Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (7 page)

It would eventually get him into trouble.

December 2—8, 1934

ALMOST FROM THE BEGINNING, Homer
Wilcox Jr. was named as a person of interest in the case. Initially, he was
sought because he was a close friend of Kennamer. On Sunday, December 2, Maddux
announced he had no more need to question Junior because other witnesses had
come forward to fill in the blanks. Then, new information was received which
made an interview with the seventeen-year-old “most important” to the case.

“We cannot help but admit that the investigation,
as it now stands, hinges entirely on young Wilcox,” thirty-eight-year-old Anderson
dramatically declared on Monday, December 3. He was a former mayor of Sand
Springs and had recently been reelected to his second term as county attorney. “I
cannot impress how vital the presence of Wilcox here is to the future
development of the case. Wilcox can be of tremendous aid to us and we need his
presence here immediately.”

This type of seesawing would become typical for the
investigation. But on Sunday, the day after Kennamer surrendered, the entire
Wilcox family had left town. Their departure from Tulsa hours before
investigators sought them out for questioning was viewed with some suspicion. They
had traveled to Toledo to do some Christmas shopping, their servants told
authorities. Homer Senior then journeyed to New York City, where investigators
were able to reach him by telephone in his room at the Waldorf Astoria. He told
them Junior would be home in a few days and would be made available to answer
their questions.

The two night watchmen for the Titus estate did
hear gunfire that night, but they weren’t the muffled shots that killed Gorrell.
Junior and three friends of his had some explaining to do as to how the
streetlights near the murder scene were blasted out just a few hours before
Gorrell was murdered in that same area. The Wilcox name featured prominently in
the newspapers for the entire first week while the family was out of town. The
extortion note was mentioned nearly every day, but the details of Junior’s
coincidental involvement with the crime scene were left out. They didn’t have
to include it. The grapevine was taking care of that for them, and it was
feeding into the narrative of a bunch of rich kids who were out of control.

From blackmail photos of daughters from wealthy
families caught in compromising positions to cocaine parties alleged by a
ne’er-do-well convict looking to reduce his burglary sentence, the Hy-Hat Club
and the youth of Tulsa’s well-to-do were getting the stink eye from adults.
Narcotics detective Sgt. Francis McMillen ran down all the “whispered tips that
dope peddlers were involved in the case” but eventually came up empty-handed.
Nevertheless, the stories got wilder and wilder.

“There are disclosures of serious trouble among our
youth and many signs of modern blight,” lectured a December 6 editorial from
the
World.

Governor-elect Ernest Marland’s attitude on the
matter reflected the times: “What is it that creates a craving for narcotics
among our young people? We are an Anglo-Saxon race, and it is not a natural
habit.”

One Tulsa school board member said in a public
meeting that first week of December, “The young people do everything that their
parents do and then go on looking for new thrills!”

The statement by Maddux on the impending arrest of
another prominent young son of Tulsa seemed only to confirm those beliefs. But by
the next morning, the university-trained criminologist retracted it. No new
suspects were being sought and no more arrests were planned.

That premature and provocative declaration wasn’t
the only grenade Maddux lobbed into the investigation’s narrative. From day
one, rumors had made their way into newspapers that a prominent Tulsa family
had
recently
received an extortion note. This turned out not to be true,
but what was true was that wealthy oilman Charles Wrightsman had received
extortion notes in 1931.

True to his pattern of behavior, Maddux made the
announcement to later that week that “an extortion note had been sent through
the mails to another Tulsa oil operator.” The note he was alluding to was the
Wrightsman note. Everybody already knew about the Wrightsman note. It was three
damn years old. It had nothing to do with the Kennamer-Gorrell case, but that
didn’t stop Maddux from using it to add to the mania that was building.

Looking down at the Sergeant’s desk, where he saw
the letter addressed to Charles Wrightsman, a
Tribune
reporter asked
Maddux, “Is that the note?”

Maddux could only smile and avoid the question,
but eventually he responded, “You’d give your left arm to see what was in that
note.”

No, he wouldn’t. Phil Kennamer was fifteen going
on sixteen in 1931.

More unnecessary excitement was injected into the
case that first full week when copies of the photograph Maddux took of a dead
John Gorrell in his car were “leaked” to the
Tribune
and
World
.
In a time when photographs of dead people rarely appeared in newspapers, it
shocked the entire city, and was grossly insensitive to the boy’s parents.

All the press coverage of extortion letters and
kidnapping plots caused federal agents to make a cameo appearance in the case.
The Kennamer-Gorrell note was locked up by the defense somewhere, and the
Wrightsman note was three years old. There wasn’t much they could do and, after
a day or two, newspapers never mentioned them again.

On December 5, County Attorney Holly Anderson
announced to the press that his office and the sheriff’s department were
closing their investigation. This declaration came after Homer Wilcox Sr.
promised that Junior would be made available for questioning upon their return
to Tulsa. Newspapers held off revealing Junior’s involvement until official
announcements were made.

The next day, Anderson, with Dr. John Gorrell,
invited Oklahoma Attorney General J. Berry King to assist with the prosecution.
King’s participation in the case gave the short-lived illusion that the state
would be heavily involved in the Kennamer prosecution. But King, like Sheriff
Price, would relinquish his office in a little more than a month.

As it turned out, King was close friends with Judge
Kennamer, even though he was a Democrat. King had recently lost his bid to be
the Democratic candidate for governor in the primary. He’d served as assistant
attorney general in the 1920s, and then attorney general for almost six years,
with his term ending on January 14, 1935. In those days, his name was just as
familiar to Oklahomans as Judge Kennamer’s, if not more so.

Like the day Phil surrendered, Wednesday, December
5, was a news-packed day. Around midmorning, a black sedan with a red warning
light mounted on top—something new in those days—parked in front of the Tulsa
County Courthouse. Five minutes later, Wagoner County Sheriff Clay Flowers and
Mr. and Mrs. Basil James were in Sheriff Price’s office. The day before
Thanksgiving, five robbers had stormed the James home, lined up them and two
guests against a wall, and robbed them of eighty-five dollars, several guns, a
watch, and forty-five pints of whiskey.

James was the owner of a roadhouse just outside of
Wagoner,
[14]
and when he and his wife saw Kennamer’s picture in the newspaper, it looked
familiar. Up at the matron’s room, they identified Kennamer as the leader of
the gang and one of two men who didn’t wear a mask and held a .32-caliber
revolver with an attached silencer.

“He was the man,” James whispered after the group
had all peeked in on Kennamer in his room. “He was the man who knocked on my
door and the man who first entered the house.”

The wife confirmed her husband’s identification
and for nearly a week, newspapers included this new angle within its coverage.
Kennamer and Moss emphatically denied the Jameses’ claim, and Tulsa
investigators backed off from pursuing it a day or two later. This time,
Kennamer was actually telling the truth; witnesses placed him in Tulsa around
the time frame of the Wagoner robbery.

On the night before Thanksgiving, the same night
the James couple was robbed, Kennamer left home around seven o’clock and walked
to Jack Snedden’s house. Snedden was taking Virginia Wilcox to a dance at the
Mayo Hotel. The trio went to the Quaker Drug Store first, where they stayed
until 8:30 p.m. Friends Sidney Born and Jerry Bates showed up around that time,
and Phil went with them downtown. At approximately 9:30 p.m., Bates and Born
went to the same dance as Snedden and Virginia, but Born loaned his car to
Kennamer, who damaged part of it in yet another wreck. Later that night, after
the dance, Born met up with Kennamer at the Sunset Café.

From there, Born and Kennamer went back to the Mayo
Hotel, where they rented a room for “a wild party.” In the morning, one of
them, presumably Born, wrote a check for ten dollars, which later bounced, to
cover their bill.

Although Basil James persisted, Tulsa authorities
were confident Kennamer didn’t commit the robbery. If he had access to a .32-caliber
revolver equipped with a silencer, he wouldn’t have been showing off a hunting
knife to friends the night of the murder. Even when his alibi became public
knowledge, the robbery accusation fed the public perception that Kennamer had a
full-fledged criminal gang that was still on the loose. Several witnesses against
Kennamer reported receiving threatening telephone calls and letters to keep
their mouths shut. The same day Oliver’s name appeared in the paper, detectives
were guarding his home after rumors had made their way to headquarters that their
witness was in danger. On Sunday night, Dr. Gorrell called to speak with Oliver
about his son but was told Oliver was out.

“Do you mean to tell me he had enough crust to go
out tonight?” Dr. Gorrell was quoted as saying. “I have heard it from reliable
sources that they are either going to implicate him or kill him.”

But Oliver was in hiding, and not even the police
could find him those first few days.

The roadhouse robbery also supported the rising
chorus from parents, pastors, educators, and local authorities that the well-to-do
youth of Tulsa were out of control, even though they had nothing to do with the
robbery. Looking out over their Christian, conservative city, they imagined
sex-mad teens driving dangerously over their streets to get to hole-in-the-wall
gambling joints and breast-bouncing dance parties where they would plan big
crimes—all while high on marijuana and drunk on 3.2 beer.

Meetings were scheduled. Plans were being made. A
crackdown was coming. Phil Kennamer had just gummed up the good times for the
fast, young, Tulsa set.

Later on during that first week of the case, after
other witnesses had paved the way by coming forward, more young people from
Kennamer’s small circle of friends gave statements to the police.

Betty Watson, a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the
University of Oklahoma, was in Tulsa on Saturday, November 24, and she swung by
the Kennamer residence for a dutiful visit.

“I was acquainted with the Kennamer family and had
seen none of them lately. I was only going to be in Tulsa for a short-time [she
was on her way to Chicago for the Thanksgiving holidays] and went by to pay my
respects,” she told County Attorney Anderson over the phone on December 5.

“Phil was there and when I left he asked me if I
would drive him to the Quaker Drug Store. We drove around for a few minutes and
as I drove he talked.

“I thought he was crazy. He had a letter in his
hand which he asked me to read. It was addressed to H. F. Wilcox and said that
unless $20,000 in $1, $5, and $10 bills was left some place I don’t remember,
something would happen to Virginia.

“Phil said that Gorrell wrote the note and that he
was going to kill him. He said that he had been to Kansas City and got the note
from Gorrell there. I let Phil out at the drug store and just put his talk down
as something silly and crazy.”

When the
Tulsa World
ran Watson’s statement
the following day, they did not publish her name and only identified her as a
sophomore at the University of Oklahoma. Too many names of good Tulsans were
already being dragged through the mud, and crackpots were calling up witnesses to
make veiled threats. The
Tribune
had just reported that Jack Snedden and
three of his friends were warned of death “if they do not keep quiet regarding
what information they know.”

When Kennamer read Watson’s story the next day, he
knew exactly who it was, and he didn’t like it one bit. Her statement, and
those of his other so-called friends, told of a planned murder, a murder in the
first degree, a murder charge that could get him the electric chair. With brash
arrogance only Phil Kennamer could come up with, he got to a third-floor telephone
and called down to Anderson’s office while Anderson was in a private meeting
with Attorney General King. Kennamer mentioned the news story and inquired if
Anderson would pass along a message to Miss Watson.

“If you intend on speaking to her, I would like
for you to give her a message for me,” Kennamer asked.

Thinking he could learn something new, Anderson
agreed.

“Give her my love and a piece of cheese,” Kennamer
said.

“I understand the love part but what do you mean
about the cheese?”

“She’ll get it, THE RAT!” Kennamer answered as he
slammed the handset down.

The incident, reported in the
World
,
revealed two things to Tulsans: Kennamer had just subtly intimidated a
potential witness, and he had an incredible amount of freedom from his room on
the third floor. But still, Sheriff Price did nothing about it. Kennamer wasn’t
moving anywhere. And if Kennamer had that kind of telephone access, maybe there
was some credence to the stories of witnesses being threatened, although police
were dismissing them as crank calls.