Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (15 page)

“[In December], I was informed by Sergeant Maddux
that he had been offered $25,000 to discontinue his investigation along certain
lines in a criminal case, that he had declined, and that the person making the
offer then said he would be obliged to use other means to stop further
inquiry,” Hoop said. Although he had been careful not to mention
which
criminal case it was during a public meeting, privately, everyone knew what he
meant, and that it tied back to earlier bribe reports in the newspapers. Hoop also
told city leaders that Maddux claimed only a little more evidence was needed
before he could make an arrest.

“I directed Maddux to submit this statement to me
in writing,” Hoop continued, “and I have filed his written statement with my
own affidavit in a safe deposit box. In case of an ‘accident,’ these papers and
others relating to the case in question will be sufficient for the police to
place in custody the persons involved, although the case is not yet complete.”

But it is what Hoop said next that was most
intriguing to reporters and commissioners, and if the newspapers knew what it
was, they didn’t dare report on it.

“A few days later, letters and papers alleging
misconduct by Maddux in another part of the country some years before were
turned over to me by Mayor Penney,” Hoop said. “It is evident that every effort
will be made to discredit this officer and secure his removal from further
participation in the work in which he is now engaged. These facts are submitted
to you so you may be fully informed in case further efforts are made to
prejudice the commission against Maddux, and also as a distinct warning to
others of our purpose.”

And there it was. Maddux’s past had come back to
haunt him. In 1924 he was employed as a deputy state game warden in northern
Texas. That was the year the twenty-five-year-old began a love affair with
Annabelle Barker, a twenty-three-year-old divorcée from Elk City, Oklahoma. In late
August, the two lovebirds embarked on a romantic getaway that took them through
southeastern Oklahoma and down to the Texas Panhandle. While in Elk City, the
happy couple told Annabelle’s sister they were going to Shamrock, Texas.

But there was just one problem Annabelle didn’t
know about. Henry Bailess Maddux had a wife and three young children in
Decatur, Texas. During her husband’s romantic escapade, his wife Clara got word
of the affair, left town on Wednesday, September 3, and traveled to Elk City to
confront her husband’s mistress. When she arrived, she spoke with Annabelle’s sister,
who told her the couple had already left for Shamrock. Furious, twenty-six-year-old
Clara bought a .32-caliber, hammerless pistol before leaving town. But when she
got to Shamrock, she was told that her husband and his female companion had driven
farther south to Childress.

Clara rented a car and drove from Shamrock
fifty-seven miles southwest to Memphis, Texas, where she boarded a train that
took her the last thirty-one miles to Childress.

After walking two blocks from the railroad station
down Second Street, Clara saw her husband leaning against his car, reading a
letter in front of the Nave Hotel. Sitting in the passenger’s seat was his
mistress. Neither one of them saw her coming.

Recognizing the woman from a photograph she had obtained,
Clara walked up to the driver’s-side window, pointed the pistol at her
husband’s mistress, and shot her twice at point-blank range. The first bullet entered
Annabelle’s left temple and came out two inches behind her right ear. The
second entered her body from the left and tore through her heart. Maddux acted
fast and ripped the pistol out of his wife’s grip before she could take another
shot. He then carried his unsuspecting lover into the hotel. She died without
saying a word or even knowing why it had happened.

Clara was quickly arrested but was released the
next day on a $2,000 bond paid by family and friends who came to her aid. The
Childress County prosecutor had Maddux arrested and charged with violation of
the Mann Act, which made it a federal crime to cross state lines with “any
woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other
immoral purpose.”

He was certainly guilty of that, and Maddux was
immediately fired from his job. The outcome of the charge against him is
unclear. His soon-to-be ex-wife went on trial in late January 1925, and after
three days of testimony and twenty-two minutes of deliberation, she was
acquitted of murder. To escape the mess he’d left, the former Marine Corps
private moved to Colorado, where he joined the National Guard and was promoted
to captain. Later, he attended Northwestern University, where he studied
criminology for two years. He then took a job as an assistant criminologist in
Phoenix, before he was hired in January 1934 by Hoop, who made it his mission
to hire intelligent new officers. While living in Tulsa, the 1935 city
directory indicates he was married to a woman named Eleanor. His three children
remained with their mother, who eventually remarried.

Maddux had apparently left that whole wife-killing-his-mistress
business out of the hiring process, because it was news to both Mayor Penney and
Hoop when it reached them ten years later. In spite of this, Hoop was still
standing by his man. For now.

WHEN KENNAMER WAS BOUND OVER for trial in district
court, his case was assigned to Judge Thurman Hurst. Then as now, rural Pawnee
County was included with Tulsa County to make up the Twenty-First District
Court of Oklahoma.
[26]
Hurst was born in Cassville, Missouri, in 1889 and moved to Oklahoma in 1892
with his parents, who later settled on a farm five miles south of Pawnee, the
seat of Pawnee County. After high school, he enrolled at the University of
Oklahoma’s law school in 1909, graduated in 1911, and was admitted to the bar
in 1912, without having to finish the bar exam due to a state supreme court
decision which came while he and other students were in the middle of taking
the test. Halfway through the exam, the announcement was made, and every
student in the room got up and walked out.

After receiving his license to practice law, Hurst
worked both in private practice and as a county attorney. He was elected
district judge for Pawnee County in 1930 and was just beginning his second term
in January 1935.

Judge Hurst was small-statured, and it appeared to
others as if his black robe had swallowed him. He had a reputation for being
fair and honest, but also stern, and he was held in high esteem by his
colleagues and by attorneys who tried cases before him.

“Around the courthouse,” the
Tribune
reported, “you will learn that Judge Hurst gets all the ‘dirty work.’ By that,
they mean, that because he lives in Pawnee, he tries almost all the cases
involving Tulsa governmental questions and important business interests.”

Tasked with hearing cases both in Tulsa County and
in the new $125,000 courthouse recently completed in Pawnee, Judge Hurst spent
a lot of his time traveling the nearly sixty miles each way. He was often late to
arrive for his own hearings and proceedings in Tulsa.

And so it was on January 5, when he arrived forty
minutes late for an arraignment of thirty-nine prisoners, which included
Kennamer and five other accused murderers. Once again, “a record throng of spectators
[was] in the courtroom, all straining for a sight of the prisoner and principal
in Tulsa’s most startling slaying,” the
World
reported. Two large
officers had to push and shove onlookers aside so Judge Hurst could make his
way into his own courtroom. While the thirty-eight other prisoners were all
marched in and out together, Kennamer was escorted in by himself.

Dr. Gorrell was there, as he had been in every
proceeding, a guardian of justice for his murdered son. No one from Kennamer’s
family attended his second arraignment. Reporters noted that he appeared more
“pallid” and stoic, and had lost that cocksure attitude displayed previously.
By looking at him, those in attendance could tell he was a special case; he was
the only one wearing a clean, newly pressed suit. A small white tissue with a
spot of red revealed that he had just shaved prior to coming to court.

In spite of rumors published the day before that
Kennamer would plead guilty and seek an insanity hearing, he was sticking to
his
story, not his attorneys. He wasn’t guilty of anything—it was self-defense.

As the other defendants remained, two guards
escorted him out of the courtroom and back up to his quarters. Later that day, his
court date was announced by Anderson. Phil Kennamer would go on trial for the
murder of John Gorrell on Monday, January 28. Moss had three weeks left to
prepare for a case made more difficult by his inability to reach Phil’s friends
who didn’t want to talk to his legal team.

He wasn’t prepared.

BY LATE DECEMBER AND EARLY January,
Tulsa’s high-profile murder case was just starting to get traction in
newspapers around the world. Four days before Christmas, the
Tribune
received
an urgent teletype from the head offices of the International News Services.

“ANYTHING NEW LATEST TULSA SHOOTING? EUROPEAN
CABLES PRESSING.”

Newspapers in Australia, England, Germany, and
France were reporting on the case, some of them emphasizing the more
titillating aspects to their readers, as well as getting many of the simplest
facts wrong or inventing new ones. One Australian newspaper, which came to the story
late, titled their article, “Sinister Orgy.” But this was not just any kind of
orgy Tulsa youth were involved in, the paper reported, but a “Bacchanalian Orgy.”

In Flemington, New Jersey, Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s
trial got underway on January 3, 1935, and would last until February 13.
Newspapers across the country, including the
World
and the
Tribune
,
devoted hundreds of column inches each day to the story, with trial coverage
that quoted participants, comparable to an official trial transcript. Very
little was left out, and readers soaked it up. Everywhere but Tulsa, the Phil
Kennamer story was pushed into the background. If his was Tulsa’s “most
sensational case in more than a decade,” then the Hauptmann trial was being
deemed America’s “Trial of the Century.”

The gossip and rumors never went away, and the
murder was still a topic of conversation in homes and barber shops, in taxicabs
and rotary club meetings. Although the story had lost its initial fervor, everyone
had an opinion and freely expressed it when asked. The secondary narrative of
wild, out-of-control, rich kids was slowly melting away locally but continued
to be played up nationally by the likes of International News Service and King
Features, which published sensational stories that hinted at unmentionable
goings-on, with a
wink-wink
from writers crafting a story that met with modesty
standards for 1935.

All of the social events and hanging out after
movies for members of the Hy-Hat Club and their contemporaries came to a
crashing halt after Born committed suicide. An Associated Press article dated January
16 summed up the situation best.

Tulsa—In casual meetings and through the sittings of social
and other clubs, hundreds of questions fly to and fro, causing dissension and
enmity in some but testifying to the nervousness that remains, particularly in
the wealthy south side, where the principals and most of the witnesses live.

Out at Eighteenth Street and Boston Avenue, known as the “Jelly
Bean Center” for years, the youths no longer gather in the evenings. The Quaker
Drug Store closes early. Uniformed waitresses no longer answer yodeling horns
on the automobiles of sons and daughters of the wealthy, parked at the curb
before, after and between movie performances and dances. Tulsa’s sons and
daughters are staying pretty close to home.

Next door at the Owl Tavern, the lights stay on fairly late, but
the customers are few and they do not linger around the beer bar and the cigar
counter as of old. And a block away, the Sunset Café feeds a few customers, and
then is barred for the night.

Those places swarmed with youngsters two months ago.

It was a similar story when the new sheriff, Garland
Marrs, grabbed some deputies and raided all the nightclubs on “Roadhouse Row.”
Before taking office, he had publicly announced that he was giving all
roadhouse operators a “fair chance to get within the law before arrests were
made.” They took his advice. The gambling tables were put in storage, the
liquor hidden, and the dancing girls, some of them advertised as wearing only
cellophane, were sent home.

The moral
crusade had been a success.

It was true that most of Tulsa’s young society set
were keeping a low profile. Their parents were anxious to keep the family name
out of what they saw as a corrosive scandal. To support his defense strategy
that Kennamer was insane, Moss wanted to gather up all the wacky stories on the
boy that he could. To do this, he had to talk to all the young people that knew
him.

“There must be anywhere from thirty to fifty in
the younger set who can testify about Kennamer’s actions, some of the crazy
things that fellow did, but they won’t come in. They say, ‘See my attorney,’”
Moss told the Associated Press. “And some of those lawyers won’t let them talk
to me. They don’t want their names mixed up in a murder case.”

This blockade led Moss to hint that he was not
prepared for trial, and he might be forced to request a postponement. His
tactic to reach them had been simple; he hired key witness Robert Thomas as his
ambassador to persuade his contemporaries to come in. “I wanted Robert to bring
in the young folks to help build up the defense case,” Moss said. Even though
he was paid four dollars a day, Thomas wasn’t very successful in finding anyone
who wanted to come to Kennamer’s defense. Whether they liked him or hated him, Phil
was poison.

Although Moss couldn’t gather as much anecdotal
evidence as he sought, he did get what he wanted from two psychiatrists. During
that second week of January, they sat down with Kennamer and interviewed him
over several sessions. Doctor Karl Menninger was able to make it in and out of
town with hardly anyone knowing he’d been there. But his opinion of Kennamer
found its way into newspapers, where he was quoted as saying that Kennamer was
“legally insane.” However, “legally insane” wasn’t necessarily a medical
diagnosis. The terminology Dr. Menninger would use to describe Kennamer’s
mental affliction would have to wait until the trial.

But Oklahoma City psychiatrist and Kennamer family
friend, Dr. Eugen Werner, was not shy about expressing his medical opinion. Judge
Kennamer personally requested he examine his son. After several interviews with
Phil that took place that same week, Dr. Werner shed some light on the thinking
process of John Gorrell Jr’s killer.

“He thinks he is right and everyone else is wrong
and has it in for him. . . . Under the definition that a man is
demented unless he knows right from wrong, Phil is legally insane. He thinks he
is right and everyone else is wrong,” Werner told reporters.

Something seemed to have changed in the
prosecution’s attitude immediately after the defense psychiatrists’ opinions
were published. When County Attorney Holly Anderson read the AP story, he scoffed
and grunted. “A very interesting hypothesis,” he said of Dr. Werner’s judgment.
“We will show that there is no legal or medical basis for such a finding.”

He might have been feeling outgunned. Moss was a gifted
attorney with more than thirty years of experience. He knew all the tricks of
both the prosecution and defense, having worked both sides. He was a powerful
presence in the local legal community and had successfully defended several
high-profile murder defendants. In a 1979 interview, former court reporter Sadie
Gelfand described him as a gentleman who walked tall and proud. During a
difficult part of any case he was involved in, he had a peculiar habit he
employed to irritate his adversaries.

“He had some coins in his pocket and [would]
jiggle them,” Gelfand recalled. “He’d sit at the counsel table and play with
the coins. That was a trademark of his. I guess he did it more to confuse than
anything else.”

In a one-on-one contest in the courtroom, Anderson
was no match for Moss. Anderson was a politician, not a trial lawyer. After
serving as mayor of nearby Sand Springs for six years, he ran for and was
elected county attorney, always a two-year term in Oklahoma during those days.
He had just begun his second term that January. During his first term, he
reportedly left the bulk of all trial cases to his assistants, who had far more
criminal courtroom experience than he did.

But it was never going to come down to just those
two men. Each side had assembled their own dream team of courtroom brawlers.
Anderson’s chief assistant was old veteran Tom Wallace, an attorney with thirty
years of experience, seventeen of them in the CA’s office. By his estimate, he had
tried more than one hundred murder cases, more than any other lawyer for either
side. He’d gone up against Moss in a murder trial before and beat him. Wallace
had secured one of the few death sentences in Tulsa courts up to that time when
he sent James Hargus to the chair for killing a city detective, and he’d also
sent Arthur “Doc” Barker to prison for life for killing a hospital security
guard in 1922, only to see him paroled ten years later.

Anderson was undoubtedly grateful to have former state
Attorney General J. Berry King on board. Although he was a lawyer turned
politician, and the state’s top prosecutor for five years, he was a force to be
reckoned with as special prosecutor.

However, even with Wallace and King, the
prosecution was still outmatched. Assisting Moss, with an even bigger legal
reputation than his, or King’s, or Wallace’s, was Charles Stuart, with fifty-six
years of practicing law. From 1893 to 1895, Stuart served as a federal judge
for Indian Territory.

But the defense team didn’t stop there. It also
included Judge Kennamer’s old law partner, Charles Coakley, who had four
decades of legal experience, and Herman Young, with nearly twenty years of
experience working both sides of the courtroom.

Anderson was likely cognizant of the fact that the
integrity of courtroom justice in his time was questionable. Juries were
different too, often taking a direct middle road, judging fairly but also sometimes
leaning toward the defendant in many instances, depending on the crime. They
often viewed them as misguided men who had stumbled accidentally into crime and
were worthy of forgiveness and a second chance. And when it came to female
defendants, acquittals were notoriously common, even when there was no
reasonable doubt. If they were convicted, their sentences were exceptionally
light.

It was also the era of long sentences by stern
judges and early releases enabled by parole brokers who negotiated paroles,
pardons, and clemency under often-corrupt circumstances. By December 28, a few
weeks before he left office, Governor William Murray’s clemency count was more
than 2,400 criminals, which included 372 murderers, 324 robbers, and 813 liquor
violators.
[27]
The
Tulsa World
, a Republican-leaning newspaper at the time, was keeping
track.

Aware of all this, and possibly intimidated by the
defense team and the boy’s father, Anderson launched a misguided attack against
Moss with a public accusation of witness tampering. After a conference with
King, Anderson told newspaper reporters in mid-January that “efforts had been
made to tamper with Floyd Huff.” In addition to this claim, Anderson said he
had proof that “approaches” had been made to two other state witnesses.

With pumped-up outrage and ambiguity, Anderson
claimed, “We are not, at this time, going to make full public disclosure of
these ‘tampering’ movements. We are not mistaken and neither is Huff. We are
positive that overtures have been made to Huff, who promptly refused to have
anything do with this lawyer.”

In his next statement, Anderson contradicted
himself within two sentences. “We have not yet learned the reactions of these
other two witnesses. We are not indulging in any guesswork and won’t stand for
any more nonsense of this sort. If this doesn’t stop immediately, someone is
going to be arrested and prosecuted.”

Like Maddux, King, and Hoop before him, Anderson
had thrown gasoline on the fire of public perception of the defense. New
excitement was injected into the local gossip.

As inflammatory as it was, there were problems
with his statement. The incident with Huff took place before the preliminary
hearing and was no incident at all. Two unidentified attorneys from Tulsa,
working for the defense, traveled to Kansas City to interview Huff about his
time with Kennamer. A Kansas City paper falsely reported that Huff claimed the
two men asked him to change his testimony. When Anderson questioned him about
it after the preliminary hearing, Huff said it wasn’t true, and that the men
talked with him about his upcoming testimony, but had not asked him to change
it. The conversation was short. “Huff says he did not talk with them long
enough to give them any information,” Anderson said after the December 17 hearing
to reporters.

Fast-forward one month, and Anderson used that
incident as the basis for his witness-tampering allegation. He also refused to
name the other two individuals, and oddly claimed that although there was no guesswork
about it, he didn’t know the reactions of these two other witnesses to the
alleged tampering.

Naturally, reporters ran to Moss to get his
reaction, and he immediately backed Anderson into a corner with a challenge to
prosecute.

“I don’t want any mystery in this case,” Moss declared.
“If anyone has approached Huff [to change his testimony] that person was guilty
of a crime and I challenge Anderson to arrest him and prosecute him.”

He then dared Anderson to name the other two
witnesses. The following day, Anderson’s published reply to Moss was to name
Sgt. Maddux and Robert Thomas, and he repeated his threat to prosecute.

“So that’s it?” Moss replied when he heard about
it. “Mr. Anderson’s conduct in this case is wretched and contemptible.” The
purported bribe-offer claim by Sgt. Maddux, and the violence he alluded to, was
a pot that hadn’t yet boiled over. Naming Robert Thomas as the other witness was
just an outright lie, Moss declared. He wasn’t “tampering” with Robert Thomas,
he had hired the young man to act as a liaison between the defense team and
Phil’s friends who didn’t want to get involved.

“Two days before I hired Thomas I went to Anderson
and told him I wanted to employ the boy to talk to young witnesses and bring
them to my office,” Moss told reporters in his law office. “I suggested to
Anderson that we have him make a sworn statement with each side retaining a
copy.