Our Hidden History

This interview took place in July 2017.

Bill Simpich, Author of State Secret

The Murder of J.D. Tippit

There is a pdf transcript attached to this listing. It can be downloaded under the "DOWNLOAD OPTIONS" on the right hand side of this page. Also available here.

OHH Okay. Bill Simpich is an attorney and anti-war activist. He's been practicing law for 35 years now. He's worked on several important political cases. He's been in court against both the FBI and the CIA: against the FBI in a case where two political activists were the victims of a car bombing and against the CIA for their involvement in Contra drug trafficking. He's been involved in cases against the Bush administrations where their civil liberties clamp down, and he's worked on cases of police shootings in the Bay Area.

He's also worked more recently to make sure votes were counted properly in the California Democratic primary. He's written on political assassinations in the '60s such as the murders of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, CIA attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, and on the assassination of John Kennedy about which he's written a book [available for free] called State Secret and a series of articles called "The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend". [For more on these topics, see Our Hidden History's previous interview with Bill, "Secret Operations in the United States and their Effects").

So thank you, Bill, for talking. We're going to talk tonight about the Tippit case. We're going to focus on that because you made a very, very interesting talk at the Assassination Archive and Research Center Conference on the Warren Commission Report in 2014. So I thought you know a lot about that. I thought it'd be interesting.

Bill Simpich Yeah. I'm looking forward to talking about the Tippit story. Quite a saga.

OHH Yeah, it really is. Do you want to ... Do you want to give us kind of the lay of the land and explain the basic story to us? There's a bunch of really interesting points that you have about Officer Westbrook of the Dallas Police -- the two wallets -- but maybe you can kind of give us the overview of things. Then we can kind of dig into some of the individual issues.

Bill Simpich Sounds good. In a nutshell, the Tippit case has never been properly investigated. They say that about the Kennedy case and they're right, but this one is a whole 'nother level of confusion. I think, frankly, much of it is because it happened in Dallas. Dallas Police are powerful, and were cowboys then certainly. I can't speak about them now. I think people were genuinely scared to even talk about the efficacy of their investigation.

The overview I got is that to understand the Kennedy assassination, the best place, I think, to dig in is between 12:30 and 2:00 in the afternoon. Because that's the period where Oswald's movements and Tippit's movements are highly contested. I would suggest there's a reason why because what happens during that period of time is nothing short of an incredible series of chases. The question that I pose is whether or not anybody fired from the sixth floor at all and certainly whether Oswald fired from the sixth floor. I'm willing to believe that people posed with guns. I'm not convinced that anybody fired a gun out from that floor. I certainly don't believe that Oswald was one of them.

Then the drama moves to where he lives which was over in Oak Cliff. Now if you're ever in Dallas and you take a look at the map, you go "Gosh." Where Oswald lived was like miles away from Oak Cliff from the sixth floor. But the wrinkle is that you can get from downtown Dallas to the Oak Cliff neighborhood in less than five minutes. Then and now. Because there's a big ol' highway that just goes -- boom -- right from the area of the Depository.

That's what's kind of crazy about it because there's a river called the Trinity River that separates Dallas proper from the immediate suburbs such as Oak Cliff. It's a big river valley, if you will. The way you cross it is on a highway. They really call it a viaduct. You're crossing over the water. That's where Tippit was parked. Did you know that? Right at the end of the viaduct as you enter into Oak Cliff. And Tippit had his car parked right at a gas station right where you get off the viaduct and enter Oak Cliff proper.

For the life of me, this is where things really tried to stall in the investigation of the assassination as far as I'm concerned because Bill Turner who just passed away recently -- William Turner -- was an ex-FBI agent who dove into this case as soon as it happened. He worked this case and others like the RFK case for many years. He worked with Jim Garrison, you name it. [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover hated him. He hated Hoover. They had a parting of ways before the assassination.

Turner interviewed five people who either worked at the gas station or lived around that neck of the woods. They knew ... Several of them knew Tippit. They knew who the cop was. That was not the first time he had parked his car. He used it as a lookout. That's what I believe he was doing that day. He was looking for Oswald. In fact, Joe McBride, who wrote I think the best book on the subject recently [Into The Nightmare by Joseph McBride], interviewed Tippit's father before he passed away. Tippit's father told the writer that he, Tippit's father, was told by a Dallas cop [inaudible] that, in fact, Tippit was looking for Oswald that day. I mean that's quite a thing.

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews