The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (7 page)

Whether any of this is the reason Mr. Jenkins was found floating in the Colorado River on April 16 with a bullet through his brain remains anybody's guess. Sheriff Keirsey thinks maybe it is. Mr. Jenkins' widow, his teenage son and his colleagues in the rare-book business think it isn't. Bastrop County Justice of the Peace Bill Henderson has issued a ruling supporting the family's opinion.

Based on his analysis of the path of the fatal bullet and the fact that no death weapon or suicide note was found, Judge Henderson ruled the shooting a homicide.

“Given the lack of evidence at the scene that it was a suicide, I had no alternative,” he said.

But Sheriff Keirsey calls the ruling “misinformed.”

“The angle of the bullet is completely compatible with suicide,” he said. “We know the trajectory of the bullet. It's measurable. It's physics. But due to the lack of a weapon, I can't really argue with Judge Henderson. He almost has to call it a homicide.”

Johnny Jenkins, as his friends called him, was one of the best-known dealers in rare books and rare historical documents in the United States. He was one of the foremost experts on Texas history—particularly the period of the Revolution and the Republic—and had edited a 10-volume work titled
Papers of the Texas Revolution
. He had written several books, including
Basic Texas Books
, considered an outstanding reference work on Texana, and an autobiographical account titled
Audubon and Other Capers
. His company, the Jenkins Co., had published more than 300 books, most of them concerning Texas and Southwestern history.

He also was one of those flamboyant, more-vivid-than-life characters that often come to people's minds when they think of the word “Texan.” He embellished his 5-foot-6, 160-pound frame with a 10-gallon hat and cowboy boots, smoked big cigars, loved a good story, drank bourbon and played poker. Like “Amarillo Slim” Preston and “Texas Dolly” Brunson, he had been given a nickname in Las Vegas. The players called him “Austin Squatty.”

“He was in action all the time,” said Jim Albrecht, manager of the card room at Binion's Horseshoe, one of 23 Nevada casinos where Mr. Jenkins held lines of credit.

“He did a lot of wheeling and dealing, and he came out pretty good a lot of times,” Mr. Albrecht said. “If he had money problems, he kept it very well concealed.”

The Rev. Kenneth Kesselus, the Episcopal priest in Bastrop and the dead man's cousin, agrees that Mr. Jenkins loved the game and was good at it.

“Texas boys have grown up for 150 years playing poker. Poker is one of our sports,” Mr. Kesselus said. “And for John, it was a sport. It was an adventure. His whole life was an adventure.”

Friends also speak of his “genius,” his photographic memory and his lifelong, passionate interest in Texas history. Mr. Kesselus had been collaborating with Mr. Jenkins in the research and writing of a biography of Gen. Edward Burleson, an ancestor of theirs who was one of the commanders of the Texas Army during the Revolution and who later served as vice president of the Texas Republic.

Mr. Jenkins had worked on the project off and on for more than 30 years. “Burleson was John's boyhood hero, rather than Roy Rogers or somebody the rest of us would have had,” Mr. Kesselus said.

On that fateful Sunday, Mr. Kesselus said, his cousin set out in search of the abandoned graveyard where James Burleson—the father of the general—was buried. Later that afternoon, the Bastrop County Sheriff's Department received a call from a fisherman about a gold Mercedes-Benz that apparently had been abandoned near a public boat ramp under the bridge that crosses the Colorado River on FM969, about six miles west of Bastrop.

“When the deputy, Jim Burnett, went down there and was looking at it, a couple of guys and a lady were there fishing,” Chief Deputy Lee Conner said. “One of the guys cast his line and snagged his hook on the dead man's shirt.”

The body was in the river, only about 20 feet from the car. Mr. Jenkins' clothing was entangled with the branches of a broken willow lying in the water, near the bank. A large-caliber bullet had entered his head from behind the right ear and had exited through the left temple, blowing away a portion of the brain and skull.

Sheriff Keirsey insists that he hasn't dismissed the possibility of murder. Thorough searches of the river bottom with a powerful magnet and a metal detector have failed to find the weapon used to kill Mr. Jenkins. But, the sheriff says, the death scene troubles him.

“All our physical facts do not indicate a second party was there,” he said. “Jenkins' billfold was found right beside the car. It was void of the driver's license and credit cards and any cash, but the other papers were all still neatly in place. There were no indications of a hasty search-through like the common thieves normally do. Jenkins' gold Rolex watch was missing, but the car wasn't ransacked or rifled through.

“There was no ground disruption, no evidence of struggle, no sign that the body had been dragged to the water.”

What bothers the sheriff most is the nature of the shooting itself.

“The Travis County medical examiner says the type of wound and the trajectory of the bullet are compatible with self-infliction,” he said. “The gun was firmly pressed to the flesh. … If a second party was involved, he probably would have been shot from some distance. The bullet would have followed a different trajectory. There would have been some ground disturbance, some sign of a struggle or a dragging of the body.

“Matter from the head exploding would have been splattered on something,'' he said. “We didn't find a speck or drop of anything.”

Sheriff Keirsey speculates that Mr. Jenkins was standing in the river when the shot was fired. “I think he was three or four feet out into the water, maybe waist-deep,” he said. “If somebody else did it, he went into the water with Jenkins and waded back out. But there was no sign of anybody coming out of the water.”

The weakness in the suicide scenario is the absence of the death weapon. A sweep of that area of the Colorado River with a powerful magnet soon after the body was found turned up the keys to the Mercedes, but no gun. Last weekend, divers spent six hours combing the river with an underwater metal detector. They turned up a pocket watch, several pieces of Reed and Barton silver flatware, three golf clubs, a plastic bag full of bullets and even a Rolex watch, but no gun. The Rolex didn't belong to Mr. Jenkins.

“There are lots of us in Bastrop County and Austin who would like to know why the sheriff hasn't dismissed suicide as a possible cause of death,” Mr. Kesselus said. “He was out there looking for the grave of James Burleson, and somebody killed him.”

But Sheriff Keirsey said two acquaintances of Mr. Jenkins' had told officers that Mr. Jenkins occasionally discussed—in a hypothetical way—the possibility of a person committing suicide and making it look like murder. When an article mentioning Mr. Jenkins' suicide comments was published in the
Austin American-Statesman
last week, the sheriff's department received several calls from the public suggesting how such a suicide might be committed.

“The favorite method they've come up with,” Deputy Conner said, “is you punch a few holes in a plastic Coke bottle and tie it to the gun. You wade into the river and shoot yourself. The gun drops into the water. The Coke bottle keeps it afloat while it drifts downstream. Then, when the bottle fills with water, the gun drops to the bottom, maybe half a mile from the scene.”

Some of Mr. Jenkins' acquaintances dismiss as “absurd” the idea that he would commit suicide as a way out of his financial difficulties.

“I guess that's the only word for it,” said Kevin MacDonnell, an Austin rare-book dealer who used to work for Mr. Jenkins. “Such a thing was against John's very nature. The most remarkable characteristic about him was his ability to pull a rabbit out of the hat, to overcome adversity, to find ways around problems.”

The public became aware of Mr. Jenkins' intelligence while he was still young. When he was 14, he discovered the memoirs of an ancestor, John Holland Jenkins, who at age 13 had served in the Texas revolutionary army. His reminiscences of early Texas had been published piecemeal in the weekly
Bastrop Advertiser
during the 1880s. The young Jenkins edited them into a continuous narrative, added footnotes and an appendix, and took his manuscript to J. Frank Dobie, the potentate of Texas letters.

Mr. Dobie not only read the book and recommended its publication by the University of Texas Press, but he also provided the foreword, in which he wrote, “Many a Ph.D. thesis shows less scholarship and less intelligence than Johnny's editorial work and is not nearly so interesting.”

The young author titled the book
Recollections of Early Texas
, and he received the first published copy on the day he graduated from high school in Beaumont. Later that year, when he entered the University of Texas at Austin, the book was assigned to him in his history class as a collateral text.

Mr. Jenkins always claimed that it was Mr. Dobie—and UT-Austin President Harry Ransom and historian Walter Prescott Webb—who encouraged him to go into the rare-book business.

In 1975, he pushed ahead in that business in a big way—by buying the famous Eberstadt Collection of Western Americana for $2.7 million. At the time, it was the largest single purchase of rare books ever made. Mr. Jenkins sold it, piece by piece, for more than $10 million and established himself as a major player in the rarefied world of rare-book dealing and collecting.

During the 1970s and early ‘80s, Texas was enjoying an immense economic boom and—largely through Mr. Jenkins' efforts—a growing number of Texas millionaires began investing in rare Texas books and documents, driving their value upward. Mr. Jenkins was acknowledged to be the top expert in the field.

But on Christmas Eve 1985, a fire destroyed an estimated $3 million worth of rare materials—many of them uninsured—in his Austin warehouse. The cause of the fire was ruled to be faulty electrical wiring. In 1987, after Mr. Jenkins had moved his business to another location, a second fire destroyed an estimated $100,000 worth of his stock. The fire was ruled arson, but no arrests were made.

Meanwhile, W. Thomas Taylor, another Austin rare-book dealer, discovered that forged copies of famous Texas documents—early printed copies of the Texas Declaration of Independence and Col. William B. Travis' famous “Victory or death” letter from the Alamo—had been sold to a number of important institutions and prominent people, including the Dallas Public Library, the museum at the San Jacinto battleground, the Star of Texas Museum at Washington-on-the-Brazos, Gov. Bill Clements and the Barker Texas History Center at UT-Austin.

Mr. Jenkins wasn't the forger, but he had sold a number of the fakes.

“I hadn't yet come to the university when the two fake documents were purchased from John Jenkins,” said Dr. Don Carlton, the Barker Center's director. “But if I had been here, I would have bought them, because they were so good. They were excellent pieces, but they were fake. When it was determined that they were fakes, Jenkins immediately reimbursed us.”

Whether or not Mr. Jenkins knew the documents were forgeries when he sold them, the discovery blemished his reputation.

And, like nearly every Texas wheeler-dealer, Mr. Jenkins was deeply damaged by the slump in the state's oil economy. He defaulted on a number of loans, including one for $1.3 million—with two partners—for the purchase of an oil rig in West Texas and several loans to renovate the campus of defunct Westminister College near Mexia, Texas, which he bought for $55,000 in 1977.

Nevertheless, Mr. Jenkins' friends don't believe that he would be driven to take his life by such a mundane problem as money.

“Someone saw him alone and decided to rob him,” said his cousin, Mr. Kesselus.

“I can't imagine that John ever in his life faced anything that he didn't think he could overcome,” said Mr. MacDonnell, the Austin rare-book dealer.

Sheriff Keirsey shrugs.

“Jenkins wasn't the type of person who would commit suicide out of despair. But there's another type that most people don't reckon with. This is the flamboyant-type person with a high intellect.”

If Mr. Jenkins' death indeed was a suicide, Sheriff Keirsey believes, he would have wanted to make it look like a murder.

“He was a sixth-generation Texan,” the sheriff said. “His family is steeped in history and tradition. That man would not want to stigmatize his name.”

April 1989

TRUCKING

When I was researching this story, I drove all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area looking for women driving pickups. I couldn't find any, so I went ahead and wrote the piece without women in it. It was a big mistake, of course. As soon as it was published, I started getting letters from female pickup fanatics who were offended that they weren't represented. I'm still sorry. I apologize again
.

“I
F
YOU'VE
GOT
A
GOOD
TRUCK
WITH
A
GOOD
ENGINE
AND
A
GOOD
rear end in it, you can go anywhere, haul anything and pull anything,” said Hollis McFail, a cowboy from Bonham, voicing the sentiment of multitudes.

Mr. McFail's own 1983 Ford F350 had pulled the trailer containing his roping horse and saddle to the Mesquite Championship Rodeo. The truck is a “dualie,” meaning it has four wheels in the back, like a semi. A “dualie” is a serious truck. “This old truck will take you straight down the road,” Mr. McFail said. “This old dun here”—he stroked his horse's withers—“me and him have been down the road a bunch of times in this old truck, and it has never let us down.”

Another day, Ocie Allen was standing beside his 1989 GMC 8500 in the parking lot of a North Fort Worth cafe where he had come to get some tamales before he started home. Mr. Allen raises Angus cattle between Denton and Decatur. “A truck is a necessity for me,” he said. “Like today I had to come to Fort Worth for some cattle minerals. You can't haul cattle minerals in the trunk of a car.”