“I directed Maddux to submit this statement to me in writing,” Hoop continued, “and I have filed his written statement with my own affidavit in a safe deposit box. In case of an ‘accident,’ these papers and others relating to the case in question will be sufficient for the police to place in custody the persons involved, although the case is not yet complete.”
But it is what Hoop said next that was most intriguing to reporters and commissioners, and if the newspapers knew what it was, they didn’t dare report on it.
“A few days later, letters and papers alleging misconduct by Maddux in another part of the country some years before were turned over to me by Mayor Penney,” Hoop said. “It is evident that every effort will be made to discredit this officer and secure his removal from further participation in the work in which he is now engaged. These facts are submitted to you so you may be fully informed in case further efforts are made to prejudice the commission against Maddux, and also as a distinct warning to others of our purpose.”
And there it was. Maddux’s past had come back to haunt him. In 1924 he was employed as a deputy state game warden in northern Texas. That was the year the twenty-five-year-old began a love affair with Annabelle Barker, a twenty-three-year-old divorcée from Elk City, Oklahoma. In late August, the two lovebirds embarked on a romantic getaway that took them through southeastern Oklahoma and down to the Texas Panhandle. While in Elk City, the happy couple told Annabelle’s sister they were going to Shamrock, Texas.
But there was just one problem Annabelle didn’t know about. Henry Bailess Maddux had a wife and three young children in Decatur, Texas. During her husband’s romantic escapade, his wife Clara got word of the affair, left town on Wednesday, September 3, and traveled to Elk City to confront her husband’s mistress. When she arrived, she spoke with Annabelle’s sister, who told her the couple had already left for Shamrock. Furious, twenty-six-year-old Clara bought a .32-caliber, hammerless pistol before leaving town. But when she got to Shamrock, she was told that her husband and his female companion had driven farther south to Childress.
Clara rented a car and drove from Shamrock fifty-seven miles southwest to Memphis, Texas, where she boarded a train that took her the last thirty-one miles to Childress.
After walking two blocks from the railroad station down Second Street, Clara saw her husband leaning against his car, reading a letter in front of the Nave Hotel. Sitting in the passenger’s seat was his mistress. Neither one of them saw her coming.
Recognizing the woman from a photograph she had obtained, Clara walked up to the driver’s-side window, pointed the pistol at her husband’s mistress, and shot her twice at point-blank range. The first bullet entered Annabelle’s left temple and came out two inches behind her right ear. The second entered her body from the left and tore through her heart. Maddux acted fast and ripped the pistol out of his wife’s grip before she could take another shot. He then carried his unsuspecting lover into the hotel. She died without saying a word or even knowing why it had happened.
Clara was quickly arrested but was released the next day on a $2,000 bond paid by family and friends who came to her aid. The Childress County prosecutor had Maddux arrested and charged with violation of the Mann Act, which made it a federal crime to cross state lines with “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”
He was certainly guilty of that, and Maddux was immediately fired from his job. The outcome of the charge against him is unclear. His soon-to-be ex-wife went on trial in late January 1925, and after three days of testimony and twenty-two minutes of deliberation, she was acquitted of murder. To escape the mess he’d left, the former Marine Corps private moved to Colorado, where he joined the National Guard and was promoted to captain. Later, he attended Northwestern University, where he studied criminology for two years. He then took a job as an assistant criminologist in Phoenix, before he was hired in January 1934 by Hoop, who made it his mission to hire intelligent new officers. While living in Tulsa, the 1935 city directory indicates he was married to a woman named Eleanor. His three children remained with their mother, who eventually remarried.
Maddux had apparently left that whole wife-killing-his-mistress business out of the hiring process, because it was news to both Mayor Penney and Hoop when it reached them ten years later. In spite of this, Hoop was still standing by his man. For now.
WHEN KENNAMER WAS BOUND OVER for trial in district court, his case was assigned to Judge Thurman Hurst. Then as now, rural Pawnee County was included with Tulsa County to make up the Twenty-First District Court of Oklahoma.[26] Hurst was born in Cassville, Missouri, in 1889 and moved to Oklahoma in 1892 with his parents, who later settled on a farm five miles south of Pawnee, the seat of Pawnee County. After high school, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma’s law school in 1909, graduated in 1911, and was admitted to the bar in 1912, without having to finish the bar exam due to a state supreme court decision which came while he and other students were in the middle of taking the test. Halfway through the exam, the announcement was made, and every student in the room got up and walked out.
After receiving his license to practice law, Hurst worked both in private practice and as a county attorney. He was elected district judge for Pawnee County in 1930 and was just beginning his second term in January 1935.
Judge Hurst was small-statured, and it appeared to others as if his black robe had swallowed him. He had a reputation for being fair and honest, but also stern, and he was held in high esteem by his colleagues and by attorneys who tried cases before him.
“Around the courthouse,” the Tribune reported, “you will learn that Judge Hurst gets all the ‘dirty work.’ By that, they mean, that because he lives in Pawnee, he tries almost all the cases involving Tulsa governmental questions and important business interests.”
Tasked with hearing cases both in Tulsa County and in the new $125,000 courthouse recently completed in Pawnee, Judge Hurst spent a lot of his time traveling the nearly sixty miles each way. He was often late to arrive for his own hearings and proceedings in Tulsa.
And so it was on January 5, when he arrived forty minutes late for an arraignment of thirty-nine prisoners, which included Kennamer and five other accused murderers. Once again, “a record throng of spectators [was] in the courtroom, all straining for a sight of the prisoner and principal in Tulsa’s most startling slaying,” the World reported. Two large officers had to push and shove onlookers aside so Judge Hurst could make his way into his own courtroom. While the thirty-eight other prisoners were all marched in and out together, Kennamer was escorted in by himself.
Dr. Gorrell was there, as he had been in every proceeding, a guardian of justice for his murdered son. No one from Kennamer’s family attended his second arraignment. Reporters noted that he appeared more “pallid” and stoic, and had lost that cocksure attitude displayed previously. By looking at him, those in attendance could tell he was a special case; he was the only one wearing a clean, newly pressed suit. A small white tissue with a spot of red revealed that he had just shaved prior to coming to court.
In spite of rumors published the day before that Kennamer would plead guilty and seek an insanity hearing, he was sticking to his story, not his attorneys. He wasn’t guilty of anything—it was self-defense.
As the other defendants remained, two guards escorted him out of the courtroom and back up to his quarters. Later that day, his court date was announced by Anderson. Phil Kennamer would go on trial for the murder of John Gorrell on Monday, January 28. Moss had three weeks left to prepare for a case made more difficult by his inability to reach Phil’s friends who didn’t want to talk to his legal team.
He wasn’t prepared.
Chapter Fourteen
BY LATE DECEMBER AND EARLY January, Tulsa’s high-profile murder case was just starting to get traction in newspapers around the world. Four days before Christmas, the Tribune received an urgent teletype from the head offices of the Internatio
nal News Services.
“ANYTHING NEW LATEST TULSA SHOOTING? EUROPEAN CABLES PRESSING.”
Newspapers in Australia, England, Germany, and France were reporting on the case, some of them emphasizing the more titillating aspects to their readers, as well as getting many of the simplest facts wrong or inventing new ones. One Australian newspaper, which came to the story late, titled their article, “Sinister Orgy.” But this was not just any kind of orgy Tulsa youth were involved in, the paper reported, but a “Bacchanalian Orgy.”
In Flemington, New Jersey, Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s trial got underway on January 3, 1935, and would last until February 13. Newspapers across the country, including the World and the Tribune, devoted hundreds of column inches each day to the story, with trial coverage that quoted participants, comparable to an official trial transcript. Very little was left out, and readers soaked it up. Everywhere but Tulsa, the Phil Kennamer story was pushed into the background. If his was Tulsa’s “most sensational case in more than a decade,” then the Hauptmann trial was being deemed America’s “Trial of the Century.”
The gossip and rumors never went away, and the murder was still a topic of conversation in homes and barber shops, in taxicabs and rotary club meetings. Although the story had lost its initial fervor, everyone had an opinion and freely expressed it when asked. The secondary narrative of wild, out-of-control, rich kids was slowly melting away locally but continued to be played up nationally by the likes of International News Service and King Features, which published sensational stories that hinted at unmentionable goings-on, with a wink-wink from writers crafting a story that met with modesty standards for 1935.
All of the social events and hanging out after movies for members of the Hy-Hat Club and their contemporaries came to a crashing halt after Born committed suicide. An Associated Press article dated January 16 summed up the situation best.
Tulsa—In casual meetings and through the sittings of social and other clubs, hundreds of questions fly to and fro, causing dissension and enmity in some but testifying to the nervousness that remains, particularly in the wealthy south side, where the principals and most of the witnesses live.
Out at Eighteenth Street and Boston Avenue, known as the “Jelly Bean Center” for years, the youths no longer gather in the evenings. The Quaker Drug Store closes early. Uniformed waitresses no longer answer yodeling horns on the automobiles of sons and daughters of the wealthy, parked at the curb before, after and between movie performances and dances. Tulsa’s sons and daughters are staying pretty close to home.
Next door at the Owl Tavern, the lights stay on fairly late, but the customers are few and they do not linger around the beer bar and the cigar counter as of old. And a block away, the Sunset Café feeds a few customers, and then is barred for the night.
Those places swarmed with youngsters two months ago.
It was a similar story when the new sheriff, Garland Marrs, grabbed some deputies and raided all the nightclubs on “Roadhouse Row.” Before taking office, he had publicly announced that he was giving all roadhouse operators a “fair chance to get within the law before arrests were made.” They took his advice. The gambling tables were put in storage, the liquor hidden, and the dancing girls, some of them advertised as wearing only cellophane, were sent home.
The moral crusade had been a success.
It was true that most of Tulsa’s young society set were keeping a low profile. Their parents were anxious to keep the family name out of what they saw as a corrosive scandal. To support his defense strategy that Kennamer was insane, Moss wanted to gather up all the wacky stories on the boy that he could. To do this, he had to talk to all the young people that knew him.
“There must be anywhere from thirty to fifty in the younger set who can testify about Kennamer’s actions, some of the crazy things that fellow did, but they won’t come in. They say, ‘See my attorney,’” Moss told the Associated Press. “And some of those lawyers won’t let them talk to me. They don’t want their names mixed up in a murder case.”
This blockade led Moss to hint that he was not prepared for trial, and he might be forced to request a postponement. His tactic to reach them had been simple; he hired key witness Robert Thomas as his ambassador to persuade his contemporaries to come in. “I wanted Robert to bring in the young folks to help build up the defense case,” Moss said. Even though he was paid four dollars a day, Thomas wasn’t very successful in finding anyone who wanted to come to Kennamer’s defense. Whether they liked him or hated him, Phil was poison.
Although Moss couldn’t gather as much anecdotal evidence as he sought, he did get what he wanted from two psychiatrists. During that second week of January, they sat down with Kennamer and interviewed him over several sessions. Doctor Karl Menninger was able to make it in and out of town with hardly anyone knowing he’d been there. But his opinion of Kennamer found its way into newspapers, where he was quoted as saying that Kennamer was “legally insane.” However, “legally insane” wasn’t necessarily a medical diagnosis. The terminology Dr. Menninger would use to describe Kennamer’s mental affliction would have to wait until the trial.
But Oklahoma City psychiatrist and Kennamer family friend, Dr. Eugen Werner, was not shy about expressing his medical opinion. Judge Kennamer personally requested he examine his son. After several interviews with Phil that took place that same week, Dr. Werner shed some light on the thinking process of John Gorrell Jr’s killer.
“He thinks he is right and everyone else is wrong and has it in for him. . . . Under the definition that a man is demented unless he knows right from wrong, Phil is legally insane. He thinks he is right and everyone else is wrong,” Werner told reporters.
Something seemed to have changed in the prosecution’s attitude immediately after the defense psychiatrists’ opinions were published. When County Attorney Holly Anderson read the AP story, he scoffed and grunted. “A very interesting hypothesis,” he said of Dr. Werner’s judgment. “We will show that there is no legal or medical basis for such a finding.”
He might have been feeling outgunned. Moss was a gifted attorney with more than thirty years of experience. He knew all the tricks of both the prosecution and defense, having worked both sides. He was a powerful presence in the local legal community and had successfully defended several high-profile murder defendants. In a 1979 interview, former court reporter Sadie Gelfand described him as a gentleman who walked tall and proud. During a difficult part of any case he was involved in, he had a peculiar habit he employed to irritate his adversaries.
“He had some coins in his pocket and [would] jiggle them,” Gelfand recalled. “He’d sit at the counsel table and play with the coins. That was a trademark of his. I guess he did it more to confuse than anything else.”
In a one-on-one contest in the courtroom, Anderson was no match for Moss. Anderson was a politician, not a trial lawyer. After serving as mayor of nearby Sand Springs for six years, he ran for and was elected county attorney, always a two-year term in Oklahoma during those days. He had just begun his second term that January. During his first term, he reportedly left the bulk of all trial cases to his assistants, who had far more criminal courtroom experience than he did.
But it was never going to come down to just those two men. Each side had assembled their own dream team of courtroom brawlers. Anderson’s chief assistant was old veteran Tom Wallace, an attorney with thirty years of experience, seventeen of them in the CA’s office. By his estimate, he had tried more than one hundred murder cases, more than any other lawyer for either side. He’d gone up against Moss in a murder trial before and beat him. Wallace had secured one of the few death sentences in Tulsa courts up to that time when he sent James Hargus to the chair for killing a city detective, and he’d also sent Arthur “Doc” Barker to prison for life for killing a hospital security guard in 1922, only to see him paroled ten years later.
Anderson was undoubtedly grateful to have former state Attorney General J. Berry King on board. Although
he was a lawyer turned politician, and the state’s top prosecutor for five years, he was a force to be reckoned with as special prosecutor.
However, even with Wallace and King, the prosecution was still outmatched. Assisting Moss, with an even bigger legal reputation than his, or King’s, or Wallace’s, was Charles Stuart, with fifty-six years of practicing law. From 1893 to 1895, Stuart served as a federal judge for Indian Territory.
But the defense team didn’t stop there. It also included Judge Kennamer’s old law partner, Charles Coakley, who had four decades of legal experience, and Herman Young, with nearly twenty years of experience working both sides of the courtroom.
Anderson was likely cognizant of the fact that the integrity of courtroom justice in his time was questionable. Juries were different too, often taking a direct middle road, judging fairly but also sometimes leaning toward the defendant in many instances, depending on the crime. They often viewed them as misguided men who had stumbled accidentally into crime and were worthy of forgiveness and a second chance. And when it came to female defendants, acquittals were notoriously common, even when there was no reasonable doubt. If they were convicted, their sentences were exceptionally light.
It was also the era of long sentences by stern judges and early releases enabled by parole brokers who negotiated paroles, pardons, and clemency under often-corrupt circumstances. By December 28, a few weeks before he left office, Governor William Murray’s clemency count was more than 2,400 criminals, which included 372 murderers, 324 robbers, and 813 liquor violators.[27] The Tulsa World, a Republican-leaning newspaper at the time, was keeping track.
Aware of all this, and possibly intimidated by the defense team and the boy’s father, Anderson launched a misguided attack against Moss with a public accusation of witness tampering. After a conference with King, Anderson told newspaper reporters in mid-January that “efforts had been made to tamper with Floyd Huff.” In addition to this claim, Anderson said he had proof that “approaches” had been made to two other state witnesses.
Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland Page 14