The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (48 page)

Aside from Clemons, the Warren Commission did not hear from two other important witnesses. According to researcher Larry Harris,
“Frank Wright, who lived on the next block . . . heard gunshots, went out to see what was happening and saw a man standing near a police car. He insisted the man ran and jumped in a gray car parked beyond” Tippit’s car “and sped away west on Tenth Street. Jack Tatum told House Assassination Committee investigators that he . . . had just passed a police car when the shooting broke out; Tatum paused and watched the gunman walk behind the squad car and take careful, deliberate aim before firing one more shot into Tippit.” The House Select Committee on Assassinations said, “This action, which is commonly described as a coup de grace, is more indicative of an execution,” something one might expect of an experienced hit man.

The key witness for the Warren Commission regarding Oswald and the Tippit slaying was Helen Markham. Larry Harris noted that while “publicly the Warren Report called ‘Markham’s . . . testimony reliable,’” in private memos, the Warren staff said, “This witness is very unsure of herself on most points.” Staff attorney Joseph Ball “complained that her account was ‘full of mistakes’ and ‘utterly unreliable,’” and “several years later Ball derided Markham publicly during a debate, called her an ‘utter screwball.’” Warren attorney Wesley Liebeler “dismissed her story as ‘contradictory’ and ‘worthless.’”

Even the Dallas Assistant District Attorney at the time, William Alexander, later told Anthony Summers that when it came to the Tippit slaying, “Oswald’s movements did not add up then and they do not add up now. No way. Certainly he may have had accomplices.” And when Oswald went to the Texas Theatre, “was he supposed to meet someone?” and “did he miss a connection?”

Jack Ruby lived just a few blocks from the Tippit murder scene. Jack Anderson, one of America’s top investigative journalists in the 1970s, later obtained information from Johnny Rosselli on several
occasions. Anderson wrote that Oswald had to be killed because, according to “Johnny Rosselli, . . . underworld conspirators feared he would crack and disclose information that might lead to them . . . so Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald.” Before Ruby had to do the job himself, he apparently tried to persuade one of his many police contacts to kill Oswald. In fact, the night of Tippit’s death, Ruby met with one of Tippit’s police-officer friends for more than an hour. According to Hurt, this officer had been “working privately as a guard at an Oak Cliff home when Tippit was murdered nearby.”

Thousands of pages have been written just about the Tippit slaying, so we cannot cover here all of the evidence and the many problems with the theory of Oswald as a “lone assassin” of Tippit. The bottom line is that evidence and witnesses are so inconsistent that there are at least four possible explanations for his murder:

1. Oswald shot Tippit, just as the Warren Commission said he did.

2. Someone with Oswald might have shot Tippit.

3. While Tippit was talking to Oswald, the officer might have been shot by someone nearby who was unconnected with Oswald.

4. Oswald might have already been inside the Texas Theatre at the time of Tippit’s death, meaning the officer had been shot by someone else.

At 1:22, officers on the scene of the Tippit shooting broadcast a description of the assailant, describing him as a white male about thirty years old, 5' 8", “black wavy hair,” slender build, wearing a white jacket, white shirt, and dark slacks. William Turner cites Dallas
Police radio logs as saying that “shortly after 1:41 p.m., Sergeant Hill came on the air: ‘A witness reports that he [the Tippit suspect] was last seen in the Abundant Life Temple about the 400 block. We are fixing to go in and shake it down.’ On an alternate channel, Car 95 ordered ‘Send me another squad [car] over here to Tenth and Crawford to check out this church basement.’” However, another call came in, erroneously reporting that the suspect was at a library, where police converged. Suddenly, police were called to the Texas Theatre, and the Abundant Life Temple was never searched. Reportedly, the Temple had recently been the site of activity by Cuban exiles.

According to the Warren Commission version, Johnny Calvin Brewer, the owner of a shoe store six blocks away from the slaying site, heard a report on the radio about the shooting. He looked up to see a man hide from a passing police car by stepping into his doorway. He followed the man, Oswald, who ducked into the nearby Texas Theatre. Brewer alerted the cashier, who called the police. However, some researchers think that Oswald had been inside the theater since shortly after 1:00 p.m., either having bought a ticket or using a ticket someone had bought earlier and given to him. As noted earlier, witness Jack Davis said that once in the theater, Oswald sat next to him for a few minutes; then Oswald moved to sit next to another person for a few minutes; then Oswald got up and went to the lobby, as though looking for someone. An alternate version proposed by some historians says that Oswald got worried when he couldn’t find his contact, so he walked out to the lobby and looked around. He then went outside—onto the sidewalk—looking for his contact. Oswald saw a police car go by and ducked into the doorway of the shoe store, then went back into the theater to await his contact’s arrival. In any event, police broadcast an alarm at 1:45 to converge on the Texas Theatre.

At approximately 1:48, police arrived at the theater, and once inside, the shoe store owner pointed out Oswald to the officers. However, Oswald was not the first patron approached. First, an officer frisked two men sitting in the center of the theater before proceeding to Oswald. Did one or more of the policemen hope Oswald would make a run for it, allowing them to shoot the possible cop-killer? Assistant DA William Alexander had gone to the theater and said the assumption at the time was that the person who killed Tippit had also killed JFK. Oswald was arrested between 1:51 and 1:55, after a scuffle. As noted by author Henry Hurt, “there is conflicting testimony among arresting officers about just what happened during the arrest,” and “most of the dozen or so patrons scattered about the theater . . . were never canvassed and questioned in any inclusive fashion by the FBI or the Warren Commission.” Other evidence calls into question what ID Oswald had on him at the time, and whether an additional wallet was found at the Tippit slaying scene. The Warren Report says that “officers found a forged Selective Service card with a picture of Oswald and the name ‘Alex J. Hidell’ in Oswald’s billfold.” Author Sylvia Meagher documented numerous problems with that claim, but that alias would soon be used to link Oswald to the rifle found on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository.

At the Texas Theatre, Oswald had something unusual with him: half of a box-top, as if he were supposed to meet someone with the other half. As noted, Oswald had sat next to at least two people in the theater, then moved, as if waiting for them to say a coded phrase or produce the other, matching half of the box-top. Later, dollar bills torn in half would be found in Oswald’s room, indicating he had used the “matching half” technique before.

Antonio Veciana told my research associate how one of his CIA contacts (the CIA officer who originally recruited David Atlee Phillips for the CIA) used the technique of a torn-in-half dollar bill to identify his contact. CIA memos show they were using that technique in 1963, as part of the AMWORLD portion of the JFK–Almeida coup plan. The “matching half” technique was also used by the heroin ring Michel Victor Mertz shared with Marcello and Trafficante, most recently in a major bust that occurred in Laredo at the time of Oswald’s return from Mexico.

Recall that John Martino said that Oswald was supposed to meet his “contact” at the Texas Theatre, and then later be eliminated. Martino himself was emblematic of how the mob manipulated Oswald, since he was both a CIA asset and a mob functionary for Santo Trafficante; Martino also knew Carlos Marcello. The use of movie theaters as clandestine meeting places for CIA missions was confirmed years later by David Atlee Phillips, the CIA officer Oswald had allegedly met with less than three months before the assassination. In his 1977 autobiography, Phillips described his own use of just such a technique, where he would meet a contact at a movie theater, whom he’d know because he carried with him a previously arranged item and recognized a prearranged coded phrase.

AT 2:00, OSWALD arrived at the Dallas Police station. He had $13.87 on him and may also have had David Ferrie’s library card, as explained shortly. At 2:30, a police call went out to look for a 1957 Chevy sedan, last seen in the vicinity of the Tippit slaying. The alert said that the car’s occupants should be checked for illegal weapons. Later, police searched Oswald’s small apartment at the rooming house. In a sea bag they found a tiny Minox spy camera, three other
cameras, a 15-power telescope, two pairs of field glasses, a compass, and a pedometer. There were also several rolls of exposed Minox film. (A November 27, 1963, memo shows that David Morales’s Miami CIA station used Minox spy cameras.)

At approximately 3:00, police arrived at the home of Ruth Hyde Paine, where Oswald’s wife, Marina, lived and Oswald had spent the previous night. Two weeks earlier, Marina had noticed what appeared to be Oswald’s rifle wrapped in a blanket in the garage. The police found the blanket empty. The case against the ex-serviceman who kept his rifle wrapped in a blanket and shot a patrolman on the street seemed cinched, except for one more important piece of evidence.

The “magic bullet,” the cornerstone of the “single bullet theory” required for one lone presidential assassin, was found at Parkland Hospital around 1:45, just before Oswald was arrested at the Texas Theatre. This was the almost pristine bullet that supposedly caused JFK’s back and throat wounds and all of Connally’s bone-shattering injuries. According to Henry Hurt, citing medical reports, it “‘literally shattered’ his fifth rib, leaving five inches of it ‘pulverized,’” and then “struck Connally’s right wrist” and “shattered the radius bone at the largest point”—all while, according to the Warren Commission’s “single bullet theory,” Connally continued to grip “his white Stetson hat” with that hand. The “magic bullet” then buried itself in Connally’s thigh, from which it supposedly later fell out, emerging in almost perfect condition.
Chapter Two
noted numerous problems that showed why the single bullet theory was physically impossible, and the bullet mostly likely planted for a Parkland employee to find.

Around seventeen minutes before that “magic bullet” was found, Jack Ruby was at Parkland Hospital, where he spoke with noted journalist Seth Kantor. The time was approximately 1:28 p.m. Another
witness saw also Ruby at Parkland around that time, though for some reason Ruby later denied being there.

The police and the Warren Commission seemed determine to pin Tippit’s murder on the obvious suspect they had in custody, Oswald. According to author Larry Harris, the police lineups regarding Oswald and the Tippit slaying have been described as “a travesty. In the first two, the disheveled and bruised Oswald was paraded before witnesses (including Helen Markham) accompanied by two detectives and a jail clerk who were neatly attired in slacks and dress shirts.” The next day’s lineup, viewed by Tippit witness (William) Scoggins, “was even more outrageous: Oswald, two teenagers, and a Hispanic man.” Despite that stacked line up, Harris pointed out that “an FBI report reveals that two days later, when FBI agents showed him a photograph of Oswald, Scoggins told them he couldn’t be sure the person he observed on Nov. 22 was ‘actually identical with Oswald.’”

AT 1:33 P.M., White House press aide Malcolm Kilduff in Dallas officially announced that JFK was dead. Five minutes later, at 1:38 p.m., CBS anchor Walter Cronkite told a national television audience the tragic news. It’s often overlooked that just over a minute earlier, Cronkite had been telling his audience that “[r]egarding the probable assassin, the Sheriff’s officers have taken a young man into custody at the scene, a man twenty-five years old we are rep—.” Cronkite abruptly stopped describing the young suspect when he was handed a memo that confirmed JFK’s death. Cronkite’s emotional words reporting that the President was dead is an oft-repeated clip, but overlooked by most is that Cronkite’s remark about the young man in custody didn’t refer to the twenty-four-year-old Oswald’s capture at the Texas Theatre. It couldn’t have, since the newsman made his fateful pronouncement about JFK at 1:37 p.m.—but
police weren’t even called to the theater until 1:45, and the first officers didn’t arrive until 1:48 p.m.

IN NEW ORLEANS, the trial of Carlos Marcello entered its final stages. At 1:30 p.m., Judge Herbert Christenberry “had just delivered his fifteen minute charge to the jury,” according to John H. Davis, when “a bailiff suddenly strode into the courtroom and . . . handed the judge a note.” After reading it, the shocked judge announced that JFK had been shot and might be dead. The judge “handed the case to the jury and called for an hour’s recess.”

For Marcello and David Ferrie, that hour would be their first chance to find out more about what had happened in Dallas. Guy Banister was not in his office that day during regular business hours, so he was probably available to tell them whatever he’d learned. While all three would have been happy at JFK’s death, the fact that Oswald was still alive and in police custody presented a huge potential problem.

Court resumed session at 3:00. However, Robert Kennedy’s lead Justice Department prosecutor on the case, John Diuguid, told me that while David Ferrie had been in the courtroom with Marcello’s team before the break, Ferrie wasn’t in court when everyone else returned. With remarkable speed, at 3:15 the jury delivered its verdict. The juror Marcello had bribed reportedly boasted later “that not only had he voted not guilty . . . but he had also convinced several of his fellow jurors to vote not guilty.” Just to be sure he avoided conviction, Marcello had also made sure the key witness against him was threatened during the trial. Consequently, the jury found Marcello “not guilty” on both counts of perjury and conspiracy.