Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland

by Morrow, Jason Lucky

  Anticipating all of this to come out sooner or later, Gilmer was quick with his statement, which may have been prepared in advance.

  “At the instigation of Judge Kennamer and some of his attorneys, Maddux went to Canton, Illinois, and represented himself there to the prosecuting attorney as a deputy sheriff from Tulsa County and acting on behalf of the prosecution in this case. As a result of this fraud, these affidavits were secured,” Gilmer’s statement began.

  However, when Maddux handed over the letters and affidavits to Judge Kennamer, the judge reneged on their agreement and, instead of paying him the $250, the ex-police sergeant only got fifty bucks. Feeling betrayed, Maddux outlined what had occurred, in a letter to Dr. Gorrell dated December 24, 1935, and offered to sell him the evidence he had gathered from Wright. He ended his letter with a postscript that stated: “I got $50 and a lot of promises.”

  Doctor Gorrell refused to pay for Maddux’s “evidence,” and together with Gilmer, the two went to Canton, Illinois, to question Wright, who not only recanted his sworn affidavits, but shifted all the blame to Maddux.

  “We obtained a sworn statement from Wright,” Gilmer’s declaration continued, “who said as a result of fraud, misinformation, and duress, Maddux obtained his affidavit and that the inferences to be drawn from his affidavit were erroneous. Wright told us that it was never his intention to defame young Gorrell’s character. He told us that Maddux dictated his, Wright’s, statement, and it was ‘largely a creature of Maddux’s imagination.’”

  In addition to exposing Maddux, Gilmer castigated Judge Kennamer as being “‘guilty of misconduct’ in moves planned to gain further reprieve for his son,” the World reported.

  A few days later, the criminal court of appeals denied Moss’s motion for a rehearing of his client’s appeal. They also granted a request from the assistant state attorney general when they issued a writ of prohibition forbidding Judge Thurman Hurst from ever granting Phil Kennamer a new trial. This obliterated any chance he had of gaining his freedom through the courts. There would be no new investigation. There would be no new trial based on documentary evidence that would “make you sit up and take notice.” The high court’s decision was the legal equivalent of saying: Go away and never come back. The judges even went so far as to remark that since the boy had violated no federal laws, he couldn’t appeal his case to the United States Supreme Court.

  On April 21, a disgusted Kennamer surrendered to the warden and expressed his opinion of the court’s decision. “Whatever influence swayed the court in their findings it was not in the high principles of law secured to us under the constitution.” He ended by telling reporters the high court had no respect for government.

  “Thank God it’s over,” Dr. Gorrell told the Tribune when told of Kennamer’s return to prison. “At least, I hope it’s over. I hope we can begin to forget about this case. It has been an awful strain on my wife.”

  But it would never be over. The Kennamers were never going to go away. They were never going to stop. They were right and everyone else was wrong. It would just keep going—on and on and on—until one of them was dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  1936

  WITH THE STATE COURTS NOW off-limits, Judge Kennamer chose to pursue his son’s freedom through backdoor channels to both the governor’s office, and to the pardon-and-parole board. When the fifty-seven-year-old gathered the support of affluent friends to secure bail, he subconsciously signaled the strategy he would use to get his boy out of prison. Instead of going at Governor Marland directly and publicly, the Kennamer family lobbied influential contacts to take the lead and swamp the governor’s office with private conversations, phone calls, and letters advocating for clemency. All of this was done quietly, behind the scenes, and away from the prying eyes of the press.

  But by October of that year, rumors were getting back to the Gorrell family that something was going on. Their son’s killer was only eight combined months into his sentence and already, the pro-Kennamer allies were campaigning for his release. On October 12, eyebrows were raised when the Tulsa Tribune revealed that Phil, his father, and a new attorney had held a secret meeting, outside of prison, in the home of an assistant deputy warden. This prompted the Gorrells to meet with Governor Marland to ask if a formal petition for clemency had been filed, and if the prison was giving Phil special treatment. They were assured that no application had been filed, and that Kennamer was being treated the same as any other prisoner. But the state’s leading politician then made a statement that was indicative of things to come. “The only thing that will change my mind (about clemency) is the production of newfound evidence,” he told reporters outside his capitol-building office.

  As would soon become clear to the entire state of Oklahoma, when Governor Ernest Marland prematurely announced in March, “There will be no clemency for the youth during my administration,” that wasn’t what he meant. What he really meant was: I’m wishy-washy, and despite what the Pawnee jury voted, and the findings of the grand jury, and the ruling by the criminal court of appeals—my actions regarding Phil Kennamer can easily be influenced.

  1937

  This much was proved when he announced six months later, in April 1937, that he “[had] been urged by close personal friends to consider the Kennamer case and grant clemency,” an Oklahoma City newspaper reported.

  “I think in fairness, I should look into this,” Governor Marland continued. “I will look into it myself, in the next year.”

  This unprovoked announcement was met with suspicion from the Gorrells and Dixie Gilmer, the new county attorney. As governor-elect in December 1934, Marland had visited Tulsa after the murder and had spoken with authorities. When pervasive gossip raised doubts about everything, he had assigned his own investigator to look into the murder, but his findings matched those of the grand jury—that there was no more to the case than what was already said in the courtroom or from the grand jury. Now, in spite of everything else, Marland allowed himself to be prejudiced by the persuasiveness of others who convinced him Phil Kennamer had been treated unfairly.

  By July, sixteen influential citizens with ties to Judge Kennamer—including a state district judge and the governor of Alabama—had personally written Governor Marland requesting parole for Phil Kennamer. Another petitioner, a local attorney from Tulsa, tried to argue that Phil Kennamer was persecuted because he is the son of a federal judge, and that he did not actually murder John Gorrell; someone else did, and Phil was “taking the rap” because he thought his father’s position would set him free.

  His letter, like many of the others, incorporated histrionic language that overstated far-fetched claims of important new evidence, based on what boiled down to as—gossip. A few weeks later, two other attorneys used this same approach to assert that “a majority of Tulsa citizens believe Phil Kennamer has been punished sufficiently for the slaying of John Gorrell.”

  That statement was soon discredited. With the Kennamer camp clearly one step ahead, Dixie Gilmer, the new county attorney, and Dr. Gorrell were forced to play catch-up. During the entire month of June 1937, they circulated a petition demanding that Phil Kennamer be kept in prison. “It is a travesty of justice that we should be required to take such a preventative measure,” Gilmer told the Associated Press.

  By July 4, they had gathered 5,455 names, with 3,783 of them coming from Tulsans.

  But when Governor Marland placed the sixteen pro-Kennamer letters in one pan of a balancing scale, and the petition with 5,455 names in the other pan, the appeals for parole weighed heavier—according to his scale of justice. This was proved a few days later when he took the unusual step of informing Fred Cunningham, lead attorney for the state pardon-and-parole board, that he was taking “personal charge” of any possible clemency action for Phil Kennamer, and that it was still under consideration.

  Based on popular opinion alone, Governor Marland could have closed the Phil Kennamer file for the remaining two years of his term.
Instead, his remarks and actions indicated he was leaving the possibility of parole open and was merely biding his time until the public outlook was more favorable. The case, Cunningham later told the Associated Press, was “. . . in a state of suspended animation.”

  True to his nature, Phil had his own plans to get out of his prison sentence. Along with 3,600 other convicts, prisoner 31-420 woke every morning at six o’clock and put on the regulation uniform of blue denim trousers, a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and a blue denim coal-miner’s cap. After a quick breakfast, all able-bodied men were required to be at their work stations by seven thirty. His first prison job had him starting off at the bottom, working as a spool tender in the prison’s twine factory. When he returned to prison following his failed appeal, he continued to work various positions in the twine factory until he was promoted to a low-level job in the prison library.

  In mid-October 1937, the young man who was once insulted by his defense attorneys’ claims that he was mentally ill personally requested a sanity hearing with prison doctors. The irony was not lost on Tulsa newspapers.

  “It (the insanity defense) was rejected by the youth himself who on the witness stand, insisted that he was sane,” the Tribune reminded its readers.

  1938

  After that effort failed, his next scheme was revealed during a January 22, 1938, self-arranged interview with the press in which he promised to leave the country and never return. The story conveniently coincided with the regular monthly meeting of the parole board, as well as intimations from Governor Marland that he would act on the case before he left office in twelve months.

  “If I were released, and it were possible under the terms of my release, I would leave the country permanently and go to South America to work for a company with which I have been promised employment,” Kennamer announced. “All I want to do is get away from here [and become] a man without a country.”

  The job was real and his statements calculated. What Kennamer was offering, with his father’s support, was a conditional parole that would, hopefully, meet with the approval of those who were against him. A month earlier, Governor Marland had revealed that he was under intense pressure to grant clemency. This latest attempt, the Kennamers hoped, would put him over the top.

  But when his case was never brought up during the monthly clemency meeting, Phil’s next bid for freedom came two weeks later when he demanded that the new Pawnee County attorney charge a prosecution witness with perjury. Although the papers didn’t mention his name at first, it was another attempt to shift blame elsewhere and get revenge against the young man who had testified to Phil’s premeditation of murder—the young man who had stood between him and Virginia Wilcox, and the same young man who had married her in October of 1936—Jack Snedden.

  In his letter, Phil claimed that Marion Hamby, the Pawnee jailer, would support his accusation of perjury and declared, “[he] will be glad to sign the complaint as required by law.” However, when County Attorney Horace Ballaine spoke with Hamby, the man said he “[did] remember something about it,” but his “memory was hazy on exactly what happened.”

  After striking out three times in five months, Kennamer retreated back into his world and began writing a book about the injustice he was forced to endure. In August, the twenty-three-year-old got one of the best jobs in the entire institution as a clerk in the prison’s treasury office. His work, overseeing the prisoners’ private accounts, ended at four thirty in the afternoon. Instead of attending the educational courses that were available to most prisoners, Kennamer returned to the cell he shared with James Arthur Camp, twenty-eight, who was serving a twenty-five-year term for armed robbery. There, he would indulge in his favorite pastimes of reading, working on his book, or writing letters.

  While Phil lived a comfortable life in a six-by-sixteen-foot cell, the Gorrells were forced to endure yet another tragedy. On a return trip from Los Angeles, daughter Edith Ann suffered serious injuries after she lost control of the car she was driving on wet pavement near Grants, New Mexico, on September 1. The sedan rolled several times, breaking her back and shoulder, and nearly pulled her scalp off. Her brother, Ben, nineteen, suffered only minor cuts and bruises. After Edith was stabilized in an Albuquerque hospital, the two were flown back to Tulsa. Despite several operations, she remained paralyzed from the waist down.

  The Kennamers were suffering too; after a fifteen-year fight with cystic fibrosis, devoted mother Lillie Kennamer, was dying. It was an unfortunate situation that created an opportunity for Phil, when her doctor advised Judge Kennamer that she wouldn’t survive another winter in Oklahoma. To extend her life, he recommended she be moved to Arizona, where the warm, dry climate would ease her frequent coughing spasms. But there was just one problem—she refused to leave without Phil. Friends who visited with her said she was emaciated, bedridden, and all she wanted to talk about was her youngest son.

  With the help of a high-ranking state politician, Judge Kennamer requested and received a clemency hearing with the parole board, who would be asked to consider a ninety-day compassionate parole for Phil to accompany his mother to Arizona. During the time period, medical furloughs were occasionally granted and, historically, a significant number of them morphed into a permanent parole.

  The hearing was held on October 31 in the famed “blue room” inside the state capitol building with a packed crowd of several hundred people, most of them pro-Kennamer-family supporters. The merits of the Gorrell-Kennamer case were off-limits. Board members were only interested in the health of Phil’s mother and the parameters of parole, if granted.

  As they had done so many times before, John and Alice Gorrell were again forced to be the watchdogs of justice for their son’s killer. In their corner was the indefatigable Dixie Gilmer, who was placed in the awkward position of lobbying against the dying wish of a long-suffering woman, who, by all accounts, was a lovely person.

  When called to testify, Judge Kennamer gave a detailed description of his wife’s recent decline. The medical opinion of her doctor was read into the record and reported on by the Tribune. “In his opinion, Mrs. Kennamer’s condition had been aggravated by worry over her son, and added the companionship of her son would prolong her life ‘which at any rate, would not be of long duration.’”

  After several dozen more people testified, most of them in favor of temporary parole, the five-member board retreated into a private room and returned fifty minutes later with a favorable recommendation to the governor. The public hearing by the board, the capitol correspondent for the Tulsa World intimated, was merely for show.

  “It was obvious from the moment board members entered the (private) room that the only question for decision would be the length of time consumed in writing the recommendation to be made to the governor,” Edward Burks wrote.

  But instead of giving Phil the customary ninety days his father had requested, the parole board generously doubled it to six months, which shocked supporters and detractors alike, and smacked of favoritism. For Governor Marland—a man who was married to his dead wife’s niece-turned-adopted-daughter but later had her adoption annulled when she was twenty-eight so they could get married—it was a win-win. His administration was finally able to give the Kennamer camp the victory they had always wanted, and it would also shift the possibility of granting permanent parole to the new governor, who would take office on January 9, 1939.

  Dixie Gilmer and the Gorrell family had finally been beaten. Alice Gorrell, who had lost twenty-five pounds since her daughter’s accident, and who was once again being forced to fight for justice for her murdered son, made a rare public statement to the press: “. . . I only wish there were some way the pardon and parole board could send my boy back to me.”

  But nobody from the governor’s office or the parole board wanted to listen to them anymore, and the time the Gorrells had left with their only daughter was slipping away. Edith Ann died of pneumonia on September 12, 1940, just twelve days before her twenty-fourth birthda
y.

  1939

  For the next five months, Phil Kennamer, now twenty-three, lived by the discipline required to meet his parole. In addition to attending to the needs of his dying mother, he was obligated to be employed, and after four weeks of searching, the former office clerk found work as a warehouse employee, unloading barrels of oil and supplies for one hundred dollars a month. This was a new Phil Kennamer, more reserved and mature. His combined thirty-two months in prison had tempered his arrogance—a little.

  On March 5, Lillie Kennamer was transported back to Tulsa where she could spend her final days with her family. She died on Sunday, March 12, at the age of fifty-four.

  The fate of Phil Kennamer was left to Governor Leon Phillips, who said he would review the entire case file and the appeals-court decision. He took his time and granted several two-week parole extensions while Phil kept working at his job in Arizona. But on May 29, Governor Phillips ordered him back to prison.

  “The story of this case is a sordid one; a disobedient and willful boy, idleness and inattention to school, refusal to continue in any job, a carefree life, culminating in a frequent use of intoxicating liquors and finally in taking of human life without legal excuse,” Phillips wrote.

  He then agreed with experts who said Phil had his own moral code outside of the one prescribed by the people and laws of Oklahoma.

  “We cannot [disregard] the verdicts and judgments of the juries and courts upon the insistence of friends, or to relieve the aching hearts of relatives because of the crime of some member of the family,” Phillips continued. “I think justice requires that I . . . reject the plea for further clemency.”