A Murder in Music City

by Michael Bishop

  Introductions were a struggle, as Mr. Richmond's hearing was as bad as his eyesight was good. I kept thinking, This man must have a hearing aid somewhere in the room, as I stood at his bedside practically shouting my reason for visiting him. Every time I had to yell the word “murder,” I looked toward the doorway to see if a security guard was coming to escort me out of the building, but fortunately no one did. I moved closer to his bedside and directed my much louder than normal voice at his left ear.

  “Mr. Richmond, you worked at the York Motel as the night clerk?”

  “No, as a manager with my wife.”4

  I produced a copy of the deposition Charles Galbreath had created for the former motel manager to sign in 1964, hoping to refresh his memory and also to interrupt our high-volume conversation.

  “You remember that weekend and the girl being murdered?”

  “Yeah, I looked out a window and saw ’em.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Me and my wife lived in a room around back of the motel and we had already changed shifts with the night clerk,” he said.

  “What time was the shift change?” I asked.

  “Oh, we swapped out somewhere around 8:30 p.m. on most nights.”

  “So who was the night clerk?”

  “We used students from that school, where they studied to be a preacher.”

  “David Lipscomb?”

  “No, up on Murfreesboro Road.”

  I thought for a moment, and then it came to me. “Oh, you mean Trevecca?”

  “Yeah, Tu-vecca.”

  “Why do you remember that night, if you didn't check the guests into their room?” I asked.

  “Because they rented a room around back,” he said.

  This part of the explanation made sense to me, because as was the style of motor courts, at the York Motel you literally parked your car directly in front of your room, so close you were barely two steps from the room's front door. Anyone renting a room on the front side of the building easily could have been seen by drivers and passengers on Franklin Road.

  “They rented a room around back?”

  “Yeah, and they were making some noise, and I looked out the window and saw ’em.”

  “How many people?” I asked.

  “Two or three.”

  “Any women?”

  “Yeah, a couple of them,” he said.

  “Did anyone come talk to you about that night?” As I inquired, I tapped my finger on the deposition that J. J. was still holding in his hand.

  “That lawyer Galbreath and somebody else I think.”

  “What about the deposition? You didn't sign it?” I asked.

  “No, and I don't remember why I didn't,” he replied.

  The return visit to Miss Evelyn's home was a lunchtime session, which involved bologna sandwiches, sliced American cheese, fresh tomatoes, and iced tea. Having experienced the regular ringing of the telephone on my previous visit with her, I decided to make good use of my time and jump right into a few questions for my feisty witness as we sat down for lunch at her kitchen table.

  “Miss Evelyn, any chance you knew other nurses who might have been close friends with Jo Herring?” I inquired.

  “No, none come to mind,” she said.5

  “How about the name Amanda, does that sound familiar?”

  As I asked this question, she was finishing the final touches on her sandwich, adding a slice of iceberg lettuce to the stack.

  “No, that name doesn't mean anything to me.”

  “I'm told that Jo might also have been close friends with a woman named Lizzie,” I offered.

  At the mention of this name, Evelyn's face whipped quickly to the left, away from me, and I registered the invisible slap as a clue.

  “There are just some things I don't care to remember,” she said, while continuing to look away.

  “Why don't we talk about the trial in Jackson,” I suggested. “Tell me about staying at the New Southern Hotel.”

  “Oh, I think they had some fun.”

  “Really? Wasn't there a murder trial going on that week?” I asked.

  “Yes, in fact I roomed with Jo the night I was there, but after my testimony I came back to Nashville. Those people were partying like it was New Year's Eve. I remember Jo got a cab driver to take her to a bootlegger somewhere around Jackson, and she brought back a case of liquor. They partied the whole week. Of course, I had a little fun myself. I remember hiding in a hotel room that one of the DA's investigators was staying in, and after he entered the room he discovered me in his bed wearing nothing but one of Jo's expensive negligees. He was so surprised but also very unhappy about it. I think he was one of the straight-laced guys.”

  “I can imagine. You say it was one of the DA's men? Did Jo Herring have a pretty good relationship with the district attorney's office in Nashville?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding me? She was seeing one of the attorneys.” Evelyn said.

  I nearly choked at this news, but recovered quickly. “She was dating a lawyer in the district attorney's office?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean at the time of the trial in Jackson?” The astonishment on my face must have been quite visible at this point.

  “Sure. The negligee that I was wearing was one I borrowed from Jo, and it had been a gift to her from the assistant DA. Of course he was married, so it was kept quiet.”

  I stopped eating, got up from the table in hopes that she couldn't read my face, and walked over to the counter to pour myself another glass of iced tea while staring out the window.

  “So who was the lawyer?” I asked.

  “I'll just call him a ‘big guy,’ but other than that I'd rather not say. Let's just leave it at that,” she said.

  “No problem. I know there were about a dozen attorneys who worked in the DA's office. I don't suppose this, uh, ‘big guy’ was in Jackson at the trial was he?”

  “He sure was.”

  As she said this, I was shaking my head in disbelief, pondering the implications of this bombshell news.

  “They had a few places around Nashville where they could go during the day or whenever they wanted to get away for a little while.” She said this as if it was of little importance, though she could clearly see I was hanging on every word.

  “You mean something like a secret hideaway or a safe house?” I asked.

  “Yes, one was a cabin near Marrowbone Lake, and there was a boat up on Old Hickory Lake they could use,” she said.

  I remembered Marrowbone Lake as one of the best kept secrets in the area. It was small, beautiful, and remote, and mostly ignored by locals and tourists alike. The lake was near Joelton, where I had found Jesse Henderson.

  “And there was an apartment not far from downtown. The apartment had more liquor in it than a liquor store.” She laughed as she gave me this news.

  “I feel like I should ask who all was involved.”

  “A couple of low-level police detectives, some lawyers, and some politicians.”

  “And, let me guess, some nurses, right?”

  “Jo and me and one of the other nurses. Now this was a long time ago, Mike, way before I got married. I wasn't that interested in the older guys in the group, I wanted young blood on my body. And it was 1964, and I suppose a lot of folks were doing all kinds of things back then and probably still do.”

  “So how did you get together?”

  “Oh, we'd just make a plan to meet in the middle of the day, or sometimes after work. We'd meet up with a couple of the guys at one of the hideouts, have some fun, and then maybe swap up and have some more fun!”

  “But all of the guys, they were married, right?” I asked.

  “Sure, but they weren't exactly running home to tell their wives what they were up to.”

  “I bet not. So where was the apartment?” I inquired.

  “You know where Zanies is nowadays?”

  “Yes, ma'am. The comedy club?”

  “Yes. It was back behind
it. Walking distance to Wedgewood Diner back then. And there was a drugstore there before the comedy club,” she said.

  I thought about this and then continued: “It sounds like this group had setup their own private Printers Alley?”

  “It sure was!” she said with gusto.

  “Wouldn't your testimony in Jackson at the criminal trial have been just a little bit compromised? I mean there was John Randolph Clarke, on trial for his life, and yet one of the lawyers trying to send him to prison just happens to be having sex with a key witness, the mother of the victim?”

  “We had to lie. There was no other option. None.”

  I was so engrossed in Evelyn's story, I didn't think to ask her why she was willing to be so forthcoming with me. But the answer may have surfaced near the end of our session when I sensed a bit of sadness in my new friend, perhaps the presence of remorse over the tragic events that had taken place decades earlier.

  Before Clifton Beverly Briley became Metro Nashville's first chief executive officer—its mayor—a position he held for twelve years, he served twelve years as chief executive of Davidson County, the county judge. Briley was a visionary, and as such he had served as the president of the National Association of County Executives prior to being elected mayor of the new Metropolitan Government. There had been talk of Briley pursuing the governor's office as well, a position he likely would have won if then Governor Frank Clement had vacated the office to run for president.

  In January of 1964, during Briley's first year as mayor, he celebrated his fiftieth birthday. During his first fifty years, Briley had accumulated an impressive array of accomplishments. At age thirteen, he was touted as having been the youngest person in Nashville to attain the rank of Eagle Scout, and he had then graduated from Central High School in 1930, at the age of sixteen. Briley also had the good fortune of being noted as a Vanderbilt University graduate, as well as attaining his law degree from Cumberland Law School in Lebanon, Tennessee, and he was admitted to the bar at the impressive age of eighteen. The law school curriculum in that era was an accelerated program of study available for those pursuing the apprentice-style degree in the 1930s.6

  A bit of research revealed that Cumberland Law School had been sold and relocated to Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961. When I contacted the relocated school, they confirmed Briley's achievement. The school also confirmed that Charles Galbreath had completed his law degree there, though he was a bit older than Beverly Briley when he did so.

  But the claim that Briley was a graduate of Vanderbilt University was a complete myth. Briley never completed a single semester at Vanderbilt University, let alone earned a degree at the prestigious school. He may have had intentions to earn a degree at Vanderbilt, but instead he enrolled in the accelerated law program at Cumberland in 1930 and then graduated in the early summer of 1932.

  Despite this, numerous mentions of the graduation from Vanderbilt University have been recorded in historical records, among them Metro resolutions, such as the resolution by the 10th Metro Council that named the Criminal Courts building in Briley's honor. Briley's son, however, did graduate from Vanderbilt University in the early 1960s.

  So I decided to review again a letter I first found in Chief Hubert Kemp's file, written ten days after Paula Herring's murder by Mayor Beverly Briley to a woman who lived in the Crieve Hall area, approximately one mile from the Herring's home.7 After some research, I found the woman and her husband living in another state. When I asked them about the timeline of the Paula Herring murder, the wife remembered that the week following the murder had been especially tense. She also remembered the postman complaining that homeowners wouldn't answer their doors as he attempted to deliver packages in the neighborhood.

  The mayor's letter had been written in response to the woman's complaint that Metro police had not been sensitive to the prowler issue, and that Mayor Briley did not appear to be concerned regarding the safety of Metro citizens. Briley's response had been copied to the metro chief of police, Hubert Kemp.

  But therein lay the problem. Not only had the mayor's letter not been received by the couple in March 1964, neither of the stated recipients of the letter had ever voiced a single concern to the mayor's office. Ever. And even more extraordinary, Briley had penned a letter placing himself in the Crieve Hall neighborhood, not only on the night of Paula Herring's murder, but at the time of the murder. Did Kemp know something about Briley's activities on this night, and if so, was this Kemp's method of forcing Briley to explain his presence in writing?

  Dinner would be at one of Nashville's oldest steakhouses. And it would be just the two of us: myself and a man named Keller.1 Keller had spent decades working as a homicide investigator in Middle Tennessee. A jolly man with tortoiseshell glasses, a slick bald head, and a keen grasp of Tennessee's homicide history, he had an extensive background in determining cause of death, both with classroom and field training, as well as on-the-job experience.

  In a previous meeting, approximately a year earlier, Keller had provided me with a photo autopsy of Paula Herring.2 For a couple of hours, he used the crime-scene photographs and the other exhibits in the file, along with an array of magnifying lenses, to examine the images of the gunshot entrance and exit paths through the sweater and skirt of the victim. Then he moved to a review of Paula's physical injuries—the deep bruises on her face, fingernail marks on her throat, and bullet entry and exit wounds on her body—and noted as well the postmortem blood pooling, as evident in the pictures of Paula lying on a metal gurney.

  Eventually, Keller's conclusion matched that of Dr. Al Harper, that Paula Herring had been shot three times, twice in the back and once in the front, in the upper chest. He also noted that one bullet was very likely still inside Paula's body. Keller said that the collarbone shot appeared to have been fired into the victim while the victim was on her knees, primarily because of a raised area of skin and discoloration on Paula's lower back that was clearly evident in one of the black and white photographs of her. He noted that the detectives shown in the photo had gone to the trouble of rolling the victim onto her side and then pointing at the area in question.

  During the same review, it was Keller who had studied the photograph of the den where Paula had been found and then stated that the unidentified object resting beneath the television set was in fact a little green army man.3 “I used to play with those,” I said. I remembered the two inch tall green, plastic toy soldiers, that kids used to play with.

  Even more surprising was when Keller pointed to the photograph of the interior of the Timberhill Drive garage and said, “See that dry spot on the floor near the broken bottle? See how it fans out? It's dry there because whoever got hit in the head with the bottle blocked the splatter. That's a person's outline. Was the Clarke fellow injured during the slaying?” he asked.

  “No. But one theory is that a truck stop manager named Carlton might have been hit with the beer bottle,” I replied.

  At one point during the session, I mentioned that Jo Herring had found her husband, dead, at the Noel Hotel some three years prior to finding her dead daughter at home on a Saturday night, and from all reports, Jo Herring had not even been viewed as a suspect in the two deaths.

  Keller asked for the cause of death for Paula's father.

  “I found out that he drank rat poison, so it would have been arsenic,” I said.

  “Do you know how many men commit suicide by drinking poison?” he asked.

  “No idea.”

  “I've investigated more than a thousand deaths in my career, and I can't remember even two of them where a man used poison to do himself in. Poison is a woman's weapon. You say the first person to find the dead man was his wife?” Keller asked.

  “That's a fact,” I said.

  “We had a case a few years ago where a guy stumbled upon a body out in a remote area, miles from anywhere. I mean an area you wouldn't even know existed on a map. It didn't take the detectives two minutes to figure out that the
guy who found the body was the guy who did the killing.” Keller paused for a moment, then continued. “See the picture of the girl's mother walking down this hallway?”

  Keller was pointing at a photograph of Jo Herring and a man walking along an interior hallway of what appeared to be a public building. Jo carried a large purse and overcoat on one arm, wore a high-necked dress, and sported a pair of cat-eye glasses. The man, sporting a flattop haircut, was wearing a white shirt with coat and tie and carrying a notepad in his right hand.

  “What about it?”

  “That's the Municipal Safety Building, downtown, and the guy escorting the Herring woman is Mickey McDaniel, one of the top detectives in the police department at that time. The point is, somebody brought her downtown, and I'm saying she must have been viewed as a suspect in the murder, from the looks of the photo, and the Metro photographer or somebody took this picture of her.”4

  “If that's true, it didn't make the paper,” I replied.

  Months later, Keller and I were waiting for our meal to be delivered at the upscale steakhouse, but this time the relaxed and jolly homicide investigator was on edge and seemed nervous. By the time we finished the first course, the source of the anxiety became clear.

  “I spoke with one of the original investigators on the Herring case,” Keller softly said. “I told him you were looking into it, and he wanted me to ask you something. Are you just doing some research, or are you reinvestigating the murder?”

  The large window next to me reflected the color draining out of my face. I quickly reached for a glass of water to buy a few seconds of time before responding. “No, no, not a reinvestigation,” I said. “I'm just researching some stories from Nashville's history. It's just interesting, that's all.”

  I could see Keller's somber demeanor as he refused to look at me and stared down at his salad plate. I took a slow scan around the restaurant to see if anyone was watching our meeting a little too intently. The next hour passed with a mix of non-homicide topics, which included memories of quirky politicians, famous eating places in Nashville, and a police sergeant who ran a prostitution business using nothing more than his squad car to deliver hookers to clients.