Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (19 page)

Map of Oklahoma showing Tulsa in relation to Pawnee and
Chelsea.

It was a riot in miniature. They
stampeded through the corridors, surged up the stairways four abreast, women
and men alike. On the top floor all broke into a run for the last few yards of
the race and those in the lead flung themselves elated into the seats of their
choice.

Men and women shoved and elbowed
alike. Women were knocked down on the stairs, clothes were disarranged,
belongings were lost and forgotten in the scramble. There were shouts, laughter,
squeals and some curses.

— Tulsa Daily
World

Dramatis
Personae

Monday & Tuesday, February
11 & 12, 1935

THE CHANGE OF VENUE HEARING
was a pregnancy that gave birth to more lawyers. In a rural county where
neighbors relied on each other, and the reputation of a man followed him
wherever he went, neither side wanted to take the chance of seating a plant on
the jury. Well-known Pawnee attorneys John McCollum and Paul Pinson were
brought in to guide the defense team through the selection process. The
prosecution picked up Pawnee Assistant County Attorney Prentiss Rowe, and
former county attorney Lee Johnson—a cool-headed tactician who would later prove
himself invaluable to the entire coterie of thirteen counselors. County
Attorney Carl McGee was also allied to the prosecution, but in name only. When
the hoopla evaporated and the crowd of celebrity reporters, photographers, newsreel
cameramen, aspiring authors, gossip magazine editors, criminologists,
psychiatrists, state political bosses, Hy-Hat Club members, and one wacky
witness left town, Pawnee would have its own lawbreakers to prosecute.

The owner of Pawnee’s Katz Department Store found
this unprecedented amount of local traffic to be the perfect time to throw a
going out-of-business sale. And what better way to promote his low-low prices
than to co-opt the very theme that had brought so much traffic to their little
city? During that first day of jury selection, visitors were kept away from the
courthouse to make room in the gallery for the pool of seventy veniremen eligible
to serve. An afternoon recess brought a much-needed respite to the tedious
process, and as the defense team stretched their legs in the third-floor
corridor, Paul Pinson casually looked over his town through a window and to his
horror discovered that the department store had erected a twenty-five-foot-wide
banner that read:

YOU ARE GUILTY

Back in the courtroom, whispered outrage flowing through the
defense team led to a conference with Judge Hurst, who then ordered Carl McGee
and Sheriff Burkdoll to have the sign taken down. As it turned out, the twenty-five-foot
banner was only half of it. The other twenty-five-foot section,

if You Don’t Attend Katz Department Store Quit Business
Sale!

was yet to be lifted into position. Bored photographers,
anxious to send anything out of the ordinary back to their newspapers, pounced on
this satirical opportunity. Thirty minutes after it first appeared, an
apologetic store manager had it removed. The crackerjack sales promoter brought
in from Oklahoma City who’d conceived the idea was criticized by both officials
and citizens alike, and he quickly left town. Judge Hurst also ordered that no
photographs of the sign be published in any newspaper.

The trial’s first disaster was averted. There
would be more.

The Pawnee attorneys working for both teams
shortcut the selection process, and by Tuesday afternoon, fifty-one potential
jurors were boiled down to twelve men who attested to their own impartiality.
As predicted, the state qualified their choices on the death penalty, the
defendant’s youth, and whether it mattered to them that his father was a
federal judge. The defense sought jurors who were open-minded to self-defense
and insanity claims. By the end, both sides claimed to reporters that they were
content with the outcome.

Those twelve stone-faced men became instant celebrities.
A group photo and a short profile on each were published in newspapers
throughout Oklahoma. Those who worked in the elements had the characteristic “hat
tan” which gave them sun-darkened faces below their brows, while above, their
white foreheads emphasized receding hairlines. They would spend the remainder
of the trial sequestered together in a house rented just for the occasion.
Deputies were tasked to watch over them and keep the outside world out. Radios
were off-limits, newspapers were censored by cutting out trial coverage
articles, and even their meals were delivered.

With an hour and a half left to go that Tuesday
afternoon, veteran prosecutor Tom Wallace presented the state’s opening
remarks. A short man with thinning hair, Wallace looked as if he would be more
at home as a bookkeeper with an insurance firm. The only color on his pasty-white
face was from the round, thin-framed glasses he wore. But this was the man who had
put Doc Barker away. This was the man who had once beaten the most intimidating
lawyer in the courtroom, Flint Moss. This docile-looking man had one hundred murder
trials under his belt—far more than anyone else.

With little room inside the crowded railing to
maneuver, Wallace stood up from his chair, holding a stack of well-worn papers
in his hand. “Your Honor, and gentlemen of the jury,” he began in a commanding
voice that surprised many, “I will read to you this information and make a
statement as to what the evidence will be on behalf of the State.”

With the jury seated, the gallery was opened to
the public, and the long benches were half-filled with spectators who had
waited patiently for the moment they could storm the courthouse. Their
excitement at the promise of what was to come was reflected in the whispered
voices and shuffling about as they settled in. But when Wallace began to speak,
the quiet roar suddenly stopped as they strained to consume every provocative
word.

“Now, the evidence will show on behalf of the State
that on the 29
^th
of November, 1934,” Wallace said as he turned to
look at Kennamer and point his finger, “the defendant, Phil Kennamer, SHOT AND
KILLED JOHN GORRELL!”

His rise in volume seemed to wake the sleepy
defendant.

Wallace then recounted the entire story, from
beginning to end, of all the major events in the case. He gave biographical
sketches of the important players in a drama in which he claimed Kennamer not
only planned Gorrell’s murder in advance, but was the architect of the entire
kidnapping and extortion plot. He praised John’s character and pointed out that
he had graduated from the Missouri Military Academy in Mexico, Missouri—a subtle
jab at Phil, who never completed secondary school at all and had run away from
a military academy in New Mexico. John had then taken classes at both the
University of Tulsa and Oklahoma A&M before enrolling at Spartan Air
Academy to fulfill a childhood dream of learning how to fly. He succeeded there
as well and proudly earned his government-issued pilot’s license in the spring of
’34. Within two weeks of meeting Phil Kennamer, he began dental school in
Kansas City on September 15. The industrious twenty-one-year-old worked three
nights a week as a telephone operator in the hotel, where he shared a room with
two other Oklahoma boys.

His read-between-the-lines message was simple: John
Gorrell was on the road to success. He was disciplined, ambitious, and able to
finish what he started—a good boy who was doing all the right things to become
a valuable member of society. And if they didn’t know it then, the jury would
soon learn: Phil Kennamer was none of those things.

Wallace spoke of the meeting Kennamer had had with
Gorrell and Ted Bath, and of the armed robbery Kennamer had proposed, of first
targeting Barbara Boyle, and then switching to a plan to get compromising photos
of the woman he professed to love, Virginia Wilcox. He told them of how Jack
Snedden had driven Kennamer to the airport and of the events that happened in
Kansas City as related by Dick Oliver and others. Wallace gave special
attention to the car ride with Huff, and to the intricate murder plot Kennamer
had planned for the dental student.

The events he spoke of, and what was said and who
said it, were all familiar to Tulsans, but were most likely new to the minds of
the jurors of Pawnee, who had not followed the case so closely. But it was what
Wallace spoke of next that was news to everyone in the courtroom.

“A few days before Kennamer went to Kansas City,
he and another boy went to Mrs. Edna Harman and asked her if she had an
apartment to rent.”

When Charles Stuart heard Mrs. Harman’s name, he
perked up and shared a knowing smile with Moss. This ticking time bomb of a
woman may have been a prosecution witness, but she was their secret weapon who
would explode in Anderson’s face after Moss cross-examined her. Edna Harman and
her husband managed an apartment building, and the story she told Anderson allegedly
took place there a few days before Kennamer flew to Kansas City. However, she had
waited two months to tell prosecutors her story. They heard it for the first
time just a few days before the trial began.

“She said, ‘I only have this small one, and maybe
that wouldn’t suit you. Over here are some nicer apartments.’

“Kennamer, doing all the talking, said ‘No, this [one]
suits us, we will take this one.’

“After they went out she got to thinking about the
good-looking fellows wanting an apartment, and wondering about their business.
So she goes around the house on the south side. She saw Kennamer sitting at a
desk or table with a pencil and tablet, and Kennamer says to the boy who was
there in the apartment with him, he says: ‘That fellow has got yellow. He has
backed out. I am going to Kansas City and I am going to put the skids under
him.’”

In the buildup before the trial, reporters pressed
Kennamer for news about this mysterious new witness who had recently come
forward. “You can say this for me about Mrs. Harman, I never heard of her,” he
told them.

When they told Anderson what Kennamer had said,
the county attorney snapped back that he didn’t care what anyone thought of
Mrs. Harman’s testimony because he was mighty impressed with it. “Her testimony
is the most important yet uncovered,” he proclaimed.

Wallace returned to his speech by showing graphic
photographs of the two bullet wounds to Gorrell’s head, taking great care to
give a vivid explanation of how the second bullet was fired a minute or more
after the first shot. The jury, one reporter noted, “was visibly impressed.”

“The first bullet wound, the blood ran straight
down this way, filled his ear, ran down the back of his neck and collar,”
Wallace explained. Pointing to where the second bullet had struck, Wallace
detailed the path the blood from that wound traveled, crossing over the blood
streak from the first wound.

For Mrs. Gorrell, this was too much, and she escaped
to the corridor where a water fountain would cool her cotton mouth.

“You can see from this photograph where the blood
flowed from. Not only that, the body of John Gorrell showed bruised spots as
though hurt with a blunt something-or-other. The bump raised up right here
where he had been struck,” Wallace declared as he pointed to the spot on the
enlarged photograph the coroner had taken at the funeral home.

On top of all that, the victim’s clothes were
smooth, his hair unruffled, his foot was still on the gas, and the ignition was
still on; Gorrell had been shot
while
he was driving, Wallace explained.

“When we have shown this,” Wallace said to the jury
as he brought his statement to a close, “we shall expect a verdict of guilty at
your hands with the extreme penalty.”

The state of Oklahoma wanted to see Phil Kennamer
dead.

Wednesday, February 13, 1935

OVERNIGHT, A HEAVY RAIN PASSED through Pawnee that
soaked into the red soil Oklahoma is known for, creating jagged ruts and
furrows in the dirt roads leading to the small community. Automobiles carrying
travelers into town with business that morning brought the clay-heavy earth
with them, their slender tires pounding and flipping it out in all directions
as they circled the square looking for a place to park.

Inside the medieval-looking jail a few hundred
yards to the northwest of the courthouse, Kennamer was laughing and joking with
the eleven other inmates as they ate their oatmeal and toast. They washed their
food down with coffee and smoked cigarettes Kennamer had purchased for all of
them after a Kangaroo Court was convened by the other prisoners to fine the new
occupant three dollars on his very first day. It was his initiation, and he
took it well—better than his first impression of his new quarters, when his jaw
dropped and sagged there for several moments as he scrutinized the tiny cell with
its flat-iron door and steel-frame bed.

But Phil quickly adapted, and his gregarious
personality won him friends among the other prisoners. Bitter over the treatment
he’d received in Tulsa, where newspapers bashed him as the perennial problem
child, and Sheriff Price set him up to be double-crossed by Lee Krupnick, he
was anxious to sing the praises of the Pawnee Jail to anyone who’d listen.

“He seems to be a pretty nice fellow,” said pack leader
Everett Hargraves, who was serving a ninety-day sentence on a liquor violation.
“The boys seem to like him and he said right out that he likes it here a lot
better than he liked staying in the Tulsa County Jail.”

Kennamer also welcomed the new reporters from
Oklahoma City, Kansas City, New York City, and Chicago, who were now swarming
around him. When the press wasn’t out to get him, as the Tulsa reporters had been,
he turned up the charm and loved to talk about himself and all the flaws in the
case against him.

“I have nothing to worry about,” Kennamer boasted.
His confidence was based on one reason—he was going to tell his story on the
stand. This was news to Tulsa writers who were under the impression Moss would
not let him testify. But whispered remarks from other members of the defense
team that weekend indicated their client
would
tell his story. The only
evidence they had to support their self-defense claim was what Phil said. If
they wanted to sell the jury on self-defense, Kennamer would have to tell them
about it.

And true to his ego, the nineteen-year-old was
“confident he has an excellent chance to be acquitted and that his own story of
the student dentist’s death will improve his chances materially,” wrote a
World
reporter, who was mixed in with the out-of-town journalists. Kennamer discussed
the case freely with them and enjoyed the attention while reporters played to
his ego to get quotes for their stories.