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.