She first inserted herself into Tulsa’s most sensational murder case in late December when she telephoned the Kennamer home with a claim that she knew some “valuable information” concerning Phil. But when his sister visited with Edna at the apartment building she managed on South Quaker Avenue in Tulsa, Opal Kennamer discovered what Harmon Phillips would later learn—that something wasn’t quite right with Mrs. Harman.
“[She] told me she was certain my brother was insane and contemplated suicide when she saw him one day in the apartment,” Opal told the Pawnee courtroom. She quickly realized the mother of three had nothing that would contribute to Phil’s defense and left. But just because she was done with Edna Harman, that didn’t mean Edna Harman was done with the Kennamers.
In early January, Judge Kennamer received an anonymous letter through the mail, requesting a loan of $2,500 in exchange for a vague promise of something that would benefit his son. It was typed on stationery that bore the watermark “Executive Bond,” and communicated a hyper-emotional message that betrayed the sender as a cuckoo bird desperate for money.
Dear Sir: I and no one else know facts concerning your son, others involved, and still others in danger of becoming involved.
The good I can do for Phil and everyone connected is inconceivable, if you will only have confidence in me and lend financial aid that is imperative to the welfare of us all.
Coming directly to the point, twenty five hundred dollars is needed. I am corresponding with you because your son is implicated and as a last resort.
Your helping me will in no way involve you, cause anyone the slightest harm nor will it impede justice. Quite the contrary, justice will then be possible.
It is necessary, for the success of my efforts that my identity remain unknown until this case is concluded at which time I will make myself known to you and repay the money. Believe me, you would be amply repaid if you never heard from me again. If I could only explain now—but I dare not.
The fate of more than one now rests on your decision. Your decision as to my truth and sincerity. I realize you have only this letter on which to base your decision and that you could so easily have me apprehended, although it would profit no one and only bring greater and final disaster.
Again, I beg, please have faith in me. Help me to help all. If you will trust me, make a package as small as possible of packets of fives, tens and twenties to total twenty five hundred dollars. When package is ready and to inform me so and that you will help, place this ad in the Tulsa World’s “Lets Swap” column:
Electric train for bicycle 9-8763.
I will then get in touch with you to name the time and place to receive the loan. Act immediately as valuable time has already been lost, because of my reluctance to ask you for help.
If this ad does not appear within 48 hours I shall consider your answer, no. But I again beg you to trust me and co-operate.
(Signed) U.R. Good
Judge Kennamer dismissed the letter’s sender as just another crackpot. Ever since his son was arrested, he had received numerous anonymous letters from individuals seeking something, promising something, or from cons and ex-cons who enjoyed the pain he was going through by having a son in jail accused of murder.
When the “Let’s Swap” ad did not appear, the sender grew more frustrated but wasn’t willing to give up. A short time later, James Barnett, described in newspapers as “a negro voodoo doctor,” walked into Judge Kennamer’s office in the federal building and laid an envelope on his desk. The anonymous letter, which was later published in the newspapers, encouraged Judge Kennamer to go to 405½ Latimer Place to seek out a man who had been able to alter the outcome of another well-known Tulsa murder trial a few years before. In a conspiratorial tone, the letter promised that if he did, his son might benefit, but only with a payment of $1,200.
Judge Kennamer then asked Barnett if the sender intended to tamper with the jury, and that all he wanted was a fair trial for his son. Barnett, who was given two dollars to deliver the message, replied he didn’t know the contents of the letter. The judge then grew irate and ordered him out of the office. Fearing he was in trouble, Barnett, who was more involved then he let on, quickly gave up the name of the letter’s author as well as her address; it turned out to be Edna Harman. The second letter was linked to the first by a similar typeface, an “Executive Bond” watermark on the stationery, and Barnett—who said Edna had discussed both letters with him and two other people.
The next day, Opal and an unidentified man went to the Latimer address, which turned out to be Barnett’s home. Although Jim was not there at the time, they met a woman who told them a “voodoo doctor” had gone to see Judge Kennamer about fixing the case with the jury the day before. Several hours afterward, a woman came around to ask Jim what the judge had to say. She was later identified as Edna Harman.
Opal then went from Barnett’s home to see Edna, who told her that her brother and another boy had rented an apartment from her. However, the description she had of Phil did not match, and the Kennamers, once again, concluded Mrs. Harman could be of no help. Instead of turning over her two letters to police, they wrote her off as one of the many attention seekers who were trying to insert themselves into a nationally known case.
Although she had struck out with the defense, Edna Harman next saw an opportunity with the Gorrells. Just after the venue change was announced, she approached Dr. Gorrell with the same story Tom Wallace had told the jury: that she had rented an apartment to Kennamer and another boy, spied on them as Kennamer was writing a letter—supposedly the letter—and overheard him remark, “That fellow has got yellow. He has backed out. I am going to Kansas City and I am going to put the skids under him.”
Gorrell then took this information to Holly Anderson, who sent his investigator, Jack Bonham, to interview Mrs. Harman, who told him the same story. But as the doctor would later testify, before Edna could come to Pawnee to testify, there was just one little thing she needed first—one hundred dollars. [39]
“Before Mrs. Harman would consent to come to Pawnee to testify, [Dr. Gorrell] was to guarantee payment of her expenses up to $100,” the Tribune reported. “She told him she could not afford to come to Pawnee on the regular witness fee basis of $1 a day and mileage.”
Her request was politely turned down, and she was handed a subpoena to testify.
When Moss learned Mrs. Harman would testify, he recalled her name from the time she had approached him some years before with an offer to sell her testimony to benefit his client who was facing a murder trial. Besides knowing of the Kennamers’ experience with her, he started asking around and learned from half a dozen defense attorneys from Tulsa to Oklahoma City that over the last twelve years, she had approached them with similar offers and, in two known cases, she had actually testified.
The hearing in Pawnee presented a unique opportunity for the Kennamer defense and prosecution to work together against a common foe. Given the nature of the hearing, the defense was allowed to put on their case first. From the stand, Edna, her three children, and her husband all told of how they had received threatening phone calls, observed strange men lurking near their apartment, and were threatened by defense team investigators, whose shoulder-holstered weapons were displayed a little too obviously for Edna’s comfort. Mrs. Harman’s strategy was to deny everything, point by point, and to burst into tears at appropriate moments during her testimony. And just like Phil Kennamer, everyone else—Opal Kennamer, Flint Moss, his two investigators, Dr. Gorrell, Dixie Gilmer, Tom Wallace, and star witness Jim Barnett—was lying, but she was telling the truth.
The hearing lasted two days and, by the end of it, the witness statements and circumstantial evidence against her were too overwhelming for Judge Hurst, who branded her a “professional witness.”
“I am convinced this defendant attempted to obtain money from Judge Kennamer as well as the other side in the trial. A mere fine is not sufficient punishment in this case,” Judge Hurst declared
as he sentenced Edna Harman to thirty days in jail and a fine of $250.[40] Normally, that would have been the end of it, but this was Edna Mae Harman, and Edna Mae Harman was too proud to have her reputation sullied with a jail term for contempt of court. Her lawyer boldly announced they would appeal the judge’s decision. This action required Judge Hurst to vacate her current bond and set an appeal bond for $1,000. Like the last time, she was forced to sit it out in jail for a few days while her family came up with the money.
Seven months later, on October 22, William Chase argued his client’s case before the criminal court of appeals. Their decision on the matter came in March 1936, one year after her original conviction. It was a long time to wait for a judgment that was boiled down to two sentences:
“Orderly trials and proceedings in court are not to be obstructed and nullified by [the] whims or temperamental outbursts of a witness. We are satisfied the punishment assessed is not excessive but on the contrary, is reasonable and humane.”
Normally, that would have been the end of it, but this was Edna Mae Harman, and Edna Mae Harman, to her credit, was a fighter. Instead of being carted off to jail, her lawyer requested, and received, several thirty- and sixty-day extensions for the start of her jail sentence. By September, the patience of Judge Hurst, Carl McGee, and Holly Anderson had reached its limit. On Friday, September 18, 1936, both Anderson and Hurst made it clear to reporters that unless Mrs. Harman surrendered the following day, a warrant for her arrest would be issued. When asked about serving her time, Edna told reporters that she “did not intend to stay over there that long.” She avoided arrest and waited another two days before beginning her sentence on September 21.
But instead of paying the fine, her husband, Orlan, would not or could not come up with the $250. Instead of serving thirty days, she had to suffer the indignity of paying off that fine at the rate of one dollar for every day in jail. She requested and was denied release in November, but by January 1937, a pardon-and-parole attorney pleaded on her behalf. Hurst, who by then was a state supreme court judge, gave his recommendation for her release. On January 21, 1937, after serving 123 days of a thirty-day sentence, Edna Harman was paroled from the Pawnee County Jail by Governor Ernest Marland.
WHEN PHIL KENNAMER WENT TO prison, the hysteria did not go with him. It was forced to linger behind in Tulsa and was amplified when Maddux’s two-gun theory was leaked to the press. The drama from his attention-seeking remark would play out for the next five weeks. It also reinforced the public’s demand that a grand jury be called to reinvestigate the entire case from top to bottom, including the bribery allegations, the obscene photographs, and Sidney Born’s death, which led to an investigation that many believed was bungled from the beginning. The common denominator in all those could be traced back to one man, who was just now sensing the storm clouds gathering around him. After waiting for more than twenty-four hours, Maddux denied saying that two different bullets and guns were used to kill Gorrell.
“I never made such a statement. It is not true,” Maddux declared Saturday night after Kennamer was sentenced. “As far as I know, the two bullets were fired from the same gun.”
But it came too late, and the damage was already done. With Anderson on an out-of-state vacation, Gilmer was forced to reopen the entire investigation, and he called for all the evidence to be brought to him. He had grown impatient with the entire case, which was being kept alive by wild gossip and the latest controversy over the bullets. This spawned new tensions between the county attorney’s office and the city’s detective bureau, with Commissioner Hoop thrown into the middle of it.
Of the two .22-caliber bullets removed from victim, only one of them was capable of being compared to test bullets fired from the same gun. Although it matched, the shell casings left some doubt. The primer marks may have been the same, but the secondary markings from one shell casing to the other were different. When Gilmer sent the fatal bullets and the gun to the state crime bureau to be tested, the difference in the secondary marks to the shell casings was enough to stump the examiner, who issued a purposefully confusing statement.
“No identification. Bullets with test bullets are each other. Fatal shell identical with test shell,” his telegram read.
The state examiner’s muddled statement raised enough doubt with Gilmer that he called for the pistols of two key witnesses in the case whose names featured heavily in local rumors—Homer Wilcox Jr. and Jack Snedden. Both of their weapons were sent, along with Gorrell’s gun, to the Bureau of Investigation in Washington, DC. After several false starts and communication with J. Edgar Hoover himself, the examiner there concluded that the fatal bullets and shells all came from Gorrell’s gun—five weeks after Sgt. Maddux started the rumor.
The entire two-gun saga was a false controversy that never would have happened if common sense had prevailed. The morning after the murder, Charles Bard told investigators that Gorrell had asked for more bullets, and then showed him the three bullets he had in the nine-shot cylinder. Two empty shell casings and one live round were later found in his weapon, and two bullets were retrieved from his head. If he was shot with two different .22-caliber pistols by two different killers, there should have only been one empty shell casing in the revolver.
For the two-gun theory to be believed, the killer or killers would have had to remove one unfired bullet from the chamber of Gorrell’s gun and replace it with the fired shell from the second gun.
A side-effect of the two-gun drama was the suspicion by Gilmer that the police department was withholding evidence, preferring to bring it out during the grand jury. When he called for more information about the purported bribe offer, both Maddux and Hoop were slow in giving it to him. During an interview with the World that was published on March 10, the assistant county attorney lost his temper.
“If [Commissioner] Hoop has information and will not give it to the county attorney’s office, we think he is deliberately obstructing justice,” Gilmer snapped.
It was an audacious statement, and interdepartmental gossip against Sgt. Maddux was building. He had finally gone too far, and he wasn’t the only one who could sense a backlash was coming—Hoop saw it too. He had unwittingly hitched his wagon to Maddux when he made the bribery claim. Now, he couldn’t distance himself fast enough from the criminologist who had a target on his back.
“All I know about [the bribe] is what Sergeant Maddux told me three months ago,” Hoop told the World in the same article. “Insofar as my own personal knowledge of the bribe offer is concerned, all I know is what Maddux told me.”
To save himself, Sgt. Maddux released a prepared statement, before the federal ballistics examiner’s report was released, in which he tried to explain the rumors and proclamations attributed to him regarding the bullets, the bribe offer, the obscene photographs, rumors that Homer Junior was involved, and perceived slights on his part against the character of Flint Moss or Judge Kennamer, whom he now praised as “ethical” men he held in high regard. It was a verbose document fraught with denials, self-justifications, claims of integrity, and the confidence that he had the full support of Oscar Hoop and Chief Carr. It did not address, however, the widely held belief that he had ended the Born investigation too soon.
But Tulsa County wasn’t content to let Sgt. Maddux have the last word on anything; that was the job of the most ambitious grand-jury investigation yet called in the city’s history. Only eighteen of the prosecution’s fifty-seven witnesses testified during Kennamer’s trial, which, to everyone’s dismay, only established the boy’s guilt in the slaying of John Gorrell Jr. The trial did nothing to stamp out, once and for all, the persistent rumors regarding Kennamer’s unknown accomplice, as well as who murdered Sidney Born, and who offered Sgt. Maddux the $25,000 bribe. Those criminals were still out there, and they needed to be brought to justice. The public also wanted to know who was behind the local vice gangs, which had corrupted the youth of well-to-do families with gambling, liquor, and Mexican weed that, when combi
ned together, probably led to those blackmail photographs that Sgt. Maddux said were in a bank vault.
The grand jury would put an end to the mystery. The grand jury would stamp out, once and for all, those persistent rumors. The grand jury would shine the light of truth and justice on the guilty, who would then be indicted and held accountable by the grace of God and all that is holy.
When the twelve jurors were selected, Judge Hurst impressed upon them the seriousness of their duties as well as the wide-ranging mandate which also called upon them to explore public corruption and to inspect the jail facilities with regard to prisoners being held without due process. He pointed out to them that the hearing, which would be held in a jury deliberation room on the third floor of the courthouse, was off-limits to the public. The press was barred from photographing or talking to any of the witnesses after they had testified, and no transcript would be made. While the proceedings were under the supervision of Anderson and Assistant State Attorney General Owen Watts, it was the jury’s job to question witnesses and then make their recommendation.
“Regardless of who may present matters to you, you should investigate them if there seems to be a basis,” Judge Hurst told the twelve men. “You are an independent body, you are not a grand jury of the court, county, nor the petitioners, and it [is] your duty to act independently.”
The grand jury began calling witnesses on April 9, and over the next twelve business days, 165 people offered up what they knew and answered questions. Reporters for both the Tribune and the World took up positions in the corridor and, although they were careful not to ask questions or take photographs, they were able to correctly surmise some of the elements under consideration by identifying the people who sat outside waiting to be called. The death of Sidney Born was obviously explored by calling in those who found him, the doctor who attended him, high-ranking police officials, and a squad of detectives familiar with the case. They also called in, several times, Dr. Sidney Born Sr., who had hired two private investigators to find his son’s killers. During the trial, he had made the announcement that two young local men would soon be arrested for his son’s murder. Although it never happened, there was speculation that it could happen at any moment. The jury even subpoenaed Phil Kennamer to seek information regarding Born’s death but were disappointed when he “left behind him a maze of theories, uncorroborated allegations and personal opinions,” the World reported.
Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland Page 27