I've been back and forth on that over the years. I believe it was a wallet, though it could be some sort of note pad.
Fair enough. I'm pretty sure, in my mind, that it was indeed a wallet and it wasn't Tippit's.
Tippit was shot from ~6 ft away. The shooter could have comfortably hit him rapidfire with a pop gun at that range.
So it's not one witness, as advertised, but a combination of the testimony of three different ones. Good to know.Anyway, Benavides saw the gunman remove and throw two cases, not one. Then again, he remembered that he heard three shots, when there must have been at least four, so his counting may be off. The shaking described by the Davis girls doesn't solve your problem. Their description implies two different possibilities to me:First is that the Davises saw the guy doing what might be called the 'combat crane close.' This maneuver involves closing the cylinder by abruptly rotating the wrist of the hand holding the pistol. If you remember old-school cop and detective shows, you've seen some actor do it at least once. Sometimes, the cylinder doesn't engage the frame and bounces back, requiring a second or even a third shake to get the thing closed. Second is where the rim of one or more cases slips past the ejector star and fall back into their chamber. If that happens, one easy way to get them out is to shake them out. In any case, if you are having to shake the cases out of a revolver, the ejector isn't doing the job and the cases aren't coming out normally. Oswald's pistol was originally chambered in .38 S&W, but the chamber was rebored to fire .38 Special. .38 S&W is slightly larger diameter than .38 special. The modification of the LHO pistol can cause .38SPL cases to permanently swell or even split during firing, which would definitely make it harder to unload normally. And it's a situation liable to cause someone to pick out cases onesey-twosey. BTW, I don't see either of the Davis girls saying that the shooter was pointing the barrel upwards when he shook the gun.
Why dump the shells at all.Why not get the F out of Dodge and then dump them.I never quite understood that.It doesn't have any bearing on who the shooter was, it just seems weird (to me, at least).
Gerald Hill’s lame excuse notwithstanding, a veteran police officer could have easily distinguished an automatic shell and a revolver shell by looking at it.