In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East
Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off
the alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report)
Implied: This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the
temple tale is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44,
on the police radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact, told
Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the scene
indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw
unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the alley
behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man running
INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not raised
tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his
Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that
the suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley.
She must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More
later on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham was
trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [
Mrs. M] went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I
couldn't holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?)
In sum: Mrs. M could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the
latter running into the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at
Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "
street", which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police,
so [Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted Callaway)
to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of the
alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased
after the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as
the killer or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off
the alley, either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and
Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading,
then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--
Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just left
hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of Mrs.
Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to
have thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see
what he could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his foot
chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly,
it seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has
found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not really
a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into thin
air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On 11/
22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that
she informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the
house. Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said that
he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no
help either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter?
Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a
couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

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* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East

Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact, told

Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the scene
indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw

unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the alley

behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man running
INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not raised
tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham was

trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn't

holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at

Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "street",
which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police, so [
Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted Callaway)

to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of the

alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased after
the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the killer
or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the alley,
either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and Callaway.

Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading, then,
towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--Scoggins
seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just left

hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of Mrs.
Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to have
thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see what he
could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his foot

chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly, it
seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has

found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not really

a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into thin
air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On 11/

22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that she
informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the house.
Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said that

he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no help
either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter? Why

did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a couple
of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff.

It's not hard for the people who look at the correct things correctly.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:45:54 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:44:11 AM UTC-7, John Corbett wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff.

It's not hard for the people who look at the correct things correctly.

What a detailed, well-reasoned response to my post! Not. And Bud should sue for plagiarism.

Did my reply seem dismissive to you? It was intended to be.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:44:11 AM UTC-7, John Corbett wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff.

It's not hard for the people who look at the correct things correctly.

What a detailed, well-reasoned response to my post! Not. And Bud should sue for plagiarism.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 12:18:03 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East

Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact, told

Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the scene
indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw

unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the alley

behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man running
INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not raised
tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham was

trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn't

holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at

Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "street",
which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police, so [
Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted Callaway)

to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of the

alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased after
the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the killer
or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the alley,
either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and

Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading,
then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--
Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just left

hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of Mrs.
Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to have
thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see what he
could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his foot

chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly, it
seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has

found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not

really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into
thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On 11/

22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that she
informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the house.
Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said that

he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no help
either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter?

Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a
couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated

The woman screaming at Scoggins' departing taxi was corroborated by Croy long ago. Croy's words just didn't make sense then. Now they do... I remember that Myers had the Holmes-Wheless story up on his website. Then he abruptly pulled it, I guess when
he realized he was aiding and abetting the opposition! Fortunately, it's still in his revision...

dcw


is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:50:33 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 12:18:03 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East

Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact,

told Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the
scene indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw

unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the

alley behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man
running INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not
raised tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham

was trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn't

holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at

Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "street",
which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police, so [
Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted

Callaway) to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of

the alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased
after the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the
killer or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the
alley, either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and

Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading,
then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--
Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just

left hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of
Mrs. Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to
have thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see
what he could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his

foot chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly,
it seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has

found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not

really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into
thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On

11/22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that
she informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the house.
Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said

that he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no
help either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter?

Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a
couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated

The woman screaming at Scoggins' departing taxi was corroborated by Croy long ago. Croy's words just didn't make sense then. Now they do... I remember that Myers had the Holmes-Wheless story up on his website. Then he abruptly pulled it, I guess when

he realized he was aiding and abetting the opposition! Fortunately, it's still in his revision...

dcw
is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

It's always a mistake to trust anything that comes from Myers. And Croy must be recognized for the clown he is. He admits that he doesn't know what he's talking about. This must be taken into account. Nobody ever thought that Scoggins was the suspect.
The pronoun "he" got thrown around and Croy caught it up his butthole. "Or something," as Croy said. Croy doesn't know who "he" is. And the woman is probably Markham, and she can't keep her lies straight beyond "1:06." She kept that one straight, the
only lie she could remember, probably. And remember now, Croy thought that Markham was standing there and watering her lawn. This must be considered when evaluating these witnesses.

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On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:45:54 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:44:11 AM UTC-7, John Corbett wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff.

It's not hard for the people who look at the correct things correctly.

What a detailed, well-reasoned response to my post! Not. And Bud should sue for plagiarism.

Enjoy yourself Don, you`re just someone with a childlike mentality playing with information like it is building blocks. Build something you like, show it to the other children, knock yourself out.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 8:33:16 PM UTC-5, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East

Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact, told

Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the scene
indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw

unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the alley

behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man running
INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not raised
tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham was

trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn't

holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at

Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "street",
which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police, so [
Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted Callaway)

to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of the

alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased after
the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the killer
or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the alley,
either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and Callaway.

Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading, then,
towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--Scoggins
seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just left

hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of Mrs.
Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to have
thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see what he
could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his foot

chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly, it
seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has

found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not really

a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into thin
air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On 11/

22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that she
informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the house.
Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said that

he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no help
either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter? Why

did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a couple
of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

There was quite a lot of activity and commotion in the locale of maybe one mile or so around Tenth and Patton around the time Tippit was shot. Too much. Some of it seemed like some kind of insider killer mob looking for Oswald, who had jumped out of
Tippit's car after Oswald got into it with Tippit and White after Oswald left 1026 North Beckley.

If Roscoe was using his 45 AUTO to shoot 38 AUTO bullets as Ricky has suggested then reloading would have been swapping out the empty or almost empty or maybe even jammed clip with a full clip, and the shells originally found were possibly found were
where they landed after being automatically ejected from Roscoe's 45. As others pointed out firing 38 bullets through a 45 deforms the bullets so they are virtually unrecognizable as to caliber. 38 AUTO shells being found under this scenario.

I believe Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz aka Umbrella Man was the other person besides Roscoe who had a weapon drawn when Roscoe shot Tippit. It's debatable whether or not Lanz fired any shot(s).

Markham saw both Roscoe and Lanz and combined them into one person in her story. She has Roscoe running down the alley after the act but that was Lanz. Roscoe ran the other way and was confronted by Callaw. Clemons saw Roscoe and Lanz. In one of the
videos Markham says the man she saw shoot Tippit was "fiddling with his gun" = changed clip = not reloading a revolver, implying Roscoe had fired enough rounds to need to reload the clip in his 45 AUTO.

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On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 8:33:16 PM UTC-5, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East

Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact, told

Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the scene
indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw

unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the alley

behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man running
INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not raised
tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham was

trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn't

holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at

Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "street",
which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police, so [
Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted Callaway)

to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of the

alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased after
the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the killer
or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the alley,
either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and Callaway.

Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading, then,
towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--Scoggins
seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just left

hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of Mrs.
Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to have
thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see what he
could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his foot

chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly, it
seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has

found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not really

a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into thin
air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On 11/

22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that she
informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the house.
Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said that

he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no help
either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter? Why

did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a couple
of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

There was quite a lot of activity and commotion in the locale of maybe one mile or so around Tenth and Patton around the time Tippit was shot. Too much. Some of it seemed like some kind of insider killer mob looking for Oswald, who had jumped out of
Tippit's car after Oswald got into it with Tippit and White after Oswald left 1026 North Beckley.

If Roscoe was using his 45 AUTO to shoot 38 AUTO bullets as Ricky has suggested then reloading would have been swapping out the empty or almost empty or maybe even jammed clip with a full clip, and the shells originally found were possibly found were
where they landed after being automatically ejected from Roscoe's 45. As others pointed out firing 38 bullets through a 45 deforms the bullets so they are virtually unrecognizable as to caliber.

I believe Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz aka Umbrella Man was the other person besides Roscoe who had a weapon drawn when Roscoe shot Tippit. It's debatable whether or not Lanz fired any shots.

Markham saw both Roscoe and Lanz and combined them into one person in her story. She has Roscoe running down the alley after the act but that was Lanz. In one of the videos Markham says the man she saw shoot Tippit was "fiddling with his gun" = changed
clip = not reloading a revolver, implying Roscoe had fired enough rounds to need to reload the clip in his 45, the reloaded clip containing 45 AUTO rounds, helping to cover up the fact Roscoe shot Tippit with 38 AUTO bullets from his 45 AUTO firearm. The
38 AUTO shells became 38 Special shells to fit the Oswald frame.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:10:19 AM UTC-7, John Corbett wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:45:54 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:44:11 AM UTC-7, John Corbett wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff.

It's not hard for the people who look at the correct things correctly.

What a detailed, well-reasoned response to my post! Not. And Bud should sue for plagiarism.

Did my reply seem dismissive to you? It was intended to be.

Ouch!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:10:23 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:50:33 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 12:18:03 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on

East Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact,

told Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the
scene indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they

saw unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the

alley behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man
running INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not
raised tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham

was trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn'

t holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door

at Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "
street", which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police,
so [Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted

Callaway) to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of

the alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased
after the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the
killer or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the
alley, either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and

Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading,
then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--
Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just

left hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of
Mrs. Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to
have thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see
what he could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his

foot chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly,
it seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin

has found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not

really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into
thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot.

On 11/22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64)
that she informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the
house. Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said

that he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no
help either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the

shooter? Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might
be a couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated

The woman screaming at Scoggins' departing taxi was corroborated by Croy long ago. Croy's words just didn't make sense then. Now they do... I remember that Myers had the Holmes-Wheless story up on his website. Then he abruptly pulled it, I guess when

he realized he was aiding and abetting the opposition! Fortunately, it's still in his revision...

dcw
is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

It's always a mistake to trust anything that comes from Myers. And Croy must be recognized for the clown he is. He admits that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Part of that was the confusion at the scene--e.g., Scoggins at first accused (by Mrs M) of being the shooter, then released on good behavior. And Holmes clears up the "detective" refs--it was he who was the (sort of) detective, not Callaway. Scoggins
was encouraged, I'm sure, to go along with this elevation of Callaway to God, Jr., and take part in the minimization of his own role.

This must be taken into account. Nobody ever thought that Scoggins was the suspect.

The Holmes episode confirms that he was suspected...

dcw

The pronoun "he" got thrown around and Croy caught it up his butthole. "Or something," as Croy said. Croy doesn't know who "he" is. And the woman is probably Markham, and she can't keep her lies straight beyond "1:06." She kept that one straight, the

only lie she could remember, probably. And remember now, Croy thought that Markham was standing there and watering her lawn. This must be considered when evaluating these witnesses.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:53:42 AM UTC-7, Bud wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:45:54 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:44:11 AM UTC-7, John Corbett wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff.

It's not hard for the people who look at the correct things correctly.

What a detailed, well-reasoned response to my post! Not. And Bud should sue for plagiarism.

Enjoy yourself Don, you`re just someone with a childlike mentality playing with information like it is building blocks. Build something you like, show it to the other children, knock yourself out.

Ouch!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:48:38 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:10:23 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:50:33 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 12:18:03 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on

East Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact,

told Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the
scene indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they

saw unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the

alley behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man
running INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not
raised tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In

his Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that
the suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley.
She must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More
later on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs.

Markham was trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She
was screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs.
M] went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I

couldn't holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum:
Mrs. M could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running
into the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side

door at Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "
street", which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police,
so [Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted

Callaway) to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most

of the alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased
after the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the
killer or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the
alley, either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and

Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading,
then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--
Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was

just left hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect
description of Mrs. Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi.
And for Mrs M to have thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car
window to see what he could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his

foot chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly,
it seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin

has found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not

really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into
thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot.

On 11/22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64)
that she informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the
house. Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who

said that he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill
was no help either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the

shooter? Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might
be a couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated

The woman screaming at Scoggins' departing taxi was corroborated by Croy long ago. Croy's words just didn't make sense then. Now they do... I remember that Myers had the Holmes-Wheless story up on his website. Then he abruptly pulled it, I guess

when he realized he was aiding and abetting the opposition! Fortunately, it's still in his revision...

dcw
is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

It's always a mistake to trust anything that comes from Myers. And Croy must be recognized for the clown he is. He admits that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Part of that was the confusion at the scene--e.g., Scoggins at first accused (by Mrs M) of being the shooter, then released on good behavior. And Holmes clears up the "detective" refs--it was he who was the (sort of) detective, not Callaway. Scoggins

was encouraged, I'm sure, to go along with this elevation of Callaway to God, Jr., and take part in the minimization of his own role.

This must be taken into account. Nobody ever thought that Scoggins was the suspect.

The Holmes episode confirms that he was suspected...

dcw

The pronoun "he" got thrown around and Croy caught it up his butthole. "Or something," as Croy said. Croy doesn't know who "he" is. And the woman is probably Markham, and she can't keep her lies straight beyond "1:06." She kept that one straight, the

only lie she could remember, probably. And remember now, Croy thought that Markham was standing there and watering her lawn. This must be considered when evaluating these witnesses.
The Holmes episode was written and directed by Dale Myers. It never happened in the real world.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East

Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact, told

Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the scene
indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw

unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the alley

behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man running
INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not raised
tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham was

trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn't

holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at

Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "street",
which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police, so [
Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted Callaway)

to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of the

alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased after
the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the killer
or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the alley,
either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and Callaway.

Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading, then,
towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--Scoggins
seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just left

hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of Mrs.
Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to have
thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see what he
could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his foot

chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly, it
seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has

found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not really

a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into thin
air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On 11/

22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that she
informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the house.
Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said that

he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no help
either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter? Why

did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a couple
of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

Myers aside, your reference to Poe's Dear Chief letter about Benavides going to church has stimulated some thought in the some thought in the noggin. I might have to blame you for another video.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Sun, 8 Oct 2023 09:53:40 -0700 (PDT), Bud <sirslick@fast.net>
wrote:


So, according to Bugliosi, it was this "oval" shape that was
"virtually conclusive evidence" of an SBT?

Chickenshit is TERRIFIED of this simple honest question. He knows
that Bugliosi was a moron if he truly thought this... yet you can't
get Chickenshit to publicly acknowledge that Bugliosi said this.

It's a simple "Yes" or "No" question, and Chickenshit cannot cite
where he has EVER answered it. (Without immediately denying it.)

So it's going to keep getting asked until Chickenshit answers it.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Sun, 8 Oct 2023 04:44:09 -0700 (PDT), John Corbett
<geowright1963@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16?PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff.

Logical fallacy deleted.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:57:10 PM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:48:38 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:10:23 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:50:33 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 12:18:03 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton,

on East Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (
Sgt. Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off
the alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report)
Implied: This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the
temple tale is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on
the police radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in

fact, told Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from
the scene indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that

they saw unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified,
haplessly, that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in

the alley behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man
running INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not
raised tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In

his Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that
the suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley.
She must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More
later on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs.

Markham was trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She
was screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs.
M] went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I

couldn't holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum:
Mrs. M could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running
into the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side

door at Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "
street", which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police,
so [Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted

Callaway) to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So

most of the alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having
chased after the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides
as the killer or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off
the alley, either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy

and Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading,
then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--
Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was

just left hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect
description of Mrs. Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi.
And for Mrs M to have thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car
window to see what he could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with

his foot chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks
mainly, it seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael

Kalin has found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still
secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing,

not really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish
into thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking

lot. On 11/22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/
64) that she informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re
the house. Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who

said that he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill
was no help either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the

shooter? Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might
be a couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated

The woman screaming at Scoggins' departing taxi was corroborated by Croy long ago. Croy's words just didn't make sense then. Now they do... I remember that Myers had the Holmes-Wheless story up on his website. Then he abruptly pulled it, I guess

when he realized he was aiding and abetting the opposition! Fortunately, it's still in his revision...

dcw
is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

It's always a mistake to trust anything that comes from Myers. And Croy must be recognized for the clown he is. He admits that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Part of that was the confusion at the scene--e.g., Scoggins at first accused (by Mrs M) of being the shooter, then released on good behavior. And Holmes clears up the "detective" refs--it was he who was the (sort of) detective, not Callaway. Scoggins

was encouraged, I'm sure, to go along with this elevation of Callaway to God, Jr., and take part in the minimization of his own role.

This must be taken into account. Nobody ever thought that Scoggins was the suspect.

The Holmes episode confirms that he was suspected...

dcw

The pronoun "he" got thrown around and Croy caught it up his butthole. "Or something," as Croy said. Croy doesn't know who "he" is. And the woman is probably Markham, and she can't keep her lies straight beyond "1:06." She kept that one straight,

the only lie she could remember, probably. And remember now, Croy thought that Markham was standing there and watering her lawn. This must be considered when evaluating these witnesses.

The Holmes episode was written and directed by Dale Myers. It never happened in the real world.

You mean that DM *intended* to suggest that Markham falsely picked out Oswald at the lineup? And suggested that she thought either Scoggins or Callaway was the perp? *That* Dale Myers?? Seems counter-intuitive...

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Monday, October 9, 2023 at 12:32:21 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:57:10 PM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:48:38 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:10:23 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:50:33 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 12:18:03 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton,

on East Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (
Sgt. Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off
the alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report)
Implied: This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the
temple tale is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on
the police radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in

fact, told Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from
the scene indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that

they saw unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified,
haplessly, that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in

the alley behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man
running INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not
raised tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject".

In his Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified
that the suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the
alley. She must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202])
More later on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs.

Markham was trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She
was screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs.
M] went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I

couldn't holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum:
Mrs. M could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running
into the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side

door at Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "
street", which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police,
so [Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and

Ted Callaway) to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So

most of the alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having
chased after the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides
as the killer or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off
the alley, either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy

and Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading,
then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--
Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was

just left hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect
description of Mrs. Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi.
And for Mrs M to have thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car
window to see what he could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with

his foot chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks
mainly, it seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael

Kalin has found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still
secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing,

not really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish
into thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking

lot. On 11/22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/
64) that she informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re
the house. Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who

said that he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill
was no help either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the

shooter? Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might
be a couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated

The woman screaming at Scoggins' departing taxi was corroborated by Croy long ago. Croy's words just didn't make sense then. Now they do... I remember that Myers had the Holmes-Wheless story up on his website. Then he abruptly pulled it, I

guess when he realized he was aiding and abetting the opposition! Fortunately, it's still in his revision...

dcw
is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

It's always a mistake to trust anything that comes from Myers. And Croy must be recognized for the clown he is. He admits that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Part of that was the confusion at the scene--e.g., Scoggins at first accused (by Mrs M) of being the shooter, then released on good behavior. And Holmes clears up the "detective" refs--it was he who was the (sort of) detective, not Callaway.

Scoggins was encouraged, I'm sure, to go along with this elevation of Callaway to God, Jr., and take part in the minimization of his own role.

This must be taken into account. Nobody ever thought that Scoggins was the suspect.

The Holmes episode confirms that he was suspected...

dcw

The pronoun "he" got thrown around and Croy caught it up his butthole. "Or something," as Croy said. Croy doesn't know who "he" is. And the woman is probably Markham, and she can't keep her lies straight beyond "1:06." She kept that one straight,

the only lie she could remember, probably. And remember now, Croy thought that Markham was standing there and watering her lawn. This must be considered when evaluating these witnesses.

The Holmes episode was written and directed by Dale Myers. It never happened in the real world.

You mean that DM *intended* to suggest that Markham falsely picked out Oswald at the lineup? And suggested that she thought either Scoggins or Callaway was the perp? *That* Dale Myers?? Seems counter-intuitive...

Well, I don't think I meant that. It could be that Myers did not consider that Donald Willis would be reading his book, and therefore did not expect this interpretation to manifest in the cosmos. I don't know why Myers created the Holmes character, or,
if I do, then I have forgotten why. It probably serves to hide something regarding Callaway or Gerald Hill. Or maybe to lend credibility to Clown Croy, who went on to provide disinformation regarding the wallet and the gun and stuff. The Coverup Clown
Show is a complex balance of lies and credibility.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Monday, October 9, 2023 at 11:24:37 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Monday, October 9, 2023 at 12:32:21 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:57:10 PM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:48:38 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:10:23 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:50:33 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 12:18:03 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from

Patton, on East Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E.
Jefferson" (Sgt. Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a
right turn off the alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-
Jez report) Implied: This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading,
if the temple tale is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at
1:44, on the police radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in

fact, told Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from
the scene indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said

that they saw unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified,
haplessly, that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith

in the alley behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the
man running INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was
not raised tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject".

In his Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified
that the suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the
alley. She must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202])
More later on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs.

Markham was trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She
was screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs.
M] went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream.

I couldn't holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum:
Mrs. M could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running
into the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the

side door at Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but
not "street", which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the
police, so [Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police
first--as Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and

Ted Callaway) to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So

most of the alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having
chased after the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides
as the killer or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off
the alley, either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of

Croy and Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [
heading, then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off
Patton--Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It

was just left hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect
description of Mrs. Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi.
And for Mrs M to have thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car
window to see what he could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late

with his foot chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--
thanks mainly, it seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael

Kalin has found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still
secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window

dressing, not really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed
to vanish into thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco

parking lot. On 11/22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI
(1/21/64) that she informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *
her* re the house. Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway,

who said that he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt.
Hill was no help either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was

the shooter? Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions
might be a couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated

The woman screaming at Scoggins' departing taxi was corroborated by Croy long ago. Croy's words just didn't make sense then. Now they do... I remember that Myers had the Holmes-Wheless story up on his website. Then he abruptly pulled it, I

guess when he realized he was aiding and abetting the opposition! Fortunately, it's still in his revision...

dcw
is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

It's always a mistake to trust anything that comes from Myers. And Croy must be recognized for the clown he is. He admits that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Part of that was the confusion at the scene--e.g., Scoggins at first accused (by Mrs M) of being the shooter, then released on good behavior. And Holmes clears up the "detective" refs--it was he who was the (sort of) detective, not Callaway.

Scoggins was encouraged, I'm sure, to go along with this elevation of Callaway to God, Jr., and take part in the minimization of his own role.

This must be taken into account. Nobody ever thought that Scoggins was the suspect.

The Holmes episode confirms that he was suspected...

dcw

The pronoun "he" got thrown around and Croy caught it up his butthole. "Or something," as Croy said. Croy doesn't know who "he" is. And the woman is probably Markham, and she can't keep her lies straight beyond "1:06." She kept that one

straight, the only lie she could remember, probably. And remember now, Croy thought that Markham was standing there and watering her lawn. This must be considered when evaluating these witnesses.

The Holmes episode was written and directed by Dale Myers. It never happened in the real world.

You mean that DM *intended* to suggest that Markham falsely picked out Oswald at the lineup? And suggested that she thought either Scoggins or Callaway was the perp? *That* Dale Myers?? Seems counter-intuitive...

Well, I don't think I meant that. It could be that Myers did not consider that Donald Willis would be reading his book, and therefore did not expect this interpretation to manifest in the cosmos.

Well, he probably suspected that I wouldn't be BUYING it. I didn't--I consulted a library copy. Actually, I think he owes me royalties or residuals from the first edition--our sparring on the alts probably boosted his sales considerably.

I don't know why Myers created the Holmes character, or, if I do, then I have forgotten why. It probably serves to hide something regarding Callaway or Gerald Hill. Or maybe to lend credibility to Clown Croy, who went on to provide disinformation

regarding the wallet and the gun and stuff. The Coverup Clown Show is a complex balance of lies and credibility.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Monday, October 9, 2023 at 9:16:39 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Monday, October 9, 2023 at 11:24:37 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Monday, October 9, 2023 at 12:32:21 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:57:10 PM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 4:48:38 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 9:10:23 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 11:50:33 AM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

On Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 12:18:03 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from

Patton, on East Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E.
Jefferson" (Sgt. Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a
right turn off the alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-
Jez report) Implied: This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading,
if the temple tale is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at
1:44, on the police radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had,

in fact, told Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far
from the scene indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said

that they saw unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified,
haplessly, that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill

Smith in the alley behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw
the man running INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it
was not raised tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject"

. In his Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified
that the suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the
alley. She must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202])
More later on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well,

Mrs. Markham was trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "
She was screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [
Mrs. M] went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream.

I couldn't holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum:
Mrs. M could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter
running into the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the

side door at Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but
not "street", which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the
police, so [Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police
first--as Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (

and Ted Callaway) to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away.

So most of the alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having
chased after the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides
as the killer or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off
the alley, either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of

Croy and Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [
heading, then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off
Patton--Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It

was just left hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect
description of Mrs. Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi.
And for Mrs M to have thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car
window to see what he could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late

with his foot chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--
thanks mainly, it seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now,

Michael Kalin has found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's
still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window

dressing, not really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed
to vanish into thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco

parking lot. On 11/22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI
(1/21/64) that she informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *
her* re the house. Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway,

who said that he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt.
Hill was no help either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was

the shooter? Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions
might be a couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

You'll never get it right if you keep citing Dale Myers. He is poison to the truth. Anything he says which cannot be corroborated

The woman screaming at Scoggins' departing taxi was corroborated by Croy long ago. Croy's words just didn't make sense then. Now they do... I remember that Myers had the Holmes-Wheless story up on his website. Then he abruptly pulled it, I

guess when he realized he was aiding and abetting the opposition! Fortunately, it's still in his revision...

dcw
is a lie designed to mislead. He is worse than worthless. His job is to fuck up your understanding.

It's always a mistake to trust anything that comes from Myers. And Croy must be recognized for the clown he is. He admits that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Part of that was the confusion at the scene--e.g., Scoggins at first accused (by Mrs M) of being the shooter, then released on good behavior. And Holmes clears up the "detective" refs--it was he who was the (sort of) detective, not Callaway.

Scoggins was encouraged, I'm sure, to go along with this elevation of Callaway to God, Jr., and take part in the minimization of his own role.

This must be taken into account. Nobody ever thought that Scoggins was the suspect.

The Holmes episode confirms that he was suspected...

dcw

The pronoun "he" got thrown around and Croy caught it up his butthole. "Or something," as Croy said. Croy doesn't know who "he" is. And the woman is probably Markham, and she can't keep her lies straight beyond "1:06." She kept that one

straight, the only lie she could remember, probably. And remember now, Croy thought that Markham was standing there and watering her lawn. This must be considered when evaluating these witnesses.

The Holmes episode was written and directed by Dale Myers. It never happened in the real world.

You mean that DM *intended* to suggest that Markham falsely picked out Oswald at the lineup? And suggested that she thought either Scoggins or Callaway was the perp? *That* Dale Myers?? Seems counter-intuitive...

Well, I don't think I meant that. It could be that Myers did not consider that Donald Willis would be reading his book, and therefore did not expect this interpretation to manifest in the cosmos.

Well, he probably suspected that I wouldn't be BUYING it. I didn't--I consulted a library copy. Actually, I think he owes me royalties or residuals from the first edition--our sparring on the alts probably boosted his sales considerably.

I don't know why Myers created the Holmes character, or, if I do, then I have forgotten why. It probably serves to hide something regarding Callaway or Gerald Hill. Or maybe to lend credibility to Clown Croy, who went on to provide disinformation

regarding the wallet and the gun and stuff. The Coverup Clown Show is a complex balance of lies and credibility.

So, you're the one who made Myers so gun shy! And wealthy!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East

Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact, told

Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the scene
indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw

unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the alley

behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man running
INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not raised
tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham was

trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn't

holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at

Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "street",
which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police, so [
Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted Callaway)

to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of the

alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased after
the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the killer
or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the alley,
either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and Callaway.

Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading, then,
towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--Scoggins
seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just left

hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of Mrs.
Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to have
thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see what he
could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his foot

chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly, it
seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has

found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not really

a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into thin
air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On 11/

22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that she
informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the house.
Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said that

he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no help
either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter? Why

did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a couple
of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

The evidence is meager, but clearly suggestive that Benavides did go to the church. But the explanation is difficult because you need to know who are the liars. I refuse to believe your Scoggins scenario. I am convinced that he saw the suspect go south
on Patton. And I think Reynolds did see him go behind the Texaco station, even though Reynolds is a conspiracy witness. Maybe I shouldn't believe that. Why should I believe Reynolds? Because there were two others with him, that's why. Of course, they are
all used car salesmen. Too many dancing clowns here!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Tuesday, October 10, 2023 at 12:19:13 AM UTC-7, NoTrueFlags Here wrote:

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9:33:16 PM UTC-4, Donald Willis wrote:

In Oak Cliff--one shooter, one accomplice, no automatic, no Oswald

Hard to discount rumors of the presence of two gunmen in Oak Cliff. There are two solid bases for two different escape routes. 1) Patrolman Summers' radio report on the suspect, at 1:37: "running on the north side of the street from Patton, on East

Jefferson". Then north through the Texaco parking lot and then west. (map, "With Malice" p20). 2) DPD was kind enough, though, to provide, also, a competing escape route: "W on alley [from Patton] to Crawford, left on Crawford to E. Jefferson" (Sgt.
Barnes' crime lab sketch, WM p161). The former made some folks happy since it included a pit stop for discarding the infamous jacket. The latter route seems in error when it posits a left turn on Crawford. There's a solid basis for a right turn off the
alley, up to the Abundant Life Temple, on 10th St.: "An unidentified witness gave Officer J.M. Poe 2 empty hulls in an empty cigarette pack & stated... that the suspect reloaded the gun as he ran across the church lawn." (11/22/63 Poe-Jez report) Implied:
This witness, later ID'd as Domingo Benavides, found said hulls on the church lawn, then, not in the yard at 10th & Patton. And it makes sense: The only reason for the gunman to have left them in the Davis yard--long before reloading, if the temple tale
is on the money--would be to have graciously provided the police with evidence. Otherwise, the four hulls would only have been found if the gunman had been followed from 10th & Patton to the temple. As DPD Sgt. Gerald Hill put it, at 1:44, on the police
radio: "A witness said he saw the gunman last at the Abundant Life Temple at 10th... 400 block." Benavides saw him first at 10th & Patton.

Benavides bent the truth, then, when he testified that he had told officers at the scene--in answer to, "Did you tell the officers what you had seen?"--"No. I left right after" (v6p450)... after handing Poe the shells, that is. He had, in fact, told

Poe about the "church lawn". The gunman, according to Benavides, reloaded later, on the church lawn. The DPD was forced to explain away two police-radio references to the use of an automatic. But Benavides' discovery of the hulls so far from the scene
indicates that the murder weapon was a revolver.

More fallout from Benavides' inconvenient statement re the belated reloading: Witness Pat Patterson was mistaken when he said that he saw a gunman "obviously trying to reload" on Patton. (FBI report 1/23/64) And the witnesses who said that they saw

unloading or reloading around 10th & Patton were--if the temple tale is on the money--conspiring to cover-up: Barbara Davis, Virginia Davis, and Sam Guinyard. In fact, Guinyard went a little crazy with the unloading business. He testified, haplessly,
that the gunman was running up Patton "knocking empty shells out of his pistol" (v7p397)--this would have been in addition to the four shells supposedly knocked out on 10th St. Just trying to help the police, apparently.

I don't recall seeing even one reference to the alley or the church in the record of the Warren Commission interviews. The cover-up of the alternate route continued with Myers' book: "The gunman was last seen by Jimmy Burt and Bill Smith in the alley

behind the cars near Crawford" (photo caption WM p91). This was based on a 1968 interview with Burt. However, in a more timely 12/15/63 FBI interview, Burt stated that "when he was close enough to Patton St. to see to the south he saw the man running
INTO AN ALLEY located between 10th & Jefferson on Patton." Not "near Crawford". The hearings, Myers, maybe even Burt--all seemed aware of the spectre of a second gunman if the problem of the alley was raised. Of course the fact that it was not raised
tends, now, to support the existence of that spectre.

However, most of the "6 to 8 witnesses... all telling officers that the subject was running west in the alley between 10th & Patton" (Poe-Jez DPD report 11/22/63) may have actually just been witnesses to a vigilante tailing the "subject". In his

Commission testimony, Sgt. Barnes did not mention speaking to any of the witnesses, by name, at the scene. However, a frame grab in "With Malice" shows the police questioning Helen Markham "near the passenger side door" (p152)--she had testified that the
suspect had "leaned over" the passenger door (v3p315)--as Barnes looks on. And Barnes was the one who provided the diagram of the alternate escape route. Interviewed in later years, Mrs. Markham said that the suspect had indeed run down the alley. She
must have been the source of a "report that a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun and had left, presumably. They don't know whether he was the one that had shot Tippit... [or had] attempted to give chase." (DPD Sgt. Kenneth Croy [v12p202]) More later
on the Markham-Scoggins tie-in with the account of the Holmes-Wheless cab chase...

Markham was one of several alley witnesses to Scoggins' flight. The testimony of sisters-in-law Virginia and Barbara Davis was inextricably linked to her own testimony. Before Virginia D even refers to the suspect, she offers, "Well, Mrs. Markham was

trying to say--" At this point, David Belin has to ask, "Mrs. Markham?", since that's the first he heard her mention Markham. Virginia D: "We heard her say, 'He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.'" Still no explanation of that "he". "She was
screaming." Finally, Belin has to come right out and ask, "Did you see anything else as you heard her screaming?" "Well, we saw Oswald." (v6pp456-7) Ah! So Mrs. M's screaming drew Virginia D's attention to "Oswald". Now, Barbara D: "First off, [Mrs. M]
went to screaming before I had paid too much attention to... the man... coming across the yard." (v3p343) Again, the presence of the man in the yard seems secondary, for the Davises, to the sound of Mrs. M's screaming.

Now for Mrs. M's account. "[The man] stared at me." [As he stood at the SW corner of 10th & Patton/CE 524] Counsel Ball: "Didn't you say something?" "No, I couldn't." Ball: "Or yell or scream." "I could not." (v3p308) "I couldn't scream. I couldn't

holler. I froze." (v3p?) Makes sense: She couldn't do anything while he was staring right at her. Then: "He cut across Patton like this [heading] toward Jefferson. Then he was still in sight when I began to scream and holler..." (v3p?) In sum: Mrs. M
could not scream until *after* the suspect had begun going down Patton, away from her. The Davises, then, like Mrs. M, have been describing a scene on *Patton*, not on 10th St. They, too, saw what Mrs. M last saw of the suspect--the latter running into
the alley.

And an apparent Freudian slip in Virginia D's 11/22/63 affidavit indicates that she was in good position to see the suspect run into the alley off Patton: "[My sister-in-law and myself] heard a shot and then another shot and ran to the side door at

Patton St." Another such slip, in her Commission testimony, reinforces that they were not at the front door on 10th St., as they otherwise maintained: "We saw the boy cutting across the street." (v6p461) She gets "boy" right, supposedly, but not "street",
which usually came out "lawn", in their testimony. And 8 or 9 times, in the meandering, doubling-back course of her testimony, she rings variations on "When Mrs. Markham was standing across the street hollering, she told us to call the police, so [
Barbara] Jeanette and I went in there, and Jeanette called the police, and we went back, and he was cutting across our yard." (v6p458) This phenomenon of repetition amounts not so much to a slip as a complex. If the two called the police first--as
Virginia insisted, many times, then they were of course too late to see the actual shooter.

Like Mrs. Markham, the Davises were witnesses to a man running into the alley. The wrong man, as it turns out--but another reason why it might have been thought that there was a second shooter. Hence, the unheroic efforts by the DPD (and Ted Callaway)

to take Tippit's pistol out of Scoggins' hands and put it into Callaway's, not just later on in the story--where it seems only natural when Scoggins is driving the cab--but from the get-go.

The other alley witnesses: Of course Scoggins. Burt and Smith. And Benavides, one of the Poe-Jez "6 to 8 witnesses". Like the Davises, though, Burt and Smith got to the scene late--they drove from 9th & Denver, a block and a half away. So most of the

alley witnesses saw only Scoggins the vigilante. But whom did *Scoggins* see? He must have seen Benavides, running ahead of him. But did he see him as a fellow vigilante or as the culprit? He certainly did not see Oswald, or--after having chased after
the killer three times, on foot, by car, and by cop car--or he would most gladly have nailed him at one of the three Friday lineups. As I have previously detailed, he was with the police as early as 1:25pm on Friday. Either he saw Benavides as the killer
or he worked in tandem with him, maybe sending him on ahead while he went back for Tippit's service pistol, then losing track of both Benavides and the killer. (He may have been the man that Warren Reynolds saw going into the old house, off the alley,
either to conceal himself or to take a short cut to Jefferson.)

Holmes and Wheless. This story is of course related third-hand--and very late in the day (1999)--from Kenneth Holmes Sr. to Kenneth Holmes Jr. to Dale Myers. But it is surprisingly credible. It meshes perfectly with the testimonies of Croy and

Callaway. Callaway: "I went with Scoggins in the taxicab, went up to 10th. Crawford, from Crawford up to Jefferson, and down Jefferson to Beckley. And we turned on Beckley." (v3p354) The Holmes version: "turning south off 10th onto Crawford [heading,
then, towards Jefferson]... [then] on one of the side streets just east of Beckley", Holmes & Bill Wheless "caught up with the cab & forced it to a stop." (WM pp165, 169 [revised ed.]). Tenth, Crawford, and Jefferson neatly frame the alley off Patton--
Scoggins seems to have been calling the shots here, picking up where he had left off on foot.

And the Holmes-Wheless narrative confirms Croy's testimony that "a cab driver had picked up Tippit's gun". It wasn't just a "report". And Croy was free to reveal that tantalizing detail in 1964 since it was not confirmed at the time. It was just left

hanging, tantalizingly. When Holmes & Wheless "pulled up [at 10th & Patton], a woman in near hysterics ran up to the car and told them that 'the man who shot the officer had got in a taxi and took off'." (WM p165 [rev. ed.]) A perfect description of Mrs.
Markham and a perfect explanation as to why she was in hysterics. No wonder. Scoggins was "getting away"--again. She had spotted him leaving the scene and running down the alley, then, not much later, leaving the scene in the taxi. And for Mrs M to have
thought that Scoggins was the killer, she must have--as I've already suggested--got to the Tippit scene a bit later than she testified that she did. Late enough so that the first thing she saw, maybe, was Scoggins looking in the car window to see what he
could see, then going to the street in front of the cab and picking up Tippit's pistol. By then, Benavides would already have been going up the alley.

Benavides was the only one of the three searchers--also including Scoggins and Callaway--to have had any luck. He tracked the perp as far as the temple, and he found the shells which the man had left behind. Scoggins was a bit too late with his foot

chase, and he and Callaway were way too late with the cab chase. Benavides must have been very discouraged when he found out, though, that his "luck" was not wanted. Nothing re searchers in and beyond the alley was wanted. The police--thanks mainly, it
seems, to Summers' transmission--had their guy's escape route. No ambiguity, no second gunman was wanted.

If it's difficult to reconstruct the movements of Benavides and Scoggins at the scene, it's due in part to the fact that some documents have disappeared. I have long known that Benavides made out an affidavit. (WM p449) Gone. Now, Michael Kalin has

found an FBI report from March 1, 1967, which states that Benavides also "made a statement to the FBI on the date of the assassination". (Education Forum 9/29/23) Also gone. If the Secret Service had Benavides do an affidavit, too, it's still secret.

Taken together, Summers and Poe-Jez seem to describe two shooters, one running from Patton to Jefferson, the other from Patton, through the alley, to the Abundant Life lawn. But I lean towards: The Jefferson running man was window dressing, not

really a shooter, just an accomplice with a display gun, a display Eisenhower jacket, and a display Oswald-resemblance. He was also a distraction, taking attention away from the vicinity of the alley. The alley shooter, by contrast, seemed to vanish into
thin air, seen perhaps by only two witnesses, Benavides and Scoggins.

The Jefferson gunman was apparently spotted by several witnesses, including Guinyard, Callaway, Warren Reynolds, and Pat Patterson. But he was not--despite what you may have read--seen by anyone going from Jefferson into the Texaco parking lot. On 11/

22/63, Reynolds was telling police and reporters that he last saw the suspect entering an old house (frame grab of Reynolds and reporter by the house, WM p131). Scratch Reynolds re the parking lot. Next up: Mrs. Mary Brock told the FBI (1/21/64) that she
informed [Reynolds and Patterson] that the [suspect] proceeded north behind the Texaco station and she last observed him in the parking lot." Busted, some time later, by the WFAA-TV footage. More likely, Reynolds would be informing *her* re the house.
Scratch Mr. and Mrs. Brock. The presence of the gas station "witnesses" suggests that Eisenhower man may not even have dropped the jacket at that time, but that it was already there. I guess the "when", though, doesn't really matter...

Upshot: Eisenhower man was last seen on the sidewalks of Jefferson. He had done his job: witness magnet. Except, almost ruinously, that one of his witnesses, for some reason, thought that he was wielding an automatic--possibly Callaway, who said that

he thought that he saw the gunman's arm in the "raised pistol" position, "the way you'd load an automatic." (WM p78) An unfortunate glitch for the apparent accomplice--he was supposed to have been displaying Oswald's *revolver*. And Sgt. Hill was no help
either, with his 1:41 radioed "Shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic 38..." These two apparent glitches necessitated the Davises' painstaking, but spurious descriptions of the unloading of the pistol.

Did Benavides and/or Scoggins see the accomplice? (The attention of Benavides had to have been riveted on the alley, but Eisenhower man was pretty flagrant, so...) Whence did the latter spring? Did Scoggins at first think Benavides was the shooter?

Why did neither Benavides nor Scoggins attend a Friday lineup? Both had apparently seen the killer (if not the accomplice), and the fact that neither ID'd Oswald that day indicates that it was not in fact he. The answers to these questions might be a
couple of the details lost with the disappearance of the 11/22 Benavides documents.

dcw c2001

The evidence is meager, but clearly suggestive that Benavides did go to the church. But the explanation is difficult because you need to know who are the liars. I refuse to believe your Scoggins scenario. I am convinced that he saw the suspect go south

on Patton. And I think Reynolds did see him go behind the Texaco station

Well, as the WFAA footage shows, yes, he went *near* the station, into that old house.

, even though Reynolds is a conspiracy witness. Maybe I shouldn't believe that. Why should I believe Reynolds? Because there were two others with him, that's why. Of course, they are all used car salesmen. Too many dancing clowns here!

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