donald willis
2021-02-10 10:51:25 UTC
Was W.W. Scoggins the only witness at 10th and Patton who actually saw Tippit's killer?
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.
An FBI interview (1/21/64 WM p547) with Lewis and an 8/26/64 affidavit (hearings v15p703) by Lewis correcting that interview shed some light on the man whom the four saw. In the interview, Lewis states that he saw a "white male... running south on Patton", then "called the DPD". In the affidavit, he makes "clarifications": "Upon hearing the shots... I immediately called the DPD.... There was so much confusion at the DPD end of the telephone conversation, they were having trouble making out what I was telling them. A FEW MINUTES LATER, I observed a white male... running south on Patton...."
Pretty clearly, Lewis' clarification indicates that the person he was watching was not Tippit's killer, nor a second gunman. The few-minute time delay indicates, rather, that the person whom Lewis saw was simply a fellow witness chasing the killer. Lewis was too late to see the latter. Lewis's affidavit reflects a similar time delay evidenced in witness Virginia Davis' Commission testimony: "Jeanette [her sister-in-law] called the police, and we went back, and [the suspect] was cutting across our yard" (v6p457). She reiterates this sequence a total of at least 10 times before counsel (David Belin) finally gets her to reverse it (p467)! Oh, too late, David. The damage is done. Virginia Davis was also too late to have seen the killer. Belin, however, satisfied (he got what he wanted), doesn't ask her again about sequencing....
A letter of information from Patrolmen J.M. Poe and L.E. Jez to Chief Curry, on 11/22/63, states, "There were approximately six to eight witnesses, all telling officers that the subject was running WEST IN THE ALLEY between 10th and Jefferson." (WM p487) Poe and Jez make reference to two of these "6 to 8" alley-suspect witnesses: Mrs. Markham and Domingo Benavides. In his Commission testimony, Poe further includes a third, "one of [the two Davis girls]" (v7p69), as among those aforementioned six or so witnesses to whom he spoke that afternoon. In all likelihood, this was Virginia Davis, who also let slip in her testimony, "We saw the boy cutting across the STREET". (v6p460) This street could only have been Patton, off which was the alley. In her 11/22/63 affidavit, she stated that she and her sister-in-law "heard a shot and then another shot and ran to side door at Patton Street". Virginia Davis was one of the Poe-Jez "west in the alley" witnesses. If her sister-in-law was, too, she was, at any rate, apparently not one of the Poe-Jez witnesses.
At the Commission hearings, Mrs. Markham said only that she last saw the suspect headed down Patton ("toward Jefferson"). But on 12/2/63, 10th Street resident Frank Cimino told the FBI that she had told him that she saw a man "run west on 10th Street and pointed in the direction of an alley which runs between 10th St. & Jefferson off Patton St." (WM p538) DPD Sgt. Pete Barnes' crime-scene sketch (WM p161) charts a path from Tippit's car on 10th to Patton to the alley ("210 ft" from 10th to the alley), and he notes, "W on alley to Crawford". The only witness shown in film footage taken at the crime scene with Barnes is... Mrs. Markham (WM pp154, 155). And, as Dale Myers writes, "In later years, Markham stated the killer cut across the SW corner of 10th & Patton & fled west down the alley between Patton [Myers apparently meant "10th"] & Jefferson" (p216). And in an interview posted on YouTube by "JFK 63 conspiracy", Mrs. Markham herself says that "he run [sic] off across the field... went over the fence and down the alley".
The third Poe-Jez witness, Benavides, like Virginia Davis, told the Commission that he was on 10th St. & thus could not have seen where the suspect went after he disappeared around the corner of the Davis residence at 10th & Patton. But the Poe-Jez report creates a little ambiguity here, and an 11/22/63 supplementary offense report by Dets. Leavelle & Dhority states that Benavides "did not see the suspect" (WM p449). More ambiguity. Benavides did little to clear up the latter--he made no affidavits, statements, or interview reports until his Commission testimony. For whatever reasons, he was a blank slate when, finally, he talked to the Commission.
The first take of another witness, Jimmy Burt, in a 12/15/63 interview with the FBI, states that "he ran to the intersection of 10th & Patton and when he was close enough to Patton to see to the south HE SAW THE MAN RUNNING INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson."
We can now tentatively name six of the Poe-Jez/alley witnesses: Mrs. Markham, Virginia Davis, Domingo Benavides, Jimmy Burt, L.J. Lewis, and Warren Reynolds. We don't know the real stories of Russell, Patterson, and Barbara Jeanette Davis. Although--if Patterson was with Reynolds, as the former maintained, and another witness, William J. Smith, was with Burt, as the former maintained--then Patterson and Smith were the last two Poe-Jez witnesses.
The next (answerable) question, Who was the man these six saw chasing the killer? Our first clues come from the Commission testimony of DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy: "There was a report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit.... Anyway, he saw it and he picked up Tippit's gun and attempted to give chase or something like that." (v12p201) Croy had apparently heard conflicting reports re Scoggins' role in the mystery, but seemed to settle more on Scoggins as vigilante rather than as killer.
Cab driver W.W. Scoggins appears to have had a personal interest in catching Tippit's killer: "I wasn't paying too much attention to the man [in the police car], you see, just used to see him every day." (v3p325) As noted, their belated response to the shooting indicated that L.J. Lewis and Virginia Davis saw only a fellow witness chasing the killer from 10th St. to the alley, most likely Croy's "cab driver [who] had picked up Tippit's gun... and attempted to give chase." (Burt--who was in a house at the intersection of 9th & Denver when he heard two shots--obviously, like Lewis, got to the scene too late to see the shooter.)
Did Scoggins himself see the perp run down the alley and through the old house and onto Jefferson, or did he see the man run directly up Patton to Jefferson? He told the Commission only that he last saw him "going south on Patton" (v3p326). But on 11/23/63, he told the FBI that the "last time he saw this man was when he was going down Jefferson". If the latter statement is correct, then Scoggins apparently took the alley as a short cut, and switched from the alley to Jefferson when he reached the old house. No wonder Reynolds and the police could find no one still in the house when they got there.
What would have been the reason for the Dallas police to rewrite the Scoggins story? To get the six to eight witnesses to change their own stories? For one thing, the police clearly really wanted only one headline story, Lee Harvey Oswald's. They didn't want the presence of a second suspect to "confuse" matters. For another, they didn't want to lose lineup eyewitnesses Mrs. Markham, Virginia Davis, and Scoggins himself.
The primacy of W.W. Scoggins. However, the main reason that Scoggins' story had to be deep-sixed was a more-encompassing one. The usual picture of the 10th & Patton area of Oak Cliff about 1:15pm, on November 22nd, 1963--when Tippit was apparently shot--was of a neighborhood crawling with witnesses to the murder and the murderer. True, the sound of the shots seemed to bring out everyone, but most of the witnesses seemed to have been brought out just a tad too late to have caught sight of the actual shooter.
The only person who I'm relatively sure actually saw the shooter in the immediate, 10th-and-Patton vicinity was Scoggins. Yes, there are a few other possible witnesses, including two whom I have not yet mentioned, Sam Guinyard and Ted Callaway, though the latter gave no indication of having seen the man, in his superfluous 1:20 police-radio advisory: "This police officer's just shot. I think he's dead." (CE 1974 p56) Harold Russell, too, was a possible witness of the shooter at 10th & Patton. But Scoggins was virtually the only certain one. The streets of Tenth and Patton were, most likely, not quite so populated as advertised, around 1:15pm, before the shooting--many of the citizens of Oak Cliff were no doubt inside their homes and offices following the fast-breaking events in Dealey Plaza, glued to their radios and television sets, and did not get outside that quickly. They couldn't know that news was happening just outside. too.
I realize that all the witnesses who actually just saw Scoggins (or, like, perhaps, Callaway, saw no one) had to be transformed, somehow, into witnesses not just of the actual shooter, but of Oswald, no small task since the two men did not resemble one another, physically, in the least. But Homicide Capt. Fritz was intent on getting "witnesses over for identification just as soon as [his men] could" (WM p207). And he did not seem to be fussy about how exactly they were processed. Main case in point: Scoggins.
On one front, the DPD had Scoggins downplay his own role in the broader story. In his Commission testimony, he first states that he abruptly left the Tippit scene about 1:24 because the police "talked with everybody else [but] didn't ask [him]" to give them a statement (v3p331). This is the version which Dale Myers parrots, or quotes, in "With Malice", page 119. However, later in his testimony, Scoggins contradicts this part of his testimony when he tells Allen Dulles that, after he had "got in the car" with Callaway "and toured the neighborhood, and then the policemen came along... I left my cab setting there and got in a car with them and left the scene...." (p337)
FBI agent Robert Barrett fortuitously confirmed the revised Scoggins version in a 1996 interview with Myers when he noted that, when he arrived at the Tippit scene, at 1:42, "he parked across from Scoggins' cab near 10th & Patton". 1:42, not 1:24. This particular instance of the methodical downsizing of Scoggins' role (here, specifically, a ride with the cops to the area where he and Callaway, in Scoggins' cab, lost track of the killer) was most critical: The fact that Scoggins went with the police, earlier that afternoon, makes it doubly strange that he did not go with them to one of the three lineups that evening. Fritz may have gotten him "over for identification", on Friday, but Scoggins did not then actually provide him with the hoped-for identification of the man who supposedly killed the man that Scoggins "used to see every day".
The DPD also, apparently, did not want it generally acknowledged that Scoggins last saw the shooter "going down Jefferson". For reasons which will become obvious, they seemed to prefer to have Patrolman Howell W. Summers' 1:37 ".32 dark finish automatic pistol" transmission (DPD radio logs) handled by Ted Callaway, who handily explained away the "automatic" reference as his own error, based on his seeing the suspect's "hand... going toward the butt of the gun, like the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) Summers had, further, radioed that his witness last saw the man "running on the north side of the street from Patton on Jefferson..." (CE 1974 p74)--which description of the escape route would seem to have eliminated, as his source, Scoggins (who initially testified that he last saw the subject "going down Patton"). Unless you are enterprising enough to read the whole of Scoggins' testimony.
Scoggins did not explicitly say whether he thought that the murder weapon was an automatic or a revolver, but he did tell David Belin that the "three or four" shots "was [sic] fast". Belin: They were fast shots?" Scoggins: "Yes, they were fast." (v3p324) Semi-automatic pistols typically deliver faster rates of fire than revolvers. Scoggins chased after the killer three times within the space of a half hour--first by foot, then by cab, then by cop car. Yet it then took him some 24 hours to make his ID of the killer... of the man that, as he testified, he "used to see every day". The disconnect!
dcw
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.
An FBI interview (1/21/64 WM p547) with Lewis and an 8/26/64 affidavit (hearings v15p703) by Lewis correcting that interview shed some light on the man whom the four saw. In the interview, Lewis states that he saw a "white male... running south on Patton", then "called the DPD". In the affidavit, he makes "clarifications": "Upon hearing the shots... I immediately called the DPD.... There was so much confusion at the DPD end of the telephone conversation, they were having trouble making out what I was telling them. A FEW MINUTES LATER, I observed a white male... running south on Patton...."
Pretty clearly, Lewis' clarification indicates that the person he was watching was not Tippit's killer, nor a second gunman. The few-minute time delay indicates, rather, that the person whom Lewis saw was simply a fellow witness chasing the killer. Lewis was too late to see the latter. Lewis's affidavit reflects a similar time delay evidenced in witness Virginia Davis' Commission testimony: "Jeanette [her sister-in-law] called the police, and we went back, and [the suspect] was cutting across our yard" (v6p457). She reiterates this sequence a total of at least 10 times before counsel (David Belin) finally gets her to reverse it (p467)! Oh, too late, David. The damage is done. Virginia Davis was also too late to have seen the killer. Belin, however, satisfied (he got what he wanted), doesn't ask her again about sequencing....
A letter of information from Patrolmen J.M. Poe and L.E. Jez to Chief Curry, on 11/22/63, states, "There were approximately six to eight witnesses, all telling officers that the subject was running WEST IN THE ALLEY between 10th and Jefferson." (WM p487) Poe and Jez make reference to two of these "6 to 8" alley-suspect witnesses: Mrs. Markham and Domingo Benavides. In his Commission testimony, Poe further includes a third, "one of [the two Davis girls]" (v7p69), as among those aforementioned six or so witnesses to whom he spoke that afternoon. In all likelihood, this was Virginia Davis, who also let slip in her testimony, "We saw the boy cutting across the STREET". (v6p460) This street could only have been Patton, off which was the alley. In her 11/22/63 affidavit, she stated that she and her sister-in-law "heard a shot and then another shot and ran to side door at Patton Street". Virginia Davis was one of the Poe-Jez "west in the alley" witnesses. If her sister-in-law was, too, she was, at any rate, apparently not one of the Poe-Jez witnesses.
At the Commission hearings, Mrs. Markham said only that she last saw the suspect headed down Patton ("toward Jefferson"). But on 12/2/63, 10th Street resident Frank Cimino told the FBI that she had told him that she saw a man "run west on 10th Street and pointed in the direction of an alley which runs between 10th St. & Jefferson off Patton St." (WM p538) DPD Sgt. Pete Barnes' crime-scene sketch (WM p161) charts a path from Tippit's car on 10th to Patton to the alley ("210 ft" from 10th to the alley), and he notes, "W on alley to Crawford". The only witness shown in film footage taken at the crime scene with Barnes is... Mrs. Markham (WM pp154, 155). And, as Dale Myers writes, "In later years, Markham stated the killer cut across the SW corner of 10th & Patton & fled west down the alley between Patton [Myers apparently meant "10th"] & Jefferson" (p216). And in an interview posted on YouTube by "JFK 63 conspiracy", Mrs. Markham herself says that "he run [sic] off across the field... went over the fence and down the alley".
The third Poe-Jez witness, Benavides, like Virginia Davis, told the Commission that he was on 10th St. & thus could not have seen where the suspect went after he disappeared around the corner of the Davis residence at 10th & Patton. But the Poe-Jez report creates a little ambiguity here, and an 11/22/63 supplementary offense report by Dets. Leavelle & Dhority states that Benavides "did not see the suspect" (WM p449). More ambiguity. Benavides did little to clear up the latter--he made no affidavits, statements, or interview reports until his Commission testimony. For whatever reasons, he was a blank slate when, finally, he talked to the Commission.
The first take of another witness, Jimmy Burt, in a 12/15/63 interview with the FBI, states that "he ran to the intersection of 10th & Patton and when he was close enough to Patton to see to the south HE SAW THE MAN RUNNING INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson."
We can now tentatively name six of the Poe-Jez/alley witnesses: Mrs. Markham, Virginia Davis, Domingo Benavides, Jimmy Burt, L.J. Lewis, and Warren Reynolds. We don't know the real stories of Russell, Patterson, and Barbara Jeanette Davis. Although--if Patterson was with Reynolds, as the former maintained, and another witness, William J. Smith, was with Burt, as the former maintained--then Patterson and Smith were the last two Poe-Jez witnesses.
The next (answerable) question, Who was the man these six saw chasing the killer? Our first clues come from the Commission testimony of DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy: "There was a report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit.... Anyway, he saw it and he picked up Tippit's gun and attempted to give chase or something like that." (v12p201) Croy had apparently heard conflicting reports re Scoggins' role in the mystery, but seemed to settle more on Scoggins as vigilante rather than as killer.
Cab driver W.W. Scoggins appears to have had a personal interest in catching Tippit's killer: "I wasn't paying too much attention to the man [in the police car], you see, just used to see him every day." (v3p325) As noted, their belated response to the shooting indicated that L.J. Lewis and Virginia Davis saw only a fellow witness chasing the killer from 10th St. to the alley, most likely Croy's "cab driver [who] had picked up Tippit's gun... and attempted to give chase." (Burt--who was in a house at the intersection of 9th & Denver when he heard two shots--obviously, like Lewis, got to the scene too late to see the shooter.)
Did Scoggins himself see the perp run down the alley and through the old house and onto Jefferson, or did he see the man run directly up Patton to Jefferson? He told the Commission only that he last saw him "going south on Patton" (v3p326). But on 11/23/63, he told the FBI that the "last time he saw this man was when he was going down Jefferson". If the latter statement is correct, then Scoggins apparently took the alley as a short cut, and switched from the alley to Jefferson when he reached the old house. No wonder Reynolds and the police could find no one still in the house when they got there.
What would have been the reason for the Dallas police to rewrite the Scoggins story? To get the six to eight witnesses to change their own stories? For one thing, the police clearly really wanted only one headline story, Lee Harvey Oswald's. They didn't want the presence of a second suspect to "confuse" matters. For another, they didn't want to lose lineup eyewitnesses Mrs. Markham, Virginia Davis, and Scoggins himself.
The primacy of W.W. Scoggins. However, the main reason that Scoggins' story had to be deep-sixed was a more-encompassing one. The usual picture of the 10th & Patton area of Oak Cliff about 1:15pm, on November 22nd, 1963--when Tippit was apparently shot--was of a neighborhood crawling with witnesses to the murder and the murderer. True, the sound of the shots seemed to bring out everyone, but most of the witnesses seemed to have been brought out just a tad too late to have caught sight of the actual shooter.
The only person who I'm relatively sure actually saw the shooter in the immediate, 10th-and-Patton vicinity was Scoggins. Yes, there are a few other possible witnesses, including two whom I have not yet mentioned, Sam Guinyard and Ted Callaway, though the latter gave no indication of having seen the man, in his superfluous 1:20 police-radio advisory: "This police officer's just shot. I think he's dead." (CE 1974 p56) Harold Russell, too, was a possible witness of the shooter at 10th & Patton. But Scoggins was virtually the only certain one. The streets of Tenth and Patton were, most likely, not quite so populated as advertised, around 1:15pm, before the shooting--many of the citizens of Oak Cliff were no doubt inside their homes and offices following the fast-breaking events in Dealey Plaza, glued to their radios and television sets, and did not get outside that quickly. They couldn't know that news was happening just outside. too.
I realize that all the witnesses who actually just saw Scoggins (or, like, perhaps, Callaway, saw no one) had to be transformed, somehow, into witnesses not just of the actual shooter, but of Oswald, no small task since the two men did not resemble one another, physically, in the least. But Homicide Capt. Fritz was intent on getting "witnesses over for identification just as soon as [his men] could" (WM p207). And he did not seem to be fussy about how exactly they were processed. Main case in point: Scoggins.
On one front, the DPD had Scoggins downplay his own role in the broader story. In his Commission testimony, he first states that he abruptly left the Tippit scene about 1:24 because the police "talked with everybody else [but] didn't ask [him]" to give them a statement (v3p331). This is the version which Dale Myers parrots, or quotes, in "With Malice", page 119. However, later in his testimony, Scoggins contradicts this part of his testimony when he tells Allen Dulles that, after he had "got in the car" with Callaway "and toured the neighborhood, and then the policemen came along... I left my cab setting there and got in a car with them and left the scene...." (p337)
FBI agent Robert Barrett fortuitously confirmed the revised Scoggins version in a 1996 interview with Myers when he noted that, when he arrived at the Tippit scene, at 1:42, "he parked across from Scoggins' cab near 10th & Patton". 1:42, not 1:24. This particular instance of the methodical downsizing of Scoggins' role (here, specifically, a ride with the cops to the area where he and Callaway, in Scoggins' cab, lost track of the killer) was most critical: The fact that Scoggins went with the police, earlier that afternoon, makes it doubly strange that he did not go with them to one of the three lineups that evening. Fritz may have gotten him "over for identification", on Friday, but Scoggins did not then actually provide him with the hoped-for identification of the man who supposedly killed the man that Scoggins "used to see every day".
The DPD also, apparently, did not want it generally acknowledged that Scoggins last saw the shooter "going down Jefferson". For reasons which will become obvious, they seemed to prefer to have Patrolman Howell W. Summers' 1:37 ".32 dark finish automatic pistol" transmission (DPD radio logs) handled by Ted Callaway, who handily explained away the "automatic" reference as his own error, based on his seeing the suspect's "hand... going toward the butt of the gun, like the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) Summers had, further, radioed that his witness last saw the man "running on the north side of the street from Patton on Jefferson..." (CE 1974 p74)--which description of the escape route would seem to have eliminated, as his source, Scoggins (who initially testified that he last saw the subject "going down Patton"). Unless you are enterprising enough to read the whole of Scoggins' testimony.
Scoggins did not explicitly say whether he thought that the murder weapon was an automatic or a revolver, but he did tell David Belin that the "three or four" shots "was [sic] fast". Belin: They were fast shots?" Scoggins: "Yes, they were fast." (v3p324) Semi-automatic pistols typically deliver faster rates of fire than revolvers. Scoggins chased after the killer three times within the space of a half hour--first by foot, then by cab, then by cop car. Yet it then took him some 24 hours to make his ID of the killer... of the man that, as he testified, he "used to see every day". The disconnect!
dcw
