The Secret Files of Clint Peoples, the Indefatigable Texas Ranger on LBJ’s Trail for Decades

The only true “hero” in the quest for justice for the crimes of Lyndon Johnson, was Texas Ranger (later U.S. Marshal) Clint Peoples. Yet he was unable to “close” his 22-year case until eleven years after Johnson died, in 1984, with a small but significant victory in a grand jury hearing which heard his evidence that Johnson was behind the murder of a man named Henry Marshall in 1961. In the process of hearing this evidence — including his findings that Johnson and his aides Cliff Carter and Malcolm Wallace were behind the murder — the jury determined that it proved Marshall’s death was not a suicide, as originally recorded, but a murder. But because all three of the perpetrators were dead, nothing further could be done in the legal system. Thusly could Johnson’s biographers ignore this event as though it never happened.

Lyndon Johnson, aided and abetted by his mole in the Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney (later becoming a Federal Judge) H. Barefoot Sanders, had managed to impede Peoples for decades.

Knowing this, Peoples recorded an Oral History document and gifted it to the Dallas Public Library, however he stipulated that certain pages of it be completely restricted until after his own death, his wife’s death and his daughter’s death, for fear that Barefoot Sanders would destroy those pages if he had that chance.

(Interestingly, that is exactly what some researchers [including me] believe happened to the original autopsy evidence, the X-rays and photographs taken of JFK’s head and back wounds which disappeared during the time [October, 1966] that Sanders conducted the procedure of adding other materials given by the Kennedy family to the National Archives).

Clint Peoples said, after that 1984 hearing, “Before I die, there will be one of the most jarring international scandals that has ever been as a result of this investigation,” but, after considering the brutal treatment he had received from Sanders (described at length in the oral history document reproduced below) he later decided that the threats on his life, as well as his wife and daughter, were too great to allow the truth to be told until all three of them had passed away (just in case Sanders would outlive him and his wife, he included his daughter as well [Sanders died in 2008]). This change probably saved those files from destruction, since they remained closed at the Dallas Public Library until April 2012, well after he and his wife passed, when his daughter died. At that point, the remaining pages of his lengthy oral history, which had been closed until then, were opened to the public at the Dallas Public Library in the Clint Peoples collection.[1]

In 1984, with the help of a reformed and contrite witness named Billie Sol Estes, Peoples finally won his long battle, even though it was too late to administer justice to the the guilty parties whom a Grand Jury agreed were behind the death of an Agriculture Extension Agent named Henry Marshall, whose case will be examined below. The Grand Jury was convened to prove that Mr. Marshall did not commit “suicide,” which had been absurdly stated by a sheriff back in 1961, despite the fact that Marshall had been shot five times within a 4″ circle in his chest. It was thanks to LBJ’s sycophant, Barefoot Sanders, that the ridiculous finding of “suicide” had stuck when the first attempt to have it corrected, by Ranger Captain Peoples, in 1962, was unsuccessful. The jury had asked for Marshall’s file on Estes but Sanders barred 87% of it withheld, because those pages implicated Johnson.

In persuading Estes to come forward and testify, Peoples asserted that he was the lesser party to the frauds committed, and that he had been exploited by a grubby politician. This excerpt, out of an oral history that ran for hundreds of page — including over thirty pages devoted to this single chapter of his stellar career in the Texas Rangers and as a U.S. Marshall — is a study in contrast to his assessment of Lyndon B. Johnson, not at all like the numerous glowing accounts written by revisionist historians and fawning biographers:

Captain Peoples, later made a US Marshal, was a man who received multiple awards over an unblemished lifetime of law enforcement (eventually appearing on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show as a consequence). Captain Peoples had worked on his case against convicted murderer and LBJ hitman Malcolm Wallace, and Wallace’s direct ties to Cliff Carter and Lyndon Johnson, for over three decades.

Most of Lyndon Johnson’s biographers have chosen to disregard the charges originally made by Billie Sol Estes and Madeleine Brown, based upon their tainted pasts, with scarcely a footnote about Johnson’s own inglorious history. But Billie Sol’s and Madeleine’s veracities were vindicated by many other credible people who knew them personally, including especially Texas Ranger Clint Peoples, whose impeccable credentials and long history of law enforcement eventually made him a Texas legend.

The murder of Agriculture Extension Agent Henry Marshall is summarized below, to set the context for what followed:

After having intensively investigated frauds involving Estes’ circumvention of U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations, the department’s local district agent, Henry Marshall, was disturbed that — rather than reaching a settlement of the issues according to usual procedure — he was bribed with an offer of a promotion to a high position in the U.S.D.A. in Washington (a patently-axiomatic proof of Estes’ connections to LBJ). Knowing that this offer was made simply to get him out of the way, and facilitate the continuance of the crimes — and made through Estes’s ties to Lyndon B. Johnson, Henry Marshall refused the offer. Shortly after Marshall refused that offer, Estes’s farm manager A. B. Foster wrote to Clifton C. Carter, a close aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, complaining about Marshall’s zealousness and how he was impeding the continuing frauds that were so lucrative to the swindler Estes and his facilitator, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. Foster wrote that “we would sincerely appreciate your investigating this and seeing if anything can be done.”

On January 17, 1961, Estes took this problem personally to Washington to discuss it with Lyndon Johnson on the evening before the inauguration, with LBJ’s aide Cliff Carter and the aforementioned Mac Wallace. On that snowy night as they stood on Johnson’s back patio, his code words for what would happen to Mr. Marshall if he didn’t accept one last chance to look the other way and allow the frauds to continue, were succinct, deadly and shrouded in euphemism: “Get rid of him.”

And so it was that on June 3, 1961, Henry Marshall was 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. He was then forced to breath carbon monoxide from his own truck and finally shot five times by a long barrel rifle within a four-inch circle on his left chest. Sheriff Howard Stegall, a long-time friend of Cliff Carter, pronounced it “death by suicide” as he had apparently been instructed to do by Carter, or possibly through the Sheriff’s cousin Glynn Stegall, who happened to work in the Executive Office Building within Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s suite of offices, next door to the White House.

As thoroughly demonstrated by Professor David Denton, Mac Wallace also participated in the assassination of President Kennedy, as subsequently and absolutely proven through a 1998 fingerprint match of previously-unidentified latent prints found on November 22, 1963 on boxes in the “sniper’s lair” of the Texas School Book Depository.[2]

For three decades Ranger Clint Peoples worked the Marshall case as hard as he possibly could. His investigation lasted from 1962 until his mysterious one car “accident” in 1992, an incident which was witnessed by a woman too afraid to report it officially, but who confided to Peoples’ secretary that she had seen his car being run off the road and into a culvert by a “big red truck.” Someone, nearly twenty years after Johnson’s 1973 death — concerned that his intensive investigation was getting too close to certain secrets — decided that “he had to go” when they learned that he was about to divulge that Malcolm Wallace’s fingerprint was found on a box in the sniper’s lair of the Texas School Book Depository. That news was finally brought forth six years later, in 1998, and is now widely known and hotly debated with certain researchers — still playing cover-up — while polluting the real story with made-up contradictory “facts” that are not true [Ibid].

Peoples’ knowledge of Lyndon Johnson’s deep tentacles into, and corruption of, the Texas judicial system was even longer, having spanned forty-one years: 1951–1992. His knowledge of the crime spree he watched unfold before his eyes in 1961-63, knowing that the vice president of the United States was behind it, must have been immensely frustrating for him. To suggest that these assertions are “speculative” in nature and not factual because they were never heard in a court of law (which is the very reason other authors use in deciding to avoid the subject) is specious reasoning, irrespective of the limited consequences of grand jury actions.

In the middle of his conducting the 1984 grand jury, Judge H. Barefoot Sanders — having recruited two other judges to participate — called (then-U.S. Marshal) Clint Peoples in to the courthouse to explain why he was persisting to investigate the death of Henry Marshall in order to change the “Cause of Death” from “suicide” to “homicide.” Sanders was not doing this in a polite and judicious way, in fact he told Peoples that he should be “ashamed” of himself; that scene can be found in Part 6 of the Oral History. Reacting to that, Peoples responded loudly to the scurrilous attack, stating in part:

Clint Peoples finally succeeded in convincing that 1984 grand jury of the truth, that Marshall had been murdered at the hands of Lyndon Johnson, Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. The only thing missing were the guilty parties, because they were already officially dead. It was probably not coincidental that they would all die before Johnson, given their knowledge of the worst of his criminal activities.

It is Clint Peoples’s unquestioned professionalism that imbues truth to his belief in Billie Sol Estes’s and Madeleine Brown’s accounts and injects both with the essential credibility that now demands our attention: Clint Peoples’s career ambition and his fight against the political machine of Lyndon B. Johnson cannot—must not—be ignored. It is the voice of this man, still resonating from his grave as you read his words below, that must be heard now, a man who had investigated many of the other crimes that constituted the case against Johnson.

Clint Peoples was one of the most honorable, highly awarded Texas Ranger in history, and as his record showed, he was relentless in pursuing the truth of all facts in his assigned cases, even when it was against the highest-level official in the U.S. government in the 1960s. His oral history, reproduced below, is one of the single-best pieces of evidence of Lyndon B. Johnson’s guilt.

It was his unimpeachable forty year record that must be factored into this metric; to ignore it is to reject arguably the most credible and important witnesses to the crime of the century.

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Endnotes:

[1] This story (except the copies of Clint Peoples’ Oral History documents attached to this piece) was the subject of the 48 page Chapter 1 of LBJ: From Mastermind to The Colossus. Regarding the release of the closed section presented here, I was able to receive the entire 31 pages of his statement regarding the murder of Henry Marshall shortly thereafter, which, to my knowledge, have never been published elsewhere. Recently I made attempts to review the material again from the Dallas Public Library but received multiple rejects of them. This gives rise to a suspicion that his documents have been removed from public access completely, and if that is true it can only mean that someone very powerful ordered them to be suppressed.

[2] See: Denton, David, “Nexus Redux”, Essays on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Midnight Writer News Publications, Lulu Press, 2020, pp. 24-34

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The Seven Parts of Clint Peoples’ Oral History document (30+ pages in total):

The pages reproduced below may be the only place they can still be accessed (and downloaded and saved for posterity).

NOTE: If your device does not show the print in large enough type, right-click the image and select “Open image in new tab” then go to the new window and left-click the image to expand it into more readable format.

• PAGE 2 / Interview Part 1 – Intro comments, discussion of Henry Marshall murder generally.
• PAGE 3 / Interview Part 2 – Description of how he began investigation of Marshall’s murder in 1962.
• PAGE 4 / Interview Part 3 – Billie Sol agrees to cooperate; Mac Wallace gets secret high-level clearance for classified work despite his history as murderer, child molester, communist and bi/homosexual philander.
• PAGE 5 / Interview Part 4 – Mac Wallace’s involvement with LBJ’s sister Josefa; how Peoples had not suspected Wallace in Marshall’s murder until Billie Sol Estes informed him of that in 1984 in their preparation for the grand jury held that year.
• PAGE 6 / Interview Part 5 – Discussion of Billie Sol’s grand jury testimony regarding the Marshall murder; BSE’s comments that a second person (unnamed by him) had been involved in that murder.
• PAGE 7 / Interview Part 6 – The part that caused Peoples to keep these pages to be restricted for fear that Barefoot Sanders would destroy them if he had access: they would reveal Sanders’ role in bringing Peoples before a three-judge panel to explain his actions, which he obliged, in a brutal shouting match, probably the worst any federal judge ever provoked.
• PAGE 8 / Interview Part 7 – His discussion of the recriminations that he and Billie Sol Estes encountered and his opinion that he did not vindicate Billie Sol, but it was Billie Sol himself who did that with his deeds after he left prison: that his coming forth and stating the truth was the way he accomplished that.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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