Cooke County reopens decades-old hanging case

Death initially ruled a suicide, but some signs point to murder

12:10 PM CDT on Friday, April 23, 2004

By PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE / Denton Record-Chronicle

A son's desire to learn the truth and a mysterious letter have led Cooke County officials to reopen the case of a Gainesville cabinetmaker who was ruled to have hanged himself nearly 58 years ago.

Authorities will exhume the body of Harold "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," Judge Lewis said. "At this point, I don't have any answers. It's just not quite right."

Herb Vest was not yet 2 years old when his father died.

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

Herb Vest said he had 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 Mr. Vest, of 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."

In 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.

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

When her husband didn't come home one night, 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 to the shop, she found the door padlocked, but there was a light on inside. In a restroom, she 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," Ms. Vest said 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 in Henrietta.

Some odd details

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

In September, Herb Vest asked Danny Williams, a private investigator who had worked for him on occasion since 1991, to look into his father's death.

Mr. Williams said that once the record of the inquest was retrieved from storage, it didn't take long 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 made Mr. Williams think the death probably was not a suicide. Because the body was found dressed in women's underwear, he said he couldn't rule out autoerotic asphyxiation, even though others who had investigated similar deaths told him that no one ever had their feet bound. But without any other information to go on, Mr. Williams said, he was stuck.

Mr. Williams and Mr. Vest decided to 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.

Ms. Smith wrote that she had not dated Harold Vest, but she had wanted to. So she put on her best party dress, fixed her hair and headed over to Harold'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 Harold's protests that they'd never had sex, the boyfriend flew into a jealous rage. He made Harold strip and put on Ms. Smith's underwear. He beat Ms. 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 Harold escape. When he nearly did, the pair tied him up in the bathroom.

She wrote that she heard of Harold'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 talked with her about what happened. He said that they'd left him standing on a block, she wrote.

Ms. 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 Ms. Smith indicated an interest in the reward, Mr. Williams said he took the letter to a forensic psychologist to evaluate its authenticity. Between that evaluation and the fact that Ms. Smith knew some intimate details, Mr. Williams thought there was something to the letter.

Mr. Williams wrote Ms. Smith at the general delivery address she suggested, but she has not contacted him again.

Looking for evidence

To keep the investigation moving, Mr. Vest and Mr. Williams presented Ms. 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 the exhumation of the body to determine whether there is enough evidence to conclude he was murdered.

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