Saturday morning, Ed the anarchist decided we needed fresh inspiration, so he sat down with a computer and inkjet printer and went to work. An hour later, he walked into the conference room wearing a T-shirt with NAIL BOSS HOG emblazoned across the chest in red. I found it hard to believe that Ed had ever watched an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, but he assured me he’d followed it religiously as a child growing up in Michigan, and that most of his ideas about the South had been formed by this grotesque television show. By afternoon, half the Examiner staff was wearing NAIL BOSS HOG shirts, and their galvanizing effect was undeniable. Even Caitlin popped into the conference room wearing one.
But the work itself was tedious and exhausting. The master map that guided us on our paper journey into Marston’s past was his 1997 tax return. It listed most of his business holdings (the number of Schedule C’s and E’s was astounding), and I immediately began drafting a supplemental request for production using these as a guide. His form 1040 showed an adjusted gross income of over two million dollars for 1997, and the sheer variety of his holdings was staggering. Real estate, manufacturing, banking, timber. And despite the moribund oil business, he had recently struck a significant gas field in south Texas. What fascinated me was the variety of small enterprises in which he participated. Several fast-food franchises around town. A steam laundry. A Christmas tree farm. Hunting camps. Apartment buildings in the black sections of town. We even found a scrawled note listing income he had realized from arranging private adoptions over a period of twenty-five years.
In short, Leo Marston appeared to administer an empire of great and small dominions, all entirely aboveboard. On closer examination, however, a dark underside began to show itself. One of the boxes Leo had planned to burn contained records of a collection agency wholly owned by him. Listed as an officer of that company was one Raymond Aucoin Presley. This was the first tangible proof of a connection between Marston and Presley. We found copies of letters sent to hundreds of local citizens, demanding payment of debts on everything from materials bought through Marston companies to personal loans made by the judge. It wasn’t hard to guess what function Presley served when these letters failed to bring payment of the outstanding balances. Most important, he was operating in this capacity during 1968, while serving as a Natchez police officer and in the month Del Payton was murdered. Closer inspection of Marston’s other companies revealed that Presley was listed as a paid “security consultant” to several of them.
Another of the “burn boxes” contained records of land transfers made to Marston or his business partners. I noted the disturbing frequency with which the parcels of land had been sold by recent widows whose estates Marston’s firm had handled. Many other sellers could be cross-indexed to debtors listed in the “collection-agency” box. It was a letter from this box that gave me my first glimmer of a possible motive for Payton’s murder.
The letter pertained to a large parcel of land south of town, near the present industrial park. It was written in an oblique style, but from it I inferred that Marston had used a secret intermediary to buy this parcel of land. Thus, while Marston was not legally the owner, he controlled the parcel’s future use and would receive all monies from such use, without anyone but the intermediary knowing about it. A related letter—this one from one Zebulon Hickson, the owner of several carpet factories in Georgia and Alabama—expressed interest in purchasing this land for use as a site for a new factory. Hickson also expressed concern about labor conditions in Adams County. He was aware that Natchez had long been a “union” town, but what concerned him more was the “wave of racial unrest” sweeping through Southern factories. This was clearly a euphemism for “nigger trouble.” What made all this interesting was that the letters had changed hands in January 1968, a few months before Del Payton died. The situation was oddly similar to the present one, in which Leo Marston owns the land BASF needs to have adequate space for its projected facility.
On Saturday night, things began to turn our way. I had requested Marston’s telephone records, but with the trial only a week away, I had little hope of getting them. Technically, phone records can be had at the touch of a computer key, but the phone company is a hidebound bureaucracy, and in actuality it can take weeks to get them. I’d put in a call to a Bell South executive in Jackson, who promised to try to expedite the process, and apparently he did. A local Bell South technician arrived Saturday night with a manila envelope containing Marston’s phone records, logging all calls beginning the day before Caitlin’s “libelous” article ran.
I hurried to Caitlin’s office, and we pored over the printouts together. On the day the article ran, there was a call from Marston’s law office to a number in Washington D.C. at 1:45 p.m. Caitlin quickly confirmed this number as the main switchboard at the Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI. The call lasted eighteen minutes. One hour later Marston’s office had received a call from D.C., this one from a different number, which turned out to be John Portman’s office in the Hoover Building. In all, six calls passed between Marston’s office and the Hoover Building that day, and several more had since. We could now prove that a link existed between Leo Marston and the director of the FBI, who had worked the Del Payton murder as a field agent in 1968, when Marston was district attorney. And while we could not know what was said during those calls, their timing indicated that they were almost certainly related to the Payton case.
Caitlin’s father faxed us a steady stream of information on both Marston and Portman. Marston’s Mississippi history was familiar to me, but his national political activities weren’t. He is not only a powerful force in the Mississippi Republican Party, but also has major influence in the national GOP. Like many Mississippians, Marston was a nominal Democrat for most of his life, voting Democratic in local elections and Republican in presidential races. But in the Reagan era he jumped ship and voted GOP straight down the line. A close friend and adviser of Senators John Stennis and “Big” Jim Eastland—Mississippi Democrats whose seniority gave them unparalleled power on Capital Hill for decades—Marston became a major supporter of Senator Trent Lott, who eventually rose to the position of Senate majority leader.
John Portman’s thumbnail biography fascinated me. Born to old money in Connecticut while his father “patrolled the coast” of Rhode Island for German U-boats in his yacht, Portman was raised in a cloistered world of governesses and squash courts. He attended Choate, then Yale, where he was tapped for Skull-and-Bones and graduated second in his class at Yale Law. He was the right age for Vietnam but did not serve (perhaps owing to a dearth of yacht units). And while the FBI seemed an odd choice for a blue-blooded lawyer, during the Reagan era these “street” credentials fueled Portman’s meteoric rise into the upper ranks of the Justice Department. His stellar legal career as a U.S. attorney and federal judge was crowned by the poetic symmetry of returning to the fields where he’d begun, no longer a foot soldier but a general, and the media ate this up. The Hanratty affair provided the only bump in the road to his confirmation as FBI director, and since nothing could be proved, that came to naught. Portman sailed through the hearings without further trouble, and he has ruled the Bureau without a public misstep ever since.
In short, John Portman appeared to be a Teflon-coated bureaucrat with no visible weaknesses. His evasion of Vietnam service might be fertile ground for tabloids, but that wouldn’t help my case any, and there was probably nothing to it anyway, or it would have exploded during his confirmation hearings. The more I learned about him, the more I became certain that the only way I would uncover his secrets would be if Dwight Stone decided to break his silence, or if Peter Lutjens succeeded in stealing Stone’s final report from the Payton file in the FBI archive.
As I waded through the mountains of paper, eyes blurring, pulse skipping from caffeine, the tragedies of the past few days began to weigh heavily upon me. I’d involved myself in the Del Payton case for essentially selfish reasons, and because of my actions my parents’ house had been destroyed, my daughter terrorized, and Ruby Flowers murdered. The sad irony was that I had returned to Natchez to help heal my daughter, yet she had not received my full attention for many days, and had not even seen me for the past two. Yet something drove me on. Despite the selfishness that had initiated
