On 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).[2]
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.”[3]
Hellbound and Down 