LP--
No, I do not think Pat Speer, 60 years after the fact, engaging in unfounded speculation, is more accurate about what Inspector Sawyer saw and did on 11.22 than Sawyer himself, as captured in the January memo and then in his testimony under oath to the WC.
Ben, as collegially and respectfully as I can say this: It seems to me that you're digging in your heels on an issue that is a total loser.
The 1964 memo has essentially nothing to do with Sawyer. It is Shanklin telling Hoover what Malley told Shanklin that Batchelor had told Drain about what Sawyer supposedly was told by an unidentified individual. This sound suspiciously like the Telephone Game, in which "Shirley has a new poodle" becomes "Shirley shot her husband" by the fourth retelling in the chain. As far as I know, is this not the ONLY piece of evidence (to use the term loosely) that anyone reported a man with a rifle running out of the back of the TSBD?
Sawyer's WC testimony does not corroborate the memo AT ALL. He says nothing about the mystery man escaping the TSBD with a rifle. Nor, apparently, did he do so on 11-22 - to anyone. Doesn't this seem like a RATHER LARGE omission on his part? All he did at the WC was confirm the physical description he had phoned in.
WC'er Belin did not ask Sawyer about the man with the Winchester rifle, possibly as that was inconsistent with the LNT.
Belin's job was similar to that of a prosecuting attorney, to develop the strongest case possible against the LN defendant. We know what the WC's job was, as defined by LBJ. Come to a LN conclusion, not ties to Havana or Moscow.
So now you include in the equation that the WC "got to" Sawyer. Is that really how the WC transcript sounds? Sawyer was also informally interviewed by HSCA staff in 1978. Nothing about any mystery man here either:
https://tangodown63.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/sawyer-hsca-1978.05.24.pdf.
It is public record that the 5' 10" 165 lbs white guy suspect description went out over DPD radio. Where did that description come from?
The CT community (and you?), contend it came from the Deep State. A planted description.
Sawyer says he phoned it in to DPD, based on what a witness told him. I lean towards Sawyer being truthful in this regard.
The witness who spoke the Sawyer may have been seeing things. Maybe not. No way to tell.
It clearly came from Brennan. Brennan was almost surely not in a position to provide such a detailed description, but he almost certainly did. This is an FBI report that summarizes what Sawyer said:
https://tangodown63.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/fbi-105-82555-oswald-hq-file-section-224-excerpt.pdf.
For starters, there is nothing - zilch - about any mystery man running out of the back of the TSBD with a rifle.
Second, Sawyer says that when he got the physical description Forrest Sorrels was present. Sorrels was speaking to BRENNAN.
No, I don't believe the description was a plant. I think it's what Brennan told Sawyer and Sorrels. It's really just kind of a very generic description of a youngish, thinnish white guy.
I have extensive personal experience of people grossly overestimating the weight of thin white guys. When I was a serious runner, I carried 135-140 pounds on my 6-foot frame (now, alas, ballooned up to 160). People consistently estimated my weight at around 175. I was aghast. Fatties (i.e., most people) just have no clue as to what we ectomorphs actually weigh.
It seems to me this Sawyer stuff is going nowhere fast. One almost comical quadruple (or maybe quintuple) hearsay memo that apparently generated no further interest and is not backed up by anything Sawyer is known to actually have said becomes a "smoking gun."