Appalachian Figures
In eastern Kentucky political memory, few names draw as mixed a reaction as Leo A. Marcum. Born in a Martin County hollow before World War II, he rose from a poor rural background to serve in the United States Marine Corps, graduate near the top of his class at Morehead State and the University of Kentucky College of Law, win a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and hold the powerful office of Commonwealth’s Attorney in the Big Sandy region.
Yet his four decade legal career ended in felony convictions for failing to file state income tax returns and permanent disbarment by the Supreme Court of Kentucky.
Taken together, the obituary notices in small town papers, the long oral history he recorded in 1991, and the stack of disciplinary opinions that bear his name offer a full Appalachian life story. It is a story that runs from Caney and Warfield to Frankfort and Fayette Circuit Court, and finally to a quiet death in Mount Sterling in 2023.
From Caney To Warfield High School
According to his funeral home obituary, Leo A. Marcum was born in Caney, Kentucky, on August 10 1942, the son of Clyde Wilson and Wade’O Lee Pauley Allen. Caney is a tiny community in Martin County, part of the Tug Fork watershed where the borders of Kentucky and West Virginia crisscross the hills.
Marcum graduated from Warfield High School, the small mountain school that served families along the Tug Fork. The obituary remembers that he was recognized as one of the top high school students in the United States, a point of local pride that fit neatly with the region’s long tradition of celebrating scholars who came out of one room schools and isolated coal camps.
Family lineages in Martin County can be complicated, especially for a surname like Marcum that appears in multiple unrelated branches. In an oral history recorded with EKU, fellow attorney Homer Marcum went out of his way to note that he and Leo were “no kin,” a small detail that helps future researchers untangle which Marcum is which in the court records and campaign stories of the Big Sandy.
Marine Corps Service And The Road To Law
Like many young men of his generation, Marcum left the mountains first for military service. The Coffman Funeral Home obituary records that he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1960 and served until 1964. During that service he completed basic training at Parris Island, was posted to the Marine barracks at Eighth and I in Washington, and served in the Presidential Honor Guard during the Kennedy administration. A reunion page for the Eighth and I association later noted that “Leo Marcum” from those years went on to become an attorney in eastern Kentucky, reinforcing the connection between the young Marine and the older mountain lawyer.
The obituary notes that he was accepted into officer candidate school at age twenty but chose not to pursue a commission so that he could attend college. After his discharge he enrolled at Morehead State University, where he finished his undergraduate degree magna cum laude in three years. He then entered the University of Kentucky College of Law and graduated cum laude, participating in Moot Court and building the credentials that would help him into both law and politics.
In a 1991 oral history interview for the Kentucky Legislature Oral History Project, Marcum reflected at length on this trajectory, discussing his early life, his education, and his decision to return to eastern Kentucky rather than seek a career in a larger city. That recording preserves his own voice and perspective on how a boy from Caney ended up practicing law and legislating on behalf of the 97th District.
A Mountain Lawyer Takes Office
Marcum was admitted to the Kentucky bar on August 1 1971. Bar records in later disciplinary cases list his roster address as Lowmansville in Lawrence County, and by the 1970s he was practicing law in Inez, often in partnership with other local attorneys under the name McCoy, Marcum and Triplett.
His first elected office came a few years later. The Legislative Research Commission’s membership directory and the concise biography on Wikipedia agree that Marcum was elected as a Republican to the Kentucky House of Representatives from the 97th District, taking office on January 1 1978 and serving through the 1978 and 1979 sessions. He represented a district based in Martin County and surrounding Big Sandy counties and was both preceded and succeeded in the seat by Democrat W. D. “Doc” Blair.
Oral histories from Marcum’s contemporaries help flesh out what those bare dates mean. In an interview preserved by the Nunn Center, Keither Endicott Jr. explained the sequence from the local point of view. Doc Blair had long held the 97th District seat. Marcum defeated him in a Republican year, then chose not to run again, opening the path for Endicott’s own campaign. That pattern of short legislative stints followed by a return to local practice was common in Appalachian politics, where courthouse offices often mattered more than Frankfort seniority.
The House Journals for the 1978 and 1979 regular sessions record Marcum’s swearing in, committee assignments, and votes. Together with his 1991 oral history, they allow historians to trace how a mountain Republican approached issues like taxation, education, and coal during the late 1970s, a period when partisan alignments in eastern Kentucky were beginning to shift.
Commonwealth’s Attorney For The Twenty Fourth Judicial District
After leaving the House, Marcum continued to build his law practice and political network. By the late 1980s he had moved into one of the most powerful local offices in the region. Contemporary news coverage and later summaries agree that he served as Commonwealth’s Attorney for Kentucky’s Twenty Fourth Judicial District, which covered Johnson, Lawrence, and Martin counties, from 1987 to 2002.
The Commonwealth’s Attorney in a coalfield district functioned as both prosecutor and political figure. Trials that touched on drug trafficking, labor disputes, mine accidents, and public corruption all ran through his office. The Floyd County Times, which covered the wider Big Sandy region, repeatedly mentioned “Commonwealth’s Attorney Leo Marcum” in the 1990s in stories that ranged from routine court dockets to high profile cases and winter storms that disrupted the courts. Those local articles, scattered through the 1990 to 1998 run of the paper, show how frequently his name appeared in Big Sandy news.
At the same time he maintained a civil practice. In the 1988 Kentucky Court of Appeals case Moore v. Commonwealth Life Insurance Company, the caption lists “Leo A. Marcum, McCoy, Marcum & Triplett, Inez, Kentucky, for appellant,” placing him in the familiar role of local counsel representing an estate in a dispute with an insurance company. Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission decisions from the mid 1980s likewise list Marcum as counsel of record in mine safety cases, reflecting the intersection of coal, law, and politics in his career.
In these years Marcum stood as one of the more visible Republican lawyers in a region where party lines were beginning to blur. A local county history page from the 1990s, summarizing Floyd County “yesterdays,” simply notes him as Commonwealth’s Attorney for Martin, Johnson, and Lawrence counties, treating his presence in that role as a basic fact of the political landscape.
Discipline, Tax Charges, And Permanent Disbarment
The public record of Marcum’s career includes not only elections and trials but also an unusually long disciplinary history. The 2012 Supreme Court opinion that permanently disbarred him begins by listing no fewer than eight prior disciplinary events stretching back to 1992.
In 1992 the Court issued a public reprimand in Kentucky Bar Association v. Leo Marcum for a conflict of interest involving successive government and private employment, the modern equivalent of a violation of the rule on conflicts in former government lawyers. A second public reprimand followed in 2000 for failures of lawyer communication. Private admonitions in 2002 and 2005 addressed conflict of interest, false statements in a disciplinary matter, and problems with diligence, termination of representation, and responses to the bar.
By the late 2000s the sanctions had escalated. In 2009, in Kentucky Bar Association v. Leo Marcum, 292 S.W.3d 317, the Court suspended him from practice for 181 days for commingling client funds and dishonesty related to his escrow account. In 2010 another opinion and order, Kentucky Bar Association v. Marcum, 308 S.W.3d 200, imposed a one year suspension based on two files. In one he mishandled a personal injury case in Fayette Circuit Court, allowed it to be dismissed for lack of prosecution, and misrepresented the status of service on the defendant. In the other he recovered funds for clients, kept a portion for his fee, accepted a new engagement when they wanted to sue, then failed to file suit, failed to respond to their inquiries, and allowed his escrow account to drop below the amount owed.
A 2011 decision added a three year suspension, consecutive to the earlier ones, once again citing commingling and false statements in a disciplinary matter. By the time those sanctions were stacked together he was effectively out of practice while the courts and the Kentucky Bar Association continued to investigate.
The final turn came through the tax system rather than a bar complaint. In October 2010 the Kentucky Department of Revenue reported that “Leo A. Marcum of Lowmansville, Kentucky, former elected Commonwealth’s Attorney for Johnson, Lawrence, and Martin counties, was indicted on six felony counts of failure to file Kentucky individual income tax returns” for tax years 2004 through 2009, in Franklin Circuit Court case 10 CR 00220.
According to the Supreme Court’s 2012 opinion, Marcum pled guilty on June 23 2011 to six felony counts of failing to file Kentucky state income taxes for those years. On February 9 2012 Franklin Circuit Court entered judgment and sentenced him to three years in prison. He did not respond to the resulting bar complaint, and the case proceeded by default.
Given that felony record and his extensive disciplinary history, the Board of Governors of the Kentucky Bar Association unanimously recommended permanent disbarment. The Supreme Court agreed and ordered that “Respondent Leo Marcum is hereby permanently disbarred from the practice of law in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.” The order was entered on September 20 2012. In later years, reference works such as Wikipedia placed him in the category of “Disbarred American lawyers,” a reminder that his national reputation rests on the ending of his career as much as on his earlier offices.
Death and Local Memory
Marcum spent his later years in Mount Sterling in Montgomery County. The Coffman Funeral Home obituary notes that he died at home there on January 8 2023 at age eighty, surrounded by family. It emphasizes his achievements and public service. The text highlights his service in the Marine Corps and Presidential Honor Guard, his academic honors at Morehead State and the University of Kentucky, his forty years of legal practice, and his time as a State Representative and Commonwealth’s Attorney, without dwelling on the disciplinary cases that closed his career.
A shorter obituary in the Mountain Citizen, the local paper for Martin County and the Tug Valley region, framed him as “formerly of Martin County” and focused on his ties to the community. That language matches a common pattern in Appalachian obituaries, where the hometown identity of someone who has moved away is preserved even after decades in another county.
Online reference sites now list him under both “People from Martin County, Kentucky” and “People from Mount Sterling, Kentucky,” reflecting the two places that claim him. Taken together, the obituaries, oral histories, court opinions, and legislative records show a man who rose high in local politics, shaped the administration of justice in the Big Sandy for a generation, and then lost his license and freedom over tax crimes and mishandled client funds.
An Appalachian Life In The Records
For Appalachian historians, Marcum’s story is not only about one lawyer. It points to several larger themes. His path from a remote Martin County community to the Marine Corps, then to Morehead and Lexington, mirrors the educational mobility that many mountain families sought in the mid twentieth century. His brief turn in the Kentucky House captures the way local leaders often used a short stint in Frankfort to build stature back home rather than to pursue long term legislative careers.
His tenure as Commonwealth’s Attorney shows how important that office was in coalfield politics. Local newspapers portrayed him as a constant presence in the courthouse, both as a prosecutor and later as defense counsel. Whether in civil suits against insurance companies or in coal related regulatory cases, he stood at the intersection of law, industry, and politics in the Big Sandy.
Finally, his extensive disciplinary record and disbarment underscore the ways professional regulation reshaped the legal culture of rural Kentucky in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The Kentucky Bar Association’s opinions, especially those from 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, document how financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and failures to communicate with clients were increasingly treated as serious ethical violations rather than informal local matters.
The Kentucky Legislature Oral History Project interview with Marcum, along with the companion interviews with Homer Marcum and Keither Endicott Jr., lets researchers hear how the people involved understood those changes. They talk about elections that turned on coal jobs and highway funding, about the personal networks that mattered more than party labels, and about the pressures that faced a Commonwealth’s Attorney trying to satisfy both voters and clients.
In the end, Marcum’s life offers a reminder that Appalachian political figures rarely fit simple categories of hero or villain. The same man who stood in the Presidential Honor Guard at Eighth and I and graduated near the top of his law school class later stood before a Franklin Circuit Court judge to plead guilty to six felonies. The records of his life, scattered from Frankfort to Fayette County to Mount Sterling, invite us to study not only his failings but also the mountain communities that made and remembered him.
Sources And Further Reading
Kentucky Legislature Oral History Project, “Interview with Leo Marcum,” October 19 1991, Kentucky Oral History Commission, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. Long first person account of his early life, education, legal career, and brief legislative service.
Eastern Kentucky University Oral History Center, interview with Homer Marcum. Includes references to “Leo Marcum,” described as an attorney and former representative, and clarifies that the two Marcum families are unrelated.
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, interview with Keither Endicott Jr., February 1 1992. Discusses the succession in the 97th House District from W. D. Blair to Leo Marcum and then to Endicott.
Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, Kentucky General Assembly Membership 1900 to 2005, Informational Bulletin 175A and 175B. Confirms Marcum’s service as Republican representative for the 97th District during the 1978 and 1979 sessions. Kentucky Legislature
Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, regular sessions of 1978 and 1979. Records his swearing in, committee assignments, and legislative votes.
Coffman Funeral Home and Crematory, “Corporal Leo A. Marcum,” obituary, January 8 2023. Provides birth date and place, parents’ names, education, Marine Corps service, and a summary of his legal and political career. Coffman Funeral Home+1
Mountain Citizen (Martin County and Tug Valley), “Corporal Leo A. Marcum Obituary,” January 11 2023. Local obituary emphasizing his roots in Martin County and service to the region.
Kentucky Department of Revenue, “Department of Revenue 2010 Cases,” entry for “Leo A. Marcum of Lowmansville, Kentucky,” noting his indictment on six felony counts of failure to file Kentucky individual income tax returns for tax years 2004 through 2009, Franklin Circuit Court No. 10 CR 00220. Department of Revenue
Supreme Court of Kentucky, Kentucky Bar Association v. Leo Marcum, 2012 SC 000411 KB, opinion and order of permanent disbarment, entered September 20 2012. Summarizes his June 23 2011 guilty plea to six felony counts of failing to file state income taxes, his three year prison sentence, and his prior disciplinary history. Justia
Supreme Court of Kentucky, Kentucky Bar Association v. Marcum, 308 S.W.3d 200 (2010). Details misconduct in the Pauley and Mullins matters, including mishandled litigation and misuse of client funds, and imposes a one year suspension. vLex
Earlier disciplinary opinions involving Marcum, including Kentucky Bar Association v. Leo Marcum, 830 S.W.2d 389 (Ky. 1992), 28 S.W.3d 861 (Ky. 2000), 292 S.W.3d 317 (Ky. 2009), and 336 S.W.3d 95 (Ky. 2011), as summarized in the 2012 disbarment order. Justia
Floyd County Times (Floyd County Public Library digital archive), issues from 1973 and the 1990s that reference Marcum as adviser to draft registrants, Commonwealth’s Attorney, or counsel in prominent cases.
Moore v. Commonwealth Life Insurance Company, 759 S.W.2d 598 (Ky. Ct. App. 1988), listing “Leo A. Marcum, McCoy, Marcum & Triplett, Inez, Ky., for appellant” as counsel of record.
Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, decisions from the mid 1980s listing Leo A. Marcum of McCoy, Marcum & Triplett as counsel in mine safety cases.
Beth Musgrave, “Former legislator suspended from practicing law for three years,” Lexington Herald Leader, April 22 2011, and “Former state lawmaker pleads not guilty to tax evasion,” Lexington Herald Leader, March 12 2011. Statewide coverage that synthesizes his legislative and prosecutorial service with the unfolding tax case. Kentucky
“Floyd County Yesterdays – 1990s,” KyKinfolk county history page, noting Marcum as Commonwealth’s Attorney for Martin, Johnson, and Lawrence counties.
Wikipedia contributors, “Leo Marcum,” and related category pages “People from Martin County, Kentucky,” “People from Mount Sterling, Kentucky,” “Republican Party members of the Kentucky House of Representatives,” and “Disbarred American lawyers.” Concise modern summary of his career and its sources. Wikipedia+4Wikipedia+4Wikipedia+4
8th & I Reunion Association, “Historical Events of the 1960s,” which notes former Presidential Honor Guard member Leo Marcum and connects his Marine Corps service to his later legal career in eastern Kentucky. 8thandi.com