From Dale Myers: "The death certificate "discrepancy" - as I noted in "With Malice" - was explained during a 1983 interview I conducted with the late Dr. Paul Moellenhoff, who attended Tippit at Methodist. He told me that the clocks within the emergency area at Methodist showed different times - neither of them accurate as it turns out.
He used the 1:15 p.m. time shown on one of the clocks. The time reported to the FBI by Dr. Liquori (With Malice [WM], 2013 [edition], p.557) - 1:24 pm - is probably the accurate one based on the recorded timing of Bowley's call, the recorded departure of the ambulance from 10th and Patton, and the known drive time from 10th and Patton to Methodist Hospital.
DPD Officer Davenport noted that Moellenhoff removed one slug from Tippit's body at 1:30 pm (WM 2013 p.536). That same time (1:30 pm) made its way into Leavelle's homicide report (WM 2013 p.519) as the time Tippit was pronounced DOA (which couldn't possibly be true, right? You don't pull a slug from a body until after he's pronounced dead). This matches up with Moellenhoff's 1983 recollection that he removed a slug from the body within ten minutes of declaring Tippit DOA.
My caption under the death certificate (WM 2013 p.506) seeks to clarify the discrepancy between the Time of Injury (1:18 pm) and the time Death Occurred (1:15 pm). Again, it stems from my conversation with Dr. Moellenhoff. The 1:18 pm time, of course, probably refers to the time that Bowley's radio call was received - not the actual time Tippit was shot.
The 1:15 p.m. notation (although close in time to the actual moment of the shooting, as far as I can calculate) probably stems from Dr. Moellenhoff's use of an inaccurate Methodist emergency room clock.
Interesting, huh? All this fuss because no one at Methodist bothered to synchronize the clocks to actual time (some running fast, some running slow).
Can you imagine how many other death certificates were marked with times that were off by a few minutes? But what does it matter in those cases? Not one whit."
