On March 12, 1998, a retired fingerprint examiner named A. Nathan Darby sat in his Austin home studying two fingerprints under a magnifying glass. One was a copy of an unidentified print lifted from a cardboard box on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, collected on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. The other was a fingerprint card from 1951, given to him with no name attached. Darby did not know whose prints he was examining. That was the point.
After roughly an hour of careful analysis, Darby signed an affidavit stating that he had found a 14-point match. Under U.S. law, 12 points are sufficient for legal identification. The print belonged to Malcolm Everett Wallace, a convicted killer who worked for Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The story begins not in Dallas but in Austin, Texas, on October 22, 1951. It was a warm afternoon. Mac Wallace, a 30-year-old former Marine and U.S. Department of Agriculture economist, drove his station wagon to the Butler Pitch and Putt golf course. He walked into the clubhouse, where John Douglas Kinser, a 33-year-old professional golfer who owned the mini golf course, was working.
No one heard their conversation. But many people heard a gunshot, fired from a .25 caliber pistol. Witnesses saw Wallace leaving the scene quickly with a gun in his hand. He got into his car and drove away. Nine miles outside Austin, the Texas Highway Patrol stopped his vehicle. A witness had written down his license plate number. He was arrested immediately.
The gun was never recovered. But the evidence was overwhelming: multiple witnesses, his license plate, and his flight from the scene. He was charged with first-degree murder. It was a seemingly airtight case, a capital case. In 1951 Texas, a cold-blooded killing carried the electric chair.
But Mac Wallace was not panicked, because he had powerful friends. Within hours, bail was arranged. Two of Lyndon Johnson's financial supporters, Abe Ruby and Bill Carroll, posted bond for Wallace. LBJ's personal attorney, John Cofer, agreed to represent him. This was the same John Cofer who had represented Johnson in his disputed 1948 Senate election, a race dogged by widespread vote fraud allegations.
The trial began on February 18, 1952. Wallace did not testify. His attorney admitted the killing but claimed it was a crime of passion. Kinser, he said, had been having an affair with Wallace's wife. The prosecution presented 29 and a half hours of testimony from 23 witnesses, but oddly could not establish a motive. Asked why, defense attorney Polk Shelton said they probably could not, because the real motive had nothing to do with Wallace's wife.
John Kinser was romantically involved with LBJ's sister, Josefa Johnson. Josefa was also involved with Mac Wallace. According to multiple accounts, Kinser had asked Josefa whether she could persuade her brother to lend him money. Johnson saw this as blackmail or a threat. Josefa had told Kinser about some of her brother's corrupt dealings. Lyndon Johnson ordered him killed. Mac Wallace carried it out.
On the evening of February 27, 1952, after deliberation, the jury returned its verdict: guilty of premeditated murder. Eleven jurors voted for the death penalty. One argued for life in prison. Judge Charles O. Betts rejected them all. The five-year sentence was suspended. Wallace walked free immediately.
According to the Texas Observer's Bill Adler, several jurors later called Kinser's parents to apologize. They said they had only agreed to the suspended sentence because their families had been threatened. Consider that: a cold-blooded killer caught at the scene, multiple witnesses, a jury that convicted him and wanted him executed. He went free because Lyndon Johnson's lawyer defended him, Johnson's supporters paid his bail, and the jury was threatened.
The Austin Statesman wrote that the case, bizarre from start to finish, left Austin residents stunned and confused. Mac Wallace had learned the most important lesson of his life: as long as Lyndon Johnson protected him, he could kill without consequence.
Five months after the murder verdict, Wallace got a job at Temco Incorporated, based in Garland, Texas. In February 1961, he was transferred to the California office of Ling-Temco-Vought, a position that required a background check by the U.S. Navy. Despite a first-degree murder conviction, LTV obtained a security clearance for him. The Office of Naval Intelligence tried to revoke it for 11 years. They failed. Lyndon Johnson's protection was impenetrable.
But Mac Wallace was not just a lucky killer. He was a hitman, and the body count was growing.
Henry Harvey Marshall was 51, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official in charge of the federal cotton allotment program for the USDA's Texas regional office. In 1960, Marshall was asked to investigate the activities of Billy Sol Estes, a Texas fraudster and close friend of Lyndon Johnson. Estes was running large-scale fraud involving nonexistent fertilizer tanks and illegal transfers of cotton allotments. Marshall discovered that millions of dollars from this fraud were being funneled into LBJ's secret funds.
Marshall refused a promotion sent by LBJ from Washington headquarters. It became clear he intended to expose everything. According to later testimony by Billy Sol Estes, Lyndon Johnson, LBJ aide Cliff Carter, Mac Wallace, and Estes himself met several times to resolve the problem. Johnson finally said, "Get rid of him."
On June 3, 1961, Mac Wallace was given that assignment. Marshall's body was found on his family farm north of Bryan, Texas. He had been shot five times in the ribs with a .22 caliber rifle. There was a deep wound on his head. And there was 15% carbon monoxide in his lungs. County Sheriff Howard Stegall ruled it a suicide. No crime scene photos were taken. No blood samples were collected. No fingerprints were examined. The next day, Marshall's truck was washed and cleaned.
Marshall's wife and brother refused to believe he had killed himself. They offered a $2,000 reward for information leading to a murder conviction. Texas Ranger Clint Peoples investigated and concluded it was entirely impossible for Marshall to have taken his own life. A gas station attendant named Nolan Griffin reported that on the day of Marshall's death, a stranger had asked for directions to Marshall's farm. A Texas Ranger artist made a sketch of the man based on Griffin's description. Peoples eventually identified the man as Mac Wallace, but the official ruling remained suicide, because Lyndon Johnson was then Vice President of the United States and used his influence to bury the case.
In 1962, Billy Sol Estes was arrested on fraud charges. The scandal threatened to expose Johnson. Within months, several people connected to the case died mysteriously. George Krutilek was found dead in his car, with a hose connecting the exhaust pipe to the window. Coleman Wade died in a plane crash. Harold Orr, Ike Rogers, all dead. In December 1961, LBJ's sister Josefa Johnson, whose relationship had triggered the Kinser killing, died of a brain hemorrhage. Despite state law, no autopsy was performed.
By early 1963, the death toll linked to Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace had reached at least eight. But Johnson faced a bigger problem. He was on the verge of being indicted for corruption. The Bobby Baker scandal was escalating. The net was closing on Billy Sol Estes's fraud investigation. Johnson faced political destruction and possible prison.
Then, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Johnson became President. All investigations into his criminal activities stopped immediately. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and charged with killing Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Two days later, before any trial could begin, Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone. Case closed, or so they thought.
But there was a problem. On the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, investigators collected several fingerprints from the cardboard boxes in what became known as the sniper's nest. Most were identified as Oswald's. Oswald worked in the building, so his prints being there was expected. But one fingerprint remained unidentified, recorded as "unknown" in the National Archives.
For 35 years, that fingerprint remained a mystery. Then, in 1998, Texas-based assassination researcher J. Harrison had an idea. What if that unknown print belonged to Mac Wallace? Harrison obtained a certified copy of Wallace's 1951 fingerprint card from the Texas Department of Public Safety. He also obtained a copy of the unknown print from the National Archives. Harrison submitted both prints to A. Nathan Darby for blind analysis.
Darby was a certified latent print examiner with decades of experience. He was a member of the International Association of Identifiers. He had headed the Austin Police Department's Identification and Criminal Records Section. Texas district judges had certified him as a fingerprint expert, noting he had testified in their courts many times. His qualifications to testify as an expert had never been questioned.
Darby examined the prints. He found 14 points of match. U.S. law requires 12 points for legal identification. Darby later said he had actually found 34 points of match, far beyond the range of coincidence. On March 12, 1998, Darby signed an affidavit confirming the match. The unknown fingerprint from Box A of the sniper's nest belonged to Malcolm Wallace.
Walt Brown held a press conference in Dallas in May 1998. The results were sent to the Dallas Police Department, which forwarded them to the FBI. Copies were sent to the Assassination Records Review Board, the federal panel created to oversee the identification and release of JFK assassination records. The implications were staggering.
Mac Wallace, a convicted killer and Lyndon Johnson's personal hitman, had left his fingerprint on a box in the sniper's nest. According to forensic experts, fingerprints can only be collected from cardboard within about 24 hours. Wallace was there on November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy died.
But the media avoided it. Mainstream news outlets would not touch the story. The History Channel eventually aired a documentary containing the fingerprint evidence in 2003 as part of its series "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." The episode was titled "The Guilty Men." After attacks from Johnson's former associates, it was banned from being rebroadcast. Why? Because the evidence implicated not only Wallace but Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Multiple eyewitnesses reported seeing someone on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository who did not match Oswald's description. Minutes before the shots, Arnold Rowland saw two people on the sixth floor, one holding a rifle. Carolyn Walther saw two men near the window, one wearing a brown coat and the other holding a rifle in a white shirt. The man in the brown coat was stocky and wore glasses. That description matches Mac Wallace precisely.
In 1994, Billy Sol Estes testified before a grand jury. He told them that Lyndon Johnson, Cliff Carter, Mac Wallace, and Estes himself had been involved in multiple killings, including those of Henry Marshall, Josefa Johnson, John Kinser, and John F. Kennedy. Estes said LBJ ordered the killings and sent instructions to Mac Wallace through Cliff Carter, who carried them out. The grand jury changed Henry Marshall's death certificate from suicide to homicide, but no charges were filed. By then, Johnson, Carter, and Wallace were all dead.
Wallace died on January 7, 1971, in a car accident near Pittsburgh, Texas. It appeared he had fallen asleep at the wheel. But according to Barr McClellan, author of "Blood, Money, and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK," Wallace had to be removed. After visiting his daughter, Wallace had gone to an office in Longview, Texas, where his car's exhaust pipe was allegedly rigged to pump gas into the vehicle. Wallace died of severe head injuries. Cliff Carter died the same year, 1971, at age 53. Both men died within months of each other.
Billy Sol Estes was due to be released from prison in 1971. Texas Ranger Clint Peoples had documents showing that Wallace was among those who fired shots in Dealey Plaza. On June 19, 1992, Peoples told a friend about this evidence. Four days later, on June 23, Peoples was killed in a mysterious car accident. The pattern is clear. Everyone who knew too much about Mac Wallace and Lyndon Johnson ended up dead.
We should be clear about what the evidence says. Mac Wallace was a convicted first-degree murderer who was freed through Lyndon Johnson's intervention. Wallace killed many people on Johnson's orders. The list of killings includes at least eight murders. On November 22, 1963, Wallace's fingerprint was found in the sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Eyewitnesses saw someone matching Wallace's description on the sixth floor. And everyone who tried to leak this information died under suspicious circumstances.
Did Lyndon Johnson order the assassination of John F. Kennedy? The fingerprint evidence does not prove that conclusively. But it does prove that Mac Wallace was there. And Mac Wallace did nothing without Lyndon Johnson's orders.
Critics of the Wallace fingerprint match argue that Darby's analysis has been disputed by other experts. Some claim the prints do not match, pointing to inconsistencies. But Darby's credentials were unquestioned. He had testified as an expert in Texas courts for decades. His fingerprint experience and that of another FBI examiner who reviewed his work totaled 75 years. And Darby did not just find 14 points of match. He found 34.
Could Darby have been wrong? Possibly. Fingerprint analysis is not infallible. But consider the alternative. If Wallace's print was not on that box, how do we explain everything else? The killings, the connections, the timing, the eyewitness descriptions, the suspicious deaths of everyone who knew the truth.
The establishment wants you to believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That a 24-year-old former Marine with mediocre marksmanship pulled off a perfect assassination with a mail-order rifle from a sixth-floor window. That Jack Ruby, a minor nightclub owner with no political motive, decided to kill Oswald on live television out of sympathy for Jackie Kennedy. They want you to believe that Mac Wallace's fingerprint in the sniper's nest was a coincidence. That every killing linked to LBJ and Wallace was a coincidence. The jury threats, the suspended sentence, the security clearance for a convicted killer, the mysterious car accidents, all coincidences.
How many coincidences does it take before a pattern emerges?
At 2:38 p.m. on November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President aboard Air Force One, with Jackie Kennedy standing beside him, still wearing her blood-stained pink suit. Johnson's corruption investigations ended that day. The Bobby Baker scandal vanished. Billy Sol Estes's fraud cases were dropped. Johnson passed landmark civil rights legislation and escalated the Vietnam War. He chose not to run for reelection in 1968 and died in 1973.
Mac Wallace's fingerprint is preserved in the National Archives. Box A from the sniper's nest is kept as evidence. The 14-point match is documented in an affidavit. These are facts. The question is not whether Mac Wallace's print was found in the sniper's nest. It was. The question is: what was LBJ's personal hitman doing on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on the day John F. Kennedy was killed?