A Murder in Music City Read online

  MONDAY—FEBRUARY 24, 1964

  Just after daybreak, patrolmen noticed a young man traveling on foot not far from the Herring neighborhood. When the suspect realized he was being followed, he bolted.

  By the time the officers caught him and delivered him to police headquarters, their suspect was readily admitting to peeping into houses and prowling around homes at all hours of the night.

  However, shortly after detectives began their interrogation, someone noticed that their talkative guest was wearing some unusual footwear. After further questioning, it turned out that their prime suspect was actually a twenty-five-year-old mental patient who had walked off the property of the nearby Central State Psychiatric Hospital.6

  While investigators were looking for their killer, Jim Squires was adding even more intrigue to the slaying with his second story of the week. The story described a book missing from the crime scene, which the detectives assigned to the case deemed to be a clue to the killing. The detectives, however, did not yet want to name the missing paperback book, and the young reporter dutifully withheld that information in his article.

  On Monday afternoon, twenty-seven-year-old Al Baker of Nashville finally met up with a friend he had been trying to reach. The friend was a Metro policeman, and over coffee Baker told the officer a story. What he said put Baker in a position to collect $7,480.00—more than a year's salary—in reward money offered by Governor Frank Clement, the Metro Council, and the Nashville Banner.7

  Baker's story was so helpful that he was taken to downtown Nashville, to the Municipal Safety Building, and asked to repeat it. There, he told the attentive police officers that, for the past three years, he'd been acquainted with a man named John Randolph Clarke. Baker said that he knew the thirty-nine-year-old as “Red” Clarke, a moniker denoting Clarke's hair color, and that they had gotten to know each other because they had previously dated women who happened to share adjoining apartments, notwithstanding the fact that John Clarke was a married man. After this shady beginning, Baker and Clarke began to meet from time to time at various watering holes around the Vanderbilt University area.

  On the most recent Saturday night, Al Baker said he had gone to Ruth's Diner, and when he got there Red Clarke was on the phone but later joined him at the counter. According to Baker, Clarke told him that “he had just been talking to a UT freshman who was home visiting her mother, and that Clarke had invited himself over with some beer.” Clarke said that he “phoned with the idea of seeing the girl's mother,” with whom he had struck up a conversation at Ruth's Diner a few days earlier, but since the girl's mother wasn't home, Clarke planned to go on over to the house and make advances toward the daughter instead.

  Baker noted that Clarke then finished his drink and left the restaurant a short time afterward. Deeply troubled by his knowledge, Baker said that he sure hoped it wasn't his friend Red Clarke who had committed this awful crime, but after reading the newspaper headlines on Sunday, his conscience had begun to torment him.

  The police asked Baker if Clarke owned a gun, and Baker said Clarke owned a .32-caliber Beretta, usually carried in a shoulder holster. At this news, the chief homicide detective dispatched two officers to pick up Clarke for questioning. It was a short ride for the officers, since the Clarke home was located near the Vanderbilt University football stadium.

  Around 5:45 p.m. Monday afternoon, police officers knocked on the door of the Clarke home, and after a brief discussion the red-headed man agreed to ride down to the Municipal Safety Building to answer a few questions. Callie Clarke, John's wife, who was ten years older than her husband, followed in the family car in order to bring John home when the police were finished. What no one knew at that point was that the questioning would continue for over eleven hours.

  Unknown to the policemen who had been sent to retrieve Red Clarke, their suspect was from a prominent family. John Clarke's father had been a general sessions judge in East Tennessee, and at one point the Republican floor leader in the state senate. Clarke's siblings were all successful, with career paths that included the CIA, the Air Force, real estate, and education. But John Clarke's contribution to the family legacy was less noteworthy, having changed jobs five times in five years. Worse yet, he had been mostly unemployed for the previous eighteen months.

  In 1943, Clarke entered the Navy after graduating high school in Livingston, Tennessee. On D-Day, his ship had been torpedoed during landing exercises, and Clarke was found unconscious on Omaha Beach. In 1945, he received an honorable medical discharge from the Navy, and a few months later Clarke used his military benefits to enroll at Tennessee Tech as a social science major. The college, based in Cookeville, Tennessee, was then known as Tennessee Polytechnic Institute, or TPI.

  Apparently Clarke enjoyed his short stint as a college student, based on an article Bob Wilson wrote for the Knoxville News Sentinel following a football game between the University of Tennessee and TPI, a game won 49–0 by the University of Tennessee in front of 12,000 adoring fans:

  One of the highlights at the VOL–TPI game was the Tennessee cheering section, or maybe I should say a red-headed character by the name of John Clarke, who happened to be a Tennessee Poly student. When Clarke, attired in dungarees, took over as guest cheerleader of the Volunteers, the Tennessee rooting section sounded off as never before. The UT rooters enjoyed Clarke's antics in leading the cheers so well that they wanted to keep him the remainder of the game. When the regular UT cheerleaders took their positions in front of the stands, the rooters booed them down and Clarke did an encore. I'll say this for him, he had plenty on the ball in getting the rooters into action and keeping them going.8

  After the cheerleading incident was reported in the Knoxville newspaper, John Randolph Clarke was asked to leave the Cookeville school.

  Upon making the short ride downtown, detectives escorted the 5'11”, 200-pound redhead to a room with some privacy and began the formal interview regarding his whereabouts during the previous Saturday night. Clarke's alibi centered upon visits to friends, taverns, and liquor stores, all in the Vanderbilt area. Clarke added that he was home by 9:30 p.m.

  On Sunday, Clarke said he and his wife went to visit her family in Tullahoma, a small town about seventy miles southeast of Nashville. While there, Clarke noted that he had picked up a large number of paperback books that his brother-in-law had been trying to sell for him at a drive-in theater.

  At the mention of books, the detectives in the room made eye contact with each other. One of the officers asked Clarke if he owned a gun. The answer was yes, a .32-caliber automatic, but it had been stolen about ten days prior. The detectives wanted to know if Clarke had reported the theft. No, came the response.

  Clarke would later testify at the criminal trial that he was questioned the entire night by never less than two interrogators and by as many as fifteen policemen at once. He noted that he was not given food, access to a lawyer or a doctor, or his medication. When he asked to use the restroom, Clarke said he was told, “You're stuck to that chair!”9 In return for the hospitality, Clarke refused to participate in all tests, including ballistics, paraffin, fingernail scraping, and polygraph, though he did submit to a full body search that revealed no scratches, bruises, marks, or cuts of any kind.

  While this vignette was being played out within the confines of the Municipal Safety Building, news that it was taking place began to spread. Before long, the hallways in the building were filled with photographers and reporters, hoping not only for a photograph of the suspect but for any inside scoop or bit of detail that might provide an edge over their newspaper and television rivals.

  At around 1:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the Krystal manager was brought into the police station to identify her “bloody” customer from Saturday night. She had been whisked from the restaurant, still wearing her all-white outfit and food-stained apron, as Red Clarke was inserted into a lineup along with four other stocky white males. After the lineup, the restaurant manager was led to the office of an
assistant police chief, where in his presence, and the presence of a detective, she could not settle on a firm conviction that it had actually been Clarke in a bloody condition inside her food establishment.

  Given the unusual access of their newspaper reporter, the Nashville Tennessean held its morning press run for most of the night in hopes of breaking news in the sensational case, especially with a lineup hanging in the balance. Just around daybreak on Tuesday morning, at a time when the Nashville Tennessean normally would have delivered fresh newspapers to its carriers, the authorities made one last attempt to tie Clarke to the slaying, asking to listen to his car for any sign of the “noisy vehicle.” But hearing nothing out of the ordinary, they decided they did not have enough evidence to hold Clarke and released him. With citizens desperate for news, the morning paper did finally arrive, albeit several hours later than usual.

  TUESDAY—FEBRUARY 25, 1964

  After Clarke's long night with detectives, he spent the day sleeping, and in the early evening felt well enough to listen to a radio broadcast of a heavyweight boxing match out of Miami, Florida, where twenty-two-year-old Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was about to shock the world with his technical knockout of heavyweight champ Sonny Liston. The following day, Clay announced his membership in the Nation of Islam, and changed his name to Muhammad Ali.

  At the Harris-Donoho funeral home in Gallatin, Tennessee, mourners arrived early for a 10:00 a.m. memorial service. They offered sad condolences to Paula's grief-stricken mother. A number of Overton High School students, classmates, teachers, and neighbors paid their respects, as did several heartbroken girls from the New West Dorm at the University of Tennessee. To every well-wisher who came through the line, more than one remembered that Jo Herring offered a strange yet simple challenge: “Just find who did it.”

  Just before noon, when Paula's casket was lowered into a grave at Crestview Memorial Gardens, the weather was cold but sunny, and Jo Herring still seemed to be in shock.10 Dressed all in black and wearing dark sunglasses, she sat motionless during her daughter's last rites. Alan Herring was nowhere to be seen. Less than two hundred miles away, in Knoxville, flags were flown at half-mast across the University of Tennessee's campus in honor of the murdered student.

  WEDNESDAY—FEBRUARY 26, 1964

  Wednesday morning's Nashville Tennessean detailed how fifty cops and workhouse prisoners had spent the day on Tuesday walking the Radnor Rail Yards near Timberhill Drive, unsuccessfully searching for the missing paperback book.

  Later that morning, however, the same man who had reported hearing a noisy car on Saturday night discovered the missing book at the edge of a field across from his home.1 The book turned out to be a seventy-five cent paperback version of All the King's Men, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, himself a former Vanderbilt student and literary legend.

  Warren's book involved a fictional character named Willie Stark, who many said was actually based on the controversial Huey Long. Long, nicknamed Kingfish, was governor of Louisiana and then US senator in the early 1930s, around the time that Warren had taught at Louisiana State University. The book became an Oscar-winning film, with Broderick Crawford in the lead role as Willie Stark.2

  On Wednesday, detectives and investigators were surprised to learn that Al Baker had yet another story to tell about his drinking buddy John Randolph Clarke, and this time it was a story that would ultimately seal Clarke's fate.3

  Baker told detectives of an incident that had happened two months prior, on Christmas Eve 1963. According to Baker, on that night he had also crossed paths with Red Clarke at Ruth's Diner. It was at the tavern that Al Baker talked Clarke into going with him to a Christmas party near Music Row. At the party, Clarke got into an argument with another man, and, after tempers flared, Clarke pulled his pistol and threatened to use it if necessary. Clarke's opponent took the threat seriously and left.

  After the party, Baker and Clarke dropped off a couple of their friends, a man named Murray Cook and one named Jesse Henderson, at an apartment on 18th Avenue. While Baker drove the foursome to the apartment, the other passengers began teasing Clarke about carrying a pistol loaded with blanks. When they arrived at their destination, Clarke unholstered his .32-caliber pistol and fired one round into a pile of snow next to the sidewalk. Baker said he remembered seeing a little white puff rise from the ground when the gun went off.

  Upon hearing this story, two Metro detectives, Al Baker, and a metal detection expert made a quick trip to the 18th Avenue apartment on Wednesday night. After receiving permission to conduct the search, the digging began just after 10:00 p.m., in a space less than ten feet by ten feet, using a searchlight and a metal detector. After working until 2:00 a.m. Thursday morning without success, the group decided to quit and try again during daylight hours. The search area was left unguarded, and when the men returned the next day one of the detectives immediately spotted a bullet lying partially uncovered next to the sidewalk.

  A few hours later, a specialist with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation noted that the two bullets recovered from the murder scene and the bullet from the sidewalk on 18th Avenue were indeed a perfect match and had been fired from the same weapon.4 The question for the local authorities, however, was whether the spent bullets, without the gun, would be enough to charge their chief suspect with the murder of Paula Herring.

  In the meantime, John Randolph Clarke quietly checked into Park View Hospital in hopes of obtaining help for blackout spells and high blood pressure. While Clarke received medical care, his clothing, retrieved from a local laundry, Paula Herring's bloody garments, and the recovered paperback book were all personally escorted to Washington, DC, to the FBI, by officials from the Metro Nashville Police Department and the district attorney's office. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI promised a preliminary report of their analysis within twenty-four hours.

  THURSDAY—FEBRUARY 27, 1964

  Buoyed by the knowledge that the bullets matched, the mayor, the district attorney general, and the chief of police were in a much better mood; the authorities in Nashville felt with a high degree of certainty that they had found their killer and that his name was John Randolph Clarke.

  Early in the evening on Thursday, February 27, WLAC-TV began to break into their programming with dramatic news bulletins announcing that the mayor of Nashville, the Honorable Beverly Briley, would appear on the “Big News” at 10:00 p.m. and would, at that time, reveal the name of Paula Herring's killer. The bulletins were repeated at intervals throughout the primetime viewing hours, which caused great excitement and anticipation in Middle Tennessee, as word passed that the case was to reach a climax that evening. When the newscast began, the mayor appeared and dramatically announced to as many as one hundred thousand households that he knew the name of Paula Herring's murderer, and that the guilty man's arrest was imminent:

  We know who's guilty of this crime, we are certain…. The man is under surveillance and he's not under arrest, but we know what's going on.5

  Within an hour of the mayor's pronouncement, a telegram was delivered to Metro's chief of police, Hubert Kemp from the FBI. The message read:

  Reference Paula Herring murder case and evidence delivered to FBI laboratory on February twenty-six. Victim's sweater composed of blue orlon fibers and white orlon fibers. Orlon fibers of both colors were found on front of suspect's coat and trousers. Victim's skirt contains coarse white woolen fibers used for novelty effect in certain fabrics. One such fiber found on front of suspect's coat. Above fibers found on suspect's clothing could have come from victim's sweater and skirt. No blood found on book or on suspect's clothing. Latent fingerprints and palm prints developed on book. Comparisons are being made. Will advise upon completion. No palm prints available for suspect. Confirmatory report will be furnished when all laboratory examinations completed. HOOVER.6

  Shortly before midnight on Thursday the 27th, Mayor Briley gathered with Attorney General Harry Nichol, Chief of Police Hubert Kemp, detectives, and other
law enforcement members to consider the evidence in the Paula Herring slaying. The joint decision was to swear out a warrant charging John Randolph Clarke with first-degree murder, and that it be delivered as soon as hospital doctors allowed.7

  The Saturday morning edition of the Nashville Tennessean reported another prowling episode from Thursday evening. Worse yet, it was another Crieve Hall address near Timberhill Drive. The front-page story noted that a frightened homeowner had been awakened in the middle of the night by his wife, who had heard a prowler in their kitchen. Taking no chances, the armed citizen fired six shots from his .22-caliber pistol into the darkened room. After turning on the lights, the man discovered that he had killed the intruder—a mouse—and had also mortally wounded his electric stove.8

  FRIDAY—FEBRUARY 28, 1964

  Early on Friday morning, a lieutenant from the Metropolitan Police Department served the first-degree murder warrant on John “Red” Clarke. Metro's public defender, Charles Galbreath, was in the hospital room at the time with his new client. The lawyer proclaimed to anyone who would listen that his client was innocent, saying that the Metropolitan Police Department had “covered up a whole lot of evidence that points away from Clarke to another person” and that “a lot of people in this county are under protection of the police.”9

  The Nashville Tennessean continued to write stories about the murder. One reporter asked Jo Herring about rumors that she was an acquaintance of Paula's accused killer. “Absolutely not true,” was the reply.10 And on Sunday, one week after the morning daily delivered the bombshell news of Paula Herring's murder, the paper published a story by Frank Ritter describing the “Sherlock Flair Shown by Lawmen” in bringing Paula's killer to justice.11