The Wounding of James Tague Refutes the Lone-Gunman Theory

[Joe Elliott]

This remains Joe Elliott’s favorite logical fallacy.

You could pick any spot that a bullet or fragment happened to strike and say that this particular spot has a much smaller chance of being hit than all the other spots. That doesn’t make it a “coincidence”.

A roulette wheel has 38 slots, 18 red, 18 black and 2 greens, labeled “0” and “00”. Following Iacoletti’s logic, you should always split you bets between “0” and “00”, because the ball will land in a green slot as often as it lands in a red or a black slot. Using “The Iacoletti system”, betting let’s say 1% of your remaining money on “0” and 1% on “00”, on each spin, you should almost certainly make money hand over fist. You’ll likely end up owning the casino. And if you do, the first thing you should do is close down all the roulette wheels.

Believe me, if you play roulette at Las Vegas, use the Iacoletti system, or any other system, you soon run out of all the money you bet unless you quit early.

Just as in roulette, where a ball rarely lands in a green slot, but usually in a black or red slot, a random bullet strike on a curb will usually strike the vertical or the horizontal face of the curb, and not right on the edge.

[Joe Elliott]

Mr. Elliott: Thank you. Well stated. 

Thank you John.

[John Iacoletti]

A roulette wheel has 38 slots, 18 red, 18 black and 2 greens, labeled “0” and “00”. Following Iacoletti’s logic, you should always split you bets between “0” and “00”, because the ball will land in a green slot as often as it lands in a red or a black slot.

Nope. Using the Joe Elliot system, if the ball lands on 7, that’s an unlikely coincidence because there was only a 1/38 chance of it landing there. And if it lands on 34, that’s an unlikely coincidence because there was only a 1/38 chance of it landing there. Etc, etc. Therefore, the reasonable assumption is that they didn’t spin the ball at all and a mouse dropped it there. Mouses do that all the time.

[Joe Elliott]

I agree that a mark on the edge is coincidental, but in this case I don’t discount anything

I don’t consider coincidences impossible. But I am always suspicious of them.

Here is link that shows photos including one with the proper orientation of the curb.
https://emuseum.jfk.org/search/curb

Thank you. Was not aware of that photograph.

What I noticed in the pictures that show the mark before any “word done” like patching or cutting etc, do not appear to show the associated scratches. Later pictures do show scratches.

All the before pictures I have seen show the vertical face of the curb in shadow, so I can’t tell if it has scratches or not. I suspect it did.

I don’t see why removing a curb would leave curved scratches on it and one of the curve scratches pointing right at the lead smear.

One other point suggesting a bullet is that I recall hearing the curb mark analysis mentioned lead with only a trace of antimony (but I have never seen a copy of an official analysis report).  I was thinking lead wheel balancers used hardened lead with at least a few percent of antimony as a hardening agent.

WCC/MC bullets had antimony and that is also common in lead tire weights. In any case, as I recall (I may be mistaken) the lead smear had too little lead to detect antimony, just lead.

[John Iacoletti]

There’s nothing “special” about the edge of the curb as opposed to any other location. What you’re doing is coming along after the fact, and carving out a specific smaller area and saying that it’s more unlikely than all the other areas. But you could say the same thing about any place that it hit.

If the roulette ball lands on 7, you could say that it was much more likely that it would have hit a number between 13-36 than a number between 1-12. Which is correct, but completely arbitrary.

[Joe Elliott]

Neither are you, but that doesn’t prevent you from just decreeing that scratches look exactly like they were caused by an unknown tire rim.

It’s true. I am not an expert on bullet strikes on concrete. Or tire strikes on concrete. But as a layman, using my own logic, it seems to be more likely a tire strike. I’m not issuing decrees, just my own opinion.

How could a fragment go on to strike Mr. Tague?

Uh, you’re kinda forgetting about the fragments left in Kennedy’s head.

I was addressing Mr. Griffith’s concern, not mine. I believe a fragment from the bullet that struck the President in the head could very well have scratched Mr. Tague on the cheek. It was Mr. Griffith who seemed to believe that this was not possible.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Investigative journalist Henry Hurt's detailed treatment of the Tague wounding is one of the best ever written. It is found in Hurt's best-selling book Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Here is part of Hurt's section on the Tague wounding:

James T. Tague, a twenty-seven-year-old Dallas automobile salesman, was standing near the concrete abutment of the triple underpass, about 260 feet downhill from the President's position. As Tague was straining to get a glimpse of the President, he heard a "cannon type sound" and looked around to try to identify it. When he heard subsequent gunfire, he ducked behind a concrete post. . . .

A few minutes later, Tague recalled that just when the shooting broke out he had felt a sting on his cheek, which he had forgotten in the excitement. He mentioned this to a nearby deputy sheriff who confirmed that Tague, indeed, had blood on his cheek. Tague reached up and found a few drops of blood.

The officer asked where he had been standing. Tague led him to the spot. They inspected the concrete curbing along the street and discovered a fresh mark they believed had been made by a bullet. It was 23 feet, 4 inches east of the abutment of the triple underpass.

A patrolman immediately radioed that a man had been "possibly hit by a ricochet from the bullet off the concrete." Soon the press was there to make news photographs, including close-ups showing where the bullet had hit the concrete, leaving a distinct pockmark. Such a picture appeared in newspapers that weekend.

All this information was available to the FBI, which had been ordered by President Johnson to lead the investigation. Two weeks later, when the Warren Commission received the FBI's five-volume report on its investigation, there was not a word about the Tague incident.

Although some parts of the report—a damning indictment of Lee Harvey Oswald—were leaked to the press immediately, no one had reason to suspect that the Tague curbstone shot had been completely ignored. It was reasonable to assume that the Tague shot would be covered in the 372-page document. (That report, Commission Document 1, was not released to the public until 1965.)

The official indifference to the Tague curb shot is instantly puzzling, even suspicious. One would expect the investigators to be interested in any shot fired in Dealey Plaza at that time. . . .

As desperate as the FBI was for evidence to shore up its lone-assassin theory, its apparent decision to ignore that the shot hit the curbing was perplexing to say the least. And since the FBI was the Warren Commission's chief investigative arm, the commission had no other direct, formal source for the information. (There are indications, however, that the Warren Commission members knew of the shot months before they finally gave it their attention. Initial accounts of it are included in the transcripts of the police radio broadcasts made by the Dallas police for the commission). . . .

On July 23, more than a month after the Warren Commission was supposed to have finished its investigation, James Tague was at last deposed. The account he gave was unwavering as he related just what he had heard and felt and then seen when he examined the curb with the deputy sheriff and others. There was not a hint of contradiction or uncertainty in his basic points.

Tague's account was fully supported by a second witness deposed by Liebeler that day, Deputy Sheriff Eddy Walthers, one of the officers who inspected the curb just after the shooting. Walthers noted that he had been in the sheriff's office for nine years and testified: "It was a fresh ricochet mark. I have seen them and I noticed it for the next two or three days as it got grayer and grayer and grayer as it aged." That aging process, of course, would do nothing to fill the obvious indentation that can be seen in the original photographs of the bullet mark.

The truly astounding aspect of Tague's testimony occurred when Commission Counsel Liebeler stated, "Now I understand that you went back there subsequently and took some pictures of the area, isn't that right?"

Perplexed and believing that no one knew he had done this, Tague asked Liebeler to repeat his question. Liebeler repeated the question, and when Tague answered affirmatively, Liebeler added, "With a motion picture camera?"

"Yes," Tague replied. "I didn't know anybody knew about that."

Liebeler did not respond. Clearly, though, Liebeler's knowledge had to represent information given to him by some investigatory agency—presumably the FBI. (In any event, some years later Tague discovered that his movie had vanished from his home.) (Reasonable Doubt, pp. 131-135)

[Joe Elliott]

Tague's account was fully supported by a second witness deposed by Liebeler that day, Deputy Sheriff Eddy Walthers, one of the officers who inspected the curb just after the shooting. Walthers noted that he had been in the sheriff's office for nine years and testified: "It was a fresh ricochet mark. I have seen them and I noticed it for the next two or three days as it got grayer and grayer and grayer as it aged." That aging process, of course, would do nothing to fill the obvious indentation that can be seen in the original photographs of the bullet mark.

Well, it sounds like Deputy Sheriff Walthers was as big an expert on bullet strikes on concrete as any who looked at the curb. Although not, so far as I know, an expert on tire rim strikes on curbs.

But he didn’t mention any missing chips from the curb. Just as the photographs do not show any missing chip, or any large enough to be visible, Deputy Sheriff Walters did not observe this either. So the best witness saw no chip missing from the curb. Only a mark.

His opinion seems to have been based on the freshness of the mark. He knows from experience that they become noticeably grayer and grayer after two or three days.

Well, we know that thousands of cars drove by that curb every day. Most of them did not strike a curb, but most bullets, would not strike a curb either. And there were not thousands of bullets fired.

None of this is strong evidence that the tire rim strike hypothesis is wrong and the bullet strike hypothesis is correct.