Team works to unearth mystery

Officials exhume remains of man who died in 1946

08:36 AM CDT on Saturday, April 24, 2004

By Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe / Staff Writer

HENRIETTA — Ruth Blakely Vest Powers traveled from Dallas Friday morning with her son to watch as authorities unearthed the remains of her first husband.

For the first hour and a half, she stayed in the car.

DRC/Barron Ludlum

Workers unearth a metal box containing the casket of Harold Eugene "Buddy" Vest in Hope Cemetery in Henrietta Friday. Vest died in 1946 in what was considered until recently a suicide.

"You never expect to do this in your lifetime," she said. "I just put myself off somewhere."

Cooke County authorities exhumed the body of Harold Eugene "Buddy" Vest to determine whether his hanging death 58 years ago was suicide or murder.

Justice of the Peace Dorthy Lewis issued the exhumation order on Jan. 22 after a private investigator hired by Vest's son, Herb Vest, presented enough evidence to reopen the case.

The investigator found inconsistencies in the original justice of the peace inquest into Buddy Vest's death in 1946. Vest, who was found hanging, was ruled to have committed suicide. Herb Vest placed a classified ad offering a reward for information, prompting a mysterious letter from a woman who said that her flirtation with Buddy Vest prompted her boyfriend to kill him out of jealousy.

Along with mother and son, Dallas area television stations, newspaper reporters and a production crew from a cable network watched as a rusted, but intact, metal box containing Vest's casket was lifted out of the ground at Hope Cemetery .

DRC/Barron Ludlum

Ruth Blakey Vest Powers, who was 22 when her first husband died, looks on.

The monument truck was escorted by Lewis; Brand Webb, investigator with the Cooke County district attorney's office; Harell Gill-King, director of the University of North Texas Institute of Forensic Anthropology; and Joseph M. Guileyardo, a forensic pathologist.

Inside the warehouse, the metal top was pried away from its base. As the crane of the monument truck lifted the top, clods of red clay dirt and chunks of rotted wood fell away from inside and into the center of the casket. Although Gill-King and Guileyardo had prepared the warehouse with materials to stabilize the remains and a steel case to transport the body, the pair elected instead to wrap the entire casket in plastic and load it onto a van for the trip to UNT.

About an hour after officials lifted the metal box from the ground, Lewis released the body to Gill-King for further examination. Gill-King and Guileyardo are expected to examine the body for evidence that Vest may have been murdered.

Lewis declined to comment on the condition of the body.

"It's still an ongoing investigation," she said.

DRC/Barron Ludlum

Herb Vest and his wife, Kerensa, stand over his father's gravesite in Hope Cemetery in Henrietta as workers exhume Harold "Buddy" Vest's body. Herb Vest has made it his mission to find out the truth behind his father's suspicious death in 1946, when Herb was 2 years old.

Herb Vest said that he didn't feel much emotion at the day's events.

"I'm optimistic that there may be something there that would be of help to us," he said.

Lewis said she expects to receive a report in the next few weeks from Gill-King.

Powers said that she only remembers brief images from the night her husband died. She remembers waking with a start, she said, realizing that Buddy wasn't home. Her last memory of the house was walking past the dinner she had set out for her husband. She went to the shop. The door to the bathroom in the back was makeshift and she needed help opening it. A man across the street helped open the door.

"He just looked at me and I knew that second," Powers said. "I learned at 22 that people die."

She said years went by before she cried, partly because of shock, partly to protect her son. She said she never wanted him to know that they thought his father committed suicide. She said she was afraid there was a gene in her son that that would cause him to commit suicide, too.

Herb Vest made it his passion to find out the truth about what happened to his father.

In addition to involving a private investigator, Vest agreed to allow Cold Case Files , a documentary series on the A&E cable channel, to film the exhumation.

Powers took in the whole scene as the crews worked and the media watched.