Helen Markham, Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, William Scoggins, Sam Guinyard and Ted Callaway all attended a police lineup and positively identified Lee Oswald as the man they saw either shoot J.D. Tippit or run from the immediate scene with a gun in his hands. Not one witness who attended a lineup identified someone other than Oswald as the man they saw.
Four men located at the Johnny Reynolds Motor Company located one block south of the Tippit shooting scene heard the shots and looked up the street. Warren Reynolds, Pat Patterson and Harold Russell positively identified Lee Oswald as the man they saw running south on Patton to Jefferson with a gun in his hands. One man, L.J. Lewis, failed to identify Oswald as the man he saw but Lewis also did NOT say that the man was not Oswald; only that he couldn't be sure either way.
Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith were out in the front yard of the house on the corner of Tenth and Denver (one block east of Tenth and Patton). They heard the shots, looked west along Tenth and saw the killer run from the scene. These two men were interviewed by the FBI and neither could positively identify Lee Oswald as the killer. However, neither man stated that Oswald was NOT the man they saw.
Domingo Benavides was the closest witness to the shooting. He heard the shots and ducked down in his pickup truck. He saw the killer but told the Dallas Police that he felt he didn't get a good enough look at the killer to make an identification. Benavides could not state that the killer was Oswald and he could not state that the killer was NOT Oswald.
Add up these above witnesses. Thirteen witnesses to the shooting and/or the killer fleeing. Nine of the witnesses positively identified Lee Oswald. Four of the witnesses could not make a determination one way or the other. But ZERO of the thirteen witnesses told the authorities that the man was NOT Oswald.
Argumentum ad populum. It is a logical fallacy to claim that just because a majority of the witnesses say the same thing, it must be true. In fact, under normal circumstances, it is a mathematical impossibility that in such a small group all witnesses say the same thing.
Witness testimony is regarded as highly unreliable. When ten people watch the same car accident, you normally expect to get ten different stories about what actually happened. With this in mind, it is totally beyond belief that so many witnesses, some of whom only saw the killer for no more than a couple of seconds at best, identified Oswald as the man they had seen, unless of course it was somehow obvious who the man was they were supposed to identify. You simply can not argue that witnesses are getting things wrong all the time (like the color of the jacket) and then turn around and claim that all the witnesses who identified Oswald in the line up could not possibly have been wrong.
But ZERO of the thirteen witnesses told the authorities that the man was NOT Oswald.Which is just about the weakest argument anybody can make.
They didn't say it was not him, so it must be him? Is that what you are saying? Really?
