I could see she was thinking about helping me, so I gave her a moment to consider my “fate” remark, before adding, “Anything, and I mean anything that you could do to point me in the right direction would be appreciated far more than you know. It seems I've been all over the country trying to find her, and I thought you might have been Carmen when I saw you step out of the car.”
She looked away and took a very deep breath, then turned back to face me. “I might have an old phone number you can try, but I'm not confident it's still in service. Would you want that?”
“Yes, definitely. I'm at zero right now; anything you have is helpful.”
“Okay, I'm going to go inside and get the number for you, and after I give it to you, you are never to come back here, ever. It sounds like a really tragic story, and maybe you can find her and get what you need. Is that a deal?”
“It's a rock solid deal. I owe you, thank you.”
A few moments later, I copied down a cell phone number, and within five minutes I was halfway out of town when a disturbing thought crossed my mind. I nearly ran over the curb as I pulled into the parking lot of an old grocery market to stop the car and analyze the situation. I was talking to myself out loud:
Did I just get played by Paula Herring's very clever friend? Is it possible that the woman I just met was in fact Carmen Lee? She looks athletic enough; she's the right age, certainly looks like someone who could be a 1964 Overton graduate. Why would she try to dupe me?
I reached into my pocket for the scrap of paper, thought about dialing the number right then, but decided I would let twenty-four hours pass before I dialed. What I couldn't foresee was that it would be almost a year before I would speak to Carmen Lee.
During the criminal trial in Jackson, Tennessee, neither the prosecution nor the defense had made any attempt at putting Alan Prewitt Jr. on the witness stand to validate Jo Herring's story of the night she had met John Randolph Clarke in Ruth's Diner.1 After tracking down Mr. Prewitt's particulars, I quickly realized that he either had had nothing to add to the trial or perhaps had used his family connection to avoid testifying, given that he was the son of the recently retired chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court.2
This meant that Jo Herring had met the son of an East Tennessee judge, John Clarke, on the same night that she was having dinner with the son of the former chief justice of the highest court in Tennessee. Perhaps the younger Prewitt's access to power was of interest to the registered nurse?
Another curious aspect of the trial record was the realization that the night manager of the Krystal hamburger restaurant, the woman brought in to view a 1:00 a.m. lineup that included John Randolph Clarke, had not testified at the criminal trial in Jackson. Clarke's attorney made a point of confirming this lack of evidence in a later exchange with one of the investigators from the DA's office.
Galbreath: Did you consider it strong evidence in this case, that an eyewitness had seen the defendant in a bloody condition a few miles from the murder scene?
George Currey: Yes.
Galbreath: Yet she wasn't called as a witness in this trial by the state?
Currey: I don't believe she was. We didn't use her as a witness.
Galbreath: As a matter of fact, you rejected her statement.
Currey: I didn't. I didn't.
Galbreath: Well do you believe, was it your position that she had indeed seen John Clarke?
Currey: I don't know.
Galbreath: You don't know.
Currey: No.3
As I mulled over these inconsistencies and questions, I was surprised to receive a late afternoon phone call on a Friday from the clerk of the Supreme Court. The helpful administrator called to apologize for not realizing that an additional trial transcript had been omitted in her review for me, and the other transcript, a civil case, also involved John Randolph Clarke. When I politely disagreed, she confirmed that she only had provided the criminal trial transcript while failing to realize that a civil trial transcript also was available.
Before I could ask her to expand on the details of the civil case, she mentioned the 1965 date of the trial and suggested that it would have been covered in newspapers from across Tennessee if I wanted to review any articles before picking up the transcript on Monday morning.
It didn't take me long to track down the bombshell article, published in the Knoxville News Sentinel. The story, by Dana Ford Thomas, was printed on May 18, 1965, and recounted how a noisy car that might have been involved in the slaying of Paula Herring had been given to a professional wrestler and his wife on February 23, 1964, one day after the girl's murder. The couple, who at the time of the article were living in Kingsport, Tennessee, were perplexed by the generous gift from a man they barely knew, one Sam Carlton of Nashville. The wife further noted that Carlton's face had been scratched when he arrived at their home.4
Davidson County district attorney general Harry Nichol was noted as being willing to question the couple but was not reopening the case.
The discovery of this news was not just a bombshell to the case against John Randolph Clarke, it was also a major dilemma for me, almost thirty-five years after Clarke's conviction. What if Sam Carlton had murdered Paula Herring and gotten away with the slaying, while Clarke went to prison? Would Alan Herring try to do something about it? What if Carlton was completely innocent but looked guilty? And where was Sam Carlton now, dead or alive? It seemed that the wisest course of action was to run down the answers to these questions.
A few weeks after Clarke's conviction, the city of Boston finally caught their elusive killer.5 And the story ended with a twist, as the Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, turned out to be a man of many disguises, his most recent being that of a police detective.
In mid-October of 1964, Charles Galbreath and his client caught a break. A woman who had testified as a character witness for John Randolph Clarke, Ruthmary Cobb, was visited late one night by Dr. Murray Cook, one of the 1963 Christmas Eve participants who had teased John Randolph Clarke into firing his pistol into a snowy sidewalk on 18th Avenue South. Cook had met the Cobb woman a party a few weeks prior, and he chose the odd timing of his visit to discuss the facts of the Clarke case and told Mrs. Cobb that he knew Clarke was innocent and that a close friend of his, one Al Baker, was guilty and offered to prove it.6
The visit so upset the woman that she filed a notarized deposition with Charles Galbreath in hopes that it might help her redheaded friend, John Randolph Clarke. The woman stated that Cook, in her presence on the night of his visit, then telephoned Harry Nichol, the district attorney general, and also a newspaper reporter for the Nashville Banner, and told both parties the same thing—that Baker was guilty and Clarke was innocent.
A few days later, Charles Galbreath received a phone call from another member of the Nashville Bar Association. The attorney on the other end of the line greeted Galbreath with the news that Charlie owed him $250. The attorney, W. B. Hogan, said he had a witness who not only could identify the bloody man at the Krystal hamburger restaurant, but that his client, a railroad worker, had known the bloody man for several years. There was no doubt that the reward would have to be paid.
Within hours of the call, the two attorneys met to formulate a game plan, and quite naturally the plan included litigation. The two lawyers decided that Galbreath would refuse to pay the reward, thus forcing Hogan to sue him in open court on behalf of his client. It was a perfect setup. At some point, the civil suit would end up on the docket of some unsuspecting judge, with the goal of overturning Clarke's conviction and winning a new trial or, better yet, uncovering the identity of Paula Herring's real killer.
Six months later, in April 1965, the civil suit came up on the docket of a local circuit judge. After Galbreath and Hogan explained the particulars of the case, the judge allowed the case to proceed.
W. B. Hogan's star witness, and also the man laying claim to the reward, was a fellow named Henry King.7 Henry and his brother both worked for the L & N Railro
ad.
According to Henry, on the night of Saturday, February 22, 1964, he had been at the Parkview Hospital in Nashville, where his wife was recovering from surgery. When visiting hours were over, Henry left the hospital and decided to stop by and see his sister and brother-in-law, who lived just off Franklin Road in South Nashville.
When Henry King got to his sister's home and discovered that no one was there, he drove around the corner to get a cup of coffee at the Krystal hamburger restaurant on Franklin Road. King parked his car in front of the store and, just as he was about to enter the front door, a man came out who Henry recognized immediately as Sam Carlton.
Henry said that he had gotten to know Sam and his brother years earlier, when the two brothers had been operating a restaurant on Clarksville Highway. Henry said that, when he realized Sam was bleeding from his head and that he had blood on his arm and pants, he asked him what had happened. Carlton's response was that he'd been knocked in the head by two men and that he was going home to get his gun and kill them.
On Sunday morning, when King returned to Parkview Hospital, his wife was reading a Sunday newspaper and commented upon the tragic news regarding the babysitter who had been murdered in Crieve Hall the night before. The news stunned Henry, and he told his wife of the encounter with a bloody Sam Carlton. But Henry didn't mention the story again, and it was forgotten.
When Galbreath took his turn at cross-examination, his obvious question to King was “Why?” Why had Henry not come forward fourteen months earlier, when the event had taken place? Henry's answer was that he didn't want to get involved and that he had read in the newspaper that a suspect had been taken into custody for the murder and he had seen the Mayor's announcement on television the week of the murder. Galbreath asked why, then, when he knew that a man had been convicted of murder in the Paula Herring case, in part due to the testimony of a restaurant manager who saw a bloody man at the Krystal restaurant, why had he not come forward to exonerate Galbreath's poor client. Again, King said that he did not want to get involved in the case, but when he saw Galbreath's October reward offered in the afternoon newspaper, he felt he should contact someone, and the someone turned out to be attorney W. B. Hogan.
Next up on the witness stand was Sam Carlton.8 Carlton was an imposing figure, dressed in boots and heavy denim work clothes, sensible attire for a man who worked at a truck stop. In the days before interstate travel, when almost every eighteen wheeler made its way through the intersection of 1st Avenue and Broadway in downtown Nashville, Carlton's truck stop was one of the highest volume fuel retailers in the South.
From the start, Carlton made it clear that he wasn't happy to be in court. Upon being seated in the witness box, he didn't wait to be asked any questions; he had a few of his own. He wanted to know who was going to pay him for his time away from work, and whether he should have brought his own attorney with him.
Galbreath ignored the first question, and, with a straight face, suggested that no attorney was needed since Carlton was merely appearing as a witness in a small civil suit.
Big Sam wasn't buying any of it. He knew exactly why he'd been subpoenaed, and he had a very simple explanation for his appearance at the Krystal hamburger restaurant in a bloody condition: Henry King was just confused about the date. Carlton didn't argue with the fact that he'd been at the restaurant in a bloody condition, or even that it had been on a Saturday night, but Carlton put the date as November 3, 1963.
W. B. Hogan had been ready for such a story, and he offered two depositions to the judge. One was a sworn statement from Henry King's wife, who indicated that her husband had visited her on Sunday morning, February 23, while she was in the hospital in Nashville, and had mentioned having run into Sam Carlton the night before. Hogan also included a bill from the hospital, reflecting that, indeed, Mrs. King had been a patient at Parkview Hospital during the February timeline in question.
When Galbreath quizzed Carlton about why he had such a clear recollection of the date being three months earlier, the truck stop manager said that he and his wife had been to a birthday party for a friend who owned a shoe shop directly across from the Krystal restaurant on Franklin Road. The party had been held in the basement of the store. Sometime around 10:00 p.m. that night, a fight had broken out among two partygoers, and when Sam tried to break it up, someone tagged him on the head with a soft drink bottle.
Carlton said that he'd been dazed and was bleeding from his head when he staggered over to the Krystal and attempted to use the phone to call a cab. With this opening, and the star witness testifying in open court, Galbreath changed gears and caught the big man off guard with his next question:
Galbreath: Mr. Carlton, I'd like to know about your mode of transportation that night. How did you arrive at this alleged party? Did you take a cab over there?
Carlton: Of course not, I drove my own car and my wife took it back home.
Galbreath asked about the car, the make, model, and whether or not it had any mechanical problems or made any noise of any kind.
Carlton: I sold it.
Galbreath: Excuse me?
Carlton: I sold the car to a professional wrestler who needed some transportation.
Galbreath: Where's the car now?
Carlton: It was wrecked and towed somewhere up in East Tennessee. I don't know what they did with it.
Galbreath: What kind of car was it, Mr. Carlton?
Carlton: 1956 Chrysler Imperial.
Galbreath: I see, and when did you sell it?
Carlton: First week of March.
Galbreath: This year?
Carlton: Last year.
Galbreath: Oh, you mean you sold it the first week of March 1964. Let's see, that would have been within days of the murder of that poor little girl in Crieve Hall. What was her name? Herring. Yes, Paula Herring. Did you know the Herring family, Mr. Carlton?
Carlton: No.
Galbreath: You weren't acquainted with the dead girl's mother or her little brother?
Carlton: No.
Galbreath: I see. Well, when you sold your car to this wrestler, did you get a bill of sale? I'd like to see it if you did.
Carlton: I sold it on terms.
Galbreath: Terms, what does that mean exactly?
Carlton: I gave the man the car, and he was supposed to pay me when he could.
Galbreath: Let me get this straight. Within days of the murder of one Paula Herring, you gave away the only car you owned with the understanding that the buyer would pay you whenever he could get around to it? Is that what you're telling me, Mr. Carlton?
Carlton: That's what I'm telling you.
Galbreath: You are one fine citizen.9
A moment later, Galbreath asked Carlton where he had been living in February of 1964. Carlton offered up a street name, which Galbreath noted just happened to cross Timberhill Drive a short distance from where the Herring family lived.
A few weeks after the civil trial, John Randolph Clarke became the recipient of bad news. The civil suit that Galbreath and Hogan had taken to court turned out to be a loser. According to the judge in the case, Henry King had not proven that the bloody man he saw on the night of February 22 was Sam Carlton. And King was not due the reward, thus effectively eliminating the foundation that Galbreath wanted to use in building a case for a new trial for John Clarke.
But a few months later, the bad news was quickly reversed when appellate judge Thomas Shriver saw it the way King said the events had happened. The bloody man at the Krystal hamburger restaurant on the night of Paula Herring's murder was indeed the truck stop manager Sam Carlton. Thus, Galbreath and his client eventually paid the reward money to W. B. Hogan's client. But the verdict from Judge Shriver was too little and too late, and eventually had no bearing on Clarke's criminal trial verdict, even though Charles Galbreath had been working furiously to sway the Tennessee Supreme Court to find that his client had been convicted in error.
Buried within one of the pleadings by Galbreath was commen
tary by a police detective named R. B. Owen that he had witnessed one of his fellow officers physically handling Clarke's clothing and that of Paula Herring. According to Owen, he had given orders that under no circumstances was anyone to handle the evidence, except himself. Owen stated that he had observed another officer with the forbidden items of clothing with fibers on some paper in one hand and a strand of fibers in another. In Galbreath's view, this was grounds for a new trial given that the fibers from Paula Herring's sweater had found a new home on John Randolph Clarke's coat just prior to those articles of clothing being hand delivered to the FBI.10
And the language in the appeal regarding the bullet discovered on 18th Avenue South was also illuminating:
Assuming that the defendant or one of his drunken friends shot his pistol at the ground on 18th Avenue, South, and it is likely this happened, can any reasonable person believe the bullet found on the second search by the police was the bullet fired that night? Consider. The bullet found was some two-thirds of its length into the ground with its nose resting against a concrete paving stone. Obvious question? Was it fired there or placed there by someone who did not know the concrete block was just beneath the surface…. This bullet which a mine detector failed to locate the day before during a search of hours; this bullet was found with the naked eye the next day sticking out of the ground; this bullet was not damaged by the concrete. And the concrete was not damaged by the bullet. The only logical conclusion is that this bullet was fired somewhere else, removed, and then placed manually where the police found it.11
But these bits of remarkable news fell on deaf ears. Primarily because every appeal that Charles Galbreath filed on Clarke's behalf was turned down, including the appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
He answered the phone on the second ring, with a high-pitched voice and a pistol-quick delivery style. My reason for calling was that I was interested in writing a story that included some of the older companies from the 1960s era of Nashville and that I had been told that the man on the other end of the telephone line might have worked at a Red Ace gasoline station during those years.1
A Murder in Music City Page 10
