Why Officer Tippit stopped his Killer

[Milo Reech]

Callaway's a fake. He did not take the gun. See item #15 this thread.

Sole purpose of the Davis women was to pick up planted hulls. This is why the fugitive's flight path had to be redirected across the front yard and out through the shrubbery. Actual path went to the corner of 10th & Patton, then south on Patton.

Jim, you like movies. Rashomon objectifies the quandary. Not all versions can be true, maybe none. Big lies are being told, possibly encompassing a few grains of truth, fiendishly difficult to isolate & extract.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Then Milo, how does one determine what is true and what is not?

[Milo Reech]

Look for facts and build on them, patiently, they are few & far between. Study the evidence carefully, cross reference & compare, always skeptical, no matter the source.

Subject solutions to minute scrutiny. Too often the proposer permits himself the luxury of gross evidence distortion to prop up a pet theory, while condemning the same practice in others.

Beware of the ecumenical approach, a failure of many reconstructions, feebly attempting to force-fit the full gamut of witnesses into an ill-founded scheme.

Instead, ruthlessly banish liars & lies, reserving cautious judgment as to the value of whatever remains.

Give ax grinders short shrift, and this above all: don't kick against the pricks.

[Milo Reech]

Always a pleasure to watch Jim DiEugenio bash the hell out of Dale Myers, as happened recently at the Ed Forum. See "Dale Myers and his World of Illusion."
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic...-illusion/

But it's not a total victory primarily because of falling back on the Jack Myers article that is the subject of this thread, ignoring various shortcomings including the absurdities of the tales told by Pulte & Brownlow, discussed previously.

There are other significant errors. I'll start with an easy one, Helen Markham, well known for the erratic nature of her statements. She's one of the key witnesses and comes in for some rough treatment. Well, why not? The poor woman came under intense pressure from the suborners to finger Oswald as the killer and badgering from just about everybody else, powerless to fend off the former while desperate to keep her wayward son out of jail. Jack Myers is downright unkind to subject her to a scathing criticism, untempered by the tepid apology for her flaky conduct that follows. Instead of dumping on her he should have exerted himself to extract whatever value resides in her various statements.

He is also wrong in item #3 of "the problems with Mrs. Markham's story:"

3. All other witnesses saw the gunman flee west on Jefferson Boulevard. No one else saw the gunman go across an empty lot and disappear down the alley.

Compare:
1. Poe & Jez: "There were approximately six to eight witnesses, all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between Tenth and Jefferson Streets."
2. Jimmy Burt: "saw the man running into an alley located between 10th & Jefferson Avenue on Patton Street."
3. Barnes' map: "W on ally to Crawford left on Crawford to E Jefferson 300 bk."
4. Bowley: "He was told by someone on the scene that a man shot the officer and had ran West on 10th Street toward the Church."
5. Clemons: "He went across that lot there, that’s all I know. He went across that lot, I don’t know which way…"

Her importance cannot be overstated, despite the cracks in her story, because she establishes 1:06 (truncating seconds) as the time of Tippit's murder as the circumstantial reality, simply by being at the location where she should have been on her way to catch the 1:12 bus at Jefferson.

[Milo Reech]

Jack Myers soars to a height of excellence in enumerating the reasons for dismissing Tatum's presence as an eyewitness, then crashes & burns on the issue of the coup de grace:

Problem is, the forensic evidence showed that one of the shots was likely fired from a steep downward angle, from above the officer, unlike the other three shots. The final shot was more accurate, more deadly, and apparently done from a much closer distance.

This amplifies Joseph McBride's Into the Nightmare:

Dr. Rose authorized the clothing to be sent to the Dallas Criminal Laboratory, where it was found to have no powder burns, indicating no gunshot wounds to the chest were fired at close range. [p.591]

But the autopsy's Gunshot Wound Chart indicates that the directions of wounds 1, 2 & 3 (head, chest & chest) are either upward (1 & 3) or slightly upward (2) and that powder burns are absent from 1 [p.11]. The report states "No powder tattooing is noted at the margins" of the head wound (1) [p.29]. Therefore, all three have similar trajectories and none was fired at close range. Dr. Rose does not analyze "the sequence of occurrence," telling the FBI, "The numbers are arbitrary and were used for identification purposes..." [p.8]. I.e., there is no known "final shot."
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7461220

Upshot is the discrepancies between what Jack Myers says about the wounds and the actual content of Dr. Rose's autopsy report constitute a massive continuity blunder, with the baseless coup de grace plot element bereft of both eyewitness & forensic support.

The long term problem is a common failure to condemn this spurious element as an obvious fiction concocted by the HSCA and injected into the large barrelful of red herrings in which Tippit murder research perpetually drowns.