Donald Willis
2023-12-23 22:19:32 UTC
The 1:22pm DPD radio message translates as The jacket was planted and the witness transplanted (revision)
It seems that all I'm doing these days is correcting myself. James DiEugenio caught me in a blatant error on the ed forum. I caught myself re another error on the first version of this thread. I trusted a DPD transcription of their own radio logs (CE 705). But, digging out my old tape recording of said logs (provided about 25 years ago by Dave Dix, from I believe, the Minnesota Public Library), I found that the 1:22 transmission did NOT say just "300 E. Jefferson", but "300 block of E. Jefferson". I have incorporated the new (old) information accordingly and made the necessary changes...
1:22pm DPD radio message translates as The jacket was planted and the witness transplanted (revision)
First faint clue: DPD Sgt. G.D. Henslee transcribes the first line of the transmission thusly: "Have a description of the suspect on Jefferson." Actually, the transmission runs, "We have a description on this suspect over here on Jefferson." The omitted "over here" makes it sound like the sender, Officer Roy Walker, is actually on Jefferson. Is there a problem with that? Oh, yes.
Second faint clue: But, first, continuing the text of the 1:22 transmission: "Last seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson. He's a white male, about 30, 5'8", black hair, slender, wearing a white jacket, white shirt, and dark slacks". (DPD radio-logs tape) And note that the dispatcher, at 1:26, has the suspect "going west on Jefferson from the 300 block". (CE 705 p22)
Third faint clue: At 1:19:05, the dispatcher tells Walker to check out 501 E. 10th at Denver (WMp105). Then, at 1:19:59, he tells Walker "The suspect's running west on Jefferson from the location" (DPD radio logs/WMp109). When, at 1:21:37, Walker radios "I haven't seen anything on Jefferson yet" (DPD radio logs), the dispatcher again directs him to "501 E. 10th at Denver" (CE 705p20/WM p113). Finally, at 1:22:36, Walker radios his "over here" description. From his 1:21:37 transmission, we know that Walker was, at the time, on Jefferson. But we don't know, from his radio transmissions, whether he was ever at 10th & Patton. He doesn't correct or follow-up the dispatcher's "10th at Denver", after either of the latter's advisories.
Fourth (getting somewhere) clue: Dale Myers insists that Walker met and talked to Warren Reynolds at the murder scene: "Reynolds returned to 10th & Patton at about [1:20], despite Reynolds' testimony to the contrary" (p112). True, in 1983, Walker told Myers that he did meet Reynolds, about 1:22. However, he adds, "One of the used car lot operators saw the incident... Warren Reynolds" (p114). The latter never said that he saw the shooting--Walker's memory fails him here.
And Reynolds would hardly have been the one to tell Walker, "Last seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson". Ruinously for him, Walker told Myers that it was "Reynolds [who] gave me the description of the gunman" (p114). Walker was apparently unaware that TV film footage has turned up showing Reynolds telling police at the scene that he last saw a suspicious man going into the back of an old house near the Texaco station (WM p131). Reynolds, then, could not have been Walker's "300 block of E. Jefferson" witness. (Reynolds' suspicious man may not have been the gunman at all, but a vigilante trailing the gunman.) Myers, then, with one hand, was simply extending Walker's witness-identity deception, despite his own text and frame grabs which, with the other hand, expose said deception! Myers giveth and Myers taketh away.
Fifth (gathering steam) clue: Myers then "buttresses" the invented Walker/Reynolds confab with yet another out-of-thin-air incident, based on the word of... no one at all: "Warren Reynolds, who had come with [Sgt. Bud Owens & Assistant DA Bill Alexander] from 10th & Patton, pointed to an old house near the Texaco station..." (p120) Alexander did not testify to the Warren Commission, and Owens, in his Commission testimony, did not mention bringing along a witness to the Texaco area. None of the principals, then--Reynolds, Walker, Alexander, Owens--can support Myers' two little vignettes re Reynolds going to and leaving the scene of the crime circa 1:20 and 1:22. Thin air.
Sixth (Eureka!) clue: Relocation, relocation, relocation. Why would Walker and Myers go to so much trouble to falsely identify and relocate a witness? Well, what other witness or witnesses were "over here on Jefferson"? (Pat Patterson was with Reynolds, so he was most probably an old-house witness, too.)
Robert and Mary Brock were, in effect the gatekeepers of the parking-lot suspect. Mary Brock was the only witness who clearly stated that she "last observed [the suspect] in the parking lot directly behind" the service station. (WM p551) They may have seen the suspect, but not in the parking lot, and certainly not doffing his jacket. Because at 1:22, he was reported "seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson", still wearing his "white jacket". Certainly worth Walker's false identification of his witness, and Myers' subsequent, false relocation of him elsewhere. Two wrongs and no right.
And the first transmission--at 1:21--re the Texaco location was the dispatcher's "Subject just passed 401 E. Jefferson" (CE 705p21), the last address, going west, before the 300 block. One of the Brocks must have been its source, as well as the source for "300 block of E. Jefferson".
Seventh clue: At 1:26, Sgt. Gerald Hill reported from 12th & Beckley, "Have a man in the car with me that can identify the suspect if anybody gets... one." (CE 1974 p63) About 1:23, at the Tippit scene, according to Hill's testimony, "Another person came up [and] told us the man had run over into the funeral home parking lot", which was opposite the Texaco station (v7p48). Sgt. Bud Owens similarly testified that, at the "scene of the shooting... we were informed by a man whom I do not know that the suspect that shot Officer Tippit had run across a vacant lot toward Jefferson" (v7p79). Someone, then, from the Texaco area--Hill and Owens both garbled the where of it--had run down to where the police were first congregating. And Hill, clearly, immediately, took this man near to where the man had last seen the suspect, the 300 block of E. Jefferson.
Eighth clue: But there must have been a big problem--retrospectively--with this witness. In fact, there is, in Hill's testimony, an implicit, hapless denial that he even had a witness or that he had even radioed from 12th & Beckley, even though it's on the record. On the record, Gerald! Both the FBI transcription (see above) and Myers (p124) acknowledge that Hill sent the 1:26 message. Hill testified, falsely, that, about 1:25, he left the Tippit scene and "whipped around the block. I went down to the first intersection east of the block where all this incident occurred and made a right turn and traveled one block and came back up on Jefferson", where he met Owens at the Texaco/old-house site (v7p48). The harried Warren Commission did not have time to check out every DPD-spun tale.
Who was Hill's radioactive witness, whom, figuratively, he dare not touch, or acknowledge, let alone name? Myers apparently knew, hence his totally unsupported relocation of that witness (as well as Officer Walker) from Crawford & Jefferson to 10th & Patton. This is called throwing the hounds off the scent. But by fallaciously drawing a witness away from the Crawford area, Myers unintentionally draws attention to that area. And Hill and Owens suggest, clumsily, but perhaps basically accurately, that a person from Texaco ran down to 10th & Patton.
Reynolds was looking east from Crawford area. But Hill's witness was looking west, towards Beckley. Now who could have gotten a pretty good look at the fleeing suspect, good enough to have estimated height, weight, race, and age, and described the man's clothing? Who could have seen him that closely--seen him as, say, he passed the Texaco station? Robert and/or Mary Brock, of course. Walker doesn't indicate the sex or number of his witnesses ("We have a description"), so it could have been either of the Brocks who contacted the dispatcher about the same time as did Walker.
And, just as the WFAA-TV footage of Reynolds exposes the Walker lie, so it exposes the Brocks' lies. As noted above, Mrs. Brock stated that she informed Reynolds that "she last observed [the suspect] in the parking lot directly behind Ballew's Texaco Service Station". Clearly, she did *not* so inform him, not without some strong input from Reynolds, who had his own story to tell and was telling it to the cops, that day, and would have told it to her. But she failed to give herself and her husband a lifeline out of the Reynolds morass. A frame-grab is worth a thousand words. Moral: Don't hitch your wagon to Warren Reynolds.
Despite their apparent proximity to the suspect, neither Brock was invited either to attend a lineup or to testify for the Commission. It might have been too easy, then, for people to connect the dots: "over here on Jefferson", "300 block of E. Jefferson", the Brocks. As the witnesses closest to both the 300 block of E. Jefferson and to the parking lot, the Brocks had to be downplayed, had to be weaned off Jefferson and weaned onto the parking lot. (Sgt. Hill didn't just downplay them--he vaporized them, or one of them.) More publicity would have meant more scrutiny, prickly questions. (On that same day--Jan. 21, 1964--Reynolds himself was slipping further into the morass: For his part, he misleadingly told the FBI then that he "last observed the individual to turn north" by the service station: "[The Brocks] informed him the individual had gone through the parking lot." [FBI interview report/WMp544] Naively, he apparently thought that the WFAA footage had been deep-sixed.)
In sum: The jacket was planted, the Texaco jacket witnesses were transplanted, Oswald was, beyond doubt, being framed for Tippit's murder, and Dale Myers was last seen imploding.
dcw
It seems that all I'm doing these days is correcting myself. James DiEugenio caught me in a blatant error on the ed forum. I caught myself re another error on the first version of this thread. I trusted a DPD transcription of their own radio logs (CE 705). But, digging out my old tape recording of said logs (provided about 25 years ago by Dave Dix, from I believe, the Minnesota Public Library), I found that the 1:22 transmission did NOT say just "300 E. Jefferson", but "300 block of E. Jefferson". I have incorporated the new (old) information accordingly and made the necessary changes...
1:22pm DPD radio message translates as The jacket was planted and the witness transplanted (revision)
First faint clue: DPD Sgt. G.D. Henslee transcribes the first line of the transmission thusly: "Have a description of the suspect on Jefferson." Actually, the transmission runs, "We have a description on this suspect over here on Jefferson." The omitted "over here" makes it sound like the sender, Officer Roy Walker, is actually on Jefferson. Is there a problem with that? Oh, yes.
Second faint clue: But, first, continuing the text of the 1:22 transmission: "Last seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson. He's a white male, about 30, 5'8", black hair, slender, wearing a white jacket, white shirt, and dark slacks". (DPD radio-logs tape) And note that the dispatcher, at 1:26, has the suspect "going west on Jefferson from the 300 block". (CE 705 p22)
Third faint clue: At 1:19:05, the dispatcher tells Walker to check out 501 E. 10th at Denver (WMp105). Then, at 1:19:59, he tells Walker "The suspect's running west on Jefferson from the location" (DPD radio logs/WMp109). When, at 1:21:37, Walker radios "I haven't seen anything on Jefferson yet" (DPD radio logs), the dispatcher again directs him to "501 E. 10th at Denver" (CE 705p20/WM p113). Finally, at 1:22:36, Walker radios his "over here" description. From his 1:21:37 transmission, we know that Walker was, at the time, on Jefferson. But we don't know, from his radio transmissions, whether he was ever at 10th & Patton. He doesn't correct or follow-up the dispatcher's "10th at Denver", after either of the latter's advisories.
Fourth (getting somewhere) clue: Dale Myers insists that Walker met and talked to Warren Reynolds at the murder scene: "Reynolds returned to 10th & Patton at about [1:20], despite Reynolds' testimony to the contrary" (p112). True, in 1983, Walker told Myers that he did meet Reynolds, about 1:22. However, he adds, "One of the used car lot operators saw the incident... Warren Reynolds" (p114). The latter never said that he saw the shooting--Walker's memory fails him here.
And Reynolds would hardly have been the one to tell Walker, "Last seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson". Ruinously for him, Walker told Myers that it was "Reynolds [who] gave me the description of the gunman" (p114). Walker was apparently unaware that TV film footage has turned up showing Reynolds telling police at the scene that he last saw a suspicious man going into the back of an old house near the Texaco station (WM p131). Reynolds, then, could not have been Walker's "300 block of E. Jefferson" witness. (Reynolds' suspicious man may not have been the gunman at all, but a vigilante trailing the gunman.) Myers, then, with one hand, was simply extending Walker's witness-identity deception, despite his own text and frame grabs which, with the other hand, expose said deception! Myers giveth and Myers taketh away.
Fifth (gathering steam) clue: Myers then "buttresses" the invented Walker/Reynolds confab with yet another out-of-thin-air incident, based on the word of... no one at all: "Warren Reynolds, who had come with [Sgt. Bud Owens & Assistant DA Bill Alexander] from 10th & Patton, pointed to an old house near the Texaco station..." (p120) Alexander did not testify to the Warren Commission, and Owens, in his Commission testimony, did not mention bringing along a witness to the Texaco area. None of the principals, then--Reynolds, Walker, Alexander, Owens--can support Myers' two little vignettes re Reynolds going to and leaving the scene of the crime circa 1:20 and 1:22. Thin air.
Sixth (Eureka!) clue: Relocation, relocation, relocation. Why would Walker and Myers go to so much trouble to falsely identify and relocate a witness? Well, what other witness or witnesses were "over here on Jefferson"? (Pat Patterson was with Reynolds, so he was most probably an old-house witness, too.)
Robert and Mary Brock were, in effect the gatekeepers of the parking-lot suspect. Mary Brock was the only witness who clearly stated that she "last observed [the suspect] in the parking lot directly behind" the service station. (WM p551) They may have seen the suspect, but not in the parking lot, and certainly not doffing his jacket. Because at 1:22, he was reported "seen about 300 block of E. Jefferson", still wearing his "white jacket". Certainly worth Walker's false identification of his witness, and Myers' subsequent, false relocation of him elsewhere. Two wrongs and no right.
And the first transmission--at 1:21--re the Texaco location was the dispatcher's "Subject just passed 401 E. Jefferson" (CE 705p21), the last address, going west, before the 300 block. One of the Brocks must have been its source, as well as the source for "300 block of E. Jefferson".
Seventh clue: At 1:26, Sgt. Gerald Hill reported from 12th & Beckley, "Have a man in the car with me that can identify the suspect if anybody gets... one." (CE 1974 p63) About 1:23, at the Tippit scene, according to Hill's testimony, "Another person came up [and] told us the man had run over into the funeral home parking lot", which was opposite the Texaco station (v7p48). Sgt. Bud Owens similarly testified that, at the "scene of the shooting... we were informed by a man whom I do not know that the suspect that shot Officer Tippit had run across a vacant lot toward Jefferson" (v7p79). Someone, then, from the Texaco area--Hill and Owens both garbled the where of it--had run down to where the police were first congregating. And Hill, clearly, immediately, took this man near to where the man had last seen the suspect, the 300 block of E. Jefferson.
Eighth clue: But there must have been a big problem--retrospectively--with this witness. In fact, there is, in Hill's testimony, an implicit, hapless denial that he even had a witness or that he had even radioed from 12th & Beckley, even though it's on the record. On the record, Gerald! Both the FBI transcription (see above) and Myers (p124) acknowledge that Hill sent the 1:26 message. Hill testified, falsely, that, about 1:25, he left the Tippit scene and "whipped around the block. I went down to the first intersection east of the block where all this incident occurred and made a right turn and traveled one block and came back up on Jefferson", where he met Owens at the Texaco/old-house site (v7p48). The harried Warren Commission did not have time to check out every DPD-spun tale.
Who was Hill's radioactive witness, whom, figuratively, he dare not touch, or acknowledge, let alone name? Myers apparently knew, hence his totally unsupported relocation of that witness (as well as Officer Walker) from Crawford & Jefferson to 10th & Patton. This is called throwing the hounds off the scent. But by fallaciously drawing a witness away from the Crawford area, Myers unintentionally draws attention to that area. And Hill and Owens suggest, clumsily, but perhaps basically accurately, that a person from Texaco ran down to 10th & Patton.
Reynolds was looking east from Crawford area. But Hill's witness was looking west, towards Beckley. Now who could have gotten a pretty good look at the fleeing suspect, good enough to have estimated height, weight, race, and age, and described the man's clothing? Who could have seen him that closely--seen him as, say, he passed the Texaco station? Robert and/or Mary Brock, of course. Walker doesn't indicate the sex or number of his witnesses ("We have a description"), so it could have been either of the Brocks who contacted the dispatcher about the same time as did Walker.
And, just as the WFAA-TV footage of Reynolds exposes the Walker lie, so it exposes the Brocks' lies. As noted above, Mrs. Brock stated that she informed Reynolds that "she last observed [the suspect] in the parking lot directly behind Ballew's Texaco Service Station". Clearly, she did *not* so inform him, not without some strong input from Reynolds, who had his own story to tell and was telling it to the cops, that day, and would have told it to her. But she failed to give herself and her husband a lifeline out of the Reynolds morass. A frame-grab is worth a thousand words. Moral: Don't hitch your wagon to Warren Reynolds.
Despite their apparent proximity to the suspect, neither Brock was invited either to attend a lineup or to testify for the Commission. It might have been too easy, then, for people to connect the dots: "over here on Jefferson", "300 block of E. Jefferson", the Brocks. As the witnesses closest to both the 300 block of E. Jefferson and to the parking lot, the Brocks had to be downplayed, had to be weaned off Jefferson and weaned onto the parking lot. (Sgt. Hill didn't just downplay them--he vaporized them, or one of them.) More publicity would have meant more scrutiny, prickly questions. (On that same day--Jan. 21, 1964--Reynolds himself was slipping further into the morass: For his part, he misleadingly told the FBI then that he "last observed the individual to turn north" by the service station: "[The Brocks] informed him the individual had gone through the parking lot." [FBI interview report/WMp544] Naively, he apparently thought that the WFAA footage had been deep-sixed.)
In sum: The jacket was planted, the Texaco jacket witnesses were transplanted, Oswald was, beyond doubt, being framed for Tippit's murder, and Dale Myers was last seen imploding.
dcw