Lance, I'm going to give a summary comment on the Tippit case and I would like you to explain if you classify it as "lunatic fringe" and say why. But first, a comment on the real issue you raise of what is the difference between a legitimate differing argument or interpretation of evidence, and "wacky" territory. I have an analogy here you might find instructive. It appears in a book I wrote a couple decades ago, "Showdown at Big Sandy", about a Bible college in east Texas I attended for two years in the 1970s. I was discussing the phenomenon of "cults", which is in some ways parallel to the definitional questions you raise here. What is the difference between a religion one does not personally believe, but which one does not regard it sociologically as a "cult"? At the time I wrote the book, one of the leading (supposedly) authorities on cults was Walter Martin, who wrote a book called "Kingdom of the Cults". He wrote from a conservative Christian perspective, and detailed an encyclopedic taxonomy of all sorts of various offbeat and idiosyncratic religious groups with which American history has been filled, part of America's claim to fame.
The problem was in among the extensive cult listings in his book, Kingdom of the Cults, he listed Unitarians. Unitarians?? I found that odd. As I noted at the time, Unitarians have produced four American presidents and too many famous scientists to count--how on earth did he have them defined as a "cult"? Well, he gave his reasons, three reasons. Here is what, in his view, made Unitarians a "cult", and I am not making this up: Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity, they do not believe in hell, and they replace the authority of the Bible with reason. Those three things, said Martin, quite logically make Unitarians a "cult". Obviously Unitarians in America are not a "cult", and it is clear what was going with Martin: he was confusing his definition of "heresy" categories (beliefs different from what he considered correct historic Christian doctrines) with a sociological/behaviorial phenomenon, "cultism", not the same thing, a category confusion.
Anyway, here is the text for review. Is this text "lunatic fringe"? Or is that kind of name-calling like Walter Martin's overreach in his labeling? This text is from my website, I wrote it.
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Informal assessment of the Tippit case--a different way to look at it
There are evidence-based 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 crime scene witness of all, because of how close he was from only 15-25 feet away, testified 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, given that all photos of Oswald show him with a tapered rear hairline. For good measure this single best crime scene witness of all was a barber. Hard to beat that for a witness favorable to reasonable doubt.
No less than 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. As everyone knows Oswald was seen by Brewer and 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.
Multiple witness reports had the gunman’s hair described as “black” or very dark brown. Oswald’s appears to have been medium brown, and I am not aware of any independent testimony to a witness seeing Oswald’s hair as “black.” Reasonable doubt grounds number three.
There is a strong–more so for reasons argued earlier than has been acknowledged–argument that two sets of fingerprints lifted from the Tippit patrol car 20 minutes after the crime, deriving from the same one individual, were left 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. Reasonable doubt grounds number four.
The witnesses who identified the gunman as Oswald are less decisive than it appears. For some reason few seem aware that since the time of the Warren Commission in 1964 when the following was not known, studies since then have established–this is mainstream yet seems still not to have percolated consciousness of JFKA related/Tippit case discussions in a perverse illustration of scholarly compartmentalization–that witness facial recognition in cases in which the witness does not already know the person, is not reliable at over 50 feet. Reason: 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 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.
This is not to say there isn’t a case against Oswald from the shell hulls Oswald revolver identfication if one does not consider chain of custody issues with those hulls to be significant.
And there is an argument from coincidence/proximity that Oswald was nearby 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 incrimination relying on the number of them more than their quality.
There is zero weight toward incrimination of Oswald from the killer’s jacket (CE 162)’s fibers, from 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 jacket itself, Marina testified it was Lee’s, and Buell Frazier testified even more emphatically that it definitely was not–that he knew Lee’s gray work jacket and Lee’s was woolen and gray, not the off-white light tan cloth CE 162 which would easily pick up dirt and not be too practical as a daily work jacket in dusty or dirty surroundings doing manual labor. One 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, but none of those photos show him wearing CE 162. But the famous Minsk coworkers’ 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 a professional. Curtis Craford, recent hire by Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby, generously given a room to sleep in exchange for work supposedly at no pay by Ruby at the Carousel Club, was a self-confessed hitman at this stage of his life. He was left-handed as the fingerprints on the Tippit patrol car, if they were from the killer, indicate the killer was. Craford had a full head of hair so dark brown that it appeared 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, first hour, from Callaway and one other witness as two first-hour police radio bulletin sources on that, who saw and 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.
And the Craford daughter told me her father had a habit of talking to himself, compare Scoggins hearing the gunman doing that leaving the crime scene, not a practice or habit known of Oswald.
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. If it’s a choice 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. Craford was driven home from the Vegas Club by Ruby at ca. 3 am the night before. Ruby could have driven him to his apartment instead of to the Carousel Club 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 in a way that has not previously been argued, though I have not had time to write the case fully, it is 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. For anyone interested here are the first three chapters start of the case: https://www.scrollery.com/?p=1850.
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 attempt to shoot an officer, and he did not say, “it’s all over now” when he stood up. He said that after he was subdued and had stopped resisting, which changes the meaning. See the testimony of Walthers and others present on that timing point. The failed attempt to shoot Oswald’s revolver evidenced by the telltale “click” everyone heard was 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 intentionally to pull the trigger to shoot him. That’s not speculation, that’s McDonald himself on YouTube. He says he started to pull the trigger to shoot Oswald with the pistol pointed by McDonald intentionally into Oswald’s stomach. That’s McDonald saying that, not me. But Bentley’s hand was injured blocking the hammer which is why McDonald’s attempt to shoot Oswald failed. 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 claimed Oswald did but McDonald clearly did. Once the matter is properly studied and considered it 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. If you read Westbrook in Sneed, Westbrook, the commanding officer at the scene of the Oswald arrest–he knew it was McDonald who pulled that trigger (p. 315).
Anyone is still free to consider Oswald guilty on Tippit. But there is another side to the story that was never investigated.
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Let me start with my Roswell “UFO crash” analogy, because it’s a close analogue to the JFKA and a perfect example of how I approach extraordinary claims. Maybe I should be embarrassed to admit it, but there is
nothing I don’t know about this subject. (Apologies to those for whom 500 words is a “book,” as I was accused of writing yesterday on my thread about ghosts, but I don’t deal – most of the time anyway! – in pithy sound bites, and Greg doesn’t either.)
It’s clear that
something happened at Roswell in 1947. The Air Force has made two stabs at a mundane explanation, and neither stands up to scrutiny. Citizens and military officials up to the level of General have said that an alien craft crashed and debris and bodies were recovered. Witnesses insist that they and their families and livelihoods were threatened. Important records have mysterious gaps or have disappeared altogether. New Mexico “just happened” to be the epicenter of the atomic bomb program, and the 509th Bombardment Group, the only nuclear weapons unit at the time, “just happened” to be based at Roswell. Like the JFKA, the study of Roswell has been plagued by every imaginable sort of hoax and hoaxster.
The Roswell counterpart to the LN narrative is that a secret Project Mogul balloon crashed; this is demonstrably false for several reasons, and Mogul itself wasn’t even secret. The Air Force’s fallback position – “test dummies” – involves a program that wasn’t even in existence in 1947. By far the most popular “CT” narrative is that an ET craft crashed, technology and bodies were recovered, and this has been covered up at the most ultra-secret level of government secrecy. Even David Grusch, the latest in a long line of supposed insiders to come forward, promotes this narrative.
It’s easy to jump on the ET bandwagon and lose sight of the forest for the trees. I step back and ask threshold questions such as (1) what is the likelihood ETs would be traveling across interstellar space in what apparently resembled 1990’s earthly technology (sufficiently understandable that we have supposedly reverse-engineered much of it); (2) what is the likelihood such craft would crash in New Mexico thunderstorms, even once, let alone in the numbers that people like Grusch insist they have crashed around the world since at least the 1930s; (3) what is the likelihood that ETs would be even vaguely humanoid – two arms with hands, two legs with feet, mouths, big eyes, etc.; and (4) what is the likelihood that multiple generations of “keepers of the secrets” could keep a lid on all this for what is now almost 80 years? I’m forced to admit the likelihood is essentially zero, compelling as some of the testimonial and anecdotal evidence swirling around the ET hypothesis may seem. And yet,
something happened – and why can’t we get a plausible mundane explanation after 80 years?
After some 50 years of involvement (
The Roswell Incident was published in 1980), I must throw up my hands and admit I have no idea. I wouldn’t call the ET hypothesis “lunatic fringe” but certainly “improbable in the extreme.” And yet, I have no mundane explanation that is any better. My guess (and that’s all it is) is some sort of staged event – staged by an alien intelligence perhaps, or perhaps by the military (in which case, why all the secrecy after 80 years?).
So that’s how I approach JFKA claims and narratives. First and foremost, from the level of “Does this make any sense?” Does it have real-world plausibility? Does it reflect who the supposed participants really were, or have they been reinvented to fit the narrative? Does it fly in the face of better evidence and a simpler, more plausible narrative? When the answer to all of these questions is in the negative, I consign the claim or narrative to the lunatic fringe. In my experience, those in the lunatic fringe ignore all the threshold questions and leap directly into “connecting all the dots,” losing sight of the fact that the claim or narrative makes no sense or is
wildly improbable; this is the conspiratorial
love of complexity that Tom Bethell and the Dutch psychoanalyst talk about. Eventually, the claim or narrative takes on a cult-like life of its own.
With Tippit, we have a pretty straightforward narrative that extends from Oswald going to his room and getting his revolver to being arrested at the theater with his revolver. What is the raw likelihood that there was some incredible intervening event that either had nothing to do with Oswald, his revolver and the JFKA (
i.e., Tippit was murdered for unrelated reasons) or was somehow part of a plot to either eliminate Oswald or further frame him? The JFKA itself framed him about as thoroughly as he could be framed. If the plot was to eliminate him, then why didn’t whomever shot Tippit just shoot Oswald (or shoot Oswald after Oswald shot Tippit)? I have a near-impossible time getting past the “What sense does this make?” question.
At one time, specifically in regard to the questions being raised about Craford in connection with Tippit, I researched him as best I could, all the way up to his death many years later. He was a complete nobody all his life. He was about as much a hitman as my grandmother and about as unlikely a Tippit assassin as one could imagine. Does his departure from Dallas look anything like a hitman on the run? Does the rest of his obscure life look like someone who had any connection to the JFKA or a hit on a policeman? In all the various scenarios into which he is plugged, all that I can see he has going for him is that he vaguely resembled Oswald and had some connection to Ruby.
The Tippit murder was a wholly unexpected, traumatic event with a chaotic aftermath. It isn’t surprising that there are conflicting witness statements and loose threads. Greg has assembled a number of items of reasonable doubt (with respect to those items) and an alternative scenario, just as he has alternative scenarios for the Walker attempt, the Furniture Mart visit and other aspects of the JFKA. They all seem to me to be creative brainstorming that was intended from the get-go to articulate an alternative scenario – and that’s fine because it’s kind of fun, but they do all seem to exemplify the conspiratorial love of complexity. Add them all together, and I say “Impossible, just flat impossible for me to believe the orthodox narrative and the hard evidence supporting it is wrong in that many respects.” I won’t use the phrase “lunatic fringe” because Greg has put a lot of original work into these scenarios and he does seem to acknowledge that he is somewhat “thinking out loud” and merely “suggesting,” as opposed to the aggressive sales job that MTG tries to do.
If there was “something more” to the Tippit shooting, my guess would be that the shooting itself took place as described in the orthodox narrative and the “something more” is to be found in (1) Tippit’s alleged actions in the time before he encountered Oswald and/or (2) the “why” questions that John Corbett chides me for even considering –
Why the hell did Tippit stop Oswald? If Tippit thought there was anything suspicious, especially related to the JFKA, why the hell didn’t he take better precautions? Why the hell did Oswald completely short-circuit his escape and make things a hundred times worse for himself by immediately shooting Tippit in front of multiple witnesses?Wow, 1,267 words. I have written
almost three books already this morning! I am the Leo Tolstoy of JFKA forums!
