The Louisiana Purchase
Marshall maintains that he was simply trying to find out what happened to the $3,500 and whether his wife had hired a private detective. That was why, he claimed, he exploited a rather weak connection he had made when he struck up a conversation at a Toms River party with a hardware store clerk from Caddo Parrish in Louisiana.
According to court documents, Marshall had claimed that "during the course of the evening, he and [the clerk] discussed insurance and financial instruments and, at some point, Marshall mentioned that he was seeking an out-of-town investigator to track missing casino winnings he had given to his wife. He expressed reluctance to hire a local investigator since Toms River was a small community where news traveled quickly."
When the clerk returned to Caddo Parrish, he put Marshall in touch with a self-described wheeler-dealer named Billy Wayne McKinnon, according to court papers. It would always strike the cops as more than a little suspicious that McKinnon didn't use his real name, but instead had Marshall write out his checks in the name of one of McKinnon's friends, who would in turn sign the checks. It seemed an elaborate subterfuge in a case which was, at least as Marshall described it, a run-of-the-mill marital investigation. It also troubled the cops that, even after McKinnon traveled to Atlantic City to meet with Marshall - he did it on more than one occasion - the little hardware store clerk remained "Marshall's primary contact in Louisiana," and the principal go-between for Marshall and McKinnon.
Blind Faith
It would trouble investigators even more that Marshall, who fancied himself a savvy businessman, spent up to $6,300 according to McGinness' account in
Blind Faith purportedly to locate, perhaps not even retrieve, $3,500. It would also trouble investigators that Marshall gave conflicting accounts, once authorities started closing in on him, about why he had wired all that money to Louisiana in the first place, claiming at one point that the money was sent to cover a bet he had lost on a basketball game.
But what would trouble investigators most of all was that Maria Marshall was unusually well insured for a stay-at-home mom. Marshall has always maintained that he carried a great deal of insurance on his wife both as a sales tool a way of persuading would be clients that they too should take out additional insurance and as a safeguard against reduced earnings in the tragic, and his view, unlikely event that the Marshalls would someday become a single parent family.
Investigators found it curious all the same that Marshall felt he would have needed $1.5 million to compensate for the time he would lose at work if Maria somehow died. It was even more troubling to them that on September 8, 1984, "Maria and her husband both were examined by a physician to qualify for an additional insurance policy."
That night, while driving home on the Garden State Parkway from Atlantic City, Marshall would claim, he heard a strange sound coming from one of the tires on his white Cadillac.
Rather than stop on the broad shoulder of the highway at a well lit toll plaza he passed, rather than trying to limp less than four miles further to a nearby service station, Marshall wheeled the car into a secluded rest stop, the Oyster Creek Picnic Area, and pulled deep inside. He maintained that Maria was awake at the time; that she was in fact anxious to get home. Authorities have disputed that.
Marshall contends that he got out of the car, and was checking the passenger side rear tire, when another car pulled up a few yards away. He insisted that he never heard the door of the other car open, that he never heard the footsteps coming near him. All he remembers, he claims, was hearing Maria cry out, "Oh my God." The next thing he knew he felt the searing pain of a heavy object a tire iron perhaps glancing across the side of his skull. It left a minor wound that took six stitches to close. Then, he claimed he lost consciousness. He said he never saw the gunman who then pumped two bullets into Maria's back, killing her as she lay across the front seat of the car. When he woke up, he claimed that $6,000 in casino winnings were missing from his pocket.
