“Did you deliver the note to anyone before you surrendered?”
“Yes, to Father Stephen Lanen, instructor at Cascia Hall.”
“What was your reason?”
“Because I had no wish to be apprehended or killed with the note in my possession,” Kennamer acknowledged.
King saw his opportunity, and went for the jugular. “Yet . . . you killed John Gorrell over it?”
“In a sense.”
“You thought one death over the note was enough?”
“Yes.”
King was finished with him. He had done well enough, but missed the opportunity to push Kennamer further with doubts about the struggle over the gun. How did John get that bruise near his right eye? How did the first bullet miss his hand completely if he was pushing on John’s face? At the very least, there would be the pitting and burns from the muzzle blast on his hand. And during his story, Kennamer said he found Sidney Born in the drugstore drinking a coke at 11:00. But in December, he told police and reporters he entered the drugstore at 10:30.
Although he had missed these points, King did set Kennamer up to fail when the rebuttal witnesses came forward.
On redirect, Stuart felt the need to undo some of the damage.
“Who is Booth?”
“He is a bootlegger in Oklahoma City,” Kennamer answered.
“At times you did business with him?”
“I was only there twice.”
“This Father Lanen, he is a Catholic priest, and had been your teacher?”
“Yes.”
“You had confidence in him and that’s why you turned this note over to him?”
“Yes sir.”
Stuart turned to consult with Moss and Coakley, and then Moss stood up and barked, “Your Honor, the defense rests.”
There would be no testimony from Preston Cochrane or Pat Burgess. They were not going to back up Kennamer’s claim that John Gorrell first told them about his Wilcox kidnapping scheme before they ever introduced him to the judge’s son. The jury would just have to take the word of Phil Kennamer that the idea originated with Gorrell. And there would be no testimony from the beautiful Betty Watson. An unconfirmed rumor hinted in the newspapers that Kennamer had professed his devotion to her as well. That was the supposed reason the defense declined to call her. Phil, apparently, was dizzy for her, too.
Tuesday, February 19, 1935
FOR HIS REBUTTAL, ANDERSON AIMED to prove two facts to the jury on the last day of the trial: Phil Kennamer was not insane, and in fact, he was the original architect of any crime aimed at Virginia Wilcox.
The base-run hitters for Anderson’s rebuttal were three psychiatrists, who did agree with Menninger’s medical diagnosis, but not his legal opinion. Yes, Phil was a psychopath, they all said, but he wasn’t insane, and he knew right from wrong. The most intriguing testimony came from “ol’ Doc Adams,” whose definition of psychopathic personality disorder seemed to fit the life of Phil Kennamer perfectly.
“A psychopathic person is an individual of unstable emotion, usually showing from early childhood. The symptoms are restlessness and they are uncontrollable, and as children are unable to be properly trained and are unresponsive to guidance of the parents. In school, there are certain types that are brilliant and other types that do not do so well and are on the border line of being feeble-minded,” Adams testified.
As he spoke, Harmon Phillips looked over at the defendant to get his reaction. He looked bored as he sat with his right arm on the table and his chin cupped in his hand. All that day he stole long, furtive glances at Virginia, who never returned his stare.
“As they advance in school and age they are hard to control and cause parents and school authorities trouble,” Dr. Adams continued. “They are hard to keep in school and as they leave school, they are restless and stubborn, go from one job to another, chasing a rainbow, staying with work only a few months, losing interest usually. Quite a number of them become alcoholics, drug addicts, and sex perverts. A lot of them do not come in contact with the law.”
Although their medical experts may have been heavy hitters, they were not Anderson’s homerun hitters. His Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmy Fox were an ex-bootlegger, a former confidant of Kennamer’s, and a blood expert.
Bail bondsman Hanley “Cadillac” Booth was forced to testify by subpoena. He didn’t want to tell his story but Anderson needed Cadillac to refute Kennamer’s claim that Gorrell was the one who had hatched the kidnapping plot.
“Do you know Phil Kennamer?” King began.
“Yes,” Cadillac said as he pointed at him. “I first met him in July 1934, at my home with Jeff Griffin and Billy Harper, Oklahoma City newspapermen.”
“Did you see him again after that?”
“I saw Phil about two weeks later, in August.”
“What was the purpose of his visit to your home at that time?”
“Phil and a friend came to my home to purchase some whiskey, which was my business at the time. I sold them some.”
King framed his next question as slowly and clearly as he could. “Did Phil Kennamer, at that time and in that conversation, discuss with you extortion, kidnapping, or robbery of some of the wealthy oil people in Tulsa, in which conversation he went on to tell you about the Wilcox girl?”
“Yes sir.”
King wanted him to say that again, so he repeated his question. “When Phil was at your home was extortion, kidnapping or robbery mentioned by Phil?”
“Yes sir.”
This was bad. Moss had to shut this down. “Did you think he was serious or not serious?” Moss interrupted.
“I couldn’t tell,” Booth said as he shrugged his shoulders. “I didn’t pay any attention to him.”
“Why didn’t you pay any attention to him?”
“It didn’t mean anything to me,” Booth said flatly. It was true. He had told Kennamer he was in the bootlegging business, not the kidnapping business.
“How many times have you been convicted?” Moss inquired. He knew the answer, and wanted to discredit the witness as he had done with Huff.
“About one hundred times. I never was convicted, I always pleaded guilty. A hundred times in municipal court, two sentences to the county jail, one fine, one term served and fine paid in federal court.”
It was a strong answer and it left Moss with no place to go.
The prosecution’s Lou Gehrig was Kennamer pal Otto Kramer, and when he took the stand, he knocked it out of the park. The twenty-one-year-old accountant began by explaining that for the last three years, he was a close friend of Phil Kennamer, who often discussed with him his infatuation with Virginia Wilcox.
“Have you ever had any conversation with Kennamer when the name of Virginia Wilcox was injected?” Gilmer queried.
“Yes. Several.”
“Was the substance of these conversations about the same?”
In spite of Moss’s best efforts to object the witness out of the chair, he was blocked by Gilmer, and Kramer was able to make his point.
“They amounted to pretty much the same, very little variation,” Kramer answered. “He stated he was very fond of Miss Wilcox at one time, and she didn’t care for his attentions, and he felt very bitterly toward her and her family and said he was going to get even, if it took his last day.”
Those in the front who could see her turned to look at Virginia. A strange, knowing smile broke across her face, and she looked down at her shoes to hide it. It was as if Kramer’s statement confirmed something she had already known or suspected.
With enlarged photographs of Gorrell’s head wound, Dr. Cecil Knoblock “proved the surprise witness of the trial by adding the final punch to the state’s attack on Kennamer’s claim that he and Gorrell engaged in a struggle before he killed him,” Biscup reported to World readers.
Over the loud objections from the defense, Knoblock declared the first .22-caliber bullet struck Gorrell in the right forehead and the second one came lower, and closer
to his ear.
“Can you say what interval of time elapsed if any between the two shots?” asked Gilmer.
“I can’t explain the chemical examination in a few words. The nature of the abrasion affects the blood clotting. Taking all things into consideration, the fact that the blood of the second wound has flowed over the face, as well as the first, I think it is fair to say the first blood would coagulate in a minute and a half. The blood from the first wound flowed down and of necessity was clotted before the second wound was inflicted.”
“What is the minimum amount of time that you think elapsed between the firing of the two shots?” Gilmer asked.
“There can be no denying that there was an interval because there was a crossing of the two paths of blood. Considering the facts that cause blood to coagulate, there would have to be at least a minute.”
Moss did his best, but despite sparring back and forth with Knoblock, he was unable to shake his testimony. For Anderson, it was as good a time as any to rest his rebuttal, and when Moss followed him, the trial of Phil Kennamer was over.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Wednesday, February 20, 1935
THE KATZ DEPARTMENT STORE decided to take another chance with their going-out-of-business sale. After everyone calmed down, the crackerjack promoter from the big city returned with an important modification to the old banner:
YOU ARE LOSER
if You Don’t Attend Katz Department Store Quit Business Sale!
With a fifty-foot sign blazoned across their storefront, it got people’s attention. Locals and out-of-towners wandered in just to see what they were offering.
Over at the Midway Barbershop, the barbers were more than pleased with all the out-of-towners who needed a shave and a haircut. Judge Kennamer was there every morning at 7:30, and his son was there every other day. Facial hair was no longer in fashion, and it was a great time to be a barber.
Things weren’t going as well for Charlie Graham who ran the Graham Hotel, where the defense team was lodged. He was just hoping to break even on his restaurant business. With all the added mouths to feed, he’d had to bring in extra help, which ate into his profits.
But there was one group of Pawnee residents unconcerned with the Kennamer trial. Every morning on the north side of the courthouse square, families crushed by the depression formed a line outside the offices of the Federal Emergency Relief Agency. “None of them so much as glance at the courthouse, but wait patiently for admission,” Ruth Sheldon wrote. Outside of the defendant’s egocentric world, there was another one with problems of its own.
And the world of one Tulsa family was shattered on a cold Thanksgiving night. The pieces remained scattered like rubble during Christmas, and then New Year’s Day, with all of its hopes and promises. For ten days in February 1935, John and Alice Gorrell endured explicit death photographs, an egocentric killer, smooth-talking defense attorneys denouncing their son, and some jackass doctor from Wichita who excused a psychopath as someone not legally responsible. Doctors like Menninger studied schizophrenics, psychopaths, sexual deviants, and folks who were truly psychotic. It was the pastors who focused on grief and sorrow, and all their answers pointed to a heavenly world. But John and Alice still had to live through this one, rebuild their lives, and endure for the sake of their remaining son, Ben, and their daughter, Edith Ann.
Throughout the trial, the Gorrells kept mostly to themselves. True to their nature, they were quiet and never answered questions or volunteered their opinions. They barely spoke at all, and the out-of-town correspondents quickly learned what the Tulsa writers already knew: to respect their privacy. But that kind of silent endurance comes with a price, and John made a payment on that debt one afternoon when he collapsed on the floor of his hotel room with a nervous breakdown, immediately after the closing arguments ended. Through a choked throat, clogged with despair, he pushed out the words, “My son . . . my son . . . ” Alice Gorrell rested on top of her husband, stroking his thin hair without bothering to wipe her away her own tears.
For the Associated Press reporter who spied on this fragile moment through a cracked door, it felt wrong to be there, and he left as quickly as he could. “Incoherent and apparently semi-conscious, the doctor mumbled of his dead son and sobbed. ‘When the other children came home for the holidays, my son was not among them.’”
It was a moment too private to be witnessed by any outsider.
The closing arguments in the Phil Kennamer trial set new records in Oklahoma legal history, with seven attorneys who spoke for nearly eight hours over two days. With no objections to hold them back, they fixed bayonets and charged. They attacked each other’s witnesses, and they attacked each other’s evidence, and when they were done with that, they attacked each other with pumped-up indignation for all the legal atrocities the other side had committed. They hurled clever one-liners and sarcastic remarks that reporters ate up and regurgitated for their readers. For the twelve grim-jawed, stone-faced jurors who gave nothing away in their expressions, it went on and on and on until it became a two-day endurance challenge of verbal diarrhea.
When it was all over with, there was a notable difference between the two sides. The prosecution’s arguments were outlined and proactive. They were pragmatic but long—winded—summaries that reviewed their best evidence and introduced provocative new ideas. The defense, on the other hand, was reactive. While eloquent, they were also emotional and disjointed. Always following behind a prosecuting attorney, one defense counselor or another was unwittingly drawn into a debate with the previous speaker.
Veteran Tom Wallace opened for the state with a concise analysis of their case that emphasized three main points: Kennamer told others he would kill John Gorrell; Gorrell was shot to death by Kennamer; Kennamer admitted killing him. Wallace then closed by calling for a life sentence or a hefty term for manslaughter.
Those anticipating an eloquent plea from Moss were not disappointed, but his argument was scattered, with conclusions that were far-reaching. After launching into a self-imposed warning about the unfairness of criticizing the victim, Moss eventually got around to criticizing the victim. To get there, he took a roundabout course by knocking off the state’s witnesses as the low sort of people John Gorrell consorted with. First, it was Floyd Huff who was “lower than a human can sink” for being an ex-con. Then it was Ted Bath’s turn; he was demoted to the dregs of humanity because he worked in the oil fields.
“Do you know what kinds of fellows are connected with pipeline work?” Moss asked rhetorically. This apparently meant the criminal kind, because John’s mere association with him revealed he was up to no good.
Moss then unwittingly criticized Gorrell for not speaking up when his own client proposed to Bath that he seduce Virginia Wilcox to get naked pictures of her. “Not a word, gentlemen, from Gorrell. NOT—A—WORD—OF PROTEST,” he said before whispering, “not a syllable.”
Even though he had protested when Barbara Boyle’s name was mentioned, Gorrell didn’t do the same for Virginia and somehow, in Moss’s mind, that made Gorrell a bad person, but not his client, who had proposed the scheme in the first place. He repeated this hypocritical error when he attacked Gorrell for not speaking out when his own client suggested armed robbery after Bath turned down the blackmail scheme.
“Then, when they talked about holding up the pig stand, who told Kennamer it was dangerous, someone might get killed? It was Ted Bath, not John Gorrell.”
As he neared the end of a ninety-minute speech, Moss continued his attack on the victim for writing the extortion note and not exposing it later to the police. Kidnappers were the “most vicious sort of criminal,” but don’t judge him for saying that because, after all, Moss “didn’t mean to be offensive to anyone.” However, Gorrell was a “potential snatcher,” and it was Phil’s “Christian duty” to stop that kidnapper.
“I want the day to dawn in America,” Moss thundered like a Baptist preacher, “when by the consecrated effort of the government—
KIDNAPPERS CANNOT EXIST!
“If I see right, every human who followed this trial—everybody who is acquainted at all with its details—knows that when Phil Kennamer is freed of this crime—WE—have taken a step forward in stopping forever and ever—kidnapping in this state.”
When King spoke after the lunch recess, he showed the capacity crowd why it was great for the prosecution to have a charismatic politician on their side. His crafty remarks were the most quoted by wire reporters and appeared in newspapers nationally. They also earned him the wrath of defense attorneys. He began with a folksy, down-to-earth appeal to the small-town jury, in which he praised them for their honesty and intelligence, adding, “It comes from the depths of my heart.”
Getting down to business, he criticized Moss’s long history of using the insanity defense. “Flint Moss carries in his vest pocket the plea of insanity and when he is hired, it is understood that THAT is to be part of the defense—if they will stand for it. THAT—is his stock and trade—an insanity plea.”
From that foundation, King adroitly blasted away at numerous defense arguments and hypothesized new arguments of his own: that despite telling Snedden he would kill Gorrell in Kansas City, Kennamer waited until he got back to Tulsa so he would be in the protective sphere of his father’s judicial district; that Kennamer forced Gorrell to write the note at the point of a knife; that Gorrell couldn’t have known the Wilcox address unless Kennamer had given it to him; and that it couldn’t have been John’s idea because Kennamer first told Cadillac and then brought up the idea again to Ted Bath in Gorrell’s presence two days before he left to go to dental school. And then there was his friend Otto Kramer, who gave them all the motive when he said Kennamer felt bitter toward the Wilcox family and wanted to get even with Virginia.
“I think he fell in love both with her charming personality and her father’s millions. I think he was a mule-headed, precocious, stubborn youngster who just couldn’t see how Miss Wilcox could resist his attentions—his, the attentions of the son of a federal judge—and it piqued his pride.”
Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland Page 24