Marshals ended its season finale with a simple card for Leonard “Lenny” E. Hancock Jr., a tribute that landed after the credits and named the prop master the show lost in December. The message read, “In Loving Memory of Leonard “Lenny” E. Hancock Jr.”
Hancock died in the Lake Havasu neighborhood of Arizona in a crash involving an off-road UTV, leaving behind a wide circle of colleagues who had already gathered for a memorial earlier this year on CBS’s Radford Lot. Sherill Watts, who set up a GoFundMe page after the accident, said, “Losing Lenny has been heartbreaking. He touched so many people, and the outpouring of stories and love says everything about who he was. He showed up fully for his work, for his friends, and for the community we share.”
The tribute gave a public ending to a loss that had already been felt behind the scenes for months. Hancock was not just a name in the credits. He shaped the look of Marshals as prop master on the CBS Yellowstone spinoff, and he brought years of experience from S.W.A.T, CSI: New York, Transformers and Jarhead to the job.
That work showed up in the details. In a “Power of Props” social video tied to CBS’s Making of Marshals series, Hancock said he used the right vests, drag bags and color choices to help the audience tell the characters apart and make the show feel true to life. “One of the things that I care about a lot when I do a show is that it’s really accurate, like on this show, the police vest they wear, that is what the Marshals wear,” he said. He added that “Cal and Kayce being ex-SEALs, I used the drag bags that they would have used at that time, little things that people at home who know will pick up on.”
He also explained the look of the characters in practical terms, saying, “Cal, being that he was in the dirt a long time, he loves his tan, his coyote, so all of his stuff is coyote,” while “Belle is a cowgirl, so we put her in green,” and “Then we get down to Andrea, and she’s from DC, so she came out of the metro area, and they generally wear all black.” Hancock said the point was to give each character “their own individual backstory without actually telling anybody the backstory.”
In the same video, he described the scale and pressure of the work with the line, “It’s a 48 foot trailer of dreams, and hopefully you have what they dreamed of.” He also said, “There’s no way you can really learn this in a book,” and, “No one can really tell you how it’s done,” before adding, “I still can’t even explain to my parents what I do.”
Marshals stars Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton and is produced by Paramount Television Studios and 101 Studios. The finale card did more than mark a death. It confirmed that a man who helped build the show’s world left his fingerprints on season 1 right through the last frame.
