“Alan?” she questioned.
“Pardon me?”
“Are you really Alan Herring? And this is your way of getting information from me?”
“No, no. I can assure you that I'm not Alan Herring. I'm happy to meet you in person if that helps to allay any of your concerns.”
“What I know won't help anybody. It was sordid.”
“I'm not surprised,” I said.
“I was good friends with Jo Herring. She was older. She worked as a public health nurse in Sumner County, the 1950s in Gallatin, Tennessee. You know the area?”
“Yes, ma'am, north of Nashville,” I replied.
“Vanderbilt Nursing students did their rotation with Jo in her duties as a county nurse. Jo did some work with the American Red Cross, doing blood drives and similar and then started working at Vanderbilt Hospital later on. I worked as a public health nurse in that same area and then at Vanderbilt Hospital.”
“Can you tell me about finding Wilmer Herring?” I asked.
“Jo asked me to come with her to the Noel Hotel. I remember thinking that it was odd that Jo knew where he was.”
“What happened when you got to the Noel?”
“Jo talked the front desk clerk into giving her a key to the room.”
“She must've been persuasive.”
“Oh, she was. And we walked in and found him. He was on the bed, and dead. He'd been there a while I think.”
“Was there anything else in the room with Mr. Herring?”
“A liquor bottle and a bottle of rat poison.”
“Was he dressed or undressed when you found him?”
“Just lying on the bed, but dressed.”
“By the way, can you describe Wilmer Herring's physical appearance for me? Not when you last saw him at the Noel Hotel, I mean just regular appearance. I've never seen a photo of him and have no idea if he was tall, short, thin, heavyset, red-headed, suit and tie, or just anything about him would be helpful.”
“He was about five-foot ten, and thin. He had very dark hair, black hair.”
“What about the suicide letter, or suicide note?” I asked.
“There wasn't one.”
“Are you sure?”
“There was no note, nothing like that,” she said softly.
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Jo used the telephone in the room to call the police. We waited for them to arrive.”
“Was this daytime or at night?”
“It was daytime when we found him,” she said.
“Did the police question you?” I asked.
“No.”
“What about Jo Herring? Did they take her anywhere for questioning?”
“No, they just went about their business,” she said.
“The event at the Noel Hotel was upsetting for you?”
“Of course it was!”
I could hear the righteous tone of indignation in her voice. “Well, to me it appears that Jo knew exactly where to find Wilmer. Did that concern you?” I asked.
“I thought he committed suicide. I was naive, but I initially thought he did.”
An interesting change of view, I thought.
“You and Jo parted company after this event?”
“Yes, seems like I was busy doing one thing and she was doing something else.”
“Any thoughts on why Wilmer committed suicide, assuming he did?” I quizzed.
“There was a lot of drinking involved, a lot of drinking. And she never told me if she was running around on Wilmer. She never mentioned anybody serious. What she did, she never told me. I know she was out in bars and such, but I didn't know where she was.”
“Anyone ever contact you about this in all these years?”
“No. Never, not one person. It was troublesome that it all happened.”
“I'm sure it was. You knew Paula, right?” I asked.
“Yes, from an early age. She grew into a bright, delightful young woman. When she was killed, all I had heard was that someone came back to the house that Paula knew and she let them into the house. Jo told me that it was someone Paula knew.”
“Were you still running around with Jo in 1964?”
As the words “running around” crossed my lips, I instantly realized my mistake and wasn't surprised at the tone of indignation on the other end of the line.
“Oh, I was not worldly wise at the time, Mr. Bishop.”
“Right, of course not.”
“I just wasn't involved with Jo when Paula died.”
But you were part of the bridge group, so this must be your attempt at distancing yourself, I thought. “Yes, ma'am. So did anyone question you about Paula's murder?”
She cut me off before I could finish my sentence.
“No, no one questioned me about Paula's death. I may have gone to the funeral, I can't remember. And I have to run some errands right now. Perhaps you could call me back tomorrow?” she asked.
“Certainly,” I replied.
The following day, I attempted to contact Amanda again by telephone. After hearing my voice, she hung up on me. Seconds later, a second attempt, same response. I waited a few minutes then tried again, and, on my third attempt, she apparently had a change of heart and decided to take my call. But her phone demeanor was now markedly different. Now she was nervous. Two minutes into the call she found those precious three words that all interviewers loathe:
“I don't remember.”5
And just as quickly, she introduced two new words into the conversation—foul play—and skillfully wove them into her new firewall: “I don't remember any foul play.” She said this at least four times in a span of three minutes. Interestingly, I hadn't asked her if there had been any foul play.
The only additional insight that Amanda would offer was that Jo and Wilmer Herring were in bad financial straits at the time of Wilmer's death, and that they drank a lot. She remembered that Jo Herring had blamed Wilmer's employer for his suicide.
“It's not like I've thought about this for forty years.”
“No, ma'am, I'm sure you haven't.”
On a return trip to visit with Miss Hattie, I implored her to try and remember the other bridge players in Jo Herring's group, especially any nurses who may or may not have been working at Vanderbilt University Hospital at the time of Paula's murder. After a few days, Miss Hattie offered the first and last name of a nurse who might have played bridge once or twice as a substitute partner.
After a tortuous period of research into the substitute's whereabouts for the previous decades, I found that she appeared to still be living in Middle Tennessee. When I spoke with the woman by phone and described my topic of interest, rather than being alarmed, she welcomed the chance to talk about the 1964 tragedy and invited me to her home for the discussion.
On a scalding hot day in early May, I navigated through an upscale residential area just outside the city limits of Franklin, Tennessee, to a well-kept home on a large lot. After I rang the doorbell, the door was answered by a tall, fit, seventy-ish-year-old woman with dark hair, dressed comfortably in warm-up pants and a nylon jacket. She invited me in to spend a few moments chatting about her old friend Jo Herring.
The woman, named Evelyn, was quite comfortable allowing a stranger, me, into her home. If she had any concerns about my visit, I soon learned that she had a large group of family members—her siblings and her now-grown children—living nearby. And for the next hour, the phone rang as if on a regular schedule, though she declined to take calls and instead simply reviewed her call identifier and then told me the name of each person calling and their likely reason for dialing her number. The reasons ranged from a gambling trip to a casino in a nearby state, a visit to Birmingham, Alabama, to see a cousin, shopping trips, and more. Based on my brief interaction, I assumed she had the energy for all of it.
“Tell me Mike, how in the world did you get onto this? That was such a long time ago.”6
As she proffered this ice-breaker, we were s
itting in her den. I was on a comfortable but worn couch, and she was in a leather recliner surrounded by the comforts of a senior-citizen lifestyle: a side table littered with a remote control for her television, telephone handset, reading glasses, cough drops, a couple of medicine bottles, magazines, morning newspaper, and a cold cup of coffee.
After I explained the background of my research, Evelyn launched into a narrative that had me raising my eyebrows numerous times and scribbling notes as quickly as possible along the way.
“Paula was very smart. But her mother, she was really smart.”
“You worked with Paula's mother at the hospital?” I asked.
“Yes, Jo was a floor nurse, but she knew more than the doctors, let me tell you.”
Wanting to refresh her recollection, I circled back to the week of the murder: “Do you remember the time period when Paula was killed?”
“Yes, I do. I had just returned from a day trip to Chattanooga when Jo called me.”
“You mean she called you to go out to dinner with her on that Saturday night?” I asked.
“No, she called me screaming about Paula and wanting me to come to her house.”
My eyes dilated to their full capacity. “I bet that was not the phone call you were expecting?”
“Not in the least. She called me around 9:00 p.m., and I stopped to buy gas over on Murfreesboro Road on the way to her house. When I got to Timberhill, Jo was standing on the front porch as if waiting for me to pull in the driveway. I thought it a bit strange.”
“You and Jo had worked together that Saturday?” I asked.
“No, I saw Jo the night before at the Wedgewood Diner.”
“So, you think she called you around 9:00 p.m.? I was thinking she called the police, or someone called the police to report the murder just after 11:00 p.m.” I inquired.
“No, it was around 9:00 p.m. when she called me, and it was almost 9:30 p.m. when I got there.”
“Anyone else at the house?”
“No, it was just Jo and Alan and the body. I nearly beat the police there. They were getting there about the same time as I did.”
“So, Miss Evelyn, what kind of car did the Herrings have?”
“Jo was a Ford person.”
“Where was the car on that night?” I asked.
“It was there. It wasn't in the garage, because they never used the garage to house the car. But I remember having to step over a busted light or some kind of car part that was just lying in the driveway when I got out of my car. But the Ford was parked where it always was outside.”
With this update, I knew I had to ask about the strange circumstances regarding Jo's dinner dates.
“You say it was just you, Jo, and Alan at first, but what about Billy Vanderpool and A. J. Meadows, the two guys Jo had been to dinner with that night?”
“They weren't there.”
“I don't understand. Multiple people testified in open court that Vanderpool and Meadows were with Jo Herring when she found Paula lying in the den.” I said.
“I can't help what anybody said in court, they weren't with Jo that night. I know a couple of the detectives were right there about the same time I drove up. They wouldn't let me in the den, and they made me and Jo wait in the front of the house while they talked to Alan in the bedroom.”
“It sounds like an awful experience,” I said.
Uh-oh. This changes everything, I was thinking. If it's true, then somebody is hiding something. Evelyn arrives almost ninety minutes before the police dispatcher is called and now says the men who claimed to be with Jo Herring weren't with her at all?
“It was really bad. At first the detectives thought I had been there all along, but I explained to them that I had stopped at a gas station on my way over. I think they checked that out just to make sure I was telling the truth. When I found out that Jo knew that Randolph Clarke fellow, it was a surprise to me. But I guess our schedules were so different at times, I didn't know all of the people she was running with.”
“Hmm, maybe she had been out with the Clarke fellow that night?” I asked.
“I don't know for certain; it was all very strange to me. I remember a day or so later I was with Jo in Gallatin at the funeral home and somebody called her on the phone and it was one of the detectives asking about Randolph Clarke. And, boy, she was mad. She said, ‘Yes, I dated him. He was a nice guy. Why would he want to kill Paula?’”
“What do you think happened to Paula? Any guesses?”
“I just don't believe that Randolph Clarke did anything to her. I don't believe he had anything to do with it. My feelings about Jo coming home and finding Paula, and then the story about those two guys with her, and them leaving as soon as they had hardly walked in the door? It never made sense to me. I know Vanderpool and Meadows weren't with her. And I thought, well, Jo, who was with you? Why didn't they stay with you? I just couldn't believe anybody would walk off and leave her like that. But she wouldn't say. In fact, at first I thought she called me to give somebody a ride.”
When I walked out of the session with Nurse Evelyn, my head was still spinning at the small bombshell she had just dropped into my research project. Jo Herring and her two male friends all claimed to have arrived at the Timberhill Drive home at 11:00 p.m. Yet here was Nurse Evelyn telling me that the men weren't with Jo and that Jo Herring could have arrived home as much as two hours earlier?
With a handful of murder suspects to consider, I made a return trip to Lipscomb University to review them, again to one of the study rooms on the second floor of the Beaman Library. After a quick dump of my books and backpack, I began creating a simple spreadsheet on the white board using a dry-erase marker. Down the left-hand side of the board I placed the names of Clarke, Bloody Man, Al Baker, Jesse Henderson, and the Crieve Hall Prowler. Beside each name I began to list the pros and cons of why they might or might not have murdered Paula Herring, in hopes that this exercise would provide some much needed clarity to my muddled thinking.
Clarke's entry included nothing I hadn't already considered, though it was helpful to me to see it in writing. If he did kill Paula Herring, he certainly had offered a reasonable motive to Al Baker while at Ruth's Diner on that Saturday night. But on the side of his innocence, he had no scratches, no bloodstained clothes, and no bite marks on his person. The prosecution team did attempt to tie him to fibers from the victim's clothing, but Charles Galbreath noted that he had been contacted by a detective who stated that those fibers might have been tampered with in the chain of evidence. More than that, when Clarke's garments were retrieved from the laundry, it seemed reasonable to assume that a laundry or dry cleaner would have had millions of fibers on their premises.
And if Clarke had done the deed, how could he have left Alan Herring alive, knowing that if Alan had seen him on the night of Paula's murder, the little boy would remember Clarke as the man who had given him a horsey-back ride to bed approximately ten days earlier, on the same night that Clarke had a one-night stand with Jo Herring. The bloody man as a murder suspect was a more compelling option to me. By all appearances, he had been engaged in a fight or struggle just prior to arriving at a fast food establishment scant minutes from the Herring home. What were the chances that this event was completely unrelated to the slaying of the eighteen-year-old babysitter? Charles Galbreath and W. B. Hogan both thought that the bloody man, Sam Carlton, either did the deed or had knowledge of who did. So why should I dismiss the opinion of two savvy attorneys? I tended to agree with Hogan when he said, “Carlton either did it or he knew something about it.”
Next to Al Baker's name I jotted a couple of notes related to his own less than detailed alibi on the night of the slaying, as well as his unusual interaction with a newspaper reporter at the criminal trial, when he had identified himself as the person who fired the gunshot into a snowbank near Music Row. How much did Baker know but wasn't telling? Had Dr. Murray Cook been correct when he pointed the finger at Baker as the killer?
Moving
down my list, if Jesse Henderson wasn't involved in Paula Herring's murder, he certainly knew a lot about it. Did he obtain his inside information from his old friend BlueSky? Or was he perhaps just a collector of theories and enjoyed doling out cryptic clues to me? Or could the quartet of Clarke, Baker, Henderson, and Cook simply have repeated their Christmas Eve joyride and then entered the home on Timberhill Drive on that fateful Saturday night while looking for Jo Herring, but found Paula home instead, and the evening turned into an unexpected and horrific slaying?
As I sat down to mull over the entries on the board, I was thinking that the Crieve Hall Prowler was not the culprit. Paula hadn't been raped, as had been confirmed by the medical examiner, Dr. Core. And prowling events in the same neighborhood continued immediately after the murder. It was as if the prowler hadn't read the newspapers of the day and was unaware of how many citizens and resources were lined up to catch him.
But my new entry on the suspect board was a person I had not previously considered until my last conversation with Nurse Evelyn, and that was Eva Jo Herring. As unfathomable as it was to think that a mother could be involved in taking the life of her only daughter, there was still a nagging question in my mind that would not go away. How could Jo Herring be the first person to discover her dead husband in a hotel room in September of 1960, and then three and a half years later be the first person to discover her dead daughter? I couldn't calculate the odds of such unfortunate luck. Yet, as far as I knew, the investigators and detectives hadn't so much as pointed a finger at Jo Herring as a possible culprit on the night of Paula's slaying. John Clarke's defense attorney, Charles Galbreath, did attempt to tie Wilmer Herring's life insurance proceeds to his suspicious death at the Noel Hotel, but the trial judge had nipped that attempt in the bud. In the end, could Jo Herring be considered a reasonable suspect in Paula's murder, even if Nashville law enforcement officials didn't view her in that light?
And then it occurred to me that I had overlooked an obvious murder suspect, though a nameless one. Not once during the criminal trial of John Clarke did Charles Galbreath attempt to point suspicion toward a young man of Paula Herring's acquaintance. The subject of a potential boyfriend or a Saturday night date on the night of the murder never bubbled up during testimony. If Clarke's defense team had been looking for an alternative suspect, what better direction to point jurors toward than a young man visiting Paula while her mother was out of the house? It was tailor-made for a “reasonable doubt” defense.
A Murder in Music City Page 16