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re certificate of merit. and the county offices in Texas. On Saturday, he would rise at dawn, as he always did, and head to his 1500-acre ranch, a few miles north of Franklin, in the gentle green hills of his native Robertson County. He would try to forget about the nagging cotton allotment questions and concentrate instead on doing the simple things on the land he loved so well. HENRY MARSHALL was a big man six feet, two inches tall, about 215 pounds with large ears, a long, straight nose, and a kind countenance. The Texas sun had scorched his fair complexion for the whole of his 51 years, tracing leathery lines on his neck and the corners of his eyes. He moved quietly and methodically and spoke sparingly in an easygoing, direct manner; often a wry grin played at the corners of his mouth. He had graying dark hair and clear blue eyes. His shoes were custom-made, one leg being slightly shorter than the other. When he went to the ranch, he wore an old pair, too worn to wear to his job or church, but sturdy enough to correct his limp. On this particularly Saturday, June 3, 1961, Marshall left his comfortable Bryan home for Franklin, a 30-mile drive, a bit earlier than usual because he was to drop off his ten-year-old son Donald with his wife Sybil’s brother, L.M. Owens. Owens drove a Dr. Pepper truck for a Franklin bottler; he was going to take Donald along to provide the “soda water” for a family homecoming up in Bald Prairie, in the northeast corner of Robertson County. It was around 6 a.m. when Marshall backed his 1960 Chevy Fleetside pickup out of the driveway. He drove through the silent streets and turned north on Highway 6. If this had been a weekday, he’d have turned south toward his office on the Texas A&M University campus in College Station, four miles away. Bryan and College Station are in Brazos County, divided from Robertson County by the Old San Antonio Road. Marshall turned right onto OSR, and followed the county boundary to Wheelock. He took a left on Highway 42, and pursued the meandering road 11 more miles to Franklin. Two or three miles before reaching town, he picked up a hitchhiker, also on his way to Franklin. He dropped the rider off in town. It was about 7 o’clock when Marshall reached Owens’s house. He went inside for a few minutes, arranged to pick up Donald at 4 p.m., and told Owens he planned to stop on the way home in Hearne to pick up some beef from a freezer locker. Alone now, he drove north out of Franklin, along a narrow, winding paved road toward Bremond, where he stopped about 7:30 to pay an old friend named Joe Pruitt for some hay baled some weeks earlier. He found the farmer in his hay meadow, talking with two other men Marshall knew, Wylie Grace and Lewis Taylor. They visited for 20 minutes or so, about the weather, mostly, and Marshall got on with his business. He wrote out a check for $36 and climbed back in his truck. It was shortly before 8 when he drove out of the meadow toward the highway. The Marshall boy and his uncle L.M. were back from Bald Prairie by 3 p.m. At five o’clock, Mrs. Marshall called her brother from Bryan to find out when Henry and Donald would be home. Owens told her Marshall had not yet returned, that he probably was delayed by some chore at the ranch. She was starting to worry. It wasn’t like Henry to be late. He had suffered a heart attack in September of 1959 and, although he’d recovered nicely, she feared the worst. She called her brother again and asked him to drive out to the ranch and have a look around. A few minutes later Mrs. Marshall headed for Franklin. Owens had worked the ranch for Marshall for many years, mending fences, cutting weeds, whatever needed to be done. He , knew the lay OT the land as’well as anyone. He said he made a quick trip out there, checked the most likely places, and returned home to see if Marshall had showed up. He hadn’t. So Owens _went back out about 6:30 with his neighbor, Ervin Bennett. This time Owens drove in by a back road, where the two men spotted tire tracks at the gate. They followed the tracks along a trail that wound through a pasture to a small clearing amidst a stand of scrub oaks. “The first thing we saw was the pickup,” Owens later told the FBI. “Then we saw him lying there. I thought it was his heart.” Henry Marshall was dead, but not from a heart attack. He was lying in the grass near the left side of his truck, with bruises on his face, hands, and arms, and five .22 bullet wounds in his left side. His rifle lay beside him. Blood was splattered on both sides and the rear of his truck, along with a fresh dent. Inside the truck, placed neatly on the seat, were the contents of Marshall’s pockets: his wallet, eyeglasses and case, watch, a pencil, a half-empty box of raisins. There also was an unused, single-edge razor blade. L.M. Owens left his neighbor at the clearing and sped back to town to tell his waiting family and Robertson County Sheriff Howard Stegall. Stegall 10 NOVEMBER 7, 1986