Why Officer Tippit Stopped His Killer

Jake Sykes wrote:As Goban mentioned earlier, I've offered up my basis for thinking that it is entirely possible that the two rare events, JFKA and the murder of a police officer, can easily have occurred together  in time and in placement i.e. both in Dallas on the day and as separated by 40 minutes or whatever, while being unrelated to each other. It doesn't exclude the possibility they were related, but is not evidence to that effect, in and of itself.

I do take seriously nevertheless the conviction that many including Goban retain that such a coincidence is virtually impossible without a conspiratorial connection. This makes me consider; if these two rare events were indeed unrelated, were the JFKA conspirators motivated to force that connection anyway by virtue of the knowledge that the public would never accept any such randomly occurring scenario?

Did killing Oswald in the theater really require the Tippet killing? Couldn't the police have all rushed the TT on an APB of the missing TSBD suspect seen entering the TT without Tippet ever happening? I think they could have, but as it turned out had no choice but to make the Tippet murder part of the official story; not out of the desire to bolster their Oswald is the assassin story, but out of necessity in presenting an Oswald is the assassin story that the public would ever accept. The timing and facts of it all are so very forced. Why risk that if they didn't have to, unless of course they felt that they really did have to?

Jake Sykes wrote:Mick, I think what Greg has suggested (I trust he'll correct me if I'm wrong) is that the disturbance was a real one, not intended to lure Tippet, but that due to the assassination, it was Tippet who responded. That happened because the regular cop had been reassigned to Dealey (I believe it was) by dispatch, so Tippet in turn was ordered away from his regular beat to fill the void that was left open in Oak Cliff by the regular cop's reassignment. The regular cop would have been very well known and "friendly" to the perp and no cop would have been killed. He did kill Tippet though because Tippet was serious about taking him in and that wasn't going to happen. That became the mess DPD had to promptly clean up by pinning it on Oswald in addition to the assassination, hence the muddled mess of 'evidence'. 

So the "relatedness" of Tippet's murder to the assassination is in the nature of it's having been precipitated by the assassination resulting in reassignments of officers to different areas of the City, but without pre-planning of Tippet's murder having occurred by the assassination planners. All speculation of course.

Just an aside with the Glocko station and Tippet being there. Perhaps simply a matter of watching a pinch point for people coming over to Oak Cliff from Dealey. Just be at the ready to block the road and to see what there was to see coming in from over there following the assassination. Then the disturbance call and away he goes.

I disagree with Greg's general view of the Tippit case.

Given that Tippit was only the third Dallas police officer to be killed by gunfire since the war and that Oswald was arrested a short distance away not long thereafter, it is very unlikely that these events were not linked to the presidential assassination. 

https://www.odmp.org/agency/924-dallas-police-department-texas

The wallet “found” at the Tippit murder scene, the contents of which were discussed by Westbrook and Barrett, was a plant. (I believe even Fritz thought it was too obvious and shuffled the contents to another found on Oswald - this was argued by Robert Charles-Dunne.) In conjunction with the MC rifle which was discovered around the same time, the key “evidence” against Oswald was in place even before his arrest. 

The likeliest scenario for me is that Tippit was singled out as a sacrificial lamb to bolster the case against Oswald, presumably with the aim of ensuring his imminent demise in the Texas Theatre at the hands of police. However, most involved in what they believed to be the plan were not working to this agenda and I think that applies to almost all DPD officers (Murray Jackson, for example, was a friend of Tippit). There is a chance Tippit was originally tasked with killing Oswald, took cold feet and then paid the price, but the narrow time-scales involved would seem to work against that scenario. Then again, the presence of Carl Mather’s car seems to open up other, more elaborate, possibilities as to what Tippit at least thought he was involved in.

Mick Purdy wrote:WFAA cameraman, Ron Reiland took film of the wallet being examined by police. He later went back to the studio and provided audio for his footage as it was aired. He described the wallet as belonging to Tippit. 


And that makes a whole lot of sense.

BC_II wrote:This is a fascinating, mature and respectful debate here. Thanks to you all for being critical in your thinking and analysis. Really helps when it should be a standard anyway when investing in this complex case. Greg, would you say that Tippit was involved in the conspiracy from a planning perspective? So, if I am to understand you correctly, you don't believe he was murdered as part of the planning but that may have happened due to a 'hiccup' or unforseen circumstance? I will definitely through this entire topic a few more times to get a better grasp on you guys' thinking and positions of course.

While stories like Tippit-was-Badgeman are clearly fanciful, Joseph McBride was correct to focus on William Mentzel (91). This is one guy who was relatively ignored by researchers even although his actions seem highly suspicious (he was supposedly on a lunch-break throughout the period following the assassination in a restaurant two blocks from the Texas Theatre). The testimony from Kenneth Croy and Harry Olsen is so unconvincing it places them as key suspects in my book. 

Tippit was several miles from his patrol area and the reason given by Jackson for his presence in north-east Oak Cliff is not credible. Several officers were in or very close to this area. One – C T Walker (56) – actually reported he was on East Jefferson seconds before Jackson’s 12:45 instruction* to R C Nelson (87) and Tippit (78). Additionally, Jackson’s dialogue with Tippit seems very stilted (“You will be at large for any emergency that comes in”) and pays undue attention to what was ostensibly a mundane policing task.

The house outside which Tippit was shot matches the address given by Jack Ruby for Joyce McDonald (Joy Dale) and correlates with “... the apartment house where he (Tippit) lives in...” part of Virginia Davis’s testimony. In other words, this encounter was unlikely to be random – I believe Tippit knew his killer.

Intriguing factors in the Tippit conundrum which have never really been explained are:

1) The Mather car at the El Chico restaurant with the Oswald lookalike.

2) Leona Miller giving the same phone number noted in the Carousel Club as that reported by the Davis sisters-in-law. 

The article from Jack Myers references the story about a “fight at Marsalis and 12th” which has now morphed into a “stabbing at Marsalis and 10th” of which there were “many witnesses” (although none has ever come forward). Such an event would seem like the ideal pretext to explain Tippit’s presence in the north-eastern section of Oak Cliff – a major dilemma facing DPD. We’d really need a lot more evidence to take this at face value.

The James Andrews story strikes me as being fictitious. It only emerged when a researcher approached him to ask about Roscoe White. Why would anyone sit on a something like this for years? The location where this incident was supposed to have occurred also conflicts with any reasonable timeline for Tippit’s last few minutes.

I keep an open mind about the Top Ten Record Shop claim – it may be true, but why did we only hear about it nearly 20 years later? Then again, Tippit did miss a radio call around this time – unanswered calls were rare and according to the Bill Drenas article one of only 5 or so in his DPD career. Noticeably, Mentzel also missed a call shortly after finally returning from his lunch-break.