Notorious Tulsa — 12 Crime Stories From Tulsa's Past

By Randy Krehbiel and Debbie Jackson

Originally Published in The Tulsa World on Saturday, December 17, 2016

Holdups. Gang hits. Black widows. Hoods, crooks and psychos. Tulsa has had them all. It may not have the reputation of Prohibition-era Chicago, frontier Tombstone, Arizona, or New York's Five Points, but this city has seen its share of notorious criminals and crime sprees.

Our dirty dozen is not intended to be comprehensive. Space does not permit that. Nor does the compilation include the city's most singular moment of infamy — the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, which is a category unto itself. But these 12 cases are as fascinating today as they were generations ago, when they first grabbed headlines in Tulsa and across the nation.

1. The Hex House scandal — She-Svengali enslaved women

Bondage. Spellcasting. Mind control. Mysterious burials.

Police and reporters called it the "Hex House" case, but it was no fictional Halloween tale — it was real.

For seven years, two young women were forced to sleep on orange crates in a cold basement, wear threadbare clothing and turn over every cent from their day jobs to a middle-aged woman who lived luxuriously in a stately ivy-covered duplex at 10 E. 21st St. in Tulsa.

The Tulsa Tribune called Carolann Smith, 51, a "she-Svengali."

Virginia Evans, 31, one of the victims, said Smith "hypnotized and mesmerized" her as part of a self-made religion. The other victim, Willetta Horner, 30, said she and Smith had a "mother daughter" relationship.

Smith's other income came from insurance policies she took out on her late husband, father and maid – all of whom conveniently died. She also bilked Evans' father out of $17,000 for fictitious nursing care for Virginia.

The police investigation was touched off when Smith fraudulently obtained eight World War II ration books for herself, the two young women, several fictitious names, and for a daughter named Bonnie, who turned out to be Smith's bulldog, BonBon.

Police dug up two small coffins containing the remains of dogs after neighbors reported a mysterious midnight burial in the yard.

A police inventory of Smith's belongings included books on mind control, expensive perfume, a $250 silverware set, a Packard car, 46 pairs of shoes, 18 pairs of gloves, 26 hats and enough makeup and beauty supplies "to stock a drugstore."

Smith was sentenced to one year in prison for inducing her two captives to give false court testimony against a neighbor. She received probation for mail fraud and making false claims to obtain ration books.

2. Lynch mob strings up Roy Belton, murder suspect

Late on the night of Aug. 28, 1920, a gang of masked men barged into the Tulsa County Courthouse, held Sheriff James Woolley at gunpoint and grabbed a prisoner they knew as Tom Owens from the jail on the top floor. With hundreds and perhaps thousands following, they drove Owens to a spot near where Southwest Boulevard bends west and hanged him from a sign board.

According to newspaper reports, the line of vehicles following Owens and his captors stretched for nearly a mile and included two ambulances. Tulsa Police officers, it was said, directed traffic. Bits of clothing, shoes and pieces of rope were torn or cut from the body as souvenirs.

A week earlier, cab driver Homer Nida had been found near this very spot, beaten and shot. His automobile, a Hudson Super Six, had been stolen. Nida said three people (later identified as Owens — whose real name was Roy Belton — Marie Harmon and a man using the name George Moore) had piled into his cab in Tulsa and asked to be driven to Red Fork. Along the way, near the "Texaco tank farm," one of the men clubbed Nida with a gun and then, when he tumbled out of the car, shot him in the stomach. A passing motorist found Nida moments later.

A week earlier, cab driver Homer Nida had been found near this very spot, beaten and shot. His automobile, a Hudson Super Six, had been stolen. Nida said three people (later identified as Owens — whose real name was Roy Belton — Marie Harmon and a man using the name George Moore) had piled into his cab in Tulsa and asked to be driven to Red Fork. Along the way, near the "Texaco tank farm," one of the men clubbed Nida with a gun and then, when he tumbled out of the car, shot him in the stomach. A passing motorist found Nida moments later.

Over the next few days, Harmon and another witness fingered Belton as the shooter. Nida's dramatic face-to-face deathbed identification of Belton essentially sealed the case. Prosecutors said Belton subsequently confessed, but Belton insisted he did not, and his last words were reported to be "I am innocent."

The same weekend as the Belton lynching, a young black man accused of killing a law officer was taken from the Oklahoma County Jail and hanged by vigilantes. Together, the two events profoundly influenced events nine months later, when the jailing of a young black man called Dick Rowland set in motion the Tulsa Race Riot.

3. Karpis-Barker Gang netted $1.1 million in loot

No criminal outfit of the 1930s stole and extorted more money than Karpis-Barker Gang. Over a six-year period it netted an estimated $1.1 million from kidnapping and bank robbery, and when the FBI cornered Alvin Karpis, the last member of the gang at large, in 1936, J. Edgar Hoover himself showed up to clap on the cuffs.

But before Hoover's public relations machine turned the dimwitted Kate "Ma" Barker into a supposed criminal mastermind, her sons Doc, Fred, Herman and Lloyd were among the young toughs hanging around Tulsa's Central Park (now Centennial Park) at Sixth Street and Peoria Avenue.

In addition to the Barkers, the Central Park Gang launched the careers of such notorious killers and thieves as Volney Davis, Wilbur Underhill, Ray Terrill and Elmer Inman. Many of the 30 or more men associated with the Karpis-Barker Gang at various times traced back to Central Park.

But Doc and Fred Barker and, by extension Karpis, who met Fred Barker in prison and returned with him to Tulsa in 1931, were the most famous Central Park alums. Their kidnappings of beer baron William Hamm and banker Edward Bremer shot them to the top of the most-wanted list in the mid-1930s.

The Barkers were known mostly as car thieves and small-town bank robbers until Doc and Volney Davis killed night watchman Thomas Sherrill at a construction site in August 1921. Doc, whose given name was Arthur, went to prison for Sherrill's death but was paroled in 1932. By that time, Karpis and Fred Barker were out of the Kansas State Prison and up to no good in Tulsa. They were caught burglarizing a safe, but, remarkably, turned loose when they returned $100,000 taken from the Wilcox Oil Co. Within a short time, they were terrorizing the entire Midwest.

4. Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd eluded Tulsa Police

Except for a few almost comical engagements with local law enforcement, none of Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd's criminal exploits occurred in Tulsa proper. But he did live here for a while — supposedly so his young son could attend Tulsa Public Schools — and, in 1932, Floyd and pal George Birdwell killed special state investigator Erv Kelley during a shootout on a farm southwest of Bixby.

Floyd, wife Ruby and son Jackie, using the name Hamilton, moved into a house on East Young Street in January 1932. Floyd was a fugitive, having jumped from a moving train a year earlier to avoid serving 12 to 15 years in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

In February, Tulsa Police engaged Floyd and Birdwell in a running battle through city streets, guns blazing from careening automobiles and bystanders running for cover. The pursuing police gave up when the department's only Tommy gun ran out of ammo.

The police found the desperadoes again the next night, and while the two managed to escape, they had to leave their car behind. That led law enforcement to the house on Young, where they proceeded to fire tear gas canisters and order Floyd and Birdwell to surrender. Crashing the outlaw stronghold, they found the bad guys had simply walked out of the back door, which the police had failed to cover.

"The raid was hardly as well organized as the raid of a country constable on a watermelon-stealing gang," opined the Tulsa World. "Going out to hunt Floyd with one machine gun — and most of the ammunition somewhere else — is not an inspiring spectacle." Federal agents killed Floyd in Ohio in 1934.

5. Judge's son convicted in society killing

No Tulsa murder case received more national attention than the high society slaying of John Gorrell Jr. by Phillip Kennamer. Kennamer, 19, was the brilliant but unbalanced son of federal District Judge Franklin Kennamer. On Thanksgiving night 1934, Kennamer shot and killed Gorrell, son of a prominent doctor, in Gorrell's car with Gorrell's gun, in the ritzy Forest Hills Addition a few blocks south of present-day Utica Square.

The case became a national sensation, exposing as it did the lives of the teenage sons and daughters of the wealthy during the depths of the Depression. Several of these teens became witnesses against Kennamer; one, Sidney Born Jr., killed himself rather than testify. The unwilling focus of it all was Virginia Wilcox, the 18-year-old daughter of oilman Homer Wilcox.

Kennamer, it seems, had a crush on Virginia Wilcox. She, in turn, wanted nothing to do with him. Given to grand schemes — including, at one point, starting a South American revolution — Kennamer and Gorrell hatched a plot to kidnap (or threaten to kidnap) Virginia to extort $20,000 from her father.

Kennamer didn't deny killing Gorrell but said he did it to keep Gorrell from harming Virginia. The trial was moved to Pawnee, which was wholly unprepared for the media circus that descended upon it. The Lindbergh kidnapping trial had just ended, and many reporters who had been covering it now turned their attention to the Kennamer case. Every hotel and spare bedroom in town was rented. Eight telegraph lines were installed in the courtroom; spectators stampeded over one another to get seats in the tiny gallery.

After 11 days, Kennamer was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter. In 1943, Franklin Kennamer wheedled a parole for his son on the condition that Phil enter the wartime military. He became a paratrooper, and during the invasion of southern France ran directly into enemy machine-gun fire. He died on the spot.

6. Five Tulsa women murdered by sex maniac and fiend

Police found the bludgeoned body of 20-year-old Panta Lou Liles sprawled in her bloody bed on May 15, 1945. Described by newspaper stories as a pretty redhead whose sailor husband was serving in the Pacific in World War II, Liles was the fourth of five Tulsa women killed as they slept between 1942 and 1948. Just as disturbing, each of their bodies had been sexually assaulted after death.

All of the crimes occurred in an area known today as the Brady Arts District. In two of the cases, the killer cooked and consumed breakfast before leaving. Newspaper headlines called the killer a "sex maniac" and a "fiend." Hounded by the public and the press, Tulsa Police and county investigators rounded up known sex offenders, checked out hundreds of tips, false leads and rumors, all to no avail.

A 30-year-old black man, LeRoy Benton, was charged and convicted in the Liles murder, but an appeals court overturned the conviction and freed Benton in a blistering opinion, charging that "star chamber" tactics were used to obtain a false confession.

In 1949, two Tulsa Police detectives tracked down and arrested 52-year-old Charles F. Floyd, who had been working in a junkyard a block from the Liles murder scene at the time of her death. In the presence of a Tulsa World reporter, Floyd confessed to two of the five killings. He was ruled mentally incompetent and committed to Eastern State Hospital in Vinita where he died in 1968.

7. Nannie Doss: Smiling serial killer served victims rat poison

Garrulous and disarmingly eccentric, Nancy "Nannie" Doss seemed more like a sitcom character than a serial killer. When her fifth husband, Sam Doss, died in 1954, a Tulsa physician suspected she was more akin to one of the cheerfully homicidal sisters from Arsenic and Old Lace.

Doss, it turned out, had poisoned her last four husbands — the first, Charley Braggs, left Nannie after their two small children died under mysterious circumstances. In all, 11 of Nannie's relatives had met unexpected ends, but she confessed only to killing four of her five husbands, at least two of whom she'd met through lonely hearts clubs.

Doss had taken out life insurance policies on her deceased husbands and on her dead children, but she also seemed to enjoy planning and attending funerals. Sam Doss, Nannie said, "got on my nerves."

Remarkably, Nannie would not have been caught had she not readily consented to an autopsy of Sam Doss' body. The case resulted in a new state law requiring such examinations in deaths without an attending physician. Sentenced to life in prison, Nannie died in 1965.

8. Top Tulsa cops jailed in bootlegging scandal

In 1956, bootlegger Bill Edwards complained to Tulsa World editor Sid Steen that he was being cut out of a protection racket that included his brother Martin Edwards, Police Commissioner Jay Jones and Police Chief Paul Livingston. According to Bill Edwards, Jones and Livingston were among those receiving payoffs to leave selected bootleggers, bookmakers and brothels alone.

Steen introduced Bill Edwards to U.S. Attorney B. Hayden Crawford, and in 1957 a grand jury indicted the city's top two law officers and 18 others on corruption charges. Sixteen, including Livingston, Jones and six TPD officers, were convicted.

"(The D-Day invasion of) Normandy was a Cub Scout meeting compared to that," one police officer said after testifying to the grand jury. Thurman Spybuck, who would later be killed in the line of duty, was transferred from the vice squad to the dog pound after it was learned he'd met with the panel. Jones and Livingston, who maintained their innocence throughout, each served about a year in federal prison.

9. The bootleg queen and the Dixie Mafia

Cleo Epps' colorful career as the queen of the bootleggers ended at the bottom of a west Tulsa septic tank. Big and brassy, Epps prospered during Oklahoma's prolonged prohibition and went into semiretirement, managing her many investments, after booze became legal in 1959. But Epps retained some of her old underworld connections, especially with two ruthless badmen in a loosely connected network of outlaws known as the Dixie Mafia.

Through the 1960s, Albert McDonald and Tom Lester Pugh dealt mainly in burglary and arson for hire, although McDonald was for a while suspected in the 1967 Tennessee murder of Pauline Pusser, wife of Sheriff Buford Pusser of "Walking Tall" fame. Although the case was never officially solved, Pusser reportedly believed another Dixie Mafia operative from Oklahoma, Kirksey Nix Jr., pulled the trigger.

According to authorities, McDonald and Pugh decided to help their attorney, state Rep. Charles Pope, become a Tulsa County judge in 1970 by blowing up his election opponent, Judge Fred Nelson. The bomb they placed in Nelson's car severely injured him, but he survived. The dynamite Pugh and McDonald allegedly used came from Epps' farm. When she realized what the two had done, she went to the district attorney and testified to a grand jury. Despite a disguise that fooled courthouse reporters on the lookout for her, word got back to Pugh and McDonald.

Epps got into a car with the pair one day and was never seen alive again. McDonald and Pugh were charged with killing Epps, but only McDonald was convicted. Pugh, at one point, was on trial simultaneously for separate murders in Osage and Tulsa counties. Ultimately, he was convicted of killing Arles Self, a Dixie Mafia member-turned-informant. McDonald was killed in prison in 1978. Pugh died behind bars at the age of 69 in 2006.

10. Walt Helmerich abducted, held for ransom

Freddie Smith was desperate. His business had gone belly-up, he had two mortgages on his house and he was running out of cash. So he decided to get some from one of the richest men in town. On the morning of June 3, 1974, Smith disguised himself as a utility worker and waited for Walter Helmerich III, president of Helmerich & Payne, to come by on his daily route to his office in Utica Square. As Helmerich approached, near 26th Street and St. Louis Avenue, Smith waved him over and told him there was a gas leak in the neighborhood.

Then Smith pulled out a pistol — actually a toy dart gun painted black — and ordered Helmerich to scoot over and duck down out of sight. After changing cars, Smith drove around for eight hours with Helmerich bound and gagged on the rear floorboard, stopping periodically to relay new instructions to Helmerich's father, Walter Helmerich Jr. Finally, Smith ordered the elder Helmerich to leave the $700,000 ransom along 131st Street near U.S. 75.

Smith picked up the money and released Helmerich an hour later. Unfortunately for Smith, a woman witnessed the ransom drop and the pickup and took down the license numbers of the two vehicles. Then she called in a littering complaint to the police. Smith was arrested the next morning. He was charged with extortion, rather than kidnapping, because he had not taken Helmerich across state lines or held him more than 24 hours. Smith at first claimed he had been coerced into grabbing the oilman but later confessed. Freddie D. Smith was sentenced to 20 years in prison just three weeks after the abduction.

11. Roger Wheeler dies in mob hit at Southern Hills

Perhaps no Tulsa crime will be remembered longer or more vividly than the murder of industrialist Roger Wheeler. The events that played out on the late afternoon of May 27, 1981, and over the three decades that followed, read more like a Hollywood movie scenario than anything that would happen in real life.

Every bit the business tycoon, Wheeler had just finished his usual Wednesday round of golf at Southern Hills Country Club — the epitome of upper-crust Tulsa society — and climbed behind the wheel of his late model Cadillac, when a man in a fake beard, sunglasses and a hat low over his face approached, shot Wheeler between the eyes in full view of more than a dozen children playing at the club swimming pool, and drove away.

Wheeler's death led to at least three more murders, all of them more than 1,000 miles away, a scandal that rocked the FBI to its core, and the downfall of New England crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger. Bulger had ordered Wheeler's murder at the behest of John "Jack" Callahan to keep Wheeler from delving any deeper into the finances of World Jai Alai. Wheeler had bought the company a few years earlier and quickly suspected someone was skimming from the operation. Bulger sent his close associate John Martorano to get Wheeler out of the way.

Eight months later, an informant named Edward Brian Halloran told all of this to Boston FBI agents. But the FBI agents were in cahoots with Bulger, and rather than arrest him, they tipped him off. Bulger killed Halloran and an innocent bystander personally and ordered Martorano to silence Callahan.

Martorano finally spilled the story in 1999. Angry at Bulger and facing a lengthy prison term, if not the death penalty, he told federal prosecutors all he knew. By then, however, Bulger was on the run and would not be caught until 2011. Some say Bulger knew almost immediately that Wheeler's murder would be his own undoing. Until then, Bulger had been involved mostly in the murder of other gangsters the police and the politicians cared little about. Gunning down a wealthy and influential man in broad daylight was a different story entirely.

12. Rapists stalked Tulsa, BA women in 1989

The late 1980s were bad years for sex crime in Tulsa. This was especially true for 1989, when 336 rapes were reported — a 40 percent increase from the average for the previous decade — and police dealt with at least seven serial rapists.

The most notorious of these became known as the Morning Stalker in the Tulsa World and the Southside Stalker in the Tulsa Tribune. Either way, the Stalker was linked to as many as 12 rapes and 20 robberies over a nine-month period beginning in July 1988.

The Stalker case was also the first time Tulsa and Broken Arrow police used DNA testing to link — and in one case exclude — sex crime suspects. As the names suggest, the rapes and robberies occurred mostly in the morning and were concentrated on the city's southeast side and in Broken Arrow. Perhaps the most brazen crime occurred Feb. 5, 1989, when two men raped a 17-year-old girl in front of her family members and boyfriend and drove away in her BMW. Pursued by police, they wrecked the car but managed to escape.

The Stalker crimes, it turned out, involved not one but three men — 25-year-old Royce Owings, who police came to view as the central figure, and his cousins Steven and Derek Burger. Owings, it was believed, participated in all of the rapes and robberies, sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied by one or both Burger brothers.

Police eventually connected the robberies and rapes through similarities in disguises and the type of tape used to bind victims, but they were stymied for suspects until a caller to the Crime Stoppers tip line suggested they check out a pickup belonging to Owings that matched the description of a vehicle used in the March 3, 1989, robbery of the Spudder restaurant.

Another tip led them to stake out the Wendy's Restaurant on 31st Street east of Harvard Avenue. There, on the night of April 15, Owings was killed in a brief shootout with police after pulling off another robbery. The Burgers surrendered and pleaded guilty to multiple felonies. Steven was given seven life sentences, Derek 85 years. Steven Burger and Owings' father claimed police killed Owings intentionally to protect an informant. Police said they wanted to capture Owings alive so they could question him and that he was killed only because he pointed a shotgun at officers and appeared to be going back into the restaurant, perhaps for hostages.

DNA testing, then a new crime-fighting weapon, connected Owings to three rapes, including the 17-year-old girl's. Steven Burger, who pleaded guilty to 17 felonies related to the March 3 restaurant holdup and the rape of the 17-year-old told reporters he was "railroaded" on the rape charges and blamed the media for his and his brother's harsh sentences. "It was blown out of proportion," Burger said. "It wasn't that the attacks were violent. None of the victims said they were beaten up or anything."

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