Was LBJ a “Serial Killer” Who Advanced His Career By Murdering at Least 6 Other Men Who Stood In His Way?

One of those men was Henry Marshall, whose death—he was shot five separate times in the chest with a rifle—was ruled “a suicide.”..

June 3, 1961, Henry Marshall was found dead on his farm near Bryan in Robertson County, Texas. He had been shot five times with his own rifle.

Marshall, 51, had worked as a clerk with the Robertson County office of the Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA), holding a senior post in the agency. In 1960, he was asked to investigate the activities of Billie Sol Estes, a wealthy benefactor of Lyndon B. Johnson, whom he found to have engaged in an illegal scheme to buy cotton allotments.

According to Barr McClellan, who worked for the Austin, Texas, law firm of Clark, Thomas & Winters which represented Lyndon Johnson, Johnson had enlisted Billie Sol Estes to help him raise money to defeat John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Democratic Party primary. The two had a close relationship dating back to the 1950s.

Heralded in local media as the “wonder boy of Texas agriculture,” Estes had pioneered the use of irrigation pumps that were run by natural gas (which was less expensive than electricity) and by discovering the benefits of anhydrous ammonia as fertilizer.[1] A master at using the government for enrichment, Estes, according to a confession he gave after he was released from prison in 1984, became Johnson’s cutout for $10 million in illegal kickbacks ($100 million in 2022)

When LBJ wanted large sums of money, Billie Sol gave it to him; in return he received key government contracts—the price being kickbacks to LBJ whenever he wanted it. McClellan wrote that “this way of doing political business in Texas was nothing short of a banana republic.”

After meeting with Estes’s lawyer, John P. Dennison, following his report about the illegal purchase of cotton allotments, Marshall was offered a promotion at a higher salary.

The catch was, he would have to relocate to Washington, D.C., and discontinue his investigation of Billie Sol Estes. Marshall understood that the promotion and salary increase were a bribe to remove him from the case, and refused. A. B. Foster, manager of Billie Sol Enterprises, subsequently wrote to Clifton C. Carter, a close aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, asking for “his help in investigating Marshall and seeing if anything can be done.”

A few months later, Marshall—who had devoted his entire life to assisting farmers and ranchers, according to Estes[4]—was killed.

Soon after his death, Robertson County Sheriff Howard Stegall declared that “the sonavabitch shot himself” and had “committed suicide”—even though he had been shot in the chest five times, and had an eye split open and broken arm.[5]

Stegall happened to be a close friend of Clifton Carter, Johnson’s connection to the Texas mafia who was from Robertson county. His cousin Glynn Stegall worked in the Executive Office Building within Vice President Johnson’s suite of offices, next door to the White House

During the course of the sheriff’s “investigation,” no pictures were taken of the crime scene, no blood samples were taken of the stains on the truck (the truck was washed and waxed the following day), no check for fingerprints was made on the rifle or pickup. And no suicide note was ever found.[7]

Marshall’s wife (Sybil Marshall) and brother (Robert Marshall) refused to believe that Henry had committed suicide and posted a $2,000 reward for information leading to a murder conviction.

Marshall had been beaten so fiercely that one of his eyes hung out of its socket and his blood was found on both sides of the dented truck.

Dr. Joseph A. Jachimczyk, the Harris County medical examiner, said he believed that Marshall’s case was not a suicide. A Houston medical examiner explained that at least three of the five shots were debilitating—meaning it was impossible for him to have shot himself five times.[9]

The undertaker, Manley Jones, reported: “To me, it looked like murder. I just do not believe a man could shoot himself like that.” The undertaker’s son, Raymond Jones, told journalist Bill Adler in 1986: “Daddy said he told Judge Farmer there was no way Mr. Marshall could have killed himself. Daddy had seen suicides before. JPs [justices of the peace] depend on us and our judgments about such things. We see a lot more deaths than they do. But in this case, Daddy said, Judge Farmer told him he was going to put suicide on the death certificate because the sheriff told him to.”[10]

Arkansas Senator John McClellan (D) convened hearings in July 1962 of a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations on Billie Sol Estes’s wheeling and dealing in which Orville Freeman, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1961 to 1969, referred to Marshall as “the man who left this world under questionable circumstances.[11]

At the hearing, Senator McClellan posed for photos with the .22 caliber rifle that had killed Marshall, and stretched his arms and pointed the rifle at his chest to show the impossibility of Marshall having killed himself in the way he had allegedly done. “It doesn’t take many deductions to come to the irrevocable conclusion that no man committed suicide by placing this rifle in that awkward position and then [cocking] it four times more,” McClellan said.

Even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover did not believe the suicide theory. On May 21, Hoover scrawled on a memo: “I just can’t understand how one man can fire five shots at himself.

According to researcher Phillip F. Nelson, the 1962 grand jury investigation into Marshall’s death was “stacked” by the sheriff, Howard Stegall, who, Marshall’s son Donald said, “hand picked the grand jury” to include “three or four members of the Stegall clan.”

The person who took charge of the proceedings was Sheriff Stegall’s son-in-law Pryce Metcalfe, a local store owner who claimed that the laceration on Marshall’s head and his protruding left eyeball were caused by Marshall “falling or agitation of the body during the process of dying.” One of the grand jurors remarked that Metcalfe used “all his influence to be sure the grand jury came out with a suicide verdict.”[19]

The Department of Agriculture’s file on Billie Sol Estes was turned over to Harold Barefoot Sanders, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas appointed by Johnson who had been sent to Robertson County by Johnson with the understanding that anything presented to the grand jury would be censored by him and that the suicide verdict would be made to stand.

Johnson also enlisted the assistance of J. Edgar Hoover, who sent an inexperienced FBI agent to Robertson County to further derail the murder investigation.[21]

Robert Kennedy Participates in the Coverup In 1984, former Texas Attorney General Will Wilson (1955-1962) told the Dallas Morning News that federal officials refused to cooperate with the state of Texas’s investigation into Marshall’s death, which he said was very evidently not a suicide.

According to Wilson, a right-wing enemy of Johnson, the U.S. Department of Justice, then headed by Robert Kennedy, refused to turn over various reports and documents to aid the Grand Jury’s investigation, including a 175-page Department of Agriculture file.[22]

The reason is not too hard to discern: as much as RFK hated Johnson, revelations about the vice-president being connected to an agricultural scandal and crook like Estes and the murder of a government official would have been a black mark on the Kennedy administration and ruined JFK’s chances for reelection in 1964—even if Johnson was dropped from the ticket.[23]

On March 20, 1984, 22 years after Marshall’s death, Billie Sol Estes was back in the Robertson County courthouse to testify before a grand jury[25] about what had happened.

Billie Sol Estes had gone to prison in 1965 for fraud relating to a scam he orchestrated in which he had reported on phantom fertilizer tank sales in order to secure more lucrative loans. Paroled in 1971, Estes was sent back to prison in 1979 for mail fraud and nonpayment of income taxes.

After his release a second time from prison, Billie Sol Estes said that he decided to testify before the grand jury and tell the truth about Marshall’s death in order to keep a promise he had made to Clint Peoples who had escorted him to federal prison near El Paso in 1979.[26]

Billie Sol Estes told the grand jury what everyone suspected from the beginning: that Henry Marshall did not kill himself, that he was murdered for fear he would blow the whistle on Billie Sol’s cotton allotment scam.

Estes went on to suggest that Marshall was murdered on orders of the then newly elected vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was afraid Marshall might link him to Billie Sol’s frauds and that they would all go to the penitentiary. The orders went through Clifton C. Carter, who had run Johnson’s Senate campaigns and for many years “did Johnson’s dirty work,” according to a Texas political insider.[

Billie Sol told the grand jury that Carter ordered Marshall to approve 138 cotton allotment transfers as a favor repaying Billie Sol for campaign contributions.

On January 17, 1961, Marshall told Billie Sol’s lawyer John Dennison the scheme was illegal and a few days later, Billie Sol said he, Johnson, Carter and Malcolm Everett “Mac” Wallace, a Johnson political operative whom Estes named as the hitman, gathered in the backyard of Johnson’s Washington home to plot Marshall’s murder.[28]

Estes said he had proposed that Marshall be promoted and moved to another department but, after he refused to take the bribe, Johnson said: “It looks like we’ll just have to get rid of him.”[29]

Apparently, Marshall was supposed to go to Washington to meet with Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally as a whistleblower, and that they all were going to end up in a penitentiary if something was not done.[30]

Billie Sol went on to say that he, Carter and Wallace—the one to ask for directions at the Hearn gas station—had met at Billie Sol’s home in Pecos after Marshall was killed.

Billie Sol said Wallace described waiting for Marshall at his ranch; he had planned to kill him and make it look as if Marshall committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Wallace said there had been an awful scuffle before he overwhelmed Marshall and put a plastic bag over his head and the exhaust pipe of Marshall’s pick-up truck.

Wallace said further that he was in the process of gassing Marshall when he heard a car coming. Afraid someone would see him, Wallace panicked and shot Marshall five times at point-blank range with Marshall’s .22 caliber rifle. Billie Sol quoted Carter as saying “Wallace sure did botch it up.”[31]

It is not known if Estes’s story is true, as he provided no corroborating evidence, and Estes had a reputation as a swindler and con man. Estes’s daughter Pam told an interviewer not long after the grand jury proceeding, though, that “even liars sometimes tell the truth.”[32]

After Estes’s testimony, the 1984 Robertson County grand jury decided unanimously to overturn the 1961 suicide ruling. District Attorney John Paschall said that, “with the evidence we were presented, we know it not to be a suicide but a homicide. That’s what it should have been all along.”[33]

A state district judge subsequently ordered the death certificate changed to “homicide.”[34] But Lyndon Johnson was never officially charged with the crime and most historians ignore or dismiss evidence that he was behind it.[35]

A product of Texas’ frontier culture, Johnson was a man of great ambition and explosive temper whose powers of cunning and the manipulation of people were developed from a childhood spent as a disobedient class bully. Johnson’s violent proclivities were visible early in his life in an incident where he took dynamite and blew up a dog in the town square of Johnson City.[36]

Crude, vulgar and controlling, he is believed to have suffered from a manic depressive disorder. Johnson’s grandmother had declared “that boy [Lyndon] is going to end up in the penitentiary.”[37]

Denis Healey, who as British Secretary of State for Defense in 1967 was Robert S. McNamara’s opposite number, said that “Lyndon Johnson was a monster. He was one of the few politicians with whom I found it uncomfortable to be in the same room. Johnson exuded a brutal lust for power which I found most disagreeable.”[38]

Many of Johnson’s crimes were triggered by the great sin that enabled him to win high political office: his engaging in ballot-stuffing in a 1948 runoff election in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

Johnson lost the race to incumbent Governor Coke Stevenson by 114 votes—until 200 extra votes were magically produced in Alice, Texas, through bribery in what became known as the “Box 13 scandal.”[39]

Johnson’s first murder victim appears to have been Sam Smithwick, a deputy sheriff who worked under George Parr, a county judge and sheriff in Duval County who functioned like a ward boss in the old machine political system.

Early in 1952, Smithwick wrote to Coke Stevenson informing him that he was ready to testify about the election fraud and could produce the missing ballot box that Luis Salas, a clerk, had kept out of court proceedings in Alice three years earlier.

Smithwick at the time was in state prison in Huntsville, convicted of the murder of a local radio talk show announcer, William H. Mason, who had criticized the Parr regime.

Before he could testify about the election fraud, guards cornered him in his cell in Huntsville and strangled him, hanging his body from steel bars on his cell’s gate by his bed.[40]

The prison coroner quickly ruled Smithwick’s death a suicide, though no one believed it was suicide. According to the few reports on the killing, the death “stunk to high heaven” and “reeked of corruption.” In 1956, Governor Allan Shivers gave a speech accusing Johnson of murder—though he was never charged.[41]

According to McClellan, Smithwick’s murder was set up after the 1948 election when Johnson’s attorney Edward A. Clark—whom Reader’s Digest termed the “secret political boss of Texas”—had arranged for Hubert Hardison “Pete” Coffield, who had enriched himself on surplus government property after the war, to serve on the State Board of Prisons.

McClellan wrote that a Texas tradition was involved whereby, in the prison system, insiders are needed to do the dirty work of controlling convicts and establishing a special guard squad for the purpose of controlling or eliminating problem prisoners.[42]

Described by Billie Sol Estes as a “stone killer,” Mac Wallace functioned, according to McClellan, as Johnson’s favored hitman. Estes told attorney Doug Caddy that Johnson would transport Wallace on military planes so there would be no record of his travels on commercial airlines.[43]

Born in Mount Pleasant Texas in October 1921, Wallace had been a star football player, U.S. Marine, and president of the University of Texas student body in the 1944-45 school year.

A man of “muscular build, ruddy complexion, and tortoise-rimmed glasses” known for holding liberal views on labor and “the racial question,” Wallace organized a large student strike in October 1944 after the firing of university president Homer Rainey for trying to block the Board of Regents firing of four tenured economics professors who supported the New Deal.

After obtaining a Master’s degree, Wallace taught college economics before accepting a research economist’s job with the USDA, a repository for CIA agents.

Wallace obtained the latter job through his connection with Lyndon Johnson whom he did odd jobs for in Texas, including strong-arming businessmen, from September 1949 to October 1951.[45]

Described by classmates as a gifted intellectual and idealist, Wallace also had an explosive temper. On October 22, 1951, a week after his 30th birthday, he walked into the clubhouse of an Austin golf course, ordered a pack of cigarettes and then shot the attendant, John Douglas Kinser, a World War II veteran and amateur actor who had been sleeping with his wife, Mary André, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s sister, Josefa.[46]

Wallace had earlier discovered that his wife and Josefa—who was described as “tall, beautiful and wild”—were involved in Austin’s underground gay culture, including a lively night-time cruising scene in Zilker Park.

Josefa was also associated with a sex group in the Austin community theater with Mary André and Kinser. Kinser thus represented a threat to Johnson due to his first-hand knowledge of the secret of his sister’s scandalous sex life.[47]

Josefa furthermore allegedly told Kinser about illicit dealings between George Brown, co-founder of Brown & Root Inc., and Lyndon, while drunk (Brown had bankrolled Johnson’s political career in return for huge construction contracts for Brown & Root, a company “filled with CIA assets,” according to Joan Mellen).[48]

In February 1952, Wallace was convicted of murder by a Travis County court but given only a five-year suspended sentence when the death penalty should have been mandatory. [49]

After the trial, several of the jurors telephoned Kinser’s parents to apologize for voting for a suspended sentence but said they did so only because threats had been made to their families, according to Al Kinser, a nephew of the convicted murderer.

Johnson admitted to his longtime mistress Madeleine Brown that he had helped get Wallace off the hook, stating allegedly, “hell, I’ve got friends in Austin who owe me favors. I’m going to call in my markers for Wallace’s trial. Madeleine, I can’t have this bullshit embarrassing my family.”[51]

Because Wallace had been spared a life sentence [in Kinser’s death] by Johnson’s intervention, he was the perfect man to work in the shadows carrying out his dirty work for many years. McClellan writes: “Johnson and Edward A. Clark [prominent Austin attorney who worked for the law firm that represented Johnson] owned Wallace and they would never let him break free.”[52]

Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent, said that she saw Wallace at Johnson campaign headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel in Austin, indicating that he worked for Johnson. Wallace had told Austin police investigator Marion Lee after his arrest for John Douglas Kinser’s murder that “he was working for Mr. Johnson and that’s why he needed to get back to Washington [he worked as an economist with the Department of Agriculture in a position secured for him by Johnson].[53]

When Wallace took a job with a security contractor in California, Ling-Temco-Vought or LTV, in 1961, he was given a security clearance despite his murder conviction. A Navy intelligence officer handling Wallace’s case told Clint Peoples that the clearance was arranged by Johnson.[54]

The company founder, James J. Ling, was close with Johnson and was reported to have contributed a quarter of a million dollars to the 1960 Kennedy-Johnson campaign.[55] Temco, the Dallas based military contractor where Wallace worked before going to California (and before the merger), was owned by D.H. Byrd who was part of the Suite 8F Group, “right-wing Texas tycoons” who “financed the rise of LBJ.”[56]

Both Byrd and Ling made huge insider buys of LTV stock in the weeks before the JFK assassination, with the stock’s value rising from $2 million to $26 million by 1967, after LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War.[57]

Wallace died in a car wreck in East Texas in 1971 at the age of 49 after he allegedly fell asleep at the wheel.[58]

Cliff Carter, who died in 1971 at the age of 58 purportedly of pneumonia. Billie Sol Estes claimed that the latter cause of death was promoted by “the Johnson clan,” which was paranoid about Johnson’s legacy.

According to Estes, Carter was found dead in a cheap Virginia motel—only a day and a half after Estes had seen him in good health—when he was reported to have died in a Virginia hospital.[72]

Journalist Bill Adler wrote in The Texas Observer that “around Henry Marshall’s life swirled the gale forces of national power politics in its rawest form: greed, ambition, corruption and cover-up.”[73]

At the end of his life, Lyndon Johnson was a broken man, haunted by all of the violence and bloodshed that enabled his rise to power.

The lies and deceit he adopted to sell the war in Vietnam—which Billie Sol Estes said was tied to a scheme by Johnson and his donors to advance their own wealth.. —were but a continuation of the practices he had adopted throughout his political career.

21 posted on 06/28/2023 1:39:07 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (The worst thing about censorship is ████ █ ██████ ███████ ███ ██████ ██ ████████. FJB.)

Had them murdered?

Possibly in some cases.

Murdered them himself?

Probably not.

24 posted on 06/28/2023 1:43:13 PM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear (Follow the money. Even if it leads you to someplace horrible it will still lead you to the truth.)

Johnson also enlisted the assistance of J. Edgar Hoover, who sent an inexperienced FBI agent to Robertson County to further derail the murder investigation.

For decades and decades...

I was going to ask if this had anything to do with the Billie Sol Estes scandal of that time, which I still remember. We were living in Carlsbad NM at the time and took both the Carlsbad Current Argus and the El Paso Times.

Also the man shot 5 times and blamed on suicide. I remember a photo of someone trying to show how he could have held the rifle to shoot himself. If I remember correctly, it was 5 times in the stomach. I believe it was a .22 rimfire rifle.

27 posted on 06/28/2023 3:08:44 PM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar (“No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”)

Wilson is the worst. His wife signed his signature when he had his stroke. Everything she did should be rescinded.

31 posted on 06/28/2023 3:26:55 PM PDT by cowboyusa (YESHUA IS KING OF AMERICA! AMERICA FIRST! DEATH TO MARXISM AND GLOBALISM! there is no coexistence wi)

Interesting.

Used to know someone whose father had been around the Wobblies in the NW.

50 odd years later, everyone stayed mum

I heard an interview on a Lubbock talk radio show with LBJ’s mistress.
She said the day before Bobby Kennedy was assassinated several men in suits came to their hotel suite in Dallas and had a closed door meeting with LBJ.
When they left LBJ told her “after tomorrow that Bobby Kennedy will no longer be a problem” or something to that effect.
She said LBJ had people killed, but it was just business. He was a really good man.
That interview was in the early ‘90’s. Wish I could have recorded it. I was driving from Midland to Amarillo. I can’t find any record of that interview.

From the book by Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy: Texas senator Ralph Yarborough, who was sitting beside Johnson that day, told this author: ‘It just didn’t happen.... It was a small car, Johnson was a big man, tall. His knees were up against his chin as it was. There was no room for that to happen.’ Yarborough recalled that both Johnson and Youngblood ducked down as the shooting began and that Youngblood never left the front seat. Yarborough said Youngblood held a small walkie-talkie over the back of the car’s seat and that he and Johnson both put their ears to the device. He added: ‘They had it turned down real low. I couldn’t hear what they were listening to.’”

Something provable is Roger Simon has a full face of Nixon tattooed on his back.

Are you sure that's provable? Do you mean Roger Stone?

How would LBJ know that Oswald was about to fire? And why would he plug his ears? The shooter wasn’t close to him.

There have been allegations that the fingerprints of Malcolm Wallace were found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. If that were true, then he may have had a better rifle than Oswald was reported to have had. Wallace was a former Marine and had experience in murder. However, there have been fingerprint experts who claim that the prints were misidentified and not those of Wallace.

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