Markham which differs from Oswald in the direction of Craford who was an inch or two shorter and maybe 10-20 pounds heavier than Oswald, darker complexion than Oswald, darker hair than Oswald, and fuller head of hair than Oswald. 

Helen Markham: the gunman had "bushy" hair (reported by newsmen who heard her telling police that within minutes at the crime scene). Oswald's hair was not "bushy". Craford however had a full head of hair that could prompt such a description.

The killer had a jacket which was off-white light tan in color and which was not the gray jacket of Oswald known to Buell Frazier and Oswald's other coworkers at the TSBD where Oswald wore his gray jacket to work. (The only reason for thinking so is Marina said so for the first and only time under questionable circumstances in her Warren Commission testimony.) In fact Oswald wore his gray jacket to Irving Thursday night (even Marina indicated that), seen by Frazier worn by Oswald Fri morning Nov 22, and that means the jacket Oswald newly put on and left going out the door of the rooming house at 1 pm seen by Earlene Roberts was his other jacket, his heavier blue one, as color-blind Earlene said, it was "dark" in color. It was not the off-white light tan jacket of the killer, CE 162.

The Tippit killer's jacket was off-white light tan, seen by the witnesses, found at Ballew's Texaco, today in the National Archives, C162, exact color and similar kind of jacket worn by Craford about a week later in Michigan in the FBI photographs of him after they tracked him down and found him.

I think Craford post-Nov 22 intentionally bought another jacket as closely similar to the one he abandoned in Oak Cliff as he could find, in order to distance suspicion from himself as having left C162 in that parking lot of Ballew's Texaco after killing Tippit. I make my arguments on the jackets, which you have probably never read, at https://www.scrollery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/T-Jackets-112.pdf (117 pages).

 

"Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid."

 

No Sir.  I did not err at all.

I have both the transcripts and the audio of the 1968 Al Chapman interview with Jimmy Burt for the National Enquirer.  Although Chapman claims in his article that Burt said the man was not Oswald, the fact is that Burt didn't say it at all.

Chapman did not include the transcripts in the article.  I wonder why...  Not really.

 

[Greg Doudna]

2 minutes ago, Bill Brown said:

"She herself said she covered her face with her hands and did not look when the killer left the patrol car and came west in what looked like her direction."

No.  Markham describes covering her eyes momentarily.  Then, she spread apart her fingers and looked at the killer and he looked at her.  This is almost a direct quote, Greg.

You're right Bill. I've edited the wording of that. 

Mr. BALL. What did the man do? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. The man, he just walked calmly, fooling with his gun. 
Mr. BALL. Toward what direction did he walk? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Come back towards me, turned around, and went back. 
Mr. BALL. Toward Patton? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir; towards Patton. He didn't run. It just didn't scare him to death. He didn't run. When he saw me he looked at me, stared at me. I put my hands over my face like this, closed my eyes. I gradually opened my fingers like this, and 1 opened my eyes, and when I did he started off in kind of a little trot. 
Mr. BALL. Which way? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Sir? 
Mr. BALL. Which way? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Towards Jefferson, right across that way. 
Mr. DULLES. Did he have the pistol in his hand at this time? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. He had the gun when I saw him. 
Mr. BALL. Did you yell at him? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. When I pulled my fingers down where I could see, I got my hand down, he began to trot off, and then I ran to the policeman. 
Mr. BALL. Before you put your hands over your eyes, before you put your hand over your eyes, did you see the man walk towards the corner? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes. 
Mr. BALL. What did he do? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Well, he stared at me. 
Mr. BALL. What did you do? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. I didn't do anything. I couldn't. 
Mr. BALL. Didn't you say something? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. No, I couldn't. 
Mr. BALL. Or yell or scream? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. I could not. I could not say nothing. 
Mr. BALL. You looked at him? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes. 
Mr. BALL. You looked at him 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir. He looked wild. I mean, well, he did to me. 
Mr. BALL. And you say you saw him fooling with his gun? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. He had it in his hands. 
Mr. BALL. Did you see what he was doing with it? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. He was just fooling with it. I didn't know what he was doing. I was afraid he was fixing to kill me. 
Mr. BALL. How far away from the police car do you think you were on the corner when you saw the shooting? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Well, I wasn't too far. 
Mr. BALL. Can you estimate it in feet? Don't guess. 
Mrs. MARKHAM. I would just be afraid to say how many feet because I am a bad judgment on that. 
Mr. BALL. When you looked at the man, though, when he came toward the corner, you were standing on one corner, were you? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir 
Mr. BALL. Where was he standing with reference to the other corner? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. After he had shot-- 
Mr. BALL. When he looked at you. 
Mrs. MARKHAM. After he had shot the policeman? 
Mr. BALL. Yes. 
Mrs. MARKHAM. He was standing almost even to that curb, not very far from the curb, from the sidewalk. 
Mr. BALL. Across the street from you? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir. 
Mr. BALL. Did he look at you? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir. 
Mr. BALL. And did you look at him? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. I sure did. 
Mr. BALL. That was before you put your hands over your eyes? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir; and he kept fooling with his gun, and I slapped my hands up to my face like this. 
Mr. BALL. And then you ran to the policeman? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. After he ran off. 
Mr. BALL. In what hand did he have his gun, do you know, when he fired the shots? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Sir, I believe it was his right. I am not positive because I was scared. 
Mr. BALL. When he came down the street towards you, in what hand did he have his gun? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. He had it in both of them. 
Mr. BALL. He had it in both of them? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir. 
Mr. BALL. When he went towards Jefferson you say he went at sort of a trot? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir. 
Mr. BALL. Did he cross Patton? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir. 
Mr. DULLES. Were there many other, or other people in the block at that time, or were you there with Officer Tippit almost alone? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. I was out there, I didn't see anybody. I was there alone by myself. 
Mr. DULLES. I see. You didn't see anybody else in the immediate neighborhood? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. No; not until everything was over--I never seen anybody until I was at Mr. Tippit's side. I tried to save his life, which was I didn't know at that time I couldn't do something for him. 
Mr. DULLES. Mr. Tippit, Officer Tippit, didn't say anything to you? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. He tried to. 
Mr. DULLES. He tried to? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Yes, sir. 
Mr. DULLES. But he didn't succeed? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. No, I couldn't understand. I was screaming and hollering and I was trying to help him all I could, and I would have. I was with him until they put him in the ambulance. 
Mr. BALL. Did you make an estimate of how far you were from this man with the gun when he came--after the shooting, and when he came down to the corner, did you make an estimate of that? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. No. To anyone-- 
Mr. BALL. We measured it the other day. We were out there, weren't we? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Now I couldn't tell you how many feet or nothing because I have never had no occasions to measure that. 
Mr. DULLES. Was it further than this table, the length of this table? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. It was across the street. 
Mr. DULLES. Across the street. It was two or three times the length of this table? 
Mrs. MARKHAM. Across from the street. That was too close.  

[Gil Jesus]

7 minutes ago, Greg Doudna said:

Paging @Gil Jesus--you have been a police officer, could you possibly be of help in obtaining fingerprints of Craford, or if such were obtained, in getting them run through whatever national database now exists to attempt to identify who left those prints on the Tippit patrol car? 

 

It's been amost 50 years since I was a cop. The guys I worked with are all either dead or retired. Likewise, any connections I had with the FBI, SS or State Police are long gone. My advice would be to connect with someone who is currently in law enforcement and see if they could find any record of the fingerprints. I'm pretty sure that a national database of fingerprints did not exist in 1963. If this Craford was fingerprinted, his prints may be on file with the FBI or the local police where he was arrested. If they are found, then you would have to have the fingerprints taken from the cruiser and his compared by an expert.

[Bill Brown]

1 hour ago, Greg Doudna said:

Bill you will admit that witnesses post-Nov 22 who had seen Craford were saying "that was Oswald" in a number of instances unrelated to the Tippit case. The only issue is whether that known phenomenon is applicable in this case.

The reason the 9 who said the killer was Oswald and not Craford is not determinative is because Craford was never offered to those witnesses's awareness as a choice between Oswald or Craford. Craford was not in those lineups. Craford's photo was not, to my knowledge, shown to any of those witnesses (do you know differently on that?). Oswald in those lineups stood among others who did not look like him or Craford. Picking Oswald would be an easy mistake for a witness to make in that context, because we know witnesses did make exactly that identification mistake.

Innocence Project exonerations in which persons convicted by juries of serious crimes such as murder, subsequently proven innocent by DNA testing, sometimes decades later, involve positive eyewitness identifications as part of the evidence which wrongly convicted those innocent persons in over half the cases. 

The sad fact is eyewitness identifications are not infallible, and not all eyewitness identifications are created equal.

In the Tippit case there is the illusion of strength in those identifications because of their number. But they are all the same in kind, and therefore piling on a few more more weak or dicey identifications to an original set of weak or dicey identifications is not changing much. 

Lets go down the line. Helen Markham was a mess (even though she is one of the most important witnesses). Her identification is questionable credibility. She saw Callaway and Scoggins take Tippit's revolver and drive away and her first claim, to Croy, was that one of those was the gunman. You yourself have just got through saying she is not credible in claiming what she saw of the killer on the other side of the patrol car. She herself said she covered her face with her hands and did not look when the killer left the patrol car and came west in what looked like her direction. She said she "picked" Oswald out of the lineup a few hours later because of all the men in the lineup he gave her cold chills looking at him. According to her memory (not that this is necessarily what happened literally) police kept asking her "which one is it?" "which one is it?" of the ones in the lineup until she "picked" Oswald among what she thought were her choices, which she did guided by her cold-chills reaction basis.

Scoggins identified Oswald out of a lineup. But when he was shown photos by police he said he picked the "wrong" police photo. (Bill, do you know whose photo Scoggins picked who he got "wrong", ie other than Oswald?)

Callaway claimed total certainty from fifty feet away of his Oswald lineup identification. He also testified that Leavelle told him prior to the lineup that they wanted to wrap up Oswald real tight on Tippit since they believed he had killed the president too which might be a tougher case to prove. Callaway was gungho to help police nail the bastard that shot Tippit.

Virginia and Barbara Davis seeing the gunman out their front door on the sidewalk go by, not much to go on there. One said she was going by a glance of a side view only. Another thought her "Oswald" was wearing a black coat (!) (Is it certain she was even identifying the gunman?) But its easy to express confidence months later to the Warren Commission when everyone else is saying a suspect "is the one".

Warren Reynolds wasn't willing to express certainty the man he saw running was Oswald until he got shot in the head and almost killed. He was reported to privately say afterward that he wanted to live, which is why he was expressing certainty in his identification of Oswald in agreement with what he believed was wanted.

Guinyard, the African American in 1963 Dallas, deep south before there was a Civil Rights Act, said it was Oswald who went by him on Patton, though there is some discrepancy on which side of the sidewalk, but again, there is no way of knowing Guinyard is different from witnesses who saw Craford and said "that was Oswald". 

And so on. And yes, I include Brewer too. He viewed the man in front of his store (which I stipulate with you was the same killer of Tippit seen by the earlier Tenth and Patton witnesses headed in that direction), not directly but through a glass door, not lengthy period of time, not up close. Then Oswald in the partly-darkened theatre got Brewer's attention by standing up in the back, and Brewer told police "that's him!" Then police arrested Oswald who it turns everyone was saying had killed JFK. Brewer sold shoes to Oswald at some earlier time, not extremely recent, those shoes have been verified. But his identification of the man in front of his store is not infallible, compared to Craford having been the man momentarily acting suspiciously standing in front of his store's front glass window door.  

As the narrative solidified within hours, of Oswald implicated for both JFK and Tippit, every witness who identified Oswald as the Tippit killer was reinforced by the news and by knowledge of the other witnesses' similar identifications, a possible groupthink phenomenon reinforcement effect. 

The question is basic: if it was not for other information such as the shell hulls match to Oswald's revolver, would the eyewitnesses alone be sufficient to know that was no mistaken identification of Oswald, instead of Craford, as the actual gunman those witnesses saw?

And we know honest witnesses (witnesses attempting and believing they were telling the truth) all over Dallas were repeatedly making this specific mistake, having seen Craford with Ruby and telling family and friends post-assassination, "I saw Oswald! I recognize him!", etc. And this happened with others than Craford, but Craford is the highest incidence of all, I believe, simply in numbers for mistaken Oswald identifications. It is not very relevant that you or I may say we don't think the photos look alike. The fact is witnesses who did not know either of these before were confusing these two, even though there are several real differences in physical description (height, hair, complexion).

Your citing nine is quantitative. Lets turn to the more important qualitative, because not all witness identifications are equal. The single most credible and strongest witness qualitatively to an identification of the killer was Benavides because he was the closest, only ca. 15 feet away, and said he got a very good look at the back of the killer's head. Nobody equals Benavides for quality and credibility of his witness of the killer. He described a block cut hairline in the back of the killer's head. I know you dispute this and parse him differently but he just did, described a block cut. That was not Oswald who had a taper cut. And Benavides said the killer was not light-skinned like Oswald and stereotypical white people; he said the killer was a little darker in complexion than that, which is in agreement with the FBI description of Craford as "medium", not light, complexion. And perhaps evocative of Helen Markham, and Julia Postal, who each separately said the killer's skin color looked "ruddy".

Yes Benavides in later years said he assumed the killer was Oswald, because that is what smart people had concluded, he never is known to have taken any position against that. But he did take a hard position on that block cut rear hairline description, and he was the single best witness of the gunman, and what he saw and what he reported is not consistent with Oswald. It is not unreasonable, in qualitative terms, that one Benavides could be stronger than nine Virginia Davises or Callaways.

Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid. And Acquila Clemons, who was a witness of the killer as much as the others, can fairly be said to appear to be describing someone who does not sound quite like Oswald. Acquila's description in fact is similar to the earliest description given by Helen Markham which differs from Oswald in the direction of Craford who was an inch or two shorter and maybe 10-20 pounds heavier than Oswald, darker complexion than Oswald, darker hair than Oswald, and fuller head of hair than Oswald. 

Helen Markham: the gunman had "bushy" hair (reported by newsmen who heard her telling police that within minutes at the crime scene). Oswald's hair was not "bushy". Craford however had a full head of hair that could prompt such a description.

The killer had a jacket which was off-white light tan in color and which was not the gray jacket of Oswald known to Buell Frazier and Oswald's other coworkers at the TSBD where Oswald wore his gray jacket to work. (The only reason for thinking so is Marina said so for the first and only time under questionable circumstances in her Warren Commission testimony.) In fact Oswald wore his gray jacket to Irving Thursday night (even Marina indicated that), seen by Frazier worn by Oswald Fri morning Nov 22, and that means the jacket Oswald newly put on and left going out the door of the rooming house at 1 pm seen by Earlene Roberts was his other jacket, his heavier blue one, as color-blind Earlene said, it was "dark" in color. It was not the off-white light tan jacket of the killer, CE 162.

The Tippit killer's jacket was off-white light tan, seen by the witnesses, found at Ballew's Texaco, today in the National Archives, C162, exact color and similar kind of jacket worn by Craford about a week later in Michigan in the FBI photographs of him after they tracked him down and found him.

I think Craford post-Nov 22 intentionally bought another jacket as closely similar to the one he abandoned in Oak Cliff as he could find, in order to distance suspicion from himself as having left C162 in that parking lot of Ballew's Texaco after killing Tippit. I make my arguments on the jackets, which you have probably never read, at https://www.scrollery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/T-Jackets-112.pdf (117 pages).

 

"I think Craford post-Nov 22 intentionally bought another jacket as closely similar to the one he abandoned in Oak Cliff as he could find, in order to distance suspicion from himself as having left C162 in that parking lot of Ballew's Texaco after killing Tippit."

 

So then you believe that Crafard was also wearing a shirt in which the shirt fibers were an exact match with test fibers removed from Oswald's arrest shirt?

For those who may be unaware, microscopic fibers were found inside one of the sleeves of the jacket found underneath one of the cars behind the Texaco station.  Test fibers were removed from the shirt Oswald was wearing when he was arrested inside the theater.

When comparing fibers forensically, one does so using three fiber characteristics... Color, shade and twist.  The fibers found inside the sleeve of the jacket (CE-162) were a match to the test fibers removed from Oswald's arrest shirt, i.e. the exact same color, the exact same shade and the exact same twist.

Incidentally, a tuft of fibers were also found in a crevice between the metal butt plate and the wooden stock of the rifle (CE-139) found up on the sixth floor.  These rifle fibers were also compared to the test fibers removed from Oswald's arrest shirt.  Yep.  Exact same color, shade and twist.

 

Edited December 18, 2023 by Bill Brown

[Greg Doudna]

1 minute ago, Bill Brown said:

"Minor point, you err in saying none of the witnesses said the gunman was not Oswald. Jimmy Burt said so emphatically several years later in a tabloid."

No Sir.  I did not err at all.

I have both the transcripts and the audio of the 1968 Al Chapman interview with Jimmy Burt for the National Enquirer.  Although Chapman claims in his article that Burt said the man was not Oswald, the fact is that Burt didn't say it at all.

Chapman did not include the transcripts in the article.  I wonder why...  Not really.

You're saying National Enquirer was getting that solely from the Al Chapman interview transcript (which I have as well)? And misrepresented what Jimmy Burt said? I had assumed that Jimmy Burt quote was something from some additional phone interview. It is represented as an exact quote (which is not in the Al Chapman transcript that you and I have). 

Thanks for clearing up that point, that there is minimally at least a question about its accuracy, not helped by the venue in which it is reported.

I respect and like your knowledge of accurate details of the case. Thanks!  

[Greg Doudna]

5 minutes ago, Gil Jesus said:

It's been amost 50 years since I was a cop. The guys I worked with are all either dead or retired. Likewise, any connections I had with the FBI, SS or State Police are long gone. My advice would be to connect with someone who is currently in law enforcement and see if they could find any record of the fingerprints. I'm pretty sure that a national database of fingerprints did not exist in 1963. If this Craford was fingerprinted, his prints may be on file with the FBI or the local police where he was arrested. If they are found, then you would have to have the fingerprints taken from the cruiser and his compared by an expert.

Thanks Gil.