The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy – part 3: Helen Markham as a Witness of the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit
Reading time: 8 minutes
Together with the captions, the pictures provide the essence of this story
Dallas – Friday, November 22 1963 at 1.15 in the afternoon
A few minutes after one o’clock, Helen Markham, a waitress, was walking to a bus stop to go to work. At the intersection of 10th Street and Patton Avenue (see pictures 1 and 2), she had to wait for a few cars, including Tippit’s police car. While she was standing at that intersection, she saw someone walking on the other side of 10th Street. The police car drove slowly alongside the pedestrian. Soon both the man and the police car had stopped. Markham did not know whether Tippit had told the pedestrian to stop, but she did see the man taking two steps backward. Leaning on the car, he started talking to Tippit through the open window. From a distance, it seemed like a friendly encounter to Helen Markham, even though she could not hear what was being said.
Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 17, p.230.
Tippit got out of the car slowly, and walked along the front of his car, when the pedestrian drew his revolver and killed him. Then the murderer walked towards Helen Markham.
“He didn’t run. When he saw me he looked at me, stared at me. I put my hands over my face like this, closed my eyes. I gradually opened my fingers like this, and I opened my eyes, and when I did, he started off in a little trot.”
Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 3, p. 308. [Helen herself on you tube: helen markham tippit]
In a panic, she screamed: “He killed him!” All the while she stayed in the same spot, trembling and screaming. Her reaction was hardly surprising: with the gun in his hand, the man walked towards her a couple of yards, and Markham was afraid he was going to kill her too. Then the man ran between some shrubbery and crossed the street (see map in picture 3).
A little before two o’ clock, soon after Tippit’s murder, Dallas police arrested a 24-year-old ex-marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, while he was watching a war movie in a nearby theatre. John Brewer, a shoe shop assistant, had observed a haggard-looking Oswald staring at the shop window, while police cars drove by, sirens blaring. Brewer thought Oswald’s behavior suspicious, so he followed him to a nearby movie theatre. Apparently, Oswald had not bought a ticket. Brewer then called the police who arrived promptly. Oswald was taken to the police station, as a suspect in Tippit’s murder. But how were they to find out whether this suspicion was justified? A common method is to put the suspect among a number of innocent distractors (so called ‘fillers’) who look like him and then ask witnesses if they can recognize their man. This is called a “line-up” in police language.
Friday afternoon, November 22: first line-up at 4.20 in the afternoon with Helen Markham as a witness
At 4:30 PM, Oswald had been placed among three fillers, all of them police officers. Helen Markham was the witness who inspected this first lineup. Incidentally, it took quite a bit of effort to get her to do so, as the interrogation of Will Fritz, head of the homicide department shows:
“The first show up was for a lady who was an eyewitness and we were trying to get that show up as soon as we could because she was beginning to faint and getting sick. In fact, I had to leave the office and carry some ammonia across the hall, they were about to send her to the hospital or something and we needed that identification real quickly and she got to feeling all right after using this ammonia.” Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 4, p.212. [in those days, on some occasions sniffing ammonia was used to prevent fainting].
While the four people had been standing in lineup, the officer leading the lineup had asked them questions about their names and professions, so the witnesses could also hear the suspects’ voices. Later on the three officers who were in the line-up said their answers were fictitious. But what kind of answers did Oswald give? We do not know, because the Warren Commission never asked the officers who attended the line-ups. As soon as the four men had entered the room, Helen Markham started to cry. According to the police she had identified Oswald as Tippit’s killer.
Did Helen Markham indeed recognize Oswald?
In the course of the interrogation before the Warren Commission, on March 26, 1964, Helen repeated the identification of Oswald as the murderer. But when we take a look at the questions Joe Ball (a lawyer who conducted many interviews on behalf of the Commission) asked her, Helen Markham does not make the impression of being a reliable witness.
Ball: “Did you recognize anyone in the line-up?”
Markham: “No, sir.”
Ball: “You did not? Did you see anybody – I have asked you that question before – did you recognize anybody from their face?”
Markham: “From their face, no.”
Ball: “Did you identify anybody in these four people?”
Markham: “I didn’t know nobody.”
Ball: “I know you didn’t know anybody, but did anybody in that lineup look like anybody you had seen before?”
Markham: “No, I had never seen none of them, none of these men.”
Ball: “No one of the four?”
Markham: “No one of them.”
Ball: “No one of all four?”
Markham: “No, sir.”
Ball: “Was there a number two man in there?”
Markham: “Number two is the one I picked. (…) Number two was the man I saw shoot the policeman.” [Oswald was No. 2]
Source: Hearings before the President’s Commission, Volume 3, p. 310 ff.
So Ball asked six times if she had recognized anyone in the lineup. And six times he got no for an answer. By the way, this curious episode is not mentioned in the Warren Report. A decade later, David Belin, who – together with Joe Ball – had handled an important part of the murder investigation, tried to explain this in his book November 22, 1963: You are the Jury. The book was intended as a defence of the Warren Report. According to him, Mrs. Markham did not know the word “recognize”. It is evident that this is not an accurate explanation. After all, Ball asked the same question four more times, without using the word “recognize”. And all four times he received a negative answer. Ball’s last question was clearly not admissable.
The greater the distance …
In the course of the interrogation, Joe Ball had asked Helen Markham if she knew how far apart she had been from the suspect. She said she didn’t know. Ball: “We measured it the other day. We were out there, weren’t we?” A few days previously, Ball had in fact measured the distance in the company of Helen Markham. But Markham did not remember: “I couldn’t tell you how many feet or nothing, because I have never had no occasion to measure that.” Within a week she had forgotten that the distance had been measured in her presence. That doesn’t improve her reliability as a witness.
Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Vol. 17, p.231.
By the way, the 888-page Warren Report does not mention anything about the extent to which the distance between a witness and a suspect will affect the reliability of a subsequent recognition. If, nevertheless, the Warren Commission had taken the trouble to find out, it could have consulted Criminal Investigation, published in 1962 (two years before the Warren Report). According to this manual, if witnesses see a suspicious person for the first time, their observation can be considered reliable only, if the distance between them and the suspect does not exceed 16 yards (= 15 meters). This corresponds to what is nowadays called in Europe the “rule of 15”: the distance should not exceed 15 meters (16 yards or 50 feet). The following applies: the greater the distance, the less reliable a subsequent recognition.
Ball did not mention the measurements in the course of the interrogation of Helen Markham; however, the Warren Report does: 50 feet. But the Report does not provide a reference. Judging by the map in picture 3, this distance of 50 ft is incorrect. The dotted line indicates the fleeing man’s route. By means of the scale on the left side of the map, the distance from where Helen Markham stood can be measured: 80 feet. The probable killer, having walked through the front yard of lot No. 400, had disappeared behind the shrubbery.
Source map: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 17, p. 229.
The map shows that Helen Markham was about 150 feet away from the scene of the crime. Because of the great distance it is doubtful whether she could have seen that the man who walked towards her was the one who committed the murder. Had no one else been around? In either case, her observations fall short of “the rule of 15”. For that reason alone, her recognition of Oswald as the running man must be considered unreliable.
Conclusion
The Warren Commission had been installed by President Johnson to investigate the murders of President Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald. The Commission interrogated hundreds of people and has issued not only its 888-page report (the so-called Warren Report), but also 26 hefty volumes, containing both the hearings and relevant documents, photographs and maps. This enables us to verify whether the Warren Report agrees with the Commission’s research data.
Judging by the photographs and the maps (see the three pictures), it appears that the Report has misrepresented (i.e. shortened) the distances from which Helen Markham saw the suspect. And the curious questioning by Ball (“Was there a number two man?”) is not mentioned in the Report. Finally, the Warren Report pays no attention to the relationship between the distance and the reliability of an observation. Thus, the truth was given a run for its money: Helen Markham should never have been accepted as a reliable witness.
Sources
Richard L. Jackson, Criminal Investigation: A Practical Textbook for Magistrates, Police Officers and Lawyers (London 1962); Warren Report p. 167-169; Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, Volumes 3, 4 and 17; David Belin, November 22, 1963: You are the Jury (New York 1973); Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, (New York 1992; orig. 1967), p. 255-258, she does not, however, discuss the distances at which the observations were made by Helen Markham.
Hearings: Hellen Markham 3H 305-322 and 340-341 (March 26, 1964); Will Fritz 4H 202-249 (April 22, 1964). Helen Markham’s affidavit in: CE 2003 (24H 195-404); FBI-interview of Helen Markham: CD 630C. CD is short for Commission Documents: all the documents available to the Warren Commission (for reference on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website: www.maryferrell.org). A small part of these documents has been published in November 1964: Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, Volumes 16 through 26.