Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (33 page)

On a visit to Oklahoma for a legal matter during
late November 1943, Kennamer had told
Tulsa World
Managing Editor Edward
Burks about a premonition he had.

“Something just seems to tell me,” Kennamer said
to his dinner guest at the family home, “that I won’t come back. I hope that if
I die under the flag of my country, those who have condemned me will hold me
differently in their memories.”

His wish was granted. News of Phil Kennamer’s
death spread nationally when it was made public on September 27, one day after
the army officially notified Judge Kennamer on his farm in Chelsea.

Governor Kerr declared that Kennamer’s death on
the battlefield justified the parole board’s decision to grant his freedom. “He
has joined the ranks of Oklahoma sons who have given their lives that we may be
free,” Kerr said in solemn tone to a
Tribune
reporter. “No man can do
more.”

Editorials from scattered newspapers throughout
Oklahoma and Texas proclaimed that with his sacrifice came redemption.

“Such a sacrifice will purify any life and clear
the record of any individual of any errors of his youth,” declared the editor
of the daily newspaper in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

“It isn’t easy to atone for a crime,” the
Denton
Record-Chronicle
stated on September 30, “but Phil Kennamer . . .
has done as much as any man can do in atonement. Kennamer is no more a hero
than thousands of other Americans who have laid down their lives in battle, but
at least some of the black mark on his name should be erased by his sacrifice.”

The
Daily Oklahoman
had more eloquent words
with its praise for Oklahoma’s fallen son. “No matter what Phil Kennamer ever
did and no matter what mistakes he ever made, he died in a uniform for country’s
sake, and that settles all scores. Let us forget the errors of youth, however
serious those errors may have been, and remember only that Phil risked his life
and gave it freely out yonder in the battle and the storm.”

This caliber of public absolution was exactly what
Judge Kennamer wanted—before 1944. Although he finally got it, it came with a
price he was never willing to pay. For on the morning of September 26, when he
received that telegram from the War Department, Franklin Elmore Kennamer discovered
what John and Alice Gorrell learned on the floor of a Pawnee hotel room:

That God has not invented pain like the pain of
losing a child—and all the pain that came before could barely be remembered. In
the years that remained, when they were lost in their quiet yearning for those
lives they would never see, they were broken by the theft—of the way it was
supposed to be.

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Holly Anderson: 1897-1974

After leaving office in January 1937, Holly Anderson worked
in private practice for two years until he entered the state House of
Representatives in January 1939. His first act was to introduce a bill
requiring a three-day notice for obtaining a marriage license in order to
prevent “gin marriages,” in which couples from Texas crossed the border into
southern Oklahoma to marry on a whim because they were drunk and horny. In
1942, after Anderson had already won the Democratic nomination for reelection,
he resigned from public office to join the US Army Air Force with the rank of
lieutenant, where he served as a technical training officer. After the war, he returned
to private practice and died on May 3, 1974. He and his wife, Virginia, had two
daughters.

William Dixie Gilmer: 1901-1954

William “Dixie” Gilmer served as the Tulsa County Attorney
from 1937 to 1946, where he developed a statewide reputation as an aggressive
prosecutor. With his popularity and name recognition firmly established, he
entered the Democratic primary for governor, but lost to Roy Turner, who went
on to win the 1946 election. In 1948, Gilmer beat Republican incumbent George
B. Schwabe to represent the First District of Oklahoma in the US House of
Representatives. His congressional career only lasted one term, and he spent
most of that time in Walter Reed Hospital being treated for tuberculosis.
Schwabe regained his seat in the 1950 election, and Gilmer returned to
Oklahoma, where Governor Johnston Murray appointed him to serve as state
commissioner of public safety. During his time with the Murray administration,
he introduced several improvements, including the use of radar in state patrol
vehicles. He died from his illness on June 9, 1954, two days after his
fifty-third birthday. He and his wife, Ellen, had no children.

J. Berry King: 1888-1962

After the Phil Kennamer trial, J. Berry King entered private
practice, but poor health forced him to retire by the 1950s. A World War One
veteran, he was active in the American Legion as well as the VFW. He was known
to be an avid newspaper reader and often wrote letters to various Oklahoma
columnists and editors. In a 1959 letter to an Oklahoma City newspaper
columnist, he described himself as “chairman of the bored.” He died on November
24, 1962. His wife, Sadie, moved to Houston, Texas, and died there in 1984.
They had no children.

Henry B. Maddux: 1898-1953

Following his public termination from the Tulsa Police
Department, castigation by the grand jury, and procurement of a discredited
witness statement for Judge Kennamer, which he then tried to sell to Dr.
Gorrell, Maddux lived in Tucson, Arizona, and Roswell, New Mexico, where he
owned and operated cemetery monument companies.

In 1947 he moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he worked
in the insurance business as a risk manager and sales director. He retired from
the life insurance branch of the American National Insurance Company in 1952
and died of a heart attack on January 2, 1953.

Although his obituary says he was fifty-two when he died,
military records available from Ancestry.com indicate he was born on December
30, 1898, and was actually fifty-four years old at the time of his death. His
obituary also reveals that Maddux was “…an internationally recognized rifle
marksman. His awards include the International Wimbledon trophy as the best
marksman in the world, a dozen other trophies, and fifty medals.”

Captain Henry Maddux, of the Texas National Guard,
did
win the International Wimbledon marksman trophy in 1923. He also won second
place in a 1922 national competition when he was a lieutenant. In spite of his
actions during the Kennamer-Gorrell case, he served his country in the military
during peacetime and in war, earned several promotions, and distinguished
himself as a one of the best marksmen in the world during the 1920s.

Austin Flint Moss: 1880-1943

After Moss quit the defense team following Kennamer’s failed
appeal in April 1936, he continued in private practice, but a heart condition
forced him to enter semi-retirement a few years later. In March 1943, he retired
for good and moved with his wife, Marjorie, to Long Beach, California, where he
died later that year, on December 16, at the age of sixty-three. He lived long
enough to see his client paroled.

Hon. Charles Bingley Stuart: 1857-1936

Defense attorney Charles Stuart died on October 30, 1936, six
months after the Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals rejected Kennamer’s appeal
and banned his case from the Pawnee County Court. As a former federal judge
during territorial days, and one of Oklahoma’s most famous litigators, Stuart
was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame on April 26, 1937. His death notice
in the
Daily Oklahoman
was full of praise and declared him to be “the
most feared and most respected man ever to practice law in Oklahoma.”

Judge Franklin Elmore Kennamer: 1879-1960

After Philip died in 1944, Judge Kennamer lived a quiet
existence on his farm near Chelsea, Oklahoma, until he died of heart trouble on
May 1, 1960. He is buried in the Chelsea Cemetery near his daughter, Opal, who
never married. His second wife, Pauline, used her ex-husband’s last name until
she died in 1955. She is also buried in the Chelsea Cemetery.

Edna Harman: 1891- or 1893-1958

As near as I can tell, Edna Harman managed to keep her name
out of the newspapers until she died in San Diego, California, in 1958, at the
age of sixty-five or sixty-seven. Different authoritative sources list her
birth year as either 1891 or 1893. In spite of the controversy she created
during the Kennamer trial, Edna Harman had a family who loved her dearly, and
she was known to be an active member of her church in Tulsa.

Sidney Born Jr.: 1915-1934

No one was ever arrested in connection with the death of
Sidney Born. Although the coroner declared he committed suicide, Born’s life
insurance company sided with the family and paid the $1,000 death benefit to
his father.

Virginia Wilcox: 1916-2008

Following her October 1936 marriage to Jack Snedden, Virginia
and Jack had two children: Jack Robin Snedden Jr. (1938-2003), and Beverly
Virginia Snedden [Freese] (1939-2014). After serving in the merchant marine
during World War Two, and then enjoying a successful business career, Jack
Snedden died of pneumonia on November 12, 1946, three days short of his
thirty-first birthday. Virginia later remarried, but she had no more children.
Her grandson, and the son of Beverly, Jim Freese, is also working on a book
about the Kennamer-Gorrell case. Virginia died in 2008 at the age of
ninety-two.

Philip Kennamer: 1915-1944

In Trans-en-Provence, along the main road to Draguignan, near
the intersection of Impasse Notre Dame and Place de 16 Aout 1944, beside a
small chapel, there is a tiny city park where the locals have erected a war
memorial to the three soldiers who died there during Operation Dragoon. The
memorial is a rough-cut stone with an iron Patriarchal Cross, and an engraved
marble slab that, when translated, reads: “In Memory of Debray Jacques, Harris
T Moore, Phillip (sic) Kennamer, American parachutists who died facing the
enemy on August 15, 1944, for the liberation of the village.”

In 1947, Philip’s sister, Opal, finished the book he started
writing while he was in prison and titled it:
The Inside of the Kennamer
Case
. On August 26, she confidently declared to
Tulsa Tribune
editors
that the manuscript was on its way to the publisher. However, there is no
record the book was ever published, and I could find no copy in existence.

Philip’s body was buried in France until it was exhumed,
returned to the United States, and interred at Memorial Park Cemetery in Tulsa
on May 8, 1948, when funeral services were held. He is buried in the same
cemetery where John Gorrell Jr. and Sidney Born Jr. were laid to rest.

Dr. John and Alice Gorrell, 1881-1961, and 1885-1959

John and Alice Gorrell died in 1961 and 1959, respectively. After
losing John Jr. and Edith Ann, they raised their two remaining children
Benjamin Franklin Gorrell and daughter Nancy Jane. Ben went on to become a
well-respected eye, ear, nose, and throat doctor, like his father.
Doctor
Ben Gorrell and his wife, Mildred, had three children, John, Benjamin Jr., and
Elizabeth Ann, who died in 1992. John is retired and lives in the country near
Sand Springs where he is fixing up a twenty-five-foot Sea Ray Cruiser and
builds birdhouses for the young patients of a children’s cancer wing of a Tulsa
hospital. Ben Jr. is a successful insurance executive in Tulsa. Nancy Jane
married George Coe and they had three children together: Mary Ann, Janie, and
Andi. Nancy Jane died in 1995.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO FIND
words to adequately thank all the people who helped me with the research for
this story. Without them, this book would be much less than what it has become.

It begins with the research department of the
Tulsa Public Library, where the kindness of Nick Abrahamson, Jennifer Greb,
Kathy Harger, Mary Moore, and Sheri Perkins was overwhelming. They were always
professional, accommodating, and helpful. Sheri was particularly helpful with
her multi-sourced answers to obscure research questions, and for introducing me
to the oral history collection, where I found thirty-five-year-old interviews
that added color and depth to a few of the book’s characters.

I couldn’t have written this book without visiting
the Pawnee County Courthouse, where Judge Patrick Pickerill gave me a tour and
let me explore, and Court Clerk Janet Dallas answered questions and provided
historical perspective.

Dodie O’Bryan, from the Pawnee County Historical
Society, was as cheerful as she was helpful, providing valuable information and
answering questions.

I also want to express my sincere appreciation to
Jean Loup-Gassend, author of
Operation Dragoon: Autopsy of a Battle: The
Allied Liberation of the French Riviera August-September 1944,
who helped
me understand Operation Dragoon, American paratroopers, and the First Airborne
Task Force. His attention to detail is appreciated. We traded dozens of emails,
and he was always informative and encouraging.

I also want to thank Operation Dragoon veteran,
Merle McMorrow, 92, both for his help with my book and for his service to our
country. During our email discussions, he patiently explained to me what it was
like to be a paratrooper, to have served during World War II, and to have been
friends with Private First Class Philip Kennamer. His book,
From
Breckenridge to Bastogne: The Accounts of a World War II Paratrooper,
contains many amazing stories about his time in the service.

Deadly Hero
would be a grammatical and
style nightmare if it weren’t for my editor, G. F. Boyer, who went far beyond
her primary duties to provide me with helpful suggestions and encouragement. In
twenty years of writing, she is the coolest editor I’ve ever had.

I wanted to save the Gorrell family for last. I
met John Robert Gorrell, John Gorrell Jr.’s nephew, last summer while doing
research for this book, and he was gracious enough to have me over to his
wonderful home. I thank him for being helpful to me and for his encouragement
to work on this story, even though it must be a difficult subject for his
family.

From my heart, thank you, everyone.