Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (26 page)

And where the others were anxious to fill the air
with words, Rowe gambled on silence. In order to illustrate Dr. Knoblock’s
testimony that Kennamer fired the second shot at least one minute after the
first one, Rowe held up his watch and stood in silence for sixty seconds.

“The jurors gazed fixedly on the watch,” Biscup
wrote. “The lawyer dropped his arm and shouted, ‘Does that look like
self-defense?’”

Rowe also had the foresight to defend John
Gorrell’s reputation and to call into question Kennamer’s contention that
his
victim was a criminal at heart. “It is my deduction that Gorrell would not go
on down the line in this career of crime. It is hardly true that a young man
who is willing to spend three nights a week working, in order that he may
educate himself and fit himself for the future, is likely to turn criminal on a
moment’s notice.”

Thursday, February 21, 1935

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, CHARLES STUART argued that
is exactly what John Gorrell was: a cold-blooded criminal. Repeating much of
what Moss had already said, Stuart again and again drove home the few good
arguments the defense had. And just like Moss, he didn’t want to speak ill of
the dead, but of course, “my judgment and my duty compel me,” Stuart said, before
launching into his attack on Gorrell’s character.

“Burgess and Cochrane told Kennamer that this man
was preparing a scheme to kidnap his girl. What did Kennamer do? He made up his
mind to go to Kansas City,” Stuart said.

“What for? To get the very evidence which he says
he did get so he could stop him. What Gorrell wanted was the easy money—he
didn’t care one iota about the girl. He wrote the letter,” Stuart insisted as
he waved the letter in their faces. “Gentlemen of the jury, here is the letter.
It is a pity that a young man of that age, that Gorrell, having all the surroundings
of a Christian home—blessed with education—blessed with all the good things of
the earth—SHOULD WRITE THAT LETTER!

“IT—is one of the most cold-blooded—exact—brief—severe
letters of extortion—that I have ever read.”

In Stuart’s determination, Phil Kennamer showed
“inexhaustible patience, inexhaustible forbearance,” by thwarting Gorrell’s
devious plot. Then, he took the heroism of Phil Kennamer to a level even Phil
Kennamer had never imagined.

“They have chased this boy to the sacred temple of
justice and you must see to it that no prejudiced testimony shall enter this
case by the poison-spewing of his enemies,” Stuart declared as he paused and
turned toward the prosecution. “I love a brave man and I hate a coward. I
believe that you are brave men, and like brave and true men you will tell this
court that this boy is not guilty.”

After Stuart took his seat at 10:45 that morning,
there was only one attorney left for the jury to endure. As everyone in the
courtroom cast their gaze toward Holly Anderson, the defense was visibly surprised
when his protégé William Gilmer stood up. They had been led to believe Anderson
would do the closing, and they had even invoked his name into their own arguments.

This was Gilmer’s big opportunity. His performance
during the trial had been acclaimed in the newspapers, and he had matched wits
with Moss well enough that it impressed everyone, including Moss. But it was
more than that. When the young lawyer stood up and began his address to the
jury, with a nervous voice that wavered a bit before he found his confidence,
it was a symbolic gesture that the torch had been passed from Anderson. In the
next election, Gilmer would be named the new county attorney.

Walter Biscup took note that it was a strong
contrast between the final two speakers. “. . . one by a veteran
defense attorney who is seventy-eight years old and has practiced law fifty-six
years, the other by a thirty-three-year-old prosecutor with ten years’
experience.”

True to his nature, true to his youthful energy,
Gilmer unleashed his wrath on Kennamer and did what no one else had done up to
that time: he pounded the boy into dust. Gilmer’s forty-five-minute summation
“was the most vitriolic presented by an attorney in this lawsuit, it was
agreed,” Biscup wrote.

Harmon Phillips saw that fire in the young
attorney as well. “Gilmer proved the sparkplug of the arguments, pacing back
and forth and nervously wiping his hand with his kerchief. His voice rose to a
shout repeatedly as he literally pounded home his point on the jury-box rail.”

The young prosecutor didn’t waste time with a
preamble. He didn’t wax philosophical on the role of the legal system in general,
or juries in particular. And he did not unwittingly bore those twelve tired men
for the selfish pleasure of hearing the sound of his own voice. With notes in
hand, he rapid-fired his points, which always hit their target.

“I’m handicapped in this,” he began with a nod
toward his much older counterpart. “I won’t attempt to match the wisdom of
Judge Stuart. That would be ridiculous for me to even try. I can’t answer his
argument because I saw nothing of an argument in his case.”

Stuart grinned when he heard this. In spite of the
boy’s jab at him, mutual respect had developed between them during the trial.

“I want you to believe me when I say the state has
tried to be fair in this case. I want to be fair to Phil Kennamer and his
father,” Gilmer continued. “But I want to be fair to the parents of that dead
boy too!

“When Phil Kennamer at the age of five was talking
about a hangman’s noose, John Gorrell was in kindergarten.

“When Phil Kennamer was running away from school,
John Gorrell was going right ahead.

“The only thing Phil Kennamer ever finished in his
life was the murder.

 “I ask you to deliberate in your own cool, sober
way, and you go back and see whether the arrogant, supercilious, pampered son
of a federal judge has a right to put himself in the place of the law, court,
and jury on that Thanksgiving night and pass judgment on John Gorrell—convict
John Gorrell—and to put himself in the place of almighty God and say to him, ‘you
must die.’

“He hasn’t the right to do that and you know it!”
Gilmer boomed.

A few minutes later, the young prosecutor circled
back to the same theme. “You have the picture of a good, industrious boy and
that of a pampered wastrel. KILLER—KIDNAPPER—KENNAMER—there he sits!” he said,
with his finger pointing at Phil Kennamer. “You know it and I know it, and I
think Flint Moss and C. B. Stuart know it too.”

As Gilmer neared the end of his summation, one of
the shortest of all, he walked back to the prosecution table, picked up the
enlarged death photographs and returned to hand them to the jury foreman.

“When you start figuring out this self-defense
plea, look at these photographs. I want you to remember these photographs of
John Gorrell when you go to your jury room.

“Who was the probable aggressor of the argument in
the car that night? Phil Kennamer.

“Who on Thanksgiving night called the Gorrell home
three or four times during the day? Phil Kennamer.

“Who sought him out? Phil Kennamer.

“Who started talking of killings and kidnappings?
Phil Kennamer. That’s the first word of testimony you heard, that Kennamer was
going to kill. He told Cadillac Booth of easy money and kidnappings. He shows
all the way through he has criminal tendencies and was abnormal.

“He started the whole thing. We all know he did.
At every stage Kennamer was in it.

“The defense says they got out there and stopped
[while the two were in Gorrell’s car]. The scuffle starts and he was pushing
him in the face,” Gilmer said as he demonstrated on Anderson in front of the
jury box. It was a demonstration planned well in advance. “[If Kennamer] was
pushing him in the face, why wasn’t the blood smeared?”

Why wasn’t the blood smeared? Uh-oh.

It was the single best point raised over nearly eight
hours of closing statements. If the struggle for the gun truly happened the way
Phil Kennamer said it did, and the bullet missed his left hand, which was
pushing on John Gorrell’s face, why wasn’t the blood smeared as a result of his
hand being there? With his hand there, the blood from John’s wound would have
been obstructed and followed a different course.
It was a great point
but one that came too late. When Kennamer was on the stand, King could have
nailed him on these issues with a reenactment. How did two bullets miss his
hand or wrist? Why didn’t he have muzzle-flash burns on his hand? Why wasn’t
the blood smeared?

As he neared the end of his fiery debate, Gilmer
asked for something that surprised everyone—and most of all, Phil Kennamer.

“Now let me tell you this—as surely as you send
that boy to the penitentiary, the reaction on the part of the father, and I
wouldn’t blame him, the natural thing for him to do then is for that father to
try and get him of that penitentiary and start to get him out the first day he
goes in.

“We are going to ask you for the extreme penalty,
gentleman,” Gilmer said with pause. “We are going to ask you to send this boy
to the electric chair with the same calmness and coolness in your judgment that
he showed John Gorrell on that Thanksgiving night. Send him down there and rub
him out the way he did that poor boy in his car. Give him the extreme penalty.
That is what we ask you to do.”

JURY DELIBERATIONS LASTED ABOUT as long as the
closing arguments. When Gilmer finished five minutes before noon, the jury took
a forty-five-minute lunch before deliberating. On the fourth floor of the
courthouse, they were locked into one of four rooms, where they debated Phil
Kennamer’s guilt for five hours. At 5:30 p.m., they were allowed to leave for
dinner at a secluded location and then took a long walk to clear their minds in
the cold February air.

With the jury in seclusion, Kennamer was taken
back to his cell. Judge Hurst retired to his farm to inspect his pecan trees.
Surprisingly, nearly all of the defense team left Pawnee, and only John
McCollum remained. Holly Anderson lounged in the tiny press room and chatted
with reporters nearly the entire time. All the other prosecutors disappeared except
Dixie Gilmer, who went back to the hotel to rest.

With nothing to do but wait, those who had to be
there found ways to occupy their time, and in doing so, discounted the dignity
of the courtroom. It was as if they were all schoolchildren again, but the
teachers were gone and they were locked in the schoolhouse. Inside Judge
Hurst’s chambers, four reporters cleared off his desk and began playing cards. Another
reporter fell asleep on a gallery bench. As a gag, his colleagues woke him up
by setting off a camera flash in his face. One reporter’s wife, who accompanied
him to watch the nationally followed trial, sat at the judge’s bench and toyed
with his gavel. When five hundred spectators cleared out, they left behind a
jumble of newspapers, paper cups, pop bottles, bottle caps, peanut shells, and
lunch sacks. The smoking rule, strictly enforced for ten days, was ignored. The
trial was over, after all. Cigarette stubs started appearing here and there for
the first time, and the smell of tobacco smoke permeated the courtroom.

Judge Kennamer paced the corridor for nearly an
hour before settling down to chat with some friends of his as he puffed on a
cigar.

Doctor Gorrell also paced and puffed on a cigar for thirty
minutes, and then retired to the Graham Hotel, where eighty-five days’ worth of
pain and sorrow fought their way out of his chest cavity to a nervous breakdown.
Several hours later, John and Alice sat together and wrote out a statement to
the press on hotel stationery.

Mrs. Gorrell and I should now like to be relieved of the
pitiless publicity that has of necessity pursued us since the tragedy that
deprived us of our boy.

We have done what we could to co-operate with the proper
authorities in the presentation of the case to the courts.

We find no fault with the trial in its several stages and
shall accept the verdict of the court and jury as parents should who have no
other refuge in periods of grief as great as ours has been. Our only emotion
toward Judge and Mrs. Kennamer is one of the deepest sympathy.

Whatever the result, we trust no Tulsa father or mother shall
ever be called upon to sustain the sacrifice we have made.

Perhaps the result may bring an awakening. John would want us
to be brave under such circumstances. We shall strive to be so in memory of
him.

For our sake, please let the press and public conclude that
with the final expression of the courts, the tragedy shall remain sealed within
our hearts.

 John and Alice Gorrell meant every word of what
they wrote. According to their grandson, John Robert, they never spoke of the
case publicly, and barely mentioned it within the family. If they spoke of John
Jr., it was to recall more pleasant memories and his achievements, not his
death.

At 8:55 p.m., the jury foreman rapped on the door
to let the bailiff know they had reached a verdict. Fifteen minutes later, the
pale-faced prisoner was brought in, and he sat between his father and John
McCollum, the only defense attorney present. When Dixie Gilmer walked in with
Anderson, Kennamer’s hate-filled glare followed the young prosecutor all the
way to his chair. His “rub him out” with the electric-chair comment had rubbed
Phil the wrong way. His scowl was so intense Biscup declared it was Phil’s
strongest show of emotion during the entire trial.

 Surprisingly, the courtroom filled up with
spectators who only had twenty minutes to get there from the time Judge Hurst
was notified to when he was handed the verdict. The Gorrells were among them
and soon, it would all be over with.

The verdict, with Kennamer’s fate written on it,
was passed to Judge Hurst, who read it before handing it to Court Clerk Nora
Harshbarger:
“. . . We find the defendant guilty of manslaughter in the
first degree and being unable to agree upon the punishment leave the penalty to
be assessed by the court.”