Now here’s an item that may or may not be significant. As a law-enforcement officer, I will caution you that it is not even close to evidence. But it sure as hell is suggestive.
Some time during or in between pillow talk with Josefa, Doug asked her to try to get her brother Lyndon to loan him some money to pay off some outstanding debts that were threatening his new pitch-and-putt enterprise. Apparently she went to Lyndon, got turned down, and went back again a couple times, after Doug pressed the issue. It’s possible Lyndon might have viewed this as attempted blackmail. Possible.
Now, Mac was living in D.C. at the time, or anyway in Arlington, and late October 1951, he drove down in his shiny new blue station wagon to Dallas, where he borrowed a little .25 from an old college roommate of his, who happened to be in the FBI. That always makes me smile. He spent a couple of days talking to Mary Andre, and asking her to be a better wife, a more normal wife, and just what the hell had she been up to lately? Who’d been doing what to whom, he wanted to know, and that kind of thing. By all reports, he was calm and cool and collected. No talk of him slapping her around this trip. Anyway, he wound up in Austin a few days later, and drove to Butler Park, where the pitch-and-putt golf course was.
It was a lazy afternoon, sunny, kind of breezy, grass turnin’ yellow with winter on the way. Golfers were fooling around nearby on a putting green, but that didn’t faze ol’ Mac. He walked right in the pro shop and confronted Doug, who was at the cash register, and a few words were exchanged. Then Mac shot Doug point-blank five times and killed him very damn dead. Well, yeah, Mr. Heller, I guess that does sound like “overkill,” but remember, it was a little gun, so Mac was probably just makin’ sure.
Anyway, when he come out with his shirt covered in blood, Mac waved the gun at the golfers nearby, told ’em to stay back, and then he drove off in that blue station wagon, a Pontiac. The witnesses saw the license plate was Virginia, not something you see every day in Austin, and they got the number and wrote it down. Mac got picked up right away, and there was some jurisdictional nonsense between the Austin police and the county sheriff, so the Rangers got brought in. It became my case, which is why I can tell you all this in an insider kind of way.
Mac was charged with murder, and right off the bat, he resigned his government job. Shortly after that, he got released on thirty-grand bail, thanks to a couple of LBJ’s financial backers, and an attorney of Lyndon’s, John Cofer, out of Ed Clark’s office, showed up to defend Mac. Cofer’s the same guy who defended Johnson for ballot-box stuffing in 1948.
Mac did not testify in his own defense. Hell, Cofer acknowledged his client’s guilt — after all, we had the car, the bloody shirt, and a damn .22-caliber cartridge in the suspect’s possession. What had me shakin’ my head, though, was when the district attorney stated he could find no motive for the murder.
That’s right, Mr. Heller. Nothing about the sex stuff came out at the trial, and certainly not that Josefa Johnson had been in a sex triangle with the murdered man and Mac’s wife. Or I guess it’s sex quadrangle, if you count Mac.
No evidence at all was introduced from either side about cause or extenuating circumstances. After a trial that lasted less than two hours, the jury found Mac guilty of “murder with malice aforethought.”
Guess what he got for killing a man in cold blood? A five-year sentence — that is, a five-year suspended sentence. Not exactly the “Texas justice” you hear so much about, like the kind all those colored boys on Death Row are waitin’ on. First suspended first-degree murder sentence in Texas history. Maybe the only one.
I hadn’t been a Ranger very long, but I’d been a deputy sheriff and a highway patrolman, and could recognize the whiff of politics. The stench of it. Do I think LBJ directed Mac to kill a blackmailer? Hard to say. But any way you slice it, Mac sure did Senator Johnson a favor by shootin’ a par five at the pitch-and-putt.
Peoples took a deep puff of his cigar, which had largely been forgotten in his ashtray while he spun his yarn.
He expelled some smoke, then said, “Hell’s bells, that’s rude of me. Would you like a cigar, Nate? I got a box of Senators right here. Made over San Antonio way.”
Somehow a Texas Senator seemed fitting, but I said, “Thanks. Smells fine. But I’m not a smoker.”
“Clean-cut fella, huh?”
“Not exactly. But I haven’t smoked since I was in the Pacific, and then just cigarettes.” I only got the urge when I was in a situation that recalled combat.
“Then can I have Ruth fetch you another Dr Pepper, Mr. Heller?”
“No thanks. But maybe you should call me ‘Nate.’ I’m starting to feel like we know each other.”
Peoples grinned; even those blue eyes seemed to have warmed up. “Only if you call me ‘Clint.’”
“Okay — but I thought the only Westerners called Clint were on TV.”
That made him smile. “Nate, I ain’t never been mistaken for Cheyenne or Rowdy Yates.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Clint.”
He blew a smoke ring, just showing off, and rocked some more. “So let’s talk about the late Henry Marshall, Nate. You know the basics, I believe.”
“The very basics.”
“The facts are easily laid out. Marshall was well-regarded, both as a man and a public servant. He worked for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Committee.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
“It is. He traveled a lot, and he worked hard — lived over in Bryan, nice family, who incidentally don’t buy his suicide, neither. Had a ranch in Robertson County, which was a mostly a hobby of his. Place to get his mind off work, mending fences, seeing to crops, feeding cattle.”
Peoples gave me a quick refresher on the case. After discovering that LBJ’s pal Billie Sol Estes had been raking in over twenty million a year for “growing” and “storing” nonexistent crops of cotton, Marshall made his report to Washington, recommending a full-scale investigation and more stringent regulation.
“Suddenly Marshall gets offered a higher-up position in another department,” Peoples said, “including a hefty pay raise, that would not so coincidentally make the Billie Sol matter none of his concern.”
Marshall rejected the new position and instead spent the next several months meeting with various county officials in Texas as well as the farmers who’d been drawn unwittingly into the scam, and just generally spreading the bad word about Billie Boy.
Shortly after, Henry Marshall turned up dead in a pasture on his ranch alongside his Chevy Fleetside pickup truck.
“No suicide note, by the way,” Peoples said.
I asked, “How can anybody buy a suicide shooting himself five times?”
“It was a .22 rifle,” Peoples said with a shrug, relighting his cigar, puffing it back to life. “What the sheriff and coroner didn’t think of — or if they did, conveniently forgot about — was that Marshall’s rifle was bolt-action. He’d have had to hold the damn thing at arm’s length to work the bolt to reload after every shot, getting wounded every time — two of ’em ‘rapidly incapacitating’ wounds, our staff coroner said. And here’s the kicker — ol’ Henry had a bum right arm, from an old farm injury. Couldn’t hold the damn thing out straight if his life depended on it.”