The welter of witnesses

[Milo Reech]

The effort to retard the bus time was an act of futility anyway. Markham would not have waited at the corner of Patton & Tenth at 1:15 to catch a bus that stopped at Jefferson at that time. Whatever her mental shortcomings no one declared her incapable of catching a bus, an endeavor she accomplished on a twice daily basis.

The DPD radio logs also have timing problems, mainly due to unsynchronized clocks that showed different times according to the height of the observer. Not joking, this is described in the first two pages of CE1974 with the upshot that the timestamps were subject to an inaccuracy of at least two minutes. So much for CE705's 1:08 transmissions attributed to 78 (Tippit).

The content is far more deserving of scrutiny. For example, this wonky disconnect between location information received by the dispatcher and the location he transmitted:

898. CITIZEN: Hello, police operator?
899. DIS: Go ahead. Go ahead, citizen using the police radio.
900. CITIZEN: There's been a shooting out here.
901. DIS: Where's it at?
902. DIS: The citizen using the police radio...
903. CITIZEN: Tenth Street.
904. DIS: What location on Tenth Street?
905. CITIZEN: Between Marsalis and Beckley. It's a police officer. Somebody shot him. What--what's...404 Tenth Street.
906. DIS: Can you hear me?
907. (Man and woman's voice in background)
908. DIS: 78.
909. CITIZEN: It's a police car, number 10.
910. DIS: 78.
911. DIS: (?) 78.
912. CITIZEN: Got that?
913. CITIZEN: Hello, police operator. Did you get that?
914. DIS: Attention. Signal 19, police officer, 510 East Jefferson.
http://www.billdrenas.com/articles/dpd01-00.pdf [p. 26]

The Sheriff's dispatcher fixed on the inexplicable signal 19 address to the exclusion of several other addresses radioed by DPD, sending everyone to 510 East Jefferson (close to the library) long before DPD Officer C.T. Walker spotted the page running across the library lawn.

[Milo Reech]

Slight detour from the salient topic of establishing an objective reality to a consideration of a proposed scenario based on nothing more than witness statement misapplication by free association, a practice that plagues Tippit research.

The Ed Forum is undergoing one of its periodic Tippit spasms, so far shedding no light on the subject, but the effort to recast Acquilla Clemmons as a Callaway observer is so easily refuted it's surprising no one has done so yet.
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic...la-clemons

Callaway was tallish, heavy & wore business clothes. He purported to observe the gunman near the alley intersecting Patton Ave, at least 200 feet from the corner at Tenth Street where Clemmons was.
CE539

The man observed by Clemmons was tall, thin & wore yellow khakis, one of two she saw facing each other on opposite sides of Tenth Street. She did not stray far from the murder scene because her employer required constant attention.
[John Kelin, Praise From A Future Generation, p. 95]

Enough! No hint of an objective reality here.

[Milo Reech]

The Ed Forum must be stuck in recycle mode, a general malady afflicting JFK assassination discussion, particularly acute on the subject of Tippit's murder. The lame idea of blaming the murder on the local criminal element has resurfaced, pooh-poohing evidence of a JFK assassination connection, while providing none in support of the neighborhood bad boy hypothesis.

I don't believe that Tippit's murder had anything to do with the assassination at all. In fact, nearly all of the witnesses to the Tippit murder gave NO DESCRIPTION of the killer in their original affidavits. Most described him as a young man, a white man or a young white man.
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic...46758_menu

William Lawrence Smith's FBI report says otherwise. He fingered LHO walking west in the 500 block of East 10th Street at the critical time:

Mr. SMITH advised that he was brick-laying at 500 East 10th Street, Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. He said that he left the job and went to lunch, exact time unrecalled, and noticed a man walking west on 10th Street. A few minutes after he got to the cafe located at 10th and Marsalis, GEORGE CHAPMAN, a bricklayer who lives on Carnation Street in Mesquite, Texas, came after him and said "Somebody shot a policeman".
...
SMITH said he later learned that this was Officer J. D. TIPPIT. After seeing photographs of LEE HARVEY OSWALD, he feels sure that the man who walked by him going west on 10th Street while he (SMITH) was going to lunch, was LEE HARVEY OSWALD.
FBI 1/11/64 SA William G. Brookhart DL 100-10461

This is difficult to dismiss because it demolishes the WR version of events, making it very unlikely that SA Brookhart put words in Smith's mouth. It also annihilates the idea that the two murders were separate & discrete events, linked only by happenstance.

The red herring recycle bin is deep. What's delaying Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon?

[Milo Reech]

There is a regrettable tendency to take Tippit's one known formal personality evaluation at face value. This is the Rorschach Test conducted by H. M. Chapman on 11/17/52 when Tippit joined the police force. Whether he was taciturn by nature or advised to say little is moot, but this is surely a wise course to follow when coming under the scrutiny of a shrink. Chapman must have been irked by the lack of verbal engagement, declaring, "This man appears to be devoid of any imaginative faculties."

But Chapman's imagination was working overtime, eventually catching Tippit in a major faux pas. During the touchy-feely portion of the procedure he twice held cards by the edges!

On two occasions he resorted to edging while handling the cards. This is a very unhealthy sign.

A rundown of the edging issue on the web turned up nothing on this point, but produced the startling information that as early as 1959 a big time shrink proclaimed, "The test has repeatedly failed as a prediction of practical criteria. There is nothing in the literature to encourage reliance on Rorschach interpretations."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test

Read the rest of the article for a barrelful of laughs. Particularly a propos is the section on test projection. We now see that Chapman was thinking of himself when he concluded, "Errors of judgment can be expected."

In short, forget about edging, it's an invalid test in its entirety.

So what little we thought we knew about Tippit just got smaller. He certainly made an error when he got gunned down upon exiting his prowl car, but he probably had reason to believe his killer was harmless. He was also decoyed by someone else standing across Tenth Street, about where Benavides parked his pickup when he arrived five or ten minutes later.

[Milo Reech]

SA Robert M. Barrett got caught up in a conundrum when dictating two reports on the same day (3/17/64) relative to Markham's one block transit of Patton Street from 9th to 10th Streets.

The shorter of the two focuses solely on the objective details:

The distance from the washateria at 328 East 9th Street to the northwest corner of the intersection of East 10th and Patton Streets was walked and timed and this time was two minutes and thirty seconds.

It was ascertained from the Dallas Transit System that during the afternoon hours of every weekday a bus going to the downtown area of Dallas can be boarded about every ten minutes at the corner of Patton and Jefferson Streets. The bus is scheduled to pass this point at about 1:12 PM and every ten minutes thereafter.
FBI DL 100-10461 Barrett

This is the entire report. A handwritten note appears on the page:

Helen Markham left the washateria at 1:04. 2 1/2 minutes later, at 10th & Patton, it is 1:07.

Markham was scheduled to testify before WC in Washington nine days later, and it was inconvenient to have the only eyewitness to the actual shooting arrive at the bus stop several minutes before the alleged perp arrived at the murder scene.

So the other report contains this revision:

She was unable to reach her daughter because the line was busy, and stated that as she left the washateria she noticed that the time was 1:04 PM, according to a clock on the wall in the washateria.

She left the washateria and walked south on Patton Street, stopping at the northwest corner of the intersection of Patton and East 10th Street. She advised that she had hoped to catch a bus at about 1:15 PM.
FBI DL 100-10461 Barrett

I suppose Barrett deserves credit for not tampering with her departure time (cf. Myers' feeble attempt to retard it). On the flip side the alteration of 1:12 to "about 1:15" was shameless. This carried over to WC's explicit "1:15" (3H306). There is no reason to believe Markham actually said this, just another example of testimony manipulation.

Leaving aside the absurdity that the transit company was ignorant of its bus schedule, there is another perplexing issue. Why on earth would Markham wait at the corner of Patton & East 10th a full eight minutes for a murder to take place? She was described in many ways, but no one said she was prescient.

The willfully obtuse WC refrained from examining this conundrum. Regardless, people who think the bus was scheduled to stop at Patton & Jefferson at 1:15 are only fooling themselves. That goes double for those who argue the bus invariably ran three minutes late.

[Milo Reech]

Larry Crafard part 1

Few assassination characters have engendered more speculation with less foundation than Larry Crafard, Ruby associate/employee during a critical period & purported LHO lookalike. The hypothetical facial resemblance and similar age & size positioned him to readily serve as a plug-in replacement whenever needed to dispose of an LHO sighting, even dislodging LHO from places of habitation, taking up his residence therein.

It started on 11/26/63 when naval gay-informant, Robert Kermit Patterson, escorted by his ONI handler, Special Agent J. M. Lankford, appeared at the FBI's Dallas Field Office to report a sighting of LHO in the company of Ruby at Patterson's electronics business.

This seemingly dovetailed with two small notebooks (more like memo pads) supplied to the FBI by Andy Armstrong, who associated daily with both Ruby & Crafard at the Carousel. With Ruby in jail and Crafard on the lam Armstrong had the run of the club. The name "Bobby Patterson" appears in both notebooks in rough writing.

Sensing a misidentification of Crafard as LHO, Dallas FBI immediately sent an urgent teletype to the Detroit office to track down Crafard from a lead as to his location also supplied by Armstrong:

WHEN CRAFARD IS LOCATED, SEVERAL GOOD COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS, BOTH CLOSEUP AND FULLLENGTH, SHOULD BE SECURED AND FORWARDED THE DALLAS DIVISION TO SHOW TO THE PARTNERS AND EMPLOYEES OF THE CONTRACTS [sic] ELECTRONICS COMPANY TO ASCERTAIN IF CRAFARD WAS, IN FACT, WITH JACK RUBY APPROXIMATELY THREE WEEKS AGO.
FBI DL 44-1639

Detroit got on the job right away but the impatient Dallas office did not wait for the photos of Crafard to arrive, instead presented photos of LHO & five non-entities to Patterson and an LHO photo to his associates at Contract Electronics, Stuart & Arndt. Patterson fingered Oswald but both Stuart & Arndt declined to do so, the resemblance to the person who accompanied RUBY being insufficient to declare an identification.

Despite being outvoted 2-1 the legend of Larry the LHO functional near-twin was born with no implied limit as to the degree of possible impersonation. He was even spotted in this role by Roger Craig running to the Rambler in front of TSBD!

BTW the "Bobby Patterson" scribbled in the notebooks referred to a musician, Robert Carl Patterson, who performed at the Vegas Club run by Ruby's sister.

[Milo Reech]

Larry Crafard part 2

The question is why did Dallas FBI jump the gun and not wait on receipt of the Crafard photos from Detroit, or ask the electronic trio to take a look at them afterward? Bargeloads of blithering nonsense could have been forestalled.

The answer might well be that there was a reluctance to penetrate Dallas' gay scene, even a strong desire to place this area of inquiry out-of-bounds in terms of what was suitable for WC's eyes.

Gay Bobby's reaching out to the FBI might be construed as an attempt to offer his services as an undercover operative for the purpose of sifting Ruby's & Oswald's sexual underground involvement, possibly involving Crafard, too. He might have hoped to parlay his role as an ONI informer. The navy took an active interest in this at a surprisingly high level as indicated by excerpts from an 11/27/63 memo to Admiral McDonald from Rear Admiral Rufus L. Taylor:

Robert Kermit Patterson, admitted 6J (homosexual), contacted resident agent Dallas about 1330 CST yesterday and said he had information in regard assassination of President Kennedy. Patterson said he and one Donald C. Stuart operated operated Contract Electronics, 2533 Elm Street Dallas. About two weeks ago, Jack Ruby/aka/Rubenstein and subject Oswald visited Contract Electronics and wanted work done on microphones at Ruby Carousel Night Club, Dallas. On this occasion Ruby told Oswald to write names of Patterson and Stuart in Carousel guest book.

...

The above information certainly raises questions as to Ruby's real motives in killing Oswald. We have all been interested in what seemed to us to be a look of recognition on Oswald's face when he spotted Ruby.

Naval top brass may have been interested in the "look of recognition on Oswald's face when he spotted Ruby," but the FBI wanted no part of an inquiry into "Ruby's real motives in killing Oswald." Consequently, Patterson's effort failed to broaden the scope of his "6J" snitch clientele.

The FBI put the issue to bed as described in the previous post while furnishing WC with a lengthy but superficial report from Detroit, CE2250. It covered a lot of ground without delving into anything of importance.

[Milo Reech]

Larry Crafard part 3

Despite a determined effort by WC's Griffin & Hubert over a painstaking three day session commencing 4/8/64 Crafard divulged nothing revelatory about Ruby's murder of Oswald. This was because the FBI had failed to provide WC with evidentiary leverage that might have been applied to force him to open up. For example, slow to develop information, the Detroit division's creepy interviews with Crafard's cousin & aunt were not conducted until June of 64.

On 4/14/64, less than a week after Crafard's testimony, an indefatigable Hubert questioned Andrew Armstrong at length. Armstrong was the manager of the successor club and former Ruby whipping boy, a Carousel menial who, along with Crafard, had been exploited by Ruby. Both had worked for small compensation, Crafard receiving none except for a place to flop and a draw against the till for daily grub.

As a witness Armstrong was more affable, but likewise provided no great insight into Ruby's activities & machinations. In a brisk exchange during the rambling interrogation, he had this to say about the appearance of LHO or a look-alike at the club:

Mr. HUBERT. Had you ever seen anybody at the club that looked like Oswald?
Mr. ARMSTRONG. No; never did.
Mr. HUBERT. Have you seen Oswald himself in the club?
Mr. ARMSTRONG. No.
Mr. HUBERT. Did you ever tell anybody that you had?
Mr. ARMSTRONG. No.
Mr. HUBERT. Specifically, did you ever tell Larry Crafard that you had?
Mr. ARMSTRONG. No.
13H343

Bearing in mind Hubert was coming off a recent three day session with Crafard and Armstrong saw Crafard almost everyday until he ran away, to what extent was it possible that Crafard bore a resemblance to Oswald? Not much if any.

[Milo Reech]

Mr. Doudna at the Ed Forum is not letting up on his campaign to sub in Crafard at will for various other sightings. As a consequence he clings to the silly idea that Clemmons witnessed a conversation between Crafard & Callaway, despite her description of one as "chunky" and the other "tall & thin." The idea of Crafard as chunky requires a prodigious mental stretch, and one must attenuate the imagination to infinity to picture a skinny Callaway. The suggestion that the latter was Vaganov (who actually resembled Clemmons' description) gets the bum's rush. Read about it here:
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic...48390_menu

Problem with this approach is that the conclusions are drawn from John Berendt's linked Esquire article --

Name: Igor "Turk" Vaganov
Evidence: See Below

Before seeing below, look above the title for this challenge from Dulles: "If they've found another assassin, let them name names and produce their evidence."

I can't prove it yet but this has to be a misquote. What Dulles must have said was, "If they've found another assassin, let them name names and manufacture their evidence."

And this is what Mr. Doudna does, otherwise even a cursory examination of the circumstances surrounding Berendt's article would have alerted him to the obvious, that Berendt was performing a  hatchet job on Gaeton Fonzi's "Loose Ends." A mere month after publication of Fonzi's article Esquire answered the call to fulfil the MSM function of readying pro-WR agitprop at the drop of a hat.

This is explained in Mark Bridger's excellent article, "...the continuing story of the Russian rover: Igor Vaganov," Daily Plaza Echo, Volume 2, Issue 2.

Looking ahead, one senses another Torbitt document is in the works, characterized by incessant name-dropping and free association by geographical coincidence. Vaganov made it into the original as Vagonov, but I do not think he appeared in "Mistaken Identity" by William Torbitt II. Not sure because there's no index and it's not the kind of book that should be read twice. However, his credentials are impeccable for a major role in the next volume based on the Ruby-Crafard-Vaganov triad.

Vaganov worked on Commerce Street near the Carousel Club, where he almost certainly matched his half of a king of spades playing card with Crafard's, and both fled Dallas late 11/22/63. Vaganov's departure was delayed by FBI men who pretended to be doing their jobs, but Crafard had no car so catching him up was easy. Both sensed Ruby's bungling of the LHO rubout put everybody in a precarious position, and they exited the killing scene post haste.

It's a scene replete with cocamamie associations for William Torbitt III.

[Milo Reech]

Speaking of loose ends two items relative to this thread require tightening up.

First involves the link to the Willis thread at alt.assassination.jfk mentioned in the first post, now flushed to the newsgroup archive:
https://alt.assassination.jfk.narkive.co...o-actually

The critical information imparted by Willis occurs in these paragraphs:

Question: Why would Officer J.D. Tippit's killer run more or less west on Jefferson, AWAY, quite logically, from the scene of the crime, then do a 180 turn, heading back more or less east in the alley, towards the two old houses/stores, TOWARDS the scene of the crime? (illustration featuring the houses p90 "With Malice") This is what Warren Reynolds would have us believe. We have a frame grab from film footage of Reynolds as he tells a policeman that the "gunman went into the rear of the used furniture store seen in the background." (WM caption p131)

It would make sense, be more logical, if Reynolds' suspect was running west in the ALLEY and, halfway down, ducked into the back of one of the houses just off the alley. No backtracking. The fact that Reynolds told the cops that he last saw the man going into the old house was never again mentioned by him--he simply told the Warren Commission that the suspect "went behind the station, and that is when I lost him" (7/22/64 testimony)--and the Commission was apparently not granted access to the film footage. Not surprising: The film-documented Reynolds-and-the-old-house story all but negates the story told by Pat Patterson, Harold Russell, L.J. Lewis, and, later, Reynolds himself--that the suspect the four had seen had turned off Patton St. and onto Jefferson, not into the alley.

This is a breakthrough from which we all benefit, relieving us of the tedious burden of supplying runners to fill the bases dictated by WR.

The second item involves Benavides, who burst into brilliance under WC's Belin's interrogation by assigning unsuspecting Belin's physical attributes to Tippit's killer. He concludes with a celebrated description of the squared-off hairline:

I remember the back of his head seemed like his hairline was sort of--looked like his hairline sort of went square instead of tapered off, and he looked like he needed a haircut for about 2 weeks, but his hair didn't taper off, it kind of went down and it squared off and made his head look flat in the back.
6H451

Guess whose "hair didn't taper off... kind of went down and... squared off and made his head look flat in the back?" Just so -- it's Belin!
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-.../515035220

So much of the Tippit scenario is grimly reminiscent of Rashomon it can drag a person down, refreshing to get to see The Usual Suspects again, with Benavides playing Keyser Söze.