“Hi Susan. I'm a graduate of the University of Tennessee, doing some research, and I spoke with your mother in East Tennessee. She gave me your number if you've got a moment to chat?”7
“Yes, are you fundraising for the school?”
“No, this is a research project on a tragic story from 1964. I'm sorry to start the conversation with such an unpleasant topic. The story involves a former UT student named Paula Herring.”
“It sends shivers up my back to even hear her mentioned again.”
“That's certainly a consistent theme among those I've spoken with from New West Dorm. I'm thinking you lived at New West in the 1963–1964 school year?”
“Yes, I was a counselor in the dorm,” she said.
“What we used to call a resident advisor, that sort of role?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What sends the shivers upon recalling the name?” I inquired.
“Before I get too far into this, tell me again who you are?”
“My apologies, I attended the University of Tennessee in the early eighties. I can provide references if that is helpful, and we can chat at some future time when it feels appropriate to you? Or not; it's completely at your discretion,” I said.
“And what's your link to this?” she asked.
After explaining my acquired interest in the topic, the woman on the other end of the conversation chose to go forward with the discussion. I explained that, after reading the newspaper accounts, I found the Paula Herring story to be perplexing. So much so that I had begun researching the story in earnest, almost to the jeopardy of my regular employment.
“What happened to Paula's mother?” she asked.
“Good question. She died in the mid-seventies in Texas.”
“I always suspected that her mother was an alcoholic.”
“Your impression was correct. Apparently alcohol abuse was at the center of her demise,” I noted.
“And what about Paula's father?” she asked.
“Records indicate that he committed suicide at a Nashville hotel in 1960, a couple of weeks after Paula's fifteenth birthday.”
“I didn't know that. In fact I think Paula may have indicated that he died in a car accident or something like that.”
“I can confirm that the cause of death listed was ingestion of poison, a suicide.”
“There was a little boy in the house, her brother, right?” she asked softly.
“Yes. And the man convicted in Paula's wrongful death spent nine years in prison, was paroled in 1975, and died in 1986. His wife died about seven years later. They had no children.”
“So what makes this an unusual story to you, short of the obvious?” she asked.
“The district attorney general from 1964, the chief of police, the mayor of Nashville, have all passed away in the past decade or so. People on one side of the aisle, legally speaking, kept saying, ‘Yes, we got the right person for the crime.’ On the other side of the aisle, the answer was, ‘No, you absolutely got the wrong person,’” I said.
“Well, I'll never forget it. Paula was on my hall in the dormitory. And we were good friends. I was haunted by the story. And I think about it from time to time. Every now and then something triggers my recollection,” she noted.
“Do you remember the plane ride you took the weekend Paula was killed?” I asked.
“It seems like Paula and I left Knoxville on the same flight.”
“Were you coming to spend the weekend with her in Nashville?” I asked.
“No, but I don't remember where I was going.”
“If I said Oxford, Mississippi, would that help?”
“Oh, yes, there was a group of us going to a sorority conference,” she said.
“But Paula didn't fly all the way to the conference?” I asked.
“No, I distinctly remember that we sat together on the flight, and she got off the plane in Nashville to visit her family for the weekend. I assume you're calling to ask me what I remember.”
“Yes, I was simply calling to find someone willing to talk about their remembrances of Paula. I'll confess that's been difficult,” I said.
“Well, I was questioned by one of the investigators. I remember that happened maybe on Monday or Tuesday after the weekend.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and I remember that the plane stopped in Nashville on the way back to Knoxville on Sunday afternoon. And Paula didn't get back on the plane. She had a seat next to me coming and going, and she didn't get back on the plane.”
“I'm sorry,” I said softly.
“I remember being surprised and then thinking, well maybe she caught a car ride back to campus. Then I heard the news that night when I got back to the dorm.”
“I can only imagine the shock,” I said.
“It still troubles me when I think about her.”
“So I was thinking, you might have majored in pre-law?” I asked.
“Yes, why does that matter?”
“Because for some reason, Paula Herring had settled on a plan to go to law school, and I made the assumption that someone she knew, perhaps a mentor, had influenced her to do so. Susan, would you happen to know why Paula wanted to change majors?”
“I'm sorry, I don't. Though I think she would have been successful in that field. She was very bright.”
“Any chance that a male student from the University of Tennessee might have had an agenda with Paula and was perhaps involved in her, uh, demise?” I inquired.
“No, never. To me it always seemed something wasn't right with the story, but I didn't have access to all the details.”
In the summer of 1999, I made a significant discovery after researching and contacting the members of the University of Tennessee's first snow skiing club, formed in the winter of 1964. A man named Paul Pharr, who had been elected as the first president of the UT Ski Club, confessed that he had been dating Paula Herring in the days and weeks prior to her tragic death. When I asked how long they had been dating, the man indicated “every weekend for three weeks prior to Paula's murder.” Paul Pharr remembered that Paula enjoyed dancing and movies and that she was going home that fateful weekend in February. He said he was shocked when he had heard the news of Paula's murder. “I thought she was a nice person and couldn't understand why someone would kill her,” he said.8
Shortly after the exchange with Paul Pharr, I was able to verify Paula Herring's class schedule for the Winter Term of 1964. She was enrolled in English 112, Elementary Spanish, General Zoology, Physical Education, Deductive Logic, and Background of Modern Civilization.
One of her dorm mates, a girl I'll call Claire, had the exact same classes except for Deductive Logic. I couldn't resist tracking down Claire and inquiring about her former friend:
Me: You might've been Paula's roommate, winter of 1964?
Claire: No.
Me: You might have loaned her a book?
Claire: Yes, I remember the title.
Me: All the King's Men?
Claire: Yes.
Me: Can you describe Paula or tell me about her?
Claire: She was athletic, not pretentious, not the cheerleader type, didn't date much, but was known throughout the dorm.
Me: Did you know Paula before Knoxville?
Claire: No.
Me: Did you live in the same dorm?
Claire: I don't remember.
Me: Did you come to Paula's funeral?
Claire: I don't remember.
Me: Did you come home that weekend in February?
Claire: I don't think so.
Me: Did the police come to see you in Knoxville?
Claire: I gave a statement I think or maybe I went to court.
Me: Where?
Claire: I don't remember. It was all very spooky, scary.
Me: On the surface, this story looks like they caught the right guy, but the more I research it, the more I'm intrigued, because my intuition says something's wrong.9
Two days later, I cal
led back:
Me: Hello? Mike Bishop calling from Nashville, Tennessee.
Claire: I'm not interested. Please don't call me again.
Not long after my conversation with “Claire,” I found Paula Herring's first roommate, the studious girl from Johnson City, Tennessee. This girl, I'll call Kay Masterson, and now married with children of her own, was quickly spooked by my research into her former roommate. After a few unsuccessful attempts at reaching her by phone, I penned a letter to her:
Dear Ms. Masterson,
I hope you can help me with a current writing/research project based out of Nashville. I'm a graduate of the University of Tennessee and for the past months I've been working on a book project.
The focus has been to cover some of the more newsworthy moments in Nashville's history. One of the more sensational yet tragic moments took place on February 22, 1964, the death of babysitter Paula Herring.
I would like to speak with you briefly regarding your remembrances of your 1963 Fall Quarter dorm mate, Paula Herring, and the atmosphere of college life in ’63–’64. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely, Michael Bishop
Approximately three weeks later, I received a response:
Dear Mr. Bishop,
I'm sorry that you've had trouble reaching me. My house-sitter tells me that you've made several calls. I have been in Canada for quite a while on assignment.
I'm enclosing some materials for you that I thought might be of some help for your research. This is all I have, items that were tucked away in an old scrapbook. I personally do not have any memories of that time, tried very hard to block them out and ultimately succeeded!
Please do not call me again. I will be leaving for another extended trip abroad soon. Good luck with your continued research.
Sincerely, Kay Masterson10
The helpful, but not helpful, note led me to the unsavory world of true detective magazines.11 When Kay returned my attempted communication with the “don't call me” letter, she also included a copy of True Detective magazine from July 1964. I wondered how painful it must have been for Paula's friends and family to read the magazine article's characterization of Paula's murder, along with news and notes about Alan, Jo, and even Wilmer Herring. The photographs in the magazine article showed no mercy, as they were brutally graphic, even more so than the local newspapers that had covered the girl's slaying. After the Kay Masterson exchange, my list of former Paula Herring classmates to contact moved from Knoxville back to Nashville, where Paula had attended high school. And thus began my long search for a girl named Carmen Lee.
One of the more noteworthy deals with the devil, at least musically speaking, was the one Robert Johnson made in 1937 in a delta town in northwest Mississippi.12 As historians tell it, no one ever before or since has played a blues guitar with the sweet sound of Robert Leroy Johnson. He was so good, in fact, because, according to Johnson, he made a deal personally with Satan himself at the intersection of a two-lane blacktop known as Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
The monument to Robert Johnson's deal is still standing, one of the loftier visuals in a town mostly filled with poor folk trying to make a living surrounded by thousands of acres of delta cotton and soybeans. Farther south, you can find where most of the devil's dealers end up, in Parchman, Mississippi, a prison of considerable bad karma, where many of its residents finish this life with a thousand volts of electricity burning up their anatomy.13 It would be in the town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, near Johnson's Memorial, that I, too, would make a deal that would begin to unravel the case against John Randolph Clarke.
Based on a brief conversation with one of the basketball players on Paula's team, I learned that one of Paula's best friends at John Overton High School was a girl who was one class behind Paula. Thus, in the winter of 1964, this girl was a senior basketball player on the Overton High School girls’ team.14
So it seemed plausible to me that if there were one and only one person Paula Herring might visit while she was home during the weekend of February 22 it would be her best friend, Carmen Lee. Their homes were in the same neighborhood, and they easily could visit with each other that weekend.
But there was a problem. There was nothing in the court record that suggested Paula and her best friend, Carmen, had spent any time together that weekend. In fact, Jo Herring was the only one to briefly mention Paula's last day on earth. And Jo's timeline of that Saturday was simply that Paula had awoken, had breakfast with her mother and her little brother, made a trip to get the car serviced, picked up some contact lenses, and then had settled in for a long afternoon and evening of report writing for her class at the University of Tennessee—and, of course, according to Jo, making the generous offer to stay home and babysit Alan while her mother went to dinner with friends. No mention of Carmen Lee, not even so much as a phone call.
So decades later, to say the trail of Carmen Lee had grown cold was a vast understatement. Off and on for years, I had been hunting for Carmen and had still not found her. I could find remnants of her family scattered throughout the southeastern United States, but no Carmen. When I thought I had found her living in Wisconsin, I flew to Chicago, drove to a little lakeside community where it appeared she owned some real estate, at least according to the county clerk's office, only to find an empty house. It was supremely frustrating. It was as if Carmen's instincts were warning her that someone was on her trail, and she would escape just before I could get to her.
The most recent attempt at tracking her down indicated that she might be living near the famous crossroads of Robert Johnson's monument in the little delta town of Clarksdale, Mississippi. With nothing more than an address and some time to waste, I made my way past cotton fields and the famous intersection at Highways 61 and 49, and slowly drove past older Craftsman-style homes on quiet streets with Native American names, such as Chickasaw and Cheyenne. The extra-wide streets were lined with giant oak trees that appeared to be a century old or more. In fact, the streets were so wide that they could have been restriped as four-lane highways, though there appeared to be little need for such an enhancement, as the amount of traffic I encountered was hardly worth the trouble.
It was a warm Saturday morning in September 2009, when I located the most recent address that had Carmen's name attached to it. After chasing her across the country, I was beginning to wonder if Carmen had parlayed some wealth into real estate speculation or rental properties, because although her name or someone with the same name was attached to ownership records, I never seemed to find her living at the address I was checking.
With the sun rising higher in a cloudless morning sky and the humidity reaching an uncomfortable level, I parked my car on the street, parallel in front of a well-kept, 1950s brick bungalow. I had just rolled down the car windows in hopes of a cooling breeze when a late-model sedan, driven by a woman I guessed could be the age of Carmen Lee, passed me and then turned into the driveway of the home I had come to visit. I must be living right, I thought to myself.
The woman exited the car and was now walking up the sidewalk to the front door. She was tall and athletic looking, with brown hair styled in a short, attractive haircut and an outfit that made me think she might be a club tennis player or perhaps a golf professional. At least those were my initial intuitions. In one hand, she held a chain of car keys, and in the other a white plastic bag with a couple of items inside. So, on the spur of the moment, I stepped out of my car and called out to her. “Carmen? Carmen Lee?”
My words were effective, and the woman halted in her tracks, but I didn't detect any smile or warmth being reflected back to me. Instead, I was seeing the woman's eyes narrow, and she took a defensive posture as I approached.
“Good morning, I thought you might be Carmen Lee.”
“No, who are you?”
“Are you related to her?” I asked, as I blocked her path to the doorway in hopes of at least getting some insight before she retreated inside and
I was left out of options for yet another search.
“No, why are you looking for Carmen?”
“I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself. My name is Michael Bishop. I'm from Nashville, Tennessee, where Carmen graduated high school back in the 1960s. I'm trying to find her. In fact, I've been trying to find Carmen for several years, and the reason is, well, I'll just tell you straight up, the reason I need to find her is about her best friend's murder when Carmen was a senior in high school in 1964. But I'm guessing you're not Carmen?”
“No, I'm not.”
With this last comment, I assumed she was going to ask me to step off her property, but, to my surprise, she didn't move away, nor did she appear to want to get away from me.
“Are you a detective?” she asked.
“No, ma'am, I'm just researching the 1964 murder case. There's been some new information discovered recently that makes me think the person convicted of the crime was not the person who should have been convicted.” I was hoping this last bit of confession might strike a chord with this woman. Her reply was delivered flatly and without any emotion. “I don't know where she is, and I can't help you.”
“But she's been here, in this town, maybe in the last year?”
“Maybe, but I can't help you. I'm sorry,” she said.
“No, I completely understand, I'm only interested in asking her a few questions.”
As I said this, I was hoping for any shift in body language or facial expression that would indicate that I might be able to sway her toward helping me. I was hoping that the negative attitude was not toward me and was instead toward whatever business or personal dealings she had had with Paula Herring's former best friend. As I waited, a small dog scampered down the middle of the quiet street.
“Are you staying here in Clarksdale?” she asked.
“No, I literally just got here in the past half-hour. I had barely parked my car when you pulled into the driveway. Maybe it's fate, both of us here at the same time?”
A Murder in Music City Page 9
