James A. Andrews

[J. William King]

There is a report that a Mr. James A. Andrews was stopped by J.D. Tippit just after 1pm on the 22nd.

The full report

"James A. Andrew’s was returning to work at his office in Oak Cliff a little after 1:00 P.M. on 11/22/63. He was driving west on West 10th Street (about eight or nine blocks from where Tippit was shot minutes later, see map). Suddenly a police car also traveling west on West 10th Street came up from behind Andrews’ car, passed him and cut in front of Andrews’s car forcing him to stop......"

Does anyone know what year and make of car Mr. Andrews was driving at the time? I'm curious as to why Officer Tippit (who Mr. Andrews said was the policeman who stopped him) would take an intrest in his particular car.

JW

Edited June 18, 2006 by J. William King

[James Richards]

There is a report that a Mr. James A. Andrews was stopped by J.D. Tippit just after 1pm on the 22nd.

The full report

"James A. Andrew’s was returning to work at his office in Oak Cliff a little after 1:00 P.M. on 11/22/63. He was driving west on West 10th Street (about eight or nine blocks from where Tippit was shot minutes later, see map). Suddenly a police car also traveling west on West 10th Street came up from behind Andrews’ car, passed him and cut in front of Andrews’s car forcing him to stop......"

Does anyone know what year and make of car Mr. Andrews was driving at the time? I'm curious as to why Officer Tippit (who Mr. Andrews said was the policeman who stopped him) would take an intrest in his particular car.

JW

JW,

I don't know what kind of car Andrews was driving but I find this report most interesting as it heavily influences Tippit's alleged mind set moments before he was killed; suggesting that he was flustered and somewhat desperate.

From what I can gather, Andrews worked out of the same offices as Roscoe White and was being questioned regarding White when Andrews told the Tippit story. My question is, do we believe Andrews?

Also, was there any reports from independent witnesses confirming that the encounter with Tippit actually happened?

Cheers,

James

[Duke Lane]

There is a report that a Mr. James A. Andrews was stopped by J.D. Tippit just after 1pm on the 22nd.

The full report

"James A. Andrew’s was returning to work at his office in Oak Cliff a little after 1:00 P.M. on 11/22/63. He was driving west on West 10th Street (about eight or nine blocks from where Tippit was shot minutes later, see map). Suddenly a police car also traveling west on West 10th Street came up from behind Andrews’ car, passed him and cut in front of Andrews’s car forcing him to stop......"

Does anyone know what year and make of car Mr. Andrews was driving at the time? I'm curious as to why Officer Tippit (who Mr. Andrews said was the policeman who stopped him) would take an intrest in his particular car.

I don't know what kind of car Andrews was driving but I find this report most interesting as it heavily influences Tippit's alleged mind set moments before he was killed; suggesting that he was flustered and somewhat desperate.

From what I can gather, Andrews worked out of the same offices as Roscoe White and was being questioned regarding White when Andrews told the Tippit story. My question is, do we believe Andrews?

Also, was there any reports from independent witnesses confirming that the encounter with Tippit actually happened?

I've always been skeptical of this account, not least because it's in connection with the Roscoe White story (which "office" did Andrews work in with him?), but more importantly because it came out so late in the game in that same "I know something that you don't know" song-and-dance that is so unfortunately common around Dallas.

Granted that it may be paraphrased, but the introduction that “Since you are interested in the assassination, let me tell you something that happened” nevertheless fairly reeks of fabrication. The story goes that

Andrews was returning to work at his office in Oak Cliff a little after 1:00 P.M. on 11/22/63. He was driving west on West 10th Street (about eight or nine blocks from where Tippit was shot minutes later, see map). Suddenly a police car also traveling west on West 10th Street came up from behind Andrews’ car, passed him and cut in front of Andrews’s car forcing him to stop. The police car pulled in front of Andrews’ car at an angle heading into the curb in order to stop him. The officer then jumped out of the patrol car motioned to Andrews to remain stopped, ran back to Andrews’ car, and looked in the space between the front seat and the back seat. Without saying a word the policeman went back to the patrol car and then drove off quickly.

I'm not certain exactly what time "a little after 1:00 p.m." is, but since we're so inclined to parsing seconds to figure out what time JDT was killed based on how far Helen Markham had to walk to catch her bus at what time, whether Tom Bowley's watch was accurate, and how many minutes before 1:16 - the time of the "citizen" call to dispatch - he had actually been shot, there is altogether too little time for this to have "fit in" to the scenario.

Consider that JDT had to have gotten from somewhere in the vicinity of 10th and Llewellyn or Van Buren, and back across Zangs and Beckley with a "jump" up to 9th and back down Storey or Crawford for a block in order to be driving easterly on 10th just a short time later. To get to 10th & Patton by 1:10 - the latest time he was shot - he'd had to have been going at breakneck speeds ... which is just what this story suggests: everything in "hurry-up" mode.

The trouble is that by the time he gets over to 10th and Patton, he's apparently slammed on the brakes and taken a pacifier since he's cruising slowly on 10th when he's next seen, "calmly" talks to someone beside his car, and then gets out of the car "real friendly like." I can only say that they didn't have stuff like that when I was in college!

Moreover, if the Top Ten Records story is true - and I don't have a particular reason to disbelieve it - then in order for Andrews to have encountered JD after 1:00, then it requires JD to cross Jefferson, go north a block, turn left for a couple of blocks, stop Andrews, go through his gyrations, and then go speeding off in the opposite direction to meet his fate. All of the above would still have to hold true as to his complete attitude adjustment and fast braking.

It was only sixteen minutes between the time that JD was last heard from on the radio at 8th and Lancaster until he lay dead in the street. If he spend even a couple of minutes on the phone at Top Ten, he didn't have time to go traipsing around time either before or afterward if he was going to get killed on time. (I think it's fair to say, tho', that he didn't know that at the time.)

The "attitude adjustment" is the biggest part of the problem, and belies someone who just didn't have a clue about what was supposed to happen shortly after his rendezvous with the man with the mad cop disease ... i.e., he didn't know that JD wasn't driving around like a madman.

As further evidence of that fact, JD was first told to move into central Oak Cliff at 12:48 when he was at Kiest and Bonnie View ("point A"). Eight minutes later (12:56) he was at 8th and Lancaster ("point B"). I have driven - several times - the most direct route (in fact, the ONLY route someone from point A to point B would have driven if he had any clue of the layout of the area) and it takes almost exactly eight minutes to drive at normal speeds (35-40 mph, the posted limits).

Now, you could say that JD was driving a cop car, could have had his siren and lights going, etc., etc., but the fact remains he was at point A one minute, and at point B eight minutes later. Period. I could have the wrong route, but any other - any other! - would cause him to first be closer to central Oak Cliff, then move away from it and then turn around and go back to it! I think we can all agree that that didn't happen ....

The sum total of all of this is that there is nothing that would indicate that JD was either in such a rush as Andrews describes, or had any cause to transmogrify from Mr Hyde into Dr Jekyll. Even the Top Ten guys didn't say he'd left in a "headlong" rush - so why the sudden change of demeanor for Andrews' benefit?

(Incidentally, there is no Jack A Andrews currently in the Dallas phone listings, so I can't easily get in touch with him to get clarifications. If someone has more info, I'm happy to follow it up, but lacking it ...?)

File this story under "B" for "bull," in my current opinion. I can be convinced otherwise ...(?)

[Lee Forman]

There is a report that a Mr. James A. Andrews was stopped by J.D. Tippit just after 1pm on the 22nd.

The full report

"James A. Andrew’s was returning to work at his office in Oak Cliff a little after 1:00 P.M. on 11/22/63. He was driving west on West 10th Street (about eight or nine blocks from where Tippit was shot minutes later, see map). Suddenly a police car also traveling west on West 10th Street came up from behind Andrews’ car, passed him and cut in front of Andrews’s car forcing him to stop......"

Does anyone know what year and make of car Mr. Andrews was driving at the time? I'm curious as to why Officer Tippit (who Mr. Andrews said was the policeman who stopped him) would take an intrest in his particular car.

JW

Hello.

I posted what there was on the JD Tippit thread. I contacted Bill Pulte who provided an update which I posted. As per my recollection, it wasn't much help. A company owned car, black or white sedan. FWIW.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...indpost&p=54106

- lee

[Ed O'Hagan]

Officer Tilson phoned DPD HQ and described what he and his daughter had seen, namely a man who looked like Jack Ruby, who had come running down the embankment towards a black car parked near the underpass. He reported that the man had opened the rear door of the car and had thrown a long shaped object into the back seat. area. If HQ broadcast the report, then Tippit could have been listening to it as he was heading east on 10th. He saw Andrew's car coming towards him which matched the description , so he swung his vehicle around and headed after it. This would explain why he looked in the space between the front and rear seats.

Tilson's wrote down the license plate number of the car while he was chasing after it along the highway, but claimed he lost the piece of paper, so that aspect is open to question. One thing for sure, it was not Ruby whom Tilson was chasing, and I would guess that the license plate number would not have been registered to Ruby either. I recall reading that the vehicle actually belonged to a cousin of Filipe Vidal Santiago's and was on loan to him for a period of about three months. It may also have been the same car which appears in the photograph of the outside view of Walker's house.

The whole idea was to point the finger at a Ruby look- alike coming down the embankment carrying what appeared to be a rifle. Recall that Julie Ann Mercer at 10:50 a.m. had seen a man she subsequently recognized as being Jack Ruby , who was sitting in a truck while another man carried what looked like a rifle up the embankment . What goes up also has to come down, so to speak, and if Tilson made a mistake in thinking the man was Ruby, then likewise Mercer was entirely mistaken when she identified the man in the truck as having been Ruby. I think she was absolutelyy accurate in what she described , and that it was Ruby at 10:50 a.m . but not at 12:30 P.M..... Tilson's tale implied Mercer had made the same mistake as he had , when she tagged Ruby as the man she had seen sitting in the truck.

One bothering aspect: Tilson's vehicle was sitting on the corner of Industrial as the presidential limousine raced past on its way to Parkland. To chase after the black car which was drive up the Elm St. ramp onto the Stemmons freeway, Tilson claimed that he drove up Commerce St turned left onto Houston and then made a left down Elm St. Looking at the Cancellare picture the traffic on Commerce appears to have been stalled and it's difficult to understand that Tilson would have been able to do what he claimed, not alone on account of the heavy traffic on Commerec, but also by the fact that Elm St had people all over the street and running up th eGK at that time.

This is just a quick response based largely on memory, so please feel free to amend/correct anything that appears to be out of whack with the known facts.

Edited June 20, 2006 by Ed O'Hagan

[J. William King]

Many thanks to all, and thanks to Lee for pointing out the thread that I missed during my search. Oops!

I've always wondered about the Andrews account. I don't understand why he wouldn't have reported it to the authorities or the media at the time it happened. His "oh, want to hear something funny?" way of bringing it up years later tells me that he, like so many others, wanted his particular "connection" to the events of that day. I thought that if I knew what kind of car he was driving, it may ring a bell with all of the other vehicles I've been looking into.

I was actually hoping he was driving a Rambler wagon.

JW

[Duke Lane]

Officer Tilson phoned DPD HQ and described what he and his daughter had seen, namely a man who looked like Jack Ruby, who had come running down the embankment towards a black car parked near the underpass. He reported that the man had opened the rear door of the car and had thrown a long shaped object into the back seat. area. If HQ broadcast the report, then Tippit could have been listening to it as he was heading east on 10th ....

Too many "ifs" in this scenario, Ed. "If" DPDHQ had broadcast the report, which does not appear in any transcript anywhere. "If" Tom Tilson made the call, which he could only have done "if" he'd seen the vehicle in question and chased it as he said, which he could only have done "if" he'd been able to continue up Commerce, turn left on Houston and left again on Elm to catch up with the guy who was "speeding away."

The most telling "if" was brought up here by Lee Forman in one of the thread Suspicious Cars and 11/22/63, quoting an age-old article of mine, "The Cowtown Connection," which was originally accompanied by this Mel MacIntyre photo showing exactly the scene Tilson described so many years later, where the limo had just cleared the Triple Underpass and had not yet gotten to the Stemmons Freeway entrance ramp, and - lo and behold! - there is no car where Tilson said there was for the supposed "Ruby look-alike" to jump into and speed off into.

Since the car wasn't there, "Ruby" didn't get into it and it didn't speed off, Tilson didn't call in a report about it and didn't chase it, and DPDHQ didn't broadcast a report about and Tippit wasn't listening to it, so therefore it wasn't the reason Tippit did anything at all.

This would explain why he looked in the space between the front and rear seats.

It might ... if it had happened. Either event!

Tilson's wrote down the license plate number of the car while he was chasing after it along the highway, but claimed he lost the piece of paper, so that aspect is open to question.

So is the fact that his daughter was 18 years old at the time and remembers absolutely nothing of this story. He "lost" the paper because he never wrote down any license plate number because he never saw any such car.

One thing for sure, it was not Ruby whom Tilson was chasing ...

We can certainly agree on that!!

I would guess that the license plate number would not have been registered to Ruby either.

That's another fair guess.

I recall reading that the vehicle actually belonged to a cousin of Filipe Vidal Santiago's and was on loan to him for a period of about three months. It may also have been the same car which appears in the photograph of the outside view of Walker's house.

When one uses fabrication as evidence, anything is possible. Actually, the car belonged to me ...! (I realize you were only quoting from a story, not necessarily promoting it, but it's still a fabrication.)

The whole idea was to point the finger at a Ruby look-alike coming down the embankment carrying what appeared to be a rifle. Recall that Julie Ann Mercer at 10:50 a.m. had seen a man she subsequently recognized as being Jack Ruby, who was sitting in a truck while another man carried what looked like a rifle up the embankment. What goes up also has to come down, so to speak, and if Tilson made a mistake in thinking the man was Ruby, then likewise Mercer was entirely mistaken when she identified the man in the truck as having been Ruby. I think she was absolutelyy accurate in what she described , and that it was Ruby at 10:50 a.m. but not at 12:30 P.M..... Tilson's tale implied Mercer had made the same mistake as he had , when she tagged Ruby as the man she had seen sitting in the truck.

I won't dispute Julia Ann's report only because it already has been ... and I don't necessarily agree that it's been disproved or debunked. Was it Ruby? Probably not, but that is not by any means to suggest that another man, regardless of what he was doing or not doing on the scene at the time, could not possibly have looked like Ruby. Also, the fact that a cop had "cleared" the men and truck on the scene machts nichts.

Ruby, however, did not become an active part of the deal until late Friday or Saturday night when he and his family were threatened. The "lone Communist" was in jail instead of dead, so the "lone Jew" was sent to silence him. My only problem with that scenario, of course, is that I can't imagine who would want Communists and Jews to take the blame for all of this! I mean, qui bono?

One bothering aspect: Tilson's vehicle was sitting on the corner of Industrial as the presidential limousine raced past on its way to Parkland. To chase after the black car which was drive up the Elm St. ramp onto the Stemmons freeway, Tilson claimed that he drove up Commerce St turned left onto Houston and then made a left down Elm St. Looking at the Cancellare picture the traffic on Commerce appears to have been stalled and it's difficult to understand that Tilson would have been able to do what he claimed, not alone on account of the heavy traffic on Commerec, but also by the fact that Elm St had people all over the street and running up the GK at that time.

I mentioned the impossible "trip around the block" (note that, coming from Commerce and Industrial, one can -and could then - take either Commerce or Main through Dealey Plaza, but even allowing that he didn't take the Commerce bend and have to cut across Main again to get to Elm ...?), now let's look at another impossible aspect of it: where Tom Tilson was in relation to everything.

The MacIntyre photo was taken at or near the position marked as "A" in bold red on the map below. Tom Tilson claimed to have been at the corner of Commerce and Industrial, marked as "B."

As you can see from the map, the Stemmons Freeway (I-35W) is in between where he was and where the limo entered the highway. It is - and was - at that point an overpass (I'll take a picture for you the next time I'm there, if you'd like) meaning Tilson not only had to see this stuff at a distance, but he also had to see it through not one, but two three- or four-lane bridges with a roadway's distance - and then some! - between each of them!

In point of fact, if Tilson had seen what he'd seen when he'd claimed to have seen it, he was too far away to have seen anything of inherent value, much less what "Ruby" looked like! And he had other ample opportunity to turn around and give chase before he'd gone through the Triple Underpass, even if he'd have had to scrape the bottom of his car to do it. Remember, if you will, the idea that JFK could have continued straight down Main Street and gone over the curb to get onto Stemmons (and they could have put a temporary macadam ramp over that curb to ease that turn if they'd been so inclined ... which they weren't).

(When I was a teenager in the Civil Air Patrol - yes, you read that right - we had someone bus a leg while out on a bivouac. A jeep was headed up the mountain to get the kid, and a dozen or so of us built a ramp over a barricade of three-foot boulders for the jeep to traverse in less than an hour, by hand ... and disassembled it like it was never there in about another hour. Surely the City of Dallas could have made a six-inch ramp in the several days' time that they had!)

As to Mr Andrews, I have to agree with JW King's assessment (above) that "I don't understand why he wouldn't have reported it to the authorities or the media at the time it happened. His 'oh, want to hear something funny?' way of bringing it up years later tells me that he, like so many others, wanted his particular 'connection' to the events of that day." Not only did he know Roscoe (who had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting, by the way), but he was in the middle of the whole Tippit deal too (which Roscoe was also not involved with!). I don't think so.

Hell, the HSCA was looking for people almost 15 years before he came up with his little ditty; why didn't he tell it then? They managed to get Louie Steven Witt and a bunch of other characters, why not Andrews - and Tilson! - too?

Edited June 20, 2006 by Duke Lane

[Steve Thomas]

J.,

I was actually hoping he was driving a Rambler wagon.

JW

Going STRICTLY by memory, I thought I had read once that it WAS a Rambler.

Steve Thomas