Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (14 page)

Principal Eli Foster admitted he had heard stories
of wild conduct by high school students but dismissed them as nonsense. With
the exception of some peddlers being arrested near the high school that spring
of 1934, the rumor mill had painted another false picture.

 “I have run down any number of these stories, and
they are all just about as ridiculous as the one that was circulated to the
effect that anyone who wanted it could buy liquor on the third floor of the high
school building,” Principal Foster told the reporter. “And I want to say, with
some heat, that although I have heard any number of such stories I have yet to
find anyone who can offer one iota of proof of those that have been
circulated.”

At the University of Tulsa, a problem had existed
there until the crackdown came that spring on peddlers dealing to high school
students. After that, the dealers avoided the university, as well as any other
school.

Undaunted by his inability to find direct evidence
between dope peddlers and teenagers, the reporter ended his article with narcotics
squad Sgt. Francis McMillen’s theory that “marijuana only became a problem when
peddlers began to find a new market among young men.” Apparently, adults didn’t
have a problem with it; they weren’t the ones overcome with sexual excitement
and raging madness. Despite all the public interest with the Kennamer-Gorrell
case, and the far-out rumors in its orbit, it all came back to an
out-of-control youth and a writer who ended his story with an unproven
hypothesis: “Young men and boys, looking for a new expression for modern youth
hysteria—a new thrill—that, says the sergeant, is the big problem.”

The earlier campaign to drive marble machines away
from schools met with success when operators, sensing public opinion was
against them, voluntarily agreed to move them away. But the precursor to the
pinball machine wasn’t the only demon that needed to be exorcised. More were
named, and new battalions came forward to join the fight.

The county-wide Christian Endeavor League took
direct aim at what one headline called “Tulsa’s Lax Morals.” The group led a
meeting that began with a strong message: “We declare open warfare upon the
vicious narcotic ring closing in upon the youth and the red coterie of
bootleggers who are peddling hard liquor.”

The meeting, which included one hundred young
people in attendance, adopted the slogan, “Make Tulsa Youth Christian,” and
planned to print up and distribute ten thousand windshield stickers with the
new message. They, like the
World
’s article on marijuana, connected
their “war” with the Kennamer-Gorrell case. “We are alarmed at the lack of
moral and spiritual sensibilities among the youth of our generation, as
revealed in general by the common, every day observations and in particular
by
recent developments
,” the group proclaimed in a new covenant.

Emboldened by their success at moving marble
machines away from schools, the PTA focused next on: “Salacious magazines,
gambling, marble machines (complete banning), firearms, and burlesque theaters
and taverns.”

Their fixation on firearms had about as much to do
with John Gorrell’s murder as it did with a campaign by the National PTA that
year “to take murder out of the nursery” by banning toy guns. “We must do away
with pernicious games of ‘cops and robbers,’” declared one officer of the
organization. To accomplish this, the group sought pledges from schoolchildren
to stop playing the make-believe game, and surrender their toy weapons
peacefully.

As amusing as that might seem, it had ironic
relevance for Tulsans in December of 1934, which saw a rash of headline-making
deaths after Born’s suicide, one of which was caused by children playing with
guns. Carl Pulliam, seventeen, was playing poker with sixteen-year-old Paul
Lumary and three other boys in a vacant building the young gang frequented,
when a quarrel erupted. Lumary started waving a pistol around. Claiming that he
“didn’t know the pistol was loaded,” Lumary said the gun “accidentally” fired a
bullet into Pulliam’s neck, mortally wounding him. Both he and Pulliam were on
parole for a burglary conviction, and two of the other three young teenage boys
were also parolees from juvenile court.

Other deaths, all coming within a few short days
of each other, unsettled Tulsans. These included a farmer who died in a fight,
the suicide of a prominent real estate man, the murder of a wealthy Claremore
café owner by a twenty-year-old ex-convict, and the mysterious murder of Robert
Sample, a forty-year-old, unemployed, department-store clerk, who was found
face-down in a pool of water in an abandoned coal mine a few miles west of
Tulsa. Rumors quickly tried to connect Sample’s death with the Kennamer case,
but this was sharply denied by authorities, who discovered Sample had just
recently moved to Tulsa from Texas to live with his sisters after losing his job.
His murder was never solved.

Motivated by all the recent deaths caused by guns,
Oscar Hoop proposed that city commissioners pass local gun registration laws,
and he also drafted an ordinance himself for mandatory licensing of bicycles. The
bicycle licenses, just like the gun registrations, would require fees, which seems
to be what Hoop was really after.

“If such a plan can be financed, I will put on
eight or ten additional men to stamp out both juvenile and adult crime,” Hoop
told city leaders. But few in local government were listening to him by that
time. He’d already lowered the salaries of many police officers when he divided
them into three tiers based on an intelligence test, and that had made him very
unpopular.

A month after he made the proposal to license guns
and bicycles, Hoop’s desire to prevent local dance halls from serving beer was
shot down when it was pointed out that beer licenses were governed by the
state. He then reversed his proposal and asked city leaders to reject applicants
who applied for dance hall permits while holding a state beer license. That idea
was also quickly dismissed, despite his public temper tantrum during the
meeting.

In spite of his failures, police were already cracking
down on illegal gambling joints, as well as establishments that sold beer to
minors. Densil West, proprietor of the Sunset Café in the heart of the Jelly
Bean Center, was arrested for that same reason. He was given a sixty-day jail
sentence and fined one hundred dollars for selling beer to kids under eighteen.
Other highly publicized raids by police and deputies showed the crackdown was
having the desired effect.

As eager as everyone was to wage war on perceived outlets
of evil influence, a few also recognized that banning something wasn’t always
the answer. On Thursday afternoon of December 20, a teen dance was held at
Central High School for the first time in fourteen years.

“It was the answer of the school authorities to
the beer halls, honky-tonks, and the places where students have learned to
spend leisure time among companions of questionable character,” the
Tribune
reported. By offering dances at the schools, parents and educators saw they
could control a social activity their children enjoyed. When the school board
banned them in 1920, it had never stopped young people from dancing; it only
forced them to hold their own dances somewhere else, which is exactly why the
Hy-Hat Club was formed in the first place.

The Central High dance was wildly popular. One hundred
fifty tickets were handed out for an estimated one thousand requests. Two days
later, a
Tribune
columnist applauded the “courageous step” with high praise,
and revealed the backward prejudices that had led to the logic behind banning
them in the first place.

“There has been, in this town, for a number of
years, a bigoted prejudice on the part of a small percentage of the population
against dancing in general,” the writer began. “They hold to the ancient idea,
inherited from the time of Pilgrims, that dancing is evil. The idea belongs to
the same era as the belief that it is a sin to kiss your wife on Sunday, or own
a deck of cards, or eat pasty-cake without first shaking it to get the devils
out of it.”

Other clubs and churches saw the wisdom behind this
new thinking and began sponsoring social events for young people and planning
dances of their own.

But the
Tribune
wasn’t the only newspaper
with an opinion. Across the country, newspaper editors observed what was occurring
in Tulsa, and the reviews were not good. The editors of the
World
read
these sanctimonious articles and editorials and saw what was happening. They
looked out over their city, and it began to dawn on them that things were
getting out hand. Rumor had replaced fact. Hysteria had replaced common sense.
The city was besieged by an overreaction of its own making.

During the latter half of December, the
World
published
several opinion pieces calling for a return to normalcy. The first of these
appeared the day of Kennamer’s preliminary hearing under the title, “Denouncing
Tulsa.”

“In consequence of the Kennamer-Gorrell-Born case,
we notice a rather prevalent newspaper disposition to include all Tulsa in
denunciations. . . . The indirect intimations are that Tulsa
society as a whole, and youth in particular, are corrupt.”

The editorial went on to point out that Tulsa kids
were probably no worse than the children anywhere else. “The ‘gilded youth’ idea
is naturally played up [by other newspapers] in this Tulsa upheaval. We would
call attention to the fact that bad conditions are likely to develop anywhere,
in any grade of society . . . it is to the credit of Tulsa youth
that its general moral and intellectual average is high.”

On December 28, the
World
published two more
opinion pieces that highlighted the public’s hysteria, and cautioned against
it. The first editorial, “Tulsa Youth,” revisited the ‘gilded youth’ idea and
called for a fair and balanced examination of the entire case.

“When all the facts are in, and the whole episode
is calmly analyzed, most of us will be surprised at the smallness of the number
of young people who actually have been contaminated or damaged by a few.”

The paper then went on to admit that despite its
own investigative report that attempted to connect widespread marijuana usage
among young people, most of them “know very little about these dope
cigarettes.”

On that same page, the
World
devoted a
separate editorial to “Rumors.” “In the last three weeks, Tulsa has developed the
rumor habit; it is a bad and disagreeable habit. The mortality list of Dame
Rumor has been very large and almost anyone can start a ‘sensation’ about
something.”

Tulsa citizens were asked to be more careful about
judging the rumors they heard, and not to pass them on or embellish them.
“There is a strange weakness in human nature, which makes the peddling of bad
news a delight to many people, and many are not any too particular how they get
their sensational fodder,” the editorial keenly pointed out.

But Phil Kennamer was the gift that that kept on
giving. His unrelenting desire to manipulate, communicate, and influence events
would once again backfire on him—just as it would for Sgt. Maddux. And as the
police would soon discover, their chief investigator had a dirty little secret
of his own.

A FEW DAYS AFTER KENNAMER surrendered,
Tulsa World
photographer Lee Krupnick took several photographs of him
that appeared in newspapers across the country. The wire services, as well as
the
World
, were clamoring for photos of the federal judge’s son charged
with first degree murder. Always friendly and personable, Krupnick chatted with
Kennamer not as a man in jail, but as a contemporary and fellow newsman since,
as a cub reporter for the
Daily Oklahoman,
Kennamer had gotten to know
World
reporter Pat Burgess and was an intimate friend of ex-reporter Preston Cochrane.

“I had never known Phil until then,” Krupnick later
said, “although I had photographed him. But we wanted some better pictures.
Phil asked me to bring the prints back and show them to him so he could pick
the ones he liked.”

After visiting with Kennamer a second time, the
two had another long and friendly discussion. At the end of their conversation,
Kennamer asked Krupnick if he would obtain for him a photograph of his friend,
Homer Wilcox Jr. This simple appeal by Kennamer was the genesis for a series of
events that would bring intrigue, coded messages, and secret meetings to the
case. For Kennamer, the request was a test of his capacity to enlist Krupnick
into his confidence, and if he would respond to his manipulation.

Krupnick was not one to take chances. After
agreeing to bring the photograph, he took the elevator to the first floor,
walked into Sheriff Charlie Price’s office, and told him what his star prisoner
requested. “They told me to go ahead, but to put a pin hole in the picture so
it would be identified in [the] event Kennamer might tamper with it,” Krupnick
continued.

When Krupnick returned with the photograph on December
17, he and Kennamer had another long chat. They talked about Sidney Born’s
death, and Kennamer confided to Krupnick the name of a Tulsa boy whom he
believed had murdered his friend and witness in the case. Krupnick, privy to the
police
investigators’ theories, and the coroner, who steadfastly
maintained it had been a suicide, asked Kennamer: why that boy? Why would he
murder Born?

“Phil was silent for a moment, [and] then he made
a jump at me and I was scared. But he only grabbed my pencil out of my pocket
and went to the corner of the room.

“‘You stay over there, Lee,’ he said. ‘Leave me
alone for a few minutes.’

“Pretty soon he came over and gave me a folded
piece of paper. ‘Give that to Cochrane,’ he said. ‘Tell him I said 3-2. Don’t
forget to tell him I said 3-2.’”

In the elevator, Krupnick unfolded the note and
saw it was a coded message:

FCQYHFHRHQGQQSDV

Once again, Krupnick found himself in the
sheriff’s office. There, deputies copied the message, and later that night
Krupnick deciphered it.

Can we
depend on Pat?

When Kennamer said “3-2,” he was giving away the key
to decode the message. The 3-2 system was a code developed by Cochrane
while he was a student in Vienna, Austria, in 1933. At the time, the Nazi
uprising in Germany had created tension there. Fearing their messages to each
other would be read by authorities, Preston and Phil used the numerical code to
communicate with each other. To decipher the first letter, the coded message’s
receiver would substitute the letter three places before it in the alphabet. To
decipher the second letter, one would count two spaces back. Then, the decipher
repeats again as three before the intended letter, and then two, and so on.

The “Pat” the message referred to was
Tulsa
World
newspaper reporter Pat Burgess, who had introduced Kennamer to John
Gorrell in late August. Cochrane also once worked with Burgess and Krupnick but
quit the
World
that October. Kennamer was insisting that Gorrell had made
the kidnapping proposal to Burgess and Cochrane
before
he had ever met
Gorrell. As part of his defense, Kennamer wanted them to testify that the
kidnapping plan was all Gorrell’s idea.

Realizing Kennamer may have created a trap for himself,
Sheriff Price took this information to Anderson, who then called for a secret
midnight meeting at the Mayo Hotel. With Anderson, Price, two deputies, and
Krupnick in attendance, a plot was hatched for the photographer to continue operating
as a secret courier for Kennamer and Cochrane in the hopes that it might reveal
valuable information that could be used at Kennamer’s trial. Anderson told
Krupnick that his participation in their scheme would “render the state a
valuable service by following Kennamer’s wishes in the matter.” Anderson then
informed J. Berry King, who approved of the operation, and the
World
backed their photographer, knowing they might get the best scoop of the entire
case.

Once again, Kennamer chose to forgo his lawyer’s
advice, and authorities dismissed his father’s request that only attorneys and
family could see his son. In spite of this, it was still Sheriff Price’s jail—the
same Sheriff Price that Judge Kennamer had locked up several years before
during Prohibition.

Preston Cochrane was the son of a corporate
attorney for one of the local oil companies. He was a handsome young man, with
high cheekbones, a strong jawline, and a full head of hair he parted on the left.
He wore fashionable glasses and dressed in expensive clothes that rested stylishly
on his slender frame. He enjoyed poetry and read many books, and although he
was extremely intelligent, his soft and agreeable manner was no match for the
domineering personality of Phil Kennamer. And with many of those same
characteristics, neither were Sidney Born or Homer Wilcox Jr., who was just
seventeen. Phil Kennamer had a unique way of selecting friends who were passive
and pliable. Applying these criteria, he seemed to believe Krupnick was the
same sort.

Together, Kennamer and Cochrane started an advertising
agency, but like many of Phil’s endeavors, he quickly grew tired of it, and
they later sold their accounts to another agency. Before Cochrane went to work
with the
Tulsa World
, the two traveled parts of the United States
together and stayed in hotels under aliases. Cochrane was known as “Douglas
Montgomery Blair,” while Kennamer traveled as “Richard Barnard.”

On December 20, Krupnick delivered the note to
Cochrane. At first, Cochrane wanted the photographer to deliver his message
orally, but Krupnick convinced him to put the message in writing “because Phil
will know your writing.”

Cautious, Cochrane replied to Kennamer:

BGVKVCITDKGJHYLNOIHVLPLVEUUPWJLU

This translated to: “Yes, is afraid he [Pat
Burgess] will get mixed in this. Burn this.”

Embracing his new secret-agent role, Krupnick was
a master manipulator himself and persuaded Cochrane, that very day, to write
another note to Kennamer, and to mark it with his signature.

“I’m for you, you know that,” Cochrane wrote in
code. “Would have been up to see you but Moss says not now. Law thinks I know
something and are [watching] me. (GJE).”

The initials
GJE
stood for
DMB
, or
Douglas
Montgomery Blair
, which Cochrane reluctantly added after he was persuaded
to do so by Krupnick. If the notes later made it into evidence at trial,
authorities wanted there to be no doubt who was behind them.
[23]

To ensure the secrecy of their little conspiracy,
the sheriff’s department took an active role by posing as lookouts. When
Krupnick was with Kennamer, Sheriff Price positioned himself near the elevator
doors on the ground floor, where he kept an eye on anyone going up to the jail.
In the sheriff’s office, Chief Deputy John Evans watched for Price’s signal. If
one of the defense attorneys or a family member was going up to see Kennamer,
Evans was ready to transmit a signal using the jail buzzer. Upstairs, jailer
Tony Benson was ready to receive the signal. Benson would then knock on
Kennamer’s door, which was the signal to Krupnick, to advise him that a visitor
was coming up to see him. Knowing that this was potential evidence, they also
took photostatic copies of all the correspondence.

The fourth note passed, from Kennamer to Cochrane,
turned into an all-out forgery by the crafty Krupnick. When pressed to write
it, Kennamer also wanted Krupnick to deliver it orally since he too believed
the exchange of notes was getting too risky. In order to continue the sham,
Krupnick typed out Kennamer’s message on his typewriter at
World
offices. But instead of passing along Kennamer’s caution, he removed those
statements and substituted phrases that encouraged continuance of the whole
note-passing affair:

Stay away from reporters. Lee is okay. Other
birds are swine. Give me more facts. Don’t worry I will burn your answers. I am
doubtful about Pat. He might talk. Give me actual low-down. I have lots to
confide you. Tell me all. Be sure and typewrite. Don’t ever write. We sure can
depend on Lee. A real pal. What’s doing? You know what I mean. Hurry with your
answer. Keep your chin up fellow.

When the note was delivered on December 21, Cochrane was
naturally suspicious because it had been typed instead of written. Krupnick
explained that a typewriter was available in the room adjoining Kennamer’s,
which was actually true. When the two met up again in a downtown café on December
22, paranoid that he was being watched, Cochrane put his reply in a matchbox that
he passed to Krupnick under the table. It read:

These better stop for few days. Am being watched. Pat won’t
talk but won’t go on stand for defense. Wants to stay clear out of it. Who is
trying to spot me? Why, I am for you Sweetheart. We’ll win in the end.

But that’s not the note Krupnick delivered.
Instead, he substituted a typewritten note in which the phrase “these better
stop for few days. Am being watched,” was eliminated.

After delivering Cochrane’s message, he returned
to the matron’s room on the morning of December 23 to find Kennamer still in
bed, sleeping.

“Lee, bring me my trousers,” Kennamer said when he
woke. “Tell Cochrane 3-5.” From one of the pockets, he handed Krupnick a
typewritten note that read:

I know you are with me. Don’t think I’ll forget it. After I
am sprung we are going to sue every paper in the United States. Forget it now
though. Vital Pat takes stand. You received a letter from Gorrell in November.
Keep your chin up, Sweetheart.
[24]

When Cochrane was ready with his reply, they met once again
at the café on the evening of December 24.

Merry Christmas. Don’t understand about Snedden except that
he tried to frame me. Same one, I know who. My chin’s up. How’s yours? - XXXXXXXXXX

According to Krupnick’s account of the whole affair
he later explained in a newspaper article,
Snedden
referred to Jack
Snedden, and was a reference to a conversation between Cochrane and the
photographer.

“Cochrane told me he didn’t like Snedden, and that
Snedden didn’t like him,” Krupnick later explained. “I thought I might get some
information by mentioning Snedden, so I told Cochrane that Phil said ‘Snedden
is talking too much, be careful,’ but nothing came of it.”

When Krupnick delivered the message to the
prisoner later that Christmas Eve, Kennamer cautioned him not to come the next
day because his family would be present. When he returned the day after,
Krupnick came with the idea of unraveling the story behind the letter that
Gorrell supposedly wrote Cochrane in November. When he got there, he told
Kennamer that Cochrane was worried about the letter from Gorrell.

“I was sitting on the bed and Phil was sitting in
the rocker,” Krupnick later recalled. “Phil became very quiet and for at least
three minutes he sat with his head on his hands, saying nothing. Then he looked
at me in the eye and said, ‘Listen, you tell him not to worry about that Gorrell
letter, that I will say that he lost it. Be sure to tell him Pat must take the
stand.’”

Krupnick then tried to convince Kennamer to put that
in writing but he refused, and instead the photographer received an eighth
message that was not in code.

Skip matter of epistle [referring to Gorrell’s letter], find
out if Pat hasn’t been ‘contacted’ by someone from the gang which is out to get
me. Keep your chin up and don’t worry.—K

But Krupnick didn’t deliver that message, and once
again, he concocted a different one, with the knowledge of county authorities and
his bosses at the newspaper. “Don’t worry about Gorrell letter. I will say you
lost it. You and Pat be sure and take the stand.”

It was the last note that would ever be delivered
after Kennamer let something slip to his chief counsel, who put a stop to it.
On January 3, a small portion of the entire affair appeared in the
Tulsa World
when Moss, seeking to do damage control, spoke of it to reporters. Moss
said it was further proof that his client “was not entirely responsible for his
‘whimsical actions,’” the paper reported. It supported the defense’s theory,
Moss added, that Kennamer was unbalanced.

“I have not seen the notes but Phil told me about
them Sunday [December 30] in a way that indicated he was boasting of his
shrewdness,” Moss said. “As far as I have been able to learn, these notes
contained nothing incriminating or of any relevance [where] the slaying proper
is concerned. Kennamer is entirely out of hand.”

He was right that the whole scheme had not
produced anything that would incriminate his client, and even the county
attorney had to agree. For those who still believed Kennamer had an accomplice on
the outside who would have been revealed in the notes, that ghostly figure
remained elusive.

Within that same article was confirmation by Fire
and Police Commissioner Oscar Hoop during a public meeting with city commissioners
that Sgt. Maddux was offered a bribe for the staggering amount of $25,000.
[25]
As he had already
shown in the past, Maddux’s proclamation inflamed the story line and fed into
city-wide beliefs of a conspiracy. Or, at the very least, it insinuated that the
Kennamer family was behind it, which they weren’t.