Body exhumed in 58-year-old case

Forensics experts take remains to UNT to look for signs of foul play

11:38 PM CDT on Friday, April 23, 2004

By PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE / Denton Record-Chronicle

HENRIETTA – Ruth Blakely Vest Powers traveled from Dallas on Friday morning with her son to watch authorities exhume the remains of her first husband.

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

"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 Jan. 22 after a private investigator hired by Herb Vest, Harold Vest's son, presented enough evidence to reopen the case.

The investigator found inconsistencies in the original justice of the peace inquest into Harold Vest's death in 1946. Mr. Vest, who was found hanging, was ruled to have committed suicide.

A recent classified ad offering a reward for information prompted a mysterious letter from a woman who said that her flirtation with Mr. Vest prompted her boyfriend to kill him out of jealousy.

Along with the 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 Mr. Vest's casket was lifted out of the ground at Hope Cemetery .

Judge Lewis was accompanied by 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.

Once the metal box was moved inside a warehouse, the top was pried away from its base. As the crane of a monument truck lifted the top, clods of red clay dirt and chunks of rotted wood fell.

Although Mr. Gill-King and Mr. Guileyardo had prepared the warehouse with materials to stabilize the remains and a steel case to transport the body, the pair elected to wrap the entire casket in plastic and load it onto a van for the trip to UNT.