LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  On June 3, 1961, Henry Marshall—the Department of Agriculture inspector in Bryan, Texas, who, as previously described, was quietly investigating the Billie Sol Estes scams unbeknownst to almost anyone other than his superiors and the principals—was found dead in a remote area of his farm. Despite the fact that he had been beaten on his head and upper body, forcefully poisoned with carbon monoxide, and shot five times with a rifle, his death was immediately ruled a suicide by the local sheriff, at whose insistence the coroner concurred. No one who knew him well thought that was possible (the fact that the sheriff and coroner ruled as they did indicates the depth of the Johnson-Clark political power throughout Texas).109 It was reported that “Justice of the Peace Leo Farmer, who [originally] pronounced [a] suicide verdict without ordering an autopsy, said tonight, ‘I just don’t have nothing to say now.’”110 In the same contemporaneous article, it was said that Marshall had been shot in the back.111

  Those who knew of his involvement in investigating the cotton allotment and fertilizer tank scams being run by Billie Sol Estes suspected a connection between his dogged determination to solve those crimes and his untimely death. A year later, after the mysterious and similar deaths of four other Estes associates, his body was exhumed because Captain Clint Peoples of the Texas Rangers had also suspected that his death was more likely a homicide, with political connections to Washington DC, and began an investigation to find out.112 By May 21, 1962, Captain Peoples had convinced District Judge John M. Barron to call a grand jury. On that day, the body of Henry Marshall was exhumed, and shortly thereafter, a report was submitted by the medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, which concluded that his death was the result of five gunshot wounds, three of which were deemed to be “rapidly incapacitating.” He also found a large bruise on the left side of the head and a 15 percent carbon monoxide level, which he estimated was probably 30 percent at the time of death. He concluded that one cannot say “‘on a purely scientific basis that a verdict of suicide is absolutely impossible in this case; most improbable, but not impossible.’ He changed the official record of the cause of death to be a ‘possible suicide, probable homicide.’”113 It was reported that the medical examiner “‘firmly believed it was not suicide,’ but for some reason was reluctant to pronounce it murder.”114 On July 13, 1962, Captain Peoples rendered his own report, stating that “it would have been utterly impossible for Mr. Marshall to have taken his own life.”115 He enumerated a thirteen-point list of issues to support that assertion, among them were the following:116

  • Marshall would have had to dispose of the materials used to administer the carbon monoxide, which were never found.

  • He had received a severe blow to the left side of his head, causing his eye to protrude.

  • His blood was found on all sides of the truck, which also had a large dent in one of the doors not previously noted by family members.

  • In order to have shot himself five times with the bolt-action rifle, he would have had to hold it at arm’s length away from him and work the bolt to reload after each shot, taking it down each time and ejecting the shell; yet Marshall had difficulty, due to a prior injury, in even straightening out his right arm, making it necessary to use his left arm.

  Ranger Peoples further stated that Marshall’s investigation of the cotton program and his “reluctance to approve many shady aspects, without a doubt, created animosity among people who were attempting to accomplish their goals. From the findings of this investigation it is my personal opinion that it would have been beneficial to a vast number of shady operators for Mr. Henry Marshall to have been disposed of.”117 Captain Peoples suspected all along that it was Billie Sol Estes’s political friend in Washington, Lyndon Johnson, whom he had also suspected of complicity in the murder of Doug Kinser ten years before. Almost immediately after Ranger Peoples submitted his report, Senator McClellan’s subcommittee considered the same evidence. As reported in Time magazine on July 20, 1962, “Said the Senator [McClellan] sternly: ‘I don’t think it takes many deductions to reach the irrevocable conclusion that no man committed suicide with a weapon like this. He would have had to place the gun in an awkward position, pull the trigger and then work the bolt, while wounded, four more times.’”

  From all the other evidence presented, including the testimony of a witness who testified under oath about a stranger who stopped at his service station asking for directions to Marshall’s farm—whose description closely matched that of Mac Wallace—it is clear that Mac Wallace visited Marshall at his ranch that day and became angry at Marshall’s resistance to stopping his investigation. He then proceeded to beat him with an object, possibly a pistol, and then attempted to rig a plastic pipe to the exhaust of Marshall’s truck to simulate a suicide. He evidently heard a truck approaching the scene and decided to shoot him with Marshall’s own rifle. Five shots were then fired from this bolt-action rifle, all of them from the same angle into his body, of which three would have been immediately fatal.

  Ranger Peoples’s lack of success in getting an indictment from the grand jury was due to the fact that three or four members of the grand jury were related to Sheriff Howard Stegall.118 The same sheriff who originally deemed the bizarre death of Henry Marshall a “suicide” had gone out of his way to assist Lyndon Johnson in undermining the grand jury’s stated mission to investigate the death of Henry Marshall: Instead of being randomly selected as normal procedure required, he handpicked the grand jury to ensure the outcome would not put Johnson, Estes, or anyone else in jeopardy. The Stegall clan was not only well represented around Franklin, Texas, but in the White House as well: Glynn Stegall and his wife Mildred were among Johnson’s sycophantic staff members. This was reflected in Robert Caro’s account: “Glynn Stegall, whose hands would shake as Lyndon Johnson humiliated him in front of this wife.” Lyndon Johnson’s tentacles—extended through his obedient staff—reached deeply into every geographic region of Texas and enabled him to assert his influence through many others, always forcefully yet invisibly.

  Years later, in 1979, Ranger Peoples had occasion to discuss the case with Billie Sol Estes as he escorted him to a federal prison at El Paso. Peoples explained to Estes that he was frustrated at not having been able to solve this crime, and Estes confirmed that Marshall had been murdered and suggested that Peoples might not be looking in the right direction. Estes then said, “‘Well, you know I cannot say too much because I am in the penitentiary. However, you should be looking at the people that had the most to lose.’ ‘Should I have been looking in the direction of Washington?’ Peoples asked, and Estes replied, ‘You are now very definitely on the right track.’”119 As we shall see, five years later, in 1984, Billie Sol Estes elaborated further, identifying the man behind this and a number of other murders as President Lyndon B. Johnson. But at the time of the inquest, in 1962, USDA Inspector Henry Marshall had already been dead almost ten months. Within a few days of Estes’s arrest, a number of other men who had the misfortune of having dealt with Estes—and vicariously, through him, with Lyndon B. Johnson—would also turn up dead through similar means, all at the hand of the same Mac Wallace. These deaths, set up to look like suicides, will be reviewed shortly. The official investigation into the Estes scandals and the related murders would come close to being solved in July 1962, as the Senate Investigations Subcommittee, chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, revealed that several times Marshall had warned Agriculture Department officials that he suspected Billie Sol’s wholesale cotton allotment transfers were illegal. Leonard C. Williams, a former assistant to Marshall, testified that his boss had first warned his staff in 1960 that Estes’s deals were fishy and were being investigated.120

  Why had the Agriculture Department delayed acting on it for two years, until May 1962? By then, there had been two suspicious deaths and the scandal had finally made headlines in newspapers across the country, beginning in March 1962. One of the reasons might have been related to Secretary Freeman’s laisse faire attitude
about conflict of interest issues confronting his Agriculture Department. The July 20 issue of Time magazine quoted him as saying “the Estes affair had been ‘ballooned out of all proportion.’ There was ‘no evidence,’ he insisted, that Estes had received special favors from the Agriculture Department.”121 W. Lewis David, Marshall’s onetime boss in Texas, also answered that question when he told the committee he had approved Estes’s operations—with Marshall’s reluctant consent—under a Washington directive that such dealings were to be okayed if the applicant merely certified that the transaction was bona fide. These were the “new rules” that, as we noted earlier, Lyndon Johnson, acting in behalf of his friend Billie Sol Estes, had asked Agriculture Secretary Freeman to have written in order to gut the existing guidelines, effectively neutralizing the governmental regulatory apparatus as it pertained to this particular issue.

  The singular purpose of Johnson’s actions—requesting, successfully, that a government agency rewrite its procedures in order to better facilitate massive fraud to be conducted against itself—was to open the door for Estes to continue conducting that massive fraud, which he was already perpetrating. Johnson’s motives could only have been prompted by kickbacks from Estes and the financial gains he would make through his investments in the Commercial Solvents Company, which was an active participant in the Estes frauds. The only reason Johnson would have gone to the lengths he did to help Estes was for his own financial gain—up to $10 million total, as will be documented shortly—which was well beyond the norm for “constituent service.” For the first year, Estes had managed to hold Ranger Peoples at bay; the second year of ever-increasing fraudulent activity can be attributed to the new “Johnson rules” but, more importantly, the disappearance from the scene of Inspector Henry Marshall and the inhibiting effect that his murder had on anyone else who might have wanted to stop the continuing fraud.

  Directly as a result of Johnson’s intervention—the use of his influence to further a criminal enterprise—the regulatory apparatus that Congress had set up to administer a system of price supports in exchange for the rationing of cotton farming was essentially dismantled by simply rewriting the administrative rules. When Henry Marshall would not yield and continued to try to enforce the old rules and ignore the newly created loopholes—because he knew that Estes was engaging in fraud—he was killed, much like Johnson’s and Hoover’s Mob friends would handle a problem of this kind. When Johnson realized the inevitable consequences if this scandal was not contained and the fact that his position as vice president and his entire political career was now in jeopardy, according to Barr McClellan, he summoned Ed Clark to his ranch, and the two of them began putting the “meat on the skeleton.” They were now ready to start the high-level planning for executing Johnson’s plan for the assassination of JFK: the financing and contracting with professional killers, through CIA contacts, complete with multiple options for a massive cover-up once the act was accomplished.

  The Murders Continue

  George Krutilek

  Within a year of Henry Marshall’s death, as the publicity on the Billie Sol Estes scams finally became front-page news in all the nation’s newspapers during March 1962, the FBI finally stepped up their investigation of Estes as well. On April 2, 1962, two FBI agents interrogated forty-nine-year-old George Krutilek, a CPA, who was Estes’s chief accountant. Krutilek was killed immediately after the FBI interview; by the time his body was found two days later, in the desert close to El Paso, his body had already decomposed significantly. He had not been seen or heard from during the period after the secret grilling by the FBI and when his body was found. A hose had been hooked to his vehicle’s exhaust pipe to make it look like a suicide, but an El Paso pathologist said that was not the cause of death. A severe bruise on his head did not persuade the coroner that there might have been more to his death than it being just another “Texas suicide,” but that is what he classified it for the legal record.122 According to the previously cited contemporaneous article in Time magazine, “A few days after the Estes scandal broke, Krutilek was found dead in his car with the windows up and a rubber hose leading from the exhaust to the interior of the car. But an autopsy revealed no trace of carbon monoxide in his lungs, and local authorities ruled that he had died of a heart attack.”123 Evidently, the severe bruise on his head and the obvious staging of a suicide were unpersuasive to the local authorities. Or, more likely, rather than the contradictory evidence, it was really “someone else” who was more persuasive to the local authorities.

  Harold Orr, Howard Pratt, and Coleman Wade

  Harold Eugene Orr had been president of the Superior Manufacturing Company of Amarillo, Texas. Orr had been involved in Estes’s financial affairs and was arrested with Estes, convicted for his role in the frauds, and given a ten-year federal prison sentence. On February 28, 1964, after his conviction and sentencing, as he was about to commence serving his prison term, he went out to his garage supposedly to change the exhaust pipe on his car. His body was found a few hours later under the car, with tools scattered around him (tools that were reported to be not suitable for the job he was supposedly working on). His death was ruled “accidental by carbon monoxide.” It was reported that he was finally preparing to reveal more about the Estes frauds to the authorities to get a lighter sentence. A few weeks later, Howard Pratt, the Chicago office manager of Commercial Solvents, the vendor supplying the fertilizer for Billie Sol Estes, was also found dead in his car, another victim of carbon monoxide poisoning according to his death certificate.

  Coleman Wade was a building contractor from Oklahoma who had contracted with Billie Sol Estes to build many of Estes’s storage facilities. In early 1963, Wade was flying home from Pecos, Texas, in his private plane when it mysteriously crashed outside of Kermit, Texas, its occupants instantly killed. “Government investigators swept in and instead of expeditiously cleaning up the wreckage in their routine way, kept the area roped off for days.”124 Wade was a friend of Billie Sol’s pilot, who, it was reported, was nearly scared to death because of the ominous overtones of the airplane crash.

  Madeleine Brown admitted Lyndon Johnson’s involvement in these murders when she wrote, “Had Marshall and the others not been killed, Lyndon would have been forced out of office right then, but the rest of us had no idea what was really going on. I was beginning to learn.”125

  Billie Sol’s Empire Continues to Crumble

  As two separate investigations into Marshall’s death continued in the latter half of 1961, Estes got word that an audit of his business transaction was about to begin. By the end of the year, Estes would reveal his close ties to Lyndon Johnson to many people in the Department of Agriculture, as a result of his protestations of the continuing investigations and the cancellation of the 1961 allotments which had been promised him previously. One week after the cancellation of the allotments, Estes’s promise to take the matter up with Johnson paid off; not only was the allotment cancellation reversed, but Charles S. Murphy, the undersecretary of agriculture, even named Estes to the Cotton Advisory Board, a position which allowed him to give his expert advice on matters pertaining to the administration of the entire regulatory framework of the USDA’s cotton program. This was also about the same time that Estes financed the Johnson gala, through the three checks totaling $145,015 noted earlier.126

  What brought down the Estes empire? Not the government, despite the determined efforts of Henry Marshall and others who tried to trap him as he repeatedly changed his deceptive financial schemes.127 In fact, through Lyndon Johnson’s efforts, the Agriculture Department practically gave Billie Sol carte blanche to proceed full-bore into his entrepreneurial enterprises. Nor did the major newspapers of the day pursue this story of fraud and political corruption either, even though they had the first opportunity to carry the stories. The big dailies finally started covering it, but only as a secondary story after it got its start in the presses of the little town of Pecos, Texas.

  The first real hero in thi
s sordid affair was a local dentist, Dr. John Dunn (the second, coming on to the scene later as the investigation turned to the murders of men connected with the Estes scams, was Texas Ranger Captain Clint Peoples). Dr. Dunn had acquired some of the security agreements and began printing details of the loans, allegedly including one by Johnson himself to Estes.128 Dr. Dunn appealed to numerous law enforcement agencies to take up Marshall’s investigation, and after providing his analysis of Estes’s massive frauds to congressmen, senators, and major newspapers, he could find no other way to bring public attention to the scandal, so he bought his own newspaper. The Pecos Independent and Enterprise was only a biweekly local newspaper, but he published three articles in it to expose the truth about the sanctimonious local legend, Billie Sol Estes, who claimed that he “never took a drink, smoked, or cursed.”129

  A single cataclysmic event led to the downfall of Billie Sol Estes, and came closer than most people realized to bringing down at least the vice president of the United States, if not more than a few others in Congress and a variety of federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture. The cataclysmic event was the Great Pecos Texas School Board Election of 1961, as reported several months later by Time magazine:130

  Estes was widely feared in Pecos because of his seeming wealth and power. But he was not widely liked. When he ran for a place on the local school board last year, he lost to a write-in candidate. That humiliating defeat led to Estes’ downfall. The local paper, the twice-weekly Independent, had opposed him for the school board post. To get revenge, Estes set up a rival paper. Upshot: the Independent investigated and printed the first exposure of Billie Sol’s tank-mortgage fraud.

  It took a lot of courage for Dr. Dunn to publish his stories of the massive fraud being conducted under the guise of a man previously portrayed as “the leading churchman, the financial genius and the ‘most promising’ citizen of the city of Pecos.”131 For his efforts to bring his fellow Texas citizens the truth of the Estes empire, he was threatened, condemned, barred from practice at the local hospital by the city council, and hounded out of town. Dr. Dunn’s articles appeared in the newspaper between February 12 and March 1, 1962, including many details of select transactions involving fifteen thousand alleged tanks for his county alone and loans totaling $34,000,000 in several Texas counties, most of it on fictitious tanks.132 Those articles were picked up by other larger newspapers in the area, then the statewide papers, and finally, through the wire services, they began appearing in the national press. During the remaining four weeks of March 1962, the scandal grew by the day until, within a few weeks, Billie Sol Estes, local Pecos legend, was in jail. On Friday, March 30, 1962, the Independent published with a banner headline saying “Federal Charge Jails Estes.” The article, written by Oscar Griffin, said that Estes was arrested by FBI agents at 6:00 p.m., March 29, 1962, and booked into the Reeves County Jail about 10:00 p.m. because of failure to raise a $500,000 bond.