Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination

by Richard Belzer

  When a homicide occurs, it is standard operating procedure for the police homicide division to send off the bullets and cartridges to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C. for study and possible identification of the gun that fired them. In this case, the homicide unit, understandably shy about advertising the coroner’s discovery, sent only one bullet to the FBI lab, informing the Bureau that this was the only bullet found in Tippit’s body.

  To everyone’s surprise, the Bureau lab found that the bullet did not match Oswald’s revolver. When it discovered this oddity, the Warren Commission was inspired to look for other bullets that might match up better. Although the Commission never received a copy of Tippit’s autopsy report, somehow it found out that four bullets rather than merely one had been found in Tippit’s body. The ordinarily incurious Commission asked the FBI to inquire about the three missing bullets, and they were found after four months gathering dust in the files of the Dallas homicide division.

  1 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy (Sheridan Square: 1988), cited at Lee Harvey Oswald’s “Murder” of Policeman JD Tippit: http://scribblguy.50megs.com/tippit.htm

  2 Griffith, “Did Oswald Shoot Tippit?,” emphasis in original.

  These bullets were sent to the FBI lab. But Special Agent Courtlandt Cunningham, the ballistics expert from the lab, testified before the Commission that the lab was unable to conclude that any of the four bullets found in Tippit’s body had been fired by the revolver taken from Lee Oswald.”1

  One government witness later concluded: “I am satisfied that the two projectiles came from the same weapon,” implying that a bullet from Oswald’s gun had conclusively matched the ballistics of a bullet found in Officer Tippit. However, that testimony is “clarified” by J. Raymond Carroll, a research expert on the shooting of J. D. Tippit:

  For the benefit of anyone who is still confused about the ballistics evidence in the Tippit murder, the FBI experts told the Warren Commission that the bullets found in Tippit’s body could not be traced to the Oswald revolver, although it was certainly possible that they were fired from that weapon.

  The Commission then hired an outside expert, Mr. Nicol, who gave the opinion cited above. This was the only time the Warren Commission rejected the opinion of FBI experts. The House Select Committee on Assassinations hired a whole team of ballistic experts, and every single expert agreed with the FBI and said that it is scientifically impossible to match the Tippit bullets to the Oswald revolver, although the Tippit bullets COULD have come from that revolver.

  I respectfully submit that citing Nicol’s opinion as though it was authoritative shows a lack of objectivity. Nicol’s opinion has been thoroughly and completely debunked, as even Dale Myers admits in his book, With Malice.

  As Myers concedes on Page 251 of WM, “[N]one of the other eight ballistics experts who have examined the bullets agree with Nicol’s positive identification.”2

  District Attorney Garrison basically caught on to the “funny business” with the bullets:

  The FBI lab found that *two* of the cartridge cases had been manufactured by Western and *two* by Remington. Since the lab had already concluded that *three* of the bullets found in Tippit’s body were copper-coated Westerns and *one* was a lead Remington, these numbers simply did not add up.3

  1 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins

  2 J. Raymond Carroll, “The J. D. Tippit Shooting Evidence,” 12 May 2006: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6722

  3 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy (Sheridan Square: 1988), cited at Lee Harvey Oswald’s “Murder” of Policeman JD Tippit: http://scribblguy.50megs.com/tippit.htm

  As the evidence clearly mandates at this point, the official version of Officer Tippit’s murder simply does not stand up to scrutiny:

  If Oswald had been tried for the murder of Officer Tippit, the eyewitness testimony against him would have been destroyed under competent cross-examination. The Commission’s star witness in the case, Helen Markham, markedly contradicted herself and made false statements, not to mention the fact that she initially described the killer in terms that did NOT resemble Oswald. None of the Commission’s other witnesses actually saw the shooting.1

  Even the Warren Commission’s senior counsel later admitted that their star witness had zero credibility.

  The star witness in the Tippit shooting was best summed up by Joseph Ball senior counsel to the Warren Commission itself. In 1964, he referred in a public debate to her testimony as being “full of mistakes,” and to

  Mrs. Markham as an “utter screwball.” He dismissed her as “utterly unreliable,” the exact opposite of the Report’s verdict.2

  Unlike Helen Markham, Acquilla Clemons and Frank Wright were very credible witnesses who had excellent views of the crime. Ms. Clemons was sitting on her front porch when she observed the murder of Officer Tippit.

  Acquilla Clemons lived on the north side of Tenth Street in Dallas. On November 22, 1963, Clemons was sitting on the porch of her house when

  1 Griffith, “Five Myths,” emphasis in original.

  2 Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime: The Definitive Book on the JFK Assassination (Marlowe & Co.: 1980)

  There were other evidentiary inconsistencies as well. The jacket discarded by the suspect at the Tippit crime scene was not Oswald’s jacket, per the testimony of his wife, who knew that he only had two jackets and that was not one of them. The “crime scene jacket” was also a size “Medium” jacket and Oswald wore a “Small.”1

  And to further confound the possibility that Oswald shot Tippit, it has also been established that Oswald’s revolver had a defective firing pin which completely prevented it from firing a bullet.2

  If you’d like to see the simple conclusion of all that info, the “bottom line” of the matter is this:

  The revolver taken from Oswald at the Texas Theater was not the gun used to kill Tippit.3

  1 Armstrong, “Harvey, Lee and Tippit: A New Look at the Tippit Shooting”: http://www.ctka.net/pr198-jfk.html

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid.

  she saw Officer J. D. Tippit killed. Afterwards she claimed that there were two men involved in the attack on Tippit. She later testified that the gunman was a “short guy and kind of heavy”. . . The Dallas police warned her not to repeat this story to others or “she might get hurt.” Clemons was not called to give evidence to the Warren Commission.1

  Mrs. Acquilla Clemons, who was in a house close to the spot where Tippit was killed, told independent investigators she saw two men near the policeman’s car just before the shooting. She said she ran out after the shots and saw a man with a gun. But she described him as “kind of chunky . . . kind of heavy,” a description which does not fit Oswald at all. Much more disturbing, this was not the only man she saw.

  Obviously, Mrs. Clemons should have been questioned more thoroughly than in a television interview. She said she had been visited by the FBI, who decided not to take a statement because of her poor health. Mrs. Clemons suffered from diabetes, hardly a condition to deter efficient investigators from taking a statement. According to two reporters who visited Mrs. Clemons several years after the assassination, she and her family still spoke with conviction of seeing two men at the scene of the Tippit shooting. Mrs. Clemons’ story finds corroboration from another witness, and he too was ignored.2

  Ms. Clemons was an excellent witness who was certain of what she saw and describes it clearly and unerringly; her video statement is available online at: http://www.youtube

  .com/watch?v=zTjq7jz8b5g&feature=related

  The fact that the testimony of a high-quality witness like Acquilla Clemons was completely ignored by the Warren Commission is further indication that the Commission actually sought to close the case, not to investigate it.

  Frank Wright was another eyewitness whose testimony, it seems,
was intentionally ignored.

  Frank Wright lived along the street from the spot where Tippit was killed, and heard the shots as he sat in his living room. While his wife telephoned for help, Wright went straight to his front door. He later told researchers: “I was the first person out,” and caught sight of Tippit in time to see him roll over once and then lie still. Wright also said, “I saw a man standing in front of the car. He was looking toward the man on the ground. I couldn’t tell who the man was on the ground. The man who was standing in front of him was about medium height. He had on a long coat. It ended just above his hands. I didn’t see any gun. He ran around on the passenger side of the police car. He ran as fast as he could go, and he got into his car. . . . He got in that car and he drove away as fast as you could see. . . . After that a whole lot of police came up. I tried to tell two or three people what I saw. They didn’t pay any attention. I’ve seen what came out on television and in the

  1 John Simkin, “Acquilla Clemons: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, accessed 30 Sept 2012: http://www

  .spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKclemons.htm

  2 Summers, Not in Your Lifetime

  newspaper but I know that’s not what happened. I know a man drove off in a gray car. Nothing in the world’s going to change my opinion.1

  Eyewitness testimony also revealed that whoever Tippit’s killer was, he was walking towards the police car, not away from it as Oswald would have been if he was walking toward the movie theater from his rooming house as the Warren Commission indicated.2

  William Scoggins, a cab driver who was an eyewitness, testified that the gunman was walking west toward Tippit’s car prior to the shooting. Another witness [Jim Burt] reported similarly. Reports from the Dallas police as well as the first reports of the Secret Service reflect the same impression. Despite the preponderance of evidence that the killer and Tippit’s car were moving TOWARD each other, the Warren Report concluded the killer was walking in the opposite direction. The commission version held that Tippit’s car overtook the pedestrian killer.3

  Witnesses who were clearly intimidated by authorities into changing their testimony include Acquilla Clemons, Warren Reynolds, and Domingo Benavides.

  • “Warren Reynolds did not see the shooting but saw the gunman running from the scene of the crime. He claimed that the man was not Oswald. After he survived an attempt to kill him, he changed his mind and identified Oswald as the man he had seen.”4

  Domingo Benavides changed his testimony after his brother was murdered.

  • “Domingo Benevides, a dark, slim auto mechanic, was a witness to the murder of Officer Tippit who testified that he ‘really got a good view’ of the slayer. He was not asked to see the police lineup in which Oswald appeared. Although he later said the killer resembled newspaper pictures of Oswald, he described the man differently: ‘I remember the back of his head seemed like his hairline sort of went square instead of tapered off . . . it kind of went down and squared off and made his head look flat in back.’ Domingo reports that he has been repeatedly threatened by police, and advised not to talk about what he saw.”5

  After his brother was shot in the back of the head and killed, Domingo told the authorities what they wanted to hear, and it’s pretty hard to blame him for that. There was also a highly suspicious break in the evidentiary chain:

  • “Officer J. M. Poe marked two of the empty shells found at the crime scene with his initials, a standard chain-of-evidence procedure, but none of the shells produced by the FBI and the Dallas police as evidence of Oswald’s

  1 Ibid.

  2 Michael T. Griffith, “Why Would Tippit Have Stopped Oswald?,” 1997: http://www.kenrahn.com/jfk/the_critics/griffith/Why_Tippit_stopped_Oswald.html

  3 Griffith, “Five Myths,” citing Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John

  F. Kennedy (Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 1986), 149-150, emphasis in original.

  4 John Simkin, “Primary Sources: Murder of J. D. Tippit,” The Education Forum, accessed 3 Oct 2012: http://www

  .spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKStippit.htm

  5 Welsh, “In the Shadow of Dallas”.

  • guilt had Poe’s markings on them. WC apologists claim Officer Poe was “mistaken,” but Poe initially told the Secret Service he was positive he had marked the shells, and even under tough questioning from the WC, Poe said he believed he had marked the shells. Moreover, one of Poe’s superior officers testified he ordered Poe to mark some of the shells.”1

  Yet the Warren Commission ignored the obvious and concentrated on what was necessary in order to convict the assigned individual in the public mind to keep the lid on the cover-up for reasons of national security.

  • “As far as the witnesses who did not support the “Oswald did it” scenario—they weren’t even scrutinized—wary eye or not. In fact, the witnesses that reported that the gunman was someone other than Oswald (Acquilla Clemons and Mr. and Mrs. Wright in particular) were never called before the Warren Commission. In addition, Ms. Clemons was told to keep her “mouth shut” about what she had seen.”2

  Jim Garrison arrived at the conclusion that the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit was a component of the plan to kill the “patsy” and wipe out the evidence trail.

  • “The reason for Officer Tippit’s murder is simply this: It was necessary for them to get rid of the decoy in the case, Lee Oswald. . . . Now, in order to get rid of him—so that he would not later describe the people involved in this, they had what I think is a rather clever plan. It’s well known that police officers react violently to the murder of a police officer. All they did was arrange for an officer to be sent out to Tenth Street, and when Officer Tippit arrived there he was murdered, with no other reason than that. Now, after he was murdered, Oswald was pointed to, sitting in the back of the Texas Theater where he’d been told to wait, obviously. . . He was arrested. This left a problem, because if Lee Oswald stayed alive long enough, obviously he would name names and talk about this thing that he’d been drawn into. It was necessary to kill him.”3

  Note the very important point here: That if Oswald had been killed immediately after the assassination, very few Americans would have even questioned the composition of the crime; rather, they would have shared a sense of relief that the President’s assassin had indeed been apprehended.

  The testimony of James Files further supports the notion that Oswald had to be silenced and that the conspirators were keenly intent on that point. Here’s the way that Files described it:

  1 Griffith, “Five Myths About the JFK Assassination”

  2 Jesus, “Re: Oswald’s Sole Guilt – Point By Point”.

  3 Simkin, “Primary Sources: Murder of J. D. Tippit,” citing Garrison, CBS Television; June 27, 1967

  Question: But the Tippit killing is related to the murder of Kennedy?

  J. Files: No, the Tippit killing is not related to the murder of Kennedy. If you want to get right down to it.

  The Tippit killing is related to Oswald. Because Oswald is the one that was supposed to die. Not Tippit. Tippit was just one of those people that stopped the wrong person, that got called into the wrong place . . .

  Question: So the party that killed Tippit though, was actually after-

  J. Files: He was after Lee Harvey Oswald. . . . The party that killed J. D. Tippit, he wasn’t there to kill J. D. Tippit. He had parked a little ways from Oswald’s boarding house. They went down there to kill Oswald. They wanted to kill Oswald. They didn’t want to make a big spectacle out of it. They wanted to silence him at that point of the game. Before anybody could get to him. But I guess- I don’t know if Lee got spooked or whatever it was, but then he went to the theater. . . . My understanding was that Lee, that he was gonna meet his controller, which is David Phillips, who was my controller. He was gonna meet him. I didn’t know it was gonna be at the theatre. I have no knowledge of that at that point. But if Lee Harvey Oswald ran to a theatre, which had to be where the meeting was going to
take place. Lee must have left his house earlier or for whatever reason, I don’t really know, but the party that went there, didn’t find Lee there. And when he started to leave, he was stopped by the police. This is when he shot Tippit. What transpired there I can’t tell you, who saw this guy there, I can’t tell you whether he ran, I can’t tell you whether he walked, I don’t know. All I understand is this: A party that I know, that had come by my motel room, told me he had to burn a cop. The cop he burned was J. D. Tippit. That was the only cop killed in Dallas that day, it had to be the one that he burned. At this point he says: “Here, do you want to get rid of that?” I said: “Hell no, you take care and get rid of your own weapon! I’ve got my own problems, Get out of here. Go!”1

  1 Wim Dankbaar, “James Files Interview,” November 19, 2003: http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/tip.htm

  Some researchers have assaulted the veracity of James Files, a witness who was in Dallas that day. However, veteran former FBI Special Agent Zack Shelton is the man who investigated that case more thoroughly than any other law enforcement official; and Zack concluded that Files’ story holds up. Files was the driver and bodyguard to Chuck Nicoletti, Chicago’s most infamous hitman. Zack checked his story thoroughly and his story checks out.1 James Files said that, shortly after the assassination, a killer, whom he knew, came to his motel room and told him that he had just “burned a cop”—killed a police officer.2 That man’s identity has since been reportedly established as Gary Marlow, a friend of James Files’, going back to their school days.3