“Let's see, I believe that was over a sadism consult, wasn't it, Klaus?” Walter asked.
“Yes, it was,” the German psychiatrist replied.
As he spoke, I quickly remembered that Richard Walter had used his research to model a helix of evil, a sort of roadmap to hell, one that could literally predict the progression path of a peeping Tom to the eventual depths of his psychosis, with all of the intervening steps along the way. It was not unusual for “sociopaths in training” to attempt to sneak into one of Richard Walter's presentations in hopes of learning how to make faster progress toward their perverse enjoyments. Unfortunately, those enjoyments were usually at the expense of the rest of free society. It was as if Richard Walter knew their future crimes before they could commit them.
“So, how was the Jack the Ripper conference at Drexel?” I asked.4 “And by the way, I figured out who the Ripper was based on your model.”5
“But I didn't say who he was.”
“No, you didn't, but I studied your learning model and applied it to the suspect list, and it seems obvious that the young man found floating in the river, the Druitt fellow, was Jack the Ripper,” I stated confidently.
“Well done. You are correct. The Brits don't much like to hear such definitive assessments, however, as it cuts into their tourist trade. They like to keep the mystery going. Why don't you tell Klaus the babysitter story,” Walter suggested.
And so I did, and along with the story, I produced supporting documents, crime-scene photographs, a few of the detective magazines from the era, telegrams from J. Edgar Hoover, and more, all from my leather portfolio. Klaus reviewed each of these carefully as I progressed through the narrative, carefully describing the night of the murder, including the phone calls answered by the little boy and his sister. It was as if I were presenting the case before a modern-day Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes, only this time, they were named Neudecker and Walter.
A half hour later, with pauses for questions and clarifications along the way, I reached the end of the story and brought the timeline to the present dinner meeting in Atlanta. Richard Walter posed the initial follow-up question to his colleague.
“So, Klaus, who murdered the girl?” Walter asked.
“Clearly, it was not the judge's son. Not the Clarke fellow,” he replied in a Bavarian accent.
“Might you posit the hand of the girl's mother with this event?” Walter inquired.
“Yes, most certainly. But how did the mother escape notice? It seems the odds of finding two dead family members would be almost incalculable.”
I jumped in with the answer: “The mother had made significant investments in the power structure of Nashville. With her work as a nurse, she was in position to encounter some powerful people with addiction problems, starting with the mayor of Nashville. Eventually her circle included police detectives, an assistant DA, and more. I'm certainly not an expert, but it seems to me that the mother could spot human weakness like a hawk can spot a three-legged rabbit.” This latter statement elicited a chuckle from my new friends, and I continued.
“There were two nurses in the house on the night of the murder, and I was told that the other nurse actually fired the gunshots that executed the girl, but the mastermind of it all was the victim's mother. She was bad news. Those two nurses were providing sexual favors, stolen drugs, and entertainment of a kind you couldn't find just anywhere, to the group. If I had to characterize the players, I'd call them drinkers, philanderers, politicians, power brokers, maybe even addicts. Whatever you want to call them, it seems they were all cooperating with each other to get their cravings satisfied. And unfortunately, that's just the way Nashville rolled fifty years ago.”
“The mother was all about power. She was a Power Assertive personality,” noted Richard Walter. “In a typical sexual homicide, which this murder is not, the perpetrator wants to feel the victim. He wants to feel the percussive impact of the assault. He will ejaculate into the victim. Not so with the Power Assertive personality. They are eliminating threats and taking names. They will talk about it. Brag about it. They're sending messaging about the crime. They are in charge, and the murder is over and done when they say it's over and done. And the letter that the mother sent to the chief of police, that's more messaging. That's hardly the act of a grieving mother over a lost child.”
As we reached this portion of the discussion, our waiter began to deliver an array of food: barbeque ribs and cold beer for the German doctor; a seafood dish with a glass of Chardonnay for the tall, thin man, and a Caesar salad with flatbread appetizer for the layman, me. After a long sip of his chilled wine, Walter repeated the poignant questions that I had heard previously, only this time they were directed to his colleague.
“What explains this case? There's a murder in the home, in a constricted area, and it's mostly undisturbed. There is no rape, no robbery. But there is staging of a type to misdirect the investigation. The mother likely viewed this as a perfect crime,” he said.
I picked up a photograph from 1964 showing Jo Herring in the hallway of the Municipal Safety Building on the night of Paula's murder.
“Not exactly the look of a grieving mother,” I heard Walter say.
“No. She looks like she just won a prize fight, and she's ready to take on all comers,” I said.
“Klaus, we were going to present this case to the Vidocq Society, but my talented friend here is not a member of the law enforcement community,” Walter said.
“I'm a private citizen. What can I say?” I shrugged my shoulders and turned my palms upward.
Walter turned to me with a question I hadn't expected: “Tell me, what happened to the relationship between the two nurses, what eventually transpired?”
“Within days of the criminal trial verdict, the other nurse involved in the slaying, I'll call her Lizzie, married one of the two men who came to the house on that Saturday night. That newlywed couple moved away and stayed off of the radar screen for years. In part, I think they wanted to avoid any retribution from the Clarke fellow who was convicted. And getting married prevented them from testifying against each other,” I said.
“So the partnership, however you want to describe it between the two nurses, that didn't continue?” Walter asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Klaus, you see what happens, it has to change. After the murder, the relationship will, of necessity, decay.”
“And something else: after the slaying, the dead girl's mother moved back home to work in a hospital in Waco, Texas,” I added.
“That's what I call a return to Normalville,” Walter responded.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“The mother is now facing life without a husband and life without her daughter, notwithstanding the fact that she had a direct hand in the reasons for both. The other nurse, Lizzie, can't very well continue being with her. And once the men in the group realize the actual relationship between the two nurses, and who was really involved in the murder, they stop seeing her as well. So she will eventually commit suicide over time. It's just the way the psyche works,” Richard Walter said.
“By all reports, she abused alcohol and cigarettes, and by the time her son was eighteen years old, she was dead,” I noted. But this led me to a mystery that had haunted me from the early days of the research, when I had visited Paula's gravesite in Gallatin.
“So the victim's mother purchases not one but two grave plots within hours of murdering her daughter. One body, two graves. Why two graves when only one is needed? Would that have been because she might have committed suicide herself in the days right after the murder?” I asked.
Neudecker placed his utensils aside, took a sip of his drink, and injected a clarifying follow-up to me: “How did she purchase the plots?”
“She paid ninety dollars for each, cash, hours after the Saturday night murder,” I said.
Richard Walter was staring at me with hawk-like intensity. “My dear fellow, that second grave was fo
r the little boy. Not for herself. She was already making plans to do him in. She would have killed him within hours, certainly that next week, if he had presented any threat to her at all.”
My mouth was open, and I didn't make a sound. I could see that Neudecker was nodding his head in agreement.
Walter continued, “The little boy probably would have met with a most unfortunate accident. That would have been her plan.”
“I never thought about that potential,” I said. “That's just evil.”
“His own survival instinct must have told him, strongly told him, to simply remember nothing from the night of the murder and to park that conscious knowledge elsewhere. He was lucky to survive.”
Neudecker used the silence to ask where Alan Herring was living and I replied that he was hundreds of miles from Timberhill Drive.6 “I don't imagine he's coming back anytime soon. Who could blame him, really?” I said.
Moments later, we returned to the topic of motivation, especially as it related to Jo Herring's motivation concerning her daughter and little son.
“The Power Assertive personality will simply eliminate any threat to the ego. It doesn't matter if it's an external threat or one from inside the home. And it's not the first time a powerful and controlling psychopath was hiding behind the clothing of a Florence Nightingale. She was simply using sexual domination and manipulation to get what she wanted. And in this case, she wanted to eliminate a threat from within, her own daughter, and the son would have been next,” Walter noted.
“The girl was doomed,” Neudecker injected.
“Once the daughter expressed any potential to point a finger at the mother for the father's death, it was just a matter of time, or in this case, a matter of about three and a half years,” I said.
We paused for a moment, while our waiter delivered slices of chocolate cake to the table. At this point, I was just eating mindlessly, with no thought of the taste of the food or even that I was actually finishing a meal.
Richard Walter looked toward the ceiling, as if recalling a lost cloud formation, before delivering another facet of the crime. “Don't look past another motivation. And that would be the elimination of a threat to the rest of the group. She might say to the politicos involved, especially if they were married, and I would bet all of the male members were married with wives and families, ‘See what I did for you? I killed her. She's not going to be a problem. Game over.’ A smart nurse would have drugged the child while she went about her work that night. It would have been easy enough to do with a simple sedative or depressant,” Richard Walter said.
“I'm told she knew more about medications than the doctors she worked with, plus she had a large supply of stolen meds in her home,” I replied.
“And one of those phone calls that the boy heard may well have been his mother answering the phone, not his sister answering. It may have been the other nurse calling back to the house to say that she was safely elsewhere with a ready alibi and the mother could go ahead and call in the discovery of the crime,” Walter said.
As I gazed across the room, the living Sherlock Holmes made an observation about me: “You are no doubt dazzled by the personalities of this story, and the political aspect as well. It seems the young woman was on a path to rise above her circumstances. You plan to write the book, yes, to honor her?”
“Yes, that's my plan,” I said.
“I would buy that book,” noted Neudecker.
“You should do it,” echoed Richard Walter.
Within hours of the unforgettable meal with my new colleagues, I returned to Nashville, knowing that the next step in my plan was to pen the final solution to the babysitter murder. In a multi-hour session, fueled by caffeine and adrenaline, I would tell the incredible story of Paula Herring and her date with death, from the moment she stepped off of a plane at the Nashville airport in February 1964, until the arrest of a scapegoat named John Randolph Clarke a week later. Only this time, the story would include the secret players, their motives, and how they participated in covering up the murder of an eighteen-year-old college student, a young woman who planned to tell her own story of murder, a plan that ultimately took her life.
It is certainly possible that the wheels of justice that swept ’round and ’round Metro Nashville in the frantic hours after Paula Herring's murder did indeed gather up the one true suspect in the slaying, John Randolph Clarke. Though if Clarke did the deed, he nearly committed the perfect crime, because other than the matching bullet found near an 18th Avenue sidewalk, and a few fibers helped onto his clothing by a compromised investigator, no other physical evidence existed to convict him. No eyewitness, no bite marks, no blood stains, no noisy car, no scratches.
But let us leave Mr. Clarke alone for the moment and consider a story that just might provide a more satisfying narrative for a jury and also involve real physical evidence, as well as the motivations for those individuals potentially involved in the slaying. I present to you a Bad Night in Nashville.
Life could not have been better for Paula Herring on February 21, 1964. With a mountain full of snow in Gatlinburg, on Friday morning she made a quick trip to the little resort town to ski with fellow club members and enjoy the wonderful, fresh powder that had fallen hours before.1 And it wasn't just the thrill of skiing that was making Paula happy. She had been dating the newly elected president of the ski club each of the previous three weekends. By late afternoon, she was at the regional airport just outside of Knoxville, smiling and laughing with her future sorority sisters as the small group boarded an Eastern Airlines flight traveling to Memphis, Tennessee.2
When the flight made a scheduled stop in Nashville, Paula Herring stepped off the airplane and flagged down a cab driver to take her home to Timberhill Drive. Instead of finding her mother and little brother at home, though, Paula found an empty house waiting for her. Having spent her money on a lift ticket earlier that day, she had no money to pay for taxi service. But a quick dash next door ended with Becky Wexler's mom writing a check for the cab fare.3
Unknown to Paula, her little brother, Alan, was just up the street visiting with one of Jo Herring's neighbors. A few miles away, Paula's mother was sitting at a table at Wedgewood Diner, drinking beer after work with Billy Vanderpool, A. J. Meadows Jr., and one of her nurse friends from Vanderbilt Hospital, a woman named Evelyn. After Jo and Alan finally did arrive home, the conversation likely turned to snow skiing, college life, and the invitation to join Alpha Omicron Pi, the prestigious sorority membership that Paula coveted.
On Saturday morning, Paula drove the family Ford a few blocks up the street to her best friend Carmen Lee's house, and over breakfast and nonstop stories from the University of Tennessee, the two girls hatched a plan to meet at the basketball tournament being played in Madison, Tennessee, that evening.4 After the game, Carmen would ride home with Paula and spend Saturday night at the Herrings, staying up late into the night, whispering, laughing, and making plans for the future.
Attending the basketball game also would allow Paula the rare opportunity to surprise some of her former Overton High classmates, as well as the coaching duo representing Overton's competition that night. The previous year, Dorothy Ellis had coached her favorite team, the one led by Paula Herring, before resigning her teaching and coaching duties at Overton High School. And the irony could not have been sweeter now that Dorothy Ellis's husband, Jody, was the head football coach for Donelson High School, and powerful Donelson was playing Overton in a winner-advance or go-home game, which Paula desperately wanted to see.5 It was a game not to be missed, and Paula had traveled many miles to be courtside and cheer on her friend Carmen in hopes that Overton would win.
When Paula Herring left John Overton High in June of 1963, she was more often than not engaged in some athletic activity, which invoked both the “tomboy” description and the word “Fish,” the moniker given to her in high school due to her last name, but the girl who would be entering the gymnasium on this Saturday night would not be the Fis
h that many remembered. This Paula Herring was an attractive blond. She had swapped her eyeglasses for contact lenses and would be dressed in a new sweater and wraparound skirt, with penny loafers and knee-length socks to complete the coed ensemble. It was also the first opportunity for Paula to announce that she was joining a most prestigious sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi.
More than that, this Paula Herring had a beautiful smile on her face and the glow of a college student who was more than anxious to see the surprised looks on the faces of friends and classmates as they realized the transformation that had taken place since they had last seen her. The transformation was not confined to just her outer appearance but reflected a newfound confidence, showing that Paula Herring had discovered her place in the world and was on a journey to make a difference in it.6
After an hour or so of visiting with Carmen and her family during breakfast, Paula returned home so that her mother could take the family car to work at Vanderbilt Hospital. Jo Herring had worked the previous day, Friday, from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., before stopping for the drinking session at the Wedgewood Diner.
Her mother's work schedule was important to Paula because Jo Herring was planning to come home early enough on Saturday so that Paula could drive the family car to the basketball game. But sometime on Saturday afternoon, Jo Herring must have spoken with Paula by phone and informed her that a new plan was now in play, one that did not involve Jo arriving home early enough for Paula to use the family automobile. Perhaps Jo told Paula that she had to work late into the evening and there was nothing she could do about it. Perhaps she told Paula a sympathy-inducing tale of having to work a double shift or an unexpected hospital incident that required Jo Herring to stay late and provide her expertise as a caregiver. It is likely that Paula expressed disappointment and then told her mother she would have no trouble finding a ride for herself and Alan to go to the basketball game.
Paula may have even thought it would be a great opportunity to ask her favorite teacher and former coach for a ride, only to discover that Dorothy and Jody Ellis already had made plans to attend the game with friends and could not help her. Even more disappointing, her friend Carmen was already en route to the game with her teammates from Overton High.
A Murder in Music City Page 26
