Lee Oswald The Cop Killer

[Jerry Freeman]

Eyewitnesses are unreliable except when they aren't.   

The Tippit shooting star witness-Helen Markham stated that she left her house at 1:00 as she usually did. That time was dismissed....she must have been 'mistaken'.
She could not point out LHO and say 'That's him there!'
Even after being prepped for her testimony, she still wasn't sure [already posted here umpteen times]

...from the start the CoE on the "Davis Shells" ..is certainly not clear

The Davis girls didn't put their initials on the shells did they? That starts the CoE legally.

[Mitch Todd]

Seven officers wrote: suspect arrested or questioned in the balcony
Criminal Intelligence Report, by L. D. Stringfellow
Deputy Sheriff Buddy Walthers  11/23/63 Statement
Tippit Homicide Report  CE Talbart

Report to Chief J. E. Curry, by J. B. Toney
Report to Chief J. E. Curry, by Bob K. Carroll
Report to Chief J. E. Curry, by E. L. Cunningham
Report to Chief J. E. Curry, by Marvin A. Buhk

The Walthers, Toney, Carrol, and Cunningham reports say that Oswald was caught on the first floor, NOT in the balcony. Buhk didn't go into Texas Theatre and didn't see the arrest; he said he heard over the radio (see DPD Ch1 1:45PM) that the suspect was on the balcony. Neither Talbert nor Stringfellow appear to have been at the Texas Theatre; they simply got the bureaucrat's job of writing a report based on someone else's information.

You didn't even bother to read the reports you cited, did you? 

[Tim Nickerson]

Nor does the fact that you prefer not to see the obvious problems with some of those alleged chains of custody doesn't mean that they are valid or even credible. It just means that your bar is at a very low level.

I would suggest that your bar is exceedingly high. Its not one that courts of law adhere to.

[Tim Nickerson]

The Davis girls didn't put their initials on the shells did they? That starts the CoE legally.

The legal chain of custody does not start until the first law enforcement officer takes possession.

[Howard Gee]

If the shells were from an automatic weapon, why weren't they found near Tippit's patrol car where the shooter was standing when he fired the shots?  The shells were found about one hundred feet away.  Do you seriously believe the killer went through the process of picking up the shells that had just been automatically ejected only to throw them down once he reached the Davis yard?  Please explain.

Hmmmm. Let me put my drooling kook hat on and figure this out.

The Davis sisters are lying. They're part of the plot to frame Saint Oz.

Or maybe they're mistaken and a big gust of wind blew the shells into their yard.

There you go, explained !

[Howard Gee]

Except neither one confirmed that either shell in evidence were the same as the ones that were allegedly found on November 22, 1963.

Too dense to understand that even if the shells in evidence were switched, that still wouldn't explain how the original shells were found in the Davis yard.

Bag of rocks.

[Jerry Freeman]

The legal chain of custody does not start until the first law enforcement officer takes possession.

We have a lady who found a shell 10 minutes after the police had left the area.

So Barbara Davis picked it up 100 ft from the shooting..maybe Virginia had a look at it...peradventure the whole family handled the shell for awhile. All their neighbors could have came over and picked up that shell. A really sharp lawyer might have objected under some exclusionary rule....and had that evidence thrown out regardless of a police initial. How do we know that shell hadn't been there since 1956? 

Warren Commission Conflicting Evidence of Bullets and Shells In The Shooting of J.D. Tippit
Winchester/Western  CE 602 (FBI Q-13) From Tippit's Body
 Dallas police say exhibit 602 is the only bullet in their possession. Volume III, page 474
Winchester/Western CE 603 From Tippit's Body  Cunningham later went back to the Dallas Police Department at the request of the Commission and found three more bullets.
Volume III, page 474..Winchester/Western CE 605 From Tippit's Body ?
Remington/Peters CE 604 From Tippit's Body ?...  Remington/Peters?

Remington/Peters? Eddie Kinsley bullet?
"And this one that they missed hit him in the button. And it fell off the ambulance still in this button. And I would give a million dollars if I had never kicked that thing out."
 
Cortlandt Cunningham was the FBI's firearms expert.         

"The bullet, Q-13 (CE 602). . . is so badly mutilated that there is not sufficient individual microscopic characteristics present for identification purposes."

Volume XXIV, page 263
Joseph D. Nicol was the firearms identification expert for the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, Illinois Department of Public Safety.         

"He (Nicol) declared that this bullet (CE 602) was fired from the same weapon that fired the test bullets to the exclusion of all other weapons."
   

Complete analysis here...
http://dperry1943.com/tippit.html
 

Conclusion
Over the years I came to believe that Oswald was responsible for Tippit's death. Taking it one step further it was something I set out to prove or disprove for Unsolved History. In my opinion I showed it was likely [seemed likely or appeared so] that Oswald shot Tippit to death. However, no matter what I came up with, during any criminal trial, the defense attorney would demand the bullet and the shell evidence be thrown out for lack of proof. To me there is no question that if the court refused to comply the case would be appealed. On appeal the case would be sent back to be re-tried without the bullet and shell evidence. That was and still is the only point I was trying to make. 

Barbara and Virginia Davis could not identify their shells when asked to do so.
Volume XXIV, page 414

From page 263 ~ In 1996 Dale interviewed Tippit shooting lead investigator, Jim Leavelle. "'Poe did not mark them,' Leavelle said of the shells recovered at the Tippit scene. 'There was no reason to mark the [hulls]. There is an evidence bag that is marked with the offense number along with your initials.'"
  In my opinion, while Dale is honest in pointing out some of the unresolved issues, several comments in this chapter tend to gloss over problems related to the chain of custody. What follows are a couple of examples:...............................................

http://dperry1943.com/tippit.html
 

[Mitch Todd]

and what do we make of it if he was not there. Assigned the report from someone else? An intentional fabrication? Delusional? Part of a conspiracy to create confusion of multiple conflicting reports to perhaps provide additional options? Was there and somehow removed by the official account.

 Sorry if I am not willing to dismiss it completely

Assuming that "he" refers to the police officer that writes a specific report on a given arrest here. The guy writing the report is stuck with using the information he has, from the sources he knows. It's not footnoted, nor are specific accounts or sources mentioned, so we don't know exactly where the information used to create the report came from.

What we do know:

The officers involved in the arrest wrote reports about it. All of them say that Oswald was arrested on the lower level of the theater, not the balcony. Many of the officers accounts say that they initially went to the balcony, but descended to the main level when Oswald was found there. At least one account noted that the officers went to the balcony based on the instruction of the radio dispatcher. In the channel 1 radio logs, at about 1:45, there is this transmission from the dispatcher: "We have information that a suspect just went in the Texas Theater on West Jefferson. Supposed to be hiding in the balcony." That transmission seems to be the source of the idea that Oswald was arrested on the balcony, and it was a source broadcast all over the department (and to anyone else who had a police radio). It's not that far fetched, then, to think that a police officer who was not at the arrest to have assumed Oswald was arrested on the balcony based on the radio traffic.

What is important is to note that all of the officers who were in the theater at the time said that Oswald was arrested on the lower level.