In 1882, a railroad spur was extended to Tulsa to serve the growing cattle business. Seven years later, when the city was incorporated on January 18, 1898, the population had grown from two hundred to eleven hundred settlers. By the 1900 census, it had increased by three hundred more people.
In 1901, oil was discovered a short distance from Tulsa, across the Arkansas River in a small area known as Red Fork. Although oil had been found decades before in other areas of what would later become Oklahoma, this discovery was “the first major commercial field developed in Indian Territory,” reports author Kenny Franks in his book, Oklahoma: The Land and Its People. Within a month, one thousand people had moved into the area. But it was the 1905 discovery of the large Glenn Pool oil reserve fourteen miles southwest of downtown Tulsa that changed everything for the city.
“It was Oklahoma’s first major oil field—and the richest field the world had yet seen,” wrote Norman Hyne in 2008. “Unlike the thick, sour oil from Spindletop, the famed 1901 Texas discovery that had already played out, this oil was light and sweet—just right to refine into gasoline and kerosene.
“The reservoir was shallow, less than 1,500 feet deep, well within the range of the cable tool drilling rigs of that day,” the professor of petroleum geology at the University of Tulsa continued. “It is said that more money was made on the Glenn Pool oil field than the California gold rush and Colorado silver rush combined.”
After this discovery, Tulsa became known as the “Oil Capital of the World,” and its population exploded. When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the population was 7,300. Three years later, it had grown to 18,182. “Tulsa became a mecca for oilmen such as Henry F. Sinclair, J. Paul Getty, William K. Skelly, and Waite Phillips,” Franks declared in his book.
More wells in the area were discovered, two refineries were built, and a major construction boom took place. By 1920, the population was 72,000. Men like Homer Wilcox, worth $20 million in 1922, more than a quarter of a billion dollars in today’s money, were not even in the top echelon and are all but forgotten today. Fourteen years later, the city’s population had doubled to 150,000. That kind of economic boom, exponential growth, and money attracted both good Christian folk and those untamed men who worked the oil fields—and a criminal element that followed them.
Tulsa developed a dual personality.
The Kennamer case was by no means Tulsa’s first taste of hysteria or mob behavior. On Memorial Day, May 31, 1921, a minor incident in a hotel elevator between a black shoe-shiner and a young, white, female elevator operator was misinterpreted and blown far out of proportion in an unfortunate series of escalating events that began as vigilante “justice” and led to sixteen hours of racial violence. The unrest then morphed into economic envy by whites who were jealous of the success achieved by blacks in their segregated but financially prosperous Greenwood District. When it was over, Greenwood, the wealthiest black community in the United States, which included “Black Wall Street,” was obliterated. More than twelve hundred black-owned residences spread out over thirty-five city blocks were destroyed, leaving ten thousand people homeless. The official number of black fatalities given at the time was thirty-nine, but that was the sanitized version. Later estimates place it closer to three hundred, and others go far higher.
Although it was an atrocity of historic proportions and without comparison in American history, vigilante justice by white Tulsans wasn’t limited to just blacks; they also murdered white men as well. A year before the race riot, nineteen-year-old Tom Owens, alias Roy Belton, was lynched by an armed mob that stormed the county courthouse after he shot and killed a popular taxicab driver during a botched robbery. The hot-tempered pack of revenge-seekers intimidated Sheriff Jim Wooley easily enough, and he surrendered his prisoner without resistance. Owens was then loaded into the victim’s own taxi, and during the nine-mile journey to a favored lynching tree outside of town, more than a hundred cars formed a death parade behind the taxi. Newspapers at the time estimated the crowd in attendance to be north of a thousand.
Many notable outlaws of the era called Tulsa home. The most famous criminals belonged to the Barker-Karpis gang, including Ma Barker herself. She and her son, Fred, would die in a shootout with FBI agents in Florida approximately one month after Kennamer’s preliminary hearing. Before they formed the Barker gang, many were members of Tulsa’s notorious Central Park Gang of the 1920s, which included Volney Davis and Harry Campbell.
“I can remember the principal of Longfellow told me at one time that there were more graduates of Longfellow grade school in Alcatraz Prison than any other elementary school in the United States,” recalled Tribune reporter, Bob Foreman, during a 1980 interview. Those graduates included Davis, Campbell, and Arthur “Doc” Barker.
Ruby Floyd, the wife of Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, lived in Tulsa, and her house was often under surveillance. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis’s ex-wife, Dorothy Slayman, was also from Tulsa and worked as a waitress at Bishop’s Waffle House. Other notable Tulsa crime figures of the day were bank robber Coney Coffey and local gangster Johnny Mayo.
Mayo was once part of the gang that participated in the infamous Osage Indian murders of 1920. His wife also worked at Bishop’s Waffle House—one of the most popular restaurants in Tulsa. The marriage took a left turn when he heard his wife was running around on him while he was a trustee at the Tulsa County Jail. For this and other reasons, Mayo stole a submachine gun and a pistol, locked up the night jailer, took the elevator to the first floor, walked out of the courthouse, and hailed a taxi to take him to the Drexel Hotel. When the night clerk refused to tell him what room his wife was in, he was persuaded to change his mind when Mayo shoved the Tommy gun in his face. Mayo grabbed the key, went up to the room, and caught his wife in flagrante delicto with her paramour. After considerable begging on their part, he eventually let them go.
The next day, Mayo called up World police reporter Walter Biscup, told him the whole story, and said he was on his way to Mexico. But it didn’t work out the way Mayo planned, and he was captured four days later.
Coming late in the year, the Kennamer-Gorrell case was notable in one of the decade’s most notable years for crime. First, Raymond Hamilton, who ran with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, was captured on April 25. One month later, the two outlaw lovers were ambushed and killed on a rural stretch of road in Louisiana. John Dillinger was also ambushed and shot to death on July 22 in Chicago. Then, Bruno Hauptmann was arrested on September 17, two years after the Lindbergh kidnapping, when federal investigators and state police got a break in the case.
Pretty Boy Floyd was the next to go, when he was killed in Ohio on October 22, followed by Baby Face Nelson, on November 27. Texas outlaw Irvin “Blackie” Thompson, who had robbed banks all over Oklahoma, was killed in a shootout on December 6. He had escaped from Texas death row that summer after fellow gang members on the outside bribed a guard to slip him and his partner, “Whitey” Walker, a gun. Whitey was shot and killed by a guard when he was halfway over the prison wall. Blackie was killed by officers in a hail of bullets near Amarillo. To cap off a historic year for the end of infamous criminals, the end came for the most sadistic killer in American history when New York City detectives announced they had arrested child killer and cannibal, Albert Fish. Most of the gruesome story he would later give to a psychiatrist was unprintable in newspapers.
THE MORAL CRUSADE TO SAVE the souls of Tulsa’s wayward youth continued after the preliminary hearing, with a two-pronged attack to remove the purveyors of evil influence and redirect their attention toward more wholesome activities supervised by adults. The front-line soldiers came from a cross-section of the most influential groups in Tulsa: city leaders, law enforcement, school officials, church pastors, the Parent Teachers Association, and the newspapers. The World didn’t just cover these efforts, they took the initiative by using an undercover reporter to produce an exposé on a fairly new problem—marijuana.
Under a grammatically con
fusing headline, “Thrill-Seeking Tulsa Youths Blamed for Marijuana Evils,” an unnamed World reporter went undercover to buy marijuana cigarettes with the intent to connect dope with “thrill-seeking youths” and the Kennamer case. But by the end of his story, the problem of marijuana use seemed to be more prevalent among adults than high school kids.
“It is the stimulant that builds a super-superiority complex and excites sex instinct. It is the stuff upon which hijackers whet their nerves for robbery and murder,” the writer boldly began. “It is the drug that feeds on brain cells and ultimately transforms human beings into raging maniacs.”
Ten years before, marijuana was completely unknown by Tulsans, the author reported. It first appeared on Tulsa streets around 1930, and had grown in popularity ever since. But as the writer quickly discovered, marijuana was hard to come by, thanks to the hysteria whipped up by the Gorrell murder.
“Events of the last two weeks—whether marijuana is involved with disclosures in the Kennamer case or not—have made the weed difficult for the novice to obtain, and peddlers who made from $6 to $10[22] a day have lost their aggressiveness [with] which they formerly plied their trade.”
The article carefully explained to the uninitiated what marijuana was (a fast-growing weed reaching heights of four to sixteen feet), where it came from (India to Mexico to the southwestern United States), where it was grown (some locally, but the higher quality coming from Mexico), who was selling it (“mostly Mexicans, some Negroes”), how it was being used (rolled into cigarettes or filtered to make tea), and how much it cost (three cigarettes for 25¢ before the Kennamer-Gorrell case erupted, but double that price by the time the reporter went undercover, or a tobacco can full enough to make sixty cigarettes for a median $4.75), and who had laws against it (states most affected by that time, which were only Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and there were no federal statutes). The problem was bad enough that the Tulsa police department had its own narcotics squad led by spectacle-and bow-tie-adorned Sgt. Francis McMillen.
When the reporter made the rounds of local peddlers to make his undercover purchases, he didn’t get quite the sensationalistic results promised from the headline. At his first stop, to allay the seller’s suspicion, the reporter was “forced to smoke part of it on the spot.”
Unfamiliar with this new buyer, other skittish dope dealers wouldn’t sell to him, or even admit they had any, and they sent him “from one place to another and in his rounds, [he] ended up at the source [where] he started.” At one dealer, he arrived too late because a local orchestra, which played for one of the many country-music dance halls in town, had bought up the entire supply.
With no connection in his story as yet made between marijuana and high school boys, he next went to Central High School and then the University of Tulsa, hoping to find stronger evidence of his premise. But it wasn’t there. Officials at both schools were proactively working against the problem. Staff members at the 4,300-student high school, along with undercover investigators who’d been brought in, had found no evidence of the weed being sold or used in the building. To familiarize themselves with its distinctive smell, relevant members of the school staff fired up a joint obtained from the narcotics squad.
Principal Eli Foster admitted he had heard stories of wild conduct by high school students but dismissed them as nonsense. With the exception of some peddlers being arrested near the high school that spring of 1934, the rumor mill had painted another false picture.
“I have run down any number of these stories, and they are all just about as ridiculous as the one that was circulated to the effect that anyone who wanted it could buy liquor on the third floor of the high school building,” Principal Foster told the reporter. “And I want to say, with some heat, that although I have heard any number of such stories I have yet to find anyone who can offer one iota of proof of those that have been circulated.”
At the University of Tulsa, a problem had existed there until the crackdown came that spring on peddlers dealing to high school students. After that, the dealers avoided the university, as well as any other school.
Undaunted by his inability to find direct evidence between dope peddlers and teenagers, the reporter ended his article with narcotics squad Sgt. Francis McMillen’s theory that “marijuana only became a problem when peddlers began to find a new market among young men.” Apparently, adults didn’t have a problem with it; they weren’t the ones overcome with sexual excitement and raging madness. Despite all the public interest with the Kennamer-Gorrell case, and the far-out rumors in its orbit, it all came back to an out-of-control youth and a writer who ended his story with an unproven hypothesis: “Young men and boys, looking for a new expression for modern youth hysteria—a new thrill—that, says the sergeant, is the big problem.”
The earlier campaign to drive marble machines away from schools met with success when operators, sensing public opinion was against them, voluntarily agreed to move them away. But the precursor to the pinball machine wasn’t the only demon that needed to be exorcised. More were named, and new battalions came forward to join the fight.
The county-wide Christian Endeavor League took direct aim at what one headline called “Tulsa’s Lax Morals.” The group led a meeting that began with a strong message: “We declare open warfare upon the vicious narcotic ring closing in upon the youth and the red coterie of bootleggers who are peddling hard liquor.”
The meeting, which included one hundred young people in attendance, adopted the slogan, “Make Tulsa Youth Christian,” and planned to print up and distribute ten thousand windshield stickers with the new message. They, like the World’s article on marijuana, connected their “war” with the Kennamer-Gorrell case. “We are alarmed at the lack of moral and spiritual sensibilities among the youth of our generation, as revealed in general by the common, every day observations and in particular by recent developments,” the group proclaimed in a new covenant.
Emboldened by their success at moving marble machines away from schools, the PTA focused next on: “Salacious magazines, gambling, marble machines (complete banning), firearms, and burlesque theaters and taverns.”
Their fixation on firearms had about as much to do with John Gorrell’s murder as it did with a campaign by the National PTA that year “to take murder out of the nursery” by banning toy guns. “We must do away with pernicious games of ‘cops and robbers,’” declared one officer of the organization. To accomplish this, the group sought pledges from schoolchildren to stop playing the make-believe game, and surrender their toy weapons peacefully.
As amusing as that might seem, it had ironic relevance for Tulsans in December of 1934, which saw a rash of headline-making deaths after Born’s suicide, one of which was caused by children playing with guns. Carl Pulliam, seventeen, was playing poker with sixteen-year-old Paul Lumary and three other boys in a vacant building the young gang frequented, when a quarrel erupted. Lumary started waving a pistol around. Claiming that he “didn’t know the pistol was loaded,” Lumary said the gun “accidentally” fired a bullet into Pulliam’s neck, mortally wounding him. Both he and Pulliam were on parole for a burglary conviction, and two of the other three young teenage boys were also parolees from juvenile court.
Other deaths, all coming within a few short days of each other, unsettled Tulsans. These included a farmer who died in a fight, the suicide of a prominent real estate man, the murder of a wealthy Claremore café owner by a twenty-year-old ex-convict, and the mysterious murder of Robert Sample, a forty-year-old, unemployed, department-store clerk, who was found face-down in a pool of water in an abandoned coal mine a few miles west of Tulsa. Rumors quickly tried to connect Sample’s death with the Kennamer case, but this was sharply denied by authorities, who discovered Sample had just recently moved to Tulsa from Texas to live with his sisters after losing his job. His murder was never solved.
Motivated by all the recent deaths caused by guns, Oscar Hoop proposed that city commissioners pass local gun registration laws, an
d he also drafted an ordinance himself for mandatory licensing of bicycles. The bicycle licenses, just like the gun registrations, would require fees, which seems to be what Hoop was really after.
“If such a plan can be financed, I will put on eight or ten additional men to stamp out both juvenile and adult crime,” Hoop told city leaders. But few in local government were listening to him by that time. He’d already lowered the salaries of many police officers when he divided them into three tiers based on an intelligence test, and that had made him very unpopular.
A month after he made the proposal to license guns and bicycles, Hoop’s desire to prevent local dance halls from serving beer was shot down when it was pointed out that beer licenses were governed by the state. He then reversed his proposal and asked city leaders to reject applicants who applied for dance hall permits while holding a state beer license. That idea was also quickly dismissed, despite his public temper tantrum during the meeting.
In spite of his failures, police were already cracking down on illegal gambling joints, as well as establishments that sold beer to minors. Densil West, proprietor of the Sunset Café in the heart of the Jelly Bean Center, was arrested for that same reason. He was given a sixty-day jail sentence and fined one hundred dollars for selling beer to kids under eighteen. Other highly publicized raids by police and deputies showed the crackdown was having the desired effect.
As eager as everyone was to wage war on perceived outlets of evil influence, a few also recognized that banning something wasn’t always the answer. On Thursday afternoon of December 20, a teen dance was held at Central High School for the first time in fourteen years.
Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland Page 12