Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland
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No photographs would be permitted in the courtroom during the trial. Those who violated these rules would be barred from the building, and the reporters associated with their newspaper would also be invited to leave.
Since the fourth floor was mostly empty, the jury deliberation room was situated there. Once twelve men had been selected,[35] they would be sequestered in a house one block south of the courthouse, where guards would keep the public and press away.
BECAUSE THIS WAS NO ORDINARY CASE, the transfer of Phil Kennamer to the Pawnee County Jail on Sunday, February 10, was bound to be anything but ordinary.
“Hundreds of curious persons had thronged the [Pawnee] courthouse grounds at noon in anticipation of Kennamer’s arrival,” the World reported. “Peanut and pop vendors hawked their wares to the matinee crowd. The eleven prisoners in the rough-cut sandstone jail, all serving minor sentences, also were affected by the holiday spirit. They wore freshly laundered clothing for the occasion.”
The crowd consisted of women dressed in their best attire, men in business suits, Indians wrapped in blankets, cowboys on horses, and uniformed Boy Scouts, as well as the local high-school football team, which, for some reason, also wore their uniforms. Standing out in this stand-out crowd was the town’s most famous resident, Wild West showman and entertainer Gordon William Lillie, otherwise known as “Pawnee Bill.” His long, gray hair, worn in the style of George Custer and Buffalo Bill, was of extreme interest to eastern newspaper reporters who were already migrating to Pawnee, which was being referred to as the “Flemington, New Jersey, of Oklahoma.” These were the newshawks who had already covered a large portion of the case, as well as a few who had just left the Hauptmann trial behind, where jury deliberations would soon begin.
As a courtesy, deputies Evans and Benson permitted Kennamer a ten-minute visit with his ailing mother, Lillie, whom he had not seen since he surrendered on December 1. When he left, he appeared unaffected by the visit with the woman who had worried the most about him. As he got closer to trial, Kennamer had grown surly and foul-tempered. Word had gotten back that the prosecution would qualify jurors on only one question: their opinion of the death penalty.
His first stop in Pawnee was the county clerk’s office, where papers were signed that officially transferred him to Sheriff Charlie Burkdoll’s custody. As they did so, newspaper photographers strained to take his picture.
“He roundly berated them, cursed the publishers of the Tulsa newspapers, and generally vented his wrath on a score of acquaintances,” the World reported. But it was the sight of their own Lee Krupnick, the double agent behind the note-passing embarrassment, which sent him into an apoplectic fit.
“Do I have to stay in the same room as that son-of-a-bitch rat, Krupnick?” Kennamer cried out to Sheriff Burkdoll inside the clerk’s office.
“What’s the matter with you, Phil?” Krupnick toyed with him. “Don’t you know when a friend is trying to help you?”
“Aw, you rat!” Kennamer screamed as he unleashed another volley of curse words.
“What happened to all your friends, Phil? None of them came up to the jail to see you.” Still thinking that Kennamer had unknown accomplices, Krupnick unsuccessfully tried to lure him into revealing their names. “You’re just trying to be a hero and take the rap for the other fellows.”
“I guess I know how I killed him,” Kennamer answered sarcastically.
“I mean the extortion note.”
“Well, that’s my affair. And I want it understood that anybody can take pictures of me except that rat, Krupnick,” Kennamer told the sheriff.
Every time Krupnick tried to get a photograph of Kennamer, Kennamer would turn his back or dodge behind someone. Krupnick only managed to take a few photos for Monday’s morning edition by waiting patiently, acting like he was engrossed in something else, and then hurriedly snapping a picture. This battle with Krupnick would last throughout the trial and would involve the entire Kennamer family and defense team. But it wasn’t just Krupnick; Judge Kennamer was lashing out against any photographer who snapped a picture of him, or his three children, without his permission.
The entire case had turned into a circus, a Roman holiday, and Judge Kennamer was just as gruff as Phil. His reputation as a strict judge who handed down long sentences was coming back to haunt him, now that his own son would be tried for murder. A week before the trial, Charles Stuart reported that the judge had been the target of anonymous gibes from criminals, who saw the whole affair as poetic justice.
“Judge Kennamer has been stern and severe on law violators,” Stuart admitted to the Tribune. “Now, members of the underworld, and especially those who were sentenced by him, have telephoned and said they are glad his son is in jail.”
The judge would have a front-row seat at the defense table during his son’s trial, while his wife, Lillie, remained at home, too ill to travel. His son and two daughters would support their brother from a bench directly behind him in the gallery. As with most women with important ties to the trial, the daughters’ clothing and accessories would be described in great detail by newspapers.
Lost in the fervor of it all was the grief of a father and mother whose eldest son was murdered by another boy who wanted to impress a girl and her family. Never without a cigar clenched in his mouth, the stoic fifty-four-year-old Dr. Gorrell kept his composure while he endured the slander of his namesake. Newspapers steered clear of interviewing the doctor, not because he was ill-tempered like Judge Kennamer, but because he didn’t believe in showcasing his grief and anger to the public. According to his grandson and the victim’s nephew, John Robert Gorrell, he kept that quiet, dignified demeanor for the rest of his life.
“It was a sore spot for them, my father and grandfather,” the sixty-three-year-old said in 2014. “They never talked about it much. They just told me my uncle John was murdered, but they never said who or why.” John had to learn about his uncle in bits and pieces, from cousins and friends, and still has the aviator helmet John Jr. had once so proudly worn.
Like Judge Kennamer, Dr. Gorrell and his wife Alice would be seated with the legal team who represented their son, and while the case had become so much more to everyone else, to the Gorrell family, it was only about one thing.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Tap twice on any image to enlarge – Press the back button to return
John Gorrell Jr. (Courtesy of Family)
Crime Scene as it looks today. Search “Philbrook Museum Tulsa” on Google Maps.
Phil Kennamer (Courtesy of Tulsa World)
Phil Kennamer (Courtesy of Tulsa World)
Virginia Wilcox (Courtesy of Family)
Sidney Born Jr.
Floyd Huff (Courtesy of Tulsa World)
Tom Wallace with Ted Bath (Courtesy of Tulsa World)
J. Berry King and William “Dixie” Gilmer
Defense Team: A. Flint Moss, Herman Young, and Charles Stuart. Not pictured is Charles Coakley. (Courtesy of Tulsa World)
Judge Thurman Hurst (Courtesy of Oklahoma Historical Society)
Coded messages exchanged between Phil Kennamer and Preston Cochrane (Courtesy of Tulsa World)
Preston Cochrane (Courtesy of Oklahoma Historical Society)
More photos are available for viewing by going to: HistoricalCrimeDetective.com
Map of Oklahoma showing Tulsa in relation to Pawnee and Chelsea.
Part Three: The Trial
It was a riot in miniature. They stampeded through the corridors, surged up the stairways four abreast, women and men alike. On the top floor all broke into a run for the last few yards of the race and those in the lead flung themselves elated into the seats of their choice.
Men and women shoved and elbowed alike. Women were knocked down on the stairs, clothes were disarranged, belongings were lost and forgotten in the scramble. There were shouts, laughter, squeals and some curses.
— Tulsa Daily World
Dramatis Personae
Prosecution Team
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Holly Anderson
Tom Wallace
Dixie Gilmer
J. Berry King
Prentis Rowe
Lee Johnson
Defense Team
A. Flint Moss
Charles Stuart
Charles Coakley
Herman Young
J.D. McCollum
Paul Pinson
Prosecution Witnesses
Dr. John Gorrell
Richard Oliver
Floyd Huff
Ted Bath
Mrs. Gorrell
Eunice Word
Jack Snedden
Edna Harman
Randal Morton
Two Unnamed Witnesses
Dr. Simpson (coroner)
Deputy Nathan Martin
Sgt. Henry Maddux
Rebuttal Witnesses
Dr. Felix Adams
Two unnamed psychiatrists
Hanley “Cadillac” Booth
Otto Kramer
Dr. Cecil Knoblock
Defense Witnesses
Gorrell’s flying instructor
Judge Kennamer
Handwriting Expert
Jack Snedden, again
Claude Wright
Homer Wilcox Jr.
Virginia Wilcox
Judge Kennamer, again
Juanita Hayes
Dr. Karl Menninger
Dr. Eugen Werner
Phil Kennamer
Chapter Sixteen
Monday & Tuesday, February 11 & 12, 1935
THE CHANGE OF VENUE HEARING was a pregnancy that gave birth to more lawyers. In a rural county where neighbors relied on each other, and the reputation of a man followed him wherever he went, neither side wanted to take the chance of seating a plant on the jury. Well-known Pawnee attorneys John McCollum and Paul Pinson were brought in to guide the defense team through the selection process. The prosecution picked up Pawnee Assistant County Attorney Prentiss Rowe, and former county attorney Lee Johnson—a cool-headed tactician who would later prove himself invaluable to the entire coterie of thirteen counselors. County Attorney Carl McGee was also allied to the prosecution, but in name only. When the hoopla evaporated and the crowd of celebrity reporters, photographers, newsreel cameramen, aspiring authors, gossip magazine editors, criminologists, psychiatrists, state political bosses, Hy-Hat Club members, and one wacky witness left town, Pawnee would have its own lawbreakers to prosecute.
The owner of Pawnee’s Katz Department Store found this unprecedented amount of local traffic to be the perfect time to throw a going out-of-business sale. And what better way to promote his low-low prices than to co-opt the very theme that had brought so much traffic to their little city? During that first day of jury selection, visitors were kept away from the courthouse to make room in the gallery for the pool of seventy veniremen eligible to serve. An afternoon recess brought a much-needed respite to the tedious process, and as the defense team stretched their legs in the third-floor corridor, Paul Pinson casually looked over his town through a window and to his horror discovered that the department store had erected a twenty-five-foot-wide banner that read:
YOU ARE GUILTY
Back in the courtroom, whispered outrage flowing through the defense team led to a conference with Judge Hurst, who then ordered Carl McGee and Sheriff Burkdoll to have the sign taken down. As it turned out, the twenty-five-foot banner was only half of it. The other twenty-five-foot section,
if You Don’t Attend Katz Department Store Quit Business Sale!
was yet to be lifted into position. Bored photographers, anxious to send anything out of the ordinary back to their newspapers, pounced on this satirical opportunity. Thirty minutes after it first appeared, an apologetic store manager had it removed. The crackerjack sales promoter brought in from Oklahoma City who’d conceived the idea was criticized by both officials and citizens alike, and he quickly left town. Judge Hurst also ordered that no photographs of the sign be published in any newspaper.
The trial’s first disaster was averted. There would be more.
The Pawnee attorneys working for both teams shortcut the selection process, and by Tuesday afternoon, fifty-one potential jurors were boiled down to twelve men who attested to their own impartiality. As predicted, the state qualified their choices on the death penalty, the defendant’s youth, and whether it mattered to them that his father was a federal judge. The defense sought jurors who were open-minded to self-defense and insanity claims. By the end, both sides claimed to reporters that they were content with the outcome.
Those twelve stone-faced men became instant celebrities. A group photo and a short profile on each were published in newspapers throughout Oklahoma. Those who worked in the elements had the characteristic “hat tan” which gave them sun-darkened faces below their brows, while above, their white foreheads emphasized receding hairlines. They would spend the remainder of the trial sequestered together in a house rented just for the occasion. Deputies were tasked to watch over them and keep the outside world out. Radios were off-limits, newspapers were censored by cutting out trial coverage articles, and even their meals were delivered.
With an hour and a half left to go that Tuesday afternoon, veteran prosecutor Tom Wallace presented the state’s opening remarks. A short man with thinning hair, Wallace looked as if he would be more at home as a bookkeeper with an insurance firm. The only color on his pasty-white face was from the round, thin-framed glasses he wore. But this was the man who had put Doc Barker away. This was the man who had once beaten the most intimidating lawyer in the courtroom, Flint Moss. This docile-looking man had one hundred murder trials under his belt—far more than anyone else.
With little room inside the crowded railing to maneuver, Wallace stood up from his chair, holding a stack of well-worn papers in his hand. “Your Honor, and gentlemen of the jury,” he began in a commanding voice that surprised many, “I will read to you this information and make a statement as to what the evidence will be on behalf of the State.”
With the jury seated, the gallery was opened to the public, and the long benches were half-filled with spectators who had waited patiently for the moment they could storm the courthouse. Their excitement at the promise of what was to come was reflected in the whispered voices and shuffling about as they settled in. But when Wallace began to speak, the quiet roar suddenly stopped as they strained to consume every provocative word.
“Now, the evidence will show on behalf of the State that on the 29th of November, 1934,” Wallace said as he turned to look at Kennamer and point his finger, “the defendant, Phil Kennamer, SHOT AND KILLED JOHN GORRELL!”
His rise in volume seemed to wake the sleepy defendant.
Wallace then recounted the entire story, from beginning to end, of all the major events in the case. He gave biographical sketches of the important players in a drama in which he claimed Kennamer not only planned Gorrell’s murder in advance, but was the architect of the entire kidnapping and extortion plot. He praised John’s character and pointed out that he had graduated from the Missouri Military Academy in Mexico, Missouri—a subtle jab at Phil, who never completed secondary school at all and had run away from a military academy in New Mexico. John had then taken classes at both the University of Tulsa and Oklahoma A&M before enrolling at Spartan Air Academy to fulfill a childhood dream of learning how to fly. He succeeded there as well and proudly earned his government-issued pilot’s license in the spring of ’34. Within two weeks of meeting Phil Kennamer, he began dental school in Kansas City on September 15. The industrious twenty-one-year-old worked three nights a week as a telephone operator in the hotel, where he shared a room with two other Oklahoma boys.
His read-between-the-lines message was simple: John Gorrell was on the road to success. He was disciplined, ambitious, and able to finish what he started—a good boy who was doing all the right things to become a valuable member of society. And if they didn’t know it then, the jury would soon learn: Phil Kennamer was none of those thi
ngs.
Wallace spoke of the meeting Kennamer had had with Gorrell and Ted Bath, and of the armed robbery Kennamer had proposed, of first targeting Barbara Boyle, and then switching to a plan to get compromising photos of the woman he professed to love, Virginia Wilcox. He told them of how Jack Snedden had driven Kennamer to the airport and of the events that happened in Kansas City as related by Dick Oliver and others. Wallace gave special attention to the car ride with Huff, and to the intricate murder plot Kennamer had planned for the dental student.
The events he spoke of, and what was said and who said it, were all familiar to Tulsans, but were most likely new to the minds of the jurors of Pawnee, who had not followed the case so closely. But it was what Wallace spoke of next that was news to everyone in the courtroom.
“A few days before Kennamer went to Kansas City, he and another boy went to Mrs. Edna Harman and asked her if she had an apartment to rent.”
When Charles Stuart heard Mrs. Harman’s name, he perked up and shared a knowing smile with Moss. This ticking time bomb of a woman may have been a prosecution witness, but she was their secret weapon who would explode in Anderson’s face after Moss cross-examined her. Edna Harman and her husband managed an apartment building, and the story she told Anderson allegedly took place there a few days before Kennamer flew to Kansas City. However, she had waited two months to tell prosecutors her story. They heard it for the first time just a few days before the trial began.
“She said, ‘I only have this small one, and maybe that wouldn’t suit you. Over here are some nicer apartments.’