There are grounds for reasonable doubt Oswald killed Tippit, contrary to prevailing mainstream opinion. This has nothing to do with conspiracy theory. It has to do with did he do the crime.
The single strongest Tippit crime scene witness of all, because of how close he was from only 15-25 feet away, Domingo Benavides, testified to the Warren Commission that he had an excellent view of the back of the killer’s head and described a block cut rear hairline which, as it stands, is highly credible stand-alone exonerating testimony, since photos of Oswald that weekend after his arrest show him with a tapered rear hairline. For good measure this single best Tippit crime scene witness of all was also a barber. Hard to beat that for a witness favorable to reasonable doubt.
Eight crime scene witnesses or witnesses of the fleeing gunman testified that that gunman was wearing a white or light-colored shirt, underneath a partly open zippered jacket. Oswald was arrested in a dark brown shirt. This is not an easy massive number of witness testimonies that can easily be accounted for as mistakes. Reasonable doubt grounds number two.
Two independent police radio reports within the first twenty minutes following the crime, reflecting two independent witnesses, put out bulletins giving a physical description of Tippit’s killer as having “black” hair. Oswald’s was medium brown, and I am not aware of independent evidence of witnesses mistakenly seeing and describing Oswald’s hair as “black.” Reasonable doubt grounds number three.
There is a strong appearance that two sets of fingerprints lifted from the Tippit patrol car twenty minutes after the crime, which have been determined to have derived from a single individual in both separated locations, were left on the patrol car by the killer. Those prints were found by expert analysis to be not Oswald’s. Those prints have never been proven to not be the killer’s as they appear to be from correspondence to the killer’s known positions and location of his hands. Reasonable doubt grounds number four.
The witnesses who identified the gunman as Oswald–five out of lineups on the first day of Oswald’s arrest on Friday; a sixth out of a lineup the next day, Saturday, and five more in FBI interviews from photos two months later in January 1964, eleven total–are less decisive than it appears. Since the time of the Warren Commission in 1964, studies have established–this is mainstream yet does not seem to have percolated consciousness of JFKA/Tippit discussions–that witness facial recognition in cases in which the witness does not already know the person, is not reliable at over 50 feet. The reason is because the human eye loses detail with distance, necessary for accurate reliability in facial recognition. This lack of reliability at over 50 feet overrides witnesses’ expressions of confidence or certainty. There goes Callaway (56 feet) and all of the three Warren Reynolds auto place witnesses, right there. The Davis sisters-in-law both said they saw the killer’s face only in profile not full face.
The main problem with going from the witness identifications of Oswald to a conclusion that Oswald was the killer is that an alternative suspect, Jack Ruby-employed Curtis Craford, was independently mistakenly identified repeatedly by sincere witnesses as Oswald, having nothing to do with the Tippit crime case. This is attested in at least a half-dozen independent cases. None of the Tippit crime witnesses–none of the eleven who identified Oswald as the killer and/or fleeing gunman they saw–were ever shown photos of Craford and asked, or saw him in person–even though the FBI was aware of the Craford witness confusions and showed other claimed Oswald witnesses photos of Craford to ask them if that was the man they had actually seen. This evidence of repeated witness mistaken identification of the alternative suspect, Craford, as Oswald makes it difficult to exclude that the same phenomenon is at work in the Tippit witnesses’ identifications. In short, the Tippit witness evidence when closely examined is not capable of distinguishing between identification of the Tippit’s killer as Oswald or Craford–the witness evidence is compatible with either actual identification.
This is not to say there is not a case against Oswald if the crime scene shell hulls were the same shell hulls the FBI lab examined and found to have been fired from Oswald’s revolver to the exclusion of any other weapon, if one does not consider chain of custody issues with those hulls to be significant. But, there are chain of custody issues.
And there is an argument from coincidence/proximity that Oswald was nearby, carrying a revolver on his person of the same kind used in the killing of Officer Tippit, in the midst of a live shooter police manhunt in process.
But the eyewitness identifications incriminating Oswald range from poor to medium quality, none exceptionally strong, with the argument for eyewitness incrimination of Oswald relying more on the number of them than their quality.
And the revolver Oswald had, a Smith & Wesson .38 special, was the most common concealed-carry handgun in America, and millions of Americans have carried for self-defense without using their weapons to murder anyone. And many persons in history have been wrongly convicted on the basis of being in the wrong place at the wrong time by accident, even though innocent.
There is zero weight toward incrimination of Oswald from the killer’s jacket (CE 162)’s fibers as claimed in some discussions, according to any expert testimony. That is why neither the FBI nor Warren Commission who knew of those fibers ever claimed they were positive weight evidence of a match to Oswald’s brown shirt, because no expert ever testified to that and it is unlikely any would. Non-expert interpretations don’t count. It is like saying common cooking ingredients prove a certain kind of cake was made.
As for the light zippered off-white light tan cloth jacket found at the Ballew’s Texaco station abandoned by the fleeing killer of Tippit, CE 162, Marina testified it was Lee’s, but Oswald’s coworker at the Book Depository who gave him rides in his car to and from Irving on weekends, Buell Frazier, testified even more emphatically that that jacket definitely was not Oswald’s gray jacket–that Frazier knew Lee’s gray work jacket–Lee sitting with him in the front seat of his car many times wearing it, and wearing it at the Book Depository where they worked together–and, Frazier testified, Lee’s gray jacket was woolen and gray, not the off-white cloth CE 162 which would easily pick up dirt and not be practical as a daily work jacket in dusty or dirty surroundings doing manual labor. When shown C E 162, Frazier was categorical that that was not any jacket he had ever seen Lee wearing. One gray jacket identification description is not right between Marina and Buell, take your pick.
Here is a clue: there are plenty of photos of Oswald when he was in Minsk, Belarus, when he defected to the Soviet Union and where he married Marina–but none of those photos show him wearing CE 162, even though Marina said he had his gray jacket in Minsk, brought by him from the U.S. to Minsk. But a famous set of Minsk coworkers’ photos–two black-and-white photographs showing Oswald with coworkers in good spirits in a group photo–shows Oswald in a jacket which appears to be an exact match with Buell Frazier’s description of Oswald’s gray woolen zippered work jacket. Draw your own conclusions from that.
There is a case from the facts of the crime that Tippit’s killer was ambushed by someone waiting for his arrival, lured out of his car and executed by a professional–not the random pedestrian called over by a police officer who is spooked and impulsively brutally kills Tippit, as in the Oswald scenario.
Curtis Craford, recently hired by Oswald’s killer two days later, night-club owner Jack Ruby–generously given a room to sleep at the Carousel Club in exchange for work supposedly at no pay by Ruby, was a self-confessed hitman at this stage of his life. He told that not to many people but to a family member (brother) and another person (writer Peter Whitmey) in later years. A daughter of Craford confirmed to me that her father had indeed told her uncle–his brother–that, that he was serious when he did so, and that her brother believed it was true. It is not that Craford was a “made man” or mob member, he would not have been a professional in that sense, but as a low-level free-lance murder-for-hire contract killer, with his confession indicating some number of kills greater than zero in the 1960-1963 time frame.
Craford was left-handed as indicated by the fingerprints on the Tippit patrol car–if those fingerprints were from the killer. Craford had a full head of hair so dark brown that it appeared black, in exact agreement with the shade of hair color reported by two independent witnesses to the Tippit killing within minutes–and not in agreement with Oswald’s medium-brown hair not known to have been seen mistakenly as black. On this last detail, Craford’s daughter (born after Craford left Dallas and remarried) told me that as a child growing up, for years as a child she thought her father’s hair was black until belatedly learning it was actually dark brown, exactly the police description of the killer’s hair color, sourced from two separate witness sources for police radio bulletins–significant because these witnesses told the color of the killer’s hair as they saw it, before there was any influence on witness testimonies of Oswald in the news.
The Craford daughter also told me her father had a habit of talking out loud to himself. Compare Scoggins the cab driver testifying to hearing the gunman talking under his breath, saying out loud “poor dumb cop” who he had just killed, as that gunman calmly left in a controlled slow lope away from the crime scene, moving past Scoggins hiding outside of his cab on the other side of his cab from the killer passing by on foot talking to himself. By contrast, Oswald had no known habit of talking out loud to himself.
Craford is known independently to have been mistakenly identified as Oswald by sincere witnesses–time after time, over a half-dozen confirmed. There goes the perception of strength of the witnesses’ Oswald identifications on Tippit and the argument from numbers of weak witnesses. Between Oswald and Craford as the Tippit gunman, it could be either one from the witnesses’ evidence.
Tippit’s killer came to the crime scene walking from the east on foot consistent with an origin point in the approximate vicinity of Jack Ruby’s apartment in Oak Cliff, which was close, only four blocks east of where the Tippit murder took place. Craford was driven home from the Vegas Club in another part of Dallas–that was a second night-club run by Ruby and his sister other than the Carousel Club–by Ruby at ca. 3 am the night before. Ruby could have driven Craford to his Ruby’s own apartment, instead of to the Carousel Club in downtown Dallas as normally. Both Ruby and Ruby’s apartment-mate George Senator, from Senator’s separate bedroom, left the apartment Friday morning. Craford could have been in Ruby’s room without Senator knowing it, then had the empty apartment to himself until the time came to walk to the crime scene four blocks west to flag down an expected arrival of Tippit as he arrived and kill him as a contract execution. Just saying.
I have developed a few things such as this on a case for Craford on Tippit, though I have not had time to write the case fully, stopped at this moment because of another project (publication of a book on the General Walker case), and I do not know when I will have time. The pdf below is however a first three chapters start of the case for those interested.
Also, final point on the arrest. Oswald did have a loaded gun on him at his arrest, he did resist arrest, and he did punch an officer. But he did not say, “it’s all over now” when he first stood up for the police, and he did not attempt to shoot a police officer. He was heard saying “it’s all over now” after he was subdued and had stopped resisting, which changes the meaning or sense of what Oswald was heard saying. See the testimony of Walthers and others present on that timing point. Oswald was also heard saying after he was subdued and had quit resisting that he was not resisting arrest and to stop hitting him. The “it’s all over now” heard in that context could have had similar sense; in any case the timing correction removes that saying from the suicide-by-cop sense mistakenly attributed to Oswald on the basis of the incorrect timing of when he said that.
The failed attempt to shoot Oswald’s revolver evidenced by the telltale “click” heard by all present (evidence of a completed intentional trigger pull) was officer McDonald attempting unsuccessfully to shoot Oswald with Oswald’s own gun. This is not speculation but fact, from confession of McDonald that he got control of Oswald’s revolver, pointed it intentionally into Oswald’s stomach, had his finger on the trigger, and started to pull the trigger to shoot him. That’s not speculation, that’s McDonald himself in a recorded interview on YouTube. McDonald said he started to pull the trigger to shoot Oswald with the pistol pointed by McDonald intentionally into Oswald’s stomach. But another officer’s hand, Bentley’s, was injured blocking the hammer which struck Bentley’s flesh rather than firing the bullet, which is why McDonald’s attempt to shoot Oswald failed (there was no malfunction in the revolver). It was not premeditated on McDonald’s part to shoot Oswald with his own gun. It followed Oswald punching McDonald in the face. But Oswald no more pulled that trigger than Anthony Pretti in Minneapolis tried to shoot ICE officers as was first claimed over national news citing ICE sources. McDonald originally claimed Oswald had tried to shoot him but McDonald was not truthful in that claim; it was he who tried to shoot Oswald, not vice versa. Once the matter is properly studied and considered this point is not even ambiguous, it is as clear as the Anthony Pretti case. Not that this point materially bears on who killed Tippit, but just to clear the deck on this particular long-standing claim. The officer in command present at Oswald’s arrest, Westbrook, in his oral history told in Sneed, No More Silence (1998), knew. He says it was McDonald, not Oswald, who pulled the trigger of the failed attempt to shoot (p. 315).
That Oswald was guilty on Tippit for so long has been considered established beyond question. The case that Oswald killed Tippit is set forth in Dale Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit (2013 edition; first published 1998), the go-to resource for primary information on the case, with primary sources and documents. The primary sources can also be found on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website with excellent search capability (https://www.maryferrell.org/).
But there is another side to this case that was never investigated.