“Let me just say now that the whole idea of him going to Texas to unite the party is hogwash. Did he really believe that’s what he was doing? If you’re really the leader of the free world why are you spending hours in a gawd-domn mootorcade?”
A new video circulating YouTube claims to be an authentic audio recording of Billie Sol Estes and LBJ aide Cliff Carter discussing LBJ ordering Mac Wallace to kill the president. I have seen no chatter at all about this tape, and it raises suspicions — not only of its authenticity, but what AI technology can do to pass off fake audio-visual as actual historical media. Directly below is the video in question. Frankly, it sounds like imagined dialogue from Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money, & Power:
In its investigation into the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor, the Warren Commission included in its exhibits a photograph taken of an unidentified latent fingerprint discovered on “box 29.” In 1998, A. Nathan Darby, a retired lieutenant-commander with the Austin Police Department and certified latent fingerprint examiner, conducted a blind test on an inked print and the latent print on box 29 sent to him by researchers Barr McClellan and Jay Harrison. Darby had no idea the latent print was from the sixth floor of the Book Depository, nor did he know the inked print was from the left little finger of a convicted murderer, Malcolm E. (“Mac”) Wallace. Darby found 34 points of congruency between the two and was certain they were a match, which he stated in a 1998 affidavit.
At the time of the assassination, Wallace was 42, a Texan native and once promising University of Texas at Austin alumnus whose football career was shattered by a spinal injury. Since then, however, Wallace’s life was anything but stable. Plagued by alcoholism and a wrecked home life, Wallace became nothing short of an assassin, enslaved to his handlers, men who would instantly drop their protection of Wallace if he showed any wavering. These men were allegedly attorney Edward Clark and his chief client, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
While a vague print on a box may indeed be Wallace’s, it certainly in and of itself does not indicate he had anything to do with the assassination. However, as fingerprint expert Sebastian Latona explained in his Warren Commission testimony, “fingerprints can only be taken from a surface like cardboard within 24 hours of its origin.” If Mac Wallace was on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, what was he doing there? Who was with him? And did anyone see him?
Just a few weeks before his death in 1994, authors Sample and Collum obtained a videotaped confession from an Oklahoma Chickasaw Indian named Loy Factor, who claimed he was hired by a mysterious man named Wallace to fire upon the president from the sixth floor of the Book Depository. Factor stated he never shot the rifle when the moment came for the fusillade of shots, only that he ejected a shell. Factor said the other shooters on the floor were Oswald and Wallace. A young woman called Ruth Ann oversaw the sixth floor operation and communicated with persons unknown by walkie talkie. In 1971, while imprisoned for the murder of his wife he said he did not commit, Factor became friendly with co-author Collum, then in his early 20s and also doing time. There, Factor revealed what he had done nearly ten years earlier.
All of this is told in the Collum and Sample book, The Men on the Sixth Floor.
It’s a remarkable story, anchored by Factor’s reticence and regret over his casual meeting of Wallace while glimpsing the motorcade of dignitaries attending Sam Rayburn’s funeral in 1961. That purported encounter, where Wallace mistook Factor’s ethnicity by first speaking to him in Spanish, allegedly led, ultimately, to Factor’s recruitment as a shooter. Factor had no knowledge of Wallace besides his name, and when he was shown photographs of Mac Wallace, with his horn-rimmed glasses, Factor instantly recognized the face of the man who hired him. By then in his early 40s, Wallace was leaning on the heavier side, and a figure resembling Wallace’s physique was seen by a number of witnesses:
- Arnold Rowland, in Dealey Plaza, saw two men on the sixth floor, one holding a rifle minutes before shots rang out
- Carolyn Walther, on Houston St., saw two men at a window, one in a brown suit coat, the other in white shirt and holding rifle
- Steel worker Richard R. Carr saw man in tan jacket and horn-rimmed glasses standing at sixth floor window; minutes after the assassination, Carr sees same man walk briskly away from Dealey Plaza down Commerce St.
- Ruby Henderson, across the street from the Book Depository on Elm, also saw two men at window.
- On the sixth floor of the Dallas jail, John Powell and other inmates glimpsed two men on the sixth floor of the Book Depository.
Factor also recalled with accuracy the since-demolished loading dock at the back of the Book Depository, as well as details on the sixth floor that few would know about.
If Wallace played a role in striking down the president, it was not his first experience with murder. In 1952, Wallace was convicted by a Texas jury for the murder of John Kinser. Kinser was shot to death by Wallace on October 22, 1951 in the pro shop of Kinser’s miniature golf venue he owned. Playing the part of a betrayed husband, an argument preceded the killing, overheard by several witnesses. Ostensibly upset that Kinser was involved with not only Wallace’s wife, Mary Andre, for all intents and purposes a bisexual nymphomaniac, but also a sometime woman of the street named Josefa Johnson — the younger sister of then freshman senator Lyndon Johnson. The sex circle scandal involving LBJ’s sister threatened to destroy Johnson’s massive political ambitions. At the time, Wallace was working for the Department of Agriculture. He was about to start a new job at the State Department. He was a loyal Johnson political operative. Which was why he got the call to take out Kinser.
A perfunctory trial followed. The jurors found Wallace guilty, but one juror held out on the death penalty. The judge, himself compromised, intervened: five years imprisonment, sentence suspended. Wallace was a free man. There was the momentary outrage, but the scandal was over, memories faded. Johnson and his ruthless lawyer, Clark, lived another day. Wallace lived to kill again (see Chapter 7, “Murders,” in Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money, & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK).
All told, Wallace was supposedly linked to nine murders, including Kinser, Josefa Johnson — who died on Christmas Day 1961 of a cerebral hemorrhage, age 49 — and Department of Agriculture investigator Henry Marshall, who uncovered a cotton allotment scheme on land purchased by Billie Sol Estes that linked back directly to LBJ. Marshall’s death was ruled a suicide, even though he was shot five times in the side and had carbon monoxide in his system, a favorite Wallace death technique. Simply put, Mac Wallace was Lyndon Johnson’s hit man, and in this way, according to Barr McClellan, target JFK was no different from the other targets. An expendable nuisance. A disposable hero.
Billie Sol Estes wrote his own memoir, the self-titled Billie Sol Estes: A Texas Legend (2005, BS Productions), in which he claimed insider knowledge of the Kennedy assassination (he also claimed to have a photographic memory). He does tell a wonderful story about John Wilkes Booth: Legend has Booth escaping to Granbury, TX as John St. Helene and later committed suicide in Enid, Oklahoma. He ran a saloon adjoining the local opera house.
It’s hard to take the book seriously. For instance: “The boarding house where [Oswald] lived was a CIA safe house at the time [in Oak Cliff[. Wallace had access to the Paine’s garage, where Oswald’s gun and other possessions were stored prior to the assassination.” Estes said the Nash Rambler station wagon was Wallace’s. Estes thought the 1971 deaths of Wallace, Cliff Carter and LBJ attorney John Cofer were staged, somehow.
Still, it’s a rip-roaring read. From my notes reading the book:
I love that BS is painting this as a parochial, provincial, lark in the country turkey shoot. And that misinfo and disinfo have been piled on this event, which ended up feeding itself. What’s missing in Stone’s film are the relationships, the intimate poker games, whorehouses. Estes manages to show how misogynistic and pure power and money and lust drove these men. Under the apparatus of this noble American republic. They knew their history, knew the playbook/script of the lone nut. It’s that Southern rudeness? Bluntness? We can’t imagine a VP doing such a thing. To his own running mate! But it was the same script with MLK and RFK. Estes says who it was. All three were connected: all three threatened to upend a certain way of living, a certain way of thinking. Tied up with both peace (nonviolence), but especially civil rights. Who is threatened by those things and has the power to do something about it? White Texans? As Estes puts it: “murdered because they detracted from the political picture envisioned by Lyndon’s backers.”
Estes died in 2013.
So what to make of the LBJ-did-it claim?
Legend has it that on the night of November 21 and into the early morning hours of November 22, while some Secret Service drank away the night at the Cellar, a Fort Worth bar, Clint Murchison, Sr. threw a party at his Dallas mansion. It is said anyone who was anyone attended, even washed up politician Dick Nixon, who had lost the California gubernatorial race a year earlier, but was in Dallas for a Pepsi-Company convention. According to Madeline Brown, alleged longtime mistress of LBJ, the Vice President arrived after midnight, and went into a closed-door meeting. When he came out, he found Brown, and squeezed her hand hard. “After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat. That’s a promise,” as quoted in Roger Stone’s The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.
At the time of the presidential blitz through Texas in November 1963, these authors argue LBJ was certain his days as a politician were numbered. He had strong-armed his way to within a heartbeat of the presidency, leaving in his wake fraudulent elections, blackmail, and scandals such as the one with the embattled Democratic operative Bobby Baker. Baker was Johnson’s right arm in the senate, and it is LBJ who is inextricably linked in the activities that brought Baker under fire, a multitude of issues that became The Bobby Baker Scandal.
For instance, it was Baker who introduced Ellen Rometsch, a possible East German spy who seduced JFK. Rometsch caused such turmoil on Capitol Hill she was deported in August 1963. The more trouble Rometsch caused, the more Baker’s problems with corruption and pimping grew. It cast a light on his connections, namely, those Johnson made happen: the big oil barons like the Murchisons and Sid Richardson.
There was a great deal of consternation from big oil over what JFK might do with the 27.5% oil depletion allowance, in place since 1926. While he advocated the present depletion allowance in the 1960 debate, his tune changed after assuming office. The barons looked to their man, the vice president, to wield any influence he had in the Kennedy Administration. But LBJ was famously kept out of the biggest decisions JFK made during his nearly three-year presidency, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. LBJ staked his political career on distributing federal contracts and in turn expected to be taken care of in each election cycle. It was also an arrangement ripe for blackmail. If you were a career politician long beholden to constituents like multibillionaire oil barons, to whom you promised substantial contracts, but were in danger of being dropped from the presidential ticket in the upcoming election, what lengths would you go to ensure your survival?
Lastly, there is a Sol Estes claim I find compelling, page 66 of his memoir:
“Lyndon asked H.L. Hunt to publish a pamphlet attacking Kennedy as a Catholic who would be subservient to the Pope. It also said, Kennedy would destroy religious freedom if he was elected president. Hunt would later apologize for breaking federal election laws after a senate investigation was started. Hunt said, ‘I was simply trying to help Lyndon.”