S1: E17 – Murder on the Parkway, Part 2

Robert Marshall was an upscale problem gambler. He and his wife Maria had spent the evening in Atlantic City. They were on their way home. There was a problem with us tire. He stopped at arrestop and his wife was shot twice in the back and died almost immediately.

The police didn't think this was a robbery turned homicide.

It was murder for hire.

And they believe the person who hired someone to kill Maria Marshall was her husband.

He had a girlfriend and he wanted out, and he wanted his wife to pay for it with her life.

Today, we're in New Jersey for the conclusion of Murder on the Parkway. I'm Slow Glass and this is American homicide. Just to note that this episode contained some graphic content. Please take care while listening. On a late summer night in nineteen eighty four, Maria Marshall was killed at a rest stop along the Garden State Parkway. The ordeal was originally believed to be a robbery turned homicide.

New Jersey is no stranger to murder. We have a lot of mobsters in New Jersey, but this was different. It was murder for hire, which we didn't get that much.

Of Journalist Judy Peat wrote about the story for a New Jersey newspaper.

It got national attention, a book was written about it, a movie was done about it based on the book, and no story about Tom's River for about twenty five thirty years ram without mentioning the spectacular murder in the headline or at least in the first paragraph.

Even the Toms River Little Leak team found that out in nineteen ninety eight when it won the Little Leak World Series.

It was huge, but they never really got their due because of the Marshall case.

By Christmas of nineteen eighty four, three men from Louisiana were charged with Maria's murder along with her husband, Robert Marshall.

Robert Marshall was an attractive man with a very attractive wife and three teenage sons, I think the youngest was about twelve or thirteen at the time, who were all championship swimmers and she was swim team mom of the year. They seemed to have an idyllic life.

Think about it, those three teenage boys already having to deal with their mother being murdered, and then they had to process the fact that their father was charged with orchestrating her death.

Robert Marshall sold insurance and iras and did very well. However, Marshall was in debt. He had a gambling problem. He had just in the months before the murder up to his wife's life insurance to a million and a half.

In fact, Robert had just taken an additional policy out on Maria the morning prior to her murder. According to prosecutors, Robert's motive for killing his wife was to use her insurance money to pay off his debt and run away with his mistress.

He had a girlfriend and he wanted out, and he wanted his wife to pay for it with her life.

Prosecutors believe Robert Marshall put the plan in place with the help of three guys from Louisiana, Billy, Wayne McKinnon, Larry Thompson, and a hardware clerk named Bobby Cumber, and they believe it all started with Bobby.

He first met Bobby at a party he was up in New Jersey visiting, and Marshall asked Bobby if he could find him a private.

Detective, Lieutenant Jim Churchill investigated and he learned Bobby Cumber connected Robert Marshall to a PI named Billy Wayne McKinnon.

McKinnon talks with Marshall.

Marshall said, I have a very sensitive investigation that I want him done.

I don't trust.

Anybody in my area to do it. So McKinnon says, well, it'll cost you five thousand dollars for me to come up there and do this. So Marshall sends him a Western Union money order, which we have a copy of.

That's when Robert Marshall took things a step further.

He says, well, basically I want her done away with. Mckinn is somewhat taken back by that, and he says, well, you know that can be done, but it's going to cost you a lot more than what you've already given me.

So then they negotiate some sort of a deal.

Now, according to Billy Wayne McKinnon, deal to murder Maria amount into over eighty thousand dollars.

McKinnon has no intention of doing this, but he has an intention of bleeding this guy for money as often as he can, because what's he going to say? You know, he stole from me because I wanted to kill my wife.

So McKinnon simply took Robert Marshall's money and strung him along throughout the summer of nineteen eighty four, and by the end of that summer he turned the job over to his friend Larry Thompson.

Thompson's the kind of guy that does this and kind of horns in on this scam. The authorities in Louisiana know him. Whenever there's a homicide, he's the first guy to think of.

McKinnon told investigators that he and Larry Thompson drove up from Louisiana the day before Maria's murder. By then, Robert Marshall had already paid Billy Wayne McKinnon nearly twenty thousand dollars with the promise of more money to come after the job was done. He and Robert Marshall then came up with their plan. They'd make Maria's murder look like a robbery gone wrong. At a rest stop off the Garden State Parkway.

They tell him to pull in, park your car here, get out of the car, and then they will do the rest. He said, I'll have twenty five hundred dollars in my pocket. You can take that. Hit me over the head, but don't hit me hard enough. I'm going to be a vegetable.

But here's where things get tricky for prosecutors.

Thompson was the only person at the scene.

Billy Wayne had dropped him off and then he circled around and came back north after the shooting had occurred and after Marshall had been hit on a head, So.

Billy Wayne McKinnon never actually saw Larry Thompson kill Maria. He dropped Larry off at the rest stop, drove away and then returned after the murder.

When he gets there, he sees Marshall land by the rear tire and Thompson is running towards a car, gets in the front and says take off. When he starts to take off, he says, wait a minute, I gotta do something. He gets out of the car, runs back to the car and Billy Wayne sees him take out his knife and stick it into the right rear tire and he hears the air coming out.

So the last thing to happen was Larry Thompson cutting the Marshall's rear tire.

There was about a two inch cut in the sidewalk, perfect for somebody who had a fairly large knife and just stuck it in air and.

Let it out.

Billy Wayne McKinnon confirmed what investigators originally believed about the tire.

We had an air pump brought to the scene to inflate the tire and it wouldn't inflated. The air was escaping as fast as it went in, So there's no way he could have driven from Atlantic City with the tire like that.

Now, if you remember, the suspicion over the tire was what made Robert Marshall a suspect early on in the investigation.

He was arrested while he was Christmas shopping.

Linda Fenwick was friends with Maria Marshall.

It was complicated. It was a complicated situation.

Now picture this, It's been three months since Maria was killed. Her husband, Robert is Christmas shopping for his three kids and that's when police go to arrest him. He even pleaded with the officers to allow him to first drop off the gifts.

But they refused. I couldn't imagine anybody hurting Maria was That was my feeling, least of all him. I was torn between whether he was guilty or not. I didn't think he was. In fact, he said to me at the last time I saw him in a swim meet. He said, don't believe everything you see in the paper. You know, I said, Okay, don't believe it. It was just before he was arrested.

But hindsight is twenty twenty and looking back, she remembers Robert's demeanor changing after Maria's murder.

At first, it was very hard for him to deal with. He he acted like a grieving husband at certainly at the funeral at the church. But yes, he did return to life is normal, you know, going to swim meets and you know, helping out of the house with the boys and whatnot. But what the boys went through was absolutely horrible to see that your father is involved in a murder with your mother. It was terrible. I mean, I mean, as far as I were can saying their

Maria Marshall looked to have the ideal life. She was beautiful, She married her high school sweetheart and they had three kids. They lived in the up for middle class township of Tom's River, New Jersey, where they belonged to the local country club. Robert was a successful insurance salesman, but he still seemed to have his priority straight. He would take Fridays off to spend time with his family, but according

Marshall was charged with conspiracy to commit first degree murder, which is a capital offense in New Jersey, or was at the time.

That's journalist Judy Pete.

The other person in the case was a man named Larry Thompson. Thompson and Marshall were tried first.

In an unusual move, prosecutors tried Robert Marshall and Larry Thompson together. Thompson was accused of pulling the trigger and shooting Maria Marshall, while Robert Marshall was accused of orchestrating the whole thing. The third man who would be tried separately is Billy Wayne McKinnon. He was accused of driving the getaway car.

McKinnon revealed the whole thing, at least his version of the whole thing, and turned four, essentially getting a vastly reduced sentence.

And this is important and likely the very reason prosecutors tried Robert Marshall and Larry Thompson together. Billy Wayne McKinnon struck a plea deal with prosecutors. He agreed to testify against the two men.

Billy Wayne McKinnon was just going to fleece Marshall, at least that's what he testified, but he ended up hiring a murderer.

Billy Wayne said he subcontracted the job and hired the co defendant, Larry Thompson, to kill Maria. If you remember, the Louisiana hardware store clerk named Bobby Cumber was the one who originally connected Robert Marshall to Billy Wayne McKinnon. Although the police charged Bobby, those charges didn't stick.

The judge actually dismissed the charges against Bobby.

There's a lot more to what happened with Bobby Cumber, and we'll share the full story in a special bonus episode of American Homicide. But first let's get into the case against Robert Marshall and Larry Thompson. I know there's a lot of names in this case, so let's recap. Robert Marshall was married to Maria Marshall. He was cheating

It really rested on Billy Wayne McKinnon.

And Billy Wayne McKinnon was a former deputy sheriff turned private detective. This is not someone you'd expect to be a hit man. He testified that Robert Marshall hired him to kill Maria, but he said his conscience wouldn't allow him to be the shooter.

He installed for at least three or four months. McKinnon never expected to actually go through with it. He was just trying to see how much he could fleece Robert Marshall for and he'd taken twenty one thousand up front.

And eventually Billy Wayne McKinnon offered some of that money to his friend Larry Thompson.

Authorities always believed that Larry was a stone cold killer.

He was fairly slick that way.

McKinnon said he and Robert Marshall planned out the murder the afternoon before.

She could not be shot in the face.

He didn't want her beauty affect it, so she was shot in the back. I mean, these were the kind of details that came out in court and they were pretty damning.

Billy Wayne McKinnon said he did not winness the shooting. He was there to drive the getaway car. But here was the problem for Billy Wayne McKinnon and prosecutors. Larry Thompson used McKinnon's gun in the killing.

Larry Thompson this surprised everyone, but he brought up a preacher and family from Louisiana who testified that he was at the dentist and a revival meeting at the time of the murder.

Larry Thompson denied killing Maria Marshall. He said he was at home in bed that night. His son, wife and brother even backed up his alibi. Larry even went a step further and said he had never even been to Atlantic City and that was the risk prosecutors took with having Billy Wayne McKinnon as their star witness. So, now with a confused jury looking on, Robert Marshall was called to testify.

He took a stand in his own behalf.

Lieutenant Jim Churchill was in the courtroom.

Basically, what he says is that he didn't do it. He was a loving father and didn't do it, and he wasn't in financial trouble. I had no problem paying bills.

Robert Marshall testified he had simply hired Billy Wade McKinnon to investigate some missing gambling winnings. He said he later learned his wife Maria, had used that money to hire a detective to investigate his adultery.

He was carrying on an affair with Saran crash Hour.

So Robert Marshall confirmed his fourteen month long affair with Saran and other women. He also admitted that in the three months after his wife's murder, he vacationed with another woman in Florida send flowers to an ex lever and was involved with a third woman. All that aside, he maintained he was not at all involved in Maria's murder.

Basically, that was it.

McKinnon who testified against him, was lying and the inference was that he did it, stole the money, and now he's making all.

This stuff up.

By this point, the trial became a spectacle. In between this testimony, Robert Marshall would turn to his family, smile and give them a thumbs up.

Marshall would have signs at a cardboard and turn around, show up to his kids that says I love you, and he'd do that so the press that was there would be able to see inflation in these cardstone.

The most explosive exchange during Robert Marshall's nine and a half hours on the stand happened during cross examination. Listen to what the prosecutor said when he noticed Robert Marshall was wearing his wedding ring.

So the prosecutor said, to hold up your left hand, Yes, sta wedding ring on there. He said, yeah, that signifies your devotion to your wife, your deceased wife, and you know your devotion and love for her.

Is that right?

You say, we can't tell Jerry why she's still on a box at the funeral home. Nobody came and picked up the ashes of Maria Marshall at the funeral home.

That's heartbreaking. Maria Marshall was cremated in mid September and Robert was arrested in December.

At the time of the trial, she was still on a shelf in the funeral because nobody picked her up.

Robert Marshall was stunned.

And he held his hand up there for like five minutes. He didn't know what to do.

When he finally found the words to respond, he said he and his children had planned to bury Maria in Florida over the Christmas holiday, but Robert Marshall was arrested a week before Christmas.

It was something I'd never seen like that.

In the court room before the seasoned insurance salesman hoped the jury would ignore the mountain of evidence against him and made one last attempt to sway the jury.

His boys testified on his behalf.

One of his sons explained that their mother wanted to be buried under a palm tree. To the prosecutor's credit, he went easy on the children who testified, but he unloaded on Robert Marshall. During closing arguments, they said, what.

He did to those boys, and he said to put him on a stand like that, and you saw it. They didn't want to be there, but he made him take the stand, and because of that, there's a special place in hell for him.

It's not always a given that the accused takes the witness stand in his own defense, especially in a murder trial, but Robert Marshall did. He testified that he was hit over the head while changing a flat tire and woke up to find his beloved wife, Maria shot to death in the front seat of their car.

That particular murder, because of the nature of it, who the people were, and so on, sent a lot of shockways through town.

Tom kellaher is the former mayor of Tom's River.

Maria had been shot with a looked like a forty five automatic and they said that Marshall was hit over the head apparently with the same forty five. I have to tell you that I thought, why would they shoot a petite blonde lady who's asleep anyway and wasn't really a threat to them, and only hit Marshall over the head. That raised a question right off the bat.

In my mind, after Robert's six week trial, the court of public opinion in Tom's River had pretty much convicted him.

The evidence was so overwhelming against Marshall. There's only one or two people that really went to bat for him, and everybody else was just kind of waiting for the other shoot a drop.

As the case went to the jury, Robert Marshall, who had been holding up signs to his children that said I love you, passed another message to his youngest son.

When everybody in the world who knew anything about the case figured that jury is only going to be out ten minutes and convict this guy. He kept temas on Listen, you go home, get the house ready for a big celebration tonight, and then when it's over, you and I are going to go to Florida, get a boat and fishing of it.

But Robert Marshall would never take his children fishing in Florida.

The jury wasn't out very long at all, and the jury found him guilty. He was convicted.

Jim Churchill was in the courtroom when Robert Marshall heard the verdict.

What happened was after the verdict came in, he fainted and they took him to a local hospital down there.

Can you even imagine. Even after Robert Marshall was hauled off on a stretcher, the jury still had to rule on the co defendant, Larry Thompson.

The same jury that finds Marshall guilty finds Thompson not guilty.

That's right, the jury acquitted Larry Thompson.

We spent as much time, I think, trying to convict Larry Thompson than we did Robert Marshall, and for some reason or other, they just didn't buy it.

It's unbelievable. The jury believed Larry Thompson's defense that he was home in Louisiana on the day of the murder.

That he was at a dentist office with his son having some work done on his child's mouth.

So Larry Thompson walked away.

A freeman, a member of the jury, was pulled and said, you had so much information, so much stuff against Marshall, and the judge kept talking about reasonable doubt, reasonable doubt, reasonable doubt. So either a system works or it doesn't work, and it stays with you.

Yeah, you know.

An infamous picture ran in the local newspaper Larry Thompson is seen climbing into his beat up pickup truck going off to leave, while Robert Marshall is laying on a stretcher in the background. But there's an even more important photo, a picture of Maria Marshall that Lieutenant Churchill had pinned to his bulletin board at work. He put it there as a reminder that the case was not closed.

I mean, you've been in this enough. Sure you get involved in cases, but you do the best you can. You collect the investigation. There might be something you might overlook, but it's certainly not on purpose.

With Larry Thompson's acquittal, the attention again returned to Robert Marshall. After recovering from his fainting spell, he returned to the courtroom hours later.

And the judge ordered him back because the hospital cent there's nothing, no reason why he shouldn't go back.

That's when Robert Marshall heard his sentence.

Marshall got to death penalty.

You know, I expected him to serve sometime, but I was surprised that death penalty.

That's Maria's friend, Linda Fenwick.

He wrote me a couple of letters early on when he was in prison, telling me that he didn't do it, and that you know, he missed Maria and he missed boys, and you know that kind of thing.

Robert Marshall spent eighteen years on death row before an appeal judge ruled that his lawyer misrepresented him during the death penalty phase of his trial. So in two thousand and six he was resentenced and had the opportunity to address the court. Here he is speaking.

I know I've made some terrible mistakes, mistakes which have caused a lot of suffering from my family. I accept full responsibility that my actions led to her death. I'm deeply sorry for my actions, but I can't change the past. However, I can change the future. I'll be seventy five years old when my thirty year sentence is up, and I hope, in prayer, I have a chance to spend what was left in my life with my sons and grandchildren.

By this time, Robert's three children were in their thirties.

I mean, he actually thought he was going to you know, that these appeals were going to work, but of course they didn't.

The judge resentenced Robert Marshall to life in prison, with the possibility of parole.

All three of them supported him until it was clear that he had some involvement, but the younger one supported him till his death.

And Robert Marshall was right about one thing. The people of Toms River did talk, and they talked about this case and the murder of Maria Marshall for years.

Yes, it had an impact on a lot of people. It's a case that's still talked about in town. I mean everybody was aware of every detail of it, and they still talk about it.

The alleged triggerman was Larry Thompson, who was acquitted, but his story doesn't end there. After being exonerated in the Marshall case, Larry Thompson was later convicted of armed robbery and the attempted murder of a Louisiana policeman that landed him a long prison sentence and a lot of time to think about his past.

In twenty fourteen, I get a phone call saying Larry wants to talk with you.

So, three decades after Lieutenant Jim Churchill had investigated Mria Marshall's murder, he gets on a plane and flies to Louisiana to visit Larry Thompson in prison.

Larry's waiting outside the Warden's office for me, and this is the first time I've talked to him ever.

The two sit face to face. That's when Lieutenant Churchill turned on his tape recorder and I.

Said, this is going to be short and sweet to fire those shots that killed Maria Marshall.

Yes, I did.

Those people testified to you, including your son, they were either mistaken or deliberate lions on your behalf.

Is that right?

Yes, Larry Thompson admitted that he fabricated his alibi and he killed Maria Marshall. But even with Larry's confession, double jeopardy laws prevented him from being retried. Regardless, it was the truth, something Lieutenant Churchill had never stopped looking for.

I did it mostly for Robbie.

Robbie Marshall was Robert and Maria's oldest son. He had always believed his father murdered his mother.

Robbie wasn't too happy with the fact that the man we charged with his mother's actual murder was found not guilty.

He thought that it was because we didn't do enough work on it.

With this information, Lieutenant Churchill got in touch with Robbie's brother, Chris.

And I called him.

I said, look, I got some closure for you here, So I told him, and he thanked me very much, and I said, do me a favor.

Call your brothers and tell them you know what I just told you.

And it was the last time he heard from any of the Marshall children.

The fact that there are three young boys who were left without a mother and then without a father, and it's amazing to me that they've done as well as they have.

The Marshall children would receive shocking news. In twenty fifteen, a year after Larry Thompson's confession, Robbie and his siblings were preparing for the possibility of their father getting out of prison. Robert Marshall was up for parole, and just before his parole hearing, Robert suffered a stroke and died. He was seventy five years old. For Lieutenant Churchill, he felt like the Marshall case was finally closed and that meant he could remove the photo of Maria that hung above his desk.

I took it off the bulletin board, put it back in a file and that's where it is among the nineteen file boxes.

In the archives.

It's been over forty years since Maria Marshall was killed along the Garden State Parkway, and nearly a decade since Robert Marshall died in prison, and this is still the one case that sticks with the lieutenant.

Not because it's the hardest case we ever had, but it's the one that's most memorable. I feel I know more about him and her and Larry Thompson and Nickinnon then they do some of my relatives.

And when he says him, he's referring to Robert Marshall.

And to have him do something like what he did, and he had every opportunity to get out of it, but he was so desperate, desperate to get out of debt, desperate to get out of the marriage, desperate.

To maintain his notor ride in the community. That trumped everything.

Next time, on American Homicide.

I was interviewing a judge and as I was walking out the door, he actually said, you know, there's one case that always bothered me.

Journalist Judy pet wrote extensively about one person in this story.

It sort of stunned me because sitting judges under New Jersey law are not allowed to discuss any case they've had.

I'm Sloan Glass. In a special bonus episode, we'll talk about Bobby Cumber, the man at the hardware store who passed messages between Robert Marshall and Billy Way McKinnon.

The Bobby Cumber angle was small. He was the little guy that nobody really paid attention to.

He was the person so few paid attention to. And yet the part of this case I think is worthy of so much more attention.

The way he was treated was criminal almost every step of the way.

That's next time on American Homicide. You can contact the American Homicide team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. American Homicide is hosted and written by me Sloan Glass and is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Todd Gantz. The series is also written and produced by Todd Gantz,