While spectators gasped when they heard this, Phil found the memory of it amusing, and smiled to himself as he kept his face covered by his left hand.
“What happened to the rope when Phil jumped out the window?” Moss inquired.
“Everything went out with it.”
“Was it heavy enough to hold Phil’s weight?”
“No.”
“Did it break?”
“No.”
“So, the curtain fell down and Phil landed in the sand pile?”
“Yes,” Wright answered. “The teacher was scared to death.”
Besides his stories of Kennamer’s daredevil escapades, his obsessive love for Virginia Wilcox, his numerous suicide threats, along with his quitting school or every job he ever had, wrecking cars, and drinking excessively—not to mention the tall tales he told—reporters focused in on Kennamer’s self-confidence in his own intelligence.
“He thought he was smarter than the Mexicans,” Wright recounted to questions about Kennamer’s desire to join far-off revolutions. “‘I could take them over and run them,’ he said.”
In a story he told Wright, Kennamer’s ambition to be a leader was nearly realized when Harlem vice gangs proposed he should rule over their entire operation.
“On his last trip to New York City, he came back and told me that he was walking around and ran across two Negro gangsters in an argument. They were gamblers and bootleggers and had been cutting prices on each other and were trying to get organized and he got their confidence so that they told him he could handle their business. They arranged a second meeting and were going to get all the members together under Phil,” Wright explained. However, his time as a Harlem crime boss was unexpectedly cut short.
“About that time his mother wanted him to come home and he left,” Wright recounted, which caused many in the gallery to laugh out loud.
During cross-examination, Gilmer got Wright to admit that in spite of Kennamer’s wild boyhood antics, there was nothing about them to indicate he didn’t know right from wrong.
“In your opinion, Phil is an awful liar, isn’t he?” Gilmer prodded.
“Yes sir.”
“What I want to know is did he tell these wild lies about gangsters and things in front of his parents and your parents, the same as he tells them in front of you young fellows?”
“He is somewhat changed in front of his parents,” Wright said.
“In front of his parents or your parents he doesn’t give all that color to his yarns?”
“He has told my father some of his yarns.”
“Would that, in your opinion, indicate that he knew right from wrong?” Gilmer carefully asked.
“Yes sir.”
The witness accounts which would make headlines across the United States came after the lunch recess when Homer and Virginia Wilcox were called up, followed by the emotional testimony of Kennamer’s father and sister Juanita. Taking his seat in the witness chair, Homer Junior looked around nervously and bit his upper lip. The courtroom was packed tight; all of the eighteen benches were filled, and young boys cutting class from the local school for Indians were standing along the walls. Just behind the door, Junior’s mother waited, occasionally sneaking a peek into the crowded courtroom.
“Now . . . ” Moss began as he leaned against the rail. Anderson had hidden his yardstick, and the defense attorney was forced to make do without it. “. . . tell the jury just what Phil told you about the plot to kidnap your sister on the part of Gorrell.”
“He told me that Gorrell was in this gang in Kansas City and that he had told him last summer of the plan to kidnap my sister and he would prevent it at any cost.”
“Homer, did he tell you what he would do if necessary to prevent it?”
“He said, if necessary, he’d kill Gorrell.”
“Did you tell your father or mother about it?”
“No,” Junior said flatly. “I took no stock in it at the time and I didn’t want to worry them.”
When the object of Phil Kennamer’s unrequited love entered the courtroom, the excited whispers of five hundred people watching her created a loud buzz that followed her all the way to the witness chair. When she sat down, the clamor dramatically stopped. Until that exact moment, she was the unheard-from heroine in a tragic drama that left one boy dead, because another boy refused to go to police with the extortion letter and needed to be a hero.
Virginia Wilcox was fashionably attired in a blue dress punctuated with an enormous silver-fox-fur collar that cascaded down to her elbows. A dainty, blue-felt hat was pinned to her brown, wavy hair and was tilted down over her right ear. Her pleasant face, with its pale skin and coffee-colored eyes, typecast her as a tender-hearted young lady who knew better than to get mixed up with a boy like Phil Kennamer.
As the nineteen-year-old answered Moss’s questions about his client’s overwhelming displays of attention shown to her the last three years, she spoke in a clear, sweet voice. The expression she wore for twenty-two minutes was one of intense seriousness combined with repressed emotion, and it was painfully obvious she didn’t want to talk about any of this. Phil’s grand plan to be more to her than he was had boiled down to this one moment, and Virginia Wilcox never looked at Phil Kennamer once. Not that he would have noticed. He couldn’t bring himself to face her either, and he sat with his head bowed, his hands covering his face completely.
None of it had worked out the way he’d thought it would.
After Virginia was dismissed, the accounts of Phil’s suicidal tendencies by his father and sister caused many of the women in the gallery to shed tears for the defendant. The cold, steely reserve of Judge Kennamer was broken several times as he testified to his son’s erratic, abnormal behavior. As he had done to his own friends, Kennamer harvested attention from his father with dark talk of suicide.
“The gray-haired jurist was unable to continue and began weeping. He removed his gold-rimmed spectacles and dried his eyes with a handkerchief,” Walter Biscup wrote. “The judge’s display of emotion did not appear to affect the prisoner, who maintained his customary position of leaning his head against his right hand propped on the counsel table by his elbow.”
Kennamer’s father was smart enough to tailor his one hour and fifty minutes of testimony with statements that reinforced an insanity defense. Just as he had done when his son had run away from home, or quit school, or quit his jobs, or crashed his car, his father was there to rescue him. Despite his reputation as a stern judge, he was now in the ironic position of having to mitigate his son’s guilt as a boy who didn’t know right from wrong. As biased as he was, Judge Kennamer did pass along one insightful revelation.
“He had a very emotional disposition,” Judge Kennamer declared at one point. “He either felt very high or very low.”
“Either in an extraordinarily happy mood or very despondent?” Moss offered.
“That expresses it.”
Chapter Twenty
Monday, February 18, 1935
BIPOLAR DISORDER, WITH ITS EXTREME highs and lows, wasn’t the only mental health issue Phil Kennamer was afflicted with. According to one of the country’s leading psychiatrists, the boy had bigger problems. When The Human Mind author Dr. Karl Menninger took the stand, he was twenty minutes late. Normally, that would have been a problem for Judge Hurst, but not that day; Monday the 18th of February came with a sense of déjà vu. Over the weekend, state and national newspapers trumpeted multiple stories saying that Phil Kennamer would testify. This spawned another hysterical mob hell-bent on getting a coveted seat in the courtroom. If Menninger could have been there when the doors opened at 8:00 a.m., he would have recognized the Pawnee County Courthouse for what it became—a madhouse. World reporter Walter Biscup depicted the events of that morning for readers.
Hysteria of the mob made its appearance at the trial of Phil Kennamer here for the first time today when a crowd consisting of all the people the courtroom would hold and a surplus of more than a hun
dred others raced through the doors and stormed up [three] flights of steps when the courthouse opened at 8 o’clock.
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.
Three minutes after the doors were opened every available spectator’s seat in the courtroom was occupied. A hundred more people took standing room at the rear and along walls. At the double doors just beside the jury box at least 50 more were wedged into a compact formation, with nothing to restrain them except the obvious fact that there was no more room inside. The corridor door at the back of Judge Hurst’s bench was impassable.
Even the booming voice of Sheriff Charlie Burkdoll could not stem the rush. And deputies made no effort to check the dash of sensation-hungry hundreds until the courtroom was filled and comparative quiet was restored.
Those who could not get in were ejected from the [third] floor of the courthouse and a deputy stood guard at the second-floor landing, permitting none above that point who were not directly connected with the case. All morning long another 100 people stood patiently on the second-floor landing, hoping to be first in line after lunch.
Even after it was announced that the courtroom was full and [no more] would be admitted, additional chairs were carried in by latecomers who blithely explained that this attorney for the defense and that attorney for the prosecution “told me it would be all right.”
As a result, by the time court convened, not a spare chair was to be found. Reporters, robbed of theirs by spectators who carried them casually from the press room, searched the courthouse from top to bottom without finding a single spare.
Influence was at a premium and there was much bitterness and some weeping among disappointed women who were turned away, only to see others turn the magic trick and squeeze chairs into spaces where there did not appear to be room for the furniture.
Furthermore, press tables became strangely filled with new faces. Many who probably never saw inside a newspaper plant protested emphatically they were reporters and obviously belied the fact by making prominent display of pencil and paper. As a result, Judge Hurst ordered the bailiff to exclude anyone occupying the seat of a bona fide reporter.
Phil Kennamer had a pretty good idea what Menninger was going to say, and he was still upset over the insanity claim. It could not coexist with his ego. It discounted his heroics. It discounted the intelligence he had used to outsmart Gorrell.
Everyone could clearly see something was wrong with Phil Kennamer—everyone except Phil Kennamer. There had to be a reason why he couldn’t stay in school or hold a job, why he thought he was smarter than everyone else, why he was a liar and manipulated people, why he had absolutely no fear, why he drank like a fish and had crashed four cars, and why he enjoyed the attention that came with being a murder defendant without the shame of being branded a criminal.
They were about to discover the answer, which came in three words. In direct response to a forty-three-minute question by Moss in which he reviewed the entire case, Dr. Menninger declared Kennamer was “irrational” at the time of the unfortunate tragedy.
“Was he able to distinguish the difference between right and wrong?” Moss inquired.
“I don’t think he could distinguish between right and wrong,” the forty-one-year-old said. He was the youngest psychiatrist to testify during the trial and represented a new school of thinking that was more empathetic to criminals.
“Will you tell us why?”
“I think he was unable to distinguish right from wrong because he was incapable of accepting ordinary standards and substituted his own. His own egotism was so great that he had his own moral code, which to him seemed a better one than the one society accepts.”
“Does the sort of insanity or mental illness which you have concluded the defendant has, is that a well-known kind of insanity—does it have a name?”
“In most books, it is known as psychopathic personality disorder,” Dr. Menninger answered. In his medical opinion, which would endure throughout his life, psychopaths were not responsible for their crimes and should be treated instead of imprisoned.
“This type of insanity has been known for years as ‘moral insanity’ and by other descriptions, which have now passed out of use,” Dr. Menninger explained. “Only in recent years has the name been changed to psychopathic personality disorder.”
There it was. Three words that explained why Phil Kennamer was the way he was.
Oklahoma City psychiatrist Dr. Eugen Werner’s time in the witness chair was far shorter than his colleague’s. He would only affirm that Kennamer did not understand or appreciate the consequences of killing John Gorrell.
“You have heard the questions I have asked and propounded to Dr. Menninger?” Moss asked him.
“I have.”
“Do you agree with Dr. Menninger?”
“I do.”
Menninger and Werner’s testimony may have been brief, but it explained more in three words than all the other witnesses combined—if anyone actually understood what psychopathic personality disorder meant, which most did not. But six hundred people didn’t storm the courthouse and break a door off its hinges, again, to listen to why Phil Kennamer’s brain was broken. Their interests were more prurient.
They wanted to hear from the defendant himself.
After the lunch recess, the nineteen-year-old told an incredible story that had witnesses doing things they never did, and saying words they never said. He took on a dozen of them at once with absolutely no fear of how their accounts differed from his own. Randal Morton was a liar. Jack Snedden was a liar. Robert Thomas was a liar. Alice Gorrell was a liar. In his world, everyone else was lying, but he was telling the truth—this time. He didn’t even seem bothered by the fact that the story he told on the stand contradicted his own accounts previously given during his newspaper interviews.
“The prisoner, who undoubtedly suffers from ego-mania, appeared the calmest person in the room as he slowly enunciated the story which he hopes will bring him freedom,” wrote Walter Biscup, who had gotten to know Kennamer well by now. “He was deliberate in every answer and it was this attitude of mental certainty, more than anything else, which convinced the lay audience that the youth was wholly sane.”
When he first sat down, he fixed his gaze directly at Virginia Wilcox, who was seated with his family on their reserved bench in the front row. Her presence with the Kennamers was a bit of a mystery, and there was speculation that Flint Moss had something to do with it. This young, attractive girl from a wealthy family did not acquire that front-row seat by fighting through a mob of people. On Friday, she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Now, she caught him staring at her and returned his gaze with a cold, blank expression that was noted in several newspapers.
Flint Moss was sitting this one out, and he had turned over the direct examination to his co-counsel, seventy-eight-year-old Charles Stuart. Stuart was a short, heavyset man with a head and face marked by red telangiectasia blemishes and brown spots from years of hunting and fishing.
Phil began his story by calmly informing the jury that he’d met Gorrell during the latter part of August—before the meeting with Ted Bath and two weeks before Gorrell headed off to dental school. Besides the extortion note, the single greatest piece of evidence in his favor was his own claim that Gorrell had first discussed the kidnapping with Cochrane and Pat Burgess before Kennamer ever met him.
“I met John Gorrell the latter part of August or the first part of September 1934.”
“State the circumstances.”
“I was working for the Frates Company, an insurance
company, and somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 in the morning, Preston Cochrane called me and asked me to come to his room and when I got there, Cochrane told me to pay particular attention to the man he wanted me to meet, and that man was John Gorrell,” Kennamer said.
“That was the latter part of August?”
“Yes sir.”
“Did you hear that there was a scheme on the part of Gorrell to kidnap Miss Virginia Wilcox, or her brother Homer Wilcox?” Stuart asked.
“Yes sir.”
“When, shortly after your last meeting with Gorrell, who told you of the plot?”
“I saw them separately. I saw Preston Cochrane first before my meeting with Gorrell. He told me of the plan to kidnap Virginia Wilcox, and later I saw Pat Burgess who told the same story.”
“When was that?”
“The middle of September,” Kennamer answered. “I was working in the insurance office. Gorrell called and asked me to meet him [at the Brown Derby Café] and asked me when I got there to come outside and meet [Ted Bath].”
“What was said?”
“He told me his plan,” Kennamer said.
“Now, without going into detail, tell the jury if at that time or if you ever agreed to the plan to kidnap Virginia Wilcox.”
“I—DID—NOT.”
Kennamer’s testimony of when Gorrell told him of the plan to kidnap Virginia contradicted his December 12 interview with the press, when he claimed Gorrell had not spoken of the plan to him until he went to Kansas City in November:
After my investigation, I went to Kansas City about the middle of November and found Gorrell. We talked a bit and then I remarked how I heard something was coming against the Wilcox family. When Gorrell discovered I was interested, he said he did not know that I would be interested in anything like this.
He then told the jury of how he arrived in Kansas City on the evening of November 20. After checking into the Phillips Hotel, by his own admission, Kennamer bought the hunting knife from a department store, and then stationery and rubber gloves from a Walgreens, which Gorrell would use to write an extortion note.
Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland Page 22