Jane P. Marshall: The First NPS Policewoman Shot in the Line of Duty

Jane P. Marshall was born in Oldham, Kentucky, in 1949. Her family moved often, and she grew up partly in Michigan, Maryland and New York. She entered Elmira College in New York in 1967 and, though not much interested in school, finished a liberal arts degree because she knew it would help her career.

Lieutenant Jane P. Marshall, about 1986. U.S. Park Police photo

From the Mall to the Peace Corps and back

Marshall's National Park Service career began not with the police but at an information kiosk on the National Mall, where she worked two summers in the late 1960s. Women in those jobs were nicknamed "kiosk cuties," and she wore the 1962 women's uniform of green skirt, white blouse and a hat she likened to a dead banana.

In June 1971 she joined the Peace Corps and went to Senegal to help start a library and teach nutrition, sewing and knitting, though she ended up working mostly as a midwife. When her brother died in spring 1972 she came home. She meant to go back but stayed in Washington, D.C., and returned to the Park Service on the National Mall, now in the tan 1970 women's uniform — whose double-knit slacks were so cold at the Washington Monument in winter that she wore her own brown ones instead.

A reluctant recruit

Two U.S. Park Police (USPP) officers who guarded the Washington Monument became her friends. They had trained alongside Paulette Dabbs and Judy Schuster, the first women in USPP uniform, and they kept urging Marshall to join. She ignored them, and refused to fill out the application they brought — so they filled it out themselves, got her to sign it, and drove her to her test and interview. Her parents, she recalled, just rolled their eyes; she had long been the family's black sheep. She joined the Park Police on April 15, 1973, meeting the height and weight standards still in force then, and after "rookie school" started on foot patrol at the Central Substation in Washington.

She tried other assignments. Her lieutenant sent her to the Communications Section for a couple of months to see whether a woman could be a good dispatcher; she proved she could, but disliked it. A stint editing in the Planning Section lasted about two weeks before she got herself back outside. Once she had enough seniority she was given a police wagon, transporting arrested people for all the substations in Maryland, Virginia and D.C. — her favorite assignment to that point.

May 21, 1975

It was the first day warm enough for short sleeves. Marshall was writing tickets near the tennis courts downtown when she heard a motorcycle officer, Ronald Blankenship, call in about a man with a flat tire near the Jefferson Memorial. Curious that he was out while the other motor officers were at dinner, she drove over and pulled in behind him.

Blankenship ran the car's plate and found many unpaid parking tickets. As he asked the two men inside for identification, Marshall covered the driver's side. One man took a pistol from the glove box and shot Blankenship in the stomach, then turned and shot her. One bullet passed through her right forearm, nicking a nerve, and through the right side of her chest, just grazing her liver. Another shattered her left hand and lodged in the battery of the radio she was holding, badly damaging two fingers.

Wounded, Marshall used the motorcycle radio to call for help, reported which way the attackers had fled, and helped bring in the medical helicopter — directing, as she remembered it, helicopters, bus drivers and taxi drivers alike. Both officers survived. The men, who had just robbed a pharmacy in a stolen car, were caught in Chicago and Miami and tried in Washington; one was convicted of wounding Blankenship but found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity in the shooting of Marshall. Marshall, the first NPS policewoman shot in the line of duty, received a special achievement award in 1976.

Recovery

She spent only three or four days in the hospital, but could not use either arm for six months. Two fingers on her left hand had to be reattached, and she lost feeling in three fingers of her right hand. While the gunmen were at large she had round-the-clock protection, and for months the motorcycle officers — and, when they could not, some of their wives — looked after her, since she lived alone and could not use her hands. The one thing they would not do was take her back to the Jefferson Memorial, so she had a friend take her.

Desperate to get back to work, she taught herself to write again and persuaded her doctor to clear her for a job with no physical contact with the public. By November 1975 she was back in the Communications Section.

Training officer, sergeant, lieutenant

A month later she was sent to Georgia as a training officer. Still a private, she acted as "mother hen" to recruits and, after her supervisor retired, as acting captain without extra pay. After training three 24-week classes, she returned to Washington around June 1977 — and was assigned a first foot beat at the Jefferson Memorial, by mistake. She found it hilarious; her supervisor was appalled. She then walked a beat at Hains Point for three years.

In April 1980 she was promoted to sergeant, to her own surprise, having not studied for the exam and having arrived at her interview five hours late and drenched after a serious accident on her route. The promotion took her to Gateway National Recreation Area, where she worked street patrol, and about a year and a half later to chief sergeant — a desk job she did not want, covering everything from relief officer and training officer to timekeeping and communications.

In January 1983 she moved to San Francisco, a posting she had wanted for years, and walked a beat as a sergeant. It was, she said, an unpleasant place to be a woman: she had just one woman on her squad, and peers and supervisors were dismissive, perhaps because she was the only sergeant who had not risen through the ranks there. Some officers even told Golden Gate park rangers not to listen to her.

On October 12, 1986, Marshall became a lieutenant — only the second woman to hold that rank — and returned to Washington as a field commander in the Patrol Branch. By 1991 she was a training officer in the Services Section. She retired in 1994 after 21½ years of service.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Jane P. Marshall" (series on women in the NPS uniform): https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/jane-p-marshall.htm
• The NPS article draws on Marshall's 1986 oral history interview (Polly Kaufman Collection, NPS History Collection, Harpers Ferry Center) and histories of the U.S. Park Police and of women in federal law enforcement. Her recollections are paraphrased here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.