Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (23 page)

“If the defendant is seeking to prove that Gorrell
wrote the extortion note,” Gilmer interrupted Moss, “we will admit it.”

Stunned, Moss replied, “You admit that the
handwriting on the envelope and two pages of the letter
is
that of
Gorrell’s?”

“Yes.”

The prosecution was prepared for this but still
maintained that Kennamer was the author of the note, even if he didn’t actually
write it. Privately, they believed Gorrell wrote it to get Kennamer off his
back, or he was intimidated. According to the defendant himself, the note was
written in his hotel room the morning of November 21, while the two were alone.

Admitting the note was written by John Gorrell
deflated Sherman’s testimony and whatever impact it may have had on the jury. Instead
of fighting it, going along with it was the state’s best strategy to reshape
what it actually meant. If Kennamer plotted all this to portray himself as a
hero, the extortion note would be the key to his entire story. Kennamer
couldn’t force Gorrell to kidnap Virginia if he didn’t want to, but he could pressure
him to write an extortion note. Once he had documented evidence in the victim’s
handwriting, Kennamer could do exactly what he did: build a story around it
that portrayed Gorrell as the evil bad guy and himself as Virginia’s brave
defender.

Gorrell wasn’t alive to tell what happened that
morning when he wrote the extortion note, but the statements from nearly every
prosecution and defense witness firmly established that Phil Kennamer was a
prolific liar. The boy couldn’t even keep his story straight between his two
interviews with the
World
and
Tribune.

All of this had made Flint Moss’s job incredibly
difficult. When Kennamer surrendered, he’d told reporters this was a simple
case of self-defense. That argument was quickly shredded by multiple witnesses
who said it was premeditated, forcing Moss to push an insanity defense as
eighty percent of his opening statement. This put Kennamer in the awkward
position of claiming to the jury that
it was self-defense when I did it, but
I was also insane at the time and didn’t know right from wrong
.

The only evidence of self-defense in the case was
Kennamer’s own account of what happened. To support that claim, the high-school
dropout would have to tell the jury himself. Moss had to go along with it
because Phil had dug that hole deep. Kennamer was all by himself on that one,
but the best strategy for Moss was to simply overwhelm the jury with stories
from family and friends, as well as expert witnesses, that supported his
agenda.

The balance of the defense witnesses that Friday
were designed to turn the courtroom into a sympathy festival—for Phil Kennamer,
the prodigal son; Phil Kennamer, the abnormal child; Phil Kennamer, the love-sick
dreamer. Moss firmly believed this was his best hope for an acquittal. If the
jury found his client not guilty by reason of insanity, the court would be
forced to let him go free. After all, the trial was not an insanity hearing,
the outcome of which could put Kennamer in a state mental hospital.

Longtime Kennamer pal Claude Wright was not
supposed to be an important witness that day, but his two hours of testimony
fed the jury outrageous stories from the life of the defendant. He was the
fourth witness called and one of three friends whose recollections would
provide anecdotal evidence to support defense psychiatrists’ claims that Kennamer
was insane at the time of the “unfortunate tragedy.” While Wright’s testimony
uncovered irrational and immature behavior, it was actually seen by many as
just the sort of childish deeds and daydreaming that could come from any boy
with an active imagination, but not necessarily one who was insane.

But that didn’t mean there weren’t peculiar
stories to be told. Wright’s most shocking account was the time Phil jumped out
of a second-story window with a noose around his neck when he was just five years
old.

“Phil was attempting to explain to the kindergarten
teacher how to tie a knot in the rope and he tied a curtain-string around his
neck in a hangman’s knot and jumped out the window. He landed in a sand pile and
wasn’t hurt,” Wright said.

While spectators gasped when they heard this, Phil
found the memory of it amusing, and smiled to himself as he kept his face
covered by his left hand.

“What happened to the rope when Phil jumped out
the window?” Moss inquired.

“Everything went out with it.”

“Was it heavy enough to hold Phil’s weight?”

“No.”

“Did it break?”

“No.”

“So, the curtain fell down and Phil landed in the
sand pile?”

“Yes,” Wright answered. “The teacher was scared to
death.”

Besides his stories of Kennamer’s daredevil
escapades, his obsessive love for Virginia Wilcox, his numerous suicide threats,
along with his quitting school or every job he ever had, wrecking cars, and drinking
excessively—not to mention the tall tales he told—reporters focused in on Kennamer’s
self-confidence in his own intelligence.

“He thought he was smarter than the Mexicans,”
Wright recounted to questions about Kennamer’s desire to join far-off
revolutions. “‘I could take them over and run them,’ he said.”

In a story he told Wright, Kennamer’s ambition to
be a leader was nearly realized when Harlem vice gangs proposed he should rule
over their entire operation.

“On his last trip to New York City, he came back
and told me that he was walking around and ran across two Negro gangsters in an
argument. They were gamblers and bootleggers and had been cutting prices on
each other and were trying to get organized and he got their confidence so that
they told him he could handle their business. They arranged a second meeting and
were going to get all the members together under Phil,” Wright explained.
However, his time as a Harlem crime boss was unexpectedly cut short.

“About that time his mother wanted him to come
home and he left,” Wright recounted, which caused many in the gallery to laugh
out loud.

During cross-examination, Gilmer got Wright to
admit that in spite of Kennamer’s wild boyhood antics, there was nothing about
them to indicate he didn’t know right from wrong.

“In your opinion, Phil is an awful liar, isn’t
he?” Gilmer prodded.

“Yes sir.”

“What I want to know is did he tell these wild
lies about gangsters and things in front of his parents and your parents, the
same as he tells them in front of you young fellows?”

“He is somewhat changed in front of his parents,”
Wright said.

“In front of his parents or your parents he
doesn’t give all that color to his yarns?”

“He has told my father some of his yarns.”

“Would that, in your opinion, indicate that he
knew right from wrong?” Gilmer carefully asked.

“Yes sir.”

The witness accounts which would make headlines
across the United States came after the lunch recess when Homer and Virginia
Wilcox were called up, followed by the emotional testimony of Kennamer’s father
and sister Juanita. Taking his seat in the witness chair, Homer Junior looked
around nervously and bit his upper lip. The courtroom was packed tight; all of
the eighteen benches were filled, and young boys cutting class from the local school
for Indians were standing along the walls. Just behind the door, Junior’s
mother waited, occasionally sneaking a peek into the crowded courtroom.

“Now . . . ” Moss began as he leaned
against the rail. Anderson had hidden his yardstick, and the defense attorney was
forced to make do without it. “. . . tell the jury just what Phil told you
about the plot to kidnap your sister on the part of Gorrell.”

“He told me that Gorrell was in this gang in Kansas
City and that he had told him last summer of the plan to kidnap my sister and he
would prevent it at any cost.”

“Homer, did he tell you what he would do if
necessary to prevent it?”

“He said, if necessary, he’d kill Gorrell.”

“Did you tell your father or mother about it?”

“No,” Junior said flatly. “I took no stock in it
at the time and I didn’t want to worry them.”

When the object of Phil Kennamer’s unrequited love
entered the courtroom, the excited whispers of five hundred people watching her
created a loud buzz that followed her all the way to the witness chair. When
she sat down, the clamor dramatically stopped. Until that exact moment, she was
the unheard-from heroine in a tragic drama that left one boy dead, because
another boy refused to go to police with the extortion letter and needed to be
a hero.

Virginia Wilcox was fashionably attired in a blue
dress punctuated with an enormous silver-fox-fur collar that cascaded down to
her elbows. A dainty, blue-felt hat was pinned to her brown, wavy hair and was tilted
down over her right ear. Her pleasant face, with its pale skin and coffee-colored
eyes, typecast her as a tender-hearted young lady who knew better than to get
mixed up with a boy like Phil Kennamer.

As the nineteen-year-old answered Moss’s questions
about his client’s overwhelming displays of attention shown to her the last three
years, she spoke in a clear, sweet voice. The expression she wore for
twenty-two minutes was one of intense seriousness combined with repressed
emotion, and it was painfully obvious she didn’t want to talk about any of this.
Phil’s grand plan to be more to her than he was had boiled down to this one
moment, and Virginia Wilcox never looked at Phil Kennamer once. Not that he
would have noticed. He couldn’t bring himself to face her either, and he sat
with his head bowed, his hands covering his face completely.

None of it had worked out the way he’d thought it
would.

After Virginia was dismissed, the accounts of Phil’s
suicidal tendencies by his father and sister caused many of the women in the
gallery to shed tears for the defendant. The cold, steely reserve of Judge
Kennamer was broken several times as he testified to his son’s erratic,
abnormal behavior. As he had done to his own friends, Kennamer harvested attention
from his father with dark talk of suicide.

“The gray-haired jurist was unable to continue and
began weeping. He removed his gold-rimmed spectacles and dried his eyes with a
handkerchief,” Walter Biscup wrote. “The judge’s display of emotion did not
appear to affect the prisoner, who maintained his customary position of leaning
his head against his right hand propped on the counsel table by his elbow.”

Kennamer’s father was smart enough to tailor his
one hour and fifty minutes of testimony with statements that reinforced an
insanity defense. Just as he had done when his son had run away from home, or
quit school, or quit his jobs, or crashed his car, his father was there to
rescue him. Despite his reputation as a stern judge, he was now in the ironic
position of having to mitigate his son’s guilt as a boy who didn’t know right
from wrong. As biased as he was, Judge Kennamer did pass along one insightful
revelation.

“He had a very emotional disposition,” Judge
Kennamer declared at one point. “He either felt very high or very low.”

“Either in an extraordinarily happy mood or very
despondent?” Moss offered.

“That expresses it.”

Monday, February 18, 1935

BIPOLAR DISORDER, WITH ITS EXTREME
highs and lows, wasn’t the only mental health issue Phil Kennamer was afflicted
with. According to one of the country’s leading psychiatrists, the boy had
bigger problems. When
The Human Mind
author Dr. Karl Menninger took the
stand, he was twenty minutes late. Normally, that would have been a problem for
Judge Hurst, but not that day; Monday the 18
^th
of February came with
a sense of déjà vu. Over the weekend, state and national newspapers trumpeted multiple
stories saying that Phil Kennamer would testify. This spawned another
hysterical mob hell-bent on getting a coveted seat in the courtroom. If
Menninger could have been there when the doors opened at 8:00 a.m., he would
have recognized the Pawnee County Courthouse for what it became—a madhouse.
World
reporter Walter Biscup depicted the events of that morning for readers.

Hysteria of the mob made its appearance at the trial of Phil
Kennamer here for the first time today when a crowd consisting of all the
people the courtroom would hold and a surplus of more than a hundred others
raced through the doors and stormed up [three] flights of steps when the
courthouse opened at 8 o’clock.

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.

Three minutes after the doors were opened every available
spectator’s seat in the courtroom was occupied. A hundred more people took
standing room at the rear and along walls. At the double doors just beside the
jury box at least 50 more were wedged into a compact formation, with nothing to
restrain them except the obvious fact that there was no more room inside. The
corridor door at the back of Judge Hurst’s bench was impassable.

Even the booming voice of Sheriff Charlie Burkdoll could not
stem the rush. And deputies made no effort to check the dash of
sensation-hungry hundreds until the courtroom was filled and comparative quiet
was restored.

Those who could not get in were ejected from the [third]
floor of the courthouse and a deputy stood guard at the second-floor landing,
permitting none above that point who were not directly connected with the case.
All morning long another 100 people stood patiently on the second-floor
landing, hoping to be first in line after lunch.

Even after it was announced that the courtroom was full and [no
more] would be admitted, additional chairs were carried in by latecomers who
blithely explained that this attorney for the defense and that attorney for the
prosecution “told me it would be all right.”

As a result, by the time court convened, not a spare chair
was to be found. Reporters, robbed of theirs by spectators who carried them
casually from the press room, searched the courthouse from top to bottom
without finding a single spare.

Influence was at a premium and there was much bitterness and
some weeping among disappointed women who were turned away, only to see others
turn the magic trick and squeeze chairs into spaces where there did not appear
to be room for the furniture.

Furthermore, press tables became strangely filled with new
faces. Many who probably never saw inside a newspaper plant protested
emphatically they were reporters and obviously belied the fact by making
prominent display of pencil and paper. As a result, Judge Hurst ordered the
bailiff to exclude anyone occupying the seat of a bona fide reporter.

Phil Kennamer had a pretty good idea what Menninger
was going to say, and he was still upset over the insanity claim. It could not
coexist with his ego. It discounted his heroics. It discounted the intelligence
he had used to outsmart Gorrell.

Everyone could clearly see
something
was
wrong with Phil Kennamer—everyone except Phil Kennamer. There had to be a
reason why he couldn’t stay in school or hold a job, why he thought he was
smarter than everyone else, why he was a liar and manipulated people, why he
had absolutely no fear, why he drank like a fish and had crashed four cars, and
why he enjoyed the attention that came with being a murder defendant without
the shame of being branded a criminal.

They were about to discover the answer, which came
in three words. In direct response to a forty-three-minute question by Moss in
which he reviewed the entire case, Dr. Menninger declared Kennamer was
“irrational” at the time of the unfortunate tragedy.

“Was he able to distinguish the difference between
right and wrong?” Moss inquired.

“I don’t think he could distinguish between right
and wrong,” the forty-one-year-old said. He was the youngest psychiatrist to
testify during the trial and represented a new school of thinking that was more
empathetic to criminals.

“Will you tell us why?”

“I think he was unable to distinguish right from
wrong because he was incapable of accepting ordinary standards and substituted
his own. His own egotism was so great that he had his own moral code, which to
him seemed a better one than the one society accepts.”

“Does the sort of insanity or mental illness which
you have concluded the defendant has, is that a well-known kind of insanity—does
it have a name?”

“In most books, it is known as psychopathic
personality disorder,” Dr. Menninger answered. In his medical opinion, which
would endure throughout his life, psychopaths were not responsible for their
crimes and should be treated instead of imprisoned.

“This type of insanity has been known for years as
‘moral insanity’ and by other descriptions, which have now passed out of use,”
Dr. Menninger explained. “Only in recent years has the name been changed to
psychopathic personality disorder.”

There it was. Three words that explained why Phil
Kennamer was the way he was.

Oklahoma City psychiatrist Dr. Eugen Werner’s time
in the witness chair was far shorter than his colleague’s. He would only affirm
that Kennamer did not understand or appreciate the consequences of killing John
Gorrell.

“You have heard the questions I have asked and
propounded to Dr. Menninger?” Moss asked him.

“I have.”

“Do you agree with Dr. Menninger?”

“I do.”

Menninger and Werner’s testimony may have been
brief, but it explained more in three words than all the other witnesses
combined—if anyone actually understood what psychopathic personality disorder
meant, which most did not. But six hundred people didn’t storm the courthouse and
break a door off its hinges, again, to listen to why Phil Kennamer’s brain was
broken. Their interests were more prurient.

They wanted to hear from the defendant himself.

After the lunch recess, the nineteen-year-old told
an incredible story that had witnesses doing things they never did, and saying
words they never said. He took on a dozen of them at once with absolutely no
fear of how their accounts differed from his own. Randal Morton was a liar.
Jack Snedden was a liar. Robert Thomas was a liar. Alice Gorrell was a liar. In
his world, everyone else was lying, but he was telling the truth—this time. He
didn’t even seem bothered by the fact that the story he told on the stand
contradicted his own accounts previously given during his newspaper interviews.

“The prisoner, who undoubtedly suffers from
ego-mania, appeared the calmest person in the room as he slowly enunciated the
story which he hopes will bring him freedom,” wrote Walter Biscup, who had
gotten to know Kennamer well by now. “He was deliberate in every answer and it
was this attitude of mental certainty, more than anything else, which convinced
the lay audience that the youth was wholly sane.”

When he first sat down, he fixed his gaze directly
at Virginia Wilcox, who was seated with his family on their reserved bench in
the front row. Her presence with the Kennamers was a bit of a mystery, and
there was speculation that Flint Moss had something to do with it. This young,
attractive girl from a wealthy family did not acquire that front-row seat by
fighting through a mob of people. On Friday, she couldn’t bring herself to look
at him. Now, she caught him staring at her and returned his gaze with a cold,
blank expression that was noted in several newspapers.

Flint Moss was sitting this one out, and he had turned
over the direct examination to his co-counsel, seventy-eight-year-old Charles
Stuart. Stuart was a short, heavyset man with a head and face marked by red
telangiectasia blemishes and brown spots from years of hunting and fishing.

Phil began his story by calmly informing the jury
that he’d met Gorrell during the latter part of August—before the meeting with
Ted Bath and two weeks before Gorrell headed off to dental school. Besides the
extortion note, the single greatest piece of evidence in his favor was his own
claim that Gorrell had first discussed the kidnapping with Cochrane and Pat
Burgess before Kennamer ever met him.

 “I met John Gorrell the latter part of August or
the first part of September 1934.”

“State the circumstances.”

“I was working for the Frates Company, an
insurance company, and somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 in the morning,
Preston Cochrane called me and asked me to come to his room and when I got
there, Cochrane told me to pay particular attention to the man he wanted me to
meet, and that man was John Gorrell,” Kennamer said.

“That was the latter part of August?”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you hear that there was a scheme on the part
of Gorrell to kidnap Miss Virginia Wilcox, or her brother Homer Wilcox?” Stuart
asked.

 “Yes sir.”

“When, shortly after your last meeting with
Gorrell, who told you of the plot?”

“I saw them separately. I saw Preston Cochrane
first before my meeting with Gorrell. He told me of the plan to kidnap Virginia
Wilcox, and later I saw Pat Burgess who told the same story.”

“When was that?”

“The middle of September,” Kennamer answered. “I
was working in the insurance office. Gorrell called and asked me to meet him
[at the Brown Derby Café] and asked me when I got there to come outside and
meet [Ted Bath].”

“What was said?”

“He told me his plan,” Kennamer said.

“Now, without going into detail, tell the jury if
at that time or if you ever agreed to the plan to kidnap Virginia Wilcox.”

“I—DID—NOT.”

Kennamer’s testimony of when Gorrell told him of the
plan to kidnap Virginia contradicted his December 12 interview with the press,
when he claimed Gorrell had not spoken of the plan to him until he went to
Kansas City in November:

After my investigation, I went to Kansas City about the
middle of November and found Gorrell. We talked a bit and then I remarked how I
heard something was coming against the Wilcox family. When Gorrell discovered I
was interested, he said he did not know that I would be interested in anything
like this.

He then told the jury of how he arrived in Kansas
City on the evening of November 20. After checking into the Phillips Hotel, by
his own admission, Kennamer bought the hunting knife from a department store,
and then stationery and rubber gloves from a Walgreens, which Gorrell would use
to write an extortion note.

During his Kansas City story, Kennamer, from the
witness chair, once again portrayed his victim as the well-armed crime boss of
a gang looking to graduate from petty robberies to kidnapping. In spite of
Gorrell’s determination to go through with it, Kennamer was able to talk him
out of it, and into an extortion plot. After a night of drinking, Gorrell spent
the night in Kennamer’s hotel room. Excited by the prospect of making twenty
thousand dollars, Gorrell woke up early, put the rubber gloves on without any
suggestion from him, and immediately started writing the note—all while he was still
asleep.

“Did he compose that note by himself without any
suggestion from you?” Stuart asked.

“Yes sir.”

“He completed it by himself?” Stuart asked one
more time.

“Yes.”

“Now, Phil, you got that extortion note, what was
your purpose in getting this note and appearing to be in with John Gorrell in
this scheme?”

“My purpose was to forestall Gorrell. I figured if
he knew the note was in my possession, he would make no effort to go through
with the scheme,” Kennamer replied. He then claimed he only showed the note to four
or five people, not the ten who reported to police he was shoving it in their
faces to read.

“What did you tell them you were going to do with
it?”

“I was going to see Gorrell when he returned and
tell him the note was in my possession and I would turn it over to the
authorities,” Kennamer smugly declared.

It sounded good, but it wasn’t what he’d told
Floyd Huff who told Chief Higgins back on December 1: “He said he was undecided
just what he would do with it. He was very positive in saying he did not intend
to turn it over to police.”

“Now, we come to the night of the
tragedy
,”
Stuart began. Like Moss, he was not using the words
killed
or
murdered
.
“When did you get into communication with him?”

“About a quarter to six or seven Thanksgiving
night,” Kennamer said. “Gorrell called me.”

“Did Gorrell arrange a meeting place with you that
night?”

“Yes sir. A drug store directly across the street
from St. John’s Hospital.”

“He told you he would meet you there at what
time?” Stuart probed.