‘All the King’s Men’ Couldn’t Put Murdering John Markel and His Family Back Together Again

by Mike Roche

On November 16, 1987, during a dark and stormy night, (and no, this is not the bad opening sentence to a mystery novel) John Markle, a Little Rock commodities investor, called his attorney, Richard Lawrence, and told him that he had done something terrible and to come to his house. The storm had crippled the telephone infrastructure and Lawrence was unable to obtain police assistance. After not getting an answer at the door of the Markle residence, Lawrence flagged down a police officer at a nearby Safeway.

The officer accompanied Lawrence and entered the darkened home. The officer discovered Markle’s body in his study of the Victorian style mansion. Using two firearms, John Markle had fired them simultaneously committing suicide. A blood splattered Halloween mask and suicide note were found nearby.

The officer searched the rest of the mansion and found the bodies of Markle’s daughters, Amy Michelle, 13, and Suzanne Marie, 9, together in Amy’s second-floor bedroom. The body of Christine Markle, 45, was found in the master suite that occupied the entire third floor of the house. All had been shot multiple times while sleeping.

John Markle had sedated his family with Elavil, an anti-depressant. He and his wife also had marijuana and valium in their blood system. He donned a Halloween mask, so that in the event his children woke up, they would not see the killer was their father. The suicide note read, “11/16/87 at 2:30 a.m. Let it hereby be stated as true that I, John L. Markle, murdered my wife, and two children, Amy and Suzanne, and then committed suicide myself. My wife had no knowledge or part in this. I think the evidence shall so prove.” Markle signed the note.

In the hallway next to the study was a black briefcase with a note to Lawrence. The briefcase contained: two letters to Lawrence, a long letter to Markle’s mother, $6,400 in cash, a $5,000 cashier’s check, a spiral notebook, a handwritten will and personal papers.

In the VCR was the movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street. The mansion was located on Main Street in Little Rock, a few blocks away from the Governor’s residence, where at the time, Bill and Hillary Clinton slept. What could have brought about such horrors behind the facade of such a beautiful home?

John Lawrence Markle was the son of Mercedes McCambrige, the Academy Award winning best supporting actress for her performance in All the King’s Men, which was also named “best picture” of 1949. She also won a Tony for her Broadway performance in Follies. McCambridge was also the demonic voice in The Exorcist.

John was born on Christmas Day, 1941, in Hollywood. His mother was at the time a 23-year-old radio actress, and her husband was writer William Fifield. When John was 8, his parents divorced and his mother remarried Fletcher Markle, a film director who adopted John.

Markle attained a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA and was hired as a commodities trader for the Stephens Brother’s Investment firm. Stephens Inc. is one of the largest privately owned investment banks in the country. The Markle family was lured to Little Rock in 1979 by the brothers, where John became the firm’s economist and one-man futures-trading department. He also handled a corporate house account for the firm’s founders, Jack and Witt Stephens.

An eccentric individual, Markle was known for his odd behavior. He was often described as being temperamental, rude and socially inept. He had a reputation for wearing purple shoes and was never without a leather Harley Davidson motorcycle cap while conducting trading. After the killings, the police investigation learned that Markle routinely cashed three or four checks totaling $600-$1,000 a week. “Where this cash was spent would be purely speculative,” the detective wrote in the final case report. His eccentric behavior was ignored in light of his performance in generating at least $3 million dollars in trading profits during his first few years with Stephens.

John operated with minimal oversight while personally managing the house account for the two Stephens brothers. When Markle placed a trade with the Chicago commodities brokerage firm, they would often delay assignment of the trade to an account until trading activity had slowed down later in the day. At this point, he would know if the trade was profitable or had lost money. He had also opened an account in his mother’s name and began assigning winning trades to his mother’s account and losing trades to the Stephens brothers’ account.

The Stephens house account lost $5.2 million during the time that Markle was controlling the activity. In the first 10 months of 1987, the house account lost more than $1.3 million dollars. Despite his horrendous performance with the Stephens account, his success rate with his mother’s account was an astounding 91.7 percent. His scheme came to light by accident. When one of the Chicago traders moved to another company, Markle began moving his business to the new company. The new company sent a duplicate accounting of the McCambridge account to the Stephens compliance office. When the compliance officer began reviewing the account history, he learned of the duplicity.

Markle was confronted about the fraud. He initially denied the accusation, but finally admitted to the wrongdoing. He was relieved of his position and given an ultimatum to pay back the money or they would turn him over to the authorities. On November 13, Warren Stephens demanded $1 million in restitution. Markle agreed to the proposal, but he requested 30 additional days to come up with the money. He was fired on Friday the 13th of November. He lamented in his diary over the damage to his family, “None of these people deserve me. I have put all of their futures in jeopardy. My relationship with my mother has been destroyed. I fear I have placed my family at considerable financial risk, i.e., I am broke and they my children have no inheritance left because of my action. Christine says I have put my family last and I have.”

Desperate for help, he went to his mother for a financial bailout. She refused his request telling him that she had provided money to him to invest in savings accounts for her grandchildren’s education and not to trade in hi-risk commodities. He would have to face the music on his own. In his 12-page letter addressed to his mother, the first page of the letter referred to the killings, and was apparently written after his mother rejected his plea for help. “But NO, you refused. So, you didn’t do it and you played hang-up for a week with me and now Stephens is made [sic] at me, and you, and so a deal that would have cost you nothing has now changed in a very different way. I wished you’d never done a lot of the things you did. Night mother. “ “… You were never around much when I needed you, so now my whole family are dead — so you can have the money — funny how things work out isn’t [it]??”

The second page began with a confession to the financial fraud. “Guilty: John Markle traded your account on an undisclosed discretionary basis. I added funds to your account; I added losses to the Stephens account.” He continued listing in chronological order various perceived insults at the hands of his mother. Those included that he was conceived to save a failing marriage, his parents’ divorce, alcohol infused fights with other celebrities, witnessing failed suicide attempts, her ruining innumerable family gatherings, and not helping during times of family crisis. He claimed to have called her daily for 26 years and used boyhood earnings to buy her gifts. “What was I trying to buy?” he wrote. Many of the sections ended with the underlined words, “Thanks for all your help.”

The motive for John Markle’s decision to kill his family was rooted in a suicide of a friend. Markle had a close acquaintance who had committed suicide the previous year. The friend’s widow was so distraught over the loss that Markle hired an individual to look after her and provide companionship to the widow during her period of grief. Markle was deeply affected by the trauma to the widow. As a result, in an effort to spare his own family the agony and humiliation of not only a suicide but the publicity of his crime, he decided to kill his entire family.

Markle was caught in the negative emotional vortex and his desperation is not hard to understand. After being an esteemed economist and trader, he was facing humiliation as an embezzler. His identity was stripped from him by his own acts. He would never obtain another job in the financial arena. He had been rejected by his employer and his mother. The taking of the lives of his family could not have been anticipated and his two daughters were denied any opportunity to build their own lives from the wreckage of their father’s.

Please click here to view Mike Roche’s previous posts:

The Grisly Details of Serial “Mall Killer” Mike DeBardeleben’s Actions Will Never Be Known

Family Annihilator Darin Campbell Murders His Family and Torches Lavish Tampa Mansion

Alex Hribal Was Desperate and Said He Wanted Someone to Kill Him

Columbia Mall Shooter Darion Aguilar Followed the Model of Notorious Mass Murderers

Peter Lanza Speaks: The Lethal and Unvarnished Truth about His Son Adam

FHP Officer Jimmy Fulford Fields Pipe Bomb Intended for Young Mother with His Bare Hands and Dies Instantly

Fire Department and California Highway Patrol Go 9 Rounds: Win, Lose or Draw?

The Boston Bombers: A Tale of Two Troubled Brothers

Don’t Text at the Movies, The Life You Lose May Be Your Own!

Killers and the Catcher in the Rye

Mike Roche has over three decades of law enforcement experience. He began his career with the Little Rock Police Department, and spent twenty-two years with the U.S. Secret Service. The last fifteen years of his career were focused on conducting behavioral threat assessments of those threatening to engage in targeted violence. He is the author of three novels and two nonfiction works on mass murder and also rapport building. Retired, Mike is currently a security consultant at Protective Threat LLC, and an adjunct instructor at Saint Leo University. He resides in Florida with his family.