Investigations: Still Digging

Spadeful by spadeful, diggers flung earth up from the grave of Henry Marshall, the Texas-based U.S. Department of Agriculture official who first started investigating the Billie Sol Estes scandal. Marshall had been declared a suicide, despite evidence that made suicide all but incredible. Now, with the Estes case bursting all over the horizon, he was being exhumed for an autopsy by a five-expert team headed by Houston Pathologist Joseph A. Jachimczyk. The team’s finding: “From the reasonable medical probabilities, it was homicide.” This was perhaps the understatement of the year. Marshall, 51, was the Agriculture official in charge of cotton allotments in Texas. A big (6 ft., 200 lbs.) man who had worked for the department for 26 years. Marshall ate an early breakfast with his wife in their $20,000 home in Bryan, Texas, on the morning of June 3, 1961. Then he climbed into his pickup truck to look over his 1,500-acre ranch in nearby Robertson County. He dropped his son Donald, 10, off with relatives.

A Plethora of Puzzles. Some ten hours after Marshall left home on that hot, dusty day, his dead body was found face down beside his truck on his rolling ranch property. There were five bullet holes in his abdomen and chest, four in his back. There was blood on the side of his truck. His .22-caliber bolt-action rifle lay nearby.

Robertson County officials conducted no autopsy, found none of the spent bullets. They allowed the truck to be washed without determining if the blood was Marshall’s, handled the rifle before checking for fingerprints. They could not even be certain that the rifle was the death weapon—but they immediately ruled the death a suicide.

But Pathologist Jachimczyk’s study showed that 1) Marshall had been hit on the head with sufficient force to knock him out; 2) there were bruises on his face; 3) he could hardly have shot himself five times, since one bullet pierced his aorta, one a lung, another the liver—any of which would have caused quick death.

Mysteriously, Marshall’s cadaver contained 15% carbon monoxide. Estimating that the embalming process had removed another 15%, the pathologist figured 30% at the time of death—not enough to be fatal in itself.

Spadesful. As a county grand jury subpoenaed some 55 witnesses to probe the Marshall death, Texas Rangers and the FBI began their own investigations.

The importance of the death to the Estes case was emphasized in a legal wrangle between Texas Attorney General Will Wilson and federal officials over an Agriculture Department report on Estes’ cotton dealings to which Marshall had apparently contributed. Wilson tried to subpoena the whole report. But Secretary Orville Freeman’s Agriculture Department was willing to divulge only excerpts.

The Marshall death was only one more spadeful in the tons of dirt cascading over the case of the Pecos Ponzi. Other developments: > Senator McClellan’s Investigations Subcommittee announced that it would investigate the suicide (apparent) of William Pratt, 31. Chicago office manager of Commercial Solvents Corp., the New York firm that sold $5,700,000 worth of anhydrous ammonia to Estes, mainly on credit, hoping to be repaid from his grain-storage income. While no connection with the Estes case was evident, Pratt, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide in his car, left a bizarre note: “The bells even toll when a rat dies. The burden of guilt is on my shoulders.”

> Billie Sol’s 16th District Congressman, Democrat J. T. Rutherford, admitted getting money from Estes. He had searched his records, he said, and was so surprised that “I could have dropped my teeth” to find that Billie Sol had given him a $1,500 “campaign contribution” last Jan. 17.

This was eleven days after Rutherford had helped set up and had attended a meeting between Estes and Agriculture Department officials in Washington. At that session, the department agreed to postpone its cancellation of Estes’ cotton allotments. Also at the meeting was Texas’ Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, who has admitted getting some $7,500 in political contributions from Estes—all, he says, before the meeting.

> The Agriculture Department decided to move all of Estes’ Government-owned grain out of his Texas warehouses. However, the department said it would do so gradually over 18 months. Thus, some of the $4,000,000 in annual storage payments would continue for a while. At his press conference, President Kennedy gave only a generalized reason for the Government’s action: “I think that it’s appropriate . . . because of all the circumstances surrounding the case.” Sol Smiles. In El Paso, Billie Sol himself, who has been sticking close to his own 52-ft. Pecos living room these weeks, walked into a federal court to face representatives of his 500 creditors. The hearing was to determine what assets Billie has left. But Estes took the Fifth Amendment on all meaningful questions.

His court-appointed receiver, Harry Moore, said that Estes’ own unverified books indicated debts of $38,387,935 and assets of $20,793,155. Estes was ordered to present a plan by June 15 for paying off his creditors. Droll Judge R. Ewing Thomason, 83, looked down at Estes’ creditors, found a bit of wry humor in their predicament. “About all you’d have left is the newspaper,” observed the judge. “But I’m sure you won’t need that, with all the publicity you are getting.” Billie Sol smiled for the first time at the hearing—he knew what was happening to the newspaper.