Tag Archives: abandoned

MURDER ON ROUTE 66: ALLINE AND WILLIAM B COLE

Posted on by
1
Alline Alma Patterson Cole. He first name was spelled several different ways by the press of the day, but Alline appears to be the correct version.

It was the afternoon of September 4, 1945, and an Arizona Highway Department workman was working on Route 66, around 16 miles west of Kingman on the road towards Oatman. The previous day he’d noticed a car stuck in a sand wash the previous morning and thought little of it. But when it was still there the following afternoon he reported it to the Sheriff’s office in Kingman.

Sheriff Frank L Porter drove out on Highway 66 to inspect the car, expecting nothing more than the misadventure of a traveller. But when he spotted a lady’s black patent leather purse on the rear seat of the 1941 DeSoto Club coupe, he was more concerned – what lady leaves her purse behind? The question was answered a few minutes later when, a few feet in front of the DeSoto, officers spotted a mound of sand – with two fingers protruding from the dirt. They were the ring and left middle finger of a woman, complete with gold wedding band and gold ring with a diamond.

The abandoned DeSoto. In front of it is the grave in which Patterson gave his sister a “Christian burial”.

The makeshift grave was revealed to contain a woman of around 30 years of age, about 5 feet six inches in height and around 125lbs in weight. She was wearing blue ladies’ overalls and bobbie socks and had brown hair. Wrapped around her head was a man’s maroon and yellow checkered sports shirt; it was bloodstained, as was the powder blue ladies’ coat that partially covered her and the rear seat and interior of the car. A pair of man’s shoes was also found in the car, the soles covered in oil.

The maroon DeSoto with its tan top was registered to a WM Cole of 1515 East 87th Street in Los Angeles but there was no sign of Mr Cole. The car was filled with cardboard boxes and personal belongings and, from their contents, officers found they belonged to mother of two, Alline Alma Cole, 27. At first, her missing husband came under suspicion – until police found there had been a third person in the car.

Emmett Edwin Patterson, ex-Marine and murderer.

A small suitcase in the car contained the personal effects – which included divorce papers and letters to a waitress in San Jose, California – of one Emmett Edwin Patterson. Better-known as Ted, Patterson was Mrs Cole’s brother. The Coles had been living in Los Angeles, but had moved in May 1945 to Paris, Texas, where Alline’s family lived and where William Cole owned a dairy farm. In August of that year he had sold the farm and was preparing to move back to California. Patterson hitched a ride with the couple, most likely to see the waitress with whom he had been corresponding.

On the way the trio stopped in Amarillo, Texas, to visit Aline and Ted’s older sister. There William Cole had a new engine fitted in the DeSoto, paying $305.97 in cash for the work. Cole was in the habit of carrying large sums of cash and it was known that he had left Texas with some $7000 (that would be around $126,000 today). One of those who knew this was, it seems, Ted Patterson.

At 1pm on September 1, 1945, the trio left Amarillo, Cole keeping to the instruction of his mechanic to drive not more than 35mph for the first 300 miles and then to keep to under 45mph for the next 300 because of the new motor. With them went their mongrel dog; both the Coles adored the dog and spoiled it – during their stay in Amarillo the dog had refused to eat anything by cooked hamburgers.

At 9.50am on Sunday September 2, 1945, the DeSoto passed through the Agricultural Checking Station on Route 66 in Holbrook, Arizona with William Cole driving, Patterson beside him and Aline and the dog in the rear seat. But after that there was little trace of them.

The police considered the prospect that they had picked up a hitchhiker who had then killed all three of them (a 22-year-old called John Hanson was briefly questioned) but Sheriff Porter was soon convinced that Patterson was responsible for the death of his sister, and possibly for that of his brother-in-law. He and his deputies spent days slowly driving along Highway 66, looking for oil and also for a peculiar type of dark-coloured sand known as ‘Job’s Tears’ which had been thrown on the floor of the DeSoto to absorb Alline’s blood.

Sheriff Porter then worked out that the DeSoto had covered some 303 miles since Holbrook and surmised that would be 150 to a point and back, making it likely the murder had taken place in California. His men searched Route 66 from the point where the DeSoto was abandoned, westwards into California, only returning to Kingman when darkness fell.

It was not the sheriff’s deputies who found William Cole’s body, but some tourists who, on September 29, had stopped at the side of the highway near Siberia for the night. They let their dog out of their car, only for Fido to return a few minutes later with a man’s legbone. The clothing found on the skeleton matched the last known description of William Cole and, proving Sheriff Cole’s distance theory, he was found 140 miles from where his wife had been buried (and some 15 miles from where the deputies had had to curtail their search).

Near the body was a large bloodstained rock which had been used to crush Cole’s skull. Also found were matches with a green head and red tip, identical to those found in the DeSoto. Just $6.48 was found on William Cole. All that was missing now was Ted Patterson – and the $7000.

Ted Patterson was two years older than his sister and, like her, had grown up on a farm in Paris, Texas. At the age of 21 he had joined the Marines but, by 1940, he was back in Paris Texas, working as a machine operator and married to Laura Jones who he had wed in February 1938. The union would produce two children but end in divorce – papers found in the car showed that Emmett was desperately short of money, now an itinerant taxi driver, and had not been providing for his kids.

On October 13, 1945, came the news that Patterson had been arrested by a Union Pacific railroad officer near Kelso, California, after having been found sleeping in a sand bed near the tracks. Kelso is only a few miles from Siberia, but around 120 miles from where the DeSoto had been abandoned. Why would he have retraced his steps to where he killed William Cole? The simple answer is, he didn’t. The man in the sand bed wasn’t Emmett Edwin Patterson.

Ted Patterson might well have gone undiscovered had it not been for his temper and his weaknesses for waitresses. It turned out that he had travelled to Hot Springs, Arkansas (how is unknown) where he had taken a job on a dairy farm under the name of Tom Morton. While delivering milk to a café in Hot Springs, he met a waitress and took her to a party on New Year’s Eve, 1945. They both got drunk, had a row, Patterson hit the girl and broke her jaw. She had him arrested the following day, but his luck held. He wasn’t fingerprinted and so his real identity wasn’t revealed. It was only in February 1946 that a sharp-eyed Hot Springs policemen looked through the wanted circulars and spotted the photo of a man wanted by the Sheriffs of Mohave and San Bernadino counties. On March 1, 1946, Emmett Patterson was arrested and taken to California to be tried.

When his trial began on July 16, 1946, in San Bernadino, Patterson had a story. He claimed that the trio had stopped by the side of the road in Siberia (although it was known by relatives that the Coles were afraid of sleeping by the roadside). He had been asleep when he had heard the dog barking and woke to find Cole, gun in hand, beating his wife. Despite claiming he was scared of his brother-in-law, Patterson leapt to his sister’s defence, picking up a rock and beating Cole to death with it, as well as throttling him. However, the trial testimony brought out the fact that Cole was a small man, 20 years older than the ex-Marine, and had suffered from tuberculosis. Moreover, relatives said that Cole not only didn’t like Patterson, but was indeed scared of him.

Patterson stuck to his story, insisting that he then had put his sister in Cole’s DeSoto, planning to take her to hospital in Kingman but, just eight miles later, had found she was dead. So, letting the dog off its leash (the dog was never seen again) he said, he intended to take Alline back home to Paris, Texas, until he realised that having a dead body in the car would invite awkward questions at the Kingman inspection station. Instead, he stopped at Ed’s Camp between Oatman and Kingman, being careful to park the car a hundred yards east of the entrance and spent the day there. After dark he headed east but then stopped at 17 Mile Wash where he buried Alline, saying he had given her a “Christian burial”.

Perhaps it was this last element that helped him escape the death penalty for which the prosecution had asked. But the jury took just minutes to declare him guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and recommend life imprisonment.

Emmett Edwin Patterson served 17 years in San Quentin. He was paroled in April 1963 to Humboldt County where he died in September 1988. Alline never got back to Paris, Texas; she and her husband are buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in Kingman where, as a last insult, the gravestone lists the wrong year of birth.

BEHIND THE NAMES ON THE TEXOLA STONE: Part Five

Posted on by
1

HERBERT COPELAND

Although Herbert Wayne Copeland’s name appears on the Texola stone, he never graduated.

Herbert was born on January 9, 1921, to Herbert and Zetta Louise Copeland. The middle child of three. His sister Billie Frances was just over two years old and his little brother, Bobby Gene, was born in February 1930. Until the age of 7 he grew up in Thomas, Oklahoma, and then the family moved to Texola when he enrolled in school. A good student, he had a near-perfect attendance record and scored As in Oklahoma history, algebra and general science. In his first two years at Texola High he received the silver cups offered as rewards for highest scholarship and was elected class vice-president.

One June Saturday night in 1937, Herbert and his cousin Lonnie joined two girls from Sayre, Opal Hammons and Laverne Avant, in a trip to a midnight movie in Sayre, Oklahoma. Ernie Bartlett – Ruby’s brother – was driving a 1936 Ford V-8 as the five young people travelled along Route 66.

Opal Hammons and Laverne Avant who were killed alongside Herbert Copeland.

At about 10.10pm, six miles east of Erick, their car collided head on with another driven by 24-year-old Alfred Eugene ‘Gene’ Still Harmon, the new assistant manager of Harrell’s Variety store in Sayre, who’d been married just four months. It was believed both cars were travelling at high speed, both in the middle of the road. The impact was colossal, destroying both automobiles. Harmon, Herbert and the girls were killed instantly. A passing motorist found Ernie and Lonnie still alive, but they died a few hours later in hospital.

A joint funeral was held for the cousins, Herbert and Lonnie. Among the pall bearers were Wintha Doss, his brother Basil, Austin Rose, Junior Hass and Jack Loftis. That Herbert’s name appears on the stone is surely an indication of the affection in which he was held by his schoolmates. The following December, Billie Frances Copeland married Basil Doss.

JOHNNIE McSPADDEN

Johnnie McSpadden at the time of her graduation.

Johnnie McSpadden was born in Arkansas on December 5, 1918, the second daughter of Aaron and Flossie McSpadden. The McSpadden children were well-spaced out; Johnnie’s sister Janice was five years her senior while her brother Roe Owen was six years younger. When the McSpaddens moved to Oklahoma they rented farmland some five miles out of Texola with Aaron’s brother. This meant Johnnie and her cousins, Nona and Mirl, had a ten-mile round walk each day to get to school; they rarely missed a day. (Incidentally, Nona would marry Hugh Manuel Hass in 1939 and become Junior Hass’s stepmother.)

Johnnie with her first husband, Bernard Burford, who was killed when his Liberator crashed in New Mexico. Johnnie was widowed at 25 with a one-year-old son.

After graduation Johnnie married flying cadet Bernard Phillip Burford on April 26, 1942 and they had a son, Garon, in September 1943. In September 1944, Staff Sergeant Burford had been on furlough to see his parents in Clovis and was on his way back to camp in Tucson where Johnnie and Garon were waiting. His Liberator bomber crashed while trying to land at an army airbase at Alamogordo, New Mexico. He was just 26; his son had just turned a year old four days earlier.

Johnnie and baby Garon moved back with her parents until 1950 when she married again in May of that year, this time to Horace Hodnett who had served in the Pacific but was now a dairy salesman. They had a son, Kenneth, born on February 22, 1952. Then, three days before Christmas 1952, 43-year-old Horace died

Johnnie’s second husband Horace, with whom she had a son, Kenneth. Horace died suddenly when Kenneth was two years old.

suddenly of a heart attack, leaving Johnnie widowed for the second time and with two small boys, one less than a year old.

In October 1962, Johnnie married for the third time, this time to Sam Davis Moore, and their daughter Janita Gaye was born in 1964. Sadly, Johnnie was widowed again in 1972, and there was still more sadness when her son Kenneth died in 1982, just one day short of exactly 30 years from his father’s death. But between her family and that of Sam’s, she got to meet 20 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren before she passed away on January 16, 1996.

Johnnie with her sons, Garon on the right and Kenneth on the left.

GROVER S THOMAS

Although the Superintendent was listed as Grover S Thomas, his full name was actually Solon Grover Thomas. He was born in Collin, Texas, on February 16, 1885 and moved to Sentinel, Oklahoma, in 1899. At the age of 24 he began teaching school and, in May 1914 married his sweetheart, Montie Roland, who was also from Collin. In 1919 he was appointed as County Superintendent, a post he served in until 1925 when he stood for election to the state senator. He would serve as the senator representing Custer, Kiowa and Washita counties for three consecutive terms while also owning a grocery store in Cordell.

Grover Thomas, a man who named his twin sons Okla and Homa!

Grover and Montie had four sons, beginning with twins born on March 21, 1915. Perhaps Grover was inordinately proud of his adopted state, or maybe he had a refined sense of humour, because he named the boys Okla and Homa. Their younger siblings, Travis Spurgeon and Solon Grover got off a little lighter (although one has to wonder if he hated his first name so much that he went through life using his middle name, why he saddled his youngest son with the name Solon).

After he failed to be elected for a fourth term in November 1936, Grover Thomas returned to teaching and became the Superintendent of Texola High School. He and Montie rented a house – possibly one tied to the school as it cost them just $8 a month, hardly anything of his $1800 a year salary. In 1941 he moved to take the same position (as well as teaching Mathematics) at Highway School near Elk City.

Grover and Montie would then move back to Oklahoma City, to a house on NE 23rd Street within sight of the state capitol. There Grover suffered a paralysing stroke and passed away on December 12, 1944, just short of his 60th birthday.

Several mysteries remain. I couldn’t track down who Charles C Vaughn, the ‘Sponsor’ of the Class of 38 was, nor do I know why a couple of names appears who were no in the graduating class that year. But the biggest mystery is just who created this stone and when. If I had to guess, I’d say George Blair, but the truth is, I just don’t know.

The Seniors of 1938.

BEHIND THE NAMES ON THE TEXOLA STONE: Part Four

Posted on by
Reply

The ‘Seniors 38’ stone outside the one-room jail in Texola.

LOIS WIGLEY

Lois Wigley was born on June 23, 1919, to Thadeus Park and Ollie Wigley, two years after her brother Robert. She was known as ‘Kitten’ from a young age and was active in school activities, especially those involving performing. Before enrolling at Texola High School, she was educated at Erick High School where, in 1935, she was Point Secretary of X-Mu, a society for students with a B average; Parliamentarian of the Rainbow Club; President of the Dinner Bell Club; founder of the Coo Coo Club and a member of the Glee Club. Texola might have seems a little dull after that!

Lois Wigley

Just days after graduating she married Gerald Bibb on October 18, 1938. Gerald had been at school in Sayre and been as active as his bride – he’d been the President of his senior class and a schout master. After graduation he had intended to attend the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science and become an undertaker. But the couple stayed in Sayre after their marriage with Gerald first managing a gas station and then owning and operating Bibb Ditching and Constriction Company. They had two children, Bobby Gerald, born on August 27, 1940, and Kenneth ‘Kenney’ Thad on July 11, 1943. Gerald enlisted in the US Army in February 1944 and served for two years. An accomplished pilot, he was instrumental in developing the Sayre Municipal airport and had served as a Trustee of the Airport Commission. ‘Kitten’ died on August 28, 1992.

VENICE SLOSS

Venice Sloss was born on January 9, 1917, to George Benson ‘GB’ and Laura Sloss in Shamrock, Texas. She married a mechanic called Robert Lee Wright on July 27, 1940, and they had four children, three daughters and a son. But the marriage ended in divorce in October 1969. Robert Lee remarried, this time to Ruth Henry, but died of stomach cancer in 1977. Venice moved to Amarillo where her youngest daughter Ethel Elizabeth lived, and spent her later years quilting, crocheting, gardening and being a grandmother and great grandmother. She died on February 22, 2008 having outlived two of her children, Rovena who died in 2004 and Doiel Wayne who passed away in 2005.

Venice Sloss

JIMMIE POWERS

Jimmie Arnold Powers was born to James Andrew and Minnie Belle Powers in Heavener, Oklahoma, on October 7, 1919, the youngest of ten. His father was a farmer and several of his older brothers worked on the farm.

Jimmie’s parents, James and Minnie Powers.

When Jimmie was just seven, the family was devastated by an appalling tragedy; Jimmie’s oldest brother William Walter ‘Bud’ had gone off to be a fireman on the railroad. On September 18, 1927, while he was acting as fireman on a Kansas City Southern freight train, the boiler of engine number 710 exploded near Marble City, Oklahoma. Bud suffered terrible injuries and died the following morning while the locomotive’s engineer lingered another week; both men were from Heavener. 27-year-old Bud left a wife and a seven-year-old son, LD Eugene. (In a horrible twist of fate, LD was killed while acting as tailgunner on the B-29 ‘Devil May Care’ which was shot down over Siam in 1944. He had just turned 25.

Jimmie Powers

Jimmie actually graduated in 1939, a year after most of the others on the stone, which seems to indicate that this was a group of friends rather than the actual class.

Like his nephew, Jimmie too would enlist and served in the army for over four years, finally being demobbed on August 29, 1945. He married Katherine McManamon and they lived in Ohio where he worked as a wire salesman before moving to California. He would marry again in 1979 and died on May 12, 1985.

RUBY BARTLETT

Ruby Ellen Bartlett was born on May 4, 1920, in Texola to Luther and Stella Bartlett.  

In 1935 she was a member of the nearly formed Texola High School girls’ Glee Club, along with fellow class members, Johnnie McSpadden and Doris Nelms. The same year, she was one of 15 Texola freshmen who made a two-day trip to Oklahoma City (others included Doris Nelms, George Blair, Wintha Doss and Herbert Copeland). It seems that only the star pupils of the school were selected for the trip in which they stayed at the Skirvin Hotel and visited some of Oklahoma’s important institutions and industries. Later that year she was picked to be one of the school’s librarians and, along with Jack Loftis and Lois Wigley, was in the Senior class play (it was called ‘George in a Jam’ and was billed as ‘a three-act comedy that will keep the audience in an uproar from the rising of the curtain’).

The youngest of Stella and Luther’s four children, she had three older brothers, but was closest in age to Ernest. He was just three years her senior and it must have been devastating when Ernest was killed in a car crash when Ruby was 17.

Ruby Bartlett at the time of her graduation.

In 1939 Ruby went to the Southwestern College of Diversified Occupations, but in November her father Luther died suddenly from a single shot from a .22 calibre rifle. The coroner adjusted that it had been an accident, Luther having grabbed his rifle by the barrel from his wagon and the trigger catching on something.

On August 30, 1941, in a dress of royal blue velvet with a bouquet of pink rosebuds and to the accompaniment of violin and accordion music, she married George Benson ‘GB’ Sloss Jr of Shamrock, Texas. If that name sounds familiar it’s because GB was the brother of Ruby’s classmate, Venice Sloss.

Ruby and her husband GB Sloss who graduated from Texola High School in 1939.

Wedded life was put on hold when GB joined the 313th Engineers Combat Battalion in 1943 and went off to Italy as part of the 5th Army. He would not return to Texola until November 1945. GB and Ruby settled down to a life ranching, raising pigs and growing alfalfa and peaches, although she continued to be an active member of the community, helping in the First Baptist church of Texola and being a member of the Bulo Home Demonstration Club. Their first child, David, was born on October 25, 1946, followed by a daughter, Martha.

Ruby Bartlett

Stella had signed the farm over to her daughter shortly after Ruby was married, living with the newlyweds but, on December 19, 1953, GB sold off everything on the farm, from the livestock to machinery to a lot of canned goods. Just a month before, the family had moved to Modesto, California, where GB had taken up a job with a food processing company. Whatever the reasons, the move didn’t work out and GB, Ruby and children were back in Texola less than a year later. They then moved to Shamrock, although Stella stayed in Texola.

In 1966 David joined the US Air Force and went on to train as a munitions specialist. He was assigned to an airbase in Okinawa, Japan, where he spent his career, married and continues to live.

Then, at 3pm on August 31, 1981, weeks before their 40th wedding anniversary, GB put a gun to his head and shot himself dead. Ruby’s mother, Stella, lived to the age of 101, dying in 1990 after which Ruby moved to Pampa, Texas, where her daughter and son-in-law lived. She passed away in 2014 at the age of 93.

BEHIND THE NAMES ON THE TEXOLA STONE: Part Three

Posted on by
2

The ‘Seniors 38’ stone outside the one-room jail in Texola.

JACK LOFTIS

Abner James ‘Jack’ Loftis was born in Texola on December 4, 1919, to Uriah Bee and Brooks Bernice Loftis, one of three children – Jack had two sisters, Helen and Tommie.

Jack graduated as the valedictorian of his class at Texola High School in 1937. Not yet 20, He married Lottie Belle Ingle in a quiet ceremony on January 3, 1939 – she wore a wine velvet afternoon gown with black accessories. At the time Jack was attending the Centra State Teachers College in Edmond.

Jack at his graduation

In December 1940, after divorcing Bee, Jack’s mother Brooks moved to Los Angeles where, a year later on December 5, 1941, she was killed after being hit by a car while crossing the street.

It being wartime, Jack went away to fight in the US Navy and served in the Pacific. In fact, he was at Iwo Jima to witness the historic raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi. When he returned to Oklahoma, it was not to teach. By now he had a young son (James, born in 1943) and a new two-bedroom house in the Venice suburb of Oklahoma City, and so he went into retail. For the next 34 years, until he retired in 1979, he worked for Safeway, becoming a manager.

The little house at 2541 E Eubank that Jack and Lottie bought when they moved to Oklahoma City.

 

Lottie died in 1984 and Jack remarried to Laverne. He passed away in 1996, still living in the little house he and Lottie had bought.  

 

 

DORIS NELMS

Doris Nelms was the youngest of those names on the plaque, having been born on August 18, 1921, to Otis and Agnes Leon Nelms. Otis had lived all his life on a farm just outside Texola where he and Agnes raised six children, Doris being in the middle. An older sister, Ruth, had died as a baby two years before Doris was born.

The farm where Doris grew up and where her fatherr Otis was born and died.

Then, in 1933, tragedy struck the family again when Doris’s younger brother Henry died of a burst appendix on July 8 at the age of just 9. Otis was so grief-stricken that he himself died of a heart attack just two days later. He was only 49 and he left his wife not only with six children, but five months pregnant with their last son, Eddie. Agnes continued to run the farm into her 60s, long after the children had left.

Doris Nelms

Like several of her classmates, Doris went to Weatherford College after graduating. She married Winford Harold Chick in September 1940 and their first son, Winford Harold Jr was born the following April. (Ten years later, in 1950, the family ties would become even strong when Doris’s little brother Curry married Winford’s half-sister Juanita.)  

They moved to Oklahoma City, Winford working as a gas station attendant and Doris as a waitress at the Edwin Café. A second son, Joe Wayne, followed in 1943.

Winford served in the US Navy at Okinawa during World War II while, in June 1945, Doris took up a job as the bookkeeper at local paper, the Beckham County Democrat. When Winford returned from active service the couple moved to Fort Worth where a daughter, Darla, was born in 1951. Winford worked in construction, becoming the superintendent of Lydick Roofing and then general manager for Chas F Williams Co. He later set up his own company, Chick Specialties Inc, with Doris acting as the Company Secretary. However, she died of a heart attack on February 1, 1974, aged just 52 years.

GEORGE BLAIR

George Allen Blair was born on June 24, 1919, southeast of Texola, to Beveley Hanford and Emma Pearl Blair, the second youngest of five children. Unlike most of those in his graduation class, George never left Texola. He continued to live on the family farm, ranching and taking care of his father in his last years. His parents’ marriage seems somewhat convoluted. In the 1940 census, Emma is listed as head of the house, divorced, and running the farm; George and his sisters Jeffie and Jean. She would also be listed as divorced on her death certificate when she passed away in Shamrock, Texas, in 1949 following a stroke. However, in 1947, she and Beverley were together in San Joaquin, California, looking after their grandchildren, Frances and Richard, the children of their eldest son Hanford.

Beveley and his wife, Ethel, had moved to California in late 1941 and Hanford was working as a farm labourer on the George Berry ranch near Linden. His parents had moved as well and, one April evening in 1942, the whole family were together, sitting on the lawn of the ranch. Around 7pm Hanford went into the house, took a .22 calibre rifle and shot himself in the head. He died two hours later. The official line was that he was despondent over recent ill-health, but the fact that Ethel had filed for divorce twice the previous year may indicate all was far from well in the marriage, and possibly why his parents had moved to California with them.

The stone of the complicated family of George Blair.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, given all this turmoil, George never married. He looked after his father until Beverley died in 1969. George himself reached the age of 90 before succumbing on August 27, 2009, to injuries he’d sustained in an automobile accident. He was the first last of the plaque’s graduation class.

BEHIND THE NAMES ON THE TEXOLA STONE: Part Two

Posted on by
1

Please see Part One for the background to this post.

AUSTIN ROSE

The ‘Seniors 38’ stone outside the one-room jail in Texola.

Born Rual Austin Rose on February 24, 1918, to Dana Elwood and Myrtle Rose, he went by the name Austin. Four years later he was joined by a sister, Anna Mae.

This was a Baptist revival held in Texola under the supervision of Reverend Billy Sunday. Anna Mae Rose is being baptised; behind her looking at their father, Dana Elwood Rose, who is crying, is Austin.

Having graduated from Texola High School in 1938, he married Eloise Moore three days before Christmas 1939; it was her 21st birthday. Eloise, like himself, was from Texola and had been part of the Class of 1939. A few months later Austin was working in Albert Ferguson’s wrecking and salvage yard in Wheeler as he trained to be a mechanic.

Austin Rose at his graduation.

At some point it seems that they moved to California as Austin enlisted in the army in 1943 in Los Angeles. He would serve from December 28, 1943 to April 12, 1944. He would later work as a mechanic for James Chrysler Plymouth in Corona for 35 years and his parents moved to southern California too, Dana running a grocery store and raising chickens and rabbits. He died of a heart attack in 1960 after spending five months in hospital.

Austin in the 1950s.

When Myrtle died in 1983 she left everything to Austin. In a will she had made in May 1969 she wrote, ‘I hate to do this but Anna Mae owes me more than I have now and so far hasn’t paid it. So I want Austin to have what I have left’. Austin inherited her mobile home, quilt tops and checking account at Southwest Bank. At their mother’s funeral, Austin gave his sister $5. Anna Mae paid for the funeral.
In 1972, Austin and Eloise moved to Shasta Lake where he died on February 7, 1997.

Austin’s parents, Myrtle and Dana Rose.

WINTHA DOSS

Norn November 20,1919, to Henry Tanner and Olli Okla Doss, Wintha graduated from Texola High School in 1938 and went on to the Oklahoma A&M College. He then enlisted in the US Army and fought in Europe, including in the Battle of the Bulge where he was wounded and later awarded a Purple Heart. By now he and his older brother Basil were orphans, his mother having died in 1937 and his father in 1943.

Returning to America, he reenlisted as a career soldier and then married Sybil Estilene Reed in Wheeler, Texas, on August 12, 1947. They travelled the world as a family; their only child, Jana, was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1949 where Wintha was working as a criminal investigator.

In 1960 Wintha retired and they moved to Erick, Oklahoma. But a happy retirement was short-lived. Sybil died after a long illness in 1962 aged just 42. Jana never married and stayed with her father until he died in 1994 and followed him to the grave just four years later.  

BEHIND THE NAMES ON THE TEXOLA STONE: Part One

Posted on by
2
The ‘Seniors 38’ stone outside the one-room jail in Texola.

On 4th and Main Street, a stone’s throw off Route 66 in Texola, Oklahoma, is a single cell jail. But what is even more interesting is the gravestone-shaped marker that has been propped up outside the jail for years. The names of it are, it says, the ‘Class of 38’. But are they? Well, yes and no.

Texola may be a ghost town now, but it once had a thriving high school, complete with baseball, football and basketball teams, Glee Club and even a school newspaper (the ‘Texola Booster’, first published in November 1919). Texola High School had an auditorium which was used for plays and operas and, at its height had over a hundred pupils. By the mid-1930s, the enrolment was around 65, and, as far as I can make out, the last graduation was in 1957.

The Texola jail.

But it’s that curious stone that has always intrigued me. What happened to the boys and girls whose names appears on that plaque, so I set out to find out. What I soon discovered was that this wasn’t simply the Class of 38. One of the youths – Jimmi Powers – was actually in the Clas of 1939, while Herbert Copeland never had the chance to graduate at all. It soon became clear that this was too long for a single blog post and it will therefore be divided into several parts; so, in the order in which the names appear, this is the Texola stone’s ‘Class of 38’.

AGNES RUDD

Agnes Telitha Rudd was born in Erick, Oklahoma on May 6, 1919, to Thomas and Lela Rudd, the second of their two daughters. It was to be a childhood blighted by tragedy. On April 9, 1928, when Agnes was just eight years old, her sister Clora Viola, older by 18 months, died of measles. Clora left big shoes for her sister to fill; Her parents considered she was a saint – before she fell ill she had been top of her class at school, while her obituary spoke of how she read her Bible each day and after she was too sick to read it, she had her mother read it to her. It was said of Clora, “If she could not say something good about anyone, she did not say anything.”

Almost exactly 19 months later, Agnes’s father died in November 1929; Thomas Rudd was just 34 years old. Agnes and Lela had no option but to move in with her grandparents. At the age of 19 she married Wesley Don Lake who had left school after the 5th grade in elementary. A year later they were renting a house in Texola; Wesley worked as a gas station attendant while Agnes stayed at home. Wesley was called up on December 26, 1942, to the 704th Training Group Air Corps in Atlantic City, but he only served six months.

Agnes Rudd

Agnes and Wesley moved to Amarillo where they both took jobs with International Harvester Co, Agnes as a machine operator and Wesley as a parts man. If they wanted children, they never came. And it seems they did, for in 1962, when Agnes was 43, they adopted a baby they called Don Wesley. Wesley was a warehouseman for Sears Roebuck Co But tragedy would strike Agnes again; when little Don was just three years old, Wesley died of a massive heart attack. He was just 50 years old.

Throughout her life, Agnes’ love of poetry sustained her. It might seem a little mawkish by modern standards – after her grandmother’s death she wrote a long poem that started:

Dear loved one we’ve missed you so

We’ve wondered oft times why you had to go

You left a vacancy that can never be filled

For with your presence we were always thrilled.

However, it gave her comfort and she enjoyed gifting poems to family and friends. She never remarried, although she lived to see Don and his wife Shawna give her three grandchildren. Agnes died in Amarillo on July 8, 2002.

JUNIOR HASS

Hugh Harrison Hass was born in Texoma, Oklahoma, to Hugh Manuel Hass and Jamie Clara Lackey-Hass on November 27, 1920, but he was always known as ‘Junior’. By the time he graduated from Texola High School in 1938, his father was a deputy sheriff. Junior went on to attend Panhandle University A&M (Agricultural and Mechanical), now Oklahoma State University. There he excelled in sports, starring in all the major athletic events.

Hugh ‘Junior’ Hass in 1938.

But Junior had an urge to fly. In 1941 he completed a primary flight course at the Texhoma CPT School and gained his pilot’s license, going to Amarillo the following January to join the civil pilot training course there.

By June 1942 he was employed as an instructor in the Cutter-Car Flying Service in Albuquerque, graduating to assistant flight instructor. When Uncle Sam called, it was inevitable that Junior would take to the air. He served in the United States Navy, training cadet fighter pilots in Norman, Oklahoma, as well as being stationed at the Glenview Air Station in Chicago.

Following his discharge he returned to Cutter Car Flying Service and then working for Texhoma Flying Service and Catlin Aviation in Oklahoma City, flying both charter and crop dusting planes. There was a stint with Standard Airways and as the personal pilot for the Tulsa Oilers hockey team, while he finished his flying career in 1990 after 13 years working for Aerial Photo Service in Tulsa.

Then he took on a second career, owning and managing a bridal shop called Joy’s Klothes Kloset. He was a man who always wanted to be busy and constantly learning; he taught himself Spanish and German and travelled widely to Europe, South America and the Galapagos Islands. When not working or travelling, he raised funds for various causes and was an all-round good guy.
On July 29, 1945, he had wed Leatrice Joy Richerson who hailed from Sayre, Oklahoma, and a few months before his death, they had celebrated 63 years of marriage, a union which had produced a son and three daughters, one who predeceased him. Junior Hass passed away on November 2, 2008.

THE MISSING TREASURE OF TEXOLA

Posted on by
4

On the evening of January 18, 1908, assistant cashier CW Jones was working late at the First Bank of Texola in Texola on the Oklahoma-Texas border. It was about 7pm when he was suddenly interrupted by two masked men bursting into the bank and uttering the deathless words, “Hands up”.

Cashier Jones did as he was told but while one bandit was busy dumping loose change into a sack he attacked the other man. His brave ‘have a go’ endeavour quickly came to an end when he was hit in the head with a gun, gagged and bound with handcuffs.

The two robbers escaped with $5008 (around $170,000 in today’s money) and Jones was eventually rescued to tell his tale of bravery to Sheriff JH Richerson and Deputy Lee Anderson. He told the lawmen how he hadn’t been able to see the robbers’ faces, but that one was 5’ 10” with light hair under a black felt hat, while his confederate was a dark-haired 5’ 4” tall man wearing dark clothing and a black derby.

Several men were arrested and then released; the bank offered a reward of $1000, but the trail went cold. Cashier Jones continued to work at the bank and tell his tale to curious customers, but not for long. The robbery hit the First Bank of Texola hard and its owners, the Thurmond brothers who owned several banks in western Oklahoma, were quick to liquidate the bank and sell it off to JE Terrell and Ira Speed who promptly withdrew the reward.

In Texola Cashier Jones was a popular man and the town had been outraged by his treatment. Reports of his heroic attempt in deterring two villains to save the bank’s money was broadcast across the nation from New York to Arizona.

There was just one problem; there wasn’t a word of truth in the story.

For whatever reason, CW Jones was not kept on by the bank’s new owners and he went to work as a local agent for the Rock Island railroad. Around this time he made a deposit of $800 with the Vicksburg National Bank of Vicksburg, Mississippi. (That would equate to around $27,000 today, quite a nest egg for an assistant bank cashier or railroad agent.) He then bought a farm in Mississippi and that was the last Texola heard of Cashier CW Jones…

…Until the summer of 1914 when Jones turned up in Clinton and explained to OH Thurmond, who had been the President of the First Bank of Texola at the time of the robbery, that there had been no masked bandits and that the only bank robber had been CW Jones himself. He repaid $440 but the story was to get even odder.

It seems that Jones had found Christianity and his conscience insisted that he confess to the crime, although it seems that he had written an anonymous letter to Thurmond in 1910 telling him that he could find the proceeds of the robbery buried in a field in Texola. Thurmond attempted to find it but with no luck.

On the night of January 18, 1908, Jones had removed some $500 of silver and the rest in gold and banknotes, left the bank and, keeping $1000 back (presumably to finance the Mississippi farm and bank deposit), buried the rest in a tin can in a grass-covered field. Then he returned to the bank, tied a towel over his mouth and manacled himself with a pair of handcuffs that he had ordered by mail order from Chicago and waited to be discovered and tell his tale.

Unsurprisingly, his next stop after OH Thurmond’s office was the local jail. In August he was sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary at McAllister, a rather short sentence which was passed down after the District Attorney made a case for leniency. After that, CW Jones passes into history.

And what of the loot from the bank? Jones went to retrieve the money after the robbery but discovered that the field had been ploughed over and he couldn’t find where it was buried. OH Thurmond was unsuccessful too, and if the money was ever found, someone kept quiet about it. So, somewhere under Texola, there could lie around $150,000 in gold and ancient bank notes…

THE LOTHARIO OF LENWOOD

Posted on by
5

Lenwood is a small town on Route 66 just west of Barstow, California, that began  in 1923 Frank and Nancy Ellen Woods decided to subdivide some 1540 acres they owned. Through the company Lenwood Estates they established a new town which, according to adverts by the firm was akin to paradise on earth – ideal for health, perfect for chicken farms, orchard tracts and businesses of all kinds. One William Barnard was appointed to manage Lenwood Estates and an office was opened in Los Angeles.

There was just one problem. It was a scam.

An advert announcing the new town of Lenwood on the ‘Ocean-to-ocean’ Highway in 1924.

Of course, no-one knew that when lots came to be sold – as many as 50 in just thirty days according to Barnard, who was actually a bankrupt, something of which the Woods were aware before they hired him. The first signs of disquiet came at the end of 1924 when WB Sifton, who had purchased land in order to build a hotel, filed a suit against Lenwood Estates to collect a salary of $175 for a four-month contract from the company. Two years later the Hayward Lumber Company sought to foreclose on the town and eventually it emerged that Barnard had set up the fictitious Arizona-California Land Company to sell lots to gullible investors during the 1920s real estate bubble.

‘Any system of raising poultry you want’!

In court in 1927 it emerged that the defendants – Barnard and the Woods – had intended ‘to create a false and fictitious value therefor and to thereby cheat and defraud the public in the sale and disposition of these lands in small tracts, a scheme or joint venture of all defendants was planned whereby they were to receive all the proceeds from such venture and yet not be responsible for any of the losses or liabilities that would surely occur on the eventual dissipation of the real estate bubble’. Woods and Barnard had also entered into a trust agreement whereupon they could deed the land to the Bank of America, leaving the Woods free from liability of any kind in connection with the scheme. It seems that the Woods escaped their liabilities by dying not long afterwards – they were both almost 70 at the time of the court case.

However, Lenwood survived and the fact that it was situated on the National Old Trails Road encouraged business. In 1923 Christian Randolph Duin and his wife Cecilia turned up in Lenwood and opened the Radio Auto Camp, starting with just three cabins and neatly combining two of the technological advances of the age in one name. Duin appears to be a man addicted to romance and marriage.

In October 1896, at the age of 20, he married 19-year-old Alice Smith in Los Angeles. It was to be a short marriage for Alice died of tuberculosis on September 10, 1901. Duin remarried in October 1907 to 27-year-old Russian emigrant Rose W Zarsky. One morning in March 1908 Christian Duin put on his best clothes and left their home in Oakland, California, telling Rose he was going to buy some tools in San Francisco for his employer, the Eagle Box factory. She never saw him again.

The Eagle Box and Manufacturing Co’s factory from which Christian Duin disappeared one morning in 1908.

In June 1909 Rose, having ascertained that her husband was alive and well and hadn’t met with some misfortune, petitioned the courts to have the marriage dissolved on the ground of desertion, which it was. However, by then Christian Duin had already married again – bigamously, of course.

On July 6, 1908 he was wed to Laura May and the marriage consummated in Denver, Colorado. In June 1911 Laura filed for an annulment of the marriage, having discovered that there was a second Mrs Duin still living. In fact, there was actually a fourth Mrs Duin by now as Duin had married Maude M Cook in Oregon on November 9, 1909…

This photo shows the garage, campground office and gas station.

I could find no record of what happened to Maude, although they were still living together in Los Angeles in 1918. It’s not known when he married Cecilia – or if he even did – but they made a success of the fledgling Radio Auto Camp, helped in no small part by Duin’s trade as a carpenter. However, the Woods’ claims of Lenwood being a healthy, dry place to live did Christian Duin no good, nor did he live to take advantage of the increased traffic when the road on which the camp stood was designated Route 66, for he died on September 1, 1926, of tuberculosis, the same disease that had taken his first wife twenty-five years before. We will probably never know whether there were other marriages and other wives than the five I have found.

Captured by Frashers Fotos, this photo shows that the Radio Auto Camp not only had cabins and a cafe, but a restaurant and beer garden.

In November 1927 Cecilia Duin remarried, this time to Moses Tufts, and they carried on operating the Radio Camp; by 1933 it boasted 11 cabins. In 1934 Mrs Tufts leased the place to AO Flowers and his uncle Fred Ridernoor but this appears to have been a business arrangement and would occur several times again.

Moses died in 1945 and Cecilia sold Radio Auto Camp that year to John and Inez O’Leary who then sold it to Homer Luring in April 1948. Two months later, in June 1948, O’Leary renamed the place the Lenwood Inn and the Radio Auto Camp was a thing of the past. I had previously believed that one building still existed, but I no longer think that is the case. Where the Radio Auto Camp/Lenwood Inn was is now a vacant lot, although some trees remain. Cecilia Duin outlived both her husbands and finally passed away in 1986 at the age of 97. She had outlived the Lothario of Lenwood by more than half a century.

Christian Duin, the man who wooed and wed at least five women.

ALL CHANGE AT YUCCA

Posted on by
3

The Joshua Motel, now gone although the palms survive.

And so more vestiges of Route 66 quietly disappear, abandoned so long that when they are finally no longer there barely anyone notices.

The Joshua Motel office.

Just south of the well-known MOTEL sign in Yucca, Arizona (all that remains of the Whiting Brothers motel which once stood there) was the Joshua Motel and Sandy’s Café. The Joshua was a small place, just eight rooms, but it had the advantage of being right on Route 66 – at least until Interstate 40 slashed through the middle of Yucca. It was probably built shortly after Route 66 first came through Yucca back in 1952.

The Joshua Motel office to the left and its first two rooms.

Next to the Joshua was Sandy’s Café which seated 38 people. It seems that life was a constant struggle for Sandy’s, its lease seemed to be constantly up for sale. In the 1960s it was modified to also serve as a drive-thru and to drum up trade. But when I-40 opened in the early 1970s it was the end of the road for the Joshua Motel and Sandy’s Café. Traffic rolled onto Kingman or Needles to find a bed or a meal. The motel staggered on for a while; in 1977 it was being marketed with a desperate air and a knock down price as a potential nursing home. When I first saw it, old petrol pumps were being stored in the office.

Sandy’s Cafe. The sign once boasted neon lighting but that was gone long ago.

A little way south, on the other side of Guthrie’s Service Center, stands Yucca’s most famous landmark (although it’s a toss up between that and the Dinesphere), the truck on a stick. It used to have buildings around it, a large roofless block building and an older wooden workshop, not to mention a house with various derelict cars and buses around it.

Ran when parked?

In the spring of 2022 the Joshua Motel and Sandy’s Café were demolished. The neighbouring land around the truck on a pole has been cleared and scraped, leaving the Peterbilt in not so splendid isolation and the entire acreage up for sale. It is, according to the realtor, ‘a great location for RV park, boat shop, restaurant, off road rental, and so much more’. But, although it’s only been on the market for two months, the price has already been dropped by $40,000. And so another little piece of Route 66 history disappears.

Very many thanks go to out to Lara Hartley Roberts for spotting that the motel and café had gone. (See Lara’s wonderful photography at www.flickr.com/photos/redshoesgirl/)

Considering the place had been abandoned for 30 years, the bathrooms had held up quite well.

This garage stood in front of the truck on a pole.

The interior of Sandy’s Cafe.

This garage stood in front of the truck on a pole.

The Joshua was always small, only ever eight units.

THE AXE MURDERER OF TUCUMCARI

Posted on by
7

18 December 1947 was a cold winter’s morning like any other in Tucumcari. Bertha Eugene Wagnon Kappel had got up at 4.45am to prepare for her shift at the Home Café in the Vorenberg Hotel. (The Vorenberg was a grand hotel in downtown Tucumcari which boasted suites with private baths, a large lobby, dining room and barber shop as well as the Home Café. After the First World War it was owned by Floyd B Redman who built quite a property portfolio over the years. In the 1950s he bought another motel which was managed by a lady called Lillian Leigon; romance blossomed and he presented the motel to her as an engagement present. The motel was the famous Blue Swallow.)

The Vorenberg Hotel. The Home Cafe where Bertha Kappel was employed can be seen at the right.

Bertha had only been working at the Home Café for a couple of months while her husband Gus Adolph did various odd jobs. They had been married in Oklahoma in 1938 but several of the family – Bertha was one of 13 children – had moved to Tucumcari where Adolph also had links. They and their daughter were staying with Bertha’s brother, Roy, and his wife Catalina, in Roy’s home on North 1st Street, although the Kappels had purchased a lot nearby on which they intended to build a rudimentary house. To this end, Bertha had bought some lumber and, after finishing work on 17 December, she visited the lot to inspect progress. She found that the lumber was missing and this set into inexorable motion the events of the next few hours.

Bertha returned to her brother’s house and accused Adolph of selling the materials. He denied it but she discovered that he had, in fact, sold the lumber to a neighbour and, even worse, he hadn’t been paid for it. Bertha told him to get the lumber back within three days or “she would turn him in”. Now, the lumber may have been from a dubious source and Kappel did have a prior conviction for theft, so it might have been a well-aimed threat on her part. The quarrel continued into the evening although Adolph would later claim that the couple had been made up by the time they went to bed.

Even before the lumber incident it doesn’t appear to have been a happy marriage. Bertha had moved to Tucumcari some eight months before while her husband tried to find work in Oregon. When he returned to New Mexico she had sworn out a warrant on him for non-support of their 12-year-old daughter, Mary Frances.

Unsurprisingly next morning, the arguing flared up again when Adolph was slow to accompany Bertha on her walk to work. She left the house without him and when he called out to her to wait, she replied; “You dirty son-of-a-bitch, if you are going with me, come on.” It was an unfortunate choice of words and Bertha probably knew that it was a term that particularly offended her husband.

At around 6am, near an overpass, the body of Bertha Kappel was discovered just three blocks from her brother’s house. She lay in a pool of blood, her head cracked open by three blows from an axe and her left ear almost severed. When she was found, Kappel was taking a nap, having returned home, vomited and then taken two aspirins for a headache and then slept for an hour. When he woke up, he had a hearty breakfast and then went to the Home Café to say that his wife wouldn’t be coming to work that day. He was then arrested close to where Bertha’s body lay.

kappel-1

Adolph Kappel had a limited mental capacity but he knew enough to get rid of the axe, tossing it onto the roof of a neighbour’s house where it was later found. He signed a confession, saying that he had no recollection of killing his wife but remembered “I was standing over her and I struck a match and seen what I had done.” At his trial, he was charged with first degree murder and the jury took less than an hour to find him guilty. He was sentenced to be executed in New Mexico’s electric chair.

Kappel appealed and was granted a second trial on the grounds that the jury had not been given the option of convicting him of second degree murder. This jury decided that the murder had been conducted in the heat of the moment and was not planned or deliberate. He was once again found guilty but this time the sentence was 90-99 years rather than death. Kappel proved to be a model prisoner – for at least a year…

Gus Adolph Kappel

Assigned to a prison work gang at the penitentiary’s clay pits, on the last day of October 1950, Adolph Kappel made his escape aboard a black mule called Pete (one newspaper reported the beast was called Pegasus which seems a little fanciful). For five days he managed to stay ahead of police and prison guards in freezing cold weather until he was finally captured 35 miles south east of Las Vegas, New Mexico. He gave various reasons for his escape, saying that he had wanted to find out why he hadn’t heard from his daughter and believed that his brother was preventing her from writing to him. He also said he wanted to see his sister-in-law who had been involved in a road accident and then intended on going to Oklahoma to visit his mother and other relatives. But he also told reporters that “I am not the man who killed my wife” and that had he been able to get to Tucumcari he “could have cleaned up the whole mess”. Given that he had signed a confession which formed the basis of his first trial and pleaded guilty to second degree murder at the second trial it’s difficult to see how anyone else might have killed Bertha.

In 1953, Governor Edwin Mechem commuted Kappel’s sentence to a flat 70 years while the Warden commented, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that Kappel was “now a plumber. He does not have access to a mule”.

Governor Erwin L Mechem who commuted Adolph Kappel’s 90-99 sentence to 70 years.

Adolph Kappel applied for parole at every chance and was denied for many years. When was he released? The short answer; I don’t know. He died in 1978 at the age of 63 and is buried in the Santa Fe National Cemetery. However, he was also incarcerated in the Penitentiary of New Mexico which is just 15 miles from Santa Fe but I found that he had won a newspaper competition in 1976 when living in Ojo Caliente near Taos so it appeared he stayed in the area after his release. Perhaps he just had nowhere else to go.

John Frederick Kappel whose bound body was found in a Sayre lake in an unsolved homicide.

It is perhaps a little ironic that, with one brother behind bars for homicide, another brother should also meet his end by murder. In September 1963, the youngest Kappel son, John Frederick, was found floating in a pond in Sayre, Oklahoma. This was no natural drowning; John’s hands and feet were tied and he had also suffered a blow on the head before being thrown into the lake to drown. He had previously been working as a union picket for the International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers Union protesting at the construction site for a grocery store in Elk City. Police stated that his job had nothing to do with his death, although they were bemused at the lack of signs of a struggle as John was a large man – 6’4” and 240lbs as well as being a karate expert – and throwing him in the pond had required lifting him over a barbed wire fence. The case was never solved.

The lower walls are all that remains of the Vorenberg Hotel after a fire in the 1970s. The house where Bertha and Adolph were living with her brother is also long gone.