JFK Assassination Forum

Martin Weidmann— I did not realize you were proposing a crime scene wallet might be the one turned in later as the Oswald wallet in evidence, and not the one said to have been taken from Oswald in the car. That removes some of my objection of irrelevance to the crime scene issue. But may I ask, are you meaning this as evidence Oswald was present at the crime scene with Hidell ID? Do you think Oswald shot Tippit? Do you think he accidentally dropped his wallet at the scene, or handed his wallet to Tippit? I’m having trouble seeing where you go with this.

30 years later for a first mention of something that would be expected memorable from the beginning is the key fact making this urban legend genre. Not all witness claims are equal. Analogy that comes to mind is the claim of Secret Service agent Mike Howard that a torn out page in Oswald’s address book had a death list of four people Oswald intended to kill, that Howard claimed he saw the first week. The problem is there is no verification and Howard first mentioned it nearly 30 years after the fact. Sure he said it. Still does. But nobody believes it (I sure don’t) because of the 30-yr delay for a first witness claim that has no other verification. This Oswald wallet at the crime scene very parallel to the Mike Howard claim. They’re both equally unbelievable and for exactly parallel reasons.

Those may be valid questions but are of no relevance to the issue under discussion, the claim of Oswald ID in the WFAA-TV wallet filmed at the crime scene. It is not logical to link objections to a vanishingly weak case on Claim A to a “what about” over somewhere else where there is no linkage at all. The point about the Oswald ID claim at the crime scene is if there had been such a thing it would have been told, Leavelle in charge of the investigation would have known, that wallet would have been marked by officers, or bagged and labeled, and turned in as evidence to the crime lab at the crime scene right then instead of returned to whoever its civilian owner was at the scene. It would not wait 30 years for a claim of such to first come out from anyone. There is not a single witness in their living lifetime who is on tape or in print or statement signed in their own name saying they saw Oswald ID at the crime scene. Think about that. Even Croy’s posthumous autograph inscription if one thinks about it is at best a claim of belief (anyone can believe anything, that’s not evidence), not a claim of having firsthand witness evidence to offer.

There is no known record that Scoggins was ever asked about that wallet, and it is not clear (to me anyway) that Callaway ever was asked directly or directly denied. The reason for a little uncertainty here is Myers never reports a Callaway denial in his book, but at one point seemed to do so in a passing comment on his blog, but when I tried to ask him for clarification on that—because it is an important point if true—he did not answer my question. And I don’t think it even was written by Myers top level in a blog post but in one of the appended comments after, and he never repeated it. So I at least am uncertain if that is actually Callaway did deny, or whether that was maybe Myers’ interpretation of something less clear from Callaway. And of course there is no exact quote, transcript or tape of Myers’ Callaway interview to consult to fact-check the point. Bottom line: it seems likely—in light of the factual linkage of that wallet to the Tippit revolver filmed in the same officer’s hand—that that wallet was from either Callaway or Scoggins, and WFAA-TV filmed it just moments before it was returned to the citizen, probably Callaway or Scoggins, as its rightful owner, of no evidential interest or relevance to the Tippit murder case.

That it was not turned in as evidence at the time indicates it was a citizen’s, not considered evidence in the murder case. Since it is abnormal for a civilian to give an officer a wallet itself instead of ID pulled out from a wallet, this was not a normal routine citizen’s ID check. But it is factually part of the return of the Tippit revolver which had factually been taken from the crime scene by Callaway, with Callaway seen having done so causing witnesses to at first suspect Callaway, and Callaway and Scoggins were stopped and the Tippit revolver retrieved from Callaway at gunpoint, or in a hostile and embarrassing encounter. Since the wallet is linked to that Tippit revolver’s recovery from Callaway (evidence: the WFAA footage), that wallet makes sense as obtained from Callaway at the same time as the Tippit revolver, both turned in to the police, the police realize Callaway was not the gunman, and give him back his wallet. It’s a reconstruction but it is a plausible explanation of the wallet which accounts for the facts, and whose else would that wallet be than one of those two—a wallet linked to the Tippit revolver recovery episode and which police do not consider physical evidence in the crime case.

A lot of nothing to do with Scoggins or Callaway as related to the wallet. They left the scene.

Think about that. Even Croy’s posthumous autograph inscription if one thinks about it is at best a claim of belief (anyone can believe anything, that’s not evidence), not a claim of having firsthand witness evidence to offer.

This part is just made up

Yes, it would indeed be memorable to find a wallet on Oswald containing the Hidell ID. So, why did none of the officers that were in the car with Oswald mention such a find in any report? For months none of the officers said anything. Bentley wasn't called to testify and Gerald Hill said in his testimony, six months later, that he vaguely remembered the Hidell name being mentioned. Now isn't that weird?

Everything else you have written is pure speculation, so I won't bother to reply to it.

What I will ask you is; can you produce a solid chain of custody for the wallet taken from Oswald by Bentley?

Also, who was the unidentified officer that gave Guy Rose a wallet that contained the Hidell ID, and where did he/she get that wallet?

Mr. BALL. Did you search him?
Mr. ROSE. He had already been searched and someone had his billfold. I don't know whether it was the patrolman who brought him in that had it or not.
Mr. BALL. And the contents of the billfold supposedly were before you?
Mr. ROSE. Yes.

If there is no chain of custody for the wallet, how can it be determined conclusively that the wallet given to Rose is the same one that Bentley took from Oswald in the car?

Those may be valid questions but are of no relevance to the issue under discussion, the claim of Oswald ID in the WFAA-TV wallet filmed at the crime scene. It is not logical to link objections to a vanishingly weak case on Claim A to a “what about” over somewhere else where there is no linkage at all. The point about the Oswald ID claim at the crime scene is if there had been such a thing it would have been told, Leavelle in charge of the investigation would have known, that wallet would have been marked by officers, or bagged and labeled, and turned in as evidence to the crime lab at the crime scene right then instead of returned to whoever its civilian owner was at the scene. It would not wait 30 years for a claim of such to first come out from anyone. There is not a single witness in their living lifetime who is on tape or in print or statement signed in their own name saying they saw Oswald ID at the crime scene. Think about that. Even Croy’s posthumous autograph inscription if one thinks about it is at best a claim of belief (anyone can believe anything, that’s not evidence), not a claim of having firsthand witness evidence to offer.

There is no known record that Scoggins was ever asked about that wallet, and it is not clear (to me anyway) that Callaway ever was asked directly or directly denied. The reason for a little uncertainty here is Myers never reports a Callaway denial in his book, but at one point seemed to do so in a passing comment on his blog, but when I tried to ask him for clarification on that—because it is an important point if true—he did not answer my question. And I don’t think it even was written by Myers top level in a blog post but in one of the appended comments after, and he never repeated it. So I at least am uncertain if that is actually Callaway did deny, or whether that was maybe Myers’ interpretation of something less clear from Callaway. And of course there is no exact quote, transcript or tape of Myers’ Callaway interview to consult to fact-check the point. Bottom line: it seems likely—in light of the factual linkage of that wallet to the Tippit revolver filmed in the same officer’s hand—that that wallet was from either Callaway or Scoggins, and WFAA-TV filmed it just moments before it was returned to the citizen, probably Callaway or Scoggins, as its rightful owner, of no evidential interest or relevance to the Tippit murder case.

That it was not turned in as evidence at the time indicates it was a citizen’s, not considered evidence in the murder case. Since it is abnormal for a civilian to give an officer a wallet itself instead of ID pulled out from a wallet, this was not a normal routine citizen’s ID check. But it is factually part of the return of the Tippit revolver which had factually been taken from the crime scene by Callaway, with Callaway seen having done so causing witnesses to at first suspect Callaway, and Callaway and Scoggins were stopped and the Tippit revolver retrieved from Callaway at gunpoint, or in a hostile and embarrassing encounter. Since the wallet is linked to that Tippit revolver’s recovery from Callaway (evidence: the WFAA footage), that wallet makes sense as obtained from Callaway at the same time as the Tippit revolver, both turned in to the police, the police realize Callaway was not the gunman, and give him back his wallet. It’s a reconstruction but it is a plausible explanation of the wallet which accounts for the facts, and whose else would that wallet be than one of those two—a wallet linked to the Tippit revolver recovery episode and which police do not consider physical evidence in the crime case.

When I was moving into a management position, my employer sent me to a management class. One of the case studies was Trump's takeover of the renovation of Wollman Rink in Central Park back in the 1980s. It was supposed to be a 6 month project but it had languished under mismanagement and outright incompetence for over 7 years. Finally, the city leaders decided to turn the project over to Trump's company. He was a Democrat back then. Trump's team finished the project in 4 months, ahead of the schedule the city had placed on him. Trump took personal control of the project and the class went over the step-by-step process to get the project completed. It was held up as an example of how to manage a large project. The Trump organization managed the rink under contract to the city for over 3 decades. The city took management of the rink away from his company in 2021. By that time TDS had become a pandemic. Who cares about competence if it means working with Trump.

Gee, that was right after KGB "spotter" Semyon Kislin "spotted" Trump in 1980 at Kislin's Joy-Lud electronics store in Manhattan. Then, in 1986, the Soviet Ambassador to the U.N., Yuri Dubinin, and his daughter, Natalia, showed up unexpectedly at Trump Tower and flattered the xxxxxxx you-know-what out of the malignant narcissist. Next thing you know, Trump's seated next to Dubinin at a big Este Lauder dinner, and wah-la, The Traitorous Orange Turd and Ivana are invited all-expenses-paid to Moscow on the bogus premise of building a Trump Tower there!!!


Regarding the Wollman Rink:

Trump convinced the primary contractor, HRH Construction, to do the work without making a profit, telling them that their work would pay for itself with the publicity.[13][18] However, in press conferences that Trump held at every incremental milestone in the four-month effort, he never mentioned HRH.[13] Adrian Benepe, then the Parks Department's spokesperson and later its commissioner, stated the project was largely complete by the time Trump entered the picture, and that the city, not Trump, had paid the contractors for the actual reconstruction.[13]

-- Wikipedia


Here's a pertinent Bloomberg article (footnote 13 from the above Wikipedia article) from 29 September 2015:

In June of 1986, Donald J. Trump was a second-tier developer in a city crawling with ambitious builders. He had a single skyscraper to his name, and was probably best known as the part owner of the New Jersey Generals in the flailing United States Football League, his taste for shiny finishes and his regular fulminations attesting to his own importance. But by November, he became, essentially, the candidate we know today, a colossal tabloid celebrity who maintains, bombastically, that he can manage government better than any politician. What changed? More than anything, what made Trump Trump was the drama surrounding the refurbishing of Wollman Rink, the ice skating oval located in the Southeast quadrant of Central Park.

As always with Trump, it’s hard to parse the reality from the publicity. At the time, New York City's government notoriously didn’t work. The city was still just a decade removed from municipal bankruptcy. Crack was everywhere. Murders were hovering around 2,000 a year. The city had actually begun to come back to life from its 1970s depths, with bricks and mortar sprouting in the lots left vacant by riots and two decades of disinvestment, but the recovery was hardly visible.

The rink was an emblem of civic dysfunction. Formerly a jewel in the crown of Central Park, a supporting star in films like Love Story and half a dozen others, Wollman Rink had fallen into disrepair. And what was worse was that the city seemingly had no idea how fix it. Shuttered for repairs in 1980 by the Koch administration and set to be restored at the cost of $4.7 million, by 1985, the rink was $12 million over budget and still not ready.

“If we could just plan and execute, it would be billions and billions of dollars that would be saved.” -- Donald Trump

Bronson Binger, a visionary landscape architect and preservationist who served as the city’s assistant commissioner of capital projects, hoped to turn Wollman into “the kind of thing you would see at Buckingham Palace,” according to Julia Vitullo-Martin, who also served as an assistant commissioner in the Parks Department during the Wollman Saga, and is now a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association. Touring the in-flux facility with a television reporter that summer, Binger pledged that the rink would be up and running by Thanksgiving. And if it’s not, the reporter asked? If it’s not, Binger said, I will resign.

It wasn’t, and he did.

Trump, who could see from his office window the messy construction site that Wollman had been for years, saw an opportunity. In June of 1986, the developer brayed that if the city would just hand the keys to the zamboni to him, he would have it done by Christmas. "I have total confidence that we will be able to do it," Trump said. "I am going on record as saying that I will not be embarrassed."

Then and after, Trump described his interest as a pure expression of civic mindedness. All he wanted in return was the rink’s concession rights, which he would, in turn, donate to charity.

“If Koch doesn't like this offer," said Trump, "then let him have the same people who have built it for the last six years do it for the next six years.”

Trump and Koch, of course, coveted exactly the same real estate—in front of microphones and TV cameras, and the front pages of the city’s tabloids, and had been engaged in a long-running feud. The city can only be dominated by one large charismatic personality at a time, and Ed was determined that it be the mayor,” said Jonathan Soffer, author of Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City.

Trump had been pushing to have some of his midtown properties made available for a property tax abatement. Koch resisted, arguing that the abatement was to encourage the building of affordable housing in the outer boroughs. Trump, of course, sued, and even brought a personal lawsuit against Anthony Gliedman, the city’s Housing Commissioner. (Trump won, and in an early display of Trumpian knife-twisting, ended up poaching Gliedman away from city government to oversee the renovation of Wollman.)

The renovation of Wollman Rink had begun poorly and turned disastrous. Rather than using brinewater as a coolant to freeze the rink, the parks commissioner elected to use Freon, a chemical used in air conditioning units and now widely banned for its ozone-depleting properties. It was an immensely complicated operation, and one the city was incapable of properly completing. A subcontractor underestimated the amount of concrete needed to pour the rink's floor and so was forced to dilute the mixture. Design flaws meant that one part of the rink was six inches lower than the rest. There was an ongoing feud between the Parks Department under the mayor’s control in Manhattan and its capital projects bureau in Queens, still staffed with loyalists to Robert Moses who saw the construction of an ice rink as a frivolity.  The project’s lead contractor was officially ruled to be in default, but by that point the principal of the company that was originally building the rink had been killed in a car accident en route to a company-wide getaway to Atlantic City, and the company subsequently disbanded.

“It was like a David Cronenberg movie,” said Vitullo-Martin. “Wollman was such a disgrace. It was hard to absorb the incompetence.”

While City Hall shrugged, the city’s tabloid turned the rink into a daily reminder of the administration’s inability to tame the city. “Skating rinks work all over the world,” The Daily News wrote. “To stand back and shrug is not going to wash. Towering incompetence is the kindest possible explanation.”

The Koch administration, meanwhile, was being consumed by a massive corruption scandal involving a kickback scheme in its parking violations bureau, a scandal that led to the suicide of the Queens borough president, a close Koch ally. And the city’s comptroller, Harrison Goldin, was eyeing his own mayoral challenge to Koch and held up any further work on the rink. Turning the project over to Trump was a way to break the political logjam and to rid himself of the cascading bureaucratic mishaps, even as Trump released a letter he wrote to Koch decrying “incompetence” that ''must be considered one of the great embarrassments of your administration.” (Koch meanwhile railed to anyone who would listen that Trump was a “blowhard” and a “supreme egotistical lightweight,” according to Soffer, his biographer.)

In allowing Trump to build the rink, Koch didn’t exactly capitulate—Trump had originally wanted to pay for the renovation himself, covering his costs by running the rink and an adjacent restaurant. In the final deal, the city paid for the renovation, and the profits were all donated to charity.

Trump had Wollman Rink up and running by November 1, two months ahead of schedule and $775,000 under budget. Skating stars like Dorothy Hamill, Scott Hamilton, Dick Button, and Aja Zanova-Steindler glided across the ice at the ribbon cutting, with Button declaring the new rink to be like skating on velvet.

If Trump has any particular genius, it is for jumping to the front of the parade and acting like it is where he has been all along. Agreeing to take on the rink was in this category. It is not as if Trump decided to take over the Second Ave Subway or other long-stalled (and far more complicated) city development projects. “I mean c’mon, it’s a skating rink,” said Vitullo-Martin. “Any halfway decent construction person would have been able to build the damn thing.” There were no real environmental reviews, limited public safety concerns, and delays usually associated with refurbishing a landmarked property were removed as a condition of Trump taking over the project. Plus, the city was limited by a review process and by hiring the lowest-bidding contractor. As a private entity, Trump was able to ignore all that, paying contractors at below cost by promising more work later on in one of his many projects.

Rudolph Rinaldi, the director of construction in the Parks Department at the time, recalled Trump's taking his team to Canada to see how a similar project was refurbished, and showing up to tour the site in Central Park with one team of architects and engineers, only to show up the next time with a completely different set of architects and engineers. “We did projects that were much more complicated without Trump,” Rinaldi said. “But we couldn’t fire all of our architects and a hire a whole new team just because we felt like it.”

At the time, City Hall was mystified that Trump was even interested. “You generally don’t see developers try to fix someone else’s capital project,” recalled Vitullo-Martin. “I mean, who does that? Have you ever seen a developer come in and say to a city, ‘Oh, I can fix your crumbling bridge?’ You need a narcissist who will come forward and say, ‘You don’t know what you are doing. I know what I am doing, I will fix it and you will put my name on it.”’

“Any real estate developer in the city could have done that project, but why do you think they didn’t?” asked Adrian Benepe, then a spokesman for the Parks Department and later its commissioner. “It’s because most major real estate families in New York want to work behind the scenes and do the deals, and so many of them do many more deals and build many more buildings than Donald Trump ever does.

“There are so many myths about this thing,” Benepe continued. “One was that he did it for free. No, he did it for whatever the budget was. Another myth: he did something the city never could have done. Well, no, the project was largely complete by the time he took over.”

But Trump also wanted to prove a point: That the private sector was a far more efficient vehicle than municipal government. By getting the thing built on time and under budget, Trump burnished his reputation as a can-do guy while pioneering the notion of public/private partnership that increasingly swept the city. And in a city where the major developers sit atop philanthropic boards and give away billions to make New York a slightly better place to live, Wollman has remained Trump’s lone calling card of his concern for the greater good.

“Yes, he did a solid for the city, but he also burnished his reputation to a considerable extent,” Benepe said. “Most real estate developers, when they get involved in something like this, ask themselves what’s in it for the city. Trump wanted to know what was in it for Donald Trump and then there may be some ancillary benefits for the city.”

The distinctive mixture of braggadocious civic concern and narcissism Trump displayed in the Wollman rink contretemps now has him well on the way to the GOP nomination.

About as significant as the Authorized Permit for Autopsy Form - i.e., no significance at all if the issue is the precise time at which Tippit died.

I just think it adds to the general mirth of the discussion. Obviously, anyone who dies before placed in the ambulance is pretty well guaranteed to be DOA even if the ambulance trip took four hours. I doubt seriously that a form authorizing an autopsy is expected to specify the "date and time of death" with exactitude, as though the difference between 1:12, 1:15 or 1:18 would be of great significance to an autopsy performed at 3:15 PM.

Deja vu all over again: The exact same parties had this exact same discussion on this thread in 2024 (and probably 2022, 2020, 2018 ...):

https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php?topic=3968.126

No wonder I find the JFKA stuff sort of depressing. If not approached in the spirit of a Monty Python skit, it's scarcely any fun. I always accuse MTG of having a loop playing inside his head that recycles every couple of years, but really it's pretty much everyone.

About as significant as the Authorized Permit for Autopsy Form - i.e., no significance at all if the issue is the precise time at which Tippit died.

The difference is that that Authorisation for Autopsy was written within 2 hours of the DOA declaration and based on information provided by the hospital.
The death certificate wasn't issued until November 29, 1963 and the information was provided by the funeral home.

I just think it adds to the general mirth of the discussion. Obviously, anyone who dies before placed in the ambulance is pretty well guaranteed to be DOA even if the ambulance trip took four hours.

True, but in this case there is no evidence that Tippit was already dead at the scene, unless somebody from the funeral home is qualified to make that call while not even being at the scence.

Is it likely Tippit was dead after taking a bullet to the head and three in the chest? Sure... but they did try to revive him before declaring him DOA at 1:15 PM.
But if we accept that Tippit was already dead at the scene, it only means that he died at least three minutes before arriving at the hospital.

I doubt seriously that a form authorizing an autopsy is expected to specify the "date and time of death" with exactitude, as though the difference between 1:12, 1:15 or 1:18 would be of great significance to an autopsy performed at 3:15 PM.


I agree, but the fact remains that it does mention 1:15 PM for the DOA, which is also confirmed by Davenport. For the autopsy there is no significance, but for Oswald being able to shoot Tippit it is beyond significance. If he couldn't have been there, he had no opportunity to shoot Tippit.

But if the DOA time isn't a major issue, as you say, can you come up with an explanation for the FBI pestering hospital workers for days about this exact matter?