The letter pertained to a large parcel of land south of town, near the present industrial park. It was written in an oblique style, but from it I inferred that Marston had used a secret intermediary to buy this parcel of land. Thus, while Marston was not legally the owner, he controlled the parcel’s future use and would receive all monies from such use, without anyone but the intermediary knowing about it. A related letter—this one from one Zebulon Hickson, the owner of several carpet factories in Georgia and Alabama—expressed interest in purchasing this land for use as a site for a new factory. Hickson also expressed concern about labor conditions in Adams County. He was aware that Natchez had long been a “union” town, but what concerned him more was the “wave of racial unrest” sweeping through Southern factories. This was clearly a euphemism for “nigger trouble.” What made all this interesting was that the letters had changed hands in January 1968, a few months before Del Payton died. The situation was oddly similar to the present one, in which Leo Marston owns the land BASF needs to have adequate space for its projected facility.

On Saturday night, things began to turn our way. I had requested Marston’s telephone records, but with the trial only a week away, I had little hope of getting them. Technically, phone records can be had at the touch of a computer key, but the phone company is a hidebound bureaucracy, and in actuality it can take weeks to get them. I’d put in a call to a Bell South executive in Jackson, who promised to try to expedite the process, and apparently he did. A local Bell South technician arrived Saturday night with a manila envelope containing Marston’s phone records, logging all calls beginning the day before Caitlin’s “libelous” article ran.

I hurried to Caitlin’s office, and we pored over the printouts together. On the day the article ran, there was a call from Marston’s law office to a number in Washington, D.C., at 1:45 P.M. Caitlin quickly confirmed this number as the main switchboard at the Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI. The call lasted eighteen minutes. One hour later Marston’s office had received a call from D.C., this one from a different number, which turned out to be John Portman’s office in the Hoover Building. In all, six calls passed between Marston’s office and the Hoover Building that day, and several more had since. We could now prove that a link existed between Leo Marston and the director of the FBI, who had worked the Del Payton murder as a field agent in 1968, when Marston was district attorney. And while we could not know what was said during those calls, their timing indicated that they were almost certainly related to the Payton case.