No More Silence: An Oral History of the Assassination of President Kennedy

W.R. Westbrook

W.R. "PINKY" WESTBROOK Captain, Personnel Division Dallas Police Department "Gerald Hill probably wouldn't know a .38 automatic shell if he saw one. Oh, he might ifhe could read the writing on the side, but you couldn't tell by looking at it on the ground... " Born in 1917 in Arkansas and graduated from Benton High School, "Pinky" Westbrook came to Dallas in 1937 and joined the Dallas Police Department in 1941. On November 22, 1963, Westbrook held the rank cf captain in charge ofthe Personnel Division. Since I was in charge of Personnel and Internal Affairs, I had no connection whatsoever with the President's coming. We watched him come by as they turned from Harwood onto Main where my office was located. With the motorcycle escorts and people on the streets, everything was in order at that time. Minutes later the dispatcher ran across the hall and said that the President's party had been fired upon. When we determined the location, I told the sergeant and patrolman in my office to get my car and immediately go to the scene. Then we couldn't get a straight story: The President had been shot; the President hadn't been and so on. Finally, when it was established that he had been shot, I walked to the scene, maybe a half mile away. While I was there, my sergeant ran up and said, "They've just shot an officer in Oak Cliffl" So I went immediately to that 314 NO MORE SILENCE scene. By the time we arrived, the body had been removed and quite a few people were there, including a woman I questioned who had seen Tippit killed.· When we left to go to Oak Cliff, we got two or three rumors that whoever had done the shooting was over at the library. There were quite a few rumors at that time. I don't recall who the officers were who were with me, but as I started walking up an alley, one said, "Look, there's a jacket under the car!" If I remember right, it was an old Pontiac sitting there. So I walked over and reached under the car and picked up the jacket which eventually turned out to be Oswald's. Then we went to the theater which I entered from the rear from the stage entrance along with Sergeant Stringer and FBI agent, Bob Barrett. At that time, it was immediately in everybody's mind that the shooting of the President and the officer were connected. Maybe it might be intuition, but when you have a president killed and a few minutes later you have an officer shot within a couple of miles, then you're going to think they're connected. A person that doesn't is an idiot! He's not normal if that's not his first thought. Standing on the right side of the stage facing the seats, I saw this one man sitting alone, a third of the way down in the theater in about the middle seat. There wasn't anyone else around at the time. In fact, I don't think there was anyone else in the theater, and the picture was shut off. Why he hadn't gotten up and tried to get out, I don't know. He should have been aware at the time that somebody in the theater had called the police about him. The bad thing about this situation was that I was unarmed; I had forgotten to get my pistol when I had left the office. So we started down, Sergeant Stringer on one side and me on the other. We could see a man down there even though the picture had been • In his book, Assignment Oswald, FBI Agent James Hosty recalled that fellow agent Bob Barrett, who was with Westbrook at the Tippit scene, told him that Oswald's wallet was found beside the car. This story was not known at the time of the author's interview with Westbrook, and thus the subject was not broached. However, logically, if the Dallas police had found the wallet at the scene they would have announced it to the world at the time, and much of the speculation as to whether Oswald killed Officer Tippit could have been eliminated. W.R. WESTBROOK, POLICE CAPTAIN 315 shut off. You didn't have to pick him out because...