Law Enforcement - what's not there to trust?

Forty-nine year old Chris Jones was detained for eight hours as a suspected sex offender. He was on a train, as was the real culprit, twenty years younger and with differently coloured hair who sat in a different carriage. Chris Jones did wear a blue jacket, which of course is easy to confuse with the blue shirt the sex offender wore. According to the police Chris Jones was arrested because he ‘appeared similar to a description of the suspect’

It is easy to smile at this but sometimes law enforcement can take more sinister turns. 

Those who doubt that DrDavid Kelly committed suicide in an Oxfordshire wood are assailed by leading establishment figures with the argument that he couldn’t have been murdered because…we don’t know why he should have been murdered. No motive. No murder apparently. So the official line remains that the former weapons inspector and leading authority on biological warfare emptied a blister pack of medication, and then cut his wrists with a blunt pruning knife without leaving finger prints…or without leaving blood. Even his mobile had been wiped clean.

Conspiracy theories are compulsive and Kennedy’s death is right up there. Imagine my delight when I read about the death of Billie Sol Estes earlier this year. Billie who? And no, I’m not delighted he’s dead. The pleasure comes in reading about him.

Billie Sol Estes was a Texan conman and former business partner of LBJ. Good connections help, and sometimes, as Estes later claimed, it’s two way traffic.  In 1961 a key investigator into Billie Sol Estes’ nefarious doings – Henry Marshall - was found dead. He had been bludgeoned in the head, shot five times in the chest and had serious amounts of carbon monoxide in his bloodstream. It was classed as ‘suicide,’ the chief FBI investigator writing: ‘My theory was that he shot himself and then realised he wasn’t dead.’

Six other men involved in the case also met unexpected deaths: three in ‘accidents;’ two others, business partners, were discovered in cars filled with carbon monoxide. The final death also appeared to be suicide by carbon monoxide – but for the absence of carbon monoxide.

This man, Estes’ accountant, was found dead in his car with a rubber tube connecting the exhaust pipe to the vehicle’s interior. No monoxide was found in his body but there was a severe bruise on his head – so death was attributed to…heart attack.

Estes was eventually jailed, but in 1984 made a ‘voluntary record to clear the record.’ He told a grand jury investigation that Henry Marshall, the investigator who had put five bullets in his own chest and then bludgeoned himself had in fact been killed on the orders of Lyndon Johnson, then U.S. Vice President.  

Terrified that his own involvement in agricultural fraud would come to light Johnson had his aide, Malcolm Wallace kill the chief investigator along with everyone else in a position to incriminate him. Wallace had form, having already been convicted of shooting the man having an affair with Johnson’s sister.

But Billie Sol Estes played his Ace last. Wallace, acting on Johnson’s orders, organised not only Kennedy’s assassination but the clean up that immediately followed starting with Oswald’s murder and Ruby’s death soon after that. And what happened to Wallace?

He was involved in a car crash in 1971 after ‘falling asleep’ at the wheel.

I reckon forty nine year old Chris Jones got off lightly when he was detained on a train for looking nothing like a sex offender.