Last updated: July 23, 2022
Article
Jane P. Marshall
Jane P. Marshall was born in Oldham, Kentucky, in 1949. When she was a child, her family was often on the move. She spent time living in Michigan, Maryland, and New York. She continued her education at Elmira College in New York in 1967. She wasn’t very interested in school but knew it would be beneficial to a career. She graduated with a liberal arts degree.
Marshall’s National Park Service (NPS) career didn’t begin with the US Park Police (USPP). She first worked for two summers at an information kiosk on the National Mall in the late 1960s. Women working in those positions at the time were nicknamed "kiosk cuties." Marshall wore the 1962 women’s uniform consisting of a green skirt, white blouse, and hat she described as “looking like a dead banana.”
Marshall joined the Peace Corps in June 1971. She was sent to Senegal to help establish a library and teach nutrition, sewing, and knitting, but she worked primarily as a midwife. In spring 1972 she returned home after her brother died. Although she had intended to return to Senegal, she stayed in Washington, DC. She went back to the NPS looking for a job and was hired to work on the National Mall. Returning to the NPS, Marshall wore the tan 1970 women’s uniform dress and pantsuit. She recalled, “Wearing the double-knit slacks at the Washington Monument in the winter was not warm so I wore my own brown slacks.”
She became friends with two USPP officers who provided security at the Washington Monument. These men were in the same training class as Paulette Dabbs and Judy Schuster, the first USPP women to wear a uniform. They pushed Marshall to join the USPP, but she ignored them. They brought her an application—which she refused to complete. In the end, they filled it out for her, and she reluctantly signed it. They also drove her to and from the testing center and her interview. When she told her family that she had applied, her parents just rolled their eyes because Marshall “had been the black sheep for a long time.” Despite their disbelief, Marshall joined the USPP on April 15, 1973. She met the height and weight standards still in force at the time that she applied. After completing “rookie school,” Marshall was assigned to the Central Substation in Washington, DC. Like other new officers, she started with foot patrol.
She also took on other assignments. Her lieutenant asked her to go transfer to the Communications Section for a couple months; he wanted to see if a woman could make a good dispatch officer. In a 1986 oral history, Marshall recalled that she wasn’t fazed. “So, I went in and sure enough, I could do it.” However, she didn’t enjoy it and was happy to transfer out at the end of the assignment. Next, she was placed in the Planning Section as an editor, but she wasn’t passionate about that work either and “managed to get out of there” in about two weeks and “got back outside where I wanted to be.” Soon she had enough seniority to get assigned to a police wagon, in charge of transporting arrested peoples for all the substations in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. She called that duty assignment her favorite in her career up to that point.
In the interview, Marshall also recounted the events of May 21, 1975. “I remember it was the first warm day of that year that we were able to wear short-sleeved shirts. I got assigned to a car. I was on a primary beat downtown at the time. We’d finished rush hour. I was merely writing tickets down by the tennis courts. I heard one of the motor men—the guys who ride a motorcycle—go out with some guy with a flat tire by the Jefferson Memorial. After rush hour was finished all the motorcycle guys went to dinner at the same time, together. I thought, ‘That’s strange. I wonder what he’s doing out.’ I was just being nosy. So, I rode around there. I just took my time. He [Ronald Blankenship] was sitting there with this car with a flat tire. I pulled up behind him.”
Blankenship ran the car’s license plate, and it came back with many unpaid parking tickets. Marshall provided backup on the driver’s side of the car while Blankenship stood at the passenger’s door. He asked the two men for identification. One man pulled a pistol from the glove box and shot Blankenship “dead center in the belly with his 45-automatic and turns around and gets me.” One bullet pierced her right forearm and went through the right side of her chest. Marshall recalled, “I got hauled off in a helicopter…The bullet went through the rib cage, under the sternum, just nicked the liver on the way by, and came back out through the rib cage.” A bullet pierced her right forearm. “It didn’t break any bones but nicked a nerve for the right side of my hand.” Another shot shattered her left hand and lodged in the battery of the radio she was holding. “I got two fingers demolished. They’re put back together now but the ring finger and the middle finger got zapped." Blankenship also survived his injuries.
Although injured, Marshall called for help using the motorcycle radio, reported the direction of the assailants’ escape, and assisted in landing the medical helicopter. In her oral history she recalls that she “just took charge. I mean, I was directing helicopters and all sort of people, bus drivers and taxicab drivers, telling them what to do.”
It turned out that the men had just robbed a pharmacy and were driving a stolen car. The suspects were eventually caught in Chicago and Miami and stood trial in Washington, DC. Michael Kleinbart was found guilty of wounding Blankenship and other charges but was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity in the shooting of Marshall. In 1976 Marshall was awarded a special achievement award for her heroic actions. She was the first NPS policewoman to be shot in the line of duty.
While she was only in the hospital for three or four days, her injuries prevented her from using both arms for six months. Two fingers had to be reattached to her left hand, and she had lost feeling in her middle, ring, and pinky fingers on her right hand. After leaving the hospital she had 24-hour protection while the men were on the loose. The men on the motorcycle patrol continued to support her (or "babysit," as Marshall called it) for months because she lived alone and couldn't use either of her hands. She recalled that when the men weren't available, some of their wives volunteered to stay with her. There was one thing that the officers wouldn't do, however; they refused to take her back to the Jefferson Memorial. She thought, “These guys are a bunch of wimps.” Undeterred she asked a girlfriend to take her and return to the scene.
Marshall recalled that she was desperate to return to work. “I finally begged my way back to work. I finally was able to use my right hand, learned how to write, do all of these things you take for granted, and convinced the doctor that I could go back to work. But he said only if it was someplace that I had no physical contact with the public” to protect her healing fingers. By November 1975 she was back in the Communications Section.
She was only there a month before she was transferred to Georgia as a training officer. Although still ranked as a private, she functioned as “mother hen” to the recruits and acting captain (without additional pay) following retirement of her supervisor. After training three 24-week classes, she returned to Washington, DC, around June 1977. For her first foot beat, she was assigned to the Jefferson Memorial, the site of her shooting. She thought it was funny and called her supervisor to compliment him on the joke; it turned out he had mistakenly assigned her the route. “I thought it was a scream. He was appalled.” She worked a beat for three more years at Hains Point in Washington, DC.
After three years, she was promoted to sergeant in April 1980. She recalled being surprised at the promotion as she had not studied for her exam. “I do things on a lark. I just figured what I knew, I knew.” She was convinced that she’d failed her interview after a serious accident on her route caused her to show up five hours late—and soaking wet because it was raining. “I went in there and I was soaking wet, I was just soaked to the gills. Every time I moved water went everywhere.”
The promotion got her out of Washington, DC, when she transferred to Gateway National Recreation Area, where Valerie Fernandes also worked. She worked street patrol rather than the beach. About one and a half years later she became chief sergeant, a promotion she didn’t want as it took her off the streets and into an office with a normal schedule. Her duties ranged from relief officer, training officer, detail clerk, assistant timekeeper, and in charge of communications. “You name it, I did it.”
She was relieved to be transferred out of the position in January 1983 and moved to San Francisco, a posting she’d been interested in for years. In California, Sergeant Marshall walked a beat instead of sitting behind the desk, and she preferred it that way. Unfortunately, she noted, “It’s an unpleasant place to be as a female.” Marshall only had one woman on her squad. She described her peers and supervisors as very dismissive of her, which she attributed to the fact that she was the only sergeant that hadn’t come up from within the ranks at the San Francisco Field Office. Some USPP officers even told park rangers at Golden Gate, “Don’t listen to what she says, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
On October 12, 1986, Marshall was promoted to lieutenant, only the second woman to have that rank. She chose to transfer back to Washington, DC. She became field commander in the Patrol Branch. By 1991 she was a training officer in the Services Section. Marshall retired in 1994 after 21.5 years of service.
Sources:
Ancestry.com. Kentucky, U.S., Birth Index, 1911-1999 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2006.
Internal Revenue Service. (1992). Women in Federal law enforcement. University of Michigan Library.
Mackintosh, B. (n.d.). National Park Service: History of U.S. Park Police. National Park Service. Retrieved May 20, 2022, from https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/police/police6.htm
Marshall, Jane interview. (1986, April 20). Polly Kaufman Collection. NPS History Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.
WIFLE Committee. (n.d.). Interagency Committee on Women in Federal Law Enforcement [Press release]. https://wifle.org/resources/1991-ICWIFLE/pdf/4-5.pdf
Explore More!
To learn more about Women and the NPS Uniform, visit Dressing the Part: A Portfolio of Women's History in the NPS.
This research was made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.