The afternoon had arrived.
When Anderson called Edna Harman to the stand, Phillips leaned forward from his perch and readied himself. Tomorrow’s front-page headline was about to unfold.
“Do you know the defendant, Phil Kennamer?”
Mrs. Harman ignored the question and turned to face the bench, “Your Honor, I am afraid to testify in this case.”
“Just answer the question,” Judge Hurst replied.
“Let her testify and let the jury and everyone hear!” Moss shouted as encouragement.
“Honorable judge, I’m afraid to testify in this case. I want to be excused. My family has been threatened time after time during the last twenty-four hours. I—I can’t do it!” she squawked. “My children—mean more to me—(sob)—than anything else on earth. I’ll take the penalty. I won’t testify!”
KA-BOOM! The ticking time-bomb of a witness had just exploded. Anderson froze. He couldn’t think straight.
“Let her tell all—I have no secrets,” Moss howled.
“Don’t say anything, Mrs. Harman!” Anderson fired back. In the gallery, the quiet roar of excited whispers added to the chaos that was unfolding.
“Any witness who will make such a statement is a disgrace and I ask that she not talk like that,” Moss yelled above the noise. “Your Honor, I demand that a mistrial be declared immediately on the grounds of prejudice.”
Not knowing what to do, Anderson blamed Moss for telling the witness to “tell all,” although it did come on the heels of Judge Hurst’s order to answer the question.
Joining in, Charles Stuart stood up and pompously remarked, “It’s a disgrace to the administration of justice!”
“It’s the truth, Mr. Moss! It’s the truth!” Mrs. Harman shrieked.
“It’s Moss’s own doing!” Anderson snapped back. How he came to that conclusion was unclear; but what was clear was that his political career was now in jeopardy.
The courtroom devolved into chaos: Judge Hurst was addressing the jury, saying something about “disregarding testimony”; the bailiff was rapping the gavel to quiet the gallery, where four hundred people were talking at once; Moss was still going on about a mistrial, and prejudice, and some other stuff Phillips couldn’t make out; Anderson was calling for a ten-minute recess; and Mrs. Harman was still shaking her head in defiance of the defense attorneys who were attacking her character.
Kennamer found the entire outburst amusing. Carefully shielding his face from the jury with his hand, Kennamer turned to face his siblings directly behind him, flashed a knowing smile, and whispered a few words Phillips couldn’t make out.
While the court reporter was reading back Mrs. Harman’s statement to Judge Hurst, Moss leaned toward Anderson and whispered, “You’re nuts.” When the stenographer finished, Judge Hurst zeroed in on a sly comment Moss had made. “Now, Mr. Moss, you asked her to proceed,” he pointed out.
Moss, well-known for his witty sarcasm in the courtroom, raised his hands in consternation, “Please, Your Honor, don’t take advantage of my excitement.”
This raised the ire of Dixie Gilmer, who was showing himself to be faster at caustic rejoinders than the sharp-tongued Flint Moss. “Your Honor, he never was excited in his life.”
“What the hell, did you plan this?” Anderson whispered to Moss, loud enough for the first four rows in the gallery to hear. The defense attorney ignored both of them and instead glanced over at one of the Kennamer siblings, pointed his finger at Anderson who’d turned his back on him, and made circles with his finger around his ear as if to say, He’s crazy.
The trial was now personal.
“She endeavored to sell her testimony to the defendant,” Moss said, getting back to business.
“Mr. Moss, you’re a liar!” Mrs. Harman cried out.
“I can prove by attorneys Breckridge and Boorstin of Tulsa that Mrs. Harman attempted to sell her testimony to the defense in a case several years ago,” Moss declared. Mrs. Harman wasn’t scared from death threats, he would later tell Harmon Phillips. The woman sensed her career as a professional witness was about to be exposed by Moss on cross-examination. The defense had done their homework. He knew the state’s witness better than they did.
“She asked for $2,500, and then $1,200, to sell her testimony to Judge Kennamer in this case. We can show some letters written to Judge Kennamer were written by her. In the last two weeks she called Wash Hudson [a criminal defense attorney] and sought to learn if she could obtain extra remuneration for testifying in an Oklahoma City manslaughter case.”
Anderson felt as sick as he looked.
“There is no question but that the defense was ready for her appearance on the stand, and the state was not,” Phillips wrote in his notepad.
“The state has already told the jury what she will testify,” Moss said as he continued his attack. “Her statement is false. We never communicated with her or threatened her. We welcome her here. I want to tell what we know and then ask the county attorney to withdraw [from] the opening statement that part about her.”
“It would be necessary if she didn’t testify,” Judge Hurst agreed.
“Your Honor, she told me two minutes before the session opened that she would testify,” Gilmer contended.
“She has told me she was threatened,” Wallace joined in. “At noon she got a telephone call. When she came back she was nervous. Two men warned her to get out of town.”
“That’s not the reason she’s scared,” Moss laughed. He was enjoying this moment. It was his revenge against Anderson, who had publicly attacked the defense with witness-tampering allegations merely because they had exercised their legal right to interview state witnesses before the trial started.
“Your Honor, [on] Saturday,” Anderson began. “She told me a story that sounded plausible. I haven’t had an opportunity to investigate her standing at home. If she’s not telling the truth, I don’t want her here.”
“Mr. Wallace made a statement we want to challenge,” Stuart protested. “He said this woman was approached by a lawyer she believed represented the defendant.”
“I’ll let her tell who he was,” Wallace barked.
“She was visited by two representatives of the defendant after we were served with notice. We were entirely proper in doing so,” Charles Coakley said, speaking for the first time that day.
“This is not a police court. It is a court of justice and I want my rights,” Stuart demanded.
Judge Hurst had heard enough. Both sides were overheated, and he needed to restore order and facilitate a compromise. “Mr. Moss, if the court will admonish the jury to disregard her statement here, and [if] the state takes her out of her opening statement, will you waive your motion?”
“I’m not certain the case isn’t prejudiced by what happened here,” Moss replied. “I’m going to ask Mr. Anderson to investigate my charges and have him tell the jury that her proposed statement would be false.”
“We’ll recess for twenty minutes and Anderson can make an investigation. Jury dismissed.”
Former Pawnee County Attorney Lee Johnson, who sat silent during the melee, sought out Moss and Stuart and worked diligently with them for a compromise. He would, they agreed, put together a strong statement for the jury. After that, Moss would withdraw his mistrial motion. Anderson, for his part, wasn’t with that group and had disappeared with Mrs. Harman to investigate her claims of harassment and death threats. He was unaware of the compromise being worked out.
When court reconvened at 2:31 that afternoon, Lee Johnson explained how they had recently learned of Edna Harman without having time to vet her story, and he expressed regret for her outburst before bringing the prosecution’s mea culpa to a close.
“Mrs. Harman voluntarily related her story and it was accepted in full faith. No one connected with the prosecution of this case knew or suspected that Mrs. Harman would make the scene she did. We have concluded she is unworthy of belief, and withdraw from the consideration of this jury
her testimony,” Johnson said. He then closed with a recommendation that Edna Harman should be arrested and charged with contempt of court.
Although Johnson had just saved the day for the prosecution, it didn’t seem to matter to Anderson, who feared he had lost his case. He wanted a do-over.
“The scene just created in this courtroom a little while ago has undoubtedly left some influence on the minds of the jurors of this case. For that reason, I want to join the defense counsel in that this be considered a mistrial and that this witness be held.”
Moss threw up his hands in disgust and another round of bickering, shouting, and finger-pointing flared up. But when Charles Stuart pointed out that this was not the first time in courtroom history that an outburst like this had taken place, and His Honor could simply tell the jury what to disregard, Judge Hurst seized upon that observation as his opportunity to put an end to the pandemonium that came courtesy of Mrs. Harman.
“Is there a man on the jury who is prejudiced on either side in this lawsuit by reason of what has happened in Mrs. Harman’s testimony?” When all of the jurors gave negative replies, that they were not prejudiced, Hurst ordered the trial to proceed, and for Mrs. Harman to be arrested.
The woman who had come to Pawnee with a bodyguard to testify against Phil Kennamer would now reside in the same jail as Phil Kennamer.
WHEN THE VICTIM’S FIFTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD mother took the stand, she did so with a sad expression that broke the hearts of every female in the gallery. Alice Gorrell was a well-dressed woman whose white hair contrasted nicely with the black hat she wore. She was dignified and well mannered, but the questions about her son’s last night on earth were disturbing, and her voice sometimes wavered as she struggled to answer Anderson’s questions as best she could. She told the jurors of how Phil Kennamer had called three times that night, looking for her son. Although she had met him previously and heard his voice before, and the voice on the telephone told her he was Phil Kennamer, Moss forced her to admit that she could not be certain the voice was actually Phil Kennamer, and he was able to block that portion of her testimony from entering the record.
When Eunice “Alabama” Word was sworn in and responded to Anderson’s preliminary questions in her Deep South twang, it was painfully obvious why they called her Alabama.
“She may have uttered ‘pardon my southern accent,’” Walter Biscup from the World wrote, but he really wasn’t sure what she said. “She is a native of Huntsville and talks with a broad accent, which at times perplexed the jurors.”
But as the county attorney led her through every single detail of that fateful night, the jurors grew accustomed to her voice. She told them everything that had happened from the time Gorrell picked her up—what they did and whom they were with—to the last moments she was with John. Anderson had shaken off the Harman disaster and was building up to something important.
“We got back to the hospital about 10:50 that night,” she said. “I remember the time because I had to sign up when I came in because we had to be in by 11:00 that night.” By Anderson’s next questions, Alabama explained to the jury that the front entrance to the hospital was quite a distance away from the street where John had parked his car.
“How far was it, what distance?” Anderson quizzed.
“Well, about 100 yards, I guess.”
“Did John go with you?”
“Yes.”
“Now, when he left the car what condition did he leave it in?”
“He got out on his side and came around and opened the door for me. He left the motor running and the door open,” Alabama said.
“He left the motor running?”
“It was raining and sleeting hard. There was frost on the windows,” she explained.
“When he placed the gun in the pocket of the car, was any part of it visible?”
“Yes, the handle was sticking above the pocket,” she specified.
“Ever see John touch the gun after he put it in the pocket at the pig stand where you ate a sandwich earlier that evening?”
“No, I did not.”
As he had done with Oliver and Huff, Moss tried to discredit both the witness and the victim with questions about drinking. To his disappointment, Alabama told him they had consumed no alcohol that night.
He then pressed her with questions about how John was showing off the borrowed .22-caliber revolver and allegedly playing with it. As hard as he tried, he uncovered nothing other than that Gorrell must have been a novice at handling pistols since he seemed mildly fascinated by it. In spite of this, Moss did uncover one interesting fact: before they ate at the pig stand, they had gone to Cook’s Court, a tourist camp with little bungalows for travelers.
“What did he do with the six-shooter when you were there [in one of the cabins]?”
“I don’t know,” she answered meekly.
“You weren’t much interested in that six-shooter then?” Moss teased the poor girl.[37]
When Jack Snedden was called up and questioned by Anderson, the eighteen-year-old explained that he had been friends with Kennamer, had driven him to the airport, and for the last year, was Virginia Wilcox’s boyfriend. Sitting less than ten feet away, Kennamer scowled at his former friend. His face was clenched tight and his eyes narrowed. He didn’t know what the younger boy was going to say, but it really didn’t matter.
“On the way to the airport, did you have any conversation with Kennamer about why he was going to Kansas City?” Anderson inquired.
“He said he was going up to see Gorrell and if he was going through with the extortion plot, he would kill him,” Snedden said in a matter-of-fact tone.
When he didn’t go through with it, Kennamer sent him a telegram: “. . . Keep your mouth shut. K.” After he got back from Kansas City, one of the first things he did was to show Virginia’s boyfriend the note, knowing Snedden would likely tell her, which is what Phil wanted.
But still, nobody took him seriously.
Snedden then told Anderson about the meeting at the Owl Tavern, where Kennamer showed him and Beebe Morton the knife he was going to use to kill Gorrell later that night.
“He told me he had a date with Gorrell and I asked him if he was going out there to kill Gorrell and he said ‘Yes.’ I talked to him about his mother and the Gorrell family and the trouble he would cause and he put his hands in his pockets and started whistling and he made a remark about, ‘calm, cool, collected is me,’ and so I left him.”
“About what time in the evening was it that he left?” Anderson asked.
“There weren’t any clocks in there but I imagine it was about 10:30 or a quarter of eleven.”
Gilmer then led Snedden to recount an incident the previous summer when Phil Kennamer pressured him to telephone Virginia at her parent’s Michigan vacation home and tell her that Phil was going to drink himself to death if Virginia didn’t write him a letter. Although she agreed to write Phil a letter, she instead wrote Jack a sharp rebuke and called into question the sincerity of his feelings for her. In response to Virginia’s letter reprimanding her boyfriend, Phil wrote a three-page apology letter to Virginia and gave it to Snedden to mail, which he never did. Introduced as evidence by Gilmer, Kennamer’s own letter to Virginia discredited defense claims that his love for her motivated him to kill.
Phil began his letter by confirming Jack’s loyalty and devotion to her, and asking that she maintain her relationship with Snedden. Kennamer ended with a melodramatic reassurance that he was no longer in love with her. As Gilmer slowly read out loud to the jury, the nineteen-year-old defendant lowered his head and covered his eyes with his right hand.
The old feeling is dead, Virginia, whatever I said in my delirium came from the liquor and not from me. Towards you now I feel nothing but admiration, respect and friendship. It has been like that for some time and all I wish in regard to you is friendship. The old feeling is dead . . . it will assure you of absolute freedom from annoyance from me. So long Virginia, if we meet again,
I assure you it will be casually.
Moss’s strategy for questioning Snedden was not to denigrate his character as he had attempted with previous witnesses, but to draw out graphic, firsthand accounts that exposed his own client’s mental instability. He needed to paint a picture of an irrational, love-sick boy, who would do anything for Virginia Wilcox, even slay another human being.
“Now then, JACK, let me ask you this—shortly after you started dating Virginia, isn’t it a fact that Phil came to you and told you that if you ever mistreated her in any way he would kill you? He told you that, didn’t he, JACK? Did he tell you this too, JACK, that if you ever said anything about Virginia that was unfavorable, whether it was true or false, he would you kill you?”
“Yes.”
Later on, Moss steered Snedden down the memory lane of another bizarre Kennamer story. “Have you known instances, JACK, when Phil would come to a gathering or a party where you and Virginia were and Phil had not had a drink that he would dash out and get a glass of beer and then pretend with the odor of the beer on his breath to be drunker than he was?”
“Yes, he would.”
The reason for this was simple: Virginia had once written Phil a letter expressing her concern that he was drinking too much. Therefore, if he acted like he was drunk, he just might elicit more of her attention. Snedden further explained how Phil used his friendship to get closer to Virginia. Once, when the two had a date, Phil bought an impressive bouquet of flowers to be sent to Virginia, but with the instructions that Snedden not tell her who they were from. But of course, that’s exactly what he did, and Kennamer knew he would, which is why he used the boy to drive him to the flower shop. Moss then got Snedden to reveal that during a Christmas dance at the Mayo Hotel in 1933, Kennamer did not just crawl along the ledge outside the sixteenth floor—he ran along it.
Although Moss was laying the groundwork for an insanity defense, the embarrassing incidents revealed in court led his client to focus his anger on Snedden. During a recess, Kennamer unleashed his wrath on Virginia’s boyfriend. In the third-floor corridor, the only place he and Dr. Gorrell and others were allowed to smoke, Kennamer’s face reddened when he saw Snedden by the water fountain.
Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland Page 19