A Murder in Music City

by Michael Bishop

  After several weeks of endless calls and research, my Red Ace gas station worker appeared to have vanished for good. Of the few records I could find for Jesse, most were dead ends until I stumbled upon a notation in a small North Alabama town that a man named Jesse Henderson had been the witness for a couple marrying in front of a judge decades earlier, in 1964. Thinking that the couple might be able to offer some insight into our mutual friend, I began pursuing this new angle, but again without success. Having no luck finding the groom, I began to work backward, starting with the bride's name. A month later, the trail had evaporated, and I could conclude only that the wife had either left town or was deceased.

  So I did the only thing I knew to do. I drove to Joelton and started knocking on doors. With a cooler of ice water and snacks in my car, I settled in for a long day. I visited nursing home after nursing home, crisscrossing two counties along the way. At every stop, I parked my car as close to the front door as possible and walked inside to ask two simple questions: Do you have a resident named Jesse Henderson? No? Okay, do you know the name of any other nursing homes in the area?

  After a day completely filled with failed attempts, at just after 4:00 p.m., I stopped at a tidy little retirement village about an hour outside of Nashville to pose the same two questions once again. With another no response, I was on my way out of the lobby when a young woman who had been watering plants called out to me as I reached the door to exit the building.

  “You know, there's a woman up the road here that rents out to veterans. Have you tried up there?”

  “A nursing home?” I inquired.

  “No, it's more of a regular house, not like this building.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Grantham's is what I think they call it. No, actually that was the woman's name that owned it. I don't know that there's even a sign in the yard. It don't matter, it's about two miles up this same road, on the left after you go around the big curve. You can't miss it. It's brick, kind of a long brick house. If he was a veteran he might be up there.”

  I thanked her for her kindness, returned to my car, and navigated the two-lane blacktop in the direction she had pointed. As described, after rounding a large curve, on the left side of the road, sheltered by towering oaks and hickory trees, was a large home that had a pale yellow brick exterior and an oversized driveway littered with too many cars for a regular home, but just about the right number for a business. There was no sign in the yard, and just a large mailbox at the end of the driveway.

  After parking my car, I cautiously approached the side door of the building and knocked before entering. A man's voice greeted me.

  “You can come on in, sonny. She's in the back cleaning up the kitchen.”

  When I stepped inside, the lighting was slightly better, and I could see that my greeter was a grizzled old man in a wheelchair, wearing a baseball cap and chewing on an unlit cigar.

  “Good afternoon, is the manager or owner here?”

  “Lurleen! You got company!” He yelled this message in the general direction of a central hallway that appeared to run the length of the house.

  “She'll be up here in a minute, sonny. What brings you out this way?”

  “Oh, just looking for a friend of mine,” I replied.

  A moment later, the hallway was darkened by a tall woman wearing a food-stained apron.

  “I'm sorry to disturb you; the folks down at the other nursing home said you might have a friend of mine staying with you. That's why I was stopping by.”

  “Well, we got about fifteen of them here, mister. What's his name?”

  “Jesse Henderson.”

  “Yep, he's one of ours. He's in the back reading a book, I think. Just follow me. Is he expecting you?”

  “No, ma'am, I don't think so. He used to live in Nashville, and then he moved away, and I haven't seen him in a while.”

  As we walked along the corridor, I resisted the urge to look into the rooms on either side of the hall, out of respect for the resident's privacy. A few steps later, she pointed at a door on my left and said, “He's in there,” and then she returned to her kitchen work in the back of the house. I knocked softly on the door, hoping not to disturb the old man in case he was asleep, and then I slowly pushed the door open.

  In the small bedroom, I could see Jesse Henderson lying on a twin bed, his head propped up by double pillows, dingy reading glasses in place, and a worn white sheet over him, pulled up under his arms.

  On the other side of the room, I could see another twin bed, occupied by an ancient man without hair. The other man was lying on top of his mattress, enjoying an afternoon talk show that was blaring from the small television positioned just above my head over the doorway.

  “Mr. Henderson, how are you feeling today?” I asked.5

  He looked up to see me, then quickly removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes as if seeing a ghost, and finally responded: “Oh, the cheap detective. What are you doing here?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you were alright. You left your other place in a hurry.”

  “Yeah, they just kicked me out is all. Said I was gonna burn the place down. I wasn't supposed to be smoking in my room, but I like a cigar every now and then.”

  “I hear this place only houses veterans. You were in what, World War II or Korea? Or was it the American Revolution?”

  “Ha! I was a Navy man in World War II.”

  “So how have you been?”

  “I ain't buying any green bananas, if that's what you're asking.”

  I laughed out loud while I looked for a place to sit, but there were no chairs in the room and attempting to sit on the edge of the bed seemed like a bad idea.

  “You still writing a book about that Clarke fellow?”

  “Mostly doing some research. Hey, I almost forgot, you remember telling me you'd been married. Your wife, what was her name?”

  “Oh, you're talking about Betty. She's somewhere in Georgia, I think. I don't keep up with her.”

  He responded as if I were asking about a missing can of corn.

  In an attempt to keep things on a light path, I noted that, “It's hard enough to keep up with one wife, let alone three or five of them, right?” This attempt at humor achieved the desired effect, and Henderson had a good chuckle out of it.

  “If I'd had any sense, I'd still be married to Betty, but I liked to drink too much. I drank my way right on down to working for the Colonel and then pumping gas.”

  “The Colonel?”

  “Yeah, the fried chicken place.”

  “That's funny. How about helping me write up this story about Red Clarke and that tragic accident? You'd certainly have a unique point of view.”

  “That wasn't no accident. Whoever did that to that girl was mad at her.”

  “Really? How's your old friend BlueSky doing these days?” I asked.

  “I don't know how he's doing. I guess he's around somewhere. You still thinking that Carlton fellow had something to do with that girl getting killed?”

  “I don't know. I know Clarke's attorney sure thought he might have been the one who killed that girl,” I replied.

  “Charlie was getting paid to say it was anybody but Red Clarke. You know none of those defense attorneys ever have a guilty client. Hey, what about those other two guys?”

  “I'm sorry, I'm not following you.” I said.

  “I thought you said there were some guys fighting in the garage when that girl was killed?” Jesse said.

  “What? No, I never said anything like that.”

  At this point, my head was spinning from the number of options that Henderson was introducing into the story. Perhaps that was his goal—to confuse me by introducing a laundry list of suspects for the murder. Or perhaps I was giving him too much credit, and this revolving suspect list was his cloudy remembrance of the baffling crime.

  After a few more minutes of conversation, I could hear food trays being delivered down the hall for the early evening meal. I promis
ed Jesse that I would return with a few paperback books on my next visit, and Henderson was either pleased to have me returning as a future guest or pleased that he could keep an eye on me and, more importantly, keep up with any progress on my research.

  A few weeks later, I took the opportunity to return to Joelton, bringing a sack full of paperback books in an attempt to gain favor with the old man. But as I pulled into the driveway of the nursing home, my jaw dropped.

  No, not again! I said to myself.

  I had been so focused on the potential conversation with Jesse, I hadn't realized what was different about the overly large home. There were no other cars in the driveway or parked on the lawn, the trash cans were overflowing, and all of the interior curtains appeared to be missing from the windows.

  After exiting my car and peering into one of the windows, not only were there no people inside, the house was completely empty; not a piece of furniture was to be seen anywhere. At the side entrance door that I had used on my previous visit, I found a utility company note taped to the glass, indicating that power would be shut off for lack of payment. The note was dated two weeks earlier.

  “I'm the one you want.”6

  She had a nervous tone in her voice, and, while most of the other people I had contacted about the Paula Herring murder were careful with their responses to me, she was too talkative.

  But her opening line sounded eerily prophetic, or so it seemed to me as I wondered how and where she would fit into the story.

  “You were in my daughter's driveway, looking for my mother the other day,” she said.

  “Lizzie?”

  “That's my mother's name. But she's not going to be any good to you,” she said.

  Before I could respond by thanking her for returning my call, she jumped in with another inquiry: “You had some questions about my mother? It freaked my daughter out that you were in her driveway asking questions. My mother had a head injury years ago, and she's not, uh, quite right. Sometimes she makes sense. Sometimes she doesn't. So how can I help you?”

  “I'm sorry if I caused your daughter any alarm, I was just trying to find a Lizzie DeVern, and I think she lived in the Music Row area of Nashville, back in the 1960s.”

  “Is it about her pension?”

  “Actually, no, it's not,” I replied.

  “How did you find my daughter?”

  “I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name.” I said.

  “Gina.”

  “Well, Gina, I'll confess, basically through a lot of old records and a lot of interviews.”

  What Gina didn't know concerned my activity for the past half-year. I had traveled down the Jesse Henderson path as far as I could go, and, at the end of that trail, I had taken a different path and met with one of the former and now retired managers of Red Ace gasoline, in hopes that I would uncover a ream of information related to both Jesse Henderson and Sam Carlton. The aged manager remembered Carlton as the company employee who had been reeled into the aftermath of the Paula Herring murder, but as to the manager's personal view, he had nothing to add and no memory of Henderson at all. After this session, I resorted to the only option I could think of, which was to spend hours reviewing the city phone directory to find people who might have lived near Jesse Henderson and his mother on 18th Avenue in 1963 and 1964, and then to discover whether any of those old neighbors could be found decades later.

  I found an old man who was still living in the same 1940s bungalow-styled home that he had lived in almost fifty years earlier. This clue earned him an in-person visit on a sunny afternoon in March 2000. As I stood on his front porch asking him about the Paula Herring murder, he had no memory of the event. When I asked about Jesse Henderson, however, he remembered drinking with Jesse on many occasions because both of them had been World War II veterans and had often seen each other at various watering holes around town and even a few parties.

  Better than remembering Jesse Henderson, the old man had fond memories of Jesse's girlfriend, a hot little number named Lizzie. When I asked how I could find Lizzie, the old man could not remember her last name, but he willingly offered to walk me through the alleyway between 18th Avenue and 17th Avenue to point out the house where she had lived in the early 1960s. And that was the starting point I used to find Lizzie DeVern.

  After my “old records and a lot of interviews” comment, Gina started speaking in a repetitive stream of non-communicators, which accomplished nothing except to fill the air and did not convey any actual information to me. She had a steady delivery of “well, you know” and “in other words” and “the thing about it is” and similar air-fillers. Her topics ranged from 1960s Nashville and all of the high-profile citizens she had known back in the day, to her daily activities in the present. But my new friend wasn't hanging up the telephone, and I sensed that she might be buying time to assess me. Here's a woman whose mother may be a player in this story, and instead of hanging up on me, or telling me she has no interest in a discussion, she's still on the line. Interesting. Maybe she wants to know what I know?

  “Gina, I'll save us both some time. I'm trying to reach your mother about a former Red Ace gas station attendant that she may have known decades ago in Nashville. The gas station man and his mother lived within walking distance of the DeVern family in 1963. Walking distance, as in, through an alleyway between 18th Avenue and 17th Avenue.”

  If the temperature of a phone line could physically drop thirty degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of seconds, this one did. A nervous laugh came through the line, and my brain started racing into high gear. “Gina, did you graduate high school in Nashville?” I asked.

  “Yes, in the 1960s. That was a while ago.”

  “So it was you and your family that lived on 17th Avenue?”

  “It was just me and my mother. My dad died right about that time. What does this have to do with my mom?”

  “I'm sorry about your dad. And that's a fair question, and here's the answer: The gas station attendant, named Jesse Henderson, was good friends with a man who was convicted of murdering a University of Tennessee coed in 1964, and I'm trying to find someone that knew either of those guys or perhaps both of those men. Do you know Jesse Henderson?”

  Again the nervous laugh, and she didn't answer my question. She hasn't asked who I am. She should ask about the murder, I thought to myself. It's an obvious next question.

  I decided to offer up the information as if she had indeed asked about the murder. “Ironically, and sadly, I might note, the murder victim was a young woman who graduated high school in 1963.”

  Silence again, but she was still on the line.

  “Gina, maybe we could meet for a cup of coffee? I'm thinking, based on my caller-ID, that you're calling from somewhere in Kentucky. Maybe you could come to Nashville and we could meet. Could you do that for me, please?” I asked.

  “My mother may have known Jesse. But the thing is…is that I don't even know why you think I would know anything about any of this,” she replied.

  “That's not a problem. I'm just trying to understand the relationships,” I said. “The guy convicted of murder was named John Randolph Clarke. I think there's a good chance that your mother knows this story.”

  “Maybe, I don't know. That was a long time ago.”

  “Jesse's an interesting little man. He mostly subsists on cigars, soft drinks, and junk food. As for the murder, it involved a University of Tennessee student home for the weekend in February 1964. The victim's mother, a nurse at Vanderbilt, goes out to dinner that night, comes home around 11:00 p.m., and finds her daughter lying on the den floor, dead. A few days later, the police settle on Jesse Henderson's friend as the best suspect, a thirty-nine-year-old ne'er-do-well named John Randolph Clarke. Trial and conviction follow, and that's the end of the story. At least until I come along a few decades later.”

  “And Jesse mentioned that he knew my mom?” she inquired.

  “No, not exactly. Another thing that intrigued me was that Jesse and another Red
Ace employee, a truck stop manager, seemed to have a connection to the murder. I'm not completely sure what the connection means, so I'm hoping your mom can help me better understand that chapter in Jesse Henderson's life.”

  “I've got to go now. Maybe you could call me back in a few days.”

  “Gina, was your mother working anywhere when you lived on 17th Avenue?”

  “Yes, she was a nurse.”

  The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if the Paula Herring murder had become an urban legend because it was never going to be anything more. It was an urban legend with multiple solutions conjured up by concerned citizens who had heard, or perhaps even experienced, various parts of the story. And John Randolph Clarke had become the most favored and the most formal solution in the legend, closely followed by the bloody man solution, and the prowler/rapist solution. Perhaps no one would ever know what had really taken place inside the house on Timberhill Drive.

  A few days later I was at a well-known eatery on West End Avenue, ready to take a turn at perhaps adding yet another solution to the babysitter legend, albeit one arriving decades late. It was 10:30 in the morning, and I was sitting inside the restaurant, at a table close to the front door, when Gina walked in. I was wearing a baseball cap to help her identify me. And I had never asked how to identify her, primarily because I didn't think Gina actually would show up. But a few moments after our appointed time, a woman of perhaps sixty sat down opposite me. She was tall and thin, with short platinum-blond hair, which, to my eye, was a wig. She was hiding behind fashionable eyewear and carrying a small, well-worn pocketbook with a set of keys attached. Before I could say hello, I caught a brief glimpse of her trembling hand.