Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (13 page)

“The hundreds of spectators who could not obtain
access to the courtroom refused to leave the building,” the
Tulsa World
reported. “They believed that a recess had been called and bailiffs were
attempting to trick them into leaving the building in order to lessen the
number of spectators.”

It took another three to four hours for the most
obstinate of the crowd to admit defeat and go home.

FOR THE FIRST THREE
CENTURIES after Columbus “discovered” America, not much had happened in the
region that would later become Oklahoma. The area was largely occupied by Indians
of the Caddo, Wichita, and Pawnee tribes, and later, the Kiowa and Apache. With
the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, America acquired 828,000 acres of territory
from France at three cents an acre, for a total cost of $15 million. This area
would eventually yield fifteen states and a small portion of two Canadian
provinces.

Three territories, Missouri, Orleans, and
Arkansas, were named from this purchase by the time the Indian Removal Act was
approved in 1830. This act paved the way for the federal government to forcibly
relocate Indians from the Five Civilized Tribes of the Chickasaw, Choctaw,
Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee Nations from their homes in the
Southeastern United States to what would become known as Indian Territory. Tens
of thousands of Indians were marched halfway across the country in a forced mass
migration that would eventually be called the “Trail of Tears,” a reference to
the thousands of Indians who died along the way.

At their destination, the five tribes received
large allotments of land, formed their own governments, and were encouraged to
become farmers, trappers, and ranchers. But over the next five decades,
numerous acts and treaties reduced their holdings and made generous allowances
for white settlers.

When the Muscogee-Creek Indians from Alabama moved
into their new lands, the Turtle Clan settled down underneath a large oak tree
near the corner of what is now Cheyenne Avenue and 18
^th
Street in
Tulsa.
[21]
They named their new settlement “Tulasi,” which meant “old town” in their
language. The Civil War largely postponed economic development in the region, while
the Reconstruction era contributed only slightly to the area’s growth. The
first post office for a village that now called itself “Tulsa” wasn’t built
until 1879.

In 1882, a railroad spur was extended to Tulsa to
serve the growing cattle business. Seven years later, when the city was
incorporated on January 18, 1898, the population had grown from two hundred to eleven
hundred settlers. By the 1900 census, it had increased by three hundred more
people.

In 1901, oil was discovered a short distance from
Tulsa, across the Arkansas River in a small area known as Red Fork. Although
oil had been found decades before in other areas of what would later become
Oklahoma, this discovery was “the first major commercial field developed in
Indian Territory,” reports author Kenny Franks in his book,
Oklahoma: The
Land and Its People.
Within a month, one thousand people had moved into the
area. But it was the 1905 discovery of the large Glenn Pool oil reserve
fourteen miles southwest of downtown Tulsa that changed everything for the
city.

“It was Oklahoma’s first major oil field—and the
richest field the world had yet seen,” wrote Norman Hyne in 2008. “Unlike the
thick, sour oil from Spindletop, the famed 1901 Texas discovery that had
already played out, this oil was light and sweet—just right to refine into
gasoline and kerosene.

“The reservoir was shallow, less than 1,500 feet
deep, well within the range of the cable tool drilling rigs of that day,” the
professor of petroleum geology at the University of Tulsa continued. “It is
said that more money was made on the Glenn Pool oil field than the California
gold rush and Colorado silver rush combined.”

After this discovery, Tulsa became known as the
“Oil Capital of the World,” and its population exploded. When Oklahoma became a
state in 1907, the population was 7,300. Three years later, it had grown to
18,182. “Tulsa became a mecca for oilmen such as Henry F. Sinclair, J. Paul
Getty, William K. Skelly, and Waite Phillips,” Franks declared in his book.

More wells in the area were discovered, two
refineries were built, and a major construction boom took place. By 1920, the
population was 72,000. Men like Homer Wilcox, worth $20 million in 1922, more
than a quarter of a billion dollars in today’s money, were not even in the top
echelon and are all but forgotten today. Fourteen years later, the city’s
population had doubled to 150,000. That kind of economic boom, exponential
growth, and money attracted both good Christian folk and those untamed men who worked
the oil fields—and a criminal element that followed them.

Tulsa developed a dual personality.

The Kennamer case was by no means Tulsa’s first
taste of hysteria or mob behavior. On Memorial Day, May 31, 1921, a minor
incident in a hotel elevator between a black shoe-shiner and a young, white,
female elevator operator was misinterpreted and blown far out of proportion in
an unfortunate series of escalating events that began as vigilante “justice” and
led to sixteen hours of racial violence. The unrest then morphed into economic envy
by whites who were jealous of the success achieved by blacks in their
segregated but financially prosperous Greenwood District. When it was over,
Greenwood, the wealthiest black community in the United States, which included “Black
Wall Street,” was obliterated. More than twelve hundred black-owned residences
spread out over thirty-five city blocks were destroyed, leaving ten thousand
people homeless. The official number of black fatalities given at the time was
thirty-nine, but that was the sanitized version. Later estimates place it
closer to three hundred, and others go far higher.

Although it was an atrocity of historic
proportions and without comparison in American history, vigilante justice by
white Tulsans wasn’t limited to just blacks; they also murdered white men as
well. A year before the race riot, nineteen-year-old Tom Owens, alias Roy
Belton, was lynched by an armed mob that stormed the county courthouse after he
shot and killed a popular taxicab driver during a botched robbery. The
hot-tempered pack of revenge-seekers intimidated Sheriff Jim Wooley easily
enough, and he surrendered his prisoner without resistance. Owens was then
loaded into the victim’s own taxi, and during the nine-mile journey to a favored
lynching tree outside of town, more than a hundred cars formed a death parade
behind the taxi. Newspapers at the time estimated the crowd in attendance to be
north of a thousand.

Many notable outlaws of the era called Tulsa home.
The most famous criminals belonged to the Barker-Karpis gang, including Ma
Barker herself. She and her son, Fred, would die in a shootout with FBI agents
in Florida approximately one month after Kennamer’s preliminary hearing. Before
they formed the Barker gang, many were members of Tulsa’s notorious Central
Park Gang of the 1920s, which included Volney Davis and Harry Campbell.

“I can remember the principal of Longfellow told
me at one time that there were more graduates of Longfellow grade school in
Alcatraz Prison than any other elementary school in the United States,”
recalled
Tribune
reporter, Bob Foreman, during a 1980 interview. Those
graduates included Davis, Campbell, and Arthur “Doc” Barker.

Ruby Floyd, the wife of Charles “Pretty Boy”
Floyd, lived in Tulsa, and her house was often under surveillance. Alvin “Creepy”
Karpis’s ex-wife, Dorothy Slayman, was also from Tulsa and worked as a waitress
at Bishop’s Waffle House. Other notable Tulsa crime figures of the day were
bank robber Coney Coffey and local gangster Johnny Mayo.

Mayo was once part of the gang that participated
in the infamous Osage Indian murders of 1920. His wife also worked at Bishop’s
Waffle House—one of the most popular restaurants in Tulsa. The marriage took a
left turn when he heard his wife was running around on him while he was a
trustee at the Tulsa County Jail. For this and other reasons, Mayo stole a submachine
gun and a pistol, locked up the night jailer, took the elevator to the first
floor, walked out of the courthouse, and hailed a taxi to take him to the
Drexel Hotel. When the night clerk refused to tell him what room his wife was
in, he was persuaded to change his mind when Mayo shoved the Tommy gun in his
face. Mayo grabbed the key, went up to the room, and caught his wife
in
flagrante delicto
with her paramour
.
After considerable begging on
their part,
he eventually let them go.

The next day, Mayo called up
World
police
reporter Walter Biscup, told him the whole story, and said he was on his way to
Mexico. But it didn’t work out the way Mayo planned, and he was captured four
days later.

Coming late in the year, the Kennamer-Gorrell case
was notable in one of the decade’s most notable years for crime. First, Raymond
Hamilton, who ran with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, was captured on April
25. One month later, the two outlaw lovers were ambushed and killed on a rural
stretch of road in Louisiana. John Dillinger was also ambushed and shot to
death on July 22 in Chicago. Then, Bruno Hauptmann was arrested on September 17,
two years after the Lindbergh kidnapping, when federal investigators and state
police got a break in the case.

Pretty Boy Floyd was the next to go, when he was killed
in Ohio on October 22, followed by Baby Face Nelson, on November 27. Texas
outlaw Irvin “Blackie” Thompson, who had robbed banks all over Oklahoma, was
killed in a shootout on December 6. He had escaped from Texas death row that
summer after fellow gang members on the outside bribed a guard to slip him and
his partner, “Whitey” Walker, a gun. Whitey was shot and killed by a guard when
he was halfway over the prison wall. Blackie was killed by officers in a hail
of bullets near Amarillo. To cap off a historic year for the end of infamous
criminals, the end came for the most sadistic killer in American history when New
York City detectives announced they had arrested child killer and cannibal,
Albert Fish. Most of the gruesome story he would later give to a psychiatrist
was unprintable in newspapers.

THE MORAL CRUSADE TO SAVE the souls of Tulsa’s
wayward youth continued after the preliminary hearing, with a two-pronged
attack to remove the purveyors of evil influence and redirect their attention toward
more wholesome activities supervised by adults. The front-line soldiers came
from a cross-section of the most influential groups in Tulsa: city leaders, law
enforcement, school officials, church pastors, the Parent Teachers Association,
and the newspapers. The
World
didn’t just cover these efforts, they took
the initiative by using an undercover reporter to produce an exposé on a fairly
new problem—marijuana.

Under a grammatically confusing headline,
“Thrill-Seeking Tulsa Youths Blamed for Marijuana Evils,” an unnamed
World
reporter went undercover to buy marijuana cigarettes with the intent to connect
dope with “thrill-seeking youths” and the Kennamer case. But by the end of his
story, the problem of marijuana use seemed to be more prevalent among adults than
high school kids.

“It is the stimulant that builds a
super-superiority complex and excites sex instinct. It is the stuff upon which
hijackers whet their nerves for robbery and murder,” the writer boldly began.
“It is the drug that feeds on brain cells and ultimately transforms human
beings into raging maniacs.”

Ten years before, marijuana was completely unknown
by Tulsans, the author reported. It first appeared on Tulsa streets around 1930,
and had grown in popularity ever since. But as the writer quickly discovered,
marijuana was hard to come by, thanks to the hysteria whipped up by the Gorrell
murder.

“Events of the last two weeks—whether marijuana is
involved with disclosures in the Kennamer case or not—have made the weed
difficult for the novice to obtain, and peddlers who made from $6 to $10
[22]
a day have lost
their aggressiveness [with] which they formerly plied their trade.”

The article carefully explained to the uninitiated
what marijuana was (a fast-growing weed reaching heights of four to sixteen
feet), where it came from (India to Mexico to the southwestern United States),
where it was grown (some locally, but the higher quality coming from Mexico),
who was selling it (“mostly Mexicans, some Negroes”), how it was being used
(rolled into cigarettes or filtered to make tea), and how much it cost (three
cigarettes for 25¢ before the Kennamer-Gorrell case erupted, but double that
price by the time the reporter went undercover, or a tobacco can full enough to
make sixty cigarettes for a median $4.75), and who had laws against it (states
most affected by that time, which were only Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and there
were no federal statutes). The problem was bad enough that the Tulsa police
department had its own narcotics squad led by spectacle-and bow-tie-adorned Sgt.
Francis McMillen.

When the reporter made the rounds of local
peddlers to make his undercover purchases, he didn’t get quite the
sensationalistic results promised from the headline. At his first stop, to
allay the seller’s suspicion, the reporter was “forced to smoke part of it on
the spot.”

Unfamiliar with this new buyer, other skittish
dope dealers wouldn’t sell to him, or even admit they had any, and they sent
him “from one place to another and in his rounds, [he] ended up at the source
[where] he started.” At one dealer, he arrived too late because a local
orchestra, which played for one of the many country-music dance halls in town,
had bought up the entire supply.

With no connection in his story as yet made
between marijuana and high school boys, he next went to Central High School and
then the University of Tulsa, hoping to find stronger evidence of his premise.
But it wasn’t there. Officials at both schools were proactively working against
the problem. Staff members at the 4,300-student high school, along with
undercover investigators who’d been brought in, had found no evidence of the
weed being sold or used in the building. To familiarize themselves with its
distinctive smell, relevant members of the school staff fired up a joint
obtained from the narcotics squad.