J. D. Tippit - Murder

Murder

On November 22, 1963, J.D. Tippit was working beat number 78, his normal patrol area in south Oak Cliff, a residential area of Dallas. At 12:45 p.m., 15 minutes after the President's assassination, Tippit received a radio order to move to the central Oak Cliff area as part of a concentration of police around the center of the city. At 12:54 Tippit radioed that he had moved as directed. By then several messages had been broadcast describing a suspect in the Kennedy assassination as a slender white male, about 30 years old, 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) tall, and weighing about 165 pounds (75 kg).

According to the Warren Commission, at approximately 1:11–1:14 p.m., Tippit was driving slowly eastward on East 10th Street when — about 100 feet (30 m) past the intersection of 10th Street and Patton Avenue — he pulled alongside a man who resembled the broadcast description of Lee Harvey Oswald. The man walked over to Tippit's car and apparently exchanged words with him through an open vent window. Tippit opened his car door and as he walked toward the front of the car, the man drew a handgun and fired three shots in rapid succession, hitting Tippit three times in the chest. The man then walked up to Tippit's fallen body and fired a fourth shot directly into his head, fatally wounding him. Tippit was dead before any help could arrive and Oswald was later arrested after “acting suspiciously” in the Texas Theatre.

The Warren Commission identified twelve people who witnessed the shooting, or its aftermath. Domingo Benavides saw Tippit standing by the left door of his parked police car, and a man standing on the right side of the car. He then heard shots and saw Tippit fall to the ground. Benavides stopped his pickup truck on the opposite side of the street from Tippit's car. He observed the shooter fleeing the scene and removing spent cartridge cases from his gun as he left. Benavides waited in his truck until the gunman disappeared before assisting Tippit. He then reported the shooting to police headquarters, using the radio in Tippit's car. Helen Markham witnessed the shooting and then saw a man with a gun in his hand leave the scene. Markham identified Lee Harvey Oswald as Tippit’s killer in a police lineup she viewed that evening. Barbara Davis and her sister-in-law Virginia Davis heard the shots and saw a man crossing their lawn, shaking his revolver, as if he were emptying it of cartridge cases. Later, the women found two cartridge cases near the crime scene and handed the cases over to police. That evening, Barbara Davis and Virginia Davis were taken to a lineup and both Davises picked out Oswald as the man whom they had seen.

Taxicab driver William Scoggins testified that he saw Tippit's police car pull up alongside a man on the sidewalk, as he his sat in his taxicab nearby. Scoggins heard three or four shots and then saw Tippit fall to the ground. As Scoggins crouched behind his cab, the man passed within twelve feet of him, pistol in hand, muttering what sounded to him like, "poor dumb cop" or "poor damn cop." The next day, Scoggins viewed a police lineup and identified Oswald as the man whom he had seen with the pistol.

The Commission also named several other witnesses who were not at the scene of the murder, but who claimed to have seen a man they later identified as Oswald running between the murder scene and the Texas Theater, where Oswald was subsequently arrested.

Four cartridge cases were found at the scene by eyewitnesses. It was the unanimous testimony of expert witnesses before the Warren Commission that these spent cartridge cases were fired from the revolver in Oswald's possession to the exclusion of all other weapons.