Together with the captions, the pictures convey the essence of this story
Dallas – Friday, November 22 at 13.15 hours
At a quarter past one, forty-five minutes after the assassination of President Kennedy, officer J.D. Tippit was murdered while getting out of his car. There was only one witness of this murder: Helen Markham (see blog 3). Eighty yards away there were two men: Ted Callaway, manager of a used car dealership and Sam Guinyard, one of his employees. They heard the shots while standing in front of the company’s office.
Picture 1: This (reconstruction) photo shows Callaway in front of the used car store’s office, when he heard the shots. Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Vol. 17, p. 237.
After the shots both men ran across a parking-lot to the sidewalk. They saw a white male, gun in hand, on the other side of the street, walking away from the spot where Tippit had been killed. In the course of the interrogation before the Warren Commission, Callaway said that the man was running, but later on he changed it to a “good steady trot, not real fast.” Callaway had hollored at him:
“’Hey man, what the hell is going on?’ (…) He slowed his pace, almost halted for a minute. And he said something to me, which I could not understand. And he shrugged his shoulders [as if he did not know himself what had happened], and kept on going.” Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 3, p. 353-354; the quote between brackets is from Callaway’s FBI-interview: CD 735.
On March 26, 1964, in the course of Callaway’s interrogation, Allen Dulles (former head of the CIA and one of the seven Commissioners) asked him if he had seen Oswald’s face. Callaway: “He looked right at me, sir; when I called him, he looked at me.”
Thirty minutes after Tippit’s murder, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested at a nearby movie theater. A shoe salesman thought his behavior was suspicious, so he followed him and saw him enter the movie theater without buying a ticket. Then he alerted the police, who arrived at the scene promptly. Inside the cinema, he pointed out where Oswald was sitting.
Friday, November 22 at about 6:30 in the evening: Callaway and Guinyard and the 2nd line-up
To verify if it was indeed Oswald Callaway and Guinyard had seen, Dallas police had placed Oswald between three innocent distractors (all of them police officers), in a so-called ‘line-up’. At 6.30 in the evening, Callaway and Guinyard attended the second line-up. This line-up was identical to the first one, inspected by Helen Markham two hours earlier (see blog 3). The way in which Callaway arrived at the identification of Oswald as the fugitive, was rather peculiar: “I stepped to the back of the room, so I could kind of see him from the same distance which I had seen him before. And when he came out, I knew him.” At this distance there could have been no facial recognition, so Dulles’ question (whether he had seen the pedestrian’s face) had been irrelevant. However, Joe Ball (who led the interrogation) did not ask Callaway in what way he had recognized Oswald! Guinyard too, was not asked why he felt Oswald was the pedestrian he had seen.
So, just like Helen Markham, Callaway and Guinyard had identified Oswald as the man they had seen earlier that day. This sealed Oswald’s fate. At 7.20 in the evening, based on the two line-ups (at that time no other evidence was available), Dallas police officially charged Oswald with Tippit’s murder.
Discarded Distances
Had Callaway and Guinyard had a good look at the white male? On March 26, 1964, when Callaway was interrogated by the Commission, the distance between him and the pedestrian came up for discussion.
Picture 2: Photograph showing Callaway’s location when he saw the white male walking by quickly on the other side of the street. A few weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, the FBI took this picture and picture 1, by way of reconstruction. Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 17, p. 237.
Ball: “About what distance was he away from you – the closest that he ever was to you?” Callaway: “About 56 feet.” Ball: “You measured that, did you?” Callaway: “Yes, sir.” Ball: “Last Saturday morning?” Callaway: “Yes, sir.” Ball: “Measured it with a tape measure?” Callaway: “Yes, sir.” Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 3, p. 355.
Ten years later, David Belin confirmed this distance in a book he wrote about the Kennedy and Tippit assassinations. In March 1964, together with Joe Ball and Ted Callaway, he had measured the distance. One week after Callaway had been interrogated, it was Sam Guinyard’s turn. According to him the distance between him and the white male, gun in hand, had been only 10 feet. Ball asked him if he was quite sure about that and Ball immediately gave the answer himself. “Mr. Callaway has told us and we measured it with a tape measure, that Oswald was on the west side of the street, and we measured it and he figured it was about 55 feet from him when he passed.”
Picture 3: Guinyard’s interrogation, in which the 10-foot distance he mentioned was immediately corrected by Joe Ball in 55 feet. By the way, this was one foot too short: Callaway had mentioned 56 feet. According to Guinyard, he and Callaway were standing close together. Yet, only the distance of 10 feet is mentioned by the Warren Report, instead of 55 or 56 feet. Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 7, p. 397 ff.
A ten feet distance would have been very unlikely indeed. If that had been the right distance, Guinyard should have been on the other side of the street, and the white male, gun in hand, would have been dangerously close to him. In the course of the interrogation, Guinyard stated that he was standing behind Callaway, who was actually on the other side of the street. Apart from Ball’s correction, the difference in distances was not discussed. Possibly Guinyard misunderstood the question and mentioned the distance between him and Callaway instead.
We are lost for words when the Warren Report mentions a 10-feet distance between Callaway and Guinyard on one side of the street, and the unknown male, armed with a gun, on the other side. The Report does not mention the fact that Ball, together with David Belin and Ted Callaway, had measured the distance and found it to over 55 feet. The map in picture 4 also shows that the distance must have been over 55 feet.
Incidentally, the Warren Report does not mention anything about the extent to which the distance between witness and suspect affects the reliability of a subsequent recognition. If the Warren Commission had taken the trouble to find out, it could have consulted Scotland Yard’s well known 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. It 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.
Picture 4: The while male crossed the street behind the cab. The felt-tip line, drawn by Callaway in the course of the interrogation, indicates the pedestrian’s route. The cross in the lower right indicates Callaway’s location, and the dot probably indicates Guinyard’s location. The while male trotted off to their left toward Jefferson Boulevard. The distance was measured by Ball and Callaway as 56 feet. In the map the distance can be measured by using the scale indicator at the bottom left: it is way over 50 feet and could not have been 10 feet, as mentioned by the Warren Report. The numbers on the map refer to the photographs taken by the FBI by way of reconstruction, a few weeks after the assassinations. Source: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volume 17, p. 236.
So, it is safe to conclude that the distance of 10 feet is incorrect, and that the measured distance of 56 feet means that a reliable recognition would be highly improbable. In short, both witnesses were too far away to be able to recognize the pedestrian in a line-up, even though the Warren Report would have us believe otherwise.
Conclusion
By mentioning a distance of 10 feet (instead of 56 feet), the Warren Report gives the impression that the recognition of Oswald by the two witnesses was a foregone conclusion. The fact that Callaway had not identified Oswald on the basis of facial recognition, is not mentioned in the Warren Report. Moreover, it is does not mention either on what basis Guinyard arrived at the identification of Oswald. Because of the great distance between the witnesses and the white male, a reliable identification would have been possible only if the witnesses had noticed something very special about the suspect, such as for instance a limp, but that was not the case.
It is rather unlikely that Ball and Belin (the authors of this part of the Report) had forgotten the actual distance. After all, they had measured it themselves and they had discussed it in the course of Callaway’s interrogation. Moreover, Ball actually corrected Guinyard when he mentioned a distance of 10 feet. Only by subtracting 46 feet from the distance at which the observations had been made, the Warren Report is able to endorse the result of the line-ups: “Oswald is the culprit”.
Sources
Warren Report p. 167-169; 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, however, she does not discuss the distances at which the observations were made by Callaway and Guinyard.
Hearings: Ted Callaway 3H 351-357 (March 26, 1964); Sam Guinyard 7H 395-401 (April 2). Affadavits by Callaway en Guinyard in: CE 2003 (24H 195-404); Ted Callaway’s interview by the FBI in: CD 735. CD is short for Commission Documents, all the documents available to the Warren Commission (for reference at the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation: www.maryferrell.org). In November 1964, a small part of the Commission Documents has been published: Hearings Before the President’s Commission, Volumes 16-26.
