Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (11 page)

If
Oswald was as he claimed “just a patsy,” it looks as though he realized his predicament the moment the hue and cry started in Dealey Plaza. It was from then on that the Oswald who had behaved so coolly in the encounter with the policeman gradually began to behave like a man in a panic.

Oswald’s account of leaving the scene of the crime goes like this: He told his interrogators how he had gotten his Coca-Cola in the second-floor lunchroom, how he had met the policeman and then gone downstairs. In the uproar, said Oswald, he heard a foreman say there would be no more work that day, so decided to leave—by the front door. Outside the Depository, he encountered a crew-cut young man whom he took to be a Secret Service agent because he flashed an identity card. Oswald had directed the “agent” to a telephone, then traveled home to his lodgings by bus and taxi.

All this is rather well supported by other witnesses. A clerical supervisor returning to her second-floor office said she saw Oswald, Coca-Cola bottle in hand, within a couple of minutes of the assassination: “I had no thoughts or anything of him having any connection with it all because he was very calm.” The foreman in question was indeed on the ground floor. The “Secret Service agent” Oswald directed to a phone was probably one of two reporters who rushed in looking for a phone on which to call their newsrooms—and recalled being pointed to one by a young man.
18
Oswald’s story of how he got home is corroborated by the bus ticket found in his pocket when he was arrested, and by a Dallas taxi driver.

Would a wholly innocent man have gone home within minutes of the assassination of the President of the United States just because he “didn’t think there would be any more work done that day”? Would not the natural thing, for a politically aware person like
Oswald, have been to linger awhile in the excited atmosphere outside the Depository? Moreover, the decision to take a taxi home, which Oswald himself admitted he had never done before, also suggests flight. Once he did reach his lodgings, much became mysterious—not least the shooting of a policeman that led to his arrest.

The Other Murder

“
There is still a real possibility that Oswald was on his way to meet an accomplice at the time of the Tippit murder. I led the Dallas investigation of that aspect of the case and was never satisfied on that point.”

—Assistant District Attorney William Alexander, 1977

I
t was just before one o’clock, half an hour after the assassination, when Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper at Oswald’s rooming house in the Oak Cliff district, answered the telephone. A friend was calling to tell her what had happened, and Mrs. Roberts turned on the television to catch the news. Just then—at 1:00 p.m.—her lodger Lee Oswald came bustling in. Roberts said, “Oh, you’re in a hurry,” and went on watching TV. Oswald went to his room and, as he himself later acknowledged, changed his clothes and armed himself with a .38 revolver. He was out of the house again within five minutes, and Roberts—who recalled looking out of the window—last saw him standing at a bus stop. In those five minutes, Roberts was to say, she had noticed something else, something that seemed inexplicable.

While Oswald was in his bedroom, she said, she had seen a Dallas police car come slowly by the house and pull up. As it did so, its horn sounded several times. Mrs. Roberts later described the incident under oath.

Commission Lawyer: Where was it parked?

Mrs. Roberts: It was parked in front of the house … directly in front of my house.

Lawyer: Where was Oswald when this happened?

Mrs. Roberts: In his room… .

Lawyer: Were there two uniformed policeman in the car?

Mrs. Roberts: Oh yes.

Lawyer: And one of the officers sounded the horn?

Mrs. Roberts: Just kind of
tit-tit
—twice.

After the police car’s horn sounded twice, the housekeeper said, the vehicle moved slowly away. She did not remember clearly the police number on the side of the vehicle. In statements in the days to come, however, she would repeat that she had seen the car stop and heard what sounded like a signal on the horn. This was a problem for the official inquiry, as checks with the police suggested there was no patrol car at that point at one o’clock. There was, moreover, no known reason for any police car to visit Oswald’s address so early in the case. He had not yet been missed from the Book Depository. The official breakdown of the day’s events shows that Oswald’s name did not crop up at all until just before 2:00 p.m.

According to the record, nobody in authority knew about his rented room until
after
two o’clock, when he volunteered it at the police station. The Warren Report dealt with the mystery the way it often did when the evidence failed to fit—by burying the police car horn-sounding incident in an obscure section of the
Report and implying that Mrs. Roberts was mistaken. The matter of the signaling car, however, may be pertinent to Oswald’s movements in the ten minutes after 1:00 p.m., ten minutes that were to end in the murder of a policeman about a mile away.

The police radio log showed that at 12:45 p.m. patrol car driver J. D. Tippit was ordered into the Oak Cliff area. At 12:54 p.m., when he reported that he was in the area, he was instructed to “be at large for any emergency.” At 1:00 p.m., as Oswald reached his rooming house, police headquarters called Tippit on the radio, and he did not reply. At 1:08 p.m., Tippit did call headquarters again, and this time the dispatcher failed to reply. The officer never called in again. Instead, eight minutes later, at 1:16 p.m., came the call from a member of the public using Tippit’s car radio: “We’ve had a shooting here … it’s a police officer, somebody shot him.”

J. D. Tippit—just J.D. to his friends—was lying dead in a puddle of blood beside his patrol car. He had been gunned down on East Tenth, a quiet, tree-lined street about a mile from Oswald’s lodgings.

The Warren Report decided on the following probable scenario. Tippit, cruising slowly along East Tenth, it was thought, had come upon Oswald walking on his own. The policeman pulled up and spoke to him, probably because he looked something like the broadcast description of the suspect in the President’s assassination. After a brief exchange through the car window, Tippit got out and began walking around the vehicle to approach Oswald. Oswald then suddenly pulled a revolver and fired four times, killing the policeman instantly. He ran off, noticed by a dozen witnesses, scattering shell cases as he went.

Later, after the hue and cry led to
Oswald’s arrest in a nearby movie theater, five of the witnesses would identify Oswald at police lineups. Crisply summarized in the Warren Report, it all sounded straightforward.

The Warren Commission had shown little interest in fully investigating the Tippit shooting. Only a handful of relevant witnesses testified to the Commission, and contradictions in the evidence were papered over.

The star witness to the murder itself was a Dallas waitress named Helen Markham, supposedly the only person to have seen the shooting in its entirety. The official version, which accepted her testimony as “reliable,” credited Markham with having watched the initial confrontation between Tippit and his murderer and with having peeped fearfully through her fingers as the murderer loped away—thus becoming competent to identify Oswald at a police lineup.

This “reliable” witness, however, made more nonsensical statements than can be cataloged here. She said she talked to the dying Tippit, who understood her until he was loaded into an ambulance. All the medical evidence, and other witnesses, indicate that Tippit died instantly from the head wound. Another witness who saw the shooting from his pickup truck and got out to help the policeman, put it graphically: “He was lying there and he had—looked like a big clot of blood coming out of his head, and his eyes were sunk back in his head… . The policeman, I believe, was dead when he hit the ground.”

Markham said twenty minutes passed until others gathered at the scene of the crime. Nonsense. Men were in Tippit’s car almost at once calling for help on the police radio, and a small crowd was there by the time an ambulance arrived three minutes later, at 1:10 p.m.

Markham was credited with having recognized Oswald within three hours at the police station. So hysterical was she at the station, however, that she was able to enter the lineup room only after the administration of ammonia. Before the Commission, Markham repeatedly said she had not been able to recognize anyone at the lineup—then changed her tune only after pressure from counsel.
1

The quality of the star witness in the Tippit shooting was described by Joseph Ball, a senior counsel to the Warren Commission itself. Speaking at a public debate in 1964, he said Markham’s testimony had been “full of mistakes.” She had been an “utter screwball … utterly unreliable.”

Other witnesses would paint a very different picture of events when Tippit was killed. Some of their statements, however, were also controversial. Acquilla Clemons, who ran out from the porch of a house close to the spot where Tippit was killed, told independent investigators that she had seen not one but two men near the policeman’s car just before the shooting. Here is part of the transcript of a filmed interview with Clemons:

Interviewer: Was there another man there?

Mrs. Clemons: Yes, there was one, other side of the street. All I know is, he tells him to go on.

Interviewer: Mrs. Clemons, the man who had the gun. Did he make any motion at all to the other man across the street?

Mrs. Clemons: No more than tell him to go.

Interviewer: He waved his hand and said, “Go on.”

Mrs. Clemons: Yes, said, “Go on.”

According to Clemons, the man with the gun went off in one direction, the second man in another. She described the man with the gun as “short and kind of heavy,” wearing “khaki and a white
shirt”—a description that does not fit Oswald. The second man, she said, was “thin” and tall rather than short, a description that could perhaps refer to Oswald.

According to reporters who visited Clemons several years later, she—and her family—still spoke of having seen two men at the scene of the shooting of Officer Tippit. Another witness, Frank Wright, added a further odd detail. Having heard the shots as he sat in his living room, he told researchers, he went to his front door in time to see the stricken policeman roll over once and then lie still. “I saw a man standing in front of the car,” he said. “He was looking toward the man on the ground.” This man, Wright said, “ran as fast as he could go and he got into his car. His car was a little gray old coupé. It was about a 1950–1951, maybe a Plymouth… . He got in the car and he drove away as quick as you could see.”

What Frank Wright and Acquilla Clemons had to say became ammunition for independent researchers who believed others—unknown—had played a role in the Tippit shooting.

More than three decades later, the work of a veteran broadcast journalist named Dale Myers brought a degree of clarity where confusion and rumor had reigned. Myers’ 1998 book, devoted solely to the Tippit murder, impresses as being the most thorough study of the case. His analysis of a mass of testimony and the ballistics evidence dispels much of the doubt as to Oswald’s guilt in the Tippit murder.
2

Myers noted that Mrs. Clemons’ statements about having seen two accomplices—rather than a lone gunman—are unsupported by any other testimony, even though Clemons was only one of a number of witnesses at or near the scene at the time. Wright’s account, with its claim that he saw the apparent gunman drive away in a car, was also his and his alone—and was disputed by
others well placed to observe events.

The best evidence in the Tippit case, meanwhile, was the forensic evidence. Four revolver cartridge cases were produced as having been recovered at the scene, and Oswald had been carrying a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver at the time of his arrest. He admitted later that the gun was indeed his, and offered a feeble excuse for having had it with him when arrested. “You know how boys do when they have a gun. They just carry it.”

Sloppy police work, though, gave openings to skeptics who thought two gunmen had been involved in the Tippit shooting. Careless talk brought confusion as to whether the firearm that killed Tippit was a revolver, like Oswald’s weapon, or an automatic. Two of the cartridge cases produced in evidence were of one make, two of another. A vital record in any firearm case, the chain of possession—the record as to who retrieved which cartridges, where and when—was inadequate.

In the overall picture, these points are of little importance. Given that Oswald had both types of ammunition in his revolver when caught, the discrepancy in the make of the cartridges becomes insignificant. The sloppiness over the chain of possession appears to reflect not deception but inefficiency.

Firearms experts said unanimously that all four bullets removed from Tippit’s body had characteristics consistent with those of Oswald’s weapon. Two of the four cartridge cases recovered, which had a good chain of possession, definitely came from Oswald’s gun. The bulk of the evidence—and common sense—suggest that Oswald killed Officer Tippit on his own.

Even so, questions remain, questions that troubled official investigators after the assassination and remain unresolved today. Could Oswald have traveled the nine tenths of a mile from his lodgings to the scene of the Tippit shooting on foot, unaided, in the time available?

Even by using the shortest possible time frame—and ignoring factors that
militated against it, the Warren Commission fudged the issue. So did the Assassinations Committee, years later. Did Oswald have transport to get to the site of the policeman’s murder on East Tenth, and if so, who provided it? And why was he there? Where was he headed?

The official who directed the initial investigation of the Tippit shooting, former Assistant District Attorney William Alexander, voiced his suspicions in an interview with the author fifteen years after the assassination. “Along with the police,” he said, “we measured the route, all the conceivable routes he could have taken to that place; we interrogated bus drivers, we checked the cab-company records, but we still do not know how he got to where he was, or why he was where he was… . Was he supposed to meet someone? Was he trying to make a getaway? Did he miss a connection? Was there a connection? If you look at Oswald’s behavior, he made very few nonpurposeful motions, very seldom did he do anything that did not serve a purpose to him. People who’ve studied his behavior feel there was a purpose in his being where he was. I, for one, would like to know what that was.”

As he drove the author along the route Oswald is supposed to have taken to the Tippit murder, the former Assistant District Attorney slapped the dashboard and repeated, “Oswald’s movements did not add up… . No way. Certainly he may have had accomplices.”
3

There are further outstanding questions. If the account of the housekeeper at the rooming house was true, if she really did see a police cruiser outside the house just after 1:00 p.m. and hear it sounding its horn, was Tippit the driver? It’s conceivable—Tippit did not
respond to the police dispatcher at 1:00 p.m. Could it be that Tippit drove Oswald to the spot where the policeman was murdered?

Were there things about Tippit that never came out? Shortly before his death, several witnesses claimed, Tippit spent some ten minutes sitting in his patrol car at a service station not far from where he would be killed. He then drove off at high speed. There was also a claim that, shortly before he was murdered, Tippit hurried into a record shop near the site of the killing, used the store’s telephone, dialed a number, then rushed out again.

Another unresolved lead was the statement of a garage mechanic who said he saw a man behaving suspiciously on the afternoon of the assassination—he appeared to be trying to hide himself—in a car parked near the scene of the Tippit shooting. That night, the mechanic recognized Lee Oswald, from his pictures on television, as the man he had seen in the car. He had taken the number of the car, and it turned out to belong to a friend of Tippit.
4