Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Most sinister of all, Braden may have been in contact with the New Orleans Mafia-CIA man, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald’s former Civil Air Patrol leader.

  Noyes found that in the weeks immediately preceding the assassination, Braden was in and out of Room 1701 of the Pere Marquette Building in New Orleans, just down the hall from Room 1707, where Ferrie was working for an attorney of Mafia boss Carlos Marcello.

  Another fascinating connection between Braden and the assassination concerns two New York businessmen, Lawrence and Edward Meyers. Lawrence Meyers was a personal friend of Jack Ruby’s. On November 20 and 21, 1963, Meyers also was staying at the Cabana Motel in Dallas. While in Dallas, Meyers told the FBI he was with Jean West, a “rather dumb, but accommodating broad.” Edward Meyers was in Dallas to attend the bottlers convention—the same convention Richard Nixon attended. Both brothers were visited by Jack Ruby briefly at the Cabana Motel on the night of November 21—the night Braden was at the same motel.

  While no direct connections between this group and Ferrie in New Orleans have been documented, it is fascinating to note that when New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison began looking at long-distance telephone calls for David Ferrie he discovered something—the same day Oswald left New Orleans for his reported trip to Mexico City, Ferrie called a number in Chicago that belonged to Meyer’s friend Jean West.

  In Warren Commission Exhibit 2350—a listing of telephone calls made by Lawrence Meyers in November 1963—it was found that that same day he, too, called the Chicago number of Jean West, the woman who accompanied him to Dallas. While not conclusive, these documents suggest possible connections between Jack Ruby and David Ferrie via Meyers/West and Braden.

  Meyers also told the Warren Commission that his friend Ruby had called him the night before shooting Oswald. The next day, upon hearing the news that Ruby had shot Oswald, Meyers decided not to contact Dallas police because “in light of the apparent hectic activities then ensuing at the police station, it would be better if he did not do so.”

  All of this occurred in the context of Braden’s visit to Dallas. The House Select Committee on Assassinations tried to sort out the truth of Braden’s visit as well as his contacts, to little avail.

  First Braden said he made the trip to Dallas from California and met with a Dallas parole officer at the moment of the assassination. However, the parole officer could not recall such a meeting. If Braden had not notified his parole office that he was leaving California, he would have been in violation of parole and subject to arrest. Braden told the committee he walked as far as the Dal-Tex Building in an effort to find a telephone so he could call his mother and tell her about the assassination. He denied he ever was in Dealey Plaza.

  However, due to statements made while in custody and the fact that Braden has definitely been identified in Dealey Plaza photographs, it is now widely accepted that Braden lied and was among the spectators gathered in Dealey Plaza minutes after the shooting.

  This fact alone—that a known felon with many ties to Mafia figures, New Orleans, and Jack Ruby would be hanging around Dealey Plaza just after Kennedy’s death—creates deep suspicion about the immediate Dallas investigation and, even more particularly, the subsequent federal investigation. This suspicion is heightened in light of the fact that in 1976, the National Archives revealed that at least two documents relating to the Braden arrest were missing.

  One of the oddest arrests that day was reported only in a Dallas newspaper.

  The November 22, 1963, edition of the Dallas Times Herald reported that a policeman arrested a man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a plaid coat, and a raincoat after Depository employees pointed to him from a third-floor window. The news account said the man was taken under protest to the Sheriff’s Department, while members of the crowd shouted, “I hope you die!” and “I hope you burn!”

  Three weeks later, the same newspaper reported that “an early suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy was still in jail—but no longer a suspect in the killing.” This account said the man was arrested minutes after the assassination after police swarmed into the railroad yards where “a man was reported seen in that area carrying a rifle.” The story said the still-unidentified man was being held on “city charges.”

  Who was this man and what, if anything, did he know about the assassination?

  Another odd arrest—that of Jack Lawrence—also deserves more serious study. Lawrence was arrested late on the afternoon on November 22, 1963, after his actions caused suspicions among his coworkers at Downtown Lincoln-Mercury, located two blocks west of Dealey Plaza.

  Lawrence had obtained a job as a car salesman at the dealership just one month before the assassination with job references from New Orleans that later were found to be phony. Lawrence never sold a car and on the day before the assassination, he had borrowed one of the firm’s cars, after telling his boss he had a “heavy date.”

  On Friday, November 22, Lawrence failed to show up for work. However, about thirty minutes after the assassination, he came hustling through the company’s showroom, pale and sweating. He told coworkers he had been ill that morning and that he had tried to drive the car back to the dealership but had to park it due to the heavy traffic. Later, employees found the car parked behind the wooden picket fence on top of the Grassy Knoll overlooking Dealey Plaza.

  Lawrence’s activities were so suspicious that employees called police, who picked up Lawrence that evening. Lawrence, who reportedly was an expert marksman in the Air Force, left Dallas after being released the next day.

  In 1991, after researcher Sheldon Inkol detailed Lawrence’s story in The Third Decade, a JFK assassination newsletter, Inkol received a call from Lawrence, whom he described as “intelligent, articulate and good-humored” but irate. He denied any role in the assassination and said he parked his “loaner” car at the intersection of Ervay and Main Streets due to traffic and hurried to the car dealership so as not to be late for work.

  A suspicious car salesman, a man held on nebulous charges for days, a Mafia man in Dealey Plaza, the three tramps—what could all this mean? Chauncey Holt, himself a suspect, may have provided the answer when he told Newsweek in 1991:

  Dallas that day was flooded with all kinds of people who ended up there for some reason. It’s always been my theory that whoever was the architect of this thing—and no one will ever know who was behind it, manipulating all these people—I believe that they flooded this area with so many characters with nefarious reputations because they thought, “Well, if all these people get scooped up it’ll muddy the waters so much that they’ll never straighten it out.”

  Of course, the most prominent arrest of that day was when Dallas police nabbed Lee Harvey Oswald less than an hour and a half after the assassination. But such rapid police action was precipitated by yet another tragic shooting—the slaying of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit.

  The Shooting of J. D. Tippit

  Of all the aspects of the Kennedy assassination, the shooting of Dallas policeman Jefferson Davis Tippit has received less attention than most others. Allegedly Tippit was shot down while attempting to arrest Lee Harvey Oswald forty-five minutes after the assassination in Oak Cliff, south of downtown Dallas. It was the slaying of this policeman that led to Oswald’s arrest and in many ways became a cornerstone of the case for Oswald’s guilt. Warren Commission attorney David Belin called the shooting the “Rosetta Stone to the JFK assassination.” “After all,” stated the conventional wisdom of 1963–1964, “Oswald killed that policeman. Why would he do that if he hadn’t killed the president?”

  Yet today a growing body of evidence suggests that Oswald did not kill Tippit—which, if true, reverses the above argument—if it can be shown that Oswald did not shoot the policeman, then perhaps he didn’t shoot the president.

  Little is known about Tippit or his life and personal contacts. This absence of information prompted researcher Sylvia Meagher to write:

  Tippit, the policeman and the
man, is a one-dimensional and insubstantial figure—unknown and unknowable. The [Warren] Commission was not interested in Tippit’s life, and apparently interested in his death only to the extent that it could be ascribed to Oswald, despite massive defects in the evidence against him.

  The commission failed to mention that Tippit’s death occurred only two blocks from Ruby’s home on Marsalis Street. Yet with no real knowledge of Tippit’s background or associations and with a number of problems with the evidence, the Warren Commission nevertheless concluded that Oswald was his killer. This was based on four primary pieces of evidence.

  1

  Two witnesses who saw the shooting and seven who saw a man fleeing “positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man they saw fire the shots or flee from the scene.”

  The chief witness for the Warren Commission was Helen Markham, whose credibility, even at the time of the Commission, was strained to the breaking point. Markham claimed to have talked for some time with the dying Tippit, yet medical authorities said he was killed instantly. She said she saw Tippit’s killer talk with the policeman through his patrol car’s right-hand window, although pictures taken at the scene show that window was shut.

  She was in hysterics at the time and even left her shoes on top of Tippit’s car. Later, in her testimony before the Warren Commission, Markham stated six times she did not recognize anyone in the police lineup that evening, before Commission attorney Joseph Ball prompted, “Was there a number-two man in there?” Markham responded, “Number two is the one I picked. . . . When I saw this man I wasn’t sure, but I had cold chills just run all over me.”

  Furthermore, other witnesses at the scene—William Scoggins, Ted Calloway, and Emory Austin—even today claim they never saw Markham in the minutes immediately following the shooting.

  Cabdriver Scoggins also identified Oswald that day, although Scoggins admitted he did not actually witness the shooting and his view of the fleeing killer was obscured because he ducked down behind his cab as the man came by. Scoggins and cabdriver William Whaley, who allegedly drove Oswald home that day, both viewed a Dallas police lineup composed of five “young teenagers” and Oswald. Whaley told the Warren Commission:

  You could have picked [Oswald] out without identifying him by just listening to him because he was bawling out the policemen, telling them it wasn’t right to put him in line with these teenagers. . . . He showed no respect for the policemen, he told them what he thought about them. . . . They were trying to railroad him and he wanted his lawyer. . . . Anybody who wasn’t sure could have picked out the right one just for that.

  If his protestations weren’t enough to guide the witnesses in identifying Oswald, the suspect had conspicuous bruises and a black eye. Furthermore, Oswald stated during the lineup he was asked his name and place of employment. By Friday evening, everyone in Dallas who attended the police lineups had heard that shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository.

  On Saturday, Scoggins again identified Oswald, although in his Warren Commission testimony he admitted seeing Oswald’s photograph in a morning paper before viewing the police lineup. His identification of Oswald fell further into disrepute when he told the Commission that after the lineup, an FBI or Secret Service agent showed him several pictures of men, which Scoggins narrowed down to two. Scoggins recalled, “I told them one of these two pictures is him [Oswald] . . . and then he told me the other one was Oswald.”

  These were the star government witnesses. Other witnesses, including Domingo Benavides—the person closest to the killing—were never asked to view a lineup nor were they able to identify Oswald as the killer.

  Several other witnesses, including Acquilla Clemons, a black woman who claimed two men were involved in the Tippit shooting but was ignored by the federal authorities. Clemons claimed she was threatened into silence by a man with a gun and was never questioned. The Warren Commission denied knowledge of Clemons, stating, “The only woman among the witnesses to the slaying of Tippit known to the Commission is Helen Markham.”

  Markham’s testimony was inconsistent. She initially stated Tippit’s killer was short and stocky with bushy hair. This is the same description given by Clemons, who in a filmed interview said the killer was “kind of a short guy . . . kind of heavy.” Markham later denied giving this description.

  Frank Wright lived near the scene of the Tippit shooting. He heard shots and ran outside. His wife called the police, who contacted the Dudley M. Hughes ambulance service. The call slip carried the Wright’s address and arrived, according to the ambulance records, at 1:18 p.m. In an interview with private researchers less than a year later, Wright said:

  I saw a man standing in front of the car. He was looking toward the man on the ground. . . . 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. His car was a little gray old coupe. It was about a 1950–51, maybe a Plymouth. It was a gray car, parked on the same side of the street as the police car, but beyond it from me. It was heading away from me. 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 newspaper, but I know that’s not what happened.

  Another witness was Warren Reynolds, who chased Tippit’s killer. He, too, failed to identify Oswald as Tippit’s killer until after he himself was shot in the head two months later. After recovering, Reynolds identified Oswald to the Warren Commission. A suspect was arrested in the Reynolds shooting, but released when a former Jack Ruby stripper named Betty Mooney MacDonald provided an alibi. One week after her word released the suspect, MacDonald was arrested by Dallas police and a few hours later was found hanged in her jail cell. Neither the FBI nor the Warren Commission investigated this strange incident.

  2

  The cartridge cases found near the Tippit slaying “were fired from the revolver in the possession of Oswald at the time of his arrest, to the exclusion of all other weapons,” claimed the Warren Commission.

  There are many problems with this evidence. First, at the time of the Tippit shooting, Dallas police sergeant Gerald Hill radioed the police dispatcher, saying, “The shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38 rather than a pistol.” Oswald reportedly was captured with a .38 Special revolver. There is a significant difference between an automatic, which ejects spent shells onto the ground, and a revolver, which requires deliberate emptying of the weapon. These weapons also use different types of ammunition.

  Other officers at the scene believed that an automatic weapon was used, based on the distance from Tippit’s body to where the shells were found and what some perceived to be scratches from an automatic’s ejector on the shells. If an automatic was used, then Oswald’s revolver cannot be blamed for Tippit’s death.

  Then there’s the problem of identification of the empty shells. Policeman J. M. Poe received two cartridge cases from witness Domingo Benavides at the scene. In an FBI report, Poe firmly stated that he marked the cases with his initials, “J.M.P.” before turning them over to Dallas crime lab personnel.

  However, on June 12, 1964, the FBI showed Poe the four .38-caliber Special cases used as evidence of Oswald’s guilt by the Warren Commission. The bureau reported:

  [Poe] recalled marking these cases before giving them to [lab personnel], but he stated after a thorough examination of the four cartridges shown to him . . . he cannot locate his marks; therefore, he cannot positively identify any of these cartridges as being the same ones he received from Benavides.

  Testifying to the Warren Commission, Poe vacillated, saying he couldn’t swear to marking the cases. However, asked to identify the cartridges, Poe also stated, “I want to say these two are mine, but I couldn’t swear to it.” Poe’s failure to find his initials on the cases, coupled with the fact
that the cases were not turned over to the FBI until six days after other inventoried evidence, leaves many researchers with the suspicion that shell cases from Oswald’s revolver were substituted for the ones Poe marked.

  To further confuse the issue, the Warren Commission discovered that the shell cases allegedly recovered at the scene of the shooting do not match up with the slugs recovered from Tippit’s body. Of the four cases, two are of Winchester-Western manufacture and two of Remington-Peters, while of the bullets removed from Tippit, only one is Remington-Peters and three are from Winchester-Western.

  Weakly, the Warren Commission attempted to explain this anomaly by surmising that perhaps a fifth shot had been fired but not recovered, although most of the witnesses recalled no more than four shots, or that perhaps Oswald already had an expended Remington-Peters case in his pistol before shooting Tippit. The Commission even suggested that perhaps “to save money . . . he might have loaded one make of bullet into another make of cartridge case.”

  This, of course, would require Oswald to own or have access to reloading equipment. It should be pointed out that when arrested, Oswald reportedly was carrying five live Winchester-Western pistol bullets in his pocket in addition to the fully loaded revolver, which apparently was never tested to determine if it had been fired recently. With this exception, authorities found no other ammunition or gun-related materials in any of Oswald’s possessions.

  3

  The Warren Commission determined that the revolver in Oswald’s possession at the time of his arrest was purchased by and belonged to him. While this segment of the evidence against Oswald may be true—some researchers are not convinced that the weapons order signed by A. J. Hidell can conclusively be traced to Oswald—it does not prove that the gun was used to kill Tippit.

  For instance, even the FBI’s resources failed to prove that the slugs recovered from Tippit’s body had been fired from Oswald’s pistol. FBI officials claimed that since the Oswald revolver had been rechambered to accept .38 Special ammunition, the barrel was oversize for the bullet, causing inconsistent ballistic markings. Thus, “consecutive bullets fired in the revolver by the FBI could not even be identified with each other under the microscope,” stated the Commission in an appendix to its report. This statement is most odd, for several firearms experts have told this author that similar .38 Special bullets do fit the rifling grooves and can be checked ballistically.