Did police ever read what was on the dash-mounted clipboard in Tippits squad car?
Yes. Conspiracy theorists have bitterly complained about the apparent lack of interest that the Dallas police had in Tippit’s dash-mounted clipboard, citing Dallas police crime lab sergeant W.E. “Pete” Barnes’ comment to the Warren Commission in 1964, “We never read his clipboard.” (7H274). Traditionally, the clipboard held a spiral notebook which officers could use to write notes on. Theorists speculated that Tippit wrote something on that clipboard that police didn’t want the public to know, or perhaps something that contradicted the Warren Commission’s conclusion about the murder. But, in 1983, former homicide detective Jim Leavelle, who led the investigation into the Tippit shooting, told me that he did check Tippit’s spiral notebook. “I looked at some of the stuff that Tippit had in the car but, to my knowledge, there was nothing ever found – that was written – in regards to the man he stopped,” Leavelle told me. “There was no reference as to why he stopped to talk to him. From my
