The opportunity for Paula to leave Nashville behind and start over in Knoxville may have been both a blessing and a curse for the young woman. The feelings of being trapped at home by her mother may have been fading away as her experience at the University of Tennessee, the new friends, and the sorority plans were rebuilding her confidence. Jo Herring probably could see what was coming. And all of those major issues—Wilmer Herring's questionable suicide, the men coming around and harassing Paula, the drugs, the alcohol, the neglect of Alan, the war over money needed by Paula for school, skiing, and the future sorority membership versus how Jo Herring was spending it, appear to have eventually loaded the literal gun. And the trigger was pulled when Jo Herring's daughter missed the opportunity to display the “new Paula Herring” to her friends at the basketball game, and the two women who were the reason for the missed opportunity entered the den of the Herring home on that tragic Saturday night.
It is more than just possible that Jo Herring was taken in for questioning as the first suspect in her daughter's murder, and she had the clout to outwit and outmaneuver her interrogators. And there was apparently nothing that Metro's finest could do about it except to release her and go back to the street to find a more suitable suspect to arrest. Two Vanderbilt University students were the next ones hauled to jail, followed by the twenty-five-year-old mental patient who had walked away from Central State Psychiatric Hospital and admitted to peeping into homes, and then finally John Randolph Clarke.
From a counting perspective, there were four different attempts at finding the right suspect. Four suspects hauled in and four suspects released, if you count the Vanderbilt duo as one team. Only later in the week did the authorities come back to Clarke as their final choice, aided by the magic bullet found near the 18th Avenue sidewalk and the doctored fiber evidence sent to the FBI. But let the record show that their first suspect, Jo Herring, was their best suspect, along with her unseen partner, Nurse Lizzie.
It is also possible that Jo Herring merely had an affinity for men who worked in law enforcement and also for men who had high earning potential as lawyers. It is ironic that her list of male acquaintances, paramours if you will, when mapped to an organizational chart, just happened to cover the gamut from a couple of police detectives, an assistant DA, the mayor, the son of a former Tennessee Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and John Randolph Clarke, who just happened to be yet another man with a well-placed judge for a father. It was as if she could see into the future and perhaps see a need to use her rolodex of compromised men as a “get out of jail free” card. Perhaps it is just coincidental that, when Jo Herring needed to call in the favor of favors, several of these men were all too willing to come to her aid. Frankly speaking, they may have been terrified not to.
If Jo Herring had been arrested for murdering her own daughter in February 1964, and especially if she had been tried and convicted for murder, a number of political careers in Music City would likely have burned to the ground. She was that powerful. Chief of police Hubert Kemp appears to have come to this realization when Jo was brought in for questioning on the night of the murder and then apparently used Briley's influence to walk out of the Municipal Safety Building free as a bird. It certainly helped that no photograph or mention of her midnight-to-dawn interrogation ever made its way into the newspaper. Thus, perhaps it is fair to wonder why Harry Nichol, the district attorney general, who, early on, stated that he personally looked forward to prosecuting Paula's killer, instead decided to step away and let his team deal with the explosive case when it came time for trial.5
In hindsight, it didn't take much to have John Randolph Clarke indicted and convicted for Paula Herring's murder. Clarke's comment to Al Baker, the tampered fiber evidence, the matching bullet, and one thing more did the trick: a concerted effort to keep Jo Herring and her activities hidden from view. The more this was achieved, the easier it became to sell Clarke's guilt.
Speaking of courtroom drama, I remember the trial of O. J. Simpson after he pled “absolutely 100 percent not guilty” to the charge of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ronald Goldman in June of 1994. Simpson's criminal trial ran from late January into early October 1995, more than thirty weeks in duration. But the biggest murder trial in the South in the fall of 1964, the one covered by newspapers from the Mississippi River to the hills of East Tennessee, from Alabama to the Ohio Valley, and picked up by the Associated Press for national distribution, that trial started on a Monday morning, and the verdict was rendered on Friday afternoon of the same week. Could some officer of the court have known the topics to avoid during the trial so that no one came close to shining the light of day on the lifestyles being led behind the scenes? It's possible.
And what could Charles Galbreath and his defense team have known about the plan? It is possible that Galbreath was well acquainted with Jo Herring's powerful “friends” and was resigned to the fact that, no matter how strong a defense, or for that matter, how little of a defense he put on for his client, John Randolph Clarke was likely going to be convicted for murdering an eighteen-year-old girl. It's also possible that Galbreath had a clear understanding of the guilty party when he asked Jo Herring in open court if she knew where the gun was located.
Perhaps that is why Jo Herring and some of the “King's Men” were partying into the wee hours of the morning during the trial week spent in Jackson. As long as Clarke was convicted and did the time, they were happy to accommodate him and escape the consequences of informing the public of their secret lifestyles.
It appears to have been well known among Jo Herring's powerful circle of friends that she may have been involved in at least one and possibly two murders and that she escaped criminal consequences for both. Either way, the viewpoint held by most of the King's Men was that Jo Herring was untouchable, not because she had carried out the perfect murder, but because she appeared to have absolute power over the Metro monarchy. And no matter how emboldened Paula Herring may have felt in an attempt to avenge her father's 1960 murder, she was still just a little “Fish” in a big Metro pond.
Fifty years after Paula Herring graduated as part of the first senior class of John Overton High School, her classmates got together to host a fiftieth reunion on a Saturday night in September, at a country club location just north of Nashville. It's one thing to celebrate the passing decades, the triumphs, joys, and sorrows shared by a group of people remembering such milestones, and it's entirely another thing to crash such a party and ask everyone to spend time focused on one of the worst events in their school memories, the cold-blooded murder of a classmate.
So I did the only thing I could think of; rather than intrude on their celebration, I wrote a one-page personal note to the attendees, asking for remembrances of their fallen classmate, and one of the class officers graciously left copies of my note on a table for anyone to review or ignore as they preferred. No pictures, no newspaper headlines, no brutal descriptions of Paula's murder for the attendees to dwell on.
A few days before the actual reunion, on a warm September afternoon, I made a drive to beautiful Center Hill Lake, about an hour east of Nashville and near Cookeville, Tennessee. After stopping to ask directions more than once, I finally located the stunning lakeside home of a man I'll call Joshua Prince.1 He met me on his front porch as I handed over fifty copies of my note and thanked him for his assistance.
Joshua was tall and friendly, with a full head of salt and pepper hair and a tiny set of wire-rimmed glasses hanging from his shirt pocket. After a few moments of friendly conversation regarding his ski-boat manufacturing business, I was on the verge of returning to my car when I remembered to ask a question regarding his former classmate.
“Mr. Prince, do you remember what you were doing the Saturday night that Paula Herring was murdered?” I asked.
“Don't think I'll ever forget it, or that weekend either.”
“Why's that?”
“I spoke with Paula on that Friday night, not too long after sh
e came in from Knoxville,” he replied.
“Well, that would be a piece of information I've never heard before. In fact, I've never found anyone, and I mean any of her high school friends or neighbors, that ever said they saw or spoke with her on that Friday night. Why such a clear memory for you?” I asked.
“Because I had been dating her next-door neighbor.”
At this point, my mouth was hanging open, and I was speechless as my brain raced through the implications.
“Do you know Becky Wexler?” he asked.
Before I could answer, he said, “Well I guess she'd be married with a different name now, right?”
“Ah, Mr. Prince, I do, indeed. She's Becky Brewer now. In fact, ironically, I used to do business with Becky and her husband before I had ever heard of Paula Herring.”
“I was at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville in my first year of college, and I came home that same weekend hoping to have a date with Becky on Saturday night, but Paula said Becky had left town Friday afternoon. Becky and I were dating pretty heavily during the previous summer,” he stated.
“You saw Paula in person on that Friday night?” I asked.
“No, spoke with her by phone.”
“Becky had gone to the Daytona 500 stock car race with her dad,” I said.
“Right. You know this was before the age of cell phones. Before Paula got on the plane in Knoxville coming home, she called Becky to see if she'd be here, but that's when she found out Becky was on her way out of town,” he said.
“What kind of mood was Paula in when you spoke with her?”
“Oh, a good mood. Paula was always in a good mood,” he said.
“You lived close to the Herrings?” I asked.
“Sure, we lived within walking distance, just up the street from their house.”
“I just thought of something to ask you. Do you remember anyone driving a hot rod, a red sports car, around the neighborhood about the time of the murder, even that very weekend?”
“I drove one,” he said.
“Really? What kind of car?”
“It was a 1958 Plymouth with glass pack mufflers and a gear shift that was actually a piston. You know, Richard Petty won that same Daytona 500 driving a 1964 Plymouth. He blew the field away!”
“Well, you just answered a question I've been trying to answer for more than a decade. Did you know the cops were looking for a young man driving a red hot rod through the neighborhood?” I asked.
“No, never heard that, but a couple of detectives came to our house that night around 1:00 a.m. to talk to me.”
“I don't think I can leave until I hear this story.”
“My dad was terrified when we got the knock at the door at 1:00 a.m. It was Saturday night, so I guess really it was Sunday morning just after midnight. And it was two men, a couple of investigators. Since it was just us guys, I'm in my underwear standing at the door with my dad, and these two detectives are really looking me over, really looking me over, and they told us a neighborhood girl had been killed, but they didn't say who it was.”
“You know why they were inspecting you, don't you?”
“No.”
“They were looking for blood on your underwear and scratches on you. Paula was left in a bloody condition, lots of bruising and facial trauma. And there was a rumor that she'd bitten her attacker, but I doubt they knew that at the time,” I said.
“Well, I told the detectives that I'd been to a party that night and described where I was and who I was with, and they left right after that. We learned it was Paula the next morning. It was awful.”
“You realize you were one of the first suspects in the murder? One of the detective magazines a few months after the murder described your hot rod car being in the neighborhood on the day Paula was killed,” I said.
“No, I never heard that. I remember that they got the right man. Some guy Paula's mother had been dating, I think?”
“Well, that was the story reported in the newspaper. But the real solution to Paula's murder looks a little different now, some fifty years after the fact.”
“Oh, really?”
“I'm afraid so. Let's just say the detectives didn't arrive at your house by accident. They had Paula's mother downtown from midnight until daybreak Sunday morning, interrogating her. She must have known about your Friday night phone call to Paula and your name must have come up. That's how the detectives came to be knocking on your door so soon after they hauled Jo Herring downtown.”
Just hours after the John Overton fiftieth reunion had taken place, I received a phone call from another attendee and member of the class, Bill Beasley. Beasley had read my handout the night before, and he and his wife were driving back to Florida where they lived. He was keenly interested in the research and provided a unique perspective of being a Vanderbilt University freshman driving through the Crieve Hall neighborhood within hours of that tragic Saturday night in February 1964.2
Not long after we began talking, Bill handed his cell phone to his wife and without missing a beat she said, “I'm not from Nashville, but the first story my husband ever told me about growing up there was the one about his friend Paula Herring. I'll never forget it.”3
Moments later, her husband was back on the phone, and he described attending the memorial service for Paula and standing in line to offer condolences to Jo Herring at the funeral home three days after the slaying. “I had never been to a funeral for a friend, and Paula was a good friend. I vividly remember Paula's mother saying to me and everyone who came through the line, ‘Just find who did this.’ I thought that was such an odd thing to say to people paying their respects.”
“You were talking to her,” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“Paula's mother, she was issuing you and everyone else a challenge. And I'm saying that you were talking directly to Paula's killer when you were in that line.”
“I was going to my grave thinking the Clarke fellow did it! Her own mother? How did she get away with it?”
I had always wanted to visit the hill country of Texas, and so it came to be that, on a blue sky winter day, fifty years after Paula Herring's murder, I found myself driving through the rolling landscape of central Texas looking for a gravesite. Jo Herring's obituary indicated that she had been born in 1923 in Texas, and that she had spent the last decade of her life living with her family in the Lone Star state, where she had been buried in the summer of 1976. And I wanted to see her resting place.
I don't know how the Texas hill country looked in October of 1923 when Jo Herring was born, but I suspect it had the same scruffy appearance as it did on this January day. It was mostly brown pastureland, more populated by cattle and deer than people, with a rolling landscape broken up by small stands of Texas live oak and an occasional cedar tree. In their winter mode, the oak trees looked gray and lifeless, hunched over as if they had spent their entire lives battling the southwest winds, and in the process had developed paralysis of the limbs and spun off hundreds of arthritic fingers.
Nor was I surprised to see a few lonely oil derricks marking time with cattle that had long since gotten used to their mechanical neighbors, though most of the derricks that I saw were silent and stationary. There were signs of recent industrialization, however, as the cattle had new homesteaders in their midst, gas wells, which appeared to have been recently drilled by energy conglomerates and were marked as “field number XYZ” or similar. These miniature silos had all been painted bright white and were a regular feature of the landscape, all the while taking up no more space than a large SUV.
I traveled south from Personville, Texas, for about five minutes on FM 39, a farm-to-market road, as I occasionally glanced at a Texas roadmap lying next to me on the passenger seat of my rental car. Throughout the Paula Herring research project, there had been a few instances where the hair on the back of my head and arms would stand at attention, somehow letting me know that the next few moments were going to be important. It was like a prelude to tim
e slowing down to a point where you could actually see and experience things in slow motion, as if the universe was carefully managing all of your sensory data, so that you could capture it all before being placed back on the conveyor belt of reality.
That was the experience I was having as I slowly negotiated my rental car onto a narrow road toward Oakes Cemetery, a historic resting place that I had been told was hidden from view and seldom visited by anyone but family members. After a hundred yards of blacktop, the pavement ended and became a gravel path eventually narrowing to a trail of packed grass and dirt.
When I looked to my right, I saw a scene straight out of a Texas hymnbook, an old wooden church chapel, with one large room and a low front porch, standing sentry over perhaps a hundred plus graves with the aid of a dozen oak trees. The church itself, save for the roof, had been completely covered in many coats of white paint, including the window panes. The burial ground appeared to have been used so infrequently that the only place to park was on the grass lawn in front of the sanctuary.
After parking my car, I decided that I would have to work quickly and methodically to ensure that I visually inspected every grave plot. If Jo Herring were indeed resting here, I suspected I might only find a foot marker similar to Paula's burial site in Gallatin, Tennessee.
Deciding to press on, I mentally tossed a coin and started carefully walking through the rows of graves, reading each headstone for any sign of the Herring name. After a few minutes of this pattern work, I realized that I was approaching the last of the markers to be read, and I began to mentally prepare myself for the conclusion that I had been misled as to the correct burial site for Jo Herring. But as I turned to walk back to my car, I found myself face to face with the grave of Wilmer Herring.1 My breath caught in my throat at the realization, and I stood frozen in place.
A Murder in Music City Page 29