About the time Paula Herring was reeling from the potential of actually missing the game she had so hoped to attend, John Randolph Clarke was getting dressed for a night of prowling, while leaving his schoolteacher wife at home alone. He knew Jo Herring would be clocking out of her hospital shift around 7:00 p.m., and Clarke knew where the little registered nurse would likely appear, at Ruth's Diner or at one of the many watering holes in the area. His thirty-ninth birthday had been the previous day, and he wanted another chance to rendezvous with the alluring nurse.
At some point in the early evening, Clarke made his way to Ruth's Diner and began drinking beer with his friend Al Baker.7 With no sign of his favorite nurse, Clarke stepped away from the bar and used the diner's pay phone to call the Herring home. When he returned, he would utter words that would eventually seal his fate with future jurors. He bragged to Baker that he was going over to Timberhill Drive to wait for Jo, and that in the interim he would try his hand with Jo's daughter, whom he had just spoken with, learning that she was home from college for the weekend.8 Not long after mentioning this macho plan, Clarke left the diner, but he didn't follow through with his boast. Instead, he began searching for his favorite nurse at other drinking spots.
On this Saturday night, Jo Herring never made an appearance at any of the watering holes she normally frequented because, unknown to John Randolph Clarke, Jo Herring was sitting in a car within walking distance of Clarke's home. At approximately 7:00 p.m., Jo had clocked out of Vanderbilt Hospital and was picked up at the curb by a man behind the wheel of a black Cadillac. In the back seat of the Cadillac was a Red Ace gas station attendant named Jesse Henderson, along with Jo Herring's best friend and coworker, Lizzie. The Cadillac's driver was also a Vanderbilt Hospital employee, a tall, thick-chested man named Carl Raylee.9 After the car left the hospital, the foursome turned their attention to finding food to go along with the adult beverages in the car.
Carl Raylee was not just any employee at the hospital, though; he was a purchasing agent, a man who could requisition drugs, medicines, and equipment, and, most importantly, a man who could reconcile shortages of drugs and who could revise purchasing records if necessary. Nurse Lizzie and Jo Herring were keenly interested in currying favor with the big man and also ensuring that he had a very good time on this Saturday night in February 1964. Unknown to Carl Raylee, it was about to become a night he would never forget.
After the black Cadillac pulled away from the hospital, it ended up a few blocks away, on West End Avenue, parked in one of the car stalls at the Krystal hamburger drive-in restaurant, where the foursome ordered curb service and received ten-cent hamburgers served in red plastic baskets with French fries. As they chatted and munched on their burgers, downing multiple beers that Jesse had brought along for the ride, a plan was hatched to drive to Jo Herring's house, where Jo and Lizzie would change out of their hospital scrubs, and then the two couples would go out on the town for a night of drinking and partying.
Near the eight o'clock hour, Carl Raylee eased the big Cadillac through the back parking lot of the drive-in onto Elliston Place and back to Vanderbilt Hospital, where the two nurses transferred to Jo's Ford and led the Cadillac to Timberhill Drive. Thus began a bad night in Nashville.
Certainly the two men following Jo Herring's car had no indication that they were about to be in for the worst night of their lives. But confirmation of this point came moments after the foursome entered the Herring home. To Paula's surprise, her mother was not at the hospital working late. And, to Jo's surprise, instead of finding an empty house, Paula was still at home, and she hadn't found a ride to the basketball game as planned.
The more troubling and darker element was that Jo Herring had walked in the door with a woman Paula Herring despised and hadn't seen for months, Nurse Lizzie.10 The thirty-five-year-old Lizzie was also a widow, just like Jo Herring. To Paula's astonishment, visibly angry at her mother and loathing her mother's best friend, these two nurses had the gall to stand before her, turning what should have been one of the happiest nights of her life into what was about to become the worst night of her life. This was the beginning of the end for Paula Herring.
From the perspective of what Paula knew or didn't know, it's certainly possible that Paula may not have known the full scope of her mother's lifestyle and the powerful men she entertained at secret hideaways, but she was very intelligent and could connect the dots. Maybe she didn't know about the stolen drugs in the house, but Paula had experienced her mother's chronic alcoholism for years. Maybe Jo hadn't tried to entice her daughter into using powerful men for sex and profit, but Paula Herring had experienced enough of her mother's lifestyle, and the random men that she brought home, to reject it completely and to be on a very different journey than her mother.
For every personal achievement that Paula Herring reported from college life in Knoxville, Jo Herring's resentment and jealousy must have increased exponentially. Paula was younger, prettier, a good student, a great athlete, and a leader. There was no way that Jo could ignore Paula's success, and the invitation to join an exclusive sorority was proof positive that her daughter was in demand and on the way to becoming everything that Jo Herring was not.
So what must Paula have felt when on Friday evening she arrived from Knoxville to an empty house? Jo Herring had paid for the plane ticket, certainly not the chronically broke college student, and Jo would have known when the flight was scheduled to arrive, but instead of a mother excitedly meeting the flight at the airport gate or waiting at home for her daughter, what did Paula Herring experience?
She experienced a mother who had chosen to go out drinking on Friday night after work, while thumbing her nose at her daughter's return.11 The Friday night situation was actually worse than Paula realized. Jo Herring wasn't rushing home to see her daughter, she was meeting with a man who owned a massage parlor, a brick and mortar front for a prostitution business.12 As for Saturday night, Jo could have hurried home and enjoyed an outing with Paula and Alan, but instead Jo Herring chose to reject her daughter yet again and spend a second night out on the town, with plans for drinking and partying with her partner, Nurse Lizzie, and the two men. To make matters even worse, the house full of hell on Timberhill Drive wasn't about a battle over borrowed clothing or missed curfews, it was a war, with the darkest of undercurrents, about the death of Wilmer Herring.13
While fifteen-year-old Paula Herring may have been devastated and confused by the mysterious death of her father, the eighteen-year-old version of that young woman appears to have been free from such doubts. According to one of Jo Herring's friends, Paula was an unlit fuse, biding her time until she could do something about her father's death. Or as one of Wilmer Herring's relatives noted for me, “Paula knew that the bottle of rat poison had come from their house and her father hadn't been suicidal.”14
With the latest round of Jo Herring's rejections, and the double-barreled impact of facing the two nurses, it doesn't require much of a leap of faith to assume that this was the moment when the fuse was lit and the violence began. And while the two male visitors may have initially found some perverted entertainment value in the fight, they quickly realized the level of threats being exchanged and had every reason to believe that something terrible was about to happen.
And unfortunately, there was a gun available to make matters worse. When John Randolph Clarke had been at the Herring home on February 10, giving Alan Herring a “horsey back” ride to bed, he would have removed his pistol and shoulder holster to avoid having the child kick or accidentally discharge the gun. After a couple of rounds in bed with Jo Herring, and in Clarke's inebriated state, he must have left the gun behind and returned home without it. Which is why Clarke's gun, but not the owner, was in the house this night and why Charles Galbreath had asked Jo Herring on the witness stand if she knew where the gun was.
In the midst of the early altercation it seems reasonable to assume that indeed a belt was slipped around Paula's neck from behind, in an a
ttempt to take the powerful athlete to the floor, where she might be more easily controlled.15 Paula Herring must have instantly realized her life was in danger, and as she fought back she delivered a vicious bite to the younger nurse. In an act of rage, Lizzie fired Clarke's gun at Paula; the bullet entered the coed's collarbone area and eventually came to rest in Paula's lower back.
Indoors, on a cold winter night, the sound of a gunshot would have been deafening. The firing of a .32-caliber pistol would have produced an explosive sound, approaching 150 decibels or more and for everyone in the room, and everyone in the house, their ears would have been ringing, and their adrenaline flowing. With a mortally wounded coed lying on the floor, chaos and anger begin to reign. The two nurses had an opportunity to come to their senses and provide aid to the girl. They could ask the two men to place Paula in the Cadillac and rush her to Vanderbilt Hospital for emergency medical care. They could do everything to save Paula, but, instead, they chose to save themselves. They left the house and drove away, leaving Jo Herring's daughter dying in the den, certain that she would not survive for long.
In a quiet house of horror, with Paula Herring's lifeblood leaving her body, the telephone rang once again. And again it was John Randolph Clarke hoping to find his soul mate, Jo Herring, who likely viewed him not only as a sexual partner but also as a source of income from the stolen drugs. But this time, instead of Paula answering the telephone, it was a terrified little boy who would truthfully say that his mother wasn't home, and in a few short hours would eventually describe his sister as lying on the den floor with “tomato juice in her hair.”
Clarke, having called from one of his regular watering holes, would continue looking for Jo Herring for the next hour, making visits to Brown's Diner, Chico's, back to Ruth's, and more, but at some point after 9:00 p.m., he would call it a night and drive to a liquor store at 16th and Broadway, where he would purchase a pint of bourbon before going home.16
On Timberhill Drive, however, the two nurses and the two men were cursing at each other as they raced away in Raylee's Cadillac, hoping the neighbors hadn't bothered to look out their windows and notice them. Moments later, and needing a place to formulate a plan, they passed the Krystal hamburger restaurant on Franklin Road and then quickly decided that a room around back of the York Motel would be the best hideout while they figured out what to do next. After checking in, it didn't take them long to realize that they'd not only left the incriminating murder weapon in the house, but the nurses likely realized that the cache of stolen drugs had to be removed as well.17
Jo Herring made a couple of phone calls, and one of those appears to have been made to her friend Evelyn Johnson, asking Evelyn to come to the Timberhill Drive home.18 Perhaps Jo was already planning to repeat the same scenario of having a friend with her as she “discovered” a body, as she had with Wilmer Herring's “suicide.” It's also possible that Jo Herring could see an even better solution to her problem, and that would be to invite an unsuspecting neighbor such as Sam Carlton to her home, and then use Clarke's gun to kill the neighbor who had broken into her home and had been “sexually assaulting” her daughter while Jo had been at dinner.
After the calls, the foursome decided the best option available was to return to Timberhill Drive to retrieve the gun and get the drugs out of the house. It was a simple plan, quickly formulated, with no time for a lengthy debate about its merits or those of any other option. But the most important element was the part that no one could foresee. What if Paula Herring was still alive? What then?
With the headlights of the Cadillac turned off as they again navigated up the driveway, the foursome inside the car were still cursing at each other and threatening each other in low voices as they parked just outside of the garage. Jesse Henderson and Carl Raylee were not about to go back into the house. They hadn't touched anything, hadn't fired a gun, hadn't struck a blow against the girl, and had no reason to retrieve anything from inside the den of horror.
When Jo and Lizzie crept back into the house, to their amazement Paula Herring was not dead. She was still lying on the floor right where they had left her, her face turned to the side, eyes focused on her assailants. But the two women were more than capable of putting aside any emotion and simply focusing on doing what was necessary. And what was clearly necessary in their view was to execute the young woman on the floor. But before they could do that, Jo Herring needed to sedate the trembling little boy in a back bedroom. This only required the proper dose of medication, readily available for the boy's mother to administer.
Meanwhile, in the den, Nurse Lizzie retrieved Clarke's pistol and watched Paula to see if she would draw a last breath. Still enraged over the bite she had received, Lizzie tried to hasten Paula's demise by stomping on the fallen girl and then slamming the butt of the pistol into Paula's face. But Paula Herring would not die. Jo quickly returned to the den with a pillowcase full of stolen drugs and, with the precious minutes ticking away, Paula's sweater was used to muffle the sound of two gunshots fired into the girl's back straight through her heart, silencing Paula Herring forever.
Just moments before this execution, the nervous men in the car were running out of patience, and they went back into the house to tell the nurses that they were leaving and that there was no time to spare. At least that was the plan until just before opening the den door, when the men heard the unmistakable sound of a car engine outside. Before the men could alert the nurses, the gunshots from the den sent adrenalin roaring through their veins, but now they were stuck in the garage.
Sam Carlton got out of his parked car, still puzzled over the invitation to Jo Herring's house. With an unopened bottle of Sterling beer in his hand, he confidently stepped through the outer garage door into the darkened room, only to be attacked by two men who were frantically trying to escape the scene.19 In the blink of an eye, one of the men shattered the quart bottle of Sterling beer over Carlton's head. His torso blocked the spray as it splattered onto the garage floor. A dazed Sam Carlton was on his knees, woozy from the blow.
In the meantime, Nurse Lizzie had fled through the front door, Clarke's gun in hand, a pillowcase of drugs in the other, racing down the sidewalk to the Cadillac parked in the driveway. Lizzie quickly started the car and floored the gas pedal, and the Cadillac launched backward into Carlton's Chrysler. This event broke one of the Chrysler's headlights and damaged the radiator and front of the Chrysler's engine.
But Lizzie's two male companions had similar ideas, and as soon as Carlton was knocked down, the two men exited the garage and ran back to the car, only to discover that Lizzie was attempting to leave them behind. Cursing at her, Carl Raylee opened the driver's-side door, and pushed Lizzie away from the steering wheel, while Jesse Henderson jumped into the front passenger seat from the other side of the car. Raylee maneuvered the big automobile around Carlton's damaged vehicle, and the trio raced away from the horrific scene.
Moments later, as Sam Carlton tried to regain his senses, he wobbled toward the den door. As soon as he saw a young woman lying on the floor, blood pooling around her, he became instantly alert. After a few seconds surveying the scene, he realized that he had been setup for murder, and now he couldn't flee the house fast enough. He returned to his car and also drove away, his damaged vehicle emitting the distinctive metallic scraping sound heard by neighbors that night.
Carlton, enraged, didn't drive home but instead drove his car toward the city lights of Nashville. It was cold and dark and, based on the noise coming from the Chrysler's engine, he needed to find a garage quickly, or at least a place where he could inspect the damage, just in case he became stranded on the road in his blood-stained and beer-soaked condition. When he arrived in the Melrose area, he saw a familiar eatery and steered the damaged Chrysler into a parking space at the Krystal hamburger restaurant. Unknown to Carlton, Henry King was also driving toward the Krystal, looking for a hot cup of coffee while his wife was recovering from surgery in a Nashville hospital.
Once pa
rked, and still furious over the potential setup to frame him with murder, Carlton raised the hood of the Chrysler, inspected the damage to the car, and looked across the street at Rhea Little's service station. Carlton and Little knew each other because both were in the gasoline business, and Rhea Little was the man Carlton now wanted to call for repair help and a late-night favor. Carlton could see that the service station was closed, but the Krystal hamburger restaurant never closed, so he decided to use the pay phone in the Krystal and call the owner at home with his request for help. Carlton walked into the Krystal hamburger restaurant, fumbled with the telephone directory, and was offered assistance by a concerned night manager. But just as quickly, the big man changed his mind and strode out of the restaurant to return to his car.
A few feet outside of the doorway, a startled Henry King said hello to Sam Carlton as they passed each other near the entrance. When King expressed concern over Carlton's all-too-apparent distress, the truck stop manager told the concerned King that he had been hit in the head and attacked by two men and that he was going home to get his gun and kill them.
Unknown to Carlton, the two men who ran out of the Timberhill Drive home after attacking him were now on their way to 17th Avenue, where they would drop off Lizzie DeVern and then race to the other side of Nashville, looking for an alibi location miles away from Timberhill Drive. Twenty minutes later, the black Cadillac was speeding into the night on River Road in West Nashville, and, after rounding a curve, the car skidded off the slick roadway, rolled over, and landed back on its wheels. The duo inside were shaken up but not injured, and the car's engine was still humming. A few minutes later, Carl Raylee delivered his passenger to a gasoline station where he could catch a ride home, and Raylee drove the damaged Cadillac home to Central Avenue, where his uncle would repair it a few days later, no questions asked.
A Murder in Music City Page 27