What really happened to Buddy Vest?

58 years after his father's death, a Dallas man wants to find out

Friday, April 23, 2004

By Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe / Staff Writer

A son's persistence to learn the truth and a mysterious letter has led Cooke County officials to reopen the case of a Gainesville cabinetmaker who was ruled to have committed suicide by hanging 58 years ago.

Courtesy Photo

It was thought that Gainesville resident Harold "Buddy" Vest, shown above in 1944, committed suicide in 1946, but now the case has been reopened to consider the possibility of murder.

Authorities will exhume the body of Harold Eugene "Buddy" Vest today from Hope Cemetery in Henrietta, 20 miles southeast of Wichita Falls in Clay County . Justice of the Peace Dorthy Lewis determined there was sufficient probable cause to reopen the case after hearing evidence that suggested the death was not a suicide.

"There was quite a bit of evidence that it was not a suicide," Lewis said. "At this point, I don't have any answers. It's just not quite right."

Herb Vest was not quite 2 years old when his daddy died.

When he was 11, he was exploring in the attic and found his father's death certificate, the paper that said Buddy Vest had committed suicide by hanging. His mother never would talk about it.

Vest said he always wanted to learn the truth about his father's death, but it became an obsession in 2002 after he went to a history lecture on the Great Hanging at Gainesville , where more than 40 men were executed for their pro-Union sympathies in October 1862.

"I never bought the suicide story," said Vest, who lives in Dallas . "He had a baby, a wife; he was happy, he wasn't drinking or gambling. There was nothing in the family history to suggest he would do this. Everybody knew him as an up and happy man."

Last September, he hired a private investigator and later placed an ad in the Gainesville newspaper offering a $10,000 reward for information about his father's death.

DRC/Hiroyuki Komae

Herb Vest holds a photograph of his father.

Vest's father moved the family to Gainesville in 1946 after he was discharged from the U.S. Army. He opened a cabinetmaking shop.

When he didn't come home the night of June 27, Ruth Vest went to a neighbor's house to get a ride to the shop, according to the justice of the peace inquest. When she got there, she found the door had been padlocked, but there was a light on inside. In a restroom in the back, Ruth found her husband, a thin leather belt looped around his neck and nailed to the door. A small rope was tied around his waist and his left arm was pinioned to his side. Another small rope was tied around his legs and fastened to the wall with an eye screw.

The ruling was suicide.

"I couldn't understand why he did it," Ruth Vest said in an interview Thursday. "But there was no other way to explain it. It never entered my mind that it could be something else."

She said she left and went to her sister's house. Her father came to pick her up, and she and her son went to live back home in Henrietta.

"I never went back in that house again," Ruth Vest said.

The story almost ended there for Ruth and her baby, except for a few odd details. She never received Buddy's wallet or other personal effects after the justice of the peace closed the investigation. And several weeks later, she read in the newspaper that someone named Harold F. Vest had been admitted to a hospital in Wichita Falls .

So last September, Herb Vest decided to find out what happened to his father that night. He asked Danny Williams, a private investigator who had worked for him on occasion since 1991, to look into his father's death. Williams said that once the record of the inquest was retrieved from archived storage, it didn't take long at all to find inconsistencies in the documents. The name of the victim was listed as Richard Eugene Vest, the address of the crime scene was wrong, and unlike every other record on the docket, the bottom half of the document was torn off and Justice of the Peace L.V. Henry had not signed it.

The description of how the body was found also tipped Williams that the death was not likely a suicide. Because the body was found dressed in women's underwear, he couldn't rule out autoerotic asphyxiation, even though others who had investigated similar deaths told him that no one ever had the feet bound. But without any other information to go on, Williams said, he was stuck.

Williams and Vest decided to take place an ad in a Gainesville newspaper offering a $10,000 reward for information in the case. They received a three-page, single-spaced letter, signed "M. Smith," which provided an account of that night.

Smith wrote that she was single and attractive and could have any man in town that she wanted, Williams said. She wrote that she had not dated Buddy Vest, but she wanted to. So June 27, she put on her best party dress, fixed her hair and headed over to Buddy's cabinet shop. A few minutes into her flirtation, three men burst into the shop. At least one had a gun.

One was her boyfriend, she wrote, a married police officer. Despite Buddy's protests that they'd never had sex, the boyfriend flew into a jealous rage. He made Buddy strip and put on Smith's underwear. He beat Smith, then took her home and beat her some more with a rubber hose. He told his two friends he would kill them if they let Buddy escape. When he nearly did, the pair tied him up in the bathroom.

Williams said the rest of Smith's story is hearsay. She writes that she heard of Buddy's death the next day. Her boyfriend told all of them that if they spoke of the matter they would all go to the electric chair. One of the men came by and talked with her about what happened. He said that they'd left him standing on a block, she writes.

Smith wrote that she moved away and a few years later consulted an attorney in Gainesville who called her back two weeks later and told her there was no way to corroborate her story.

Because Smith indicated an interest in the reward, Williams said he took the letter to a forensic psychologist to evaluate it for authenticity. Between that evaluation, and the fact that Smith knew things only the widow would know, Williams and Smith knew they had something in the letter.

They wrote Smith at the general delivery address she suggested, but she has not contacted them again.

In order to keep the investigation moving, Vest and Williams presented Smith's letter and the evidence they had uncovered from the docket archives to Judge Lewis. She conferred with Cooke County District Attorney Janelle Haverkamp and the two agreed to seek Vest's exhumation to determine whether there is enough physical evidence to conclude he was murdered.

"What comes next depends on what is found," Haverkamp said. "There is the possibility that a criminal investigation could be reopened. There's no statute of limitations here."

According to Smith's letter, her boyfriend and one of the accomplices are dead, the third, the man who came to talk to her the day after Buddy died, is frail.

Herb Vest said that he feels a lot better knowing that his father didn't kill himself and that if it were up to him, no one would be prosecuted.

"I served in Vietnam . I killed people in that war and I know what they live with," he said. "It's sufficient punishment to live with that every day."

Ruth Vest said that she is proud of her son for seeking the truth.

"I wanted answers, too," she said.