The New York Times reported on June 25, 1962, that the previous day “‘Billie Sol Estes appeared in Texas District Court today and in a surprise move demanded an immediate trial on charges of stealing $827,577 in fertilizer tank deals. Mr. Estes appeared almost jovial in court. Mr. Estes’ demand for a quick trial, made through his lawyer John Cofer, surprised Atty. General Will Wilson of Texas. Mr. Estes … cannot be summoned to Washington to testify before a Congressional committee if he is being tried in Pecos, his hometown.’ As LBJ’s friend, Cofer’s plan is clearly to prevent Estes from testifying in Washington. In conjunction with that goal, he will also prevent Estes from testifying during his trials in Texas. By use of this tactic, connections to federal officials such as Johnson can be concealed.”159 (emphasis in original)
Billie Sol Estes Tries to Cleanse His Conscience
On April 3, 1962, the day after George Krutilek died, Estes was indicted by a federal grand jury on fifty-seven counts of fraud. The same attorney who had helped Lyndon Johnson through the 1948 voter fraud scandal and who was able (with inside help from the judge and a tainted jury) to keep convicted murderer Mac Wallace out of jail was named as Estes’s lawyer: John Cofer, who worked in the Austin law firm of Ed Clark. This clearly illustrates—again—Billie Sol Estes’s connection to Lyndon Johnson, through his longtime personal lawyer and adviser, Ed Clark; it also validates much of what Barr McClellan wrote about the criminal activities of Johnson leading up to the ultimate crime: the murder of JFK. An article in the Texas Observer in 1986 described some of the background of the investigations into the Estes frauds from over twenty-five years before that time:160
In Washington, the House Intergovernmental Relations subcommittee was holding hearings on Billie Sol’s cotton allotments. Among those testifying was Carl J. Miller, the Agriculture Department official responsible for allowing the Estes grain storage bond to remain at $700,000 instead of raising it to $1 million (as normal procedure would have required). Miller said he’d been visited by Estes, who mentioned names of the politically powerful to whom he was connected [i.e., Lyndon B. Johnson—ed.]. Meanwhile, the Robertson County grand jury heard testimony from a Hearne gas station attendant named Nolan Griffin, who said that reading about the case in the newspapers had reminded him of a fellow who stopped by the station to ask directions around the time Marshall died, a year earlier. The man asked Griffin where the county seat was and then he asked where “the Marshall place” was, Griffin told the grand jury. The following day, the man returned to the station and told Griffin, “You gave me the wrong Marshall, but that’s all right. I got my deer lease.” Griffin said the man drove a 1958 or ’59 Plymouth or Dodge station wagon [matching Wallace’s car]. He said the man wore dark-rimmed glasses, had dark hair and a scarred, dark face. A Texas Ranger artist, Thadd Johnson, drew a facial sketch of the fellow, dubbed “Mr. X,” which was circulated in newspapers across the state and country.
By the middle of August, the police had a lead in West Texas. On August 21, Texas Ranger Captain Clint Peoples flew with Griffin to Odessa, where a man said to resemble the composite drawing was interrogated by Peoples and positively identified by Griffin, according to a sworn statement Griffin made the fallowing week. The lead, however, proved unfounded: the man, whose name was not released and has since been lost to time, was “checked out and completely cleared” by the Rangers after passing a polygraph test. A few days after Griffin returned home, he received an eerie, anonymous phone call warning him to keep an eye on his children and to watch what he said, Griffin recalled recently. Shortly after that, Griffin said, Hearne Police Chief Perkins visited him at work one morning and told him Bryan Russ, the county attorney, wanted to see him right away. Griffin waited for his boss to return and rushed over to Russ’s office, where he found Russ sitting with Sheriff Howard Stegall (who, as noted above, had already gone out of his way to accommodate a number of requests from Lyndon Johnson, through the Stegall connection in the White House). “While I was talking to Howard,” Griffin, now a Hearne city councilman, told the Observer, “he handed me a pen and Bryan shoved a paper under me and asked me to sign it. I didn’t know what it was, didn’t read it or anything. They were my friends and I just did what they asked me to. A minute or so later, they got up, shook my hand, and I left.” What Griffin did, he now says, was unwittingly sign an affidavit stating that he positively identified the Odessa man on August 21, 1962. This meant, of course, that the testimony he gave the grand jury was effectively discredited, giving added weight to the local authorities and to the FBI’s suicide theory. “I never positively identified the man. All I did was sign my name when they shoved the thing under me.” The affidavit states: “I told the Rangers on that day that this was the man and I knew it on that date and I know it now. I cannot identify any other person for I am positive that this is the man.”
Shortly after this happened, Nolan Griffin received a telephone call from a man with an intimidating voice who warned Griffin that he knew where he lived and that he knew all about his family, including his children. He then told Griffin to back off if he knew what was good for his family, then hung up the telephone. Griffin later heard that Lyndon Johnson had flown into Bryan at least twice during this period with Cliff Carter to meet Billie Sol Estes.161 These incidents are included here to illustrate the lengths to which Johnson and Clark would go in order to sabotage the investigation and divert attention away from the real perpetrator of the murder, Malcolm Wallace, who Captain Peoples was convinced was the murderer of Henry Marshall. As Peoples’s biographer James M. Day wrote, “As Peoples thinks back, he believes he questioned the person involved in murdering Henry Marshall, but, without concrete evidence, he will not be able to prove anything. It rankles him.”162 The following excerpts from Billie Sol Estes’s website provide additional insight into his promise to help Captain Peoples, before the threats of prosecution (read, persecution) from the Justice Department and his own acknowledgment regarding his associations with Lyndon Johnson:163
Billie Sol Estes was released from prison in December, 1983. Three months later he appeared before the Robertson County grand jury. He confessed that Henry Marshall was murdered because it was feared he would “blow the whistle” on the cotton allotment scam. Billie Sol Estes claimed that Marshall was murdered on the orders of Lyndon B. Johnson, who was afraid that his own role in this scam would become public knowledge. According to Estes, Clifton C. Carter, Johnson’s long-term aide, had ordered Marshall to approve 138 cotton allotment transfers. Billie Sol Estes told the grand jury that he had a meeting with Johnson and Carter about Henry Marshall. Johnson suggested that Marshall be promoted out of Texas. Estes agreed and replied: “Let’s transfer him, let’s get him out of here. Get him a better job. Make him an assistant secretary of agriculture.” However, Marshall rejected the idea of being promoted in order to keep him quiet. Estes, Johnson and Carter had another meeting on 17th January, 1961, to discuss what to do about Henry Marshall. Also at the meeting was Mac Wallace. After it was pointed out that Marshall had refused promotion to Washington, Johnson said: “It looks like we’ll just have to get rid of him.” Wallace, who Estes described as a hitman, was given the assignment.
After having served a total of ten years in prison, Estes was anxious to “stay clean” and avoid a return. Clint Peoples of the Texas Rangers had remained in contact with him and convinced Estes to testify before the Robertson County grand jury when he was released in 1984. The grand jury agreed that Henry Marshall had been murdered and heard Estes testify that Lyndon B. Johnson, Mac Wallace, Cliff Carter, and Estes himself had met several times to discuss the investigation being carried out by Henry Marshall. According to Estes’s testimony, Johnson gave Mac Wallace the assignment of getting rid of Marshall.164 Unfortunately, though the grand jury found this testimony persuasive of Johnson’s guilt as being behind Marshall’s death, there was little they could do since all parties to those meetings were dead, except for the witness who wished to confess his own complicit
y. The grand jury did agree to change the cause of death listed on Henry Marshall’s death certificate from “suicide” to “death by gunshot.” The grand jury investigation ended with this finding since the perpetrator was no longer available for prosecution; unfortunately for posterity, and the historical record, this finding did not seem to blemish the thirty-sixth president’s reputation. Other testimony in the grand jury hearings stated that Lyndon Johnson approved the murder because he feared that Henry Marshall would give Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy evidence concerning cotton allotments incriminating Johnson. Unfortunately, the grand jury’s actions were anticlimactic and did not get widespread publicity since, by 1984, there was no one left to prosecute. The protectors of presidential legacies, namely, the historians who have a vested interest in portraying only the approved conventional wisdom proffered by the selfsame historians, have also attempted to avoid this particular news item.
The fact that former president Johnson had already been dead for more than a decade, putting him yet again beyond the reach of the law, allowed him one more final “benefit of the doubt.” Despite the stunning news of his complicity in Henry Marshall’s murder, the fact that he was never found officially guilty of this or any other murder caused his standings of “presidential greatness” among historians to never waver, as though none of his criminal activities had caused a single blemish on his reputation as a great president. After he left Washington, he knew his own death would be the final “pass” he needed to cement his standing as one of the United States’ greatest presidents and that no amount of evidence of his clear criminal conduct would ever change that since he could no longer be prosecuted for his crimes, making it seem, in the record, that they never happened. But for that very record, we shall attempt to do just that.
Billie Sol Estes asserted that all of these murders were committed by Mac Wallace at the behest of Lyndon Johnson, for the purpose of protecting Johnson’s political career so that he, in turn, could continue protecting Estes and Wallace. These revelations are contained in a series of letters between Estes’s lawyer, Doug Caddy, and Stephen Trott, an assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice. A witness to the meeting between Estes and Carter—in which they talked extensively of all the “old times” with Johnson, including, according to Estes, up to seventeen murders—was named: one Kyle Brown, then living in Brady, Texas. Twenty-two years later, author Harrison Livingstone spoke to Kyle Brown, who confirmed everything Estes had said.165 According to Larry Hancock, “Billie Sol Estes … related that he had been personally told of Johnson’s involvement in Kennedy’s assassination by none other than his long time associate, Cliff Carter. Estes related being told that a convicted murderer named Malcolm Wallace had also been involved … Carter has named a third party [Tom Bowden], who had heard the tape and has verified Estes’ description of the content to researchers. Bowden has not provided any detail on the tape other than to affirm it does contain what Estes has maintained and can be taken to implicate Lyndon Johnson as a murderer. Brown’s words to Lyle Sardie included the statement: ‘They prove that Johnson was a cold-blooded killer.’”166
The witness Kyle Brown is on record as stating that as a young man he often carried cash between Estes and Carter—cash destined for Lyndon Johnson. The cash involved amounts from $50,000 to $100,000 dollars in the 1950s. Brown had been closely associated with Cliff Carter when he managed Johnson’s political network in Texas and administered both Texas patronage privileges and politics (in his oral history Carter identified his primary responsibilities for the vice president as the political and patronage areas), and it is clear that Estes’s affairs involved both of these areas. Estes invited both Carter and Brown to an impromptu meeting in 1971; Brown listened to Carter say that he regretted assisting Johnson in the criminal activities including murder. Brown described Carter as remorseful, very sad, and very much “down,” apparently attempting to clear his conscience, but was simultaneously also warning Estes that Johnson was becoming more and more paranoid.167
This cursory examination of the Estes affair is sufficient for the reader to grasp the essence of the unfolding events in the period 1961 through the end of 1962, by which time, through Johnson’s control, the scandal had receded enough to be off the front pages of newspapers and no longer the crisis to Lyndon Johnson’s political career that it had been just months before. At this point, the efforts of Johnson and Ed Clark seemed to have paid off, and they felt that the crisis was over. But it still left many questions in the minds of a lot of journalists and Washington politicians about the troubling details of the “Billie Sol Estes affair,” to say nothing of the American public. That it left the murky relationship of Johnson with Billie Sol Estes on the back shelf was all that Johnson could hope for at the time. Estes had clearly been threatened by Johnson to keep quiet, and for as long as Johnson remained alive, he obeyed that ultimatum; he continued his silence for eleven more years after Johnson died. But Texas Ranger Clint Peoples, who knew more than anyone else about the long and tumultuous relationship between Billie Sol and Lyndon, was convinced that Johnson was behind the murder of Henry Marshall.
Many links between Estes and Johnson remained, even as the story disappeared from the newspapers and magazines in the latter part of 1962. By August, Johnson had arranged for the scandal to be put on the back burner indefinitely by having his friend and associate Morris Jaffe purchase the Estes bankruptcy estate for $7 million. “With his trial set to begin in a few days, Estes’ assets and legal fate are now in the hands of men close to Vice President Johnson.”168 Among the tidbits of anecdotal (hearsay) information—at an earlier time, it could have been called “admittable circumstantial evidence”—was a report on April 25, 1984, in The Dallas Morning News that Vice President Johnson or his staff had written over twenty letters to Billie Sol Estes in the period during which they conspired to conduct and/or protect the scandal. The letters to Estes evoke a tone of complete deference to Estes, soliciting his requests with pleas such as “Please call me when we can be of service.” But there were no traces of the illegal activities, which were carefully confined to face-to-face meetings or telephone calls from public telephones. In better days, a notable example of their friendly linkage, which Estes had cherished, was Johnson’s personalized photographic portrait, which had hung prominently in Estes’s Pecos home, inscribed, “To Billie Sol Estes with warm regards and best wishes. Lyndon B. Johnson.”169
As long as the money flowed into his coffers and Billie Sol kept out of trouble—then kept his mouth shut when trouble came—Johnson continued to be his “dear friend.” When Johnson was dead for over eleven years, Estes—coached to do so by Captain Peoples—finally made what he thought was an honest effort to tell the truth, though he did ask for a number of concessions, including immunity from prosecution and having his parole restrictions lifted. On August 9, 1984, Estes’s lawyer Douglas Caddy wrote to Stephen S. Trott at the U.S. Department of Justice. In the letter Caddy acknowledged that Estes, Lyndon B. Johnson, Mac Wallace, and Cliff Carter had been involved in many more murders; Henry Marshall was only the first: George Krutilek, Harold Orr, Ike Rogers, Coleman Wade, Josefa Johnson, John (Doug) Kinser, and John F. Kennedy were also on the list furnished by Estes. Caddy added, “Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders.”170 The Department of Justice responded with a letter from Stephen Trott, dated September 13, 1984, which made it very clear that if any errors were found in Estes’s testimony, “the promise not to use any statements against Mr. Estes will be null and void and the government will not be bound by any other representations or agreements it makes.”
Estes might have concluded from this letter that, to continue this process any further, he was running the risk of the Justice Department finding a way to impeach his testimony and put him back in prison. It was after these threats that he decided his efforts to “come clean” were foolish i
f it meant cutting his own throat. The negotiations fell apart immediately thereafter, and from then on, Billie Sol Estes’s lips were sealed, and he began his “circumspect” period that would prevail for the next twenty years. A careful reading of Stephen Trott’s September 13, 1984, letter indicates all the conditions that might prompt further criminal action against Estes. It is possible that Billie Sol Estes read that letter as a threat of more jail time for him if he chose to press the matter any further, though his attorney Douglas Caddy has stated to this author that “Trott’s letter was a standard U.S. Department of Justice communication used under such circumstances … Why Estes’ backed out has remained a mystery. U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples told me afterwards that he thought Estes backed out because one of his family members might have ended up being implicated in the dealings with LBJ had the disclosure project proceeded.”
Twenty years after all of this, Estes published, in France, the book JFK, the Last Standing Man.* In an interview with journalist Pete Kendall about Lyndon Johnson’s criminal actions, Estes said, “He (Johnson) told me if I wouldn’t talk, I would not go to jail.” Estes has had no contact with LBJ’s other longtime associates, he said, since the book’s publication. “About all of them are dead, really. I think I’m about the last one standing.” That’s partly why, he said, he wasn’t interested in doing a book sooner. “I’ve been accused of being dumb,” he said, “but I’m not stupid.”171
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