Eight Murphys
At the beginning of my last post I mention that in the 1910s there's a chain of assassinations and attempted assassinations whose particulars remarkably tend to line up with the particulars of disasters much more than one would expect. Those who want to know the truth will naturally wonder whether the alignment continues thereafter. In America at least, it seems to. The main focus of this post will be the JFK assassination, but let's first look at what I believe are the most significant acts of violence against U.S. politicians by assassin-like figures from the end of World War I until JFK is shot.
15 February 1932. Italian immigrant and Paterson, NJ, resident Giuseppe Zangara fatally wounds Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago in Miami, Florida, probably while attempting to shoot President-Elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. February 15 is the anniversary of the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898. Miami is the closest large American city to Havana, Cuba, and the sinking of the Maine, whether an accident or an act of war, was especially significant as being the precipitating cause of the Spanish American War (Americans were told to "Remember the Maine"). (Though not directly relevant to my main point, it's worth mentioning that the July 29, 1900, assassination of King Umberto of Italy was by someone who had been a former Italian immigrant living in Paterson, NJ, and that, as you may have noticed if you paid attention to my last post, the 1916 Matheson fire (and possibly the placing of the bomb at Black Tom) was exactly 16 years later).
8 September 1935. Louisiana Governor Huey Long assassinated in Baton Rouge, LA, on anniversary of 1900 Galveston Hurricane striking Galveston, TX, to this day the deadliest U.S. disaster (not counting pandemics, of course).
1 November 1950. Two Puerto Rican extremist nationalists attempt to shoot their way into Blair House and assassinate President Truman. An assassin trades gunfire with a heroic White House Policeman, resulting in the death of both, and the two would-be assassins never get into the building. Anniversary of the 1 November 1918 Malbone Street Train Wreck (93 dead) entering Prospect Park station in Brooklyn, NY, typically considered the fourth deadliest-ever U.S. railroad disaster.
1 March 1954. Puerto Rican Extremist Nationalists shoot 30 rounds from a gallery in the House of Representatives Chamber of the U.S. Capitol, wounding five Representatives. Anniversary of 1 March 1910 Wellington, WA, snow avalanche (96 dead), typically considered the third deadliest-ever U.S. railroad disaster.
10 April 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald is believed to have shot at General Edwin Walker. Earlier in the day, the nuclear submarine USS Thresher sank off Massachusetts, killing all 129 on board. Also the anniversary of the 1917 Eddystone munitions plant explosion (confer preceding post) during WWI.
Though not an assassination or attempted assassination, there was another incident during the period that caused alignment of disaster with prominent assassination: on 6 September 1943, Pennsylvania Railroad's Congressional wrecked (79 dead) in Kensington, North Philadlephia, PA, approaching the curve at Frankford Junction. The wreck was on the anniversary of the fatal shooting of President McKinley in 1901. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some sort of sabotage was involved in that wreck, especially as it happened during WWII, after America had entered the war.
It's worth mentioning that all the assassins or would-be assassins starting from 1910 that I have mentioned in this and the preceding post who have operated in the U.S. have ties either with New York City or (in the case of Zangara) with a suburb of New York City (i.e., Paterson, NJ). This strongly suggests that the disaster-referrent tendency in assassination took off in New York City, as indeed makes sense since the German sabotage campaign was centered in New York City, and as we have seen in the previous post, the same tendency to kill while referring to disasters seems to have been displayed by the saboteurs. In August 1952, Oswald moved to New York City--he and his mother Marguerite first stayed with his half-brother John Pic and his wife in Yorkville at 325 E. 92nd Street in August 1952. In the 1950s, Yorkville was the most German part of New York City and had been a center of German-American Bund activity immediately preceding WWII. The closest Lutheran Church to where John Pic lived was (barely) probably Zion-St. Mark's, the descendant of the St. Mark's Church (which had combined with another church and moved to Yorkville from the Lower East Side in 1946) that lost about a thousand parishioners in the General Slocum disaster (including the young woman who may or may not have been the girlfriend or even fiancee of John Schrank, the man who shot Teddy Roosevelt). According to her own testimony to the Warren Commission, one of the first tasks Lee Oswald's mother set about upon arriving in New York City was to attempt to get Lee confirmed in the Lutheran faith.
Now on to the Murphys. Can you find all eight? I do not wish to indicate now whether or not I have found other possible Murphy references. Wise it seems to maintain an air of mystery.
22 November 1950. Motorman William Murphy's Train No. 780 is rear-ended by Train No. 174 in Richmond Hill, Queens, 78 dead. NYC Police Commissioner Thomas Murphy visits wreck site at 12:30am the next day. Motorman Benjamin J. Pokorney of No. 174 is believed to have misinterpreted a signal for an adjacent block as though it were for his block. Conductor Austin of 174 indicated in testimony in the official report that his train started speeding up above restricted speed (15 mph) when he, Conductor Austin, in second car, was roughly opposite the Kew Gardens station. The train cars were about 64.5 feet long, and so the best guess is that Pokorney would have been about 95 feet beyond (southeast of) being opposite the center of the Kew Gardens train station when he started speeding the train above restricted speed, believed to have been the main cause of the disaster.
Autumn 1960. Belmont, NH, Postmaster Thomas Murphy alerts authorities concerning possible danger of Richard Paul Pavlick to JFK.
22 November 1963. Thirtenth Anniversary of Richmond Hill or Kew Gardens wreck. Railway Worker Thomas Murphy views JFK motorcade from triple overpass railway bridge. On the Stemmons Freeway overpass just west of the railway bridge, Patrolman Joe Murphy keeps an eye on the railway workers on the adjacent bridge and keeps onlookers off his bridge. Lee Harvey Oswald catches Cecil McWatter's Lakewood-Marsalis bus at Elm and Murphy a few minutes after the shooting notwithstanding there is no stop there (he bangs on door). Oswald is arrested while resisting at the Texas Theatre while watching “War is Hell” narrated by war hero Audie Murphy, who was born only about 50 miles northeast of Dealey Plaza. Audie Murphy and Officer J.D. Tippit both did basic training at Camp Wolters, TX, also where Robert Preston learned to fly a helicopter (onto the White House grounds in 1974).
13 March 1964. Kitty Genovese is stabbed for the last time and left for dead in a stairwell of her apartment building, where she had taken refuge at 80-62 Austin Street, Kew Gardens. The exterior doorway at this stairwell is about 90 feet from the center of Track 2 where the trains involved in the wreck had been in 1950, and opposite a spot on the tracks about 85 feet southeast of the spot on the tracks opposite the center of Kew Gardens Station. Genovese was first stabbed about 3:20 am; she had left the bar in Hollis around 3am, just 2.5 minutes after the anniversary (Pacific time) of a disaster (400 dead) that happened in California two days after James Earl Ray was born.
Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese”, New York Post, Larry Getlen, February 16, 2014: One could argue that Genovese became a legend not on the day she was killed, but 10 days later, when New York City Police Commissioner Michael “Bull” Murphy had lunch with The New York Times’ new city editor — later to become the paper’s executive editor — Abe Rosenthal.
After Rosenthal brought up a case Murphy wished to avoid discussing, the commissioner pivoted to the Genovese case.
“Brother, that Queens story is one for the books. Thirty-eight witnesses,” Murphy said. “I’ve been in this business a long time, but this beats everything.”
18 March 1968. (1) Anniversary 1925 Tri-State Tornado (695 dead) devastating Murphysboro (234 dead). (2) James Earl Ray abruptly leaves St. Francis Hotel in Los Angeles to head to Atlanta via New Orleans; in Atlanta, Ray will choose to rent a room in a boarding house around the corner from where Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell had been fatally injured by an automobile while she was crossing the street. (3) Winston Moseley, who had been convicted of murdering Kitty Genovese, escapes while returning to prison from a hospital visit and will do rapacious things until he is recaptured three days later.
Update, more Murphy, et cetera! (added February 5, 2022):
15 January 1953. On Martin Luther King's 24th birthday in 1953, Pennsylvania Railroad's Train No. 173, the Federal, a 16-car train from New York and Boston, just north of Union Station, Washington, DC, on approaching the station, was discovered to have lost most of its braking power. (It was later found the last 13 cars had lost their brakes due to a closed angle cock on the brakeline at the rear of the third car, New Haven RR car #8665, and that the cause was likely not sabotage but a defect causing the handle of the angle cock attached to the coupler assembly to periodically touch the bottom cross member of the buffer pocket portion of the underframe end construction--the angle cock was attached immediately underneath this cross member rather than back of the inside face of it, as specified by the New Haven Railroad. Moreover, such touching was aggravated by increased vibrations and oscillations in the coupler caused by the car immediately behind it having couplers and truck-spring assemblies that were not of exactly the same design.) The train plowed into the Station Master's Office at the end of Track 16 and then took out a newstand. The electric GG1 locomotive pulling the train and the two cars behind the locomotive partially collapsed the concourse and ended up mostly in the basement baggage (and mail?) room below. The conductor of 173, a resident of Baltimore, was Thomas Joseph Murphey. The railway triple overpass in Dallas where Thomas J. Murphy, mail foreman at the Union Terminal Annex (the postal annex for Union Station), watched the shooting of JFK is about 1000 feet north of Union Station, Dallas, where the tracks head. Both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby had a connection to the Union Terminal Annex: Oswald rented post office box 6225 at the Terminal Annex on 1 November 1963, and on 7 November 1963, Jack Ruby rented there post office box 5475.
The 30 Lakewood/Marsalis bus which Oswald caught just after the JFK assassination at Elm and Murphy apparently had a rollsign on its front displaying “30 Marsalis Union Sta”, indicating it was the 30 bus en route to Union Station and then to Marsalis in Oak Cliff. When a female passenger got off the bus in order to walk to Union Station (the bus was stuck in the traffic pursuant to the assassination of JFK), that's when (according to the bus driver) Oswald also got off the bus, shortly to catch a taxi to near his rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley in Oak Cliff. Bus driver Cecil McWatters had earlier punched the transfer hole for the No. 23 point of origin, i.e., Lakewood, and gave Oswald the bus transfer as he was leaving the bus.
Thomas J. Murphy (the mail foreman) resided at 8615 San Benito Way, in the Little Forest Hills neighborhood of Dallas near the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. The Richmond Hill or Kew Gardens wreck that happened 13 years to the day before JFK was shot was believed to have been mainly caused by Benjamin J. Pokorney, engineer of Train No. 174, having prematurely ceased following the signal aspect of signal C (stop and proceed at restricted speed) appropriate for his block in order to prematurely follow the approach (at medium speed, prepared to stop at next signal) aspect of Signal 114R. Signal C was 4335 feet from Signal 114R. Signal 114R is on a signal bridge that still exists, it would seem. Measuring back using Google Maps would have put Signal C just west of the westbound lanes of the Union Turnpike overpass. If boundaries are the same now as then, and my measurements are precise enough, this would have put Signal C in Forest Hills, very close to its border with Kew Gardens. The largest and perhaps most prestigious botanical gardens in the world is Kew Gardens in Richmond upon Thames, London, England. The 1 November 1918, Malbone Street Wreck, New York's deadliest ever, and the 16 February 1907 Woodlawn wreck also both happened basically on the border of prestigious botanical gardens—in Brooklyn and the Bronx, respectively. The 1 November 1950 assassination attempt on President Truman was exactly three weeks before the Kew Gardens wreck. The Forest Hills wreck of 1887 occurred at the border of Arnold Arboretum, the first US public arboretum.This Forest Hills wreck may be the second deadliest ever Massachusetts railway disaster (or maybe it is the Great Revere Train Wreck of 1871?). (The 7 November 1916 Summer Street retractible bridge disaster was the deadliest Massachusetts railway disaster, and it involved only a single unattached trolley car falling through the open bridge and not a full-fledged train.) The 1887 Forest Hills, Massachusetts, wreck occurred 14 March, just one day removed from 13 March, the date Kitty Genovese was killed in 1964 at her apartment building on Austin Street opposite where (according to Conductor Austin of No. 174) Pokorney is believed to have prematurely ceased following Signal C in Forest Hills. On 14 March 1940, a truck carrying farm workers was hit by a train at a grade crossing in Alamo, TX, killing (according to the Texas Historical Marker) 34, which would make it the most deaths ever to this day in the US in a motor vehicle crash if you exclude more recent bridge/elevated roadway collapses (1967 Silver Bridge collapse, 1980 Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse, 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake). True, the similar Chualar, California, migrant laborer bus/train collision of 17 September 1963, which killed 32, is also sometimes listed as the deadliest motor vehicle crash, because the Alamo crash is listed variously as having caused as few as 29 deaths. Alamo is only about 30 miles (not far considering Texas) from San Benito. If you exclude not only bridge/elevated-roadway collapses but also train collisions with motor vehicles, the deadliest ever US motor vehicle incident is the 1976 Yuba City bus disaster (29 dead) in California caused as a bus drove off an elevated roadway. The deadliest US motor vehicle disaster until 1967 not involving a train was the 4 August 1952 head-on collision (28 dead) between two Greyhound buses just north of Lorena, TX, and south of Waco, TX. I'm fairly sure it is still the deadliest collision between motor vehicles in US history. One of the dead in this bus collision was Airman 3rd Class Thomas T. Murphy, 19, stationed at Lackland Air Force Base, and son of Thomas J. Murphy, of 4604 Fairmont [mispelling of Faimount?], Dallas, TX. Was this the same Thomas J. Murphy who was on the triple overpass when JFK was shot? I don't know. Looking at land records (to get Thomas J. Murphy's wife's name) and the 1940 Census, I'm quite sure that the Thomas J. Murphy on the triple overpass lived in 1940 at 2235 Garden Drive, Dallas, and had a child named Thomas who was listed as 5 on the 1 April 1940 census. Perhaps Thomas T. Murphy overstated his age by a year or so when enlisting, as Audie Murphy had famously done? (Update to update: The 1955 Dallas City directory contains under the listing Murphey: "Thos J formn Junion Terminal r4606 Fairmount av". It therefore is almost certain that a son Thomas Terry Murphy of the Thomas J. Murphy on the triple overpass was indeed killed in the 1952 bus collision near Waco. The 1944-45 and 1961 Dallas City directories as well as the next page of the 1955 directory list a Thomas J. Murphy as married to Pleasant Murphy, and in 1955 and 1961 he and his wife are listed as living at 8615 San Benito Way. I don't know why Thomas J. Murphy apparently is listed in 1955 twice with slightly different spellings of his last name or why his apartment number is slightly off from what is listed in the newspaper clipping, though I doubt it is of much signficance to figuring out the JFK assassination--pedestrian explanations seem much more likely, involving, e.g., errors in the directory or the newspaper clipping about the bus wreck, moving near the time of the directory, or temporary personal changes in relationships and living arrangements.)
It's worth noticing that the northbound Greyhound bus was headed to Dallas, and that the southbound Greyhound bus was headed from Dallas when they collided south of Waco. Thomas T. Murphy was on the southbound bus, which left Dallas at 12:01 am carrying 37 persons [Victoria Advocate, Aug 4, pg. 1], some four hours before the collision ocurred at 4:05 am, 4 August. Recall that about 15 minutes after shooting JFK, Oswald caught Whaley's taxi at the Dallas Greyhound bus station in order to return to his boarding house in Oak Cliff. At the time of the JFK assassination, John Pic, Oswald's half-brother, was stationed at the same Lackland Air Force base where Murphy was stationed when he was killed in the collision. The ICC concluded that the most likely cause of the collison was the northbound bus driver Milburn Herring dozing off and going across the center line into the path of the southbound bus. Another "herring" disaster is that which befell the Herring Fishing Club when the James D. Nicol sank off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, on June 24, 1894, the same day the President of France was assassinated. As I mention in my February 2022 post, the survivors of this fishing tragedy were mostly rescued by another tugboat which would crash into the General Slocum, knocking the latter's rudder off, on the day the Great Hinckley fire purportedly killed the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Britain entered WWI by declaring war on Germany on 4 August, 11pm London time (which was midnight, 5 August, Berlin time). Also on 5 August, 1914, was the Tipton Ford crash of a gasoline powered doodlebug rail car, which killed 43 in Missouri. Robert Preston hijacked his helicopter in 1974 from Tipton Army Airfield on the anniversary of the Rockville Centre train wreck.
It's easy to imagine that it was decided that the reason Pavlick's 1960 assassination attempt against President-Elect JFK was foiled by Belmont postmaster Tom M. Murphy was that Pavlick had failed to heed the coincidences concerning Tom Murphy in disasters, namely that, (1) Police Commissioner Thomas Francis Murphy was one of the two leading representatives of NYC at the scene of the Kew Gardens train wreck the night of the crash (Murphy showed up with acting Mayor Joseph T. Sharkey at 12:30am the night of the accident—the actual Mayor, Mayor Impellitteri, was in Havana), (2) Thomas T. Murphy, son of Thomas J. Murphy of Dallas, was killed in the Waco bus collision, and (3) Conductor Thomas J. Murphey of Train 173 had a fright when he found that pulling the emergency brake just north of Union Station did not work (his efforts had no effect on the rear part of the train because he was forward of the closed anglecock in the brakeline at the rear of the third car). If only Pavlick had heeded the Tom Murphy warnings inherent in the disasters, I am supposing it was believed or argued, he would have taken it as an omen to be wary of Tom Murphys and so would not have been prevented from killing JFK. And so from a desire to please disaster spirits I can imagine it was decided to do homage to these three “Tom Murphy” disasters by assassinating Kennedy (especially if the circumstance of JFK coming to downtown Dallas as he did may have been taken as a sign, having made the assassination so convenient), what the disaster spirits I suppose were claimed to be trying to encourage by producing useful omens for Pavlick, and of course like with all the other assassinations motivated by worshipping disaster spirits or whatever, it was presumably believed the assassination had to have particulars aligned with the particulars of those disasters, particularly with those related to Tom Murphys, since those were the particulars which one might logically most infer to have been caused by profoundly magical omen-giving disaster spirits a disaster-spirit worshipper would be most tempted to worship. Provisionally, I feel it more likely than not that Oswald felt it would be enjoyably desecrating to cause Murphy to in some sense relive the tragedy of his son's gruesome death by gruesomely killing the president right in front of him. Evil.
The Rockville Centre collision (32 dead) of February 17, 1950, in many ways presages the Kew Gardens collision (78 dead)—the wrecks both happened on the Long Island Railroad (then owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad) in 1950. There's a curious decreasing (with respect to time) sequence of three consecutive numbers involved in these wrecks that can be extended to one of four consecutive numbers by including the Federal Express wreck, which sequence might have seemed somehow of supernatural significance to the assassin or assassins. Indeed, the Rockville Centre wreck may well have happened when Jacob Kiefer, motorman of eastbound Train No. 192, failed to take sufficient notice of the approach aspect of signal S176, and as a result could not stop in time at Signal O2R, the next signal, which guarded the partially overlapping gantlet track where No. 192 did collide with westbound Train No. 175, demolishing the left side of the front car on each train. Kiefer, who suffered from high blood pressure, claimed during his trial for manslaughter that he believed he had blacked out from before reaching signal S176 until moments before the collision. (A doctor testified that he may have blacked out because blood vessels to his brain may have spasmed, and Kiefer was acquitted by the jury.) Train No. 174 it was whose failure to obey the proper signal was the main cause of the Kew Gardens wreck. Recall Train No. 173 was the southbound Federal involved in the 1953 wreck.
It's a little curious, too, that the first names of the motormen most at fault in the Rockville Centre and Kew Gardens wrecks were Jacob and Benjamin, what since according to the Old Testament, Jacob begat Benjamin, possibly suggesting to the superstitious that the Rockville Centre wreck somehow begat the similar Kew Gardens wreck that happened about nine months—about one human gestation period—later. The Waco tornado of 11 May 1953 also occurred about nine months after the 4 August 1952 bus collision near Waco--to be precise the Kew Gardens wreck was 278 days after the Rockville Centre wreck and the tornado was 280 days after the bus collision. The Waco tornado was no trifiling tornado, neither, it killing 114, to this day tied (more-or-less) with the 1902 Goliad tornado for deadliest-ever Texas tornado. I suppose the malarkey was that the Rockville Centre disaster on some spiritual level impregnated the Long Island Railroad while the Waco bus collision impregnated the Waco area, causing even more wretched disasters to be spawned about one human gestation period later, respecitively to the same railroad and area.
It's worth noting that on 22 January 1927 Waco's Baylor University lost 10 basketball students (the Immortal 10) when at a grade crossing in Round Rock their bus was hit by the Sunshine Special. The team was travelling to the University of Texas in Austin from Waco, using roughly the same route as the buses in the 1953 collision. When Highway 81 (the route the 1953 buses took) was built a few years later a railroad overpass was built through Round Rock, purportedly the first railroad overpass in Texas
I wish I could pin down whether there really was a mail room in the basement where the front of the Federal Express ended up (Wikipedia says this, but period newspaper articles don't mention it, and I am skeptical). Indeed, this would make the Federal Express wreck that Thomas J. Murphey was involved in greatly involve the US mail, and of course Thomas M. Murphy, the postmaster in Richard Paul Pavlick's hometown of Belmont, New Hampshire, and Thomas J. Murphy, the mail foreman at the Union Terminal Annex in Dallas, both were heavily involved with US mail. The number 1 point of origin at the top of the transfer that Oswald received from bus driver Cecil McWaters is “Belmont”.
Oswald was caught largely due to the effort of Johnny Calvin Brewer, who had noticed the suspicious Oswald when he had momentarily ducked into the lobby (a terrazo-tiled area flanked by glass display cases between the concrete sidewalk area along Jefferson Boulevard and the door of the store) of the Hardy Shoe Store, 213 W. Jefferson, which Brewer was managing as police were cruising up and down Jefferson looking for Officer Tippit's shooter. Brewer bravely stepped outside to observe Oswald until he snuck into the Texas Theatre without a ticket, where after a discussion between Brewer and Julia Postal the ticket cashier, the police were notified by her, and where Officer McDonald would shortly arrest Oswald. Right next to the Hardy Shoe Store, which seems to have lacked a prominent sign, was the Austin Shoe Store, 215 W. Jefferson, which did have a prominent sign. Given the coincidences (Austin Street, Conductor Austin) of Austin with the Kew Gardens wreck, I shouldn't be surprised if Oswald thought it an omen that he should temporarily try to stay low at this Austin Shoe Store, which he might have confused with the Hardy Shoe Store next door (or of course maybe not, it could be meaningless coincidence and that Oswald was at that time hiding wherever and whenever he felt most convenient giving the evolving circumstances). On the evening of the 22nd, Austin, the state capital, was to have been JFK's next and last stop on his two-day five-city tour of Texas.
Something about Officer Tippit is that 78 was both his unit number and the number of his normal patrol district.1 The Kew Gardens train wreck killed 78. The number of the car Tippit was driving when he stopped to talk to Oswald was 10, and this number was clearly printed on the front doors of the car; Oswald was leaning on the passenger (front) door, perhaps even touching the 10 with his waist while talking to Tippit shortly before Tippit exited to go in front of the car and was shot to death when Tippit was about opposite the left front tire. Numerological references (compared with, say, references to names involved with disasters) are not particularly interesting or spooky, normally, especially with a small number like 10, or at least I don't see signs of them much when I look for spooky references in (say) spooky cold cases and assassinations, but what you can do with 10 is multiply easily--just add a zero--no need to be a mathematician to know that trick. In particular, multiplying 78 by 10 yields 780, the number of the lead train involved in the Kew Gardens wreck. Could Oswald have targeted Tippit for death because of these numerological coincidences? That leads one to wonder whether Oswald somehow manipulated Tippit beforehand (e.g., by giving him some cryptic "prophecy" that would look like a clue) in order to encourage meeting up with Tippit after the assassination, so he could murder Tippit. Rumors have it that shortly before Oswald killed him, Tippit tried to make a phone call at Top Ten Records, located in Oak Cliff at Jefferson and Bishop, just one block west of the Texas Theatre. If Oswald had told Tippit something strange that made Oswald seem to have prophetic knowledge of the assassination in order to get the latter to meet him after the assassination, then before the assassination Tippit likely would have ignored Oswald, considering him a random weirdo, but after the assassination one can imagine Tippit having made an effort to inform headquarters about what would be his suspicions of Oswald before investigating the latter, but wouldn't have notified via the police radio (which anyone with a police-band radio could listen to), since it is best not to drag people through the dirt just on suspicion. Either way, I seriously doubt Tippit was otherwise than a hero. If indeed Tippit made a phone call at Top Ten Records, he may have been trying to tell his superiors about Oswald. If ever people take me seriously, some might I suppose find a way to drag Tippit through the dirt on account of the numerological coincidences, but I'm pretty sure Tippit would prefer me to put the weird coincidences out there anyway, because heroes care more for the truth than about their own reputation. And yes, the numbers could be just random coincidence, but perhaps not. Tippit also had a badge number, which was 848, which probably meant nothing to Oswald if he even knew it (some websites say that 848 died in the Eastland disaster but there are and have been lots of numbers floating around as the death toll--844 seems most common figure nowadays).
I can see, though, that it may be somewhat bothersome to you that 78 refers to Tippit two ways (unit number and normal patrol district), but 10 is just referenced one way. So you're short a 10 if you want to multiply each 78 to get 780. But that's to look at things in a wrong, incomplete way, in my opinion: Oswald shot Tippit dead on 10th Street (near Patton). Hmmm, another 10, but maybe you consider the 78 that's the number of dead in the Kew Gardens wreck as yet another loose end number that needs multiplication by 10 to get the train number of the rear-ended train again. Well, whadya know, I just mentioned in last paragraph yet another 10, namely "Top Ten Records." So there you go you've indeed got three 10s to match the three 78s, making it all tidy and symmetrical-like. But wait, let's be even more far out--let's see (necessarily more speculatively) what the most far out reaches of lala land has to offer because it's pretty clear that Oswald was weirder than fiction--and be even more daring, hmm yes, the standard tip in the US back in the 50s and early 60s was 10% by most accounts, and so you've got from the first part of Tippit a "Tip" that makes for another 10% and thus another 10. Hold on, there, though, Tippit's a palindrome, i.e., reads same backwards as forward, so what you've got is another 10 from reading Tippit backwards, so in some sense you got two 10s arising from the name Tippit. (A double tip wouldn't seem to be something Oswald would pride himself on--at least he didn't want to be thought a double tipper "tippit" when he gave cab driver Whaley a five cent tip on a 95 cent car fare--just a skosh over 5% that was.) Anyway, that would leave us two 78s short. Whoa there, Top Ten Records was founded in 1956, and 'twasn't 'til 1957 according to authoritative-looking site on internet that 45s replaced 78s as the most common record format used for records in the US. So Top Ten Records indeed gives another 78 reference. That leaves us one 78 short. Hmm... The signal that Benjamin Pokorney of Train 174 stopped following when he wrongly sped up when Conductor Austin was roughly opposite the Kew Gardens train station was "Signal C". As mentioned, the Signal C seems to be barely in Forest Hills, just west of the Union Turnpike overpass. So let's see what else is just west of the Union Turnpike overpass, shall we? Hmm... yep, 78th Avenue is the next road west—some distance, but still fairly close—"that counts" Oswald would probably say. So you've got five instances of 10 and five instances of 78, enough 10's and 78's to give not just 780, but 780 to the fifth power. Five tens and five seventy-eights together comprise 10—that's ten (Oswald would probably have said "mwahahaha" if Sesame Street (started in 1969) had been a thing in his childhood that he had looked at) possible numerologically-special factors in the murder of Tippit, which I suppose yields yet another possible "10" reference....
Footnotes:
1This is presumably not as peculiar as I had originally thought: In Four Days in November, in a footnote on page 103 of the 2007 ed., Vincent Pugliosi writes "The number "78" was Tippit's call number because it was the police district, number 78, that he was assigned to." In the same footnote, Pugliosi references a telephone inverview he had with Jim Bowles on March 25, 2004. Bowles, who later became a sheriff of Dallas County, was the supervisor of the Dallas Police Department radio division during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and so would have been well positioned to know such things. In the same footnote, Bugliosi also references the "Dallas Police Department Squad Districts as of January 1, 1960"
