Oswald's Wallet and Police Culture*
Oswald's wallet, containing "A. Hidell" identification, was supposedly taken from him in the squad car after he was arrested at the Texas Theater. However, there is contradictory evidence that it was actually found at the scene of the J.D. Tippit murder. Not only that, it was also filmed at the site by WFAA Channel 8 photographer Ron Reiland.. See https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/wallet-mystery-from-officer-tippits-murder-settled-after-50-years/287-306016477 .
While I normally put more weight on sworn testimony (Dallas Police sergeant Gerald Hill testified that the only way the police found Oswald's name was to remove his billfold and check it themselves, and Detective Richard Stovall testified that Oswald had his billfold containing the Selective Service card with the name A. Hidell) over someone's say-so, in this case the argument that the wallet was actually found at the Tippit murder scene seems stronger, especially given the contemporaneous film evidence (which unlike the Zapruder Film, does not have reason to doubt its authenticity). So in this case, the WFAA film evidence and non-testimony Barrett statements carry more weight than the Hill and Stovall testimonies about how the wallet was recovered. Hill, in his Warren Commission testimony, stated that he never actually handled the billfold himself, which was supposedly removed from Oswald's person by DPD Detective Paul Bentley. Nor does Hill specifically mention "Hiddell" although that name "sounded" like one he heard in connection to the identifications. Detective Richard Stovall testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald had been brought into the interrogation room, and seemed to indicate that Oswald had his wallet with his identification on him there. So there's a bit of conflicting story between the two DPD men who testified about Oswald's wallet or billfold, and the one who supposedly took it off him never testified. Hill's testimony can be found at https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh7/pdf/WH7_Hill.pdf
and Stovall's testimony can be found at https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh7/pdf/WH7_Stovall.pdf .
(A brief aside here is warranted. In a contemporaneous WFAA interview made the day after Oswald's arrest and before Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby, Detective Paul Bentley said he was the one who removed Oswald's wallet from his person and looked at the identification. He mentioned library card, but no mention of the Selective Service card or the name A. Hiddell. Nor does Bentley make any mention of the A. Hiddell alias in his December 3 report to Chief of Police J.E. Curry. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKdCly1uzSg for the video and https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth340641/m1/3/ for the December 3 police report. These discrepancies, especially given the lack of the mention of the Oswald alias, are certainly very interesting. One wonders if the Selective Service card was added to the wallet contents later, except that the Barrett statements indicate the name was mentioned at the Tippit crime scene. Perhaps the Selective Service card was removed at that point and the wallet subsequently given to Bentley to say that he took it off Oswald's person? At any rate, there does not appear to be any under oath testimony by Bentley to the Warren Commission.)
So why would Hill and Stovall lie (or disseminate) about where/how the wallet was recovered? Apparently someone of authority (or at least, Hill and Stovall) decided it would be more advantageous for their case against Oswald if the wallet was recovered from his person rather than at the scene of the murder--which makes little sense to me, since the wallet found at the scene would be direct evidence linking Oswald to the scene of the Tippit murder. Per the article referenced above, "Barrett and Rookstool believe police made that up for the official report because too many officers handled the crucial piece of evidence at the shooting scene." (Barrett refers to FBI agent Bob Barrett who had been in Dealey Plaza and was at least researcher's for the "blond agent" photographed near the Elm Street manhole cover, although Barrett's handwritten recollections appear to discount that. Rookstool refers to Farris Rookstool, III, a "JFK Historian and former FBI analyst," who studied the Oswald Wallet and was responsible for the revelation that it was actually recovered at the Tippit murder scene.)
What I think happened was this: The wallet and the A. Hiddell identification (that might or might not have been inside the wallet--maybe Oswald took it out to show Tippit?) were actually found at the Tippit murder scene, but too many people were handling the evidence. So when Oswald was brought to the station, someone told Bentley about the problem, and Bentley "took care of it" by, instead of taking the wallet from Oswald, actually put it back into Oswald's hip pocket (with the A. Hiddell identification in it, or maybe that card was added to the wallet contents later) after pretending to take the wallet out to look at the identification. That's admittedly speculation on my part, but Bentley, again, never actually testified, and there is that film evidence that the wallet was actually at the Tippit murder scene. Given that Tippit was one of their own who was murdered, they likely just wanted to make it seem as if the chain of evidence was unbroken.
The creation of the fiction that the wallet was found on Oswald's person does raise an important and concerning issue concerning police culture of the era. As it turns out, Dallas County, Texas, is the site of the first (or one of the first) "Conviction Integrity Units" (also called "Conviction Review Units") that rapidly produced an unprecedented series of DNA and non-DNA post-conviction exonerations." See https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/80789/OSJCL_V14N2_705.pdf . In nearby Harris County, one of the two offices from which the vast majority of nationwide CIU exonerations came, "There were 60 CIU exonerations in 2015 and 70 CIU exonerations in 2016. In 2016, 48 of the CIU exonerations (69%) were drug conviction guilty pleas from Harris County. There were 9 additional CIU exonerations in 2016 for drug crimes from other counties, 10 for homicides, and 3 for other violent crimes. The Harris County drug cases arose from late receipt of laboratory results showing the substances possessed by individuals who pled guilty for whatever reason were not, in fact, controlled substances." (See Footnote 2 of the above referenced article.) I suspect that the "individuals who pled guilty for whatever reason" did so because they realized the system was rigged against them, and decided that a guilty plea would result in the lightest possible sentence.
Problematically, there has been a history of some police being less than truthful. For example, false testimony in court has been prevalent enough to warrant its own slang: "testilying" or "police perjury." O.J. Simpson's trial for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson brought the matter to public attention when Detective Marc Fuhrman was caught lying to the court about his use of the derogatory term "nigger ". See https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/ucollr67&div=49&id=&page= Police misconduct has gone so far as to include the use of torture (in one case, electric shock) to elicit a confession. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/29760781?typeAccessWorkflow=login .
There seems to have been a long-standing culture that "Officers of the law could do no wrong." although that culture appears be changing in more recent history, as the relatively recent convictions of police officers in the wrongful death of George Floyd (which sparked the "Black Lives Matter" protests) seems to confirm, one might assume that as of November 22, 1963 it was firmly in place, as the details of the Oswald wallet seem to show.
Moreover, and more to the point of my thesis, that culture of police doing whatever they wanted to likely spread to other law enforcement agencies. Even the FBI (which aside from being the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been dubbed as standing for "Fidelity, Integrity") has had its own integrity issues and is not without its own controversies. (Wikipedia lists a bunch at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies .) Specifically in regards to the JFK Assassination, John Hunt described the FBI's misrepresentation of evidence, specifically by FBI expert Robert Frazier, who testified to the Warren Commission, in Hunt's excellent article "Frazier Speaks" (See https://history-matters.com/essays/frameup/FrazierSpeaks/FrazierSpeaks.htm ). Hunt concluded that "Frazier speaks. But he does not tell the truth." There are too many anomalies in the JFK assassination evidence, when in fact, none should appear at all. As I have stated from the outset of my documentary, conclusions are supposed to be based on evidence. The same evidence may lead to different conclusions, and conclusions may change as new or better evidence emerges. However, in this case, the official conclusion has always bene the same (i.e., that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for all the injuries that occurred in Dealey Plaza), and evidence was demonstrably changed to fit that single conclusion. (The scenario I give aligns, I believe, with the most reliable evidence of the case.)
The Secret Service was not immune to this culture of "law enforcement can do no wrong." The recent revelation of Paul Landis that he placed a bullet on Kennedy's stretcher in Trauma Room One is evidence of this. It took nearly 60 years for Landis to make the full revelation. I've shown in my documentary how Clint Hill lied and disseminated about the location of the blow-out on JFK's head.
The culture of "testilying" and "police perjury" has caused more problems than it has solved. In this case, the insistence that "Oswald did everything," despite all the evidence to the contrary, has created the impression among some that "Oswald did nothing." In fact, I do think Oswald was directly responsible for the first head shot, and without his invitation of the attack on the President in Dealey Plaza, the Secret Service accidental "slam fire" head shot would never have happened. The cover-up is what has created so much controversy and division in our country, so in that sense, the cover-up has been worse than the crime. One would hope that the culture is changing regarding law enforcement accountability (and the convictions of the officers involved in George Floyd's wrongful death may be evidence of this), but that improvement still has a long way to go. The ongoing failure of U.S. government agencies to admit to participating in the cover-up and publicly describing the full extent of their participation continues, and not even the Mary Ferrell et. al. lawsuit has changed that.
*I previously included a similar article on my old JFK-donahue website (https://jfk-donahue.weebly.com/oswalds-wallet.html ) but decided it was time to update this website to include that information, as well. -Denise
Oswald's wallet, containing "A. Hidell" identification, was supposedly taken from him in the squad car after he was arrested at the Texas Theater. However, there is contradictory evidence that it was actually found at the scene of the J.D. Tippit murder. Not only that, it was also filmed at the site by WFAA Channel 8 photographer Ron Reiland.. See https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/wallet-mystery-from-officer-tippits-murder-settled-after-50-years/287-306016477 .
While I normally put more weight on sworn testimony (Dallas Police sergeant Gerald Hill testified that the only way the police found Oswald's name was to remove his billfold and check it themselves, and Detective Richard Stovall testified that Oswald had his billfold containing the Selective Service card with the name A. Hidell) over someone's say-so, in this case the argument that the wallet was actually found at the Tippit murder scene seems stronger, especially given the contemporaneous film evidence (which unlike the Zapruder Film, does not have reason to doubt its authenticity). So in this case, the WFAA film evidence and non-testimony Barrett statements carry more weight than the Hill and Stovall testimonies about how the wallet was recovered. Hill, in his Warren Commission testimony, stated that he never actually handled the billfold himself, which was supposedly removed from Oswald's person by DPD Detective Paul Bentley. Nor does Hill specifically mention "Hiddell" although that name "sounded" like one he heard in connection to the identifications. Detective Richard Stovall testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald had been brought into the interrogation room, and seemed to indicate that Oswald had his wallet with his identification on him there. So there's a bit of conflicting story between the two DPD men who testified about Oswald's wallet or billfold, and the one who supposedly took it off him never testified. Hill's testimony can be found at https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh7/pdf/WH7_Hill.pdf
and Stovall's testimony can be found at https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh7/pdf/WH7_Stovall.pdf .
(A brief aside here is warranted. In a contemporaneous WFAA interview made the day after Oswald's arrest and before Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby, Detective Paul Bentley said he was the one who removed Oswald's wallet from his person and looked at the identification. He mentioned library card, but no mention of the Selective Service card or the name A. Hiddell. Nor does Bentley make any mention of the A. Hiddell alias in his December 3 report to Chief of Police J.E. Curry. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKdCly1uzSg for the video and https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth340641/m1/3/ for the December 3 police report. These discrepancies, especially given the lack of the mention of the Oswald alias, are certainly very interesting. One wonders if the Selective Service card was added to the wallet contents later, except that the Barrett statements indicate the name was mentioned at the Tippit crime scene. Perhaps the Selective Service card was removed at that point and the wallet subsequently given to Bentley to say that he took it off Oswald's person? At any rate, there does not appear to be any under oath testimony by Bentley to the Warren Commission.)
So why would Hill and Stovall lie (or disseminate) about where/how the wallet was recovered? Apparently someone of authority (or at least, Hill and Stovall) decided it would be more advantageous for their case against Oswald if the wallet was recovered from his person rather than at the scene of the murder--which makes little sense to me, since the wallet found at the scene would be direct evidence linking Oswald to the scene of the Tippit murder. Per the article referenced above, "Barrett and Rookstool believe police made that up for the official report because too many officers handled the crucial piece of evidence at the shooting scene." (Barrett refers to FBI agent Bob Barrett who had been in Dealey Plaza and was at least researcher's for the "blond agent" photographed near the Elm Street manhole cover, although Barrett's handwritten recollections appear to discount that. Rookstool refers to Farris Rookstool, III, a "JFK Historian and former FBI analyst," who studied the Oswald Wallet and was responsible for the revelation that it was actually recovered at the Tippit murder scene.)
What I think happened was this: The wallet and the A. Hiddell identification (that might or might not have been inside the wallet--maybe Oswald took it out to show Tippit?) were actually found at the Tippit murder scene, but too many people were handling the evidence. So when Oswald was brought to the station, someone told Bentley about the problem, and Bentley "took care of it" by, instead of taking the wallet from Oswald, actually put it back into Oswald's hip pocket (with the A. Hiddell identification in it, or maybe that card was added to the wallet contents later) after pretending to take the wallet out to look at the identification. That's admittedly speculation on my part, but Bentley, again, never actually testified, and there is that film evidence that the wallet was actually at the Tippit murder scene. Given that Tippit was one of their own who was murdered, they likely just wanted to make it seem as if the chain of evidence was unbroken.
The creation of the fiction that the wallet was found on Oswald's person does raise an important and concerning issue concerning police culture of the era. As it turns out, Dallas County, Texas, is the site of the first (or one of the first) "Conviction Integrity Units" (also called "Conviction Review Units") that rapidly produced an unprecedented series of DNA and non-DNA post-conviction exonerations." See https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/80789/OSJCL_V14N2_705.pdf . In nearby Harris County, one of the two offices from which the vast majority of nationwide CIU exonerations came, "There were 60 CIU exonerations in 2015 and 70 CIU exonerations in 2016. In 2016, 48 of the CIU exonerations (69%) were drug conviction guilty pleas from Harris County. There were 9 additional CIU exonerations in 2016 for drug crimes from other counties, 10 for homicides, and 3 for other violent crimes. The Harris County drug cases arose from late receipt of laboratory results showing the substances possessed by individuals who pled guilty for whatever reason were not, in fact, controlled substances." (See Footnote 2 of the above referenced article.) I suspect that the "individuals who pled guilty for whatever reason" did so because they realized the system was rigged against them, and decided that a guilty plea would result in the lightest possible sentence.
Problematically, there has been a history of some police being less than truthful. For example, false testimony in court has been prevalent enough to warrant its own slang: "testilying" or "police perjury." O.J. Simpson's trial for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson brought the matter to public attention when Detective Marc Fuhrman was caught lying to the court about his use of the derogatory term "nigger ". See https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/ucollr67&div=49&id=&page= Police misconduct has gone so far as to include the use of torture (in one case, electric shock) to elicit a confession. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/29760781?typeAccessWorkflow=login .
There seems to have been a long-standing culture that "Officers of the law could do no wrong." although that culture appears be changing in more recent history, as the relatively recent convictions of police officers in the wrongful death of George Floyd (which sparked the "Black Lives Matter" protests) seems to confirm, one might assume that as of November 22, 1963 it was firmly in place, as the details of the Oswald wallet seem to show.
Moreover, and more to the point of my thesis, that culture of police doing whatever they wanted to likely spread to other law enforcement agencies. Even the FBI (which aside from being the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been dubbed as standing for "Fidelity, Integrity") has had its own integrity issues and is not without its own controversies. (Wikipedia lists a bunch at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies .) Specifically in regards to the JFK Assassination, John Hunt described the FBI's misrepresentation of evidence, specifically by FBI expert Robert Frazier, who testified to the Warren Commission, in Hunt's excellent article "Frazier Speaks" (See https://history-matters.com/essays/frameup/FrazierSpeaks/FrazierSpeaks.htm ). Hunt concluded that "Frazier speaks. But he does not tell the truth." There are too many anomalies in the JFK assassination evidence, when in fact, none should appear at all. As I have stated from the outset of my documentary, conclusions are supposed to be based on evidence. The same evidence may lead to different conclusions, and conclusions may change as new or better evidence emerges. However, in this case, the official conclusion has always bene the same (i.e., that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for all the injuries that occurred in Dealey Plaza), and evidence was demonstrably changed to fit that single conclusion. (The scenario I give aligns, I believe, with the most reliable evidence of the case.)
The Secret Service was not immune to this culture of "law enforcement can do no wrong." The recent revelation of Paul Landis that he placed a bullet on Kennedy's stretcher in Trauma Room One is evidence of this. It took nearly 60 years for Landis to make the full revelation. I've shown in my documentary how Clint Hill lied and disseminated about the location of the blow-out on JFK's head.
The culture of "testilying" and "police perjury" has caused more problems than it has solved. In this case, the insistence that "Oswald did everything," despite all the evidence to the contrary, has created the impression among some that "Oswald did nothing." In fact, I do think Oswald was directly responsible for the first head shot, and without his invitation of the attack on the President in Dealey Plaza, the Secret Service accidental "slam fire" head shot would never have happened. The cover-up is what has created so much controversy and division in our country, so in that sense, the cover-up has been worse than the crime. One would hope that the culture is changing regarding law enforcement accountability (and the convictions of the officers involved in George Floyd's wrongful death may be evidence of this), but that improvement still has a long way to go. The ongoing failure of U.S. government agencies to admit to participating in the cover-up and publicly describing the full extent of their participation continues, and not even the Mary Ferrell et. al. lawsuit has changed that.
*I previously included a similar article on my old JFK-donahue website (https://jfk-donahue.weebly.com/oswalds-wallet.html ) but decided it was time to update this website to include that information, as well. -Denise