Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (9 page)

By Monday morning, the city was equally divided
between those who believed it was suicide, and those who knew it was murder.
Maddux and city police ruled his death a suicide, based on the physical
evidence, and “because of imaginative worries over his connection with the
Gorrell slaying and the threatened exposure of his previous escapades with Phil
Kennamer.”

Born’s university professors told police he was a
high-strung boy, nervous, and prone to worry over insignificant things. The
insignificant thing Born worried over was a threat by Kennamer “to make public
the details of [some of their] escapades.” The
Tulsa World
quoted an
anonymous “police official,” who sounded a lot like Sgt. Maddux, saying that he
was convinced Kennamer spoke with Born from the matron’s quarters sometime
between ten in the morning and noon, despite the claims of the county jail
employees. Born’s effort to contact Kennamer from the drugstore twenty minutes
before he shot himself was “one last effort to persuade the imprisoned youth
not to reveal their escapade at the Mayo Hotel.”

The anonymous police official dodged questions
regarding how the telephone communication between the two boys could have occurred.
Jailer A. J. Schultz denied any outgoing call had been placed, and the Born’s
maid, Josey Henderson, told police the phone only rang once that morning and it
was for her. Schultz did admit that a young man called around 1:15 p.m. and asked
to speak to Kennamer, but the jailer said he told him Kennamer wasn’t allowed
telephone calls. This was corroborated by the drugstore employees who reported
Born only used the phone for approximately twenty seconds before slamming the
receiver down.

Even if this “police official” was making
provocative statements, the physical evidence lent itself to suicide. An
autopsy revealed powder burns and bullet fragments inside the wound, which detectives
believed were consistent with suicide.

When Born left the drug store, he bumped into a
young female friend who was later interviewed by police. “He left her and told
her that he was going to jump into the river,” Maddux said later. “That was
just a few minutes before he was found shot. Apparently he meant it but changed
his mind on the method of suicide.”

In spite of all this evidence, the county
sheriff’s department firmly believed Born was murdered. Explaining his theory
that another, unknown man aided Kennamer the night Gorrell was slain, and then
later murdered Born, Sheriff Charles Price said, “we have, from the start,
worked on the theory that Born’s death may have been murder, and [we] are not
satisfied with the suicide theory.”

The sheriff’s department was self-admittedly
affected by the rumors flying around Tulsa that it was a murder. They searched
for a suspect seen fleeing Born’s car after the gunshot echoed across Detroit
Avenue, but this turned out to be the man who found Born, and he was running to
call for an ambulance.

Sheriff Price then took issue with how Born’s body
was positioned when found by the ambulance drivers. “The pistol was found in
Born’s lap,” Sheriff Price told reporters. “If the boy had shot himself, I
believe the weapon would have dropped straight down to the seat. The boy’s
hands also were cupped in a manner as to fill with blood. That doesn’t seem
right to me. The right hand should have been outside the leg.”

Also suspicious to the sheriff was the entrance
wound in the right temple which was larger than the exit wound on the left. It
should have been the other way around, he said. Normally, that would be true, answered
city detectives, but when Born pressed the barrel against his temple, the
bullet fractured the temporal and parietal plates. When the bullet exited the
left side, it punched a small hole in the driver’s-side window and kept on
going. However, Chief Deputy Evans didn’t believe it happened this way.
Instead, he put forth the theory that Born’s killer was standing outside the
car when he shot Born through the window.

But if this was true, where did the bullet go? It
wasn’t inside his head. It wasn’t inside the car, and it didn’t open the door
and then close it on its way out of Born’s Chevrolet. Evans’s theory was based
on his own assumptions and ignored the plausible answer. Nevertheless, people
believed him.

During that entire week, whispered phone calls were
made to Sheriff Price, instructing him to look at certain people, or hinting
that he should follow this lead or that clue, and it would all bring the
mystery man into the light, the
World
told its readers. A young girl,
nationally known for her ability to mimic birdcalls, was in the area that Sunday.
She reporting hearing a gunshot and then hearing a man running through the
bushes. Deputies investigated this report but were never able to substantiate
it. Nevertheless, it was more proof that Born was murdered, even though it
could never be verified.

When his investigation into Born’s death began to
stall, Sheriff Price became frustrated and publicly claimed that there were
many witnesses with information who were just too afraid to come forward. If
they did, he said, they would prove his murder theory.

“I am at a loss to understand this fear,” Price
said. Hundreds of people knew the boys, and in his mind, one of them held the
key to solving both murders, if they would only come forward. “Just because
they chanced to know something of the principals in this case does not mean the
police will interpret that as meaning they are connected with the case . . .
or as anything detrimental to their reputation.

“They should consider it a civic obligation to aid
officers in the matter. If these persons will get in touch with us, we will see
that they will receive the full protection of this office.”

No one ever came forward.

WHILE THE DEBATE OVER BORN’S death continued, one
persistent rumor was cleared up when seventeen-year-old Homer Wilcox Jr. walked
into police headquarters on Monday, December 10, as promised, to explain his connection
to the case. Police and newspapermen had been holding back on reporting that
Wilcox, classmate Bill Padon, and their dates that night, had shot out the two
streetlights near Gorrell’s Ford just hours before he was murdered. The murder,
and all the rumors and events that stemmed from it, roused the suspicions of
officials and the general public. It was hard for them to believe the
streetlights being shot out did
not
have something to do with the murder
and was just a coincidence.

Homer Wilcox Jr. and his father arrived at 8:35 in
the morning and were both neatly dressed in dark blue overcoats, tailored
suits, and fashionable ties. They were unfamiliar with the layout of the police
station and appeared confused by the crowd at the door of the municipal
courtroom. A helpful reporter directed them to Maddux’s office.

While the sergeant and Assistant County Attorney Dixie
Gilmer questioned the young man for forty-five minutes, Homer Senior and his
attorney waited in the press room of the courthouse and chatted with reporters.
Wilcox expressed his belief that Kennamer had “forced his companionship” on
some of the younger boys whose names had been mentioned in the case.

“Kennamer often called our house by telephone and
asked for Homer, but Mrs. Wilcox consistently discouraged the association,
principally because Kennamer was reputed to be a wild driver and had been in
several automobile accidents,” Senior told reporters. “Mrs. Wilcox didn’t want
our son to go out with Kennamer and get hurt in an accident. I told the boy to
give police any information he might have that would help them. But he doesn’t
know anything.”

The fact that Wilcox and friends shot out the two
streetlights nearest to where Gorrell was found dead in his car was mere
coincidence, Senior asserted.

Maddux and Dixie Gilmer agreed and seemed
satisfied with the boy’s explanation that his connection to the crime scene was
a fluke, but Junior and Padon had still broken the law. Homer was formally
arrested on a charge of malicious mischief and was in the process of emptying
his pockets for the desk sergeant when he remarked, “I’ve certainly gotten
myself in a fine mess.”

Before he could be jailed, however, his father’s
attorney made arrangements for the boy’s release on a $500 bond. When he
appeared in municipal court the next day, the flash of a news photographer’s
camera brought an admonishment from Judge Andress Hatch.

“This young man is under the protection of the
court,” Judge Hatch began. “While he’s under my jurisdiction, I am not going to
subject him to pictures unless he wants them taken.”

For such a minor crime and the boy’s accidental
involvement in the case, the
World
and
Tribune
devoted dozens of
column inches and numerous photographs. The story then spread as far east as
the
New York Times,
and to California newspapers like the
Oakland
Tribune.

Judge Hatch reprimanded the boy and hinted at the perceived
privileges of being the son of a wealthy oilman.

“Doubtless you have been the subject of parental
indulgence,” he began. “You have had pleasures and conveniences which many your
age do not have. You should have had some privations and hardships to make you
strong. Perhaps if things in general had not been so easy, it would be
different.”

He then fined the boy seventy-five dollars and
expressed his desire that it should be deducted from his Christmas allowance. In
contrast, the
Tulsa Tribune
noted that the madam of a brothel was fined fourteen
dollars plus court costs that same day. Padon was also arrested and fined fifty
dollars for his part. The two girls who were with them that night were never
charged. Ironically, it was one of them who had shot out the light nearest to
Gorrell’s Ford after Padon had taken a shot and missed.

Outside the courtroom, Wilcox Senior took offense to
the judge’s criticism of his parenting and how newspapers and city leaders were
shaping the story into a cautionary tale of rich kids gone wrong.

“The amount of money given my children as spending
change is so small that I would not name it for fear friends would think it
untrue. The children of financially well-off families are wild, in a way, but
no wilder than those in less fortunate circumstances. And it is only the
prominence of the parents that has brought both stories to the front pages of
the nation’s press.

“Youths of families living in my neighborhood and
who are schoolmates of my son do not have large sums of money to spend,
according to their fathers with whom I have talked. I believe my own family is
an average one and I know that Junior does not have too much money to spend,”
Senior said as he adjusted his fedora in preparation to leave. “One does not
have to have money to get into trouble. Lack of it is the usual cause for
crime. Daily check of the newspaper and courts will show that.”

But Wilcox’s statement was never given much
consideration. For average folks in town, it was easy to cast blame on the
shortcomings of all the mothers and fathers of Tulsa’s privileged youth. After
all, the names of kids from regular families weren’t being dragged through the
newspaper mud—it was those high-society types. Hours after the news of Born’s
death had spread throughout Tulsa, Mayor Truman Penney made a rare Sunday
evening appearance at the police station.

“The parents are to blame at bottom for this
shocking revelation of what our children have been doing,” Mayor Penney dramatically
declared to a
World
reporter. “While the parents give their time to
making money (this left no doubt
which
parents he meant), the children
go about ungoverned. I am greatly disturbed and saddened by what happened today
and by what has happened in the last two weeks. It has got to the point where I
don’t know what to do next.”

But he did know what he was going to do next. In a
meeting of city commissioners led by Oscar Hoop on Tuesday, December 11, city
leaders swore to go after the one element which they believed was corrupting Tulsa’s
youth the most: marble machines—the grandfather of the pinball machine.

“Marble machines and loitering of young people
around them have provided much of the background for events that tie into the
death investigation,” the
Tribune
claimed in a front-page article. However,
the precise correlation between marble machines and murder was never actually explained.

“Reverberations of the Gorrell murder case were
felt in the city commission meeting Tuesday [December 11] as Police
Commissioner Hoop announced that marble machine distributors would either clean
house or the police would do it for them,” the
Tribune
continued. Hoop’s
proposal was to clear the machines from establishments located near the
schools, and to establish the city’s complete control over them through
licensure.

But as Hoop later confessed in that same meeting,
he didn’t want to just restrict the simple penny-operated games, he wanted to
eliminate them.

“I offer this more in hope than in confidence; I believe
it will ultimately be necessary to remove the machines,” Hoop asserted. And in
his mind, their removal from businesses located near schools didn’t necessarily
mean removal from businesses located near schools. Instead, it meant anywhere
young people congregate in their free time for fun and socializing.

“Marble machines, which Hoop and Mayor Penney
declare are taking the lunch money
[17]
of grade, junior high, and high school students, must be moved from any store,
café, or drug store where students usually congregate, Hoop decreed,” the
Tribune
continued.

The college-professor-slash-police-commissioner
found an avid supporter in Mayor Penney.

“I have received more complaints from the parents
of children about these machines than any other one thing,” the mayor postulated.
“It seems even that prizes are offered for high scores!”