Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland by Jason Lucky Morrow Page B

perceived
privileges of being the son of a wealthy oilman.
    “Doubtless you have been the subject of parental
indulgence,” he began. “You have had pleasures and conveniences which many your
age do not have. You should have had some privations and hardships to make you
strong. Perhaps if things in general had not been so easy, it would be
different.”
    He then fined the boy seventy-five dollars and
expressed his desire that it should be deducted from his Christmas allowance. In
contrast, the Tulsa Tribune noted that the madam of a brothel was fined fourteen
dollars plus court costs that same day. Padon was also arrested and fined fifty
dollars for his part. The two girls who were with them that night were never
charged. Ironically, it was one of them who had shot out the light nearest to
Gorrell’s Ford after Padon had taken a shot and missed.
    Outside the courtroom, Wilcox Senior took offense to
the judge’s criticism of his parenting and how newspapers and city leaders were
shaping the story into a cautionary tale of rich kids gone wrong.
    “The amount of money given my children as spending
change is so small that I would not name it for fear friends would think it
untrue. The children of financially well-off families are wild, in a way, but
no wilder than those in less fortunate circumstances. And it is only the
prominence of the parents that has brought both stories to the front pages of
the nation’s press.
    “Youths of families living in my neighborhood and
who are schoolmates of my son do not have large sums of money to spend,
according to their fathers with whom I have talked. I believe my own family is
an average one and I know that Junior does not have too much money to spend,”
Senior said as he adjusted his fedora in preparation to leave. “One does not
have to have money to get into trouble. Lack of it is the usual cause for
crime. Daily check of the newspaper and courts will show that.”
    But Wilcox’s statement was never given much
consideration. For average folks in town, it was easy to cast blame on the
shortcomings of all the mothers and fathers of Tulsa’s privileged youth. After
all, the names of kids from regular families weren’t being dragged through the
newspaper mud—it was those high-society types. Hours after the news of Born’s
death had spread throughout Tulsa, Mayor Truman Penney made a rare Sunday
evening appearance at the police station.
    “The parents are to blame at bottom for this
shocking revelation of what our children have been doing,” Mayor Penney dramatically
declared to a World reporter. “While the parents give their time to
making money (this left no doubt which parents he meant), the children
go about ungoverned. I am greatly disturbed and saddened by what happened today
and by what has happened in the last two weeks. It has got to the point where I
don’t know what to do next.”
    But he did know what he was going to do next. In a
meeting of city commissioners led by Oscar Hoop on Tuesday, December 11, city
leaders swore to go after the one element which they believed was corrupting Tulsa’s
youth the most: marble machines—the grandfather of the pinball machine.
    “Marble machines and loitering of young people
around them have provided much of the background for events that tie into the
death investigation,” the Tribune claimed in a front-page article. However,
the precise correlation between marble machines and murder was never actually explained.
    “Reverberations of the Gorrell murder case were
felt in the city commission meeting Tuesday [December 11] as Police
Commissioner Hoop announced that marble machine distributors would either clean
house or the police would do it for them,” the Tribune continued. Hoop’s
proposal was to clear the machines from establishments located near the
schools, and to establish the city’s complete control over them through
licensure.
    But as Hoop later confessed in that same meeting,
he didn’t want to just