Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (25 page)

“Have you ever had any conversation with Kennamer
when the name of Virginia Wilcox was injected?” Gilmer queried.

“Yes. Several.”

“Was the substance of these conversations about
the same?”

In spite of Moss’s best efforts to object the
witness out of the chair, he was blocked by Gilmer, and Kramer was able to make
his point.

“They amounted to pretty much the same, very little
variation,” Kramer answered. “He stated he was very fond of Miss Wilcox at one
time, and she didn’t care for his attentions, and he felt very bitterly toward
her and her family and said he was going to get even, if it took his last day.”

Those in the front who could see her turned to
look at Virginia. A strange, knowing smile broke across her face, and she
looked down at her shoes to hide it. It was as if Kramer’s statement confirmed
something she had already known or suspected.

With enlarged photographs of Gorrell’s head wound,
Dr. Cecil Knoblock “proved the surprise witness of the trial by adding the
final punch to the state’s attack on Kennamer’s claim that he and Gorrell
engaged in a struggle before he killed him,” Biscup reported to
World
readers.

Over the loud objections from the defense,
Knoblock declared the first .22-caliber bullet struck Gorrell in the right
forehead and the second one came lower, and closer to his ear.

“Can you say what interval of time elapsed if any
between the two shots?” asked Gilmer.

“I can’t explain the chemical examination in a few
words. The nature of the abrasion affects the blood clotting. Taking all things
into consideration, the fact that the blood of the second wound has flowed over
the face, as well as the first, I think it is fair to say the first blood would
coagulate in a minute and a half. The blood from the first wound flowed down
and of necessity was clotted before the second wound was inflicted.”

“What is the minimum amount of time that you think
elapsed between the firing of the two shots?” Gilmer asked.

“There can be no denying that there was an interval
because there was a crossing of the two paths of blood. Considering the facts
that cause blood to coagulate, there would have to be at least a minute.”

Moss did his best, but despite sparring back and
forth with Knoblock, he was unable to shake his testimony. For Anderson, it was
as good a time as any to rest his rebuttal, and when Moss followed him, the
trial of Phil Kennamer was over.

Wednesday, February 20, 1935

THE KATZ DEPARTMENT STORE decided to
take another chance with their going-out-of-business sale. After everyone calmed
down, the crackerjack promoter from the big city returned with an important modification
to the old banner:

YOU ARE LOSER

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

With a fifty-foot sign blazoned across their storefront,
it got people’s attention. Locals and out-of-towners wandered in just to see
what they were offering.

Over at the Midway Barbershop, the barbers were more
than pleased with all the out-of-towners who needed a shave and a haircut. Judge
Kennamer was there every morning at 7:30, and his son was there every other day.
Facial hair was no longer in fashion, and it was a great time to be a barber.

Things weren’t going as well for Charlie Graham
who ran the Graham Hotel, where the defense team was lodged. He was just hoping
to break even on his restaurant business. With all the added mouths to feed, he’d
had to bring in extra help, which ate into his profits.

But there was one group of Pawnee residents unconcerned
with the Kennamer trial. Every morning on the north side of the courthouse
square, families crushed by the depression formed a line outside the offices of
the Federal Emergency Relief Agency. “None of them so much as glance at the
courthouse, but wait patiently for admission,” Ruth Sheldon wrote. Outside of
the defendant’s egocentric world, there was another one with problems of its
own.

And the world of one Tulsa family was shattered on
a cold Thanksgiving night. The pieces remained scattered like rubble during
Christmas, and then New Year’s Day, with all of its hopes and promises. For ten
days in February 1935, John and Alice Gorrell endured explicit death photographs,
an egocentric killer, smooth-talking defense attorneys denouncing their son,
and some jackass doctor from Wichita who excused a psychopath as someone not legally
responsible. Doctors like Menninger studied schizophrenics, psychopaths, sexual
deviants, and folks who were truly psychotic. It was the pastors who focused on
grief and sorrow, and all their answers pointed to a heavenly world. But John
and Alice still had to live through this one, rebuild their lives, and endure
for the sake of their remaining son, Ben, and their daughter, Edith Ann.

Throughout the trial, the Gorrells kept mostly to
themselves. True to their nature, they were quiet and never answered questions
or volunteered their opinions. They barely spoke at all, and the out-of-town
correspondents quickly learned what the Tulsa writers already knew: to respect
their privacy. But that kind of silent endurance comes with a price, and John
made a payment on that debt one afternoon when he collapsed on the floor of his
hotel room with a nervous breakdown, immediately after the closing arguments
ended. Through a choked throat, clogged with despair, he pushed out the words,
“My son . . . my son . . . ” Alice Gorrell rested
on top of her husband, stroking his thin hair without bothering to wipe her
away her own tears.

For the Associated Press reporter who spied on
this fragile moment through a cracked door, it felt wrong to be there, and he
left as quickly as he could. “Incoherent and apparently semi-conscious, the
doctor mumbled of his dead son and sobbed. ‘When the other children came home
for the holidays, my son was not among them.’”

 It was a moment too private to be witnessed by
any outsider.

The closing arguments in the Phil Kennamer trial
set new records in Oklahoma legal history, with seven attorneys who spoke for nearly
eight hours over two days. With no objections to hold them back, they fixed
bayonets and charged. They attacked each other’s witnesses, and they attacked
each other’s evidence, and when they were done with that, they attacked each
other with pumped-up indignation for all the legal atrocities the other side had
committed. They hurled clever one-liners and sarcastic remarks that reporters
ate up and regurgitated for their readers. For the twelve grim-jawed,
stone-faced jurors who gave nothing away in their expressions, it went on and
on and on until it became a two-day endurance challenge of verbal diarrhea.

When it was all over with, there was a notable
difference between the two sides. The prosecution’s arguments were outlined and
proactive. They were pragmatic but long—winded—summaries that reviewed their
best evidence and introduced provocative new ideas. The defense, on the other
hand, was reactive. While eloquent, they were also emotional and disjointed. Always
following behind a prosecuting attorney, one defense counselor or another was unwittingly
drawn into a debate with the previous speaker.

Veteran Tom Wallace opened for the state with a
concise analysis of their case that emphasized three main points: Kennamer told
others he would kill John Gorrell; Gorrell was shot to death by Kennamer;
Kennamer admitted killing him. Wallace then closed by calling for a life
sentence or a hefty term for manslaughter.

Those anticipating an eloquent plea from Moss were
not disappointed, but his argument was scattered, with conclusions that were
far-reaching. After launching into a self-imposed warning about the unfairness
of criticizing the victim, Moss eventually got around to criticizing the
victim. To get there, he took a roundabout course by knocking off the state’s
witnesses as the low sort of people John Gorrell consorted with. First, it was Floyd
Huff who was “lower than a human can sink” for being an ex-con. Then it was Ted
Bath’s turn; he was demoted to the dregs of humanity because he worked in the
oil fields.

“Do you know what kinds of fellows are connected
with pipeline work?” Moss asked rhetorically. This apparently meant the
criminal kind, because John’s mere association with him revealed he was up to
no good.

Moss then unwittingly criticized Gorrell for not
speaking up when his own client proposed to Bath that he seduce Virginia Wilcox
to get naked pictures of her. “Not a word, gentlemen, from Gorrell. NOT—A—WORD—OF
PROTEST,” he said before whispering, “not a syllable.”

Even though he had protested when Barbara Boyle’s
name was mentioned, Gorrell didn’t do the same for Virginia and somehow, in
Moss’s mind, that made Gorrell a bad person, but not his client, who had
proposed the scheme in the first place. He repeated this hypocritical error
when he attacked Gorrell for not speaking out when his own client suggested
armed robbery after Bath turned down the blackmail scheme.

“Then, when they talked about holding up the pig
stand, who told Kennamer it was dangerous, someone might get killed?  It was
Ted Bath, not John Gorrell.”

As he neared the end of a ninety-minute speech,
Moss continued his attack on the victim for writing the extortion note and not
exposing it later to the police. Kidnappers were the “most vicious sort of
criminal,” but don’t judge him for saying that because, after all, Moss “didn’t
mean to be offensive to anyone.” However, Gorrell was a “potential snatcher,”
and it was Phil’s “Christian duty” to stop that kidnapper.

“I want the day to dawn in America,” Moss thundered
like a Baptist preacher, “when by the consecrated effort of the government—KIDNAPPERS
CANNOT EXIST!

“If I see right, every human who followed this
trial—everybody who is acquainted at all with its details—knows that when Phil
Kennamer is freed of this crime—WE—have taken a step forward in stopping
forever and ever—kidnapping in this state.”

When King spoke after the lunch recess, he showed the
capacity crowd why it was great for the prosecution to have a charismatic
politician on their side. His crafty remarks were the most quoted by wire
reporters and appeared in newspapers nationally. They also earned him the wrath
of defense attorneys. He began with a folksy, down-to-earth appeal to the small-town
jury, in which he praised them for their honesty and intelligence, adding, “It
comes from the depths of my heart.”

Getting down to business, he criticized Moss’s long
history of using the insanity defense. “Flint Moss carries in his vest pocket
the plea of insanity and when he is hired, it is understood that THAT is to be
part of the defense—if they will stand for it. THAT—is his stock and trade—an insanity
plea.”

From that foundation, King adroitly blasted away
at numerous defense arguments and hypothesized new arguments of his own: that despite
telling Snedden he would kill Gorrell in Kansas City, Kennamer waited until he
got back to Tulsa so he would be in the protective sphere of his father’s
judicial district; that Kennamer forced Gorrell to write the note at the point of
a knife; that Gorrell couldn’t have known the Wilcox address unless Kennamer had
given it to him; and that it couldn’t have been John’s idea because Kennamer
first told Cadillac and then brought up the idea again to Ted Bath in Gorrell’s
presence two days before he left to go to dental school. And then there was his
friend Otto Kramer, who gave them all the motive when he said Kennamer felt
bitter toward the Wilcox family and wanted to get even with Virginia.

“I think he fell in love both with her charming
personality and her father’s millions. I think he was a mule-headed,
precocious, stubborn youngster who just couldn’t see how Miss Wilcox could
resist his attentions—his, the attentions of the son of a federal judge—and it
piqued his pride.”

King then criticized Phil’s strategy for enlisting
a younger boy like Homer Junior, whom he could easily influence, with the hope that
he would tell Virginia or her father, and the family would then welcome him as a
hero.

“I wonder if it has occurred to you why, if he is
all that he is pictured to be, why did he not go to his own devoted father and
tell him of the kidnapping plot?” King asked rhetorically. “Now we find him
back home with the note. Why didn’t he take it to his father? Show it to some
official? Why didn’t he say John had written the note he had in his possession
to some person of authority? That is all he needed to do.”

In asking for a guilty verdict, King demanded that
the jury “do what his father, Federal Judge Franklin E. Kennamer, failed to do—check
him in his career of crime.”

John McCollum blew right into a hyperbolic
denunciation of King, the unfairness of the prosecution, and the attempted
assassination of Judge Kennamer’s career, before ending with a plea that his
client be murdered instead of sent to prison—or something like that. No one
could really understand what he meant.

“This trial has been conducted in such a way that
it has driven me to conclude that the prosecution has endeavored to destroy
fairness. I am going to make the statement now, and you will remember it, that
they are trying to use this lawsuit for the purpose of destroying Judge
Kennamer,” McCollum said with sincere outrage.

The Pawnee defense attorney then put all the blame
on J. Berry King and declared that the sole reason he was brought into the case
was to do the dirty work of a political assassin. McCollum then wandered far
off-point with a long defense of Judge Kennamer that had little to do with the
innocence of his client until he was near the end, when he said the prosecution
had not provided the jury with a motive. Nor had they proved, in his mind, that
Phil had entered the Gorrell car before John did, which led him to conclude
that Phil had somehow been framed for murder by John Gorrell, who carried the
gun that killed him.

“Was Phil framed? [By] the other boy? Yes. He
proved that. They did. He drove around on that evening with this gun in
evidence,” McCollum cried out as he held up the Herrington and Richardson
revolver. “This gun was taken from his person and put in the pocket of the car.
That was just a few minutes before he was to meet Phil. Just as handy a place
as you can put a gun in unless you sit there and hold it in your hand.”

It was a statement that left the prosecution
scratching their heads.
John Gorrell framed Phil Kennamer for murder by
leaving the gun out in order to get himself killed?
Or, was he saying the
prosecution was framing his client with the theory that Kennamer found the gun
before Gorrell returned to his car?

It was hard to comprehend what McCollum meant
about anything, or the logic in his conclusions, and it didn’t improve as he
wound down his speech. In reviewing how the medical experts recommended Phil
Kennamer be treated for his psychopathic personality, McCollum made another confusing
statement to the jury. “I would rather have a man commit murder than ask me to
send a helpless, mentally deficient boy to the state penitentiary. That is an
awful thing to think about. Send this boy to the penitentiary among hard,
heartless characters because you have no other place to send him? There is
ample law in Oklahoma to take care of him.”

It was another head scratcher. So, John McCollum
would rather murder a man, his own client perhaps, than send the helpless,
mentally challenged Phil Kennamer to the penitentiary? If he was asking for his
client to be found not guilty by reason of insanity, it was a curious way of
going about it.

Prentiss Rowe was less prone to overblown
hyperbole. Fighting off a flu bug that had ravaged Pawnee, the 240-pound
assistant county attorney commanded attention without ever having to raise his
voice. Since his work on the jury selection, Rowe had taken a backseat during
most of the trial. When given a chance to speak to that jury one last time, his
immediate approach was to return to the topic that seemed to dominate the
closing arguments, Judge Kennamer. Like all the others, he was overly
philosophical on the role of juries and the legal system. Like all the others,
he took the scenic route to get to any of the few relevant points the entire
case boiled down to. When he did get there, he was surprisingly eloquent, more
so than any of the other attorneys.