Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland

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Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland Page 10

by Morrow, Jason Lucky


  Their names were wisely left out of the newspapers.

  Returning to the extortion plot that was on everyone’s mind, a reporter asked the chain-smoking prisoner, “Why did you show the extortion note to so many people?”

  “I had no reason to fear anything in the case. When I heard of the plot last September, I set out to stop it. I went about it carefully and when I had obtained the written note from Gorrell, I had the evidence to show of the plot and didn’t care who knew it,” Kennamer said.

  He was then asked about why he told Robert Thomas he had killed Gorrell. “Thomas thought I was joking,” Kennamer replied. “I didn’t offer to show the body. Thomas asked to see it. I told him I had to kill Gorrell, that it was too bad, but that it was his life or mine and that the trouble was over the extortion note.”

  Kennamer then told of how Tommy Taylor had given him a ride home and that the next morning he went to his father’s farm in Chelsea to hunt quail. Saturday morning, he got back on the train to return to Tulsa to see his attorney, “and make a clean breast of the whole thing.”

  With humor, he recalled how he accidentally ran into Richard Oliver.

  “I got on the train and walked to the front of the smoker car. I sat down and then decided to move further back in the car. I looked at the other passengers and noticed the man, later known to be Oliver, and thought he looked familiar,” Kennamer said as he held back his laughter. “His eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of his head!”

  He couldn’t hold it in anymore and paused to laugh, with the reporters joining in. “I—I started to ask him if he was going the wrong direction for the insane asylum! I looked at him closely and he covered his face with his hands.”

  Despite the poor boy’s being scared out of his mind, the reporters were laughing with Kennamer. The World reminded its readers of Oliver’s first words to police that morning. “Protect me! The killer is on this train and is trying to kill me!”

  Kennamer continued laughing and remarked, “That is just another strange coincidence in this case.” The other strange coincidence Kennamer acknowledged was Homer Junior, Bill Padon, and their dates shooting out the streetlights near the crime scene.

  The day before Kennamer gave his version of the truth to reporters, the World published a story which quoted the anonymous police official. Since the start of the investigation, the World had quoted only two people with the Tulsa Police Department when it came to their coverage of the investigation: Police Chief Carr and Sgt. Maddux. Within their December 12 story, the same unnamed police official hinted that the photos and negatives, which had never been connected with the case but were the subject of city-wide gossip, “probably will be produced at trial.” For Tulsans—and scandal-hungry tabloids nationwide—this was another explosive angle to the case. With all the other problems their children had supposedly gotten themselves into, now there were naked pictures of them doing things they weren’t supposed to do until they got married.

  “Do you know, for a fact, that the negatives and photographs figuring in street rumors in connection with the Gorrell slaying exist?” the police official was asked.

  “I can’t deny that they do exist,” the police official answered, in a puzzling reply.

  “Will they be introduced during the preliminary hearing?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. If the state finds it necessary to introduce them, I believe they will be available.”

  “Do you have them?”

  “No.”

  “Are they in possession of Dr. Gorrell?”

  “I can’t say, I don’t know.”

  Exasperated with getting nowhere, the reporter finally asked this anonymous source, “Where are they?”

  “I understand that they are in a safety deposit vault in a certain downtown bank,” the police official said.

  In the paragraphs that came directly before that exchange, the newspaper is quoting Sgt. Maddux. Later on in the story, Sgt. Maddux is the next person quoted. If Sgt. Maddux came before and after the unnamed police official, it wasn’t hard for many to know who it was.

  Including Phil Kennamer.

  When the subject of marijuana and dirty pictures came up, Kennamer unleashed a verbal broadside at Sgt. Maddux.

  “The efforts of Mr. Maddux to conceal the facts of this case are little short of criminal,” Kennamer began. “He has consistently hinted at the existence of salacious pictures involving girls of prominent families, when he knew that no such pictures existed, in order to perfect the pattern of the case he has attempted to build around me. He has considered it necessary to vilify and slander the name of Sidney Born and others.

  “I’m morally certain Gorrell had no such photographs. I know I did not. If anyone has them, they acquired them by the process known as super-imposition.”

  When reporters challenged Sgt. Maddux about the photographs the next day, he denied knowing anything about them and added that, as far as he was concerned, the investigation was over.

  As for the rumored drug use that was going on around town, Kennamer denied that he or any of his friends used drugs and asserted that “narcotics entered in the case in no way.”

  But when pressed for why Born might have been murdered, according to his version, Kennamer answered that he was convinced that someone representing himself to speak for Phil Kennamer telephoned Born on Sunday morning and made a date for Born to meet at the spot where he was fatally wounded. When Born went to the drugstore to try to telephone Kennamer, he was attempting to verify the message. Unable to do so, Born went to the meeting and was shot in the head by one of the three boys from Gorrell’s “gang,” who then staged the scene to look like a suicide.

  However, Josey Henderson told police the family only received one telephone call that morning, and it was for her, which made Kennamer’s story impossible.

  The interview came to a halt when it was time to serve Kennamer his evening meal. In his own mind, he had just talked himself out of a murder trial. In spite of the sanctimonious confidence he had in his performance, some of his answers actually seemed plausible. And the prosecution had a major hurdle with the fact that Gorrell was killed with his own gun. Kennamer didn’t go to the meeting armed with a weapon; Gorrell did. And if Kennamer didn’t go to the meeting armed, it would be hard to prove premeditation. Coupled with the possibility that Gorrell may have actually written the note, Kennamer’s lawyers had a good defense.

  Judging by all the crazy stories being told around town, Tulsans, it seemed, were capable of believing anything. And if they believed even half of his story, that could give a jury enough reasonable doubt to let him go free.

  When the judge’s son went to bed that night, he was confident he’d done the right thing. He had told the truth, and the truth would exonerate him. Everyone would read his side of the story in tomorrow’s newspaper, and perhaps they would even let him go free after Monday’s preliminary hearing. In his mind, Phil Kennamer had just won his own case.

  Chapter Eleven

  PHIL KENNAMER MAY HAVE JUST blown his own case. When Flint Moss read his client’s story the next morning, he got sick, went home, and didn’t get out of bed for two days. One of his assistants told reporters he was resting from “a nervous condition.”

  The fifty-four-year-old attorney liked to play his cards close to his chest. He didn’t want prosecutors to know about his defense until the trial. At the preliminary hearing scheduled for Monday, he had no plans to call any defense witnesses, or to put on any defense at all, for that matter. Doing so would have shown Anderson and King which cards he intended to play at trial. But now, his client had given away almost everything. The prosecution would be adequately prepared to counterattack valid arguments the defense wanted to preserve for the trial.

  In thirty-four years of practicing law, Moss had never had a client quite like Phil Kennamer. Judge Kennamer shared in his frustration, but he’d also grown accustomed to his son’s impulsive behavior. After a long talk with the boy, Judge Ken
namer had a long talk with Sheriff Price.

  “Judge Kennamer conferred with Sheriff Price yesterday [Thursday, December 13] and requested that his son not be permitted any visitors unless they were approved by him or the youth’s attorneys,” the World reported the day after the story was published. “Kennamer told the sheriff that since his son was a minor, he would exercise his privilege as a father and not permit the boy visitors unless they are sanctioned. The sheriff agreed to the request.”

  In other words, he couldn’t trust his son to keep his mouth shut.

  Local excitement about Monday’s preliminary hearing soared exponentially over the weekend. Newspapers gave their readers in-depth speculation on the strategies of both sides as if it were a sporting match. The lineup of players was announced and dissected. Both the World and Tribune listed all of the nearly two dozen state witnesses and reminded their readers of the role each had played in the events leading to the moment.

  For the prosecution, County Attorney Anderson would lead while his assistant, Tom Wallace, would provide backup. Wallace was much older than Anderson and had far more experience in the courtroom trying murder cases. State Attorney General J. Berry King was invited into the case as a special prosecutor, and his involvement sent a powerful message.

  “The state is in this case to give vigorous assistance to local authorities,” King declared to reporters on Saturday. “It should be understood that the state is primarily interested in seeing that criminal laws are enforced, and it is not interested in idle rumors and the talk of common gossip.”

  What King was alluding to was a startling new development that came from Sgt. Maddux, who had informed his superiors he was offered $25,000 to “drop certain phases of his investigation.” It was also insinuated that Maddux might receive bodily harm if he didn’t do so. Maddux was careful not to reveal the source of the bribe, but declared it was made to him while he was away from Tulsa interviewing another blind-alley witness. When Chief Carr and Police Commissioner Hoop were asked about the bribe, they neither confirmed nor denied it. King would not elaborate on his statement, and Maddux himself would say very little except to note that a record of his investigation and evidence of the bribe had been locked away in a safe deposit box.

  It was a peculiar claim by Maddux, one that would take on a life of its own in the months ahead. Its peculiarity dwelt in the notion that a bribe to drop certain phases of the investigation, as he said it was, was even possible. It had seemingly come way too late. The entire case was heavily reported on in newspapers throughout the country. The cat was already out of the bag. How could Sgt. Maddux be expected to put a screaming, clawing cat back in the bag without arousing suspicions?

  It was an inflammatory accusation that, if true, made the Kennamer family look suspect and could negatively influence the jury pool. But Maddux wasn’t the only one throwing mud at the Kennamer defense. Colonel Hoop, with more verbal ambiguity, softly intimated to both Tulsa newspapers that he was also in physical danger from the same men who had tried to bribe Maddux. When asked about both the bribe and the implied threats, he gave reporters an evasive answer that only seemed to confirm the rumor.

  “I can’t say as to that,” he told them.

  There was more to the story, but Tulsa would have to wait to hear it all. For now, it was just the latest in a long line of sensational proclamations from authorities. The day before, J. Berry King had succumbed to the trend when he told a United Press reporter, “The real facts in the Gorrell slaying case have never yet been permitted to come to light. The trial of Philip Kennamer will prove a series of sensations undisclosed at present.”

  There were more sensations? His careless comment seemed to confirm that the wild rumors flying around town might actually be true.

  Ruth Sheldon, a feature writer for the Tribune declared, “. . . he set tongues wagging again in Tulsa.” The public, already keyed up and on edge, were vulnerable to that kind of tantalizing statement. When the Oklahoma Attorney General said there was more to the case, folks believed him. King, like many other officials involved in the case, was fueling the machine that drove public excitement and jeopardized Kennamer’s chances for a fair trial.

  And Flint Moss was taking note of it.

  Despite all the hype and preparation, the task before the state on Monday was simple. They only had to show Court of Common Pleas Judge Bradford Williams three things: that Gorrell was slain on the night of November 29, that a crime was committed, and that there was probable cause to believe that Phil Kennamer had committed that crime. If the judge ruled in the prosecution’s favor, Kennamer would be bound over, and his murder trial would be set for the January term of district court. Due to an idiosyncrasy in the law at that time, it was unlikely that he would be allowed bail.

  At first, Anderson said he would only put on a prima facie case—just enough to have Kennamer bound over. Later on, he seemed to waffle on this strategy out of concern that many of the state’s witnesses were in hiding and could disappear completely before the trial date. If he called them in at Monday’s hearing, their testimony would be on the record, which could then be used at the trial.

  Over-excited from a nonstop assault of rumors and revelations, many hoped the preliminary hearing could give Tulsans the answers to all their questions. Who gave Kennamer a ride to the Owl Tavern after he murdered Gorrell? Was it Sidney Born? And who was Born’s killer, and will his death affect the prosecution? What role did marijuana play in all this? Will the extortion note be presented? Did Gorrell really write it? Where are the salacious pictures of Tulsa debutantes, and who was in them? Is Wade Thomas the leader of a criminal gang of rich kids? Why did Floyd Huff serve three sentences in prison? Is he a marijuana smuggler? What was that Wilcox boy really up to that night? And the marble machines—what about the marble machines?

  Veteran Tribune editor Harmon Phillips played into the public’s demand for answers when he raised their expectations in the lead paragraph of a front-page story published the afternoon before the December 17 hearing. “The hysterical theories and fantastic rumors which have swept the city the past two weeks in connection with the deaths of John Gorrell, Jr., and Sidney Born, will be reduced to reality Monday when Phil Kennamer, 19, sits in a courtroom to hear the state, for the first time officially, reveal the facts upon which it prosecutes him for the murder of Gorrell.”

  However, further down in that same article, Harmon hedged against his over-promise in the lead when he wrote, “The preliminary trial may prove sensational or it may assume the plane of simple formality.”

  Floyd Huff, the state’s star witness, arrived Saturday, and reporters were cautioned not to interview him or ask questions. Prosecutors were taking no chances in the final hours. After a one-hour meeting with the nervous man, Anderson said they were merely “brushing up on his testimony.”

  A big deal was made in the papers about how Born’s statement to police—that he gave Kennamer a ride to meet with Gorrell—could not be used at trial. It was an observation used to introduce the fact that witness statements given at the hearing could be used later at trial “should any state witness die a natural death, disappear, commit suicide or be murdered.” As intimated by Anderson earlier, this was a true concern of many.

  In anticipation of an insanity defense hinted at by Moss, Anderson requested that Dr. Felix Adams, superintendent of the Northeastern Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane in Vinita, be in attendance to observe the defendant. “At this time, Doctor Adams will begin his official observation of Kennamer to offset any defense plan [to plead insanity] at the subsequent trial,” the World reported early Monday morning.

  The psychiatrist rumored to be snagged by the defense was one of the biggest names in his field at the time, Dr. Karl Menninger of Wichita, Kansas. Menninger’s book, The Human Mind, published four years earlier, had made him and the Menninger Clinic famous. For the next few decades, he enjoyed a successful secondary career as an expert witness for defense attorneys with clients facing th
e death penalty. He was their go-to psychiatrist when they needed to have a client declared insane, and Karl Menninger declared nearly all of them “insane.” During a 1951 competency hearing of a spree-killer in federal court in Oklahoma City, evidence was produced that Menninger had been a long-term but secret member of a national anti-death-penalty group.

  Accurately gauging the public’s interest in the case, Judge Williams moved the preliminary hearing from his relatively small courtroom to the more accommodating courtroom of a district court judge. A large crowd was anticipated. In their Monday morning issue, released before the hearing began, the World accurately revealed what was in store for that day.

  “Indications that a throng will pack the courtroom and overflow in the corridors were seen yesterday with continuous demands upon officials for seats. Throughout the day, county and city officials were besieged at their homes with telephone calls from hundreds of friends and acquaintances desirous of getting in the courtroom. No official who has been even remotely mentioned in connection with the Gorrell-Kennamer case escaped the avalanche of calls.”

  In spite of the city-wide excitement, Anderson and King were cautioning Tulsans that there was likely to be no sensational testimony or other developments during the hearing. It was a statement that showed Anderson had finally decided to put forth only the minimum necessary to have Kennamer held for trial.

  “The public apparently does not understand the significance of a preliminary hearing trial, which is meant only to present sufficient evidence and testimony to justify the holding of the defendant for jury trial,” King explained to both World and Tribune readers. But nobody was listening, and King’s own relatives in Tulsa reported they were flooded with telephone inquiries from those hoping to get seats via their connection with the attorney general.

  In addition to the four regular bailiffs, six deputies were called in that morning to “herd the human horde.” Despite the nine o’clock starting time, a large mob was already present when the courthouse opened at 6:45 that morning. Forty-five minutes later, the normally spacious Division Two courtroom on the second floor was packed with hundreds of seated and standing spectators. Several hundred more who were too late to get inside massed together in the second-floor corridors, flowed down a wide stairwell with two wings, and spilled out all over the first-floor lobby, in a line that kept on going out the front door. Outside, more people gathered around the large granite steps and along the sidewalk. Anyone with regular business at the courthouse that morning discovered it was impossible to park a car within a reasonable distance.

 

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