A Murder in Music City Read online

  Paula was thrilled with snow skiing and was glad about anything that would produce more of the white powder on the ski slopes of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where she was learning the sport. The Gatlinburg Ski Resort had been open for only two years when Paula and some of her University of Tennessee classmates formed the school's first Ski Club during the Winter Quarter of 1964.2 With little Mount Harrison as its primary peak, the resort boasted 3,500 feet of elevation—approximately two-thirds of a mile altitude—and several easy runs for skiers to use while learning the sport. Less than forty miles from the university, the slopes were easily accessed by driving southeast from downtown Knoxville along Chapman Highway to Gatlinburg and then up Ski Mountain Road.

  Paula was overjoyed with skiing and could not get enough of it. As a gifted athlete, the 5'5”, 110-pound blond was surprisingly strong, all muscle, with a body made for the fast-twitch jumps and turns and the tricky balance needed to use the edges of her skis to navigate the steeper runs of the little resort. As one of her dorm mates noted, “Paula would rather spend money on lift tickets than food.”3

  But skiing was by no means the only athletic endeavor at which she excelled. Jo Herring would describe Paula as having been her daddy's “tomboy,” with basketballs, tennis balls, and her dad's golf clubs filling up her room at home. Part of the first graduating class of John Overton High School in southern Nashville, Paula had been captain of the girls’ basketball team, had played tennis, and was an excellent bowler. She had more than a few trophies on display in the house on Timberhill Drive.4 And, like the tomboy she was, and given her last name, she was always referred to as “Fish” rather than “Paula” by friends and classmates at Overton High.5

  She also carried her father's love for the Baylor Bears football team, his favorite while growing up in Texas. If she hadn't grown to love the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, she would have given serious consideration to attending Baylor University, but she couldn't wait to get to the University of Tennessee after graduating from John Overton High in June 1963.

  Paula's parents, Wilmer and Eva Jo, both had grown up in the hill country of Texas, forty miles east of Waco, near the working-class communities of Groesbeck and Mexia.6 Near the time of Wilmer's birth, in December 1919, enormous fields of natural gas were found in the area, and the economy as well as the population swelled in response. However, by the time Wilmer was eighteen, the community had settled back to a population of approximately six thousand residents.

  Mexia, with a reputation as a small Texas town you would enjoy no matter how you pronounced it, was where Wilmer Herring and Eva Jo Ainsworth graduated from high school. Decades later, Mexia would also be home to a future celebrity and Playboy Playmate named Anna Nicole Smith, who worked at a local fried chicken restaurant while sporadically attending Mexia High in the early 1980s.7

  Wilmer was four classes ahead of his future bride. He was the oldest of six children and along with his family had been a regular churchgoer from an early age, in part because his grandfather, Napoleon Bonaparte “N. B.” Sikes, had been an influential gospel preacher in the area, with the conservative protestant group known as the Church of Christ.8

  After high school graduation, Wilmer worked at the local J. C. Penney company and then, in July 1941, was inducted into the United States Army Air Forces, where he began study at the military's radio communications university.9

  As a radio operator, Wilmer was responsible for monitoring changes in bomber flight plans, for record keeping, and for broadcasting to other planes, as well as for sending Morse code, at a minimum of twelve words per minute, when required. Three years later, in the summer of 1944, Wilmer Herring earned his silver wings as an aviator and received a commission as a second lieutenant.10

  Eva Jo Ainsworth, born in October 1923, was the second child of a pipefitter and his wife and was thirteen months old when a prospector struck oil in Limestone County, Texas, near the little town of Wortham, where the Ainsworths were living at the time. Up until oil was discovered, the town had primarily been known for ginning cotton for local farmers. But when word of an oil gusher leaked out, the little town was transformed from a few hundred residents to more than 30,000 fortune hunters. Three years and millions of barrels later, the wells dried up, the fortune seekers departed, and the community returned to its former life. When the Great Depression began to impact the farmers in the area, cotton prices plummeted and money became scarce. Jo Herring's father, with a wife and two girls and two boys to support, was hit especially hard by the exit of the drilling operations and the onset of the Depression.

  In September 1941, just weeks before she turned eighteen, Eva Jo Ainsworth embarked on a career as a nurse. The future could not have been brighter on such a path, as there was already a nationwide shortage of nurses when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In July 1943, the dark-eyed brunette from Limestone County obtained her Cadet Nurse card and began a career as a public-health nurse. At around the same time, she married the handsome Wilmer Herring, and he soon went off to war in the South Pacific.11

  Wilmer, meanwhile, served honorably as an Army Air Forces pilot and eventually earned a promotion to first lieutenant. At 5'10” and 150 pounds, he carried his ancestors’ handsome features and kept his wavy black hair combed back from his forehead. In August 1945, while Wilmer dreamed of returning home from the Philippines, where he was serving with the famous Bomber Barons, his daughter, Paula, was born in Texas on Tuesday, August 21. It was twelve days after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, and twelve days before Japan formally surrendered to General MacArthur on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.12

  After the war ended, Wilmer took advantage of the GI Bill to enroll in Baylor University, where he continued his radio studies, combined with a surprising focus on a foreign language—French—and graduated in the class of 1948. With the advantages of good looks, a college diploma, and a prestigious military career, Wilmer Herring accepted a job with Life and Casualty Insurance of Tennessee, housed in one of the tallest buildings in the South, in downtown Nashville. And in 1949, with the promise of rapid career advancement, the Herrings moved from Texas to Gallatin, Tennessee, just north of Nashville, and Jo Herring took a job as county nurse for Sumner County, as the family settled into postwar life.

  For the next ten years, the Herring family built a life in Gallatin, and Paula enjoyed the undivided attention of her parents. In 1958, the family welcomed a newcomer into the mix, baby brother Alan, and a year later they departed Sumner County and moved into a rental house on Elysian Fields Road, near an area south of downtown Nashville that would one day become the Nashville Zoo. While Wilmer continued his work with Life and Casualty, Jo Herring transitioned from her role as county nurse to working as a full-time nurse for Vanderbilt University Hospital. But tragedy struck in September of 1960, when forty-year-old Wilmer Herring was found dead in one of the guest rooms of the Noel Hotel, located in the heart of downtown Nashville.13

  The Noel Hotel was mere steps to Nashville's illegal entertainment mecca, Printers Alley, home to gambling, free-flowing liquor, and adult pleasures. As a conduit to the Alley, the Noel provided twenty-four-hour free parking, twenty-four-hour food service, and a radio and television in every air conditioned room of its building.14

  By all accounts, the loss of her father was especially hard on Paula. Friends said she kept quiet about the tragedy, and focused her energy, talents, and especially her anger on athletic endeavors at her new high school. When the Herrings had moved from Gallatin to Nashville in 1959, John Overton High had just added a ninth grade class to the seventh and eighth grades it had opened with in the fall of 1958. Sadly, on the same day that Wilmer Herring was buried in Mexia, Texas—Tuesday, September 6, 1960—Paula Herring was scheduled to begin the newly added sophomore class at John Overton High School. Years later, many of Paula Herring's closest friends would state that they had not been aware of the circumstances surrounding Paula's father's death,
nor even that he had died.15

  A few weeks after Wilmer's funeral, Jo Herring took the life insurance money from Wilmer's policy and purchased a one-year-old home on Timberhill Drive in the Crieve Hall community as an attempt at a fresh start for the little family.

  In time, Paula's classmates would describe the athletic teenager as “bright, clever, and a jokester,” as well as a tough basketball player. She also took on the enjoyable challenge of being the society editor of the school's newspaper for all four years of high school.16

  Two years later, in September of 1962, seventeen-year-old Paula was one of a several Nashville citizens reporting strange black circles and semicircles in their yards. The Nashville Tennessean described the story in their Saturday, September 22nd edition as “A Dark Whodunit,” and then quoted Paula as claiming to have found a ten-foot-wide circle in her own yard: “My science teacher told me it was probably some kind of mushroom or mold. Whatever it is, it sure is weird.”17 And a few weeks later the seasonal change in the weather caused the circles to simply vanish as if they had never appeared.

  During her final year at John Overton, Paula switched from wearing eyeglasses to contact lens and then lightened her brown locks to accentuate her new look, as she began leaving her tomboy phase behind.18 Male classmates described Paula as “playful and likeable, but not flirtatious, or coquettish.” Her high school graduation photo reflected an attractive young woman with a Mona Lisa smile, a smile that seemed to suggest she had plans for the future.

  A few weeks after Paula's murder, in an interview with Julie Hollabaugh of the Nashville Tennessean, a grief-stricken Jo Herring described her eighteen-year-old daughter as “a girl full of the joy of being alive.”19 Paula was “warm, lovable, intensely energetic, and full of plans for the future. She was an ambitious girl and could achieve anything she wanted to achieve,” recalled Mrs. Herring. “After she outgrew the tomboy stage she thought for a while of going into journalism.”

  Talking about Paula's athleticism and her being captain of her high school basketball team, Jo Herring said, “We used to go to all the basketball games and whenever she'd have a free throw and the gym would get quiet, her little brother would look around and say, ‘that's my sister, hit it, Sister!’”20

  That Alan Herring was proud of his big sister was obvious to anyone who saw them together. And Paula adored her little brother, as well. She nicknamed him “Sputnik” a year after Russia launched the space age in October 1957 by putting their Sputnik satellite into orbit. Paula and her mother later shortened the nickname to “Sput.”

  “Paula was a gregarious extrovert,” said Mrs. Herring, “who made friends easily and rapidly. Within weeks of her enrollment ‘on the Hill’ [University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus] she'd made scores of friends, her room became headquarters for card games and gabfests and hairdos and she'd been elected president of the dorm floor.” According to Jo Herring, Paula called just before she came home for that fateful weekend in February, saying she'd decided to change her major from biology to pre-law. It was the girl's first visit home since Christmas, Mrs. Herring added.

  Later in the same interview, Jo Herring said that she and Paula “had been close since the death of Paula's father, and that it was at Paula's suggestion that she went to dinner that Saturday night. She said, ‘why don't you take the evening off? I have to read a book and make a report.’”

  Decades later, an amateur researcher would pause to wonder why Paula Herring, who clearly was having the time of her life at the University of Tennessee, would choose to leave the ski slopes and the biggest snowfall in years, as well as her sorority friends, just to come home to Nashville to write a book report on a Saturday night in February 1964.

  As for her feelings about the murder, Mrs. Herring said, “I'll never get adjusted to it. I just can't believe it or realize it's happened. I'm living one day at a time. Somehow with friends and help of God, I've managed to survive it this long. But I just keep thinking it's a dream, Paula's still at school.”

  But Paula wasn't at school, and the citizens of Nashville were up in arms over the coed's murder.21 They also felt betrayed and abandoned by the sheriff and other Metro policemen, who had been indicted for taking payoffs to maintain the corrupt lifestyle of Printers Alley. So much so that many of those living in the suburbs decided they were better off banding together in neighborhood watch groups where men would walk nightly patrols while armed with guns and walkie-talkies.

  After visiting the Paula Herring crime scene early Sunday morning, the chief of police, Hubert Kemp, ordered every available man on the police force to be involved in an around-the-clock investigation of the girl's murder. In Kemp's view, “the Herring case takes priority over all other police work.”1

  As for suspects in the Herring case, detectives immediately thought of Boston.2 From June of 1962 through early 1964, the city of Boston had been on a desperate hunt for a man simply known as “the Strangler.” It was said that the strangler had been responsible for as many as thirteen sexual homicides in the area, and he was still on the loose.

  With unfortunate parallels to Boston, in the Crieve Hall area of Nashville there had been many reports of a man prowling the neighborhood. And all the reports had a similar description: a young man with dark hair, fast runner, early twenties, around 5'11” with a light build, and usually seen late at night on weekends, always targeting houses where there was no man at home at the time.3

  In September 1963, a young pregnant mother of two had been raped in the living room of her home by a man fitting the description. Her husband had been away at the time, and her two small children had been asleep in nearby bedrooms.4

  Seven weeks later, a seventeen-year-old girl who was babysitting for a neighbor in Crieve Hall heard someone rattling the locked front door. When she saw a man through the window of the door, she ran to another room and called her father at their home two streets away. When the father arrived at the house, the young man had disappeared into the night.

  These episodes were behind the formation of a group of vigilantes made up of approximately 250 residents of the new suburb.5 The primary catalyst for their formation was the group's feeling that the area “was not getting proper police protection. And when called, the police were taking too long to arrive and when they did they trampled upon whatever evidence was left behind.” The group paired up in twos starting around 9:00 p.m. each night; armed with walkie-talkies provided by the new Metro government, they patrolled the area in hopes of catching the rapist and providing some much needed comfort to area residents.

  Residents of the area didn't allow children to play outside, and under threat of corporal punishment forbade them from answering any knock at the door. Area hardware stores couldn't keep up with the demand for door locks, door latches, and guns of every make and model. In many households, the mantra was to shoot first and ask questions later, and the terrorized residents were deadly serious about following this plan.

  On March 4, 1964, ten days after the murder of Paula Herring, one of the Herrings’ neighbors left his home on Timberhill Drive at around 3:00 a.m. to manage a group of newspaper carriers for the Nashville Tennessean. About fifteen minutes later, the man's wife heard a car pull into the driveway and then someone whistling as they approached the bedroom door, which opened to the backyard. The woman assumed that her husband had forgotten something and had returned home. She heard the doorknob turn and rattle. Before opening the door, she decided to look outside. A lightning flash at that moment illuminated not her husband but a thin young man, in his early twenties. Her screams brought her father from another part of the house with a pistol in his hand, but the prowler had driven away by the time the father had gotten to the door.

  The additional manpower on the Paula Herring murder case immediately produced results. A neighbor of the Herrings, living two blocks south, noted that, on Saturday night, he and his wife had retired for the evening at 9:30 p.m. Within five to ten minutes of going to bed, they heard a loud noise
at the juncture of the two streets in front of their home. The neighbor described the noise as a car taking off with a sound like a fan turning and metal hitting against metal. By the time the man looked out his bedroom window, the car was out of sight, headed north toward Nashville.

  On Sunday, a local television station reported that the police had arrested two Vanderbilt University students on suspicion of murder just hours after the Paula Herring slaying. A WLAC-TV cameraman photographed one of the police officers involved holding a .32-caliber pistol taken from the students and identified it as a possible murder weapon in the Paula Herring case. While police held the students, a ballistics expert from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation quickly ran comparison tests against the bullets recovered in the den on Timberhill Drive. But the suspects were released when the ballistics didn't match and the students produced an airtight alibi for their whereabouts on Saturday evening.

  As disappointing as this news was to Nashville law enforcement, they caught a solid break when a night manager at the Krystal hamburger restaurant on Franklin Road contacted the district attorney's office about a bloody guest who had visited her establishment on Saturday night, apparently not long after Paula Herring had been murdered. In addition to the obvious significance of a bloody customer, the proximity of the restaurant to the crime scene was especially noted, a distance of less than three minutes by car.

  According to the night manager, the bloody man entered the restaurant and began looking through the phone book, at which point she asked if she could assist, and the customer requested her help in finding the phone number for Rhea Little's service station, noting that he was having car trouble. At this point, the night manager pointed out that Rhea Little's station was directly across the street from the Krystal but had already closed for the evening. According to the restaurant manager, the bloody man then quickly left the restaurant.