www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/10/11/delusion-ep-24-dale-k-myers/
Episode 24 of Fred Litwin’s YouTube show, “On The Trail of Delusion.”
A conversation with Dale K. Myers, author of “WITH MALICE” on the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit.
Websites about Dale K. Myers:
https://www.oakcliffpress.com/
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro:
I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon. My name is Fred Litwin.
Noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of
I was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, On the Trail of Delusion and Oliver Stone’s film Flam the demagogue of Dealey Plaza.
Fred Litwin is here. He’s a longtime author and certainly watcher of politics.
joining us uh Fred Litwin, great to have you here. Thank you very much.
[Music]
Okay, welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion, where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than the usual grl you’ll find on the internet and on YouTube. And today my guest is Dale Myers. Dale Myers is a 50-year veteran of radio and television. He’s the winner of numerous awards for his work in the broadcast industry, including four Emmy awards for his computer animation work. Dale is a recognized expert on the JFK assassination. And over the last two decades, maybe three decades, he has served as an on camera expert and technical consultant for numerous television channels, including ABC News, the BBC, PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel.
So, welcome Dale Myers.
Hello, Fred. How are you?
Good. How are you?
I am excellent.
So, my first question is, you know, how did you get started in in researching the JFK assassination?
Kind of a strange thing. in 1975 I had my first radio job up in Cadillac, Michigan.
Actually in the next couple of days will be the 50th anniversary of KISS coming to Cadillac, Michigan.
So there’s a whole hoopla going on up there about that. But it was shortly after their visit. So actually probably in early 1976, one of the high schoolers came up and said, “Hey, our teacher showed us the Zapruder film.”
They had a bootleg copy.
And as you probably know, it hadn’t it had aired on national television, I believe in March of 75, but I hadn’t seen it. And I was anxious to see what it looked like. I said, “Well, can you get the address of where he got this bootleg Super Eight film?” And of course, it was Penn Jones that was selling these.
So, I ordered one. And when I got it, I thought, “Wow.” Of course, you see the head go back and you’re thinking, “Wow, that that looked like from the front or something.” So, I I wanted to learn more about it. I went to the local Cadillac library and I was looking for any book on the Kennedy assassination, specifically one that maybe talked about the Zapruder film and I found one on the on the shelf.
It was called 6 seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson, as people will recognize. And so I took that and I read that. I thought, “Wow, there’s a lot more to this than I ever thought.” And so I went back and got another book and another book and as you know, you’re off and running. Yeah. So uh you know it took me I think about two and a half to three years at at that time to crawl through the books and the magazines and the newspaper articles that were available.
Of course there was no internet.
So newspaper articles and magazine would be like in the vertical file they used to call that at the library. So, you know, after exhausting all of those, uh, someone uh, I wrote a letter. I was interested in the the visual stuff and, uh, I heard about the DCA film, which was a collection of 8 millimeter films of the motorcade.
I think I wrote to the National Archives. Marian Johnson was the curator at the time, and I expressed interest in anything they had on the DCA film. Well, they sent me uh an FBI document which listed the names and addresses of those members that were part of that uh association and they also sent it to an a guy out in Iowa. And so he ended up writing me a letter, hey, I I understand you’re interested in the DCA film. So again, this is before the internet, so this was the only way you really hooked up with other people. He then started send he had a vast collection of 8×10 black and whites. he would send me spares that he had. And so my collection began to grow and of course my interest and uh I ended up calling uh the secretary of the DCA and I was inquiring about whether there was still a copy around. As it turned out, he had his own personal copy. He was willing to sell me for 25 bucks. So I bought it and uh you know that’s how I kind of got started and eventually I really got an interest in the tippet shooting because of largely because of Mark Lane’s book. Uh he had written the most on the shooting up to that point that had been in print. I think he wrote his chapter was 14 pages long. Usually it was a couple of sentences or a few paragraphs in other books but he had the most uh that I had read about it. expressed an interest in that and I began to order stuff from the National Archives and you know I was working as a dish jockey they didn’t pay a squat so I had very few dollars to spend you know that was spare so to speak so I actually devised a plan I found this recently a list I would order two 8 by10s and they were like six six and a quarter at the time uh each and so I laid out a plan there was like 50 or 60 that I wanted I couldn’t afford to buy them all at the same time. So I would order like one or two like every month and then they would start coming in six months down the road they start coming in and then I’m I’m kind of leapfrogging. So it took about two or three years to acquire what in essence were the Warrant Commission exhibits on the tippet shooting. But uh you know I was kind of off and running at that point. So what what what you know I think you initially you believed there was a conspiracy but what what’s tell us a bit about your journey from into believing that Oswald was the lone gunman. Well I I tell people I I went the long way around the barn so to speak. Um and I also tell people that you know 90% of what’s written out there is conspiracy oriented. So you can’t if you’re reading the books out there you can’t help but walk away thinking there’s a conspiracy. And I certainly did. I mean, they read Sylvia Mar’s book uh on the tippet shooting, Mark Lanes, of course, I mentioned and you know, and then of course you had Josiah Thompson talking about the shooting in De Plaza. But, you know, yeah, I couldn’t help but think that there had to have been a conspiracy. And uh and so at at one point I started to focus on the tippet shooting because that seemed the easiest to be able to prove. You know, what I’m reading is, oh, he Oswalt’s frame for the tippet shooting. This is all designed to show he had a capacity for violence and therefore they could really hang the assassination on him as well. So I thought, well, if if it’s a frame up, and if it’s the obvious frame up that Mark Lane and the others are talking about, this should be it should be a cakewalk, right? So in Mark Lane’s book, as you know, he had he was one of the few books that had footnotes and he had the documents on the tippet shooting that he was referencing. So just like the photographs, I ordered all the documents from Marian Johnson at the National Archives and you know 6 months later you know you get the documents and I was shocked to be honest that what he had referenced was not only was it not true most of it wasn’t even in the context. So he’d take things out of context or he just flat out lied about it. And I guess the thing, you know, being naive at the time, I used to think that when a publisher published a book, they didn’t publish lies. They had to be facts. I mean, right? The publisher is not going to just publish lies. People would get sued, wouldn’t they? Well, apparently that’s not true. So, uh, one thing I did learn is I never bought a book after that that didn’t have footnotes and reference notes because, you know, and you know, there was a lot of books that came out, the the fast paperbacks that there was no reference notes or anything. There was no way to check what they were saying. So, uh, I was really uh, dismayed at the fact that, uh, Lane had basically lied in his book, Rush to Judgment, in particular about the tippet shooting. I mean, you can go through a lot of the other stuff, but in particular, I I got well verssed on the tippet shooting stuff. With my eyes kind of open, I started to use my uh role at the radio station to be able to open the door that might not have been open to other people. So, years ago, Fred, um before I got into the Kennedy assassination, when I was like, you know, 13, 8th grade or so, I really got a fascination with the Lincoln assassination. Now, not that I’m fascinated by assassinations, but this is just the journey I was on. And there was a book that was out, big picture book called 20 days. And uh I was just always fascinated by the Lincoln assassination, the conspiracy, and just really the crime itself, the the technical aspects of it. And I re I started researching that and I realized, wow, this happened like 150 years ago. I mean, everybody there’s nobody to talk to. They’re all dead. And it was sort of in the back of my mind that when I got into the Kennedy assassination, I thought, you know, here’s where you can make a difference because this is only when I started, it’s only 15 years earlier. And I thought a lot of these people are still alive, you know, and uh again, this is before the internet. So I would go like, let’s say I’m looking for John Smith or in the case of the tippet shooting, Bill Smith. Now you can imagine Smith is a last name and Bill pretty common name. There’s a lot of Bill Smiths in the Dallas area and there’s there was no reason for me to think that he still lived there but you know he had to start somewhere. So I would go to the white pages the telephone book right at the library and I would copy the three or four pages of Bill Smith’s. I would go home and it was like dialing for dollars. I would just start and are you the Bill Smith who used to let no and they’d hang you know whatever they’d hang up and I’d move on. So, I had these huge phone bills at the time, like $3 400 when they should be like 50 bucks. And uh but I would hit pay dirt. I would hit some of these guys. So, I would call from the radio station and it would enable me to feed the phone line through a tape recorder and I would roll tape on all these and make a transcript. And I got pretty good at at doing those. Now what was happening at the time this was 1983 and so I uh the 25th anniversary was coming up and I thought this’d be kind of cool to take these recordings and turn this into kind of a radio documentary kind of theater of the mind. I could play some actualities from the time period which I had begun to collect and then I had these interviews that were kind of exclusive. So and it was going to be on the whole case not just the tippet shooting. So, I would call with that as being sort of the the reason for the call. Listen, the 20th anniversary is coming up. I’d like to talk to you about the assassination. When I got when I talked to police officers, a lot of them were hung up would hang up on me because they’d been burned in the past. Yeah. You know, I wasn’t the first guy to call some of these people. And a lot of these guys were abused by the people that would call them. But occasionally, you would hit a good one. One of them being Jim Lavell was probably the nicest guy in the world. Yep. and he was very open. And the thing with Jim was is if he liked you and he gave you his stamp of approval, he would then open the door. He would vouch for you. So the other cops would then talk to you that you might not otherwise get. So I did uh like 25 or 30 interviews in that 1983 period. most of them with police and eyewitnesses that had not been interviewed before that nobody had ever heard of or had not given testimony to the warrant commission or in like Nick McDonald’s case had given testimony but Nick had been raped over the coals about the mysterious guy that fingered the guy in the back right in the front row there was mysterious guy at least that’s how it was written up turned out of course it was Johnny Brewer who he’s referring to but I could call these guys and ask them the questions that had been asked and left unanswered in all these right books that I’ve been reading. So, it kind of gave me a leg up to to do it that way. So, and I did do the radio documentary. It aired uh in Michigan. It was uh my the news director of the station I was working for uh had it sent to the AP for the AP awards. It actually won an honorable mention. Oh, nice. and and the judges did say it was the best radio documentary on that subject that they had ever heard. So, it was very encouraging to be able to do those kinds of things. Well, yeah, it’s a good thing you did. And I thank God you you found all those witnesses. I have to sort of stop for a bit of a commercial and basically show people the fact that this this book second edition of your book with malice is is just unbelievable and this belongs in everybody’s bookshelf. I mean it’s an incredible book. It is the ultimate guide to the tippet shooting, but also it’s more than that because it gives you a little bit of insight into conspiracy thinking and how to debunk things and what the truth is and uh full of pictures and also it humanizes JD Tippet. He’s not just a a name, somebody who was murdered. He was a a man, a husband, a father, um a real person and and a family who really deeply loved him. And you get a sense of the man in this book and that’s fantastic. Well, thank you. And you know, I got to say that the original version was the uh the kind of burnt orange uh cover in ’98 actually led me to meet the Tippet family, which allowed me to get the inside story about him and then update the book for the version that you just showed, the 2013 edition. And I was very happy to do it for them really because they, you know, I bought your book three times. I bought the first edition, the second edition, and the Kindle edition. Oh, well, thank you very much. And they’re all, you know, the Kindle is the only one still out there, and they’re they’re basically out of print. The you never see the blue one on eBay. I’ve noticed that. And and of course, there were far fewer copies of that that were actually printed. I printed 3,000 of the first edition, 500 of the 2013 edition, and it was really only done because I wanted JD’s sister Joyce to see her brother’s story in print, the the, you know, the family part of the story. So, what had happened is when the 98 book came out, at that time on Amazon, when you made a comment, they actually would include your email address. They don’t do that anymore. and uh uh one of the nieces of JD Tippet commented finally the true story about my uncle and had her email address and so I contacted her and we ended up talking on the phone that led to an interview with her and her sister which then you know they were kind of you know feeling me out and vouching for and then they brought in their parents which was Jad’s uh older sister and his uh his brother-in-law who he had known since they were 16. and they lived right next door on the farms. And uh and then they led me to Joyce, the the younger sister, the brothers. When I say I met the Tippet family, I don’t mean Marie and her children, although I did meet them, right? But she didn’t want to do an interview. And um largely because of something that had been written in the first edition of the book. And even though the the family went to bat for me and tried to get her to do an interview, she refused to do one. And I understood. But as it turned out, I ended up interviewing, you know, his a lot of his cousins, his close friends, people that you would have never uh gotten the story from. And I really think that I ended up getting much more than I would have had I just interviewed Marie. Right. Right. even though I would have loved to have done it. Um I did get a lot of the the backstory from other perspectives. So that was all good. And then uh when the 2013 anniversary was coming up, I thought, you know, I she really Joyce really wanted in the and Christine really wanted to have this part. They said, gosh, it’s too bad that this part of the story is family story wasn’t in the first edition. I said, well, I could do another edition. And so I did basically for them. And so that’s the second edition. And I I’ll tell you what, Fred, if I if I got nothing out of doing either book, meeting them and becoming very close friends and still friends with the family. Worth it. Absolutely worth it for sure. Um, and it’s it’s a fantastic section. You have a lot of pictures as well. So it’s it’s really really terrific. And and I think one of the saddest things to me about the JFK assassinations is that people is is sort of the victims. There’s so many victims of the conspiracy idiots out there. People well like the Tippet family where you have JD Tippet accused of being involved in the assassination. I mean this is this is just such shameful behavior by the conspiracy community. Yeah. And uh unfortunately some of the early conspiracy types approached the family and you know they told me later we we wanted to talk about JD. We wanted to talk about our brother but these people would turn on us. One in particular a very well-known researcher and uh I don’t remember if I mentioned who it is in the book but everybody would know who it is. Yeah. He actually went to her house. She o opened the door. Open arms. Come on. See, he he was over there for two or three days and uh toward the end he said, “So tell me the truth now.” And she was appalled and they got into an argument and her husband come out and threw this guy out of the house. He had managed to she gave one of the the smiling photo. We’ve seen the smiling photo of JD taken in ‘ 61, which is actually a a closeup of his face from a much larger photograph. She gave that to him because that was uh when he was when he was killed, they really the family didn’t have that many photos. And so this was one they thought really represented him smiling. That’s the way they remember him. And then of course there was that police uniform photo from 1957. So those two photos sort of hit the market, but the smiling photo was later. So it wasn’t one of the Warren Commission exhibits. The Warren Commission used his 1952 ID photo when he joined the force and then that 57 photo of him in with the police cap on the uniform. And then the smiling photo came out later because this researcher got it from Joyce and he put it out there. And of course uh she was appalled at his uh you know what he had done. And then I found out in interviewing Murray Jackson, the same guy did the same thing to him. befriended Murray. And Murray was the nicest guy in the world. I wrote in the book, it was like putting on a pair of slippers. This guy was the nicest guy in the world, you know. And here’s the thing, Fred, and you kind of touched on it. When you meet these people in real life, you realize, oh, this guy reminds me of my uncle or my grandfather. You immediately recognize the personality type, and you’re thinking, Murray Jackson was the dispatcher. I know they’ve talked about, oh, he dubbed in these commands to tip it after the fact to cover up whatever they’re imagining. It’s like, there’s no way this guy’s involved in anything like I mean, all that stuff melts away as soon as you meet these people. So, that was a nice privilege to have, but at the same time, I tried to convey that sense in my book so that people that hadn’t met him could at least get a sense of the way I felt when I when I met him. But the same researcher had done the same thing, betrayed Murray and he was he was appalled years later he was telling me he said I couldn’t believe we had exchanged Christmas cards and everything and this guy just turned on me and said okay Murray tell me the truth what really happened what you were part of it right and it’s like oh my god so a lot of these guys if it didn’t happen to them specifically they heard about it and they were jaded so I’m coming in the wake of that kind of stuff and trying to get these guys to open up, right? And some of them would not talk at all. They just said, “I want nothing to do with it.” And just hang up the phone. I mean, this sort of reminds me of what’s happened to Ruth Payne, you know, this who went to in to interview Ruth and she lets him in and does all these interviews and all of a sudden it’s all about her being a, you know, member of the CIA, right? Just crazy stuff. And I went to her talk there in Irving uh was a couple maybe five years ago and I was with uh my good buddy Todd Vaughn. And so she began talking and we got they got about halfway through and I leaned over to him. I said, “So what do you think?” He goes, “Everything I thought about her has melted away.” And of course we had both heard all the conspiracy talk. And I couldn’t agree more. It’s like okay this this is not anything like the person we’ve been told that she is completely different. It’s just like I say when you meet these people not only does it give it a sense of reality uh because you see the personality taste but it also gives you an insight into this event as a historic event. It’s like other things that you may experience in your life and you look back on it, you go, “Wow, I get just three or four fleeting moments of that memory of of a whole weekend. You go to a concert. I just remember this one or two songs and something maybe happened when we went in and that’s it.” And yet when when conspiracy people interview these people and and I was like this at the beginning, so not to be too tough on them, but you kind of you’re expecting them to be able to remember things that you wouldn’t be able to remember about something that happened last week, let alone 25 years earlier. The best story to illustrate this, Fred, was uh I called Bill Alexander, and he was easily the most colorful person I ever talked to. This guy swore like a sailor or a truck driver, but he looked like your grandfather. So, it was very disarming and uh but yeah, he used every four-letter word and then some that he had combined in new extraordinary ways. So, very colorful guy. But at one point uh and I had interviewed him on the phone and in person, but during our interview on the phone in ‘ 83, I started, you know, I’m I’m doing the conspiracy thing where I’m I’m drilling down deep. Okay. So, so you went here and then what happened? You’re there about 5 minutes cuz I really I would do a lot of heavy research. I would find out everything they they had said uh either testimony wise or in a newspaper article. I would then have a list of questions that I would ask them in a specific order um with the one I thought might they might hang up the phone on me. I would ask that last so I get everything in that I needed. Right. But uh but I generally would call them and ask them to, you know, walk through your story and let them tell it unencumbered. That would give me questions that I hadn’t written down in advance. And then I would come back and I’d walk them through the story and have them go through slower while I’m asking questions. And I actually had an FBI guy that told me after I finished interviewing him, he says, “Wow, I just want to compliment you on your interview technique.” Because by doing it that way, you don’t taint the key is don’t taint the person you’re talking to with whatever you’re thinking happened. I started drilling down deep on a specific and he goes, “Let me ask you answer you this way.” He says, “I didn’t have a stopwatch. I didn’t have a tape measure.” He says, “This thing was like a blur.” He says, “I remember specific things very vividly, but the rest of it,” he says, “I don’t remember that much. And I certainly couldn’t tell you, you know, that this happened and then two minutes later or two and a half minutes later this happened. And so that was kind of an eye opener. I realized, okay, yeah, these guys, you can’t ask them questions like that and expect them to to know the answer. I remember somebody asked me, “Did you ever when you talked to Tia Bolley, who is the uh citizen uh who called in on Tippets Police Radio to report the shooting?” And he reportedly looked at his watch and said it said 110. And of course, everybody has used that uh ad nauseium to claim that the shooting happened much earlier than it actually did. And so they would they asked me, “Did you ever ask him about his watch?” And I was thinking, I don’t remember. And I had to actually go back and look at the transcript. And I was, as I was reading it, I was kind of, you know, you started to relive. I’m remembering, oh, I remember, you know, I remember the phone call. I remember him saying these things. And I remember, oh, that’s right. About halfway, this was after the Alexander phone call. And I remember about halfway through thinking, there’s no point in even asking this guy about his watch because a this is 25 years later. He’s not either way. It’s not you could never it would never hold up. If he said, “Yeah, I remember my watch was accurate.” There’s no way that would be believable. You couldn’t hang your hat on it any more than uh most people don’t know his interview in which he said that was actually an affidavit that was two weeks later. You know, he went on vacation. He came back, I think it was December 12th, uh and then gave that affidavit. So, and and so the accuracy of the watch was irrelevant. And I thought I by then I already had the Dallas police tapes and I knew there was a better way to determine the time of the shooting than his recollection of whether his watch was accurate enough or not. And of course it couldn’t have been accurate because the evidence is overwhelming that that shooting happened much later than he remembered from his watch reporting. You learn when you interview a lot of these guys that u that uh and I’m always afraid to to follow behind somebody else who’s done an interview of somebody because they’ve ruined the person. I remember FBI agent Bardwell Odum. I interviewed him and he he was out at the arrest scene at the Texas theater and he had done like a it was a three-s sentence report so there wasn’t much to the story but I thought you never know there could be you know what was the buildup. I wanted to find out why he was out there and so forth. Anyway, he told me this hilarious story. He says, “Yeah, there was a guy he called me one year.” He said, “Uh, can I come down there? I’m gonna fly down. I’m come down there and interview you.” He said, “Okay, if you want to, you know.” So, they arranged a day. The guy comes down. He says he sat here in my kitchen and talked told me for five hours what he thought had happened and then he left. He didn’t even ask me. He didn’t ask me anything about anything that he was involved in. and he just thought that’s all this guy wanted. And you know, I think there’s a lot of people that are kind of amateur armchair detectives that, you know, they’ll track down one of these guys that, you know, now it’s 30 years after I talked to him and there, you know, the guy’s memory is shot. He was probably not. You got people asking Bardwell Odell, do you remember writing a a 302 report on on uh showing Tomlinson the bullet or something? I don’t remember. Well, of course you don’t. He the man conducted thousands of interviews. I know. He doesn’t interview. Then they say, “Well, he didn’t do it. It didn’t happen.” Yeah. And then they said, “The 302 reports must have gotten deep sixed because all we have is this is this uh basically a uh conglomeration of various 302 reports.” Well, no, they didn’t do a 302 report. This is the report. That’s right. Just this is the report, you know. So, there are no 302 reports. And all those agents took notes and then the notes were destroyed for the very reason that we’re talking about so that they’re not grilled and questioned about now wait a minute on this note you added this word and in the report you left that word out. Now why is that? No. The way Hoover wanted it is you once it was committed to a final report. That’s it. This is the record and everything else goes bye-bye. And you know, you can understand that because you know, I mean, I’ve got stuff from my interviews and you know, people say, “Well, you know, how come we’ve never heard his interviews?” Well, first off, it’s my private property and uh eventually I’m planning to have this donated to some library, right? So, somebody will eventually get access after I’m long gone, and they’ll find out that everything that I’m saying is absolutely true. What? There’s no reason to not tell the truth. It’s all there. And uh so anyway, it’s uh I you know I think we’re past the part of being able to interview these pe most of these people are all gone, right? The vast majority of the And so but now and I predicted this years ago, Todd and I would be sitting around and I’d say, you know, eventually they’re going to be interviewing the cousin. Yeah. It’ll be the son of the guy and then it’ll be it’ll be his son. It’ll be the grandson of the guy. And so like you got they’ll ask you Erlene Roberts, you know, great grandson. Well, well, did she did did Oswwell come in at 1257 or did he come in at 1259? What did she tell you? You know, right? And then you hear, you know, and then we got this guy out in Australia who interviewing uh with the Markham family. Actually, it’s the daughter-in-law. So, it’s her son’s ex-wife. I guess he’s deceased now, but I think they were divorced. But regardless, it’s like, what? And then what she’s telling isn’t got any relation to reality. I mean, it’s not even close. You can tell, you know, when you talk to somebody, and I know people say, well, you know, like Jack Tatum, he came he came out 15 years later. You know, it’s that’s not credible because it wasn’t at the time. Well, credibility has more to do than just the chronology. There’s a lot going on there. Just like uh the people that ran uh the Dean’s Dairy Way, right? That I ended up just by happen stance. Well, they contacted me. That was a thing. Their grandson, I guess, contacted me after seeing a write up and saying, “Oh, you know, there’s a part of the story you don’t know about. I ended up interviewing them, but what they’re telling me fits in. You know, there’s some skewed things, but basically it does fit in with the the timeline, the chronology and with what we know is true about when you play telephone, you know, they get skewed and if everybody nobody knows what I’m talking about. There’s used to be a game you’d play telephone or you’d have people in a circle and somebody would start something and you’d pass it on. and they’d whisper it and then the last person would announce what it was and it had absolutely no resemblance to what had begun, what was actually said the first time because each person heard something different or added their own take to it. And that’s kind of what happens when you go through multiple hands with a story like that. So the big question I have for you is well who killed Tippet? Well, it’s obviously Lee Harvey Oswald, right? I mean, you know, you one of the things is if you look, and this is one of my big things, put things in a chronological order. And when you do that, you start to see how this plays out to the people in the order in which it’s happening to them. And then when they’re talking about it, you can see from their perspective, you know, how their part of the story fits in. I’ve always said that I know more about the shooting than the people who are actually there because I know all the parts. I have sort of this omnipotent view, if you will. I can I can step back from the trees and see the forest whereas each of the trees has their own perspective and that’s all they know or a couple of little interactions with others. And and so the uh if if you put things in chronological order, all of a sudden it becomes crystal clear, you know, what happened. Look, and the bottom line is is Oswwell’s caught red-handed with the murder weapon in his hand 45 minutes after the shooting. And when he stands up, he says two things. And for a long time, I thought it was one or the other. And that then that the two things that he supposedly said kind of got skewed. But I’ve I’ve been recently going back over that whole thing. And I’m I’m convinced that in the earliest retellings, he actually did say both things. He said, “This is it and it’s all over now.” So, I mean, two sentences that show resignation to what to what if he didn’t shoot just shoot a police officer and of course more than likely killed President Kennedy as well. Yeah. that whole, you know, so my book picks up, as you know, from after the assa, from the time of the assassination, the shots of Oswald’s escape from the Texas School Book Depository, how he got out to Oakliff, how he encountered Tippet, how he makes his way to the theater, and how he gets arrested. And all that happens within a 45minut span, and you know, all the viewpoints, police, spectators, it they all dovetail. It all overlaps. There’s little things that you know don’t agree completely, but that that would be expected. And so the people that claim, oh, this is all just a frame up and they coers these witnesses to no because it doesn’t read like that. They would the thing would be more in lock step with each other. The fact that things are skewed and there’s a little bit of difference in each story tells you, oh, this is the real thing. This is what happened. So I guess Larry Kfar didn’t did not kill Tippet. You’ve seen that story lately? Yeah, I have seen some of the craziest stuff written. And I uh I hesitate to use the names of the people that write some of this stuff because I don’t want to give them any more glory, if you will, or validation uh than their story deserves, which is nothing. But there’s one guy that uh just writes page after page. It’s like a stream of consciousness page after page and post this on these uh on the education forum, the UK forum. It you read this and it’s like I I I get three or four pages in. I’m already lost. What’s the point? I I’ve forgotten what the point is. But he actually had uh yeah, he’s got Larry Craford there. Uh and he’s got him in order to put his right hand print on the fender of the car and shoot with the left hand. He’s got this guy twisted into a pretzel in his mind and just concocting things just right out of the blue. And uh you know there’s him and then there’s of course that Harvey and Lee site and the guy that runs that website, Jim and you everybody knows his last name. Just totally made up Westbrook and Croy are in on it. They’ve got these two cops killing this other cop for they don’t really explain why, but somehow Tippet’s a dirty cop. But again, if you read the family stuff, it’s like there’s no way that’s even remotely true. And so, you know, I really have distanced myself from all that. I used to get into uh the arguments early on and uh and I found that it didn’t matter what kind of logic and rationale you used, they completely reject it. And so, there was no point. And a lot of those same people from 30 years ago have resurfaced. are back out there on the forums trying to validate their existence on the planet with absolute just rubbish. So I really feel sorry for people you we used to think and maybe you remember this when the internet first started I used to think wow this would be great for the JFK research not only will I be able to contact other people easier but you’ll be able to you know have you know good discussions and do the research and work together and so forth. It’s like none of that’s happened. It’s filled with crazy people. They’re just absolutely lunatics. The the only thing I I would say is is that, you know, I I know that if I fight with some of these zealots on the education forum, I’ll never never convince them of anything I say, no matter what. But I do think there are some people who lurk who just sort of are watching that you can influence, you know, who can see, oh, there’s sort of some sane people around who uh aren’t super uh crazy when it comes to arguments and they present some interesting arguments. So, I think you could win people that way, but the zealots, I mean, forget it. I mean, they’re they’re they’re unreachable. No. And so, I leave it to guys like you to take those people on. I did for a while. Now, it’s your turn, Fred. Yeah, you take them on and eventually there’ll be somebody else that’ll pick up the the baton and they’ll run with it. They do need to be challenged. I agree. And I do write occasional blog articles. Uh when it’s when it’s what I like to do is let them take all the rope they need and then when they’re done or when I think they’re done, then I’ll just wind that back in and let them hang themselves with it because they say some of the craziest stuff that’s just so easily unproved. Uh, I’ll just say one thing. For instance, years ago, you know, I bought a copy of the Dallas Police Tapes from Pen Jones. He was selling the the ZRA film and the Knicks films and and he had the Dallas Police Tapes, which the pedigree was actually uh from Judy Bonner, who got them from Marie Jackson, who got them from JC Poles. I mean, all this stuff kind of dubtales, but those tapes have been out. And it wasn’t until recently when I realized they’re not even nobody ever digitized that whole set and put them online. So most of these guys that are talking, they’re arguing about what’s in the transcripts and how the discrepancy in the transcripts and I’m thinking you don’t need the transcripts anymore. We have the recordings. Yeah. What what are you looking at the transcripts for? It doesn’t give you the time, you know. So the transcript shows a time check of 116 and then the next one is at 119. And I think in one of the transcripts there’s a typo and it says 110 and then they and then it’s typed over and says 119. So somebody’s making a big deal. Look, they’re altering they’re altering the transcript. They’re not altering anything. First off, you if you listen to the recording, you would see that 3 minutes went by between that 116 time check and the 119 one. So it’s can’t be 110, which is which comes up after 116 to begin with. And in fact, I there’s a Warren Commission document where they point this out. They said, “Hey, there’s a problem with this transcript.” They they noticed it back in 1964 and said, “This can’t be because the earlier check is 116. How can it go from 116 to 110 and then 119?” So that that’s why that was changed because it’s an obvious typo. But so you get people arguing about the time of the shooting and uh and what I love is they absolutely dismiss everything Helen Markham said except that 106 time that she gives for the time of the shooting which is a guess because in one of her early reports she said when they asked her about the time she says around 1:30. So they of course they ignore that one because the 106 is so much better. But obviously it can’t be 106. If you just listen to the the recordings and yeah they weren’t continuous but once the tippet shooting happened all that activity it the tape is almost uh continuous right for a large portion of it is continuous and all you have to do is do a linear regret regression. I I said that right in the front of my book and people act like they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. All right. Well, type in linear regression and figure it out. I mean, it’s not that hard. You’re basically just plotting a a line on a on a graph and you’re seeing you’re seeing if the time checks that they’re given are falling within a parameter. Look, I was a disc jockey for years, right? We had a we had a sweep clock, right? And you would it you know, if I had a break that’s coming up and it it was scheduled for 110 and let’s say it’s really 109, I would just say it’s 110. Yep. you know, because it it didn’t it didn’t really matter. And then there was a sweep hand, so you know, you weren’t doing it to the second anyway. But I would I would find that generally speaking, if you looked up and saw where the sweep hand was at, if you were about 15 seconds on the sweep hand before the before the the spot-on minute at the top up until about 45 seconds after, you would probably say that minute. So, let’s say it’s 12 known. So 15 seconds before at 11:59 45 seconds you might start saying 12 noon and you would say 12 noon from then all the way till actually 12 noon plus 30 seconds or maybe 45 and then right in that 45 range you would tend to say it’s now 12:01 right so basically you know there’s sort of the think of it as sort of this 45se second floating window and so when I did the linear regression I’m looking at this and I’m imagining, okay, so here’s uh in particular, I think they use the 119 time check and they mention it three or four times. And that’s really the best when you find those instances where they mention that time check several times because you can then take that and you kind of slip this back and forth to test. Okay, so the first time he says 119, is that exactly 119? And the last time he says it, well, so let’s say it’s a minute later. Is now is he has he skewed the time a little bit? Let’s try it. So if I slip the whole thing this way back a minute earlier, so that his last 119 is actually 119. How do the rest of his time checks line up? And how do the time checks before that line up? Well, you find it that doesn’t work. So basically I do a linear regression of all the time checks and then you slide it back and forth and find the sweet spot where it actually matches right it’s precise during all of that time. Now is that exactly accurate supposed real time? Well no as as JC B said there’s no way really to correlate the tape recordings with real time. What’s real time? Are we talking atomic time in Washington DC? Uh, are we talking based on what how they’ve set their clocks in Dallas in the dispatchers’s office? So, there’s no real way. But we know it’s not five minutes off. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not, you know, it’s not 10 minutes off. No, you’re within 60 seconds of the real time. And so just for to put together my chronology, I then attached seconds because I’m measuring between events. So if the tape recording is running in real time and in some of the like I say right after the shooting, there’s a lot of activity. So it is pretty much running in real time. You can measure between this statement and that statement. That’s exactly 15 seconds. So I can say if he says it’s 119 here and that’s 119, this is 119 15. and so on and I could work through the whole thing. It’s not designed to say, okay, that thing happened exactly at 119 and 15 seconds. But it is designed to say that happened after the event that happened at 11910 and before the thing that happened at 11920, right? The chronological order is correct. The exact time could skew a little bit. And when it comes to the tippet shooting, you don’t, you know, we’re not talking about something where you need to be that precise anyway. Um, you know, Oswald, the the whole thing. Could Oswald have made it to the tippet shooting scene in time. And again, I was a conspiracy theorist, so I I know all the arguments. I know where the skeletons are buried. So, the the whole idea of that betrays the fact that, well, look at all the evidence that shows eyewitness accounts, the physical evidence that that he is there at the time of the shooting. So, therefore, he had to have made it. So, now you have to go back to, okay, so when was the last time he was seen? And then of course when when you really investigate that you find out okay it’s actually there’s a margin there’s a window when he could have got to his rooming house and it’s actually earlier than everybody thinks. Just because Erlene Roberts said he got he came in about 1. Now what does that mean? Does that mean it’s 10 to one? Does that mean it’s 5 to one? Does that mean it’s 10 after one? you know, so he and and then she said he was at one point she said he was only in his room long enough to put on the jacket and come back out. So she kind of uh suggested it was maybe 30 seconds or less. And then of course she made the statement where he was in there three or four minutes. And you and I both know plenty of people that when you ask him about timings, they’ll use the term minutes and not seconds when they mean seconds. Yeah. And you know because it’s just a frame of they just mean a short period of time and a lot of people have no sense of time. Being a disc jockey I actually got an an internal body clock after 10 years. I can tell when 3 minutes have gone by because I would know I’ve got so much time to get down and get a cup of coffee and come back up. I got to be back in the studio before that song ends. So you get a sort of an internal body clock. And I think cops, people that work jobs where the clock is an important factor in what they’re doing, I think they developed a body clock. So, I’m just saying that uh you know the that whole timing of when JD Tippet is is uh what time was he shot has been so misused and so mischaracterized. So using the tape recordings you find that the you know T uh or rather Domingo Benvitas he said he got in he couldn’t work the radio and you hear this mashing button sound again if you only have the transcripts and you don’t have the recording so you don’t know any of this right you don’t see somebody’s mashing the button like they’re they’re keying the mic but they’re not saying it. So they’re hitting the button and letting it go and what he’s probably doing is that’s he’s pushing the button down letting it go and he’s talking and of course they can’t hear that. So then he’s listening and nobody’s saying anything in response. So he he imagines it again and does the same thing. And uh now I’m I’m imagining that because I’m trying to figure out, okay, it didn’t work. Something like that had to have happened. And we can hear him mashing the button for almost a minute before Tia Bowie comes on who said that he walked up and here’s this here’s Domingo Benvitz in the front. He didn’t know his name, but he said there was a Mexican fellow there. He didn’t know how. He said, “I don’t know how to work it.” He takes the microphone and so from the last mash button there’s a short pause 10 seconds or 15 seconds and then all of a sudden Bowie comes on it’s clear as a bell. So you can see how this all lines up with both the stories that they told and the sounds we’re hearing. And when you wind that back from Bowie’s call, which if you look at all the time linear time regressions and the the time checks after that starts at about I think it now don’t quote me on this, it’s in the book, but I think it was 11734 something like that is when he first comes on and he talks for about 40 seconds. So, just after 118. Um, and if you wind that back, you can hear Bowi almost or I’m sorry, Domingo Benvdas almost a minute earlier mashing the button and we know that he didn’t jump right out of the truck. He said the guy went around the corner and so it’s not that hard. We know the distances involved. He he described him as trotting. We and everybody else did too. He’s he’s trotting to the corner around the corner. So you know, okay, it’s about 25 to 30 seconds to do that over 150 ft. And he said that he thought it was a domestic dispute. He thought the guy lived in the corner house, so he was afraid to come right out. But we also know that Helen Markham after when he went around the corner. The Davis girls have come to the front door. They’re seeing Helen Markham screaming, pointing, and saying, “He killed him. He killed him.” And then by her own account, Markham said as she ran to Tippet at that point. So it’s hard to imagine that Domingo Benvitas would be still sitting in his truck 30 seconds later when Helen Markham arrives at the body and we now know that other people are starting to come out of their homes. So the the idea that he sat Yeah, I believe he testified, I sat in the truck for several minutes. This is another incident where people are using the term minutes. And what they really mean is a short period of time, an unknown short period of time, but not necessarily minutes. And when you look at all that, you can see it’s probably a much shorter period of time. So anyway, you work all back. I ended up with my time of the shooting is at about 11430. So just before that’s when Oswalt stops Tippet. They’d probably have a 10-second uh conversation, nothing longer. And it occurred to me that um one of the and let me just say this, I don’t think JD Tippet had any idea that this was the presidential assassin or that he was in any danger. Generally, police officers don’t like somebody approaching the car when they’re seated because you can’t respond. And so I know some some people we we don’t know if Tippet called Oswald over to the car or he came over on his own valition, but I I I suspect Tippet wouldn’t have called him over to the car simply because he would have rather get gotten out and talked to him rather than be sitting in the car. But he could have. It’s possible, I guess. I’ve heard some people just as an aside say, “Yeah, it’s it’s very tight. It’s he’s just there. He’s just in time to get there.” that that made him hard for them to believe he did it. And I’m thinking, well, it’s not like he’s standing around waiting to shoot somebody. Of course, it’s just enough time to get there. And reality is very tight. I mean, by very nature, it has to be very tight. But yes, people don’t understand the whole nature of an alibi. If you really want to prove an alibi, you can’t say it would take you five minutes and you would only have you really only had 5 minutes and 4 seconds or you have to have you have to have something extreme to really prove an alibi. Exactly. what we’re all what we’re all doing when we recreate the the walk is proving it’s it’s possible. That’s it. It’s possible. And he had the jacket zipped up. I think when he leaned down, he’s got to be sweating. I’m thinking his hair’s got to be wet. It’s It’s stuck to his forehead. And if I’m a police officer, that’s the kind of thing that looks suspicious. You’d be thinking, well, it’s 68 degrees. Why wouldn’t you just take the jacket off and carry it? I mean, why has he got this thing zipped up? I also wonder whether his hair was disheveled because Bledsoe said that he looked a bit crazy on the bus. Maybe his hair was a bit disheveled as well. And uh it could have been and it was a windy it was considerably windy. Um and then there’s another thing that came out. Um the BBC did an interview with An McCraven. Now they pronounce it as McCravy. It was phonetically pronounced. But if you if you look in the uh if you look in the U city directory, there was a Charles Mc Raven M Capital R a V I N right and his wife’s name was Anne. And so that fits. So it’s not Anne McCra. It’s not Anne McCravy, it’s Anne McCraven. But in her BBC interview, she said that she saw the guy that eventually shot Tippet, who we know is Oswald, run by her house. Then she said, so in her chronology, the guy runs by and then the police car pulls over. The police officer got out and the guy shot him, you know, in a wink of an eye that quick. What intrigued me though was her statement that the guy ran by her house because it occurred to me, wait a minute, he can’t be running he can’t be running east on 10th, right, with Tippet driving up behind him because Anne McCraven lived in the house that was east of the shooting scene. If he’s running past her house, he’s got to be running toward the corner. And then that made sense with the chronology. She says he ran by the house, then the police car pulls over. So that got me to thinking that. Now my my theory that I proposed in the book, and that’s all it is. It’s just a theory, but it’s based on the eyewitness accounts. You had two groups of witnesses. One that said he’s walking west. We’re talking about Oswald. And one that says no, he’s coming from the east. And for a long time, people were were trying to say it was one or the other. And it occurred to me, well, wait a minute. What if what if it’s not one or the other? What if they’re both right? He is coming from the west. Does a quick about face and then is walking east. And that’s what causes Tippet to Well, when you realize where if he’s walking and where he stopped where he stopped by Tippet, I figured I back timed. Okay. Where would he make the turn? Where would he turn around? How close to the corner? We know he didn’t pass the corner because this was my main argument is Scoggins never saw him. He’s the cab driver sitting at the corner having lunch. He never saw him before the shooting. He he thought he was he thought he was walking west or at least he said I he was facing west when I first saw him. And frankly the cab would have been parked right there at the sidewalk where the intersection was. So, if Oswald had been coming from the east, as the Warren Commission said, he literally his pant leg would have brushed right against the the cab. How could how could he miss that? So, my thought was, okay, he’s coming from the other direction. Does an about face before he reaches the corner and is walking back. And as it turns out, there’s a bunch of trees and so forth, but there’s kind of a clearing right toward the the corner. And I think he’s just reaching that clearing. And here’s Tippet approaching. And they would have eye contact. Well, now add in the An McCraven thing. What if Oswalt’s walking briskly toward that corner, spots the approaching, the tippet car is quite a ways down the street, but he sees and he thinks, I got to get around the corner before he gets there. So, he starts running, runs past McCraven’s house, and it’s almost to the corner and realizes, now this is again all speculation, but realizes, I’m not I’m not going to make it. I’m not going to get to the corner before he gets there. So, he slams on the brakes, turns around, and starts walking back the other direction. Now, the only thing I’ve added into this that’s different from what’s in the book is I’ve added the possibility he actually might have been running that last few seconds before Tippet spot him, which would just look even more suspicious. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the other thing that people don’t really factor in as well is that is that Oswald on his way to Tenth and Patton could have, you know, walked um through people’s gardens, backyards, and stuff and uh, you know, there were fewer fences back then, so maybe he didn’t, you know, he could have taken a more d a more direct route. Who knows? Yeah. And nobody’s ever really going to know. I’ve seen people re online recently speculating. We’ve all have. I did the same thing. What if he went this way and went that way? They’re trying to get him around to be coming back from the west, but they use the most, you know, the most the furthest route and they say, “Oh, it’s not possible he could.” No. Again, as you said earlier, to create an alibi, you got to look what’s the shortest the shortest possible way he could get there. And then if that doesn’t fit the window that’s available to him, then you might have something. But of course, it fits the window that’s available to him because all the other evidence again show that just supports it that yes, it’s him. There’s no question about it. So, the most direct route, we come right down Beckley. You do a little zigzag at Davis uh Patton to 10th and then he walks right down 10th in the opposite direction heading east, gets around close to Marcellis, returns and comes back the other way. And I remember Gary Mack years ago said, “Well, Dale, you would have walked right past Helen Markham and Scoggins and all these people and they didn’t see him.” And I and I had to remind him and other people have made the same argument recently. It’s like, no, the the other people aren’t sitting there waiting for the shooting. Look, Scoggins is at the gentleman’s club and he comes up only after he’s only in his cab a couple of, you know, a couple of seconds, maybe a minute, starting to eat his lunch when this happens. So, he’s not even in his cab. Roswell would have come by the first time. Helen Markham wouldn’t have left the washeteria yet by her own account when he came by the first time. Uh Bert and Smith were at their brother his Bert’s brother’s house over on 9inth and then they said they came back to his house over at at the corner there at at Denver and uh and 10th and again so they wouldn’t have been there the first time. So actually it’s almost as if Oswwell would have come through the neighborhood and then all the players moved into their position as he’s coming back. So yeah, it it could have still happened that way. I I tell you, Fred, I’ve spent more time thinking about this stuff, right, than anybody on the planet. And so, uh, I know the story pretty well. I know where the holes are and where they’re not. So, do you want to show us? You have some computer stuff. Do you want to show us? Yeah. All right. So, these are these are the color versions of the graphics that I used uh created for the book. And, uh, so this kind of gives you the the overall lay of the land. Uh, this is Jefferson Boulevard. If you can see the little hand motion here. Yeah. Uh here here’s here’s Tenth and Patton. This intersection here. And if we zoom in, this is where Tippet’s police car ends up stopping. And as everyone can see here, Tenth comes down, does a little elbow, and then this is Marcelis here. And that uh the bus stop where Oswalt’s transfer was good would have been right here at this corner. And this is the library right where Adrien Hamby parked his car here and ran across the lawn and uh CT Walker was driving down here and saw him run across the lawn and that’s when he hollered he’s in the library get some people over here. Oswald’s escape path is going to be down here behind the Texico station and then down the alley. So I’m going to uh I’ll walk you through here the next couple. So, we’ve kind of reoriented ourselves here. We’re we’re just east of Denver and 10th. And the first sighting of Oswald coming back in this direction is made by the foreman on this apartment job that was going on right here. And he left to go up to the Town and Country uh cafe to have lunch. Now, we’re not sure exactly where this occurred, but somewhere in this stretch uh east of the elbow and before Marcela Street. And you can see I’ve got Jimmy Bert and Bill Smith standing in front of his house. And then there was the uh the tile layer and his uh this is uh Jim Archer and Jim Brewer are eating lunch in in a truck here. Okay, so we got to switch our view around here. So, here’s our here’s our Oswald character coming down 10th Street passing in front of the um apartment complex being worked on and Bert and Smith are standing out in front here. Now, I didn’t talk to Jimmy Bert was killed in a traffic accident, so I didn’t interview him. Uh, but I did talk to Bill Smith and he said he never saw the guy walk by, the guy being Oswald. Bert, of course, always said he did see him before he got down to the shooting. So, it’s possible that Smith had his back to him. I asked Smith, “How was how was Bert’s veracity on this?” He said, “Well, we were all drinkers at the time.” So, but he says, “I didn’t see him. That’s all I can say.” All right. So, as Oswald approaches uh the corner, he does something really interesting. He goes behind the truck. So, these two guys are sitting in the truck and Jim uh Jim Archer is here in the driver’s seat and his buddy Brewer is sitting next to in the passenger seat. Archer didn’t notice the guy because, you know, uh Brewer is blocking his view as he approaches, but Brewer said, “No, no, the guy was coming from the west.” So, Archer doesn’t notice anything until the shooting happens way down the street. But the fact is Oswwell didn’t go in front of the truck. He went behind it, which I thought was interesting. It’s almost like he’s trying to avoid people. All right. So, now we have here’s Oswald approaching now the corner of Tenth and Patton. And you can see uh hang on a sec here. Computer is refreshing. All right. So, here comes Tippet. You can see the Abundant Life Theater down or the the Abundant Life temple down the street. Here comes Tippet’s patrol car. Scoggins is sitting in his cab here. Helen Markham is approaching the corner on her way to catch a bus down at the corner of Jefferson. And here comes Oswwell. Now, I’ve removed the trees on both sides of the street. So, there’s trees along about here. And then it kind of busts free and there’s only one tree located here. So, from from what I can gather, Oswell could have gotten as far as this bush right about this point before he turned around and started back on the opposite direction. And Anne McCraven, by the way, would have been living in this house. And Tippet’s going to pull up in front of this driveway right here. Okay. So, that’s our that’s our setup. Go to the next slide. All right. So, here’s the basically the moment when Oswell does an about phase. Tippa would have been just approaching the corner. You could have easily seen that happen. Ellen Markham is now standing on the corner waiting. Now traffic is also approaching from the other direction and just the traffic we know about. So we know that Jack Tatum is coming. So is Domingo Benvitas, but 10th Street’s actually kind of a busy street because people would use it to avoid Jefferson Boulevard and they could run parallel to it. So there could have been other traffic passing here at the time is all I’m saying. All right. And so on our next uh slide, just as Tippet is pulling up alongside the guy over here and Helen Markham is watching, right? Yep. And and by the way, Aquilla Clemens is working in this house here. Second house off the corner behind and beyond Helen Markham. If you come down here while this is going on, this is when Jack Tatum is coming up the street and starting to turn the corner. As he as he’s making this turn, he said he looked down the sidewalk and he could see Tippet just pulling over to the curb and this guy walking. So, he is one of the witnesses that as Oswwell coming from the east. And of course, Burton and Smith are over here on the corner and they’re looking down there. Again, I’ve removed trees just to make this clearer, but there’s a lot of foliage in between here that would make this not an easy view, a direct view. All right, next slide. Uh, Jack Gray Tatum now is folded front and coming right behind him is Domingo Benvitas in his pickup truck. And as Tatum is passing now, he says, uh, JD is leaning over in the car and Oswald has his hands in both hands in the zipper jacket, so he’s not actually leaning on the car. So, this is the 15 ft that Jack Tatum talks about that he was that close to Oswald. Everybody thinks, “Oh, it’s after the shooting.” And they’re going, “No, wait a minute. Oswell runs around the corner and Jack Tatum’s here. That’s that’s longer. That’s way more than 15 feet.” Now he’s talking about earlier when he drove by. He’s less than a car length away. So he got a good look at him. And then our next slide is just the time it takes Tatum to drive past and get to the intersection. And uh the stop sign is for traffic coming this way. So technically he could have rolled straight through. I know my own driving habits is any intersection I slow down and kind of I don’t necessarily stop at I’ll I’ll do a kind of bump and roll just to avoid I’ve seen too many people get t-boned at these intersections. Just because there’s no stop sign doesn’t mean somebody’s not going to run it. And this is where Oswald pulls the gun and shoots across the hood hitting Tippet. Domingo Beneditz pulls his truck into the curb. Helen Markham’s on the corner here. And it’s not really clear whether Aquilla Clemens hears the shots and comes out on her porch or is already out on the porch. But after the shooting with tip it down on the on the pavement, Oswald now leaves and cuts across this corner. The Davis girls come out on the front porch and so they’re only 15 20 feet away from as he cuts through these bushes. And the cab driver is rolled out of the cab. He started across the street and he realized there’s no place to hide. So he just come back and duck behind this rear quarter panel, the left rear quarter panel. And of course, uh, Ellen Markham’s on the corner watching all this. And we believe according to Aquilla Clemens account that she has come out off the porch. He’s either on the porch or in the in the uh in the process of coming out toward the sidewalk at this point. So this is our overview at at this juncture. And our next slide as well cuts through these bushes. And when he does, he’s throwing he throws a shells, two shells here. They did find uh another shell underneath this window. And it’s not clear where um Barbara Davis found her shell, but I believe in this area here. And of course, then there was a fifth shell that their father-in-law recovered. And that probably was recovered here as well. So the two that Domingo Benvdas recovered were probably the two that were right in this area. Right. So as Oswald passes, he uh Scoggins here who’s kneeling down behind the car, hears him say, “Poor dumb cop or poor damn cop.” So Oswwell starts down the street goes a short distance and as we’re going to see here next slide
by now Frank Samino who lives in the second house here has come out he hears the gunshots here’s screaming he comes out Helan Markham is hollering he killed him he killed him the Davis girls are here at the front door and Oswald’s come around the corner and he’s heading down this side of the sidewalk, but then quickly crosses the street probably because Sam Guiinard is washing a car here in the alley and he can see if he continues down, he’s going to run right into this guy. So, he crosses the street and he’s coming this way. Now, over at standing on the porch of this used car lot is Ted Callaway, who I thought was the best witness that I ever talked to and maybe the best witness in the whole thing. He hears the five gunshots. Friends of his that were with him, Bey Cersei, who I’ve got shown here, and some other people are standing there in the office, and they said, “Well, somebody’s got firecrackers.” And he being a uh US Marine during World War II and trained on the pistol range in San Diego later, immediately recognized those are pistol shots. He runs to the sidewalk and when he gets here, he said he looked up the street and he sees the cab driver crouched behind the car and just then he sees like a genie. He sees Oswald materialized jumping through this bush coming toward him, crossing the street and coming down with the pistol in a raised pistol position. And as soon as he crossed the alley and got about right here, he’s about 56 feet away. This is when uh Ted Callaway hollers to Oswald, “Hey man, what the hell is going on?” And he kind of slows up. Now, the cars are parked across the sidewalk, so Oswalt’s got to come out. He either go in front of the uh traffic, but according to the used car people on the Johnny Reynolds lot, he comes out into the street and actually finishes this journey down the center of the street. And so he comes around these cars, comes back to the sidewalk here. In the meantime, out on the front porch with Johnny Reynolds on this upper porch, Johnny Reynolds comes out with LJ Lewis and BM Patterson and Harold Russell. So they’re watching this guy coming out down the street onto the sidewalk and he gets almost to this corner. Now, this isn’t quite completely accurate, but according to uh there was one additional eyewitness that I talked to who was, you know, this was the Harris Brothers motor lot, and the owner the owner’s son was actually dropped off. There’s a bus stop. The bus stop that Helen Markham was going to was on this corner to go downtown. And then the opposing bus stop was on this corner going this way. And so Jimmy Harris, the son, had been in with some friends, school friends down at the motorcade, watched the parade and it was coming back just as this was happening. So they’re on the bus. He’s just getting off or had just gotten off the bus, was here a short time. So he said Oswwell came to this corner and looked like he was going to cross the street and then hesitated and then turned and started up toward Mars Brothers in this direction. So a little bit of a detail that most people aren’t aware of. And uh at this point is when Reynolds and BM Patterson decide we’re going to follow the guy. So they’re following across the street. They’re kind of tailing Oswald as he comes up the street here. Now, the way they originally told the story is Oswald comes up, passes the the Dean’s Dairy Way, which is a convenience store, if you will, like a 7-Eleven, and then cuts between this building and the the Texico service station and into the back of the lot. And uh then Reynolds said he and Patterson run across the street and they talked to the mechanic and and they say, “Oh yeah, the guy just came by here.” Well, the way that Brocks told it is, “No, five minutes elapsed between the time Oswald passes them and Reynolds comes over here.” And so then I years later, I get the story from the dairy way that in fact Oswald attempted to get into one of these buildings. Now, I I’m showing the dotted line here between the buildings cuz we’re not sure which one he attempted to get into, but when the police got there and WFAA was filming, Ron Ryland was filming, they’re filming the back of this house. So, it could have been this one as opposed to this one. But what’s interesting, and we’ll go to the next slide. If you go around the back, the stairs, these these 3D models I built are based on photographs. The stairs coming to this upper balcony do come in from this side. So Oswald could have slipped between the two buildings. Come up here. Now the reason what what she heard that is um Dodie Dean was working cash. She heard somebody like trying to break into one of these doors and then heard somebody coming down a set of rickety stairs. And when she looked up, Oswald’s passing in front of her, kind of taking the jacket off as he’s passing in front of the store. And of course, he’s then going to go between these two buildings. So, it’s a little unclear exactly uh whether he’s breaking in back here or breaking in down here or coming around the front. But we know that there was a delay and that Reynolds and Patterson who were over here. But when they told the Brocks 5 minutes later about a guy passing him, they said, “Yeah, he probably shot a policeman.” Well, if you think about it, there’s How do they know a policeman was shot? They hadn’t been to the shooting scene. or had they? So, I surmise. And the other thing is is when the police are brought over here, Reynolds is telling him he thinks the guy’s hunkered down in one of these buildings. So, I’m I’m pretty certain that he thought he went into one of the buildings. He and Patterson then leave. Probably not. Probably Patterson stays. Reynolds goes first. And then of course uh Reynolds, Warren Reynolds is the one who gives the first description to uh Roy Walker who’s at the tippet shooting scene and uh and then he brings the police back here and of course the rest of the story. So we’ll go to the next slide. So what happens is is after Oswald tries to break into one of these buildings, probably the closer one, he passes and there’s like three garage doors. This is the type of building this is. The cash register is right here. And Dodie Dean sees Oswald as he walks by and uh taking in the process of taking the jacket starting to take it off. So he then cuts back next to the Texico service station comes back and then the jacket is eventually found behind this car back here. So he cuts between the buildings and then probably re-enters the alley. And one of the reasons that believe that’s true is that in the meantime way back over here, Bert and Smith have run down to the shooting scene. They see that it’s a police officer and by their accounts, they ran down this way with the intent of going all the way to Jefferson. But when they got to the alley entrance here, they looked down this way and they said they saw the guy running west in the alley. Okay. And so the timing is such that this would have been after he reentered the alley and to them they always thought no, he had cut through the alley to begin with and ran all the way down this way. So that’s how that whole story about um that Helen Markham then later told because Burton Smith were friends with her son Jimmy Markham. That’s how that whole story got um told that oh he cut through the alley and never went to Jefferson. No, there’s plenty of there’s plenty of eyewitnesses that show that he went all the way to Jefferson and then later Helen Markham I think in the late60s started telling how he cut across this lot into the alley and went. So there were later stories that got told and embellished. So in anyway, uh within within two minutes or three minutes of the shooting, Oswald is gone. He’s out of there. All right. So 20 minutes later, here’s how the arrest unfolds.
Hardy Shoe Store is about this distance, about 100 yards from the front of the Texas theater. And uh so as as we know the story, Oswald had stepped into this glass vestibule. Johnny Brewer saw him, thought he was acting suspicious. A police car with a siren makes a U-turn and they’re basically responding to the the Oakcliff Library call for a suspect. And as soon as Oswald starts up the street, Brewer comes out and he’s standing here. Now, he didn’t come out right away because he said Oswald was almost to the theater by the time he came out. So, there was some delay before he came out, but he’s standing here. Now, he knew Julia Postal. And while Oswalt’s heading toward the front of the theater, a police car, another police car zips past the Texas theater, excuse me, and this brings Julia Postal out of the ticket booth, right? So, she comes out to the comes out and she’s facing West and this gives Oswald an opportunity to slip behind her back into the theater. And of course, what he doesn’t know is that Brewer is seeing this happen. So Brewer comes up the street and asks Julia Posto, “Did you see that guy?” And she sort of h expected to see him because she said when she was coming out of the booth out of her peripheral vision, she saw a guy approaching and then when Brewer comes up, she realized, well, the guy never passed me and he’s nowhere to be seen, so he must have gone into the theater. And this is what alerted Brewer to go in. him and uh Butch Burroughs kind of make sure that no one’s left the exit doors, so he must still be in there. He Brewer comes back out as Postal call the cops and of course they now come to the theater. So this is the view if we’re the screen. We’re looking back onto the main floor. There’s two main aisles, a center section and then a left and right section. Oswald is sitting third row from the back, second seat in when he’s arrested. Originally, he’s in the fifth seat in. And today, these three rows are gone. They built a little stage back here. So, if you go there now, you can actually see the drill holes in the cement where they’ve removed rows. So, you could actually take a tape measure, which we did, measure the distance between these three rows, and then you could use that or these four rows. Use that. take the last row that’s there currently and measure back and you could you could basically figure out exactly where Oswwell was sitting. Anyway, he’s in the fifth seat in and Brewer has gone down and he’s down here near the front um behind the velvet uh curtains that are hanging at this exit here. And uh when the house lights come up, he sees Oswell back here in this fifth seat stand up, step to the aisle like he’s going to exit. And of course, the cops are pouring in. So, he just sits back down in the second seat and that’s when uh McDonald and the and the cops are at the back door and they start rattling the back door. Brewer lets him in, points out, “Yeah, I can show you the guy. He’s in the brown shirt.” He points out Oswald. There’s very few PE patrons in the theater. McDonald comes down. He searches these two guys and basically comes up the row this way at the same time. And I don’t I can’t remember the officer’s names, but I believe it’s TA Hudson and CT Walker. And there’s another uniformed officer. They come up. And so when McDonald approaches Oswald, he’s kind of facing this way. And then at the last second, he spins toward Oswald and says, “Get on your feet.” These three officers are now entering the row behind Oswald, Oswald’s row, and a row in front of him. So they’re kind of coming in from this direction. And McDonald, of course, says, “Get on your feet.” Oswalt stands up, brings his hands up without being asked about shoulder high. And as he does that, he says, “This is it. It’s all over now.” And when McDonald reaches down to pat down his waist, Oswald slugs him and then reaches for the gun. And the fight ensues. These three guys come running in. They pull Oswald back over the seat in a in a headlock, this officer behind him. The other two officers get on both hands, and of course, it’s a little bit of chaos before they subdue him, right? And so, uh, there you have it. That’s the shooting to the arrest. And that covers from 115 to about 150. So, about 35 minutes is the time period that we looked at. As David Bellon said, this is the Rosetta Stone of the GFKs. I mean, it’s just so clear. The evidence is so so overwhelming and and yet people just can’t seem to accept it. Yeah, it’s pretty straightforward. I mean, he’s caught red-handed with the gun in his hand. And you’ve heard the thing probably about the bent firing pin, which I traced back to it was a newspaper article in which they were trying to speculate why the shell didn’t go off. When Oswald fired, it clicked. Now, there are a couple of versions. McDonald always said the web of his thumb, you know, he he grabbed the they’re you’re taught to grab the cylinder so that it can’t rotate when you’re trying to pull the trigger, right? and and so his that puts the web of his hand on the near the back of the cylinder that the hammer the hammer comes back and as it snaps forward he said it caught his hand there were numerous officers that said they saw a dent near the primer we’ve seen the shells that were taken out of the boat none of them have a dent there there is one with a slight dent but it’s way off center and couldn’t have been caused by the hammer striking the primer uh lightly or whatever. So, uh, who knows whether the Now, there is a little bolt in a in a revolver. There’s a little bolt lock. So, it’s a double-action pistol. You you can you can pull the hammer back, right? And it clicks and this little metal slide gets locked in there and that holds the hammer back until you pull this the trigger a second time basically, and that releases the lock and the hammer comes forward. or as in a in the doubleaction revolver that it was, you just pull the trigger once, comes all the way back, and if you keep pulling the trigger, that lock never gets into place, and the hammer comes down and and hits the shell. It’s not clear as to what happened, but it is clear that Oswald did attempt to fire the pistol. Certainly had it pointed at at uh McDonald’s head. Yeah. I mean, how do you explain that? This is it. It’s all over now. And then he tries to basically go out in a in a in a cop suicide and of course that doesn’t happen and uh he’s caught red-handed, you know. And so I would just briefly say the one of the main arguments that was made early on by Sylvia Maher and Mark Lane is they suggested and that’s all they could ever do. They suggested the shells have been switched because Jo, the way they explained it, couldn’t find his marks. But if you look at Joe Po’s testimony, he’s very clear that he can’t remember whether he made the marks or not. And Jim Lavell told me years later, and he knew Po, you know, they still went went to retirement parties and uh gettogethers with the police association. He said, “Look, you know, sometimes officers just get in over their heads.” He says uh he didn’t mark the shells. There was no reason to mark the shells in the scene. The head of the crime lab, George Dowy, was there collecting shells. He took he he was the one that took the shell directly from uh Barbara Davis. There’d be no reason. But Po could give the shells to Dowy. Dowy could put his mark on it, which he did. Verify these were given to me by Po. He would testify to that. And that there’s the chain of custody. You didn’t need Po marking the shelves. and and also a post said that he he marked his initials JMP. Well, I went to the National Archives, right, for my book to to look at the shelves for his hand, something that no one had ever done. I hired a photographer to come in and take photos so that we could put them in the book. I made sketches of the marks because they’re very hard to see. You got basically, you know, you’ve got burnt propellant in there that’s years old and then you’ve got these marks that are are scratched through the burnt propellant. And of course, it’s now oxidized, so some of it’s kind of green on the inside, but they’re very hard to see. And there’s no way that you could take that little shell, which only has an opening of about a quarter of an inch, and put any kind of you couldn’t put three initials in there. You’re lucky if you can get one. Most of these cops said they put a mark in it that they would recognize. They didn’t necessarily initial it because there’s no there’s no room to initial it. You just now George Dowy kind of put it’s almost a scripted D like you would a cursive kind of the letter D and it’s kind of a in one of them it’s kind of clear what it is the other one it’s kind of a butcher’s job some of the other guys simply made a z an O and kind of put a line through I mean all they’re looking is I’ll make a mark that I will recognize as the one I made and so the uh the two shows that the Davis girls turned in there’s a clear line of you know forget Po let’s take him out of the equation the other two shelves were clearly there’s a clear chain of of uh possession and so what’s the argument now they switched only two of the shelves I mean and and then you’ll hear that from stupid people who read comic books and watch TV shows that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about saying well yeah it was just a sloppy frame up yeah right yeah it’s a sloppy frame don’t be stupid and then when would they do it here’s the other thing years ago I was still a conspiracy theorist Paris and I got hired to be the tippet spokesperson on front lines 1993 show who was Lee Harvey Oswald. I had gone to the AS conference in Chicago. I met Gus Russo there. He found out I was the into the tippet shooting. He was the connection. He made the connection between me and Frontline. I go out to WGBH in Boston. I meet Mike Sullivan. I go into his office and he says, “Well, tell me about the tippet shooting.” So, you know, I’m laying out the big grand conspiracy plan, you know, from memory. Here it is. I lay it all out, the switch shells, all the stuff that everybody talks about today. And uh he looked at me and he said, “What if you’re wrong?” And I was floored. My first thought was, “Man, I didn’t make a convincing case.” But he wasn’t asking that. He was simply saying, “What if you’re wrong?” Because in everything I was saying, I was raising the same questions that Sylvia Maher and Mark Lane and every con Larry Ray Harris, all the conspiracy people had brought up before that, but never tried to answer. And I thought, okay. And then so I I realized if this is going to be the ultimate book on the tip of shooting, and at that time it’s going to be a conspiracy book, I’m going to have to answer the questions. I can’t just do what everybody else did. I’m gonna have to answer the questions. And so I like what uh when I did finally finish the book and I ended up convincing myself that in fact Mike Sullivan was correct. I was wrong. And uh and I asked uh Bob Johnson who was the head of the AP in Dallas at the time to write the forward. I was very glad to see that he wrote a line in there something about Meyers. uh to get to the truth, all he had to do was lift up every stone and look under every rock. And really, that’s really what it was. It was come up with the answers. Like, okay, so who was the mysterious guy that Nick McDonald talked about in his byelined article that he said a mysterious fellow, even his dad, I don’t know who it was, pointed out Oswald. Well, it turned out when you dug into the story, he didn’t write the story. The story was written by a staffer. And I asked Bob Johnson, he recognized the style and he told me who it was who wrote the story most likely. Now, he didn’t know for sure, but he said the style was reminiscent reminiscent of this particular writer. And he said, “In fact, we never would let I mean, and it makes sense. We’d never let Joe Citizen write the article. We would write the article for them. They would read it over, make sure it’s and then they would they we would put their by line on it because it made it better. Here’s Nick McDonald telling the story of the arrest, but it’s not written by Nick McDonald, right?” So the whole idea of the mysterious person and I and of course when I talked to Nick McDonald, you know, to button up the the the story completely, who did you mean by the mysterious? No, I just meant Johnny Brewer. So, you know, all the stuff begins to melt away. And I found it was just like uh picking up a handful of sand at the beach and letting it run through your fingers. Eventually, you’ve got a handful of nothing. And that’s what today all they all they can do is grasp at the sand and come up with chain of custody. Yeah. And I would challenge them what with the same question Mike Sullivan challenged me with. What if you’re wrong? And then try and prove yourself right or wrong. Yeah. You know, and eventually you’ll find out the truth. Everybody’s got to do their own journey. I can appreciate that. Yep. Again, going back to I went the long way around the barn, but I wrote down what I found. Uh, most people are not going to have the advantage of being able to interview a lot of the people that I did because they’re long gone, but their story is preserved and I think the the abundance of the evidence is clear. Oswald killed Tippet. Absolutely no question about it in my mind anyway. And uh it’s a historic fact as far as I’m concerned. Well, I’m glad you took the long way around the barn. And again, I strongly recommend everybody, everybody go buy this book.
It has to be in your collection. If you can’t find it, find it secondhand or in Kindle. It is worth every page, every penny. It’s a great great book.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dale, for appearing on On the Trail of Delusion.
Oh, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
