The interview itself was informal. The heavy detective sat behind the desk, and the thin one balanced half on the desk corner with one foot on the floor, as I sat in a wooden chair facing both men. When the time came to identify which specific case held my interest, I decided to avoid asking about the Paula Herring murder and instead dropped the bombshell that there could be as many as forty. Laughter filled the room until I quickly reeled off the names of a half-dozen cases from past decades, starting with the 1934 unsolved kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Dorothy Distelhurst, whose eyes had been burned out with acid and body buried in a shallow grave on the grounds of a nearby tuberculosis hospital.
The two detectives quickly switched from skepticism to encouragement, offering their perspective and even a few gems of insider information that could be useful down the road.
The whole interview lasted less than thirty minutes, and near the end it was obvious that I had passed the initial test to gain admittance to their historic crime vault.
A few days later, I dialed a number for the Metro Police Archives and spoke to an officer about the pre-access meeting with the two detectives, and she let me know that she had gotten word that a visit to the vault had been approved. She also suggested, strongly, that the visit take place the following day.
The following morning, I made my way downtown to a small paved parking lot surrounded by a tall fence topped with razor wire and a building located in back of the new Justice Center. It seemed to be hidden in plain view among a cluster of bail bond store fronts and law offices. After a couple of deep breaths, I entered the front door of the Metro Police Archives.
The lobby area just inside the doorway was barely large enough for a couple of chairs and a long narrow desk almost chest high. Behind the desk, on a facing wall, was a doorway marked Secure Area. A tall female officer, early fifties I speculated, with gray hair and almost no makeup, greeted me as if they were used to having a steady stream of people walking in off of the street, asking for directions or a cup of free coffee.
After I signed in and offered a photo ID, she motioned for me to follow her through the secure doorway behind the desk. Just before I took a step toward her, she said that I would have to leave any pens, papers, cameras, or phones with her while I was inside. For once, I had guessed correctly and had left all such collateral in my car.
Having visited libraries and museums all of my life, I had a few mental images of what I might expect to find inside a police archives facility, but I could not have been more mistaken in the scene waiting for me just beyond the door. It was an island of misfit toys. File cabinets of every color, shape, and size filled an enormous warehouse, nearly as far as the eye could see. It was as if every file cabinet no longer needed by a local high school or government agency had been shipped to the Police Archives for their use.
I had no idea how anyone could know where to look for a specific year of files, let alone a specific case file. The giant warehouse was arranged with rows and rows of file cabinets of all types. Most were four drawers, some were three, and some were five. In the back of the warehouse, the file cabinets were stacked two high, and a ladder was needed to explore the contents of the upper cabinets.
But with my specific request came a specific fulfillment. I was led to the south side of the giant warehouse and was directed to a single file cabinet halfway down a long wall of cabinets. The guidance provided was that I could explore only the top two drawers in the assigned cabinet and nothing more. My compliance with this request was not left to chance or voluntary acquiescence. A large uniformed police officer showed up moments after my arrival and took up residence in a folding chair positioned within ten feet of my work space. He brought a morning newspaper to read and a cup of coffee to sip while making sure I did not stray from my work area. I did not fail to notice the large-caliber pistol at his side.
My specific file cabinet was labeled as a 1960s storage unit for closed homicide cases that included the letters H through P. This meant I could review the file for William “Big Bill” Powell, a former Vanderbilt football star and Capitol Chevrolet executive, accused of murdering the seventy-two-year-old owner of the dealership during a midday car ride in May 1968. Fellow dealership executives contributed fifty-thousand dollars for Powell's defense fund. Ironically, the shooting had taken place a few blocks from the Metro Archives building where I had first discovered the Paula Herring file. With master attorney Jack Norman Sr. on his team, forty-one-year-old Powell walked free in 1969, and with his freedom came the ownership of the lucrative Capitol Chevrolet franchise.
Within the first hour of exploration, I also found an empty folder labeled “Herring,” and I wondered if perhaps the missing file in the Police Archives was the very file that I had stumbled upon one rainy afternoon in the Metro Archives building.
The state of Tennessee is well known for its Grand Divisions, described as East, West, and Middle. Perhaps less well known to many of its citizens is that the highest court in the state, the Tennessee Supreme Court, is also divided into the same three divisions, with locations in Jackson, Knoxville, and Nashville. In the search for trial evidence, especially documentation of criminal proceedings, I was guided by more than one helpful clerk toward the notion that, as John Randolph Clarke's case had been appealed by his attorney, his court records might have traveled along with any formal motion by counsel. Thus, armed with this bit of knowledge, I started my trial transcript search in Music City.
After making a midday trek to the 7th Avenue North location of the Tennessee Supreme Court, I stepped into the most solidly built marble structure I had ever entered and immediately adopted the somber tone I perceived to be seeping from the walls. It felt like Fort Knox and the Vatican had opened a law practice together. It was also a reminder that my simple plan of research was now entering a world of real consequence. I decided to tread carefully within these historic and hallowed walls.
The initial version of my plan, at least as it related to answering the questions haunting me, had been to find John Randolph Clarke alive and well. However, the conversation with Clarke's former next-door neighbor confirmed that I had struck out with that plan, so my next option was to find the criminal trial transcript from the Paula Herring case in hopes of uncovering the answer as to why Clarke hadn't also killed Alan Herring on the night of Paula's murder. In combination with the trial transcript search, I thought perhaps a conversation with the lead attorneys from both the prosecution and the defense teams might also be revealing.
After locating the administrative office of the court, I was greeted by a young woman dressed in a blue suit who offered assistance with a smile. I proffered the “I hope you can help me” introduction, quickly followed by the story of a little boy who had slept through his sister's murder as part of the request for the State v. John Randolph Clarke criminal trial transcript. I was confident that the clerk had not heard this kind of request before, mostly because of the growing height of her eyebrows as I reeled out my brief narrative.
Her response was most positive, though she warned me that records from a decades-old criminal case might take several days to locate. I assured her that I could wait.
It was with much anticipation a few days later that I found myself almost jogging back to the Tennessee Supreme Court building to discover why the helpful clerk had requested a subsequent meeting with me. After entering the massive doors to the building and crossing the lobby into the clerk's office, the young woman who had previously helped me flashed a knowing smile in my direction as I approached the counter.
“I was able to find the transcript for your case.”
“What do I owe you? Do you need a new car, a vacation perhaps?”
She laughed and said that she was happy to find the case, and, as she spoke, she began pulling thick legal-sized documents from under the counter and stacking them in front of me. Decades earlier, someone had sorted the eventual 1,200 pages of court reporter output into sections of two-hundred pages each, then had b
ound the legal-sized pages with a brown wrapper, now crumbling with age at the edges. As the stack began rising, I stared open-mouthed at the sheer volume of transcript.
“You can review these here in my presence but I would suggest that you take them one at a time into the little hallway behind you to review. The documents can't leave the building, unless you want us to copy them for you, and that runs one dollar per page. We would need a certified check to get started, and it would be a few days before we'd have them ready for pickup.” It seemed like minutes had passed before I finally remembered to mumble, “Thank you,” and, “This is amazing.”
Seconds later, I stood in a hallway where lawyers and paralegals and reporters would stop by to inspect a wooden tray holding copies of recent rulings, filings, and motions from the various judges. For the next ten minutes, I thought of every option imaginable to walk out the door with more than a thousand pages of criminal trial transcript. Being comfortable with personal computers and the technology that accompanied them, I thought about using a scanner hooked to a laptop computer to scan every page, but the technology was too unwieldy for this option, not to mention cost prohibitive for managing and indexing a thousand pages of legal-sized images. I wondered if hiring a court reporter to read and reenter the trial text into a fresh version of transcript might be doable, but the dollars for this exercise would eclipse the dollar-per-page option.
I stepped back into the clerk's office and meekly inquired whether or not I could checkout the transcript as I might do with a library book. But I was quickly told, in no uncertain terms, that I could not walk away with a criminal trial transcript as if the highest court in Tennessee offered some sort of interlibrary loan program. But she quickly followed with a surprising solution: “You can submit a motion to one of the justices on behalf of the surviving family member, to review the documents outside of our offices for a short period of time, and you might get lucky.”
Over the next few minutes, this legal angel explained that the judges would not waste their time writing a response to my request to access the documents, but I could submit a formal motion to the court, and at some point, the motion would be reviewed and acted upon, either with agreement or rejection.
I restrained my enthusiasm long enough to thank her for the guidance and also to acknowledge that I had zero experience in writing the formal motion, short of hiring a lawyer to write it for me. The young clerk graciously offered a couple of samples that I could use to model my request.
Hours later I sent a note to Alan Herring, letting him know that there was a possibility of obtaining a copy of the transcript from the 1964 criminal trial, and with his approval I would submit the motion as his “reporter” in the request. Alan agreed to the plan and over the weekend, I wrote the motion, created an affidavit to be notarized, and also created a formal order for the eventual judge to sign if he agreed to the motion. By Monday morning I had gotten the affidavit notarized, and then dropped the documents off with the clerk where it was dutifully stamped into formal receipt, though there was no estimate as to how long it might take for a judge to respond to my motion.
True to her word, a few months after dropping off the motion, I received another call from the helpful clerk. Justice Alan E. Highers of the Western Division of the Tennessee Court of Appeals, had agreed to my motion to remove the transcript documents from the court's offices for a period of three business days.1 I was ecstatic at the news, notwithstanding the fact that I would have to pay to make two copies of more than one thousand legal-sized pages of trial transcripts.
Alan Highers was a familiar name to me, primarily because I knew that among Churches of Christ, Judge Alan Highers was a regular speaker, debater, and also the editor of a publication out of Memphis, known as The Spiritual Sword.2 Given Wilmer Herring's family background and their prominence among the Churches of Christ in the hill country of Texas, it seemed a bit ironic to me that Justice Highers was the one agreeing to the motion.
After picking up the documents on a Friday afternoon, I descended upon a print shop in Green Hills in Nashville and began to homestead a couple of the machines for several hours, making copies, rebinding pages, and attempting to speedread my way through hundreds of pages of trial transcripts as the machines did their work. The following morning, I returned the original transcript to the clerk of the court and then buried myself in my new reading assignment.
After a careful study of the 1963–1964 yearbook from the University of Tennessee, I started calling girls who had lived in New West Dormitory, where Paula Herring had been elected president of her floor. Surely, there would be students who remembered Paula. Not only was my assumption correct, I discovered that a number of these former coeds deeply cared about their lost classmate.1
I began to compile my notes from various telephone calls and even a few in-person meetings with those in close proximity of the Knoxville campus, and I learned that in 1964 Paula Herring was having the time of her life while attending the University of Tennessee. She clearly viewed college life as an escape from the sadness of her father's death and her mother's alcoholism and lifestyle choices. And it seems that she viewed her new life as the best way to help her younger brother back home in Nashville.
In her first term in Knoxville, Paula was selected to room with a studious girl from Johnson City, Tennessee. But the girl was a poor match for Paula, who went out a lot and liked to date and party. By the time Winter Quarter began in January, 1964, Paula had found a new roommate named Julia “JuJu” Nicholson, and they were a much better match. According to one of Paula's other dorm mates, Paula and her friends would make frequent trips to nearby Cumberland Avenue to drink chocolate sodas and sit and gossip.2 According to one of her friends, Paula didn't rush a sorority in the fall of 1963, but after Christmas, they learned that a girl who had previously pledged Alpha Omicron Pi sorority had not been initiated, and Paula Herring gladly rushed when the Winter Quarter began.3 The sorority assigned her to Big Sister Dottie Whelan in February 1964. The plan was to formally initiate Paula into the sorority in April or May. But Paula, who had pledged her loyalty and devotion to Alpha Omicron Pi, flew home for the weekend in late February and never returned.
When I asked the woman, whom I will call Virginia, if she and others from UT had attended Paula's funeral, I was told that several girls from the dorm had made the trip, and that they had stayed overnight in Nashville. According to Virginia, the funeral had been open casket, and the funeral home personnel had covered up Paula's facial wounds. She did remember that Paula's little brother was noticeably absent, and the girls could only guess the reason. Was he traumatized? Or was he being hidden from people? No one knew the answer.
When I asked why she had such clear memories of Paula Herring, Virginia said that she and Paula discovered that they had been classmates in elementary school in Gallatin, Tennessee, in grades three and four.4 They hadn't realized it until they both moved into the same dorm on the same floor in Knoxville. At the end of our meeting, Virginia graciously offered photographs of Paula, taken inside the New West Dormitory during her brief time in school.
The photos included one of Paula sitting on her bed in the dorm with a stuffed kitten in her lap, dated February 1964. It was possibly the last photograph ever taken of Paula Herring while she was still alive. In the background you can see other photos on the wall:
A prom party photograph from an AOPi function
The AOPi class with her Big Sister, Dottie Whelan
A Sadie Hawkins party with an unknown date in a straw hat
A photo of little brother, Alan Herring, on her corner table
A few days after our meeting, I received a note from Virginia:
Dear Michael,
I also had another impression about Paula and that was that she and her mother did not get along well. I also remember Paula using her money to buy clothes for ski equipment and not having enough for food for the rest of the quarter, not uncommon for a lot of students, but very uncommon for someone wh
o had just pledged a sorority.
Sincerely,
Virginia5
On a summer afternoon decades after Paula Herring was murdered, I stumbled upon a small article in the archived files of the University of Tennessee student newspaper, at the time known as the Orange and White. The note, published on page ten of their February 21, 1964, edition included a headline that read “Six Panhellenic Representatives to Attend Ole Miss Meeting.” The article noted that a group of girls from the school were traveling from Knoxville to Oxford, Mississippi, to attend the annual Southeastern Panhellenic Conference. The reporter had been kind enough to include the names of the girls attending the sorority conference, as well as the ironic news that the girls were traveling on the exact same Friday afternoon that Paula Herring would have been flying from Knoxville to Nashville—February 21, 1964.
After reviewing the article, I realized that one of the last names in the group was also a match for a name in the Ski Club photo that had included Paula Herring. The girl, named Susan, was also noted as the Panhellenic Rush Chairman.
It took a few weeks of careful research, but eventually I discovered that the skiing sorority member had also lived in New West Dorm. Not many days before she was murdered, Paula Herring had announced to her mother that she was changing her major to pre-law, from the biology major that she had initially chosen, and that she was also going to increase the focus on her undergraduate studies to ensure that she would eventually be accepted into law school.6 My assumption was that someone, perhaps a professor who had observed her keen mind in class, a mentor of some type, had influenced Paula to change paths. It was a long shot, but I called the University of Tennessee Alumni Association Office and posed a simple question: did a former student, the skiing sorority member, have a degree or focus of pre-law while enrolled at the University of Tennessee. The answer was yes. A few weeks later, I found her.
A Murder in Music City Page 8