
This gives us some insight on how the police manipulated the witnesses.
This gives us some insight on how the police manipulated the witnesses.I think it was more of a miscommunication than a manipulation. McWatters was not easy to communicate with, that is apparent in his WC testimony. They sometimes had to ask him the same question several different ways to get an answer that made any sense. McWatters was probably shocked and befuddled when they whisked him off the bus to question him on the evening of 11/22/63. And he had hardly any time to contemplate what had happened before he was taken to the lineup. Our memories are not like snapshots, they are reconstructions based on associations. In all the confusion, McWatters mistakenly associated his conversation with the teenager to the bus transfer. (This type of thing happens to the best of us every once in a while.) He was thinking about the teenager when he saw the lineup, hence the hesitancy to say for sure. I can only guess that, sometime that evening, McWatters must have related the story of the teenager's words to someone at the Dallas Police Department and they assumed it was the same person who got the bus transfer. The two facts (who said the President was shot in the temple then grinned; and where LHO got on the bus) in error in the affidavit are not as important as the fact that is correct: "The transfer #004459 is a transfer from my bus with my punch mark."