The Man Who Killed Kennedy

by Roger Stone, Mike Colapietro

  “I had been too recently a member of the club, and too keenly felt a kinship with LBJ and others, to turn rat,” wrote Baker years later. “You may say that I was honoring the code of the underworld if you will, but I didn’t want to hurt my friends. That’s the context in which I thought of it.”7

  Baker soon found out that Johnson was much less of a friend. From the time of his resignation to only a few months before Johnson died, Lyndon cut communication with his former personal secretary in order to save his own career. His one conversation with the Johnson family during the “Bobby Baker Scandal” would come when Lady Bird phoned to assure Baker that the family still loved and stood by him.

  “I was thinking. LBJ’s right there by her side, but he won’t talk to me because he wants to be able to say that he hasn’t,” Baker wrote. “I knew Johnson was petrified that he’d be dragged down; he would soon show this by attempting to make light of our former relationship and saying that I had been more the Senate’s employee than his own.”8

  As Johnson attempted to separate himself from Baker, Bobby Kennedy put the puzzle together.

  Reporters from Life magazine had been sent out the week before the assassination to fill in the gaps of the Johnson fortune. They found corruption on a scale that could ruin Johnson’s career. The feature story, which would focus on Johnson’s dealings with Baker, would run without a byline. The person with his hand buried the deepest in the story was the attorney general.

  “It was all coming from Bobby,” said former Life editor James Wagenvoord. “It was going to blow Johnson right out of the water. We had him. He was done. Bobby Baker had taken the fall for Johnson. Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964 ticket, and would have probably been facing prison time.”9

  With the death of the president, the article would never see the light of day. In its stead, the issue’s focus was the Zapruder film. Following the assassination, Life had bought the rights to the it and fashioned the truths shown in this key piece of evidence to keep in line with the official story.

  Wagenvoord would also witness an FBI agent drop off material further incriminating Oswald: a newsreel of Oswald handing out pro-Castro fliers in New Orleans.10

  “An hour later [after the film arrived at Life], the fat lady sang an encore. Jack Ruby shot Oswald,”11 said Wagenvoord.

  Johnson went on to be president, and Baker went on to jail.

  In September 1972, three months after Baker was released from jail for his crimes, former Johnson aide Walter Jenkins sent word to him that the Johnson family wanted to invite him for a weekend at the ranch. Baker accepted.

  “Well, Mr. Johnson isn’t in the best of health. He’s been seeking out old friends lately,” Jenkins said. “I think he’s mending fences.”12

  What Baker was treated to was not an apology for not coming to his aid and breaking communication with his loyal aid, but a final Johnson pity party. Johnson talked to him about how he would have helped him, but the media and Bobby Kennedy would have “crucified”13 him, adding how tough it was to be president.

  Baker asked for another bit of help. Nixon man Bebe Rebozo was putting pressure on Bobby to dole dirt about politicians, and a call from LBJ could help smooth it out. Johnson wouldn’t consider it.

  “If Bebe Rebozo told President Nixon I was sticking my nose into it, or, uh, if the press got a hold of it, then it’d be in big black headlines, and I don’t think it would help either one of us,” Johnson told Baker.

  For Baker, whose admiration led him to name two of his children after Johnson, the brush-off was insulting.

  “I rethought just about everything he’d told me during the afternoon and evening, realizing that most of it had touched on how people had let him down; not a word of his own faults or failures; not a word of his own backing and filling,”14 Baker wrote.

  Upon leaving the LBJ Ranch that weekend, Baker glimpsed the guestbook, which had last been signed by Johnson attorney and company man Abe Fortas a few days before.15 In a final slight to Baker, he had not been asked to sign the book that Johnson had always carefully maintained.

  “So the prodigal son had not returned all the way home,” Baker wrote. “He was welcomed only by the back door.”16

  During the years of the Kennedy administration, the moneymaking schemes of fellow Texan and Suite 8F member Billy Sol Estes would also threaten Johnson. If Bobby Baker was a glad-handing politician looking for a con, Estes was a con-man looking for a glad-handing politician. Both contributed to the desperate measures that Johnson would take in Dallas.

  When, in 1953, the US Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of the ten outstanding young men in the United States, Estes said that to be successful, “you had to walk out on a limb to the far end—for that’s where the fruit is. If it breaks, you learn how far to go next time.”17

  The quote would be symbolic of Estes, who often went too far out on the limb, overstretching and overselling his business deals until he was brought up on fraud charges in 1962.

  In the mid–1950s, Estes began selling anhydrous ammonia, a low-cost farm fertilizer made marketable by its easy application and availability. It was through the sale of anhydrous ammonia that Estes incurred a sizable debt to his distributor, Commercial Solvents. The company overlooked Estes’s $555,000 debt, and with the aid of Billy’s smooth talking, provided him $125,000 more for the purchase of additional ammonia and with $225,000 for him to start a business in grain storage.18 Federal money rolled in, and Estes was able to slash the prices of his ammonia, cutting the cost of the competition and forcing them out of the industry.

  “If you shatter an industry,” Estes said, “you can pick up all the pieces for yourself.”19

  Estes then used his salesmanship to sell imaginary anhydrous ammonia storage facilities to West Texas farmers, who took out mortgages on unseen tanks and leased them back to him. Estes made over $30 million on the scam.20

  In 1958, Estes also began conducting business with the federal government, obtaining subsidies to support his grain storage. It was through this government contact that Estes and Johnson began working together. He, like Baker, was treated as a personal friend to Johnson. The two hunted quail together, and Estes was given an invitation to John Kennedy’s inauguration.21 He would contribute a lot of money to Johnson personally and politically, while Johnson helped Estes secure cotton allotments for a scheme in which he grew the cotton on allotments illegally whittled off farmers.22 When regulations were tightened, Estes would look to the vice president’s top aide, Cliff Carter, for relief.

  “Am moving my family to Washington this week so call on me in the vice president’s office as we can serve you,”23 Carter wrote to Estes on December 27, 1960, as he was preparing for the Kennedy administration.

  By that time, it was typical Johnson: money for favors.

  “During that time, daddy had been supplying Lyndon with large infusions of cash, not only for his own political needs, but for people Johnson himself chose to help,” Estes’s daughter Pam wrote. “Since these transactions were all cash, there is no reliable way of knowing how much money went to Johnson or what became of it.”24

  By 1960, the US Department of Agriculture was looking into Estes’s scams. Henry Marshall, an inspector with the department, led the investigation as Johnson campaigned for the White House.

  In January 1961, Estes had the manager of Billy Sol Enterprises, A. B. Foster, write to the newly-elected vice president’s aide, Carter, to help stamp out the spreading blaze.

  “We would sincerely appreciate you investigating this and seeing if anything can be done,”25 Foster wrote. Of course, Johnson would have interest in quashing the examination of his deals with Estes, which would no doubt spark interest into many of Johnson’s other deals with Texas businessmen.

  Two days before the Kennedy inauguration, Estes, Carter, and Johnson met at Lyndon’s Washington home and determined that Marshall would have to be “taken care of for good.”26

  On June 3, 1961, Ma
rshall was found dead on his farm in the grass alongside his Chevy Fleetside. Shot five times in the chest and left abdomen with a .22 bolt-action rifle, the case was impossibly determined to be a suicide by the sheriffs on the scene. It was a verdict rendered without blood samples gathered or fingerprints taken from the truck or murder weapon.27 Carbon monoxide was also found in Marshall’s body—a hallmark in LBJ’s Texas justice murders.

  It was a death that would follow famed Texas Ranger Clint Peoples long into retirement. For Peoples, no sense could be made of the bizarre nature of the crime. Aside from the evidence, which convinced the ranger that it was a murder, Marshall did not seem to be a man who would take his own life.

  Years later, Marshall’s brother Robert related that Henry had no monetary or personal reasons to kill himself.

  “He and his wife lost their first two kids, and this little boy (Donald Marshall) came along, and he was the happiest person in the world,” Robert Marshall said. “He had everything to live for.”28 The case was reopened in May, 1962. Marshall’s body was exhumed and examined, and the case was put before the Robertson County grand jury. The doctor who conducted the autopsy upon exhumation on May 22, Joseph A. Jachimczyk, backed Peoples’s claim of a homicide. “Based on my preliminary autopsy examination,” Jachimczyk said. “I believe this was not a suicide.”29

  Jachimczyk found that, if Marshall had used his shirt to seal off the exhaust pipe and administer carbon monoxide, there would have been soot on the shirt. But no soot was found. The doctor also found that the bruise on Marshall’s head could not have occurred from a fall but a harder blow.

  Jachimczyk found that “if in fact this is a suicide, it is the most unusual one I have seen during the examination of approximately fifteen thousand deceased persons.”30

  The case was garnering attention in Washington, particularly from the attorney general. “I talked to John Kennedy one time and I talked to Robert Kennedy ten or twelve times,” said Judge W. S. Barron. “He [Bobby] would just ask questions—how we were getting along, what we’d found, things like that.”31

  Nolan Griffin was a gas station attendant, who recalled a man stopping to ask for directions at the approximate time of the murder. The man, in Griffin’s recollection “wore dark-rimmed glasses, had dark hair, and a scarred, dark face.”32 The description led to “Mr. X,” an artist’s rendering that was circulated in the national media.

  The police brought in a man who they claimed had been positively identified by Griffin. The man would later pass a polygraph test and be cleared of wrongdoing, which effectively discredited Griffin’s testimony. Griffin would say later that the police were wrong and that he had been tricked by county attorney Bryan Russ and Sheriff Howard Stegall.

  “When I was talking to Howard,” Griffin said, “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.”33

  The trick worked, and all the fuel was taken out of Griffin’s story.

  “I never positively identified the man,” Griffin said. “All I did was sign my name when they shoved that thing under me.”34

  Estes would be called to testify, but spent the majority of the inquiry clinging to the Fifth Amendment. The case would be rendered inconclusive, and the strange death of Henry Marshall would be shelved for a decade. Ranger Peoples, though, continued his dogged investigation.

  In a report sent to Texas Rangers chief Homer Garrison in July, 1963, Peoples’s detailed the improbable elements of the death, which he said, pointed more likely to homicide.

  Our investigation reveals that, for Mr. Henry Marshall to have committed suicide, the following acts would have had to occur:

  The first act of Mr. Marshall would have been to take carbon monoxide. (The pathologist’s report reveals that 15 percent carbon monoxide was present at time of autopsy one year later and that 15 percent would have been lost from embalming processes. A lethal dose consists of 40 percent.)

  Mr. Marshall would have had to dispose of the facilities with which the carbon monoxide was administered.

  Mr. Marshall received a serious brain injury on the left side of his head from a fall and a cut over his left side of his head from a fall and a cut over his left eye, causing the eye to protrude.

  Severe bruises with skin breakage on the back of his hands.

  Blood left on the right and left sides and the rear of the pickup truck.

  Mr. Marshall would have had to cut off the motor on the pickup.

  Absence of blood inside of the pickup after the motor was cut off.

  Absence of blood on the front of Mr. Marshall’s shirt.

  The shirt of the deceased was open, with no bullet holes in front.

  Nitrites present only on the tail of Mr. Marshall’s shirt (back side).

  A deep dent present on the right side of the pickup caused by some type of instrument other than a human hand or head, which was placed there on this date.

  Due to the lack of blood on the front of the shirt but considerable amounts present around the pickup creates another mystery.

  The investigation revealed that it was difficult for Mr. Marshall to straighten out his right arm, which was due to a prior injury, and it would have been necessary for him to pull the trigger with his left hand.35

  Peoples went on the ascertain that all of the gunshot wounds were fired in a straight manner, which would have required composure and balance, a skillful feat that would have been impossible given the incapacitating damage that three of the shots inflicted: “one severing the aorta and two paralyzing.”36 The Texas Ranger contended that this was one of the “very, very few”37 murder cases that he had been unable to solve and that he, like many others involved in the case, learned there were higher powers at work.

  Johnson would be safe in the confines of government, and Estes would be sacrificed in the same vein as Bobby Baker. In April 1962, Estes was indicted by a Federal grand jury on fifty-seven acts of fraud.38 At the time, Bobby Kennedy ordered seventy-six FBI agents to sort through the Estes scandal.39 The Department of Agriculture and other sectors of the government were also being investigated for jobs and gifts received from Estes. The inquiry, no doubt, made Johnson, who had not only accepted money but had been cut into some of Estes’s business opportunities, very nervous.

  At the Estes trial, Johnson made sure that he was protected, hiring personal attorney John Cofer to serve his interests. Cofer had previously represented Johnson in the “Box 13” scandal. The attorney made certain that Estes never took the witness stand to ensure that nothing was said about his associations with Johnson.

  “I don’t believe that Johnson wanted daddy convicted,” wrote Estes’s daughter Pam concerning the intentions of the vice president. “However, his order of priorities and those of Cofer were to protect Lyndon Baines Johnson and to prevent Daddy’s conviction if possible. But, if not, to get the verdict overturned, and, if that didn’t work, get Daddy to go to prison all by himself without making any waves. And that is exactly what happened.”40

  Before Estes was convicted, he was offered a deal by Bobby Kennedy: freedom in exchange for evidence and testimony against LBJ.

  “I didn’t take that deal,” Estes told the Houston Chronicle. “I’d have been free for thirty minutes. Then, I’d have been dead. There were already some others who had gone that route.”41

  In 1971, after serving more than six years in prison, Estes was no more ready to start handing over names of those who had been in high places while he was locked up.

  ”I can’t see that there would have been any honor in doing time with big-name people,” Estes said. “I know I was betrayed by some of them. I got my business and my politics all mixed together. As they say in Texas, I got my tit in a wringer. That won’t happen again.”42

  Peoples, still certain that Marshall’s death was a homicide, hounded E
stes for the truth. In 1979, he escorted Estes to La Tuna Federal Prison in El Paso to serve four more years in prison for tax fraud. During their flight from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, Peoples asked about the Marshall murder.

  “You may be assured … that Henry Marshall very definitely did not commit suicide,” said Estes. “He was murdered.”

  “Billy Sol, which direction should I have been looking?” asked Peoples

  “Well, you know I cannot say too much because I am in the penitentiary. However, you should be looking at the people who had the most to lose,” answered Estes.

  “Should I have been looking in the direction of Washington?” Peoples asked.

  “You are now very definitely on the right track,” said Estes.43

  By the mid–1980s, Estes was ready to talk.

  In 1984, he dragged the death of Marshall back into questioning before the Robertson County grand jury. He charged that Johnson and Cliff Carter were intimately involved with the death of Marshall and that Johnson had given the order. The testimony of Estes was rejected on the basis that many of the major players in the story were dead and could neither confirm nor deny the charges. The accomplishment of the testimony was two-fold: It changed the death of Marshall from suicide to death by gunshot, and it brought into light bespectacled Johnson hit man, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace.

  At one point, Wallace, a former marine who had been the president of the University of Texas student body, had strong political aspirations. In 1946, Wallace was an organizer for Homer Rainey’s campaign for governor.44 Wallace eventually became indebted to Johnson, and the closest he would ever get to political office would be in administering of carnage for Johnson and his Texas business associates. Wallace was the Mr. X at the gas station asking Nolan Griffin for directions.