Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland
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Authors: Jason Lucky Morrow
Deadly Hero
Also by Jason Lucky Morrow
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Copyright © 2015 Jason
Lucky Morrow
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may
be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in academic works, critical reviews, and certain other
noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Published by: Historical
Crime Detective Books, Tulsa, OK
Editor: Gloria F Boyer,
gfboyer.com
Cover Design: Jason Morrow
ISBN-13: 978-1511991711
ISBN-10: 1511991712
ASIN: B00XLSKNI2
First Edition, 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mom.
A Special
Note on Historical Accuracy
AS A FORMER NEWPAPER
REPORTER, my style of writing is to craft an entertaining story, but also to
stick with the facts. I go where the research leads me and in the end, the
story is the story. All of the dialogue, quotes, and events in this book are as
they appeared in the original source materials. I have not recreated any
dialogue or manufactured events to make the story more dramatic. In some cases,
especially during the trial portion, I had to trim excess verbiage to make the
content flow more efficiently.
To help bring the characters to life, I relied on an
enormous amount of newspaper coverage to guide me in portraying body language,
facial expressions, mannerisms, gestures, and tone of voice. These character
traits are used to enhance the scene and set the mood, without altering the
facts. About half of such character traits were specifically described in the
research material. The other half of the character traits portrayed in this
book are based on clues found in the research material and should be considered
semi-fictional.
This book was written by referring to
approximately 640 newspaper articles, magazines, books, maps, census reports,
interviews, and other resources. Although I have done my best to verify the
information I have included, in any work of nonfiction, it is inevitable that
some facts or interpretations will be incorrect.
Footnotes:
I have used footnotes
throughout this book to provide clarity, perspective, or additional
information. If you are reading this book on an e-reader, I encourage you
to click the footnote links for information that will enhance your understanding
of the events and your experience of the story.
Thank
you
Before we
begin, I would like to thank you for purchasing a copy of this book. I truly
hope you enjoy this bizarre true story. If you do, I would be grateful if you
would write a review on Amazon. Your reviews will really make a difference in
the success of this book. As an independent researcher and writer, my only
sources of advertising are reviews and word of mouth. As an underdog author in
the true crime genre, I rely on my fans to spread the word.
The Murder
His teeth chattering so that he could
hardly speak, Oliver refused details until he had pushed those who met him into
the safety of the baggage room at the Claremore station.
“He is going to kill me,” Oliver
squeaked. “My God, why did I say that I would name the man who killed Gorrell?”
— Tulsa Daily
World
December 2,
1934
Friday, 12:05 a.m., November
30, 1934
WESLEY CUNNINGHAM JUST
WANTED TO get home. After his family’s Thanksgiving
[1]
meal, the seventeen-year-old
met up with friends for an evening out in downtown Tulsa that included a 9:30
showing of
College Rhythm
, followed by sandwiches and Nehi pop at the
Orpheum Theater’s lunch counter. Around midnight, Wesley said his good-byes and
sat in his family’s Ford DeLuxe while the engine warmed up. The weather had
turned ugly, and the mixture of rain and sleet would impair his visibility for
the drive home. It was time to get going.
Driving south, Wesley was just a minute or two
from reaching his stepfather’s driveway, when he saw something unusual in the
road. In front of him, on a triangular median wedged between Victor Avenue and Forest
Boulevard in the heart of Tulsa’s exclusive Forest Hills residential area, the
front end of a Ford sedan had gone partway over the median, with the back half blocking
the street. Although his headlights could barely pierce the elements to illuminate
the car, he thought he could make out a figure slumped behind the steering wheel.
Since it was a holiday weekend and college students were back in town
reconnecting with old pals, he first thought it was a rich kid living nearby
who’d had too much to drink.
He lived two blocks away and knew the area well. The
square mile of land that radiated out from the troubled car was one of the
wealthiest in the state. Several hundred yards to the west, the seventy-two-room
Philbrook Mansion sprawled out over twenty-three acres crafted into a garden
that would rival the estates of Italy on which it was modeled. Its owner, Waite
Phillips, was the younger brother of the founders of Phillips Petroleum. With
the rest of the country mired deep in the Depression, oil-rich Tulsa was
surviving marginally better than other major cities. And within that square
mile lived most of the oil barons and elite of Tulsa society.
The area was unusually dark, and Cunningham noted that
several streetlights in the vicinity were out. His car was equipped with a
spotlight, and as he pulled abreast of the Ford, he guided the beam toward the
cab.
“I saw a man, very pale, with blood running down
his face,” he would later tell police. But as he studied the situation more
carefully, he slowly began to understand that it was no drunk driver.
That
fella looked dead.
Accelerating to get out of there, Cunningham sped
to his home nearby and told his stepfather, who called police. When the patrolmen
arrived on the scene five minutes later, they checked on the driver and saw
what looked to be a bullet hole in his right temple. Blood streaks had
gravitated down in jagged lines that took several different directions. Their
first assessment of the situation led them to believe the young man had shot
himself while the car was still in motion, which might explain why it had gone
over the curb. They did find a gun in the car, but it wasn’t where they thought
it would be. Instead, it was tucked neatly in a leather shoulder holster that lay
on the seat next to him.
That was odd.
From the description given by Wesley’s stepfather,
the police dispatcher assumed the Ford’s occupant was dead, and at 12:20 a.m.
he notified Sergeant Henry B. Maddux, who was on duty. Maddux was the police
department’s criminologist and second-in-command of the detective bureau. He’d
been hired in January by a progressive new fire and police commissioner, and his
boyish face misled others into thinking he was much younger than his
thirty-five years.
There was virtually no traffic on the wet streets
as Sgt. Maddux, accompanied by Detective George Reif, drove to the scene. When they
arrived at the triangular median, the investigators found the whole area
unusually dark. Looking around, they noticed several streetlamps were out. They
would need more light. Maddux ordered a patrolman and Detective Reif to reposition
their patrol vehicles so that the victim’s car was in the middle, lit by four
headlight beams.
Peering through the open passenger door, Maddux
immediately noticed the death car was still in gear, and the ignition switch
had not been cut off. When the Ford jumped the curb, it had apparently shut the
motor off. Turning his attention to the dead man, Maddux found that aside from
the streaks of blood and a small bruise over his right eye, the young driver
appeared peaceful. His clothing was in perfect order, and his dark, wavy hair was
still carefully in place. His feet were still on the clutch and gas pedals, and
his right fingers were touching a leather holster that held a revolver.
That didn’t sit right with him. How does a man
with a bullet in his head put a revolver back in the holster? He didn’t know
where this case was going to lead, but his training told him photographs of the
dead driver would be needed. As Detective Reif pointed a flashlight toward the
cab, Maddux adjusted the Kalart flash, peered through the Kodak’s viewfinder,
and snapped a picture.
After handing the camera off to Reif, Maddux
carefully reached into the dead man’s coat and, from an inside pocket, retrieved
a wrinkled envelope addressed to John Gorrell Jr., at 1205 Linwood Boulevard,
Kansas City, Missouri. The return address was 2116 East 15
th
Street,
Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the letter was apparently from the boy’s mother.
John Gorrell Jr.?
Maddux didn’t know the name but Reif did; John
Gorrell Sr. was a prominent local physician, and if this was his son, it was a
bit of a surprise to both of them. There had been a lot of suicides lately, but
most of those were by men who had lost fortunes or were beaten down by the
Depression. But as he tilted the boy’s head and aimed Reif’s flashlight toward
the grisly wound, he made a discovery that would eventually turn the entire
city of Tulsa inside out.
There were two bullet holes in the side of Junior’s
head.
Maddux called Reif to take a look and told the
young detective to keep the fact that this was now a murder investigation a
secret. Maddux made an instant decision to throw off the killer by letting him
think the police believed it was a suicide. He wanted the shooter to relax and
let his guard down.
The sergeant then turned his attention to the
revolver jammed tightly into a leather shoulder holster on the seat next to him.
With his handkerchief, Maddux lifted the holster from the edge and gingerly
placed it in a paper sack. If it was the murder weapon, then fingerprints might
link it to the killer. The barrel protruded through the bottom of the holster,
and judging by its smell, it had recently been fired. But a more detailed
examination would have to wait until later that morning, after Maddux notified
the boy’s parents.
In spite of the late hour, the commotion attracted
a small crowd of onlookers. Across the street, the grounds of the Cornelius
Titus mansion were well lit, but not enough to reach across the street. Parked
in a car nearby were two security guards who worked for Mr. Titus. Sergeant
Maddux, a man who lived with his wife in a modest apartment, looked around the
area and understood that this was the part of town where the rich people lived.
It was not going to be a routine murder investigation.
As he warned the patrolmen to guard the scene
until the coroner arrived, one of them directed the senior lawman’s attention
to Wesley Cunningham, who had returned to the area.
“As I turned off Forest Boulevard, I noticed the
car,” Cunningham explained to Maddux. “It looked as if there had been some sort
of accident. I stopped when I was abreast of the car and turned on my
spotlight.”
He then told of how he had seen the lines of blood
on the right side of the man’s pale face and had sped home to tell his stepfather,
who then called police at 12:15 a.m. He estimated five to ten minutes had
passed from the time he discovered the car to when the phone call was made.
That would put the time of death sometime before midnight,
Maddux would later report.
When the police sergeant reached the Gorrell home,
a reporter for the
Tulsa Daily World
had already broken the news to the
family. With a lack of sensitivity, the writer asked Dr. Gorrell if he thought
his son could have committed suicide, a theory being advanced by police.
“Ridiculous,” Dr. Gorrell said, while standing in
the doorway, dressed in his pajamas. “John was in the best of spirits
yesterday. He had been attending dental school in Kansas City and only got home
yesterday morning for the holidays. I know that he would not kill himself. He
was not the type.”
Both parents were emphatic in their opinion that John
had had no reason to commit suicide. He was a normal, vibrant, young man who
was intensely interested in joining the dental profession and was engaged to an
attractive young woman living in Pittsburg, Kansas.
With a scornful look to the reporter, Sgt. Maddux
introduced himself and was let into the Gorrell home. At the same dining-room
table used by the family just hours before, Maddux proceeded slowly with his
questions to the grieving parents. He needed a timeline of their son’s
activities that day, where he was, and who
he was with.
John had returned early that morning from Western
Dental College in Kansas City, where the twenty-one-year-old shared a room with
two other Tulsa boys, Richard Oliver and Jess Harris, the parents told him. Oliver
had stayed in Kansas City, but Harris and Gorrell
drove back to Tulsa in
the Ford. Around noon, John reconnected with his pal Charles Bard, who was home
from Oklahoma A&M.
[2]
The two of them then attended a University of Tulsa football game before having
Thanksgiving dinner at the Gorrell home. It was a normal day, but what they
told Sgt. Maddux next caught his interest.
Thirty minutes into the family dinner, they were
interrupted by a telephone call. Mrs. Gorrell pushed her chair back from the
table to answer the phone, but John was already out of his. There were eight people
at the dinner table that night: John and his younger siblings, Edith Ann and
Ben; Charles Bard; Dr. and Mrs. Gorrell; and two adult guests.
“No, I’ll go, Mother,” John had said as he walked
to an adjoining hallway where the family telephone was located. His mother
couldn’t make out what he was talking to the caller about, but when he returned
to the dining room, she could tell something was wrong. The sparkle had left
his eyes, and his face was blanched and tight.
“He looked to be in a state of suppressed nervous
excitement,” Mrs. Gorrell said. “When I asked what was wrong, he said ‘nothing.’”
But just a few minutes later, John announced he
and Charles had dates that night, and they excused themselves from the table.
They ran upstairs to John’s room to get ready and came back down around 7:20 p.m.
When they came back down, his mother could hear the clicking of the telephone
dial as her son made a call and then John speaking in a low mumble. After he
was done, John and Charlie walked by the crowded dining table toward the front
door. She asked her son where he was going and received a terse reply.
“Don’t ask me, Mother.”
That was the last time she saw her son alive.
BACK AT THE CRIME SCENE, reporters for the
Tulsa
World
and
Tulsa Tribune
were moving through the growing crowd,
looking for neighbors to interview. Frank Moss, one of the night watchmen for
the Titus estate, had heard five shots earlier that night. At nine o’clock, he had
heard three shots, then the sound of a car speeding away, and then later, two
more shots. His partner, Carl Rust, had also heard shooting.
“I heard three shots and then the sound of racing
cars,” Rust told a
World
reporter. “They came around the curve from over
the hill, and then there were two more shots. The cars separated. One of them
drove toward town, and the other turned down in such a way that it could have
been just where this one was found.”
Rust assumed it was young people still celebrating
the holiday. He judged the incident as unimportant until he noticed all the activity
where Gorrell’s car was found. Somehow, the two night watchmen had not noticed
the Ford until the police had shown up.
Sergeant Maddux’s strategy of publicizing a
suicide theory, with the intention of getting the killer to let his guard down,
lasted only a few hours. As reflected in the morning paper, reporters had
learned Gorrell had been shot in the head, twice, and the probable murder
weapon was his own revolver, which was returned to the shoulder holster that
rested on the seat. That information came from police Captain J. D. Bills, who
apparently wasn’t in on the secret.
After the body was removed by the coroner, Maddux
and Reif directed their attention back to the streetlights. Two of them were
out, including one with a shattered bowl that was near the Gorrell car. They
weren’t sure what to make of this detail, or if it was even connected to the
murder. For now, they needed to find Charlie Bard, and they needed to find the
two young ladies the boys had been with the night before. To solve this case,
Maddux and his detectives would have to reconstruct every minute of the nearly five
hours between 7:30 p.m. and 12:10 a.m.