He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.
—Proverbs 11:29, Old Testament
Decades later, in August 1997, I was having lunch at a local restaurant near the Sylvan Park area of Nashville, not far from Vanderbilt University. The day was so hot the shade was looking for shade, and my friend Clayton began to tell me about his project to catalog major crimes and mysterious happenings that had taken place in Nashville over the previous hundred years. It wasn't the topic of conversation I had expected, but, given that I was still a relative newcomer to the Athens of the South, he had my full attention.1
As we waited for the food to arrive, Clayton began to reel off names and dates of events, such as the search for country music star Jim Reeves after his small airplane crashed and disappeared south of the city in the summer of 1964, the train wreck that killed 118 people in one of the worst railroad accidents in US history, and the 1973 slaying of Hee Haw star David “Stringbean” Akeman and his wife, Estelle. When I asked how many stories were on his list, he replied, “Oh, about forty of them.” What I failed to realize was how much time he had already invested in the project, primarily at the main Nashville library and also at a place described as the Metro Archives.2
One of the reasons I was interested in the project was because of my previous history of research experience at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. A decade earlier, I had just finished working my way through graduate school when the personal computer boom took off. And instead of continuing the path I had chosen, which is to say instead of continuing to be mostly unemployed save for a few hours a week fundraising for a local nonprofit organization, I went to work in one of the first computer retail stores in Nashville.
During this leisurely meal, I also learned how the city of Nashville and Davidson County had merged in 1963 to become the first “Metro” government in the United States. With consolidation, better schools and additional police and fire protection were promised to the suburbanites. In the pre-Metro world, it could take more than an hour for a sheriff's deputy from Davidson County to respond to a call, but the “Metro” promise was a law enforcement officer within five minutes of every home, notwithstanding the fact that the move to a metropolitan government meant an increase from 71 square miles of oversight to 533 square miles. When the consolidation vote received a green light, at the stroke of midnight on April Fools’ Day 1963, a former county judge, Clifton Beverly Briley, became the mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County.3
After the lunchtime conversation, and armed with directions and a list of forty crimes and mysteries, my curiosity got the better of me, and I made a quick trip to the archives to see if I might enjoy helping out with the project. After finding my way to a one-story brick building on Elm Hill Pike, I signed a visitors’ register in the small lobby and was greeted by a young woman, who listened patiently to the reason for my visit and then ran through a concise history of the archives and its current role in Nashville government and told me that most of the day-to-day work was spent cataloging records and artifacts and warehousing any new arrivals until they could be processed.
It was at this that point that she casually mentioned that the archives had just received a number of boxes that were the effects of former Nashville chief of police Hubert Kemp. They had not yet cataloged the records, but she told me I was welcome to look through them if I was interested. My answer was a solid, “Yes, I would love to review them. Don't laugh, but when was Hubert Kemp the police chief?”
“That would have been when Metro Nashville Government was formed, back in the early sixties. The Metro Police Department sends their records to us after a few decades have passed. These are the latest ones.”
A few moments later, I heard squeaky wheels drawing closer as the clerk returned with a stainless steel cart so large it barely fit through the doorway. After the clerk left the room, I stared at the stack of cardboard boxes. The only sound to be heard was the steady rain pelting the roof of the windowless building.
I grabbed a container and placed it on the table. The boxes themselves were so tall that it was easier to stand and explore them than make the attempt while seated. After removing the lid of the first box and glancing down inside, I froze.
“That's a brown recluse spider,” I said to myself. “No, make that two of them.” I had never seen a live one before but knew from photographs that the spider could be identified by a small “fiddle” neatly etched into its back. Both spiders were the size of a quarter, perched on top of the neatly arranged files inside the box.
Keeping a close eye on my new friends, I quickly stepped across the hallway to announce my findings to the clerk, who punched a line on her desk phone and asked one of her associates to “bring the spider spray.” While waiting for the in-house exterminator, I reviewed the labels of the folders inside the open box at arm's length. Most were tagged as Attendance Reports, Complaints, and Training Logs. Not exactly my cup of tea. But for the rest of the week, every day at lunchtime, I signed in and reviewed box after box of Hubert Kemp's records.
On my third visit, which occurred during a heavy summer storm, I reviewed one of the final boxes in the stack. After a quick scan for spiders, I retrieved a file that seemed to be out of place among the attendance reports. Inside a manila folder labeled “Paula Herring,” I found a disturbing set of black and white photographs, along with telegrams, personal notes, and letters to Hubert Kemp, chief of police, Metropolitan Nashville.
The photographs were eight-inch by ten-inch, and several appeared to have been taken inside the den of a 1960s-era home. In one photograph, a sofa, china cabinet, and television framed the figure of a young woman lying facedown on the floor. She was lying in a pool of what I could only assume was her own blood. Another photograph showed a detective, dressed in plain clothes and wearing an overcoat, black shoes, and white socks, squatting down in an empty garage pointing at a broken bottle of beer and the resulting splatter on the garage floor. The remainder of the photographs in the file appeared to have been taken on an autopsy table. They were brutal and disturbing. It was obvious that the pretty blond girl in the photographs had been violently slain.
And now I felt queasy. My little adventure to the archives had taken a dark turn for the unexpected. I glanced at the back of one of the photographs and saw the date: February 22, 1964. A few minutes later, after using the copy machine in the adjoining room, I said goodbye to the clerk and dodged puddles of water on the way back to my car. I sat there for several minutes, staring motionless through the rain-covered windshield, as I wondered why a crime scene file had been shipped to the Metro Archives with a box full of administrative records.
With some reluctance as to what I was getting myself into, two days later I opened my worn leather portfolio, and carefully organized the copies I had made into two stacks on a work table. In one pile were the horrific crime-scene images of Paula Herring and in the other pile I placed a copy of a postcard from a physician in Carthage, Tennessee; a letter from Mrs. Eva Jo A. Herring; a letter from then mayor of Nashville Beverly Briley; a couple of witness statements; telegrams from J. Edgar Hoover to Hubert Kemp; and other documents.
While sifting through the file, I made a call to my friend Clayton, asking if he remembered the murder of a blond University of Tennessee student named Paula Herring, from February 1964.
“You bet I do,” he said. “That's one of the stories on the list. Why are you asking?”4
When I explained what I had stumbled upon at the archives, he recalled that Paula Herring had been babysitting her little brother on the night she had been killed. “I remember for years after her murder, parents would always tell their kids and babysitters to lock the doors while they were gone or they'd end up like Paula Herring.”
Clayton had been a newspaper carrier at the time, and he remembered that the morning paper, the Nashville Tennessean, was held so late on a school day during the murder week that he had to get a written excuse from his
dad to get into class. “By the way, who killed the babysitter?” he asked.
“I don't know, but I'll look it up. Oh, and I think the babysitter's six-year-old little brother was spared. The kid apparently slept through his sister's murder,” I said.
“Maybe the killer didn't know the little boy was in the house?”
“Maybe, but it sounds like the makings of an urban legend if you ask me,” I replied.
I initially began researching the babysitter story with hardly a thought as to whether I should actually be engaged in such an activity, and more because the urban legend of a boy sleeping through his sister's murder had hooked me hard from the moment I first discovered it. From this unusual beginning I attempted to reach out to the 1964 neighbors of the Herring family, especially those who lived on either side of Paula Herring. My assumption was that the neighbors would be more than willing to share their remembrances of the old tragedy, and the timeline would have been seared into their consciousness, given that the slaying had taken place exactly ninety days after President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas.
I was so convinced of this naive point of view that I asked the Ben West Public Library staff to show me their collection of ancient city phonebooks so that I might find the names of neighbors who had lived on Timberhill Drive near the Herring family at the time of the 1964 murder, in hopes of tracking them down and asking about the slaying.
Me: I'm researching the Paula Herring murder from 1964.
Neighbor: I wouldn't have anything to say.
Me: But you were her neighbor at the time?
Neighbor: I'm sorry, I wouldn't.
Me: You don't care that she was murdered?
Me: Could you help me understand?
Neighbor: I wouldn't be interested.
The next call will be better, I assured myself. I just need to set it up with a little more finesse and not be so eager and direct with my questioning.
Me: Hello, we haven't spoken before and I'm hoping you can help me with an old event from your neighborhood in 1964. It involved a girl named Paula Herring.
Neighbor: I don't know anything, OKAY? And I don't have an opinion one way or the other, so, don't ever call me again.
After adjusting my introduction yet again, my third attempt was a bit more productive.
Me: Good afternoon, I'm trying to do some research into a story from the 1964 era that involved the Crieve Hall community and your former neighbor, Paula Herring.
Neighbor: Well, it electrified the whole community, I can tell you that.
Me: I bet so. What happened on the night of the murder? You must've known the victim, right?
Neighbor: What's the reason for the inquisition?
Me: Oh, no formal inquisition, I'm just trying to get a better understanding of that February timeline back in 1964.
Neighbor: Well, I'd direct you to the newspapers, and like I said, it certainly electrified the community, but other than that I wouldn't have anything to say to you.
Though I had a full-time job selling computer-based services and products to corporate America, I was still attempting to use my lunch hour to research the Paula Herring story. Initially, I attempted to find Paula's mother, thinking she might still be residing in Middle Tennessee. After a week of dialing “Herrings” and repeatedly striking out, though, I came to the realization that, over the course of several decades, Paula's mother could have gotten married and divorced multiple times or be living with relatives and have no personal phone, and, either way, she would now be in her mid-seventies.
So I switched my focus to Paula's father and after some digging I discovered Wilmer Herring's sad demise on September 1, 1960, noted in the Nashville Tennessean newspaper. According to the Davidson County Medical Examiner, Dr. W. J. Core, forty-year-old Wilmer had been found in a hotel room on Friday, September 2, with time of death estimated to have been at 10:00 p.m. on Thursday evening. Dr. Core ruled the death as suicide due to poison that Wilmer Herring had swallowed.1
A few days later, I stumbled upon one of Wilmer Herring's family members via telephone, and I learned that Jo Herring had returned to Waco, Texas, with her young son not long after Paula had been murdered, in part so she could be closer to her family, and in part to take a job as a nurse at a Waco hospital.2 Over the next decade, Jo Herring's chronic alcoholism eventually caught up with her and took her life due to liver failure at the relatively young age of fifty-two in 1976.3
When I inquired as to the circumstances surrounding Wilmer's death at the Noel Hotel, the family member said, “We were told that he had committed suicide, but we had serious doubts about that. Jo told us that Wilmer had been devastated when he lost his job, but he was a college graduate, and he had been a pilot during World War II. He could've gotten a job. It just didn't make sense to us. I remember when Jo brought Wilmer's body to Texas for the burial that Labor Day weekend in 1960, she told us that he had left a suicide note but, she never showed it to us. We just never understood it.”4
As I thought through the timing of this tragedy, it dawned on me that public schools in Nashville would have started back on the Tuesday after the Labor Day holiday. On Monday, kids and families would have been enjoying the last rites of summer, with a focus on picnics, grilling out, and swimming pools, before being sent back to school. Paula Herring, however, would have celebrated her fifteenth birthday about ten days prior to Wilmer Herring being found dead on the Friday of Labor Day weekend. Then, instead of looking forward to obtaining her learner's permit to drive the family car, she would have been burying her father on the same day that the new school year was to begin.
As for her younger brother, by the time Alan Herring had turned eighteen, he had lost his father to suicide, his sister to murder, and his mother to an early death. If I had been Alan Herring, I might have wondered for a lifetime why I was spared on the night my sister was murdered, while I had slept within a few feet of the tragic event.
A week or so after I received the update on the Herrings, I surprised myself by locating the boy who had slept through his sister's murder and was now living hundreds of miles away from Nashville. In all of my searching and thinking about searching, I had spent little time actually preparing for a conversation that might transpire if I ever did find Jo Herring's son.
I reached Alan Herring on a warm September day and quickly realized just how intrusive my phone call might have been to the man on the other end of the telephone line.5 But he was considerate, and curious that anyone would be reaching out to him decades after losing his family. My disjointed explanation for the call was to walk him through the Nashville stories project and the potential inclusion of the babysitter legend as a cornerstone element of the future work.
As I fumbled through the details, I wondered how long it had been since Alan Herring had last spoken with anyone about Paula's death. Near the end of our discussion, I made a feeble attempt at empathy, noting that in the early 1960s, about the time I had also been six years old, my eighteen-year-old Aunt Mae had vanished from our home in northeast Alabama and had not been seen or heard from since. The only other comment I could muster, in an attempt to build rapport, was to note that I had completed a graduate degree at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, though it had been several years after his sister Paula had been there.
Finally, I asked about the tragic night of February 22, 1964. It came as no surprise to me when I learned that Alan Herring didn't remember that night at all, and had lost that entire weekend in his conscious memory.6 But he did have two questions that had haunted him for decades: Why hadn't Clarke killed him on the night of his sister's murder? And where was his father's suicide note? His mother had told him she had it and would let him see it at some future point in time, but she had never produced the note, and he didn't find it in his mother's personal effects after her death.
After reading in the 1964 Nashville newspapers that John Clarke had indeed been indicted and convicted, I made the simple deduction that perhaps a visit to the
Tennessee Department of Corrections might be enlightening. So I made the trek from my West End Avenue office to the Rachel Jackson building on Deaderick Street in downtown Nashville, and then rode the elevator to the operations group of the TDOC.
I knew that my initial plan to track down John Randolph Clarke and ask him point blank, “Why didn't you kill Paula Herring's little brother while you were taking Paula's life?” was foolish at best, and perhaps dangerous at worst; but frankly, I was willing to pursue the answer, even at some real or imagined peril. The problem, however, wasn't asking the question but rather finding the convicted felon some thirty-five years after his Murder One conviction.
Just before the elevator door opened, I mentally confirmed what I had been thinking for much of the morning: I'm out of my element here. I'm not a lawyer; I'm not a court reporter; I'm not a journalist; and I'm not a paralegal on an errand. This could go badly. But much to my surprise, when I exited the elevator, the first person I encountered was a middle-aged, raven-haired woman with a smiling face and helpful disposition.
“I'm hoping you can help me,” I said. “I'm trying to find information on a Davidson County resident who may be in the care of the Department of Corrections.”
The response behind the desk could not have been more helpful: “Sure, we just need you to fill out this form. If you're looking for records, the cost for the search and printing of files is ten dollars. We'll need a check with the application form and your personal information completely filled out.” As she handed me a clipboard, she motioned toward a chair in the empty waiting room. Ten minutes later, after I had completed the form and returned it to the desk, the helpful clerk explained that they would contact me when the report was available.
In the last days of the nineteenth century, circa 1898, the state of Tennessee had built a new penitentiary near the Cumberland River, bordering the city of Nashville. It was a striking example of gothic architecture, but its usefulness would last less than a century for housing inmates. In fact, after its correctional use was finished and the prison closed in 1992, the abandoned structure became famous when the 1999 Oscar-nominated movie The Green Mile, based on Stephen King's novel, was filmed there with superstars Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan.1 In 2001, The Last Castle, with Oscar-winning actor Robert Redford and Soprano's star James Gandolfini, was also filmed at the prison.2
A Murder in Music City Page 6
