The Tippit Case in the New Millenium

[Milo Reech]

An article in the 11/66 issue of Ramparts mentioned an abortive attempt by Mark Lane to interview Benavides.

Earlier this year Mark Lane located Domingo Benavides, a witness to the shooting whose brother was mysteriously killed (see above), and arranged to meet him at Lane's motel for a filmed interview the next morning; Lane offered him $100. That night two men from the homicide squad came to the motel and inquired of Lane's film crew why they were so interested in Benavides. "What did you offer our boy $100 for?" they asked. According to the film crew, the policemen knew the exact time of Benavides' appointment with Lane, implied Benavides would not be there, and generally showed a great deal more concern about their footage on the Tippit murder than about the killing of Kennedy. Benavides never showed up.
Ramparts Magazine
The Legacy of Penn Jones, Jr. by David Welsh
https://www.unz.com/print/Ramparts-1966nov-00039 p.47

Sounds sinister but there's no mystery as to the source of the information supplied to the policemen of the homicide squad. After dropping a dime & spilling the beans Benavides was instructed by his handlers to stay away from Lane.

This item about Tatum appears in the Tippit material available at Dealey Plaza UK. From Bill Pulte's 2/99 letter to Harrison Livingstone:

Tatum and the used car dealers are critical to Myers' case. But there isn't a shred of evidence that Jack Tatum was actually there, and Warren Reynolds told his close friend Mack Pate that he was closer than any other of the car dealer employees to the suspect but not close enough to have any idea who it was.

And there's this:

Greg Lowrey asked everyone he could find who had [been] at the scene of Tippit's murder to describe everything they saw.. A lot of details were described by two or more people independently. Greg has written hundreds of pages based on these interviews. What he did is encyclopedic. So, when he doesn't find in his interviews any references to anyone who looks like Tatum, who did what Tatum claims to have done, and who drove a vehicle like Tatum's, it is pretty clear that Tatum wasn't there.
[Tippit 1.pdf p.8]
http://dealeyplazauk.com/research/collec...documents/

The straightforward way to refute the contention that "Tatum wasn't there" is to provide "a shred of evidence" that he was, an uncompleted task.

More on Reynolds to come at some point. In the meantime, given the intrinsic merit of Lowery's method, access to his encyclopedic material would be very welcome, but I'm coming up empty so far. Help will be appreciated.

[Mark A. O'Blazney]

An article in the 11/66 issue of Ramparts mentioned an abortive attempt by Mark Lane to interview Benavides.

Earlier this year Mark Lane located Domingo Benavides, a witness to the shooting whose brother was mysteriously killed (see above), and arranged to meet him at Lane's motel for a filmed interview the next morning; Lane offered him $100. That night two men from the homicide squad came to the motel and inquired of Lane's film crew why they were so interested in Benavides. "What did you offer our boy $100 for?" they asked. According to the film crew, the policemen knew the exact time of Benavides' appointment with Lane, implied Benavides would not be there, and generally showed a great deal more concern about their footage on the Tippit murder than about the killing of Kennedy. Benavides never showed up.
Ramparts Magazine
The Legacy of Penn Jones, Jr. by David Welsh
https://www.unz.com/print/Ramparts-1966nov-00039 p.47

Sounds sinister but there's no mystery as to the source of the information supplied to the policemen of the homicide squad. After dropping a dime & spilling the beans Benavides was instructed by his handlers to stay away from Lane.

This item about Tatum appears in the Tippit material available at Dealey Plaza UK. From Bill Pulte's 2/99 letter to Harrison Livingstone:

Tatum and the used car dealers are critical to Myers' case. But there isn't a shred of evidence that Jack Tatum was actually there, and Warren Reynolds told his close friend Mack Pate that he was closer than any other of the car dealer employees to the suspect but not close enough to have any idea who it was.

And there's this:

Greg Lowrey asked everyone he could find who had [been] at the scene of Tippit's murder to describe everything they saw.. A lot of details were described by two or more people independently. Greg has written hundreds of pages based on these interviews. What he did is encyclopedic. So, when he doesn't find in his interviews any references to anyone who looks like Tatum, who did what Tatum claims to have done, and who drove a vehicle like Tatum's, it is pretty clear that Tatum wasn't there.
[Tippit 1.pdf p.8]
http://dealeyplazauk.com/research/collec...documents/

The straightforward way to refute the contention that "Tatum wasn't there" is to provide "a shred of evidence" that he was, an uncompleted task.

More on Reynolds to come at some point. In the meantime, given the intrinsic merit of Lowery's method, access to his encyclopedic material would be very welcome, but I'm coming up empty so far. Help will be appreciated.

The Welsh article in Ramparts is what got me going all those years ago. I was but a wee lad, but knew how to read well. Well........ times change, and so do our viewpoints. Thank you very much for this memory, Milo + Stars in your Crown, Henry !!!

[Milo Reech]

Filmed by WFAA's Ron Reiland about 1:30PM on 11/22/63 who reported, "An eyewitness here said he had seen the man run into the building," followed by nearly two months of official oblivion, ending on 1/21/64 with an FBI interview. The report altered the observed flight path from an old house to the Roger Ballew Texaco Service Station two buildings away, implying that Reynolds had forgotten what Reiland had filmed at the time of the event.

Same day (1/21/64) the same FBI SAs interviewed the Brocks at the Texaco station, producing reports that substantiated the altered flight path, but they made two mistakes by: 1) insisting the fugitive preceded Reynolds by five minutes; and 2) claiming Reynolds informed the Brocks that a police officer had been killed nearby. For one thing, Reynolds kept close to the fugitive. For another, according to Reynolds' FBI statement he did not learn a police officer had been shot until five or ten minutes after talking to the Brocks. This is consistent with his 7/22/64 WC testimony: "So when they left, well, I did too, and I didn't know this man had shot a policeman" (XI p.436).

Two days later (1/23/64) Reynolds was shot in the head and left for dead in the basement of Reynolds Motor Co. where he worked. The big question is why? It is tempting to attribute it to his failure two days previously "to definitely identify OSWALD as the individual" he had followed, but this is hard to credit. Armstrong proposes a more compelling reason for the attempted rubout at harveyandlee.net, postulating a meeting between the fugitive & Westbrook in the parking lot behind the Texaco station:

When LEE Oswald met up with Capt. Westbrook he may have told Westbrook that someone was following him. To Westbrook this individual posed a very serious threat. It didn't matter whether Reynolds actually saw the shooter (LEE Oswald) make contact with a police car. It only matters if Capt Westbrook or LEE Oswald thought he did, because Reynolds could then connect the man who shot Tippit with the Dallas Police. For Capt. Westbrook this presented no problem, because Westbrook could easily learn the identity of this unknown man by reading police reports of interviews with witnesses. Once Westbrook had identified a troublesome witness, he could fix the problem. Could this be the reason Warren Reynolds was shot in the head two months later?

http://harveyandlee.net/Tippit/Tippit.html

The problem here, admittedly, is that proof is lacking. There is also the implication that the man Reynolds followed on Jefferson Blvd was the same man observed by Burt (from Patton Ave) at the Crawford St end of the alley, but the timing does not work. The route via Jefferson Blvd took too long to complete.

They were not the same individual. Many witnesses described the alley flight path, leading to the obvious conclusion that there were two fugitives.

Overlooked was the observation of an LHO look-alike by ambulance assistant Eddie Kinsey:

He came out from behind that Texaco station... and he was on the median and he run across in front of us... we were downgrading him for running across in front of us. You know how stupid anyone seeing red lights and siren on the ambulance and still run out in front of you.

Tippit After the Murder by Bill Drenas

[Tippit 1.pdf p.54]

http://dealeyplazauk.com/research/collec...documents/

This fugitive ran in the direction of the library to which almost the entire DPD search force subsequently redeployed, where they were preceded by a contingent of constables & deputies. The forces combined to rout an old lady from the basement and make a page sweat. Potential tragedy was headed off by the intervention of two controls, posing as Secret Service agents, described in Marvin Buhk's DPD report. There were no known SS agents in the area.
http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/u?/po-arm,10282

See the section, "It's another Battle of the Little Big Horn," in William Weston's Missing Radio Transmissions article for an entertaining account of what happened at the library. This gathering of forces was observed by LHO's erstwhile bus driver, Cecil McWatters, whose bus was stopped at Marsalis & Jefferson where he witnessed the operation in a surprising convergence of thematic material.
Fourth Decade volume 7 number 4 p.12
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html...0&tab=page

The library runner was the same as the Jefferson Blvd runner, who eluded his pursuers and doubled back after crossing the street in front of the ambulance.

A better answer to the question asked above is that Reynolds saw both fugitives simultaneously. This marked him for death.