Back at Timberhill Drive, Jo Herring had changed clothes and was waiting for Nurse Evelyn to arrive. Evelyn would later realize that her role was to help Jo “discover” the horrific scene in the den. But Evelyn stopped for gasoline on Murfreesboro Road and was delayed by a few precious minutes. At about the same time, a couple of Jo Herring's Metro friends arrived at the Herring home and began to work on damage control. It was no coincidence that the men who arrived were part of Jo Herring's inner circle and just happened to be members of Metro's law enforcement community. It was very likely that they were concerned that one of the group members, be it a detective, an assistant DA, or an even more powerful member of the group, was in fact responsible for the young woman lying lifeless on the floor in the den.
Somewhere in the approximately ninety-minute window between Nurse Evelyn's arrival and the phone call to the police dispatcher at 11:00 p.m., the decision must have been made to replace Jesse Henderson and Carl Raylee with the two men from the Friday night drinking session at the Wedgewood Diner in the story the police would be told. There is simply no other way to explain the presence of two men who were not actually present that Saturday night. When I spoke with A. J. Meadows Jr., in October of 1999, he admitted that he hadn't actually been at the Timberhill Drive house on the night of Paula Herring's murder. He had been there the night before, Friday night, and, even then, he had never been in the garage or even entered the home.20
After more than an hour of chaos, shortly after 11:00 p.m., the Herring home was finally ready for an official visit from Metro detectives called out to investigate yet another Crieve Hall Prowler event. But this time the attack would appear to have escalated into murder. Upon arrival, the real detectives initially found a hysterical mother, sobbing and incoherent. The widowed nurse could barely muster enough words for the investigators to understand how she had discovered the pretty blond college student lying in the den. As experienced detectives, they quickly separated the hysterical mother from her young son and begin asking questions about the chain of events that took place before they arrived.
With a house filling up with policemen and investigators, it didn't take long for the lead detectives to realize that the story the widowed nurse was telling was highly suspect. Around midnight, the next-door neighbor who had paid Paula's cab fare the night before was brought over to babysit Alan Herring while detectives took Jo down to the police station for some intensive questioning. Nurse Evelyn followed the detectives’ car to the Municipal Safety Building, where she would wait for Jo Herring until the break of dawn, when Jo was released to return home.
It isn't possible to know every detail of what transpired while Jo Herring was being interrogated during her midnight to dawn session. But it is possible to know what Jo Herring needed to keep hidden from the investigators. Her first order of business would have been an attempt to make herself look completely innocent of the slaying, while hiding every motivation for the murder, along with its participants. Jo Herring had at least a three-hour window of opportunity, perhaps longer than that, to concoct a story that would hopefully allow her to walk away freely from any charge of murdering her daughter. Did she telephone her lawyer for help—the compromised assistant district attorney?
We do know that Jo Herring described her Saturday night activities as the outcome of a gracious daughter strongly encouraging her mother to have a night out on the town, as if such an event were so rare as to be celebrated when the opportunity arose. It was this cold and calculating lie that likely served as the foundation of Jo's attempt to walk away. She embellished it even more by attributing a quote to Paula in support of the plan: “Mother, take the night off while I work on a book report.” It was this deceit that allowed Jo Herring to misdirect investigators from seeing one of the motives in her daughter's wrongful death. In fact, the lie made it seem that Paula could have gone anywhere she chose that night, but instead chose to focus on her school work and stay home cuddled up with Robert Penn Warren's classic tale of political corruption and murder.
Rather than admit to the actual relationship she had with Paula, in an attempt to divert suspicion, Jo Herring must have gone out of her way to describe what a close bond she had with her daughter and how proud she was of her college coed. Jo must have also realized that she would have to keep quiet about Paula's anger at being unable to attend the district basketball game; otherwise it might speak to another element of motive in the slaying. And certainly there would have been no reason to bring up any discussion of Wilmer Herring's 1960 death or the identity of the trio who had entered the house with her hours before.
At some point during the interrogation, Jo Herring must have played her eventual trump card. It's doubtful that she would have played it with rank and file detectives, and more likely that she delivered her bombshell news to one of the chiefs of police. It would have been only a matter of time before Chief Hubert Kemp would have received the news and been forced to make a decision. The trump card would have been a devastatingly simple declaration: “I'm close friends with Mayor Briley. Very, very close, if you understand what I'm saying to you? Can you get him on the phone and ask him to come down here? Now.” A winning move by the brilliant nurse. Game. Set. Match.
After a couple of phone calls, all Hubert Kemp would have been able to do was to let her go, wondering if in forty-eight hours he would be sending a detective back out to arrest her. No one knows what the mayor might have said during his conversation with Hubert Kemp, but two things took place after the phone call: Jo Herring walked away from the Municipal Safety Building at daybreak on Sunday morning and, sometime the next week, Kemp asked the mayor to explain why he had been in the Crieve Hall neighborhood on the night of the murder. And Briley dutifully penned a letter in response.
Perhaps unknown to Briley, Hubert Kemp's brother lived in Crieve Hall, and the chief used his brother's next-door neighbor as the reason for the request to Briley for an explanation. Though Kemp may have been viewed as “too dumb to steal” when he was chosen to lead the police department after the Printers Alley housecleaning, he wasn't too dumb to trick Briley into placing himself in Crieve Hall at the time of the murder.21
At some point during the night, whether when arriving or departing, Jo Herring strode down the hallway of the Municipal Safety Building, purse and coat hanging on one arm and eyeglasses awkwardly in place, and a newspaper photographer captured the moment on film. Neither the photograph, nor the fact that Paula's mother was the prime suspect in her daughter's murder, would ever make a newspaper or television account in Nashville, and it wouldn't be revealed until decades later. With news beginning to spread that a murder had taken place in Crieve Hall, authorities were on high alert. And especially so on West End Avenue, where two patrolmen stopped a speeding car at daybreak on Sunday morning and, in a tension-filled scene, captured two Vanderbilt University students at gunpoint, one of whom had just fired shots from the passenger's window into the cold morning air using a .32-caliber pistol.22 The Vanderbilt students were taken to jail and held for questioning as first alternates in Paula's murder. In a bit of irony, just as Jo Herring was leaving her interrogators, her replacements arrived in the form of the two Vanderbilt students.
Sometime on Sunday morning, John Randolph Clarke loaded a collection of paperback books into his car, and he and Callie Clarke began driving to Tullahoma, Tennessee, where they would spend the day with Callie's brother and family. And, on the other side of town, on Sunday afternoon, an angry Sam Carlton, knowing that his noisy car might bring unwanted attention, gave away his damaged Chrysler automobile to a professional wrestler, a man he hardly knew.
On Monday, a concerned Al Baker told a policeman friend that Red Clarke might be a “red hot suspect” in Paula Herring's murder. By the end of the week, Baker's other acquaintance, Jesse Henderson, would check himself into the VA Hospital's psychiatric ward. But before doing so, Jesse discovered that a single bullet was all that was needed to tie a murder weapon to the investigator's chief suspe
ct in the Paula Herring slaying, John Randolph Clarke. Even better, the bullet needed only be found next to the sidewalk in front of Jesse's apartment.
It seems reasonable to assume that Jesse Henderson telephoned Lizzie, instructing her to fire the pistol into a soft target where she could retrieve the bullet. And, within a few short hours, Jesse received a .32-caliber gift that could quietly be dropped into the unguarded digging site. On the Thursday morning after the slaying, the bullet was magically discovered lying on top of the dirt, nose touching the concrete sidewalk, its shape unaltered. This event sealed Clarke's fate via ballistic-matching by a TBI firearms expert later that same day.
On Thursday evening, during a 10:00 p.m. television newscast, Mayor Beverly Briley announced a break in the case to the terrified citizens of Metro Nashville. An announcement that some might view as a cryptic admission regarding the slaying in Crieve Hall: “We know who's guilty of this crime, we are certain….”
On a rainy fall afternoon, not long after my last visit with Nurse Evelyn, I again read All the King's Men, the book that played a substantial role in Paula Herring's murder investigation.1 Students of the book can easily recount a number of themes running throughout this classic American tale: Willie Stark's alcoholism, his episodes of serial adultery, his willingness to use blackmail as a means to an end, as well as his unbridled lust for power and a secret lifestyle that eventually helped destroy him. Ironically, the books famous author, Robert Penn Warren, visited Nashville in the days just prior to Paula Herring's murder, a visit chronicled by one of the local newspapers.
There were only two items known to have been taken from the Herring home immediately after Paula's murder, the murder weapon and the paperback book. What was it about the little paperback that warranted removing it from the den as if it were as incriminating as the gun used in the slaying? And why had Jo Herring used the phrase “a date with All the King's Men” in her fictitious description of Paula's Saturday night plans?
As I pondered this secondary mystery, I was reminded of what a world-class liar Jo Herring had been at every opportunity following her daughter's murder and during its subsequent investigation. To one reporter, she had described Paula's last visit home as a wonderful surprise. It was hardly a surprise since Jo had paid for the plane ticket. To another, she told a loving tale of the close relationship between mother and daughter and how Paula had been homesick and just wanted to spend the weekend with her mother and little brother. To yet another reporter, she said she didn't know John Randolph Clarke.2 To the detectives working her daughter's murder investigation, she described in detail how Paula had urged her mother to take the night off and go to dinner with friends. But all of these descriptions were lies, self-centered, self-protecting, self-promoting lies.
In retrospect, there was little that came out of Jo Herring's mouth that wasn't deceptive or manipulative. So if Jo Herring's tale about Paula volunteering to stay home and babysit on that fateful night was pure fiction, then why should we believe her when it comes to the book report? Answer: we shouldn't. Here's the rest of the story that I believe was missed between the night of the murder and the arrest of John Randolph Clarke.
A close look at the timeline reveals that the tale of the missing paperback book arose at some point on Sunday, February 23, 1964, and was reported by Jim Squires in the Monday morning edition of the Nashville Tennessean:
Mrs. Herring said her daughter, a freshman student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was reading a book when she went out to dinner, leaving Paula with her 6-year-old brother, Alan. The girl was scheduled to make a report on the book in class today.3
But this was yet another lie. Jo Herring hadn't been at home to see or experience anything that had gone on that Saturday night, at least not until she arrived home with Nurse Lizzie and the two men. And there was nothing in the university records to indicate that Paula Herring had been taking any class that would have required a freshman English student to compose a critique of an American classic. A salient point made by Paula's classmates at the time.4 So what happened?
I believe what happened is this: When Jo Herring walked out of her midnight-to-dawn interrogation, after having played her “mayor's mistress” card, and after having been treated as royalty—thank you, Jesse Henderson—she surely must have known that law enforcement would still be looking at her as a possible suspect in her daughter's slaying. And she couldn't simply call a meeting at her home and invite her paramours over for a late Sunday brunch and a discussion of possible alibis she could use. I believe she did the only thing she could do, and that was to send a message to the King and his Men, All of them.
Jo Herring must have been keeping her eye on a ticking time bomb in her home, from the day that Wilmer Herring died until Paula followed him in death, some thirty-nine months later. If Paula Herring had been angry over her father's death and had blamed her mother for it, then a house full of hell would have indeed evolved and Wilmer's demise would have become the undercurrent in any future battles. With Paula's announcement that she planned to attend law school, it's easy to see how Jo Herring might have been even more concerned about the future.
This likely accounts for the unusual number of powerful men that Jo Herring added to her “get out of jail” plan.
If a fifteen-year-old girl couldn't find it within herself to point a finger at her mother for potentially murdering the girl's father, what could a twenty-five-year old woman, a freshly minted attorney, do instead? Answer: a lot. How many of Jo's inner circle knew of Wilmer Herring's unusual demise? All of them? Some of them? If no one else, at least two of the men must have known. The assistant district attorney and the mayor. For the mayor to have been involved with not one but two nurses (read mistresses), with two eighteen-year-old daughters and two dead husbands, he had to have been aware of the risk, if for no other reason than his own political self-preservation. And if anyone was a student of history, especially American political history, or American literature about American political history, it seems that person would have been Clifton Beverly Briley, the mayor.
Through the secret and sexual relationships in what John Hollins had described as “a drinking group,” Jo Herring had become one of the most powerful figures in Metro Nashville, albeit a player behind the scenes. Let's just call her the Queen of Metro. Her rolodex of powerful men was an impressive one. One that included married men who had been playing with fire, only to find themselves beholden to Jo Herring. If she needed to send a message to the mayor, to get his attention and remind him that she could burn down his political kingdom with a single phone call, or an inopportune confession, all she had to do was figuratively waive a copy of the little paperback book in front of a local newspaper reporter, and the message would have been transmitted in crystal clarity to the King and his Nashville Men. It was that simple. I think she did exactly that.
It would have been a chilling reminder that Jo Herring was the person who actually held all of the trump cards in her daughter's murder investigation. In the words of Richard Walter, it would have been more messaging. The district attorney was the only one who could move such a presentment forward, toward a grand jury indictment or, worse still, a trial. And if anyone would have wanted to avoid having Jo Herring defend herself against a charge of murder, exposing her secret friends in the melee that would follow, well, that would have been the mayor and the rest of the powerful little group.
So how did the paperback book get from the den to the ditch, where it was discovered a few days after the slaying? It is possible that Paula Herring did bring a copy of the book home for the weekend, but either way, assuming Nurse Evelyn was correct, Jo Herring had her own copy available.
Would that knowledge have driven Jo to toss the paperback book in a ditch sometime after Paula was killed, in an attempt to use the “missing book” story to her strategic advantage? I'll leave that for the reader to decide.
Perhaps the best thing to have happened to the new Metro government after Paula He
rring's slaying would have been if Jo Herring had been exposed as Paula Herring's killer along with Nurse Lizzie. Perhaps justice might have prevailed? Maybe a number of those involved in the horrific tale would have been forced to focus on their personal issues by seeking addiction counseling, while others, with perhaps less obvious problems, could have provided healthier oversight of the new government. It is ironic that, in an area known as the buckle of the Bible belt, Nashville quietly became one of the leading centers for the treatment of sexual addiction in the United States, a status that continues at the time of this writing.
More than fifty years have passed since Metro Nashville was born at the stroke of midnight on April Fools’ Day 1963. And more than fifty years also have passed since the biggest homicide case took place in the early formation of the new Metro government, the Paula Herring babysitter murder.
It is certainly possible that John Randolph Clarke did, in fact, murder Paula Herring on a Saturday night in February 1964. And in doing so, he was able to beat a young woman nearly to death and finally did kill his victim by shooting her three times with a .32-caliber handgun, without incurring even so much as a scratch or a bite mark or collecting a single drop of the victim's blood on the clothing he wore that evening. If he did, then he failed his Sexual Assault 101 class, because his victim wasn't sexually assaulted.
It's certainly possible that a registered nurse could indeed stumble separately upon two dead family members in a matter of three-plus years and it simply be an odds-defying, blind piece of unfortunate luck, where one death was completely unrelated to the other. It's unlikely, but possible. Perhaps Eva Jo Herring led a transparent, consistent, and exemplary life at home, at work, and in the community. Or perhaps it also is possible that she was hiding behind the personality of a caretaking Florence Nightingale, covering a startling shallowness in her depth of emotion and connection to others, and simply harboring an appetite for whatever she desired.
A Murder in Music City Page 28