A Murder in Music City Read online

  On a Saturday in 1964 Nashville, a child might spend his morning watching cartoons on television, while being entertained in the evening by any of the three local television stations.10 Oddly enough, as if completely unaware of the typical day of a six-year-old, neither side of the legal aisle asked a single question of Alan Herring about what surely must have been a regular Saturday spent on Timberhill Drive.

  James Diamond finished his examination by asking two questions that may have provided the most overlooked clue in the courtroom as to Paula's condition when her little brother found her on the floor on the night of the murder:

  Diamond: Did you observe your sister when you said it looked like she had tomato juice on her?

  Alan: I thought that was really tomato juice.

  Diamond: Did you see any marks on her, other than this tomato juice?

  Alan: No, sir.11

  Following the little boy's testimony, the attorneys agreed to let Alan return to Nashville and continue his schooling at Norman Binkley Elementary School in the Crieve Hall neighborhood.

  The Herrings’ next-door neighbor, Catherine Wexler, followed Alan Herring on the witness stand and testified that Paula had called her from the Nashville Airport when she got in on Friday evening, February 21. Since no one was home at the Herrings’, the cab driver delivered Paula to the Wexlers’ home.

  The Wexlers had lived next door to the Herrings for five years, and Mrs. Wexler was a good friend to Paula. Paula had babysat for the family numerous times, most recently when she had been home from Knoxville during the Christmas holidays. Mrs. Wexler confirmed that Paula kept her watch on “University” time, the Eastern time zone, during her return visit to Nashville's central time zone. The attractive next-door neighbor also volunteered that she personally had written a check for Paula's cab fare on Friday evening.

  Another witness for the state was Dr. W. J. Core, the Metro Nashville medical examiner.12 Dr. Core was a kindly old gentleman who had graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School in 1915, almost a half century before the trial. Core told the jury that his job was to check all deaths from violence, all deaths where the deceased had not had medical attention within twenty-four hours, and all rapes.

  Dr. Core estimated the time of death to be 9:30 p.m. on February 22, 1964. At the time of his initial assessment, the physician had stated that Paula Herring had been shot three times, once in the front and twice in the back. But in open court in Jackson Core simply noted that Paula Herring had died as the result of two gunshots from close range and that the bullets had entered the girl's back and passed through her heart, ultimately ending her life.

  In a grandfatherly voice, the old doctor described the physical results of the terrible crime: multiple contusions of the face, a severe bruise on the left jaw below the ear, deep scratches in the middle of the neck, and four contusions on the right side of the face, possibly caused by a fist. The victim's clothing was in place, and she definitely had been facedown on the rug when the killing shots had been fired.

  On the question of intercourse, Core said no. Nor was seminal fluid present at the time of his examination.

  Following the elderly physician on the witness stand were the analysts from the FBI and the TBI. They described in detail their findings regarding the fibers found on Clarke's clothing and also the matching of the three bullets that had been linked to the slaying. The prosecution's last witnesses were the detectives who had been involved in Clarke's all-night interrogation.

  One detective after another took the stand and told similar stories about their observances of the crime scene on Saturday night, as well as their part in the grilling of John Randolph Clarke two nights later.

  Each detective described how they all had arrived at the Timberhill Drive home within minutes of the call that Billy Vanderpool had made to the police dispatcher. Each said that, other than policemen, the only living people at Timberhill Drive when they arrived were Vanderpool, Paula's mother, and little Alan Herring. Vanderpool and Jo Herring gave the officers the definite impression that they had been drinking. Jo was described as being hysterical and in a state of shock.

  When it came time for the defense team to present alternate theories to the state's case against Clarke, Charles Galbreath seemed without direction. His initial plan had been to sully Jo Herring's reputation, but, with the help of the prosecution, Jo already had taken care of that aspect; Galbreath instead spent some time cross-examining Jo Herring's dinner companions from the night of Paula's murder. Billy Vanderpool had operated a wrecking company in Nashville for several years, and gathered materials from the tear-downs to build houses.13 In the courtroom, Vanderpool testified that he first met Jo Herring on Friday the 21st at the Wedgewood Diner, and that he and Meadows had delivered Jo home to Timberhill Drive, where they were introduced to Paula, who had just flown in from Knoxville.14

  The following afternoon, Saturday the 22nd, Vanderpool arrived with Meadows to pick up Jo Herring for a dinner date, and the men testified that they all had returned to Timberhill Drive just before 11:00 p.m. The other dinner companion, A. J. Meadows Jr., offered more detail, and Charles Galbreath bored in on his relationship to Billy Vanderpool and the evidence that investigators had discovered at the Herring home:

  Galbreath: How well do you know Billy Vanderpool?

  Meadows: He used to tear down a few houses, Charlie, and I was in the process of buying a little material from him where I could make me a little money building a house with used material.

  Galbreath: Did you know anything about Mr. Vanderpool's illegal activities?

  Meadows: Well, I mean, he had a massage room, and I found out later that's kind of outlawed.

  Galbreath: That's a house of prostitution, isn't it?

  Meadows: Well, I wouldn't say that, I mean, I don't know, I never have seen any activity.

  Galbreath: Do you drink Sterling beer or know anyone who does?

  Meadows: No, sir. I drink Budweiser or Blue Ribbon. Sterling gives me a headache, and I don't know anyone who likes Sterling.

  Galbreath: Did you see a quart bottle of Sterling beer sitting there in the garage that night, broken?

  Meadows: I did not see a Sterling beer. I mean the lights were off in the garage when I walked through. The only thing I remember is just barely getting through there and barely getting out.15

  Charles Galbreath clearly had adult beverages on his mind, as over the course of the next hour, Galbreath elicited a steady stream of facts that had not been well known prior to the trial. Per A. J. Meadows and Billy Vanderpool, the night of the slaying turned out to be a beer-drinking marathon at the Wedgewood Diner. For approximately four hours, Vanderpool, Meadows, and Jo Herring sat and drank. Meadows testified that no one left the diner at any time, and certainly not to run to Timberhill Drive, commit a murder, and return to the diner.

  Around 11:00 p.m., when the trio got to Timberhill Drive and the gruesome discovery was made, Meadows said he heard no cry or scream from Mrs. Herring. Meadows said he began to get sick and quickly decided to leave.

  Galbreath's next step was to go after Clarke's conscience-stricken friend, Al Baker. The defense attorney took Baker through a series of questions related to Clarke's missing gun. He was able to get Baker to confirm that he had tried to purchase Clarke's pistol on more than one occasion, most recently just days prior to Paula's murder. Galbreath was able to elicit testimony that Baker had told mutual friends that the gun was his, though he hadn't actually paid Clarke for the weapon. It was clear that Charles Galbreath was suggesting to the jury that Al Baker might have taken Clarke's gun and used it to commit murder. At a minimum, it was an attempt to raise the question of reasonable doubt.

  Before he allowed Baker to step down from the witness box, the defense attorney caught Baker off guard with a question regarding his whereabouts on that fateful Saturday night in February. Baker coughed up a rather disjointed reply: he had left Ruth's Diner at about the same time Clarke did, and then he had visited a string of beer jo
ints and night-owl locations until just after midnight.

  After Galbreath finished with Baker, the defense attorney seemed content to parade a series of character witnesses in front of the jury. Most of them provided little that could be described as helpful to his client.

  When the time came to try the physical evidence in the case, Galbreath turned deadly serious and wasted no time getting down to business, especially with the investigators who had worked the case:

  Galbreath: What were the results of the fingerprints found near the murder scene?

  Investigator: We didn't get any.

  Galbreath: You didn't get any fingerprints?

  Investigator: No, sir.

  Galbreath: Did you make any effort or do you know anybody that did make any effort to find any fingerprints?

  Investigator: No, sir.

  Investigator: Well, what were the results of the fingerprints found on the broken beer bottle in the garage?

  Investigator: Didn't get any.

  Galbreath: Well, how about on the cigarette butts you found there?

  Investigator: I don't know what happened to those, Counselor.

  Galbreath: Did you examine my client physically down at the police station?

  Investigator: Yes, sir.

  Galbreath: And what did you find? Did you find any scratch marks on him, any bruises, any cuts of any kind?

  Investigator: No, sir.

  Galbreath: But you knew you were supposed to be looking for someone who'd been scratched and was bleeding, didn't you?16

  The next-to-last witness for the defense was Callie Clarke, John's wife, a meek school teacher. She testified under oath that her husband has gotten home on the night in question around 9:30 p.m. and that she observed nothing suspicious in his demeanor to suggest knowledge of any crime. The woman also said that there had been a few disagreements with John in the past concerning his tendencies to stay out too late, but she claimed that she'd never even heard of the Herring girl or her mother.

  As his last witness, Galbreath brought John Randolph Clarke himself to the stand. Though he was under no obligation to testify on his own behalf, Galbreath wanted the jury to hear Clarke say that he didn't commit the awful murder, and along the way he took Clarke through a steady stream of denials.

  Clarke denied that he'd seen Al Baker on the night of Paula's murder. He further denied that he had made any telephone calls to anyone from Ruth's Diner on the night of February 22. He had no recollection of shooting a bullet into the ground on the previous Christmas morning. And he stood by his alibi regarding a series of stops among local diners beginning with Ruth's, then Brown's, Chico's, and a liquor store on West End at the corner of 16th and Broadway, before arriving home around 9:30 p.m. that Saturday night.

  But Clarke was able to lay out in detail the arrangement of the Herring home. He sketched the floor plan of the den with its entry into the garage, the bedrooms, bathrooms, and living room, as well as describing the furniture. Galbreath's final questions were simple and to the point:

  Galbreath: Mr. Clarke, had you ever seen this poor little girl in your life?

  Clarke: Never.

  Galbreath: Did you know her name, Paula?

  Clarke: No, sir.

  Galbreath: Did you telephone the Herring house and speak to this little girl the night of this murder?

  Clarke: No, sir.

  Galbreath: Did you have a quart of Sterling beer with you?

  Clarke: No, sir.

  Galbreath: Did you have any Winston cigarettes or Lark cigarettes with you that night?

  Clarke: No, sir.

  Galbreath: Were you on the premises of that place at all on the night of the murder or even in the Crieve Hall area that night?

  Clarke: No, sir.17

  Before the defense rested, the district attorney general for the Jackson, Tennessee, area, David P. Murray, requested just a few moments to cross-examine the defendant and ask a few questions of his own. With a rafter-raising voice, Murray posed over 950 questions to the accused man, and, five hours later, he was satisfied that he had enlightened the jury regarding the defendant's less-than-exemplary lifestyle. He had exposed Clarke's womanizing, heavy drinking, and ragged employment record for everyone in the courthouse to see. After Clarke realized what was taking place, he settled in for Murray's onslaught and answered almost every question with three simple words: “I don't remember.”

  On the same day that Clarke was enduring the grilling by David Murray, a report commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson was being delivered to the White House. A team led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and the Warren Commission Report detailed the intensive review that had begun some seven days after JFK's assassination in Dallas during the previous November.

  In a bit of irony, on this same Thursday night in Jackson, Tennessee, Al Baker had been drinking in the taproom of the New Southern Hotel bar, while carrying on a conversation with one of the reporters covering the trial. The details of the conversation so stunned the reporter that he later provided a deposition of the event to a notary public in hopes that it might influence the outcome of the trial. According to the reporter, Al Baker had been standing at the bar drinking a Sterling beer and then had approached the reporter to compliment the way the reporter's newspaper had covered Baker's testimony of the previous day. In the course of the conversation, Baker mentioned that one of the most damaging pieces of evidence against Clarke was the bullet “that I fired, I mean that Clarke fired on the night of the Christmas Eve party.” The deposition eventually made its way to Clarke's attorney in hopes that it might help with an appeal.18

  It was midmorning on Friday, September 25, when the closing arguments from both sides were presented to the jury. John Hollins implored the jury to convict Clarke of murder, and suggested that Miss Herring had chosen “to die rather than have her body defiled by a half-man, half-animal.”19

  Following a recess for lunch, Judge Tip Taylor charged the jury and explained the range of possible outcomes: murder in the first or second degree, manslaughter, or not guilty.

  Taylor informed the jury that, if they convicted the defendant, they also were required to set the sentence. If murder in the first degree was the choice, then the punishment was death by electrocution, unless there were mitigating circumstances, in which case they could reduce the sentence to not less than twenty years in the penitentiary.

  On Friday afternoon at 5:15 p.m., the jury sent word to the judge that they had a verdict. With Clarke standing to face the jury, the foreman reported that they had found Clarke guilty of murder in the first degree, and, rather than send him to the electric chair, they had fixed his punishment at thirty years in the state penitentiary.

  As the sentence was announced, Clarke appeared to black out, and he would have fallen to the floor if not grabbed by one of his defense attorneys. A few moments later, Clarke came to and asked, “What happened?” He then said that all he had heard was “Guilty.”20

  Exactly one week after the verdict in Jackson, Tennessee, Jo Herring penned a handwritten note to Chief Hubert Kemp, lauding the work of Metro police officers, detectives, and investigators in her daughter's murder case, and Kemp passed the letter to the Nashville Tennessean for publication. Two days later, on Sunday morning, October 4, the newspaper buried the note in the Want Ads section on page fifty-four. However, by the time the note was published, someone at the Tennessean had added the district attorney general's office to the list of those being thanked and also included the prosecutors in the headline: “Mrs. Herring Lauds Police, Prosecutors.” What caught my eye was that Jo Herring had not included the DA's office in her original note. Perhaps it meant nothing, but it seemed to me an unusual edit.

  On the same day that Jo wrote her letter, the afternoon paper, the Nashville Banner, was noting an offer of reward by one of its subscribers. The subscriber was attorney Charles Galbreath, who said that he would pay $250 to anyone with information leading to the identity
of the bloody man seen at the Krystal hamburger restaurant on Franklin Road on the night of February 22, 1964.

  In what must have been a shock to the citizens of Nashville, four days after Clarke's conviction, two of his family members in East Tennessee posted a $25,000 property bond to allow Clarke to remain free while his conviction was being appealed by Charles Galbreath. The family members, whom Galbreath described as two “spinster aunts” had put up their twenty-six room home as surety.1 Allowing a convicted murderer to remain free on bond was quite unusual and required the agreement of a willing trial court judge who was convinced that the defendant would reappear in court as requested. Perhaps the fact that Clarke's father was himself an East Tennessee judge played a role in this unusual act of freedom.

  Meanwhile, Galbreath was hoping for someone to take the reward bait, while he filed motions and appeals on his client's behalf. Eventually, Charles Galbreath would appeal Clarke's murder conviction all the way to the US Supreme Court, but he had to exhaust each stage of the lower appellate courts before he could be heard by Chief Justice Earl Warren and his eight influential friends.

  While Galbreath worked the legal angles, John Randolph Clarke continued to walk freely around Music City. This included helping his wife chaperone high school students, including teenage girls, to school activities in and around Nashville. All the while, Clarke continued to declare his innocence in the Paula Herring slaying and personally offered a $5,000 cash reward for anyone who could help him identify the guilty party.2