The Man Who Killed Kennedy
Page 21
Described as a “hatchet man”45 for Johnson by Lyndon’s mistress Madeleine Brown, Wallace was an important link in many of the murders connected to Johnson. Estes’s lawyer, Douglas Caddy, revealed Wallaces and Johnson’s complicity in Texas-style justice in a letter to Stephan S. Trott at the US Department of Justice:
My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984.
Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960’s. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mack Wallace.
Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses:
Murders
1. The killing of Henry Marshall
2. The killing of George Krutilek
3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary
4. The killing of Coleman Wade
5. The killing of Josefa Johnson
6. The killing of John Kinser
7. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy46
Of the seven names listed, three stood out: Henry Marshall, Johnson’s sister Josefa, and President John Kennedy. Johnson’s sister Josefa had become a political liability to Lyndon. An employee at a local brothel, Josefa was branded as a “working girl“.47 On Christmas Eve, 1961, Josefa died under mysterious circumstances, and despite state law, no autopsy was performed on the body.48
George Krutilek was one name not so easily recognizable. He was Estes’s business associate and accountant. Seven days after the arrest of Estes on fraud charges, April 4, 1962, Krutilek was found dead in his car. Two days earlier, Krutilek had been interrogated by FBI agents about the Estes affair.49 In a crime scene that resembled Marshall’s, his death was also ruled a suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning.
When Marshall’s body was found, it was theorized that, in an initial attempt to kill himself, he had pulled his shirt over his head to form a hood and endeavored to inhale fumes from the exhaust pipe.50 More likely, Wallace attempted to kill Marshall with carbon-monoxide to make it look more like suicide. At some point, there was a struggle: There were bruises on Marshall’s face, hands and arms. Mac used the bolt-action rifle to finish the job.51
Two other of Estes’s associates, Harold Eugene Orr and Howard Pratt, were also found dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in 1964. Orr owned the Superior Manufacturing Company of Amarillo and had played a key role in Estes’s fraudulent dealings. There was some fear that Orr, who was sentenced to ten years in prison, would open up to authorities for a lighter sentence, but he never made it to prison. Two days before he was to begin serving his sentence, he was found dead in his garage.52 It was ruled accidental, with the claim that Orr had been changing the exhaust pipe on his car. The tools found scattered around his body were unfit for that type of automotive repair.53
Barbara Orr, Harold’s wife, maintained her belief that her husband had been murdered. “I never did believe that Harold killed himself, but what good does it do to bring it out now?”54 Barbara asked years later.
These deaths, all occurring in the span of a few years, had a strange similarity both in the way they occurred and their connection to Estes.
“They were all carbon monoxide poisonings,” Peoples said concerning the deaths of Orr, Krutelik, and Pratt. “But I didn’t look into it in any depth. They were off in another district, and the authorities were handling it.”55
Another name on the list was John Kinser, the owner of the Butler Pitch and Putt Golf Course in Austin. Years earlier, in 1951, Wallace shot Kinser several times in his pitch-and-putt office during a daytime argument. It has been speculated that the killer’s actions stemmed from bitter love triangle between Kinser, Johnson’s sister Josefa and Wallace—or that Kinser was involved with Wallace’s estranged wife, Mary Andre DuBose Barton.56 In truth Kinser, had knowledge of Lyndon’s sister Josefa’s indiscretions and was trying to blackmail Johnson.57
When he was arrested for the murder, Wallace slipped to Austin police investigator Marion Lee that “he was working for Mr. Johnson and [that’s why] he had to get back to Washington.”58 Wallace, at the time of the shooting, was an economist working for the Department of Agriculture in Washington, a position secured for him by Senator Lyndon Johnson.59
After learning that Wallace had connections with Johnson’s family and other prominent state political figures, Clint Peoples remarked, “I knew that I had to put every bit that I had into the investigation because the smell of politics was all around there.”
During the ten-day trial in February, 1952, Wallace was defended by Lyndon Johnson’s personal attorney John Cofer, who had previously represented LBJ in the “Box 13” scandal and who would, years later, defend Billy Sol Estes. Wallace was found guilty of murder, sentenced to five years in prison, but with a suspended sentence. Years later, Peoples would say that in his fifty years of law enforcement, he had never seen such a thing happen.60 In a review of Texas jurisprudence, this author has found no other examples of any Texas citizen convicted of murder receiving a suspended sentence.
Only three months following the suspended sentence verdict, Wallace would get a job with Temco, a defense contractor in Dallas owned by Suite 8F member and owner of the Texas School Book Depository building, D. H. Byrd,61 a major contributor and fundraiser for Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
Incredibly, Byrd, a big game hunter whose living room was stuffed with taxidermy of the wild game he had shot, had the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository removed and sent to his home as a trophy following the assassination of President Kennedy.
Temco, later known as TLV, would get a major federal defense contract from Johnson’s defense department at the same time convicted murderer Malcolm Wallace went to work for the firm as an “economic consultant.”
Glen Sample and Mark Collum in their book The Men on the Sixth Floor unearthed a May 13, 1984 Dallas Morning News article that reports an incredulous Clint Peoples finding from a Navy intelligence officer about Wallace’s new job.
“I was furious that they would even consider a security clearance for Wallace with the background he had,” said Peoples. “I asked him [the intelligence officer] how in the world Wallace could get the security clearance, and he said ‘politics.’ I asked who could be so strong and powerful in politics that he could get a clearance for a man like this, and he said ‘the vice president.’”62
Five years later, in 1957, still a free man, Wallace’s record was wiped clean.
In 1960, during Lyndon Johnson’s bid for the presidential nomination, Wallace would be a frequent hanger-on. Lucianne Goldberg, a campaign worker, had seen Wallace at functions at least three times, always in the company of LBJ aide Cliff Carter.
“I just knew him and remember him because that was sort of what we were all about—remembering everybody you meet, because you never knew where they were going to end up,”63 Goldberg said in her recollection of meeting Wallace in the hospitality suite of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Goldberg would later remember seeing Wallace at the Ambassador Hotel, the home of Johnson’s campaign headquarters.
“I’d be sitting at my desk, and there’d be a lot of people milling around, and I’d see him with his thumbs hooked into his belt the way those [Texas] guys do.”64
Wallace would never realize his political ambitions, but he would certainly play a part in seeing that Johnson realized his.
After the assassination of President Kennedy, a fingerprint was found on a cardboard box in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. It could not be linked with Oswald, any other employee of the Texas School Book Depository, or any law enforcement officer who had handled the box. Wallace’s print from his previous conviction and the one found on the box were a match, according to fingerprint expert A. Nathan Darby, former head of Austin’s police identification unit. Darby was the most experienced certified latent print examiner in America, with more than thir
ty-five years of military forensic and police experience. An initial comparison found a match between the two prints on fourteen unique points while Darby ultimately ascertained that the two prints had thirty-two matching points,65 far exceeding the requirement for identification and conviction.
“I’m positive,” said Darby. “The finger that made the ink print also made the latent print. It’s a match.”
In comparison, “the Dallas police found only three partial fingerprints of Oswald on only two of the boxes in the area.”66
Robert Caro, who through four volumes of a planned five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson painstakingly recreated the life and character of Johnson, has painted a picture of a man who holds power and monetary gain over all else. Caro shows the duplicitous nature of the man, the animalistic drive, and the treachery of his political and business deals. Still, his biographies miss a key part of the Johnson makeup: Mac Wallace.
In a 2012 correspondence, Doug Caddy, Billy Sol Estes’s lawyer, revealed a confrontation he had had with Caro in the mid–1980s and the forces still at hand in burying the truth:
When Barr McClellan’s book, Blood, Money, & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, was about to be released in 2003, both Barr and I independently received about a half dozen phone calls from someone who was vitally intent in stopping its publication or limiting its impact. The person who called always remained unidentified, and the phone number from which the call was made was later found to be nonexistent. In one of the phone conversations with me, the person in response to my bringing up Robert Caro hopefully covering LBJ’s involvement in JFK assassination, told me that “We are not worried about Caro. He is on board.” I was disappointed to hear this because I took it to mean that Caro may downplay LBJ’s involvement in his forthcoming final volumes on the biography of LBJ. In 1985 or 1986, Robert Caro gave an address at the University of Houston on the subject of urban planning. I attended his speech accompanied by my father. After the speech, I approached him when he was answering questions posed by about a half dozen attendees gathered around him. I decided to pose my own question to him, asking, “Do you plan to cover the role of Mac Wallace in your biography of LBJ?” Caro looked startled and shaken and grabbed me by the lapels of my business suit, saying “Who are you? How can I get in touch with you?” I gave him my business card, which he examined on the spot and pocketed it. However, I never heard anything more from him.67
Caro helps to wipe away the blood and bury the bodies littering Johnson’s path to power by failing to mention Wallace. Johnson used Wallace to keep secrets protected and to stop the cancer which grew from his own more loathsome characteristics. Baker and Estes acted like Johnson: Wallace was the solution to the way Johnson acted. Baker and Estes served their time for their indiscretions; Wallace was there to ensure Johnson never would.
In 1971, Wallace would be disposed of in a similar fashion to his victims. A stuffed tailpipe caused carbon monoxide to permeate the interior of the car that he was driving, causing him to lose control and crash near Pittsburg, Texas.
The death of Wallace did not deter Texas Ranger Clint Peoples in his attempt to find answers in the strange death of Henry Marshall, its connection to related deaths, their connection to Wallace, and his connection to Estes and Johnson.
In 1992, Peoples was also killed in an untimely automobile accident. Madeleine Brown remembered the “accident” in her interview with author Robert Gaylon Ross:
I’m really gunshy talking about this because Clint Peoples was really killed. Clint was going on camera to verify the things that I said and my friend Billy Sol Estes, and anyway, I called Clint, it was on a Friday, I distinctly remember that, and I said, “Clint, I understand you are going on a recorder with Billy Sol and me. They were gonna do it as the end of a movie.” I said, “I have a sick sister,” and I couldn’t make arrangements to go, and I said “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Clint. I’ll come next Friday, and I’ll even buy lunch. Then you can be a kept man.” I really liked Clint. Well, on the Tuesday following my conversation, Clint was run off the road in Waco, Texas and ultimately died, passed away from his injuries.68
Billy Sol Estes, who died on May 14, 2013, rebuffed my many attempts to interview him. He had long stopped speaking publicly about the strange deaths or his knowledge of them, praying as he got older in years for a more spiritual solution to the murders.
“I think there’s still a God in heaven, and I think that God will straighten history out,” Estes said. “I’ve decided that none of us can do it down here.”69
I did have access and the full cooperation of Billy Sol Estes’s personal attorney Douglas Caddy, who supplied interviews, source materials, and remembrances for this book. I can understand Estes’s reluctance to give interviews in his later years. By the time I asked him in 2012, he had already identified Lyndon Johnson as the ultimate perpetrator in the murder of President Kennedy and had implicated him in seven other murders on record, in interviews and with many credible media outlets.
Both Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes were self-described wheeler dealers, operators, hustlers; both were in deep with Johnson, made money from his political influence, and eventually paid for it. Both overreached for personal gain, possibly believing that their leader could exonerate them. Johnson used them for his own wealth until they became a liability. Then, they were promptly cut off the tree and left to rot.
It had been Lyndon Johnson’s great obsession to become president of the United States. But it would not be until he was threatened with the prospect of prison that he needed the office of the presidency to cloak his indiscretions.
It was not a lapse in reason when Kennedy family friend Bill Walton said, in reference to the assassination, “Dallas was the ideal location for such a crime.”70 For Johnson—with members of the Houston-based Suite 8F group, organized crime figures connected to Dallas, and state and federal government operatives—Dallas was home turf. It was a perfect ambush point because many involved knew the environment intimately, making facts surrounding the assassination easy to manipulate. The point was made clear by Billy Sol Estes’s daughter Pam in her book Billy Sol: King of the Texas Wheeler-Dealers:
Lyndon Johnson was not about to be ruined by such tactics by two upstarts from Massachusetts. He proved to have more influence than they counted on. In going through all the mounds of trial and investigation testimony, there appeared to be little curiosity about the large gifts Daddy had provided for the Democratic Party and Lyndon Johnson personally.
A year and a half later, after John Kennedy was shot while riding down the streets of Dallas in an effort to mend his Texas political ties, Daddy said, “It looks like Lyndon won after all.”71
NOTES
1. Baker, Wheeling and Dealing, pgs. 82–86
2. Caro, Passage of Power, pg. 277.
3. Nellor, Washington’s Wheeler Dealers, pg. 5.
4. North, Act of Treason, pg. 322.
5. Gettysburg Times, January 23, 1964.
6. Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, pg. 307.
7. Baker, Wheeling and Dealing, pg. 185.
8. Baker, Wheeling and Dealing, pg. 182.
9. Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, pg. 307.
10. Ibid, pg. 308.
11. Ibid, pg. 308.
12. Baker, Wheeling and Dealing, pg. 261.
13. Ibid, pg. 308.
14. Ibid, pg. 270.
15. Ibid, pg. 276.
16. Ibid,.
17. Time, May 25, 1962, ‘Investigations: Decline and Fall.’
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. North, Act of Treason, pg. 152.
22. McClellan, Blood, Money and Power, pg. 125.
23. Adler, Bill, The Texas Observer, “The Killing of Henry Marshall,” November 7, 1986.
24. Estes, Billy Sol, pg. 47.
25. www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmarshallH.htm.
26. McClellan, Blood, Money and Power, pg. 156.
27. Alder, Bill, “The Killi
ng of Henry Marshall.”
28. Dallas Morning News, August 14, 1985, “Cause of Death Changed from Suicide to Murder.”
29. Adler, The Killing of Henry Marshall
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Day, Captain Clint Peoples: Texas Rangers, pgs. 133–134.
36. Ibid, pg. 134.
37. Ibid, pg. 131.
38. North, Act of Treason, pg. 140
39. Time, May 25, 1962, ‘Investigations: Decline and Fall.’
40. Estes, Billy Sol, pg. 66.
41. Sample and Collom, The Men On The Sixth Floor, pg. 120.
42. Demaret, People, April 23, 1979, ‘Billy Sol Estes May Face New Fraud Charges; Vol 11, No. 16.
43. Ibid, 135.
44. Adler, Bill, “The Killing of Henry Marshall.”
45. Brown, Texas in the Morning, pg. 79.
46. Sample and Collom, The Men On The Sixth Floor, pgs. 150–151.
47. McClellan, Blood, Money and Power, pg. 105.
48. Ibid, pg. 167.
49. Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, pg. 137.
50. Adler, Bill, The Texas Observer, November 7, 1986, “The Killing of Henry Marshall.”
51. Ibid.
52. Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, pg. 137.
53. Ibid, 138.
54. The Reading Eagle, March 30, 1984.
55. The Dallas Morning News, March 29, 1984.
56. Ibid, pg. 134.
57. McClellan, Blood, Money and Power, pg.107.
58. Dallas Times Herald, April 6, 1984.
59. Day, Captain Clint Peoples: Texas Ranger, pg. 81.
60. Ibid, pg. 82.
61. Sample and Collom, The Men on the Sixth Floor, pg. 167.
62. Ibid, pg. 169.
63. Adler, Bill, “The Killing of Henry Marshall.”
64. Ibid.
65. McClellan, Blood, Money and Power, pg. 328.
66. Zirbel, The Texas Connection, pg. 209.