Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (31 page)

But it would never be over. The Kennamers were
never going to go away. They were never going to stop. They were right and
everyone else was wrong. It would just keep going—on and on and on—until one of
them was dead.

1936

WITH THE STATE COURTS NOW off-limits,
Judge Kennamer chose to pursue his son’s freedom through backdoor channels to both
the governor’s office, and to the pardon-and-parole board. When the fifty-seven-year-old
gathered the support of affluent friends to secure bail, he subconsciously
signaled the strategy he would use to get his boy out of prison. Instead of
going at Governor Marland directly and publicly, the Kennamer family lobbied
influential contacts to take the lead and swamp the governor’s office with private
conversations, phone calls, and letters advocating for clemency. All of this
was done quietly, behind the scenes, and away from the prying eyes of the
press.

But by October of that year, rumors were getting
back to the Gorrell family that something was going on. Their son’s killer was
only eight combined months into his sentence and already, the pro-Kennamer
allies were campaigning for his release. On October 12, eyebrows were raised
when the
Tulsa Tribune
revealed that Phil, his father, and a new
attorney had held a secret meeting, outside of prison, in the home of an
assistant deputy warden. This prompted the Gorrells to meet with Governor
Marland to ask if a formal petition for clemency had been filed, and if the
prison was giving Phil special treatment. They were assured that no application
had been filed, and that Kennamer was being treated the same as any other prisoner.
But the state’s leading politician then made a statement that was indicative of
things to come. “The only thing that will change my mind (about clemency) is
the production of newfound evidence,” he told reporters outside his capitol-building
office.

As would soon become clear to the entire state of
Oklahoma, when Governor Ernest Marland prematurely announced in March, “There
will be no clemency for the youth during my administration,” that wasn’t what
he meant. What he really meant was:
I’m wishy-washy, and despite what the
Pawnee jury voted, and the findings of the grand jury, and the ruling by the criminal
court of appeals—my actions regarding Phil Kennamer can easily be influenced.

1937

This much was proved when he announced six months
later, in April 1937, that he “[had] been urged by close personal friends to
consider the Kennamer case and grant clemency,” an Oklahoma City newspaper
reported.

“I think in fairness, I should look into this,”
Governor Marland continued. “I will look into it myself, in the next year.”

This unprovoked announcement was met with suspicion
from the Gorrells and Dixie Gilmer, the new county attorney. As governor-elect
in December 1934, Marland had visited Tulsa after the murder and had spoken
with authorities. When pervasive gossip raised doubts about everything, he had assigned
his own investigator to look into the murder, but his findings matched those of
the grand jury—that there was no more to the case than what was already said in
the courtroom or from the grand jury. Now, in spite of everything else, Marland
allowed himself to be prejudiced by the persuasiveness of others who convinced
him Phil Kennamer had been treated unfairly.

By July, sixteen influential citizens with ties to
Judge Kennamer—including a state district judge and the governor of Alabama—had
personally written Governor Marland requesting parole for Phil Kennamer. Another
petitioner, a local attorney from Tulsa, tried to argue that Phil Kennamer was
persecuted because he
is
the son of a federal judge, and that he did not
actually murder John Gorrell; someone else did, and Phil was “taking the rap”
because he thought his father’s position would set him free.

His letter, like many of the others, incorporated
histrionic language that overstated far-fetched claims of important new
evidence, based on what boiled down to as—gossip. A few weeks later, two other
attorneys used this same approach to assert that “a majority of Tulsa citizens
believe Phil Kennamer has been punished sufficiently for the slaying of John
Gorrell.”

That statement was soon discredited. With the
Kennamer camp clearly one step ahead, Dixie Gilmer, the new county attorney,
and Dr. Gorrell were forced to play catch-up. During the entire month of June
1937, they circulated a petition demanding that Phil Kennamer be kept in
prison. “It is a travesty of justice that we should be required to take such a
preventative measure,” Gilmer told the Associated Press.

By July 4, they had gathered 5,455 names, with
3,783 of them coming from Tulsans.

But when Governor Marland placed the sixteen pro-Kennamer
letters in one pan of a balancing scale, and the petition with 5,455 names in
the other pan, the appeals for parole weighed heavier—according to his scale of
justice. This was proved a few days later when he took the unusual step of
informing Fred Cunningham, lead attorney for the state pardon-and-parole board,
that he was taking “personal charge” of any possible clemency action for Phil
Kennamer, and that it was still under consideration.

Based on popular opinion alone, Governor Marland
could have closed the Phil Kennamer file for the remaining two years of his
term. Instead, his remarks and actions indicated he was leaving the possibility
of parole open and was merely biding his time until the public outlook was more
favorable. The case, Cunningham later told the Associated Press, was “. . .
in a state of suspended animation.”

True to his nature, Phil had his own plans to get
out of his prison sentence. Along with 3,600 other convicts, prisoner 31-420 woke
every morning at six o’clock and put on the regulation uniform of blue denim
trousers, a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and a blue denim coal-miner’s cap.
After a quick breakfast, all able-bodied men were required to be at their work
stations by seven thirty. His first prison job had him starting off at the
bottom, working as a spool tender in the prison’s twine factory. When he
returned to prison following his failed appeal, he continued to work various
positions in the twine factory until he was promoted to a low-level job in the
prison library.

In mid-October 1937, the young man who was once
insulted by his defense attorneys’ claims that he was mentally ill personally
requested a sanity hearing with prison doctors. The irony was not lost on Tulsa
newspapers.

“It (the insanity defense) was rejected by the youth
himself who on the witness stand, insisted that he was sane,” the
Tribune
reminded its readers.

1938

After that effort failed, his next scheme was
revealed during a January 22, 1938, self-arranged interview with the press in
which he promised to leave the country and never return. The story conveniently
coincided with the regular monthly meeting of the parole board, as well as
intimations from Governor Marland that he would act on the case before he left
office in twelve months.

“If I were released, and it were possible under
the terms of my release, I would leave the country permanently and go to South
America to work for a company with which I have been promised employment,”
Kennamer announced. “All I want to do is get away from here [and become] a man
without a country.”

The job was real and his statements calculated.
What Kennamer was offering, with his father’s support, was a conditional parole
that would, hopefully, meet with the approval of those who were against him. A
month earlier, Governor Marland had revealed that he was under intense pressure
to grant clemency. This latest attempt, the Kennamers hoped, would put him over
the top.

But when his case was never brought up during the
monthly clemency meeting, Phil’s next bid for freedom came two weeks later when
he demanded that the new Pawnee County attorney charge a prosecution witness
with perjury. Although the papers didn’t mention his name at first, it was
another attempt to shift blame elsewhere and get revenge against the young man
who had testified to Phil’s premeditation of murder—the young man who had stood
between him and Virginia Wilcox, and the same young man who had married her in
October of 1936—Jack Snedden.

In his letter, Phil claimed that Marion Hamby, the
Pawnee jailer, would support his accusation of perjury and declared, “[he] will
be glad to sign the complaint as required by law.” However, when County
Attorney Horace Ballaine spoke with Hamby, the man said he “[did] remember
something about it,” but his “memory was hazy on exactly what happened.”

After striking out three times in five months,
Kennamer retreated back into his world and began writing a book about the
injustice he was forced to endure. In August, the twenty-three-year-old got one
of the best jobs in the entire institution as a clerk in the prison’s treasury
office. His work, overseeing the prisoners’ private accounts, ended at four
thirty in the afternoon. Instead of attending the educational courses that were
available to most prisoners, Kennamer returned to the cell he shared with James
Arthur Camp, twenty-eight, who was serving a twenty-five-year term for armed
robbery. There, he would indulge in his favorite pastimes of reading, working
on his book, or writing letters.

While Phil lived a comfortable life in a six-by-sixteen-foot
cell
,
the Gorrells were forced to endure yet another tragedy. On a
return trip from Los Angeles, daughter Edith Ann suffered serious injuries
after she lost control of the car she was driving on wet pavement near Grants,
New Mexico, on September 1. The sedan rolled several times, breaking her back and
shoulder, and nearly pulled her scalp off. Her brother, Ben, nineteen, suffered
only minor cuts and bruises. After Edith was stabilized in an Albuquerque
hospital, the two were flown back to Tulsa. Despite several operations, she
remained paralyzed from the waist down.

The Kennamers were suffering too; after a fifteen-year
fight with cystic fibrosis, devoted mother Lillie Kennamer, was dying. It was
an unfortunate situation that created an opportunity for Phil, when her doctor
advised Judge Kennamer that she wouldn’t survive another winter in Oklahoma. To
extend her life, he recommended she be moved to Arizona, where the warm, dry
climate would ease her frequent coughing spasms. But there was just one
problem—she refused to leave without Phil. Friends who visited with her said
she was emaciated, bedridden, and all she wanted to talk about was her youngest
son.

With the help of a high-ranking state politician,
Judge Kennamer requested and received a clemency hearing with the parole board,
who would be asked to consider a ninety-day compassionate parole for Phil to
accompany his mother to Arizona. During the time period, medical furloughs were
occasionally granted and, historically, a significant number of them morphed
into a permanent parole.

The hearing was held on October 31 in the famed
“blue room” inside the state capitol building with a packed crowd of several
hundred people, most of them pro-Kennamer-family supporters. The merits of the
Gorrell-Kennamer case were off-limits. Board members were only interested in
the health of Phil’s mother and the parameters of parole, if granted.

As they had done so many times before, John and
Alice Gorrell were again forced to be the watchdogs of justice for their son’s
killer. In their corner was the indefatigable Dixie Gilmer, who was placed in
the awkward position of lobbying against the dying wish of a long-suffering woman,
who, by all accounts, was a lovely person.

When called to testify, Judge Kennamer gave a
detailed description of his wife’s recent decline. The medical opinion of her
doctor was read into the record and reported on by the
Tribune
. “In his
opinion, Mrs. Kennamer’s condition had been aggravated by worry over her son,
and added the companionship of her son would prolong her life ‘which at any
rate, would not be of long duration.’”

After several dozen more people testified, most of
them in favor of temporary parole, the five-member board retreated into a
private room and returned fifty minutes later with a favorable recommendation
to the governor. The public hearing by the board, the capitol correspondent for
the
Tulsa World
intimated, was merely for show.

“It was obvious from the moment board members
entered the (private) room that the only question for decision would be the
length of time consumed in writing the recommendation to be made to the
governor,” Edward Burks wrote.

But instead of giving Phil the customary ninety days
his father had requested, the parole board generously doubled it to six months,
which shocked supporters and detractors alike, and smacked of favoritism. For
Governor Marland—a man who was married to his dead wife’s niece-turned-adopted-daughter
but later had her adoption annulled when she was twenty-eight so they could get
married—it was a win-win. His administration was finally able to give the
Kennamer camp the victory they had always wanted, and it would also shift the possibility
of granting permanent parole to the new governor, who would take office on
January 9, 1939.

Dixie Gilmer and the Gorrell family had finally
been beaten. Alice Gorrell, who had lost twenty-five pounds since her
daughter’s accident, and who was once again being forced to fight for justice
for her murdered son, made a rare public statement to the press: “. . .
I only wish there were some way the pardon and parole board could send my boy
back to me.”

But nobody from the governor’s office or the parole
board wanted to listen to them anymore, and the time the Gorrells had left with
their only daughter was slipping away. Edith Ann died of pneumonia on September
12, 1940, just twelve days before her twenty-fourth birthday.

1939

For the next five months, Phil Kennamer, now
twenty-three, lived by the discipline required to meet his parole. In addition
to attending to the needs of his dying mother, he was obligated to be employed,
and after four weeks of searching, the former office clerk found work as a
warehouse employee, unloading barrels of oil and supplies for one hundred
dollars a month. This was a new Phil Kennamer, more reserved and mature. His
combined thirty-two months in prison had tempered his arrogance—a little.

On March 5, Lillie Kennamer was transported back
to Tulsa where she could spend her final days with her family. She died on
Sunday, March 12, at the age of fifty-four.

The fate of Phil Kennamer was left to Governor
Leon Phillips, who said he would review the entire case file and the appeals-court
decision. He took his time and granted several two-week parole extensions while
Phil kept working at his job in Arizona. But on May 29, Governor Phillips
ordered him back to prison.

“The story of this case is a sordid one; a
disobedient and willful boy, idleness and inattention to school, refusal to
continue in any job, a carefree life, culminating in a frequent use of
intoxicating liquors and finally in taking of human life without legal excuse,”
Phillips wrote.

He then agreed with experts who said Phil had his
own moral code outside of the one prescribed by the people and laws of Oklahoma.

“We cannot [disregard] the verdicts and judgments
of the juries and courts upon the insistence of friends, or to relieve the
aching hearts of relatives because of the crime of some member of the family,”
Phillips continued. “I think justice requires that I . . . reject
the plea for further clemency.”

Governor Phillips, unlike his predecessor, had a
backbone, and when he sent Phil back to prison, the strong language with which
he ordered it sent a message to those in the Kennamer camp that he considered
the matter closed for discussion. For the next two years, pleas for leniency
were filed and disregarded.

1940-41

During that time, Judge Kennamer, now a widower,
was preoccupied with personal problems. In May 1940, after fifteen years on the
bench, he retired nine years early on a disability pension, citing fatigue and
arthritis. One year later, he raised eyebrows when he filed for divorce from
thirty-two-year-old Pauline Fox Kennamer. The two had gotten married on
February 19, 1940, in a secret ceremony in Benton County, Arkansas, where the
sixty-one-year-old gave his name as Elmore Kennamer, fifty-one, from Big Cabin,
a village twelve miles east of Chelsea.