J. D. Tippit

J. D. Tippit (September 18, 1924 – November 22, 1963) was a police officer with the Dallas Police Department who, according to two government investigations including the Warren Commission, was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald after Tippit stopped Oswald following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Oswald's initial arrest was for Tippit's murder, not Kennedy's.

Biography
Tippit was born in Clarksville, Red River County, Texas, to Edgar Lee Tippit, a farmer, and Lizzie Mae Rush. The Tippit and Rush families were of English ancestry, their ancestors having immigrated to Virginia from England by 1635. It is sometimes reported that J.D. stood for "Jefferson Davis", but in fact, the letters did not stand for anything in particular. Tippit attended public schools through the tenth grade and was raised as a Baptist. He entered the United States Army on July 21, 1944, and was assigned to the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the US 17th Airborne Division. He saw combat in Operation Varsity, the airborne crossing of the Rhine River in March 1945, earning a Bronze Star, and remained on active duty until June 20, 1946.

Tippit was married to Marie Frances Gasway on December 26, 1946, and the couple had three children (whose ages were 14, 10, and 5 at the time of his death ). That same year, he went to work for the Dearborn Stove Company. He next worked for Sears, Roebuck and Company in the installation department from March 1948 to September 1949, when he moved to Lone Star, Texas, and attempted cattle raising.

Tippit attended a Veterans Administration vocational training school at Bogata, Texas, from January 1950 until June 1952. He was then hired by the Dallas Police Department as a patrolman on July 28, 1952. Officer Tippit served capably and was cited for bravery in 1956 for his role in disarming a fugitive.

At the time of his death, Tippit was assigned to Dallas Police vehicle #10, had badge #848 and was earning a salary of $5,880 a year as a Dallas police officer. He was also working two other part-time jobs.

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 ft tall, and weighing about 165 lb.

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 ft 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.

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.

Criticism of the case against Oswald
Since the Warren Commission Report was published in 1964, some researchers have alleged discrepancies in witness testimony and physical evidence which they believe calls into question the Commission's conclusions regarding the murder of Tippit. These critics cite evidence indicating that Oswald may have had an accomplice in the killing, or that possibly Tippit was killed by an assailant (or assailants) other than Oswald. According to Warren Commission critic Jim Marrs, Oswald's guilt in the assassination of Kennedy is placed in question by the presence of "a growing body of evidence to suggest that [he] did not kill Tippit". Others say that multiple men were directly involved in Tippit's killing. Conspiracy researcher Kenn Thomas has alleged that the Warren Commission omitted testimony and evidence that two men shot Tippit and that one left the scene in a car.

William Alexander, the Dallas assistant district attorney who had recommended that Oswald be charged with the Kennedy and Tippit murders, has also been critical of the Commission's version of the murder, stating that its conclusions on Oswald's movements "did not add up", and that "certainly, he may have had accomplices."

Allegations regarding timeline
Some researchers, including Anthony Summers and Robert Groden, point to evidence that Tippit's murder may have taken place earlier than the time given in the Warren Report. The Warren Commission concluded that the shooting occurred at 1:16 p.m. from the police tapes that logged Domingo Benavides' use of the radio in Tippit's car. However, Benavides testified that he did not approach the car until "a few minutes" after the shooting, because he was afraid that the gunman might return. He was assisted in using the radio by witness T.F. Bowley, who testified to Dallas police that he arrived at the scene after the murder, and that the time was 1:10 p.m.

Some critics of the Warren Commission version believe that Oswald did not have sufficient time to travel the nine-tenths of a mile from his house to the scene where Tippit was killed. The timing is of critical importance because, according to the Warren Commission, Oswald arrived at his rooming house at around 1:00 p.m., then left "3 or 4 minutes" later, and was last seen by his housekeeper a moment later standing at the corner bus stop. The Commission’s own test and estimation of Oswald’s walking speed demonstrated that one of the longer routes to the Tippit shooting scene took 17 minutes and 45 seconds to walk. Additionally, no witness ever surfaced who saw Oswald walk from his rooming house to the murder scene.

Witness Helen Markham initially told the FBI that the shooting occurred "possibly around 1:30 p.m.," but she later told the Warren Commission: "I wouldn't be afraid to bet it wasn't 6 or 7 minutes after 1." Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig stated that when he heard the news that Tippit had been shot, he looked at his watch and noted that the time was 1:06 p.m. However, in a later statement to the press, Craig seemed unsure about the time of the shooting.

Warren "Butch" Burroughs, who ran the concession stand at the Texas Theater where Oswald was arrested, told author James Douglass in 2007 that Oswald came into the theater between 1:00 and 1:07 p.m., which if true would make Oswald's alleged 1:16 shooting of Officer J.D. Tippit impossible. This was a claim that Burroughs had made earlier in the documentary, The Men Who Killed Kennedy.

Allegations regarding witness testimony and physical evidence
Only two Commission witnesses were identified as actually having seen the shooting, Helen Markham and Domingo Benavides. Joseph Ball, senior counsel to the Commission, has referred to Markham's testimony as "full of mistakes," and characterized her as an "utter screwball."

Domingo Benavides initially said that he did not think he could identify the assailant and was never asked to view a police lineup, even though he was the person closest to the killing. Benavides later testified that that the killer resembled pictures he had seen of Oswald. Other witnesses were taken to police lineups. However, these lineups have been criticized as flawed in that they consisted of people who looked very different from Oswald. In one case, the lineup was composed of five "young teenagers" and Oswald.

Additionally, certain witnesses who did not appear before the Commission identified an assailant who was not Oswald. Both Acquilla Clemons and Frank Wright witnessed the scene from their respective homes, within one block of the murder. Clemons saw two men near Tippit’s car just before the shooting. After the shooting, she ran outside and saw a man with a gun whom she described as "kind of heavy." He waved to the second man, urging him to "go on". Frank Wright also emerged from his home and observed the scene seconds after the shooting. He described a man standing by Tippit’s body who had on a long coat, and who quickly ran to a car parked nearby and drove away. There have also been concerns about ballistic evidence and finger print evidence on the police car that seemed to make it less likely that Oswald was the killer.

Some researchers have questioned whether the cartridge cases recovered from the scene were the same as those that were subsequently entered into evidence. Two of the cases were recovered by witness Domingo Benavides and turned over to police officer J.M. Poe. Poe told the FBI that he marked the shells with his own initials, "J.M.P." to identify them. Sergeant Gerald Hill later testified to the Warren Commission that it was he who had ordered police officer Poe to mark the shells. However, Poe's initials were not found on the shells produced by the FBI six months later. Testifying before the Warren Commission, Poe said that although he recalled marking the cases, he "couldn’t swear to it." Poe later told researchers that he was absolutely certain that he had marked the shells. The identification of the cartridge cases at the crime scene raises more questions. Sergeant Gerald Hill examined one of the shells and radioed the police dispatcher, saying: "The shell at the scene indicates that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38 rather than a pistol." However, Oswald was reportedly arrested carrying a non-automatic .38 Special revolver. The number of cartridge shells found at the crime scene raises further questions for some. Sergeant Gerald Hill, who took possession of Oswald's revolver upon his arrest, reported that the gun's six chambers were fully loaded with unspent cartridges and that Oswald had no ammunition on his person.

Aftermath
On the evening of the assassination, both Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, called Tippit's widow to express their sympathies. Jacqueline Kennedy wrote a letter expressing sorrow for the bond they shared. The plight of Tippit's family also moved much of the nation and a total of $647,579 ($4.5 million in 2009) was donated to them following the assassination. One of the largest individual gifts was the $25,000 ($176,600 in 2009) that Abraham Zapruder donated after selling his film of the assassination.

A funeral service for J.D. Tippit was held on November 25, 1963, at the Beckley Hills Baptist Church, with the burial following at Laurel Land Memorial Park in Dallas. His funeral occurred on the same day as those of both Kennedy and Oswald.

In January 1964, Tippit was posthumously awarded the Medal of Valor from the American Police Hall of Fame, and he also received the Police Medal of Honor, the Police Cross, and the Citizens Traffic Commission Award of Heroism.

Tippit's widow married Dallas police lieutenant Harry Dean Thomas in January 1967.

Popular culture
In movies, Tippit has been portrayed by Price Carson in 1991's JFK, and David Duchovny in 1992's Ruby.