I’d say the bullet mark is a valid piece of opposing evidence, assuming the lone-gunman theory can’t explain it (minty green says Posner can explain it, though). The type of gun is evidence opposing the lone-gunman theory, not evidence of another theory. Unless you speculate that another gunman, using another type of gun was in the Depository, it doesn’t count (and is also easily refuted). The bullet found in the hospital is an integral part of the lone-gunman theory, so using it for another theory is unimpressive.
You also say:
Gadarene, I agree it’s good to test our beliefs, but so far I don’t think I’ll be reading it. I believe I’ve heard both sides of the debate while discussing the case with people, and lurking on alt.conspiracy.jfk for a long time. I know it seems ignorant of me to refuse to read any more of the subject, but I haven’t heard anything good enough to make me take the other side seriously. So basically I will not look into it - it requires an investment on my time on something I think is a great modern folly. Would you read a 400 page book on how the Earth is flat, because you wanted to test your beliefs? Until someone can prove to me that the JFK conspiracy theories are different, that the evidence isn’t monumentally unbalanced towards the lone-gun side, or my logic in rejecting them isn’t sound, I’ll continue to try and use my time for more meaningful or fun activities.
Let us assume that kennedy was killed by a someone other than Oswald-why would the most powerful political family (the Kennedys) allow the conspirators to get off the hook? Old Joe Kennedy had bought most of the politicians in Washington-you would think he would have moved heaven and earth to expose his son’s killer! This one fact seems (to me anyway) to invalidate the whole conspiracy theory.
Have to get back to you on Tippitt when I get home tonight, Gadarene. For the moment, suffice it to say that Markham, though hysterical, did identify Oswald in a lineup at the police station immediately after the shooting.
And again, poking holes in the statements of individual witnesses does not destroy the big picture. Many other witnesses ID’d Oswald as running away from the Tippitt murder, with a gun in hand. Doubts among two or three of them, or minor inconsistencies in their recollection, do not lead to the conclusion that it must have been someone else.
As shown in Rush to Judgment, Markham’s testimony about the murder was substantively different from every other witness, primary or ancillary. For example, she said she sat with Tippit for twenty minutes as he died–medical reports say he was killed instantly. She said she saw the assailant walking east (from the direction of Oswald’s rooming house) before the shooting happened; another eyewitness (William Scoggins, who had his view obscured of the actual killing) saw the man walking west. Markham says Tippit rolled the car window down to talk to his assailant; other witnesses and photographs show that the window was rolled up.
This simply isn’t true. As much as Markham changed her testimony, she was absolutely the best witness the Commission had–or at least the one on which they placed the credibility of their account. Hell, Acquilla Clemons, to whom I alluded earlier, says she saw two men standing near Tippit’s patrol car before the shooting. She wasn’t heard by the Commission, nor mentioned in the hearings.
Nor are the inconsistencies minor. There’s also some interesting stuff about the fact that though four bullets were recovered from the body and four shells from the area, three of the four bullets were Winchesters and one was Remington, while only two of the shells were Winchester (and two were Remington). The FBI firearms expert discounted the possibility of manual loading, which leaves open the seemingly good chance that five bullets were fired. What’s more, there are substantial differences between the police radio transcript the Dallas police made of the day of the shooting, and the one the FBI did for themselves. Specifically, while the Dallas transcript shows Tippit’s call number (78) attempting to radio in twice in the minutes before the shooting, the FBI transcript shows instead the call numbers 58 and 488, respectively, and describes the transmission as “(garbled)”. Even though the FBI transcript uniformly identified call numbers by listing the name of the reporting police officer alongside them, this was not done for 58 and 488. Nor are 58 and 488 listed anywhere else in the transcript.
According to the examination of physical evidence, depositions, and Commission testimony in Rush to Judgment–all scrupulously referenced in the citations section of the book–the conclusion reached in the Tippit killing is far, far more flimsy that you’re making it out to be. If you can show that Lane is making errors of fact, then fine–otherwise, I’d like to know how you can reconcile the Commission’s finding with the inconsistencies that have been pointed out (and there are others).
egkelly: Not for me to say. Who knows? I’m trying to deal with verifiable facts in examining the competing claims, without delving into the motivations of the victim’s family after the fact.
Avumede: One more thing. I find it telling that you seem to compare any and all JFK conspiracy theorists with flat-earthers.
About five minutes on the web and I found this page, which contains a transcript of Lane’s tape recorded telephone conversation with Mrs. Markham. If this is representative of his work, I am unimpressed. Mrs. Markham sounds elderly and easily led, but Lane still puts a whole lot of words in her mouth and spins her statements to fit his own story.
For instance, we have this exchange, which is Lane’s third or fourth attempt to get her to describe the suspect as a short, fat, and bushy-haired:
Decent work if you’re a defense attorney, but terrible if you’re a researcher trying to objectively find out what really happened. Lane apparently makes much of Markham’s statement that the suspect was short (LHO was avg. height), but rips this statement from the context that she described him as short even after ID’ing him in the police lineup.
But my favorite line there is where she estimates his weight at 150-160 pounds, then Lane puts words in her mouth that this means the suspect was a little heavy. Very nice work, Mr. Lane.
Anyway, I still intend to get back to you tonight on the totality of the evidence regarding Oswald’s murder of Tippet. I’ll also attempt to respond to your points about the different sources of ammunition–I know there’s an answer, but I don’t remember at the moment.
But in the meantime, what the heck kind of difference could it possibly make that the DPD and FBI transcripts of the radio recordings show variations? And why should we be surprised that two different transcribers come up with different transcriptions? That’s extremely weak evidence of conspiracy, and adds nothing to the proposition that Oswald was misidentified at the scene of the crime.
Fair points about that part of the exchange with Markham. It seems clear that any way you look at it, however, she’s about as unreliable a key witness as you could ask for.
Seriously? For one thing, the transmissions in question came at 1:08 pm. In order for Oswald to have been able to kill Tippit, the shooting had to have taken place about ten minutes after that–the window of opportunity, given Kennedy’s assassination, is so narrow that Oswald could not have been with Tippit at 1:08. Someone else, obviously, could have. And while it’s not necessarily surprising that two transcribers came up with two different transcriptions, the fact that Tippit’s call nuumber in the first transcription was replaced in this instance with two unidentified call numbers which appear nowhere else in the transcription, and the text of the message appearing as “(garbled)” when in the first transcript there was no record of contact having been established…well, I’m as much a fan of Occam as you are; you don’t think that’s suspicious? Especially considering that if it were established that Tippit was trying to call in at 1:08, as detailed in the original transcript, it casts potentially serious doubt on the assailant being Oswald?
C’mon, minty–examine the variations on their merits; don’t dismiss them out of hand because it’s unsurprising to you that “different transcribers come up with different transcriptions.”
I followed your link; is there anywhere that contains the entire transcript of Lane’s conversation with Markham?
Anyway, Lane makes repeated reference to a Dallas newspaper article after the assassination in which Markham is quote as having described the shooter as short, stocky, and with bushy hair. Your post implies that he made the description up out of whole cloth.
The bottom line is that Markham continuously and consistently contradicted herself and other witnesses on fundamental aspects of the shooting, as well as reversing her stance numerous times on, for example, whether or not it was even her voice on that tape (I can quote transcript just like you, and it’s not pretty). She was the Commission’s cornerstone witness in the case of the shooting; without her, they have no eyewitnesses to the shooting that identify Oswald. And she is utterly unreliable; she’s a joke, it seems.
As promised, here is a summary of the evidence that converges on Oswald as the killer of J.D. Tippit.
But first, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Mrs. Markham as a valid ID of Oswald as the killer. Yes, she has given varying details of the killing, and her version differs in detail from the testimony of other witnesses. But on the central fact of Oswald’s identity as the murderer, she is a very strong witness. From half a block away, she saw a man shoot Tippit. She was quickly taken to the police station, where at around 4:00 (approx. three hours after the murder), she immediately identified Oswald as the murderer in a lineup with three other men. She doesn’t appear to be the brightest (or most emotionally stable) bulb in the box, but that ID seems very solid despite Lane’s later attempts to get her to describe someone else. You may read her testimony here: http://www.jmasland.com/testimony/tippit/markham.htm
According to Posner, the timing of Tippit’s murder is not seriously in dispute:
That seems pretty solid on timing for me.
Helen Markham: While waiting for a bus half a block away, Markham saw a man shoot Tippit. The man then ran towards her, fiddling with his gun, and passed across the street. He looked directly at her, at which point she put her hands over her face. She was clearly traumatized by the event, and had to be given smelling salts at the police station. [Given this reaction, it’s easy to understand her belief that Tippet was trying to talk to her as he died. Hell, it might even be true.] As discussed above, she positively ID’d Oswald in a lineup shortly after the murder.
Domingo Benavides: Was driving a pickup when, from approximately 15 feet away from the parked police car, he began to hear gunshots and saw a man shoot Tippit. He saw Tippit fall over after the first shots, then watched the killer leave the scene while emptying shells from the gun. Benavides was one of the witnesses who used Tippit’s radio to report the shooting. Although he got a good look at the killer, Benavides was not taken for a lineup before Oswald was killed. [I’ve seen suggestions that he did not believe he could recognize the killer, but that would be quite different than identifying someone other than Oswald as the killer.] In his WC testimony, he states that he recognized newspaper and television pictures of Oswald as the man he had seen shoot Tippit. He also later told Walter Cronkite that there was no doubt in his mind that Oswald was the killer.
Virginia and Barbara Davis: Heard gunshots from inside their home. They went to the front of the home and saw a man cutting across their lawn, removing shells from his gun. The man smiled at Virginia as he went around the corner. Barbara heard Helen Markham screaming "He shot him. He is dead. Call the police. Both women picked out Oswald from a police lineup that night. Here is Barbara Davis’ testimony: http://www.jmasland.com/testimony/tippit/davis_b.htm
William Scoggins: A taxi driver, eating his lunch in his car a half block away from Tippit. He heard gunshots and saw Tippit fall, then hid behind the taxi as a man ran towards him. Scoggins got a good look at the man, and even heard him mutter something like “poor dumb cop.” Scoggins picked Oswald from a police lineup the next day. Here is Scoggins’ WC testimony: http://www.jmasland.com/testimony/tippit/scoggins.htm.
Ted Callaway: Heard gunshots, and ran towards them. He then saw a man run past a cab, carrying a gun in “We used to say in the Marine Corps in a raised pistol position.” Callaway immediately identified Oswald in a police lineup that night. Again, here is the Callaway testimony: http://www.jmasland.com/testimony/tippit/callaway.htm.
Sam Guinyard: Also heard shots and saw a man running away from the scene, emptying shells from his upward-pointing gun. About ten feet from the man at his closest, Guinyard also identified Oswald as the running man with the gun in a police lineup on the night of the murder. http://www.jmasland.com/testimony/tippit/guinyard.htm
Warren Reynolds: Heard shots fired, then saw a man running down the street with a gun in his hand. Reynolds saw the man tuck the gun in his pants before he lost sight of him. Reynolds testified that he had a “very good” look at the man’s face. Although he was not interviewed by law enforcement personnel until two months after the shooting, he had no doubt that the person he saw was Oswald.
William Smith and other witnesses also identified Oswald from photographs as the man they had seen running away from the scene. All of the above accounts seem quite consistent, which of course lends credence to their observations. On the other hand, there is Acquilla Clemons, who told Lane she had seen two men standing in front of the police car before one of them shot Tippit and they both ran in different directions. This account diverges so seriously from those of the other witnesses that its accuracy must be considered questionable, even before one considers that she never reported it to the police and only told Lane more than a year after the shooting.
But wait! There’s more! All the witnesses describe the killer as wearing a tan jacket, although as you see in their testimony, some disagree whether the one that a Dallas police officer retrieved from under a nearby car was the one that they remembered. Nevertheless, Marina Oswald identified this jacket as belonging to her husband. That’s in Vol. 1 of the Warren Commission Hearings and Evidence collection, pages 121-22, according to Posner.
The shells that witnesses retrieved from the scene were matched, to the exclusion of any other gun, to the revolver that Oswald was carrying when arrested. Because the gun had been rechambered from a regular .38 to handle .38 special ammo, it was difficult to match the four slugs retrieved from Tippit’s body to Oswald’s gun. Three were found by experts to have “the same characteristics” as test shots fired from Oswald’s revolver. However, the fourth bullet was matched to Oswald’s gun to the exclusion of all others. Posner cites WC Vol. 3, p. 483 for this conclusion.
Two Winchester shells and two Remington shells were recovered at the scene. Of the four bullets, three were Winchester and one was Remington. The obvious conclusion is that Oswald shot five rounds, and that one Remington bullet and one Winchester shell were not found. An ambulance attendant reported kicking a loose bullet (which had perhaps struck a button on Tippit’s uniform) when unloading Tippit’s body. The witnesses, naturally, disagreed over the number of shots fired, giving estimates of between three and six. And lest anyone think that two different manufacturers of ammunition indicated two different guns were fired, Oswald had a total of eleven rounds on him when he was arrested: eight made by Winchester and three by Remington.
All of the above is, taken together, pretty good evidence that Oswald was the man who murdered Tippit. Mark Lane can dance around with radio transcripts and put words in people’s mouths until the cows come home, but can he show that the evidence, in fact, converges on a different conclusion?
sigh Let’s save this for the other thread. I’m tired right now, and if I start picking this apart…
There’s a lot of stuff about it in the Lane book, though. He addresses the arguments and contradicts Posner on numerous points–though, as I say, I’ve got only my judgment as to whose facts are correct.
