Scandal in Texas (Contd.)

In a Houston high-school auditorium, 350 depositors in Texas' U.S. Trust & Guaranty met in an angry mood last week. They were gathered to discuss ways to get back the savings they lost when Albert Benton Shoemake brought U.S. Trust down into bankruptcy (TIME, Dec. 26). In the middle of the meeting, a speaker interrupted with a surprise announcement: Insurance Man Shoemake had just shot himself. Bitterly, some of the audience broke into vengeful applause.

Shoemake, 59, was discovered by a neighbor who rang a doorbell of the palatial Shoemake home in Waco to find out why the insurance man had not kept a dinner date. Shoemake staggered to the door, his body streaming with blood, a bullet hole through his head. The green carpet of his bedroom was soaked with blood, which trailed into the kitchen, where the gas jets of a stove had been opened. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital, still alive but incoherent.

Alone in the house for several hours before the shooting, Shoemake wrote two suicide notes. To his wife he said: "The only thing I have done wrong is to try to build a business. As you know, I have no money to defend myself, and I cannot go on embarrassing you day by day." In another, unaddressed note he said simply: "Call the justice of the peace."

Texans learned that Shoemake had taken out a $1,000,000 policy on his life in May 1954 with Los Angeles' Occidental Life Insurance Co.; U.S. Trust & Guaranty was named the beneficiary. But the depositors he bilked saw little hope that they would benefit from the million-dollar policy. The exact conditions of the policy are still to be settled legally, but chances are that it will be automatically cancelled in case of a suicide verdict.

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