When Jake L. Hamon lay down in his hospital bed in Ardmore on the night of November 22, 1920, the official explanation for the bullet wound through his abdomen remainedremarkablysimple. Hamon had accidentally shot himself. Frank L. Ketch, his business manager and one of his closest associates, said the .25-caliber automatic pistol haddischargedwhileHamon was cleaning or handling it in preparation for a trip. Hamon’s physicians were cautiously optimistic. The bullet had passed through his liver and lodged near his back, but he had walked approximately two blocks from the Randol Hotel to the hospital after being wounded, undergone surgery, and initially appeared likely to survive. If no complications developed, his doctors believed he might recover.
Carter County Attorney Russell B. Brown was not satisfied.
Sometime during that Monday, Brown began making his own inquiries into what had occurred inside the Randol Hotel the previous evening. Precisely what Brown learned during those first hours remains less clear than the conclusion he reached. By Monday night, November 22, he had decided there was enough evidence to reject, at least for purposes of criminal investigation, the story being publicly offered by Hamon’s friends. Brown went before Justice of the Peace Hal M. Cannon and filed an information accusing Clara Smith of assault with intent to kill Jake L. Hamon.
The language of the complaint was unequivocal. BrownallegedthatClarahad “willfully and feloniously and with premeditated design” shot Hamon with a pistol. It was a remarkable accusation to file while the supposed victim remained alive in a hospital insisting, through his representatives, that nobody had shot him at all.
Brown did something else that same evening, however, that has largely disappeared from later retellings of the Hamon affair. He filed a second criminal information. This one named both Clara Smith and Jake L. Hamon and charged them with adultery.
The November 23 Lawton News placed both developments together beneath a headline that announced the official collapse of the accident story:“JAKEHAMON IS SHOT BY WOMAN.” The Associated Press report explained that Brown had filed the assault-with-intentto- kill information against Clara and “a second information charging Clara Smith and Jake L. Hamon jointly with a statutory offense.” Other newspapers were less delicate about identifying that statutory offense. The Ponca City News reported plainly: “Another warrant charges her and Hamon with adultery.” The Tulsa World likewise told its readers that Brown had filed a second information “charging Clara Smith and Jake L. Hamon jointly with adultery.”
That second charge deserves more attention than history has generally given it. Jake Hamon was lying wounded in a hospital, his wife and children, who had long before moved to Chicago, were traveling toward Ardmore, and his political associateswereattemptingto preserve both his reputation andthestorythathehadaccidentally shot himself. Brown nevertheless placed the alleged relationship between Jake and Clara directly into a public criminal pleading. The accusation that newspapers and political acquaintances had whispered about was no longer merely gossip. The county attorney had made it part of the official record.
Brown initially delayed serving the adultery warrant upon Hamon because of his physical condition. He showed no similar hesitation concerning Clara. The assault warrant was placed in the hands of Carter County officers with instructions that she be found. Almost immediately, however, law enforcement encountered a problem that would consume the next several weeks.
Nobody seemed to know where Clara Smith was.
Or, perhaps more accurately, nearly everyone seemed to have a different answer.
Where Was Clara? Within hours, Clara was reported in enough places to make it almost impossible to follow her actual movements. ShehadgonetoRingling.She was traveling to California. She might be in Oklahoma City. She might have taken a train north. She might be hiding somewhere near Ardmore. Later she would supposedly be seen in Tulsa, Chickasha, Kansas City and again on the streets of Ardmore itself. One newspaper after another carried a new report, frequently contradicting the report printed the day before.
Some of the confusion came directly from Hamon’s own circle. On November 23, Frank Ketch told the Tulsa World that Clara was “in Ringling this morning getting ready to go to California whereherpeopleliveandwas to have gone three or four days ago.” Ketch continued publicly to deny that Clara had anything to do with the shooting. According to his account, Hamon had told him, “I know that no one will believe it. But I shot myself accidentally.” Ketch even argued that the small caliber of the weapon made the accusation of attempted murder implausible: “The idea of anyone trying to kill another with so small a gun is absurd.”
Yet Ketch could not produce Clara. When questions naturally arose about why the woman accused of shooting Hamon did not simply come forward and tell investigators where she had been, Ketch responded that he did not know where she was. “We know nothing of the whereaboutsofClaraSmith,” he told the Oklahoma City Times. If County Attorney Brown or the newspapers knew where she was, he added, “let her be produced.”
Meanwhile, Clara’s baggage was traveling in an entirely different direction from Clara.
Two trunks bearing markings that police believed identified them as Clara’s were discovered in the baggage room at Kansas City’s Union Station. Detectives were assigned towatchtheminhopes that Clara—or someone acting for her—would appear to claim them. Contemporary reports differ somewhat concerning exactly when the trunks were checked and by whom, but they agree upon the essential fact: Clara’s luggage had been sent north toward Kansas City while authorities were attempting to determine whether Clara herself had traveled north.
She had not. The Miami Daily Record Herald reported on November 23 that Brown believed Clara “had checked her baggage to Kansas City but did not leave on the train.” The Oklahoma City Times similarly reported that authorities no longer believed she had boarded the train supposedly bound for California. Instead, officials considered the possibility that she had been “spirited away” somewhere insouthernOklahoma or had crossed the Texas line by automobile.
Police nevertheless had to chase every possibility. At Brown’s request, Ponca City Police Chief Paul Mead and Sheriff Dan Bain boarded northbound Santa Fe trains and searched the Pullman cars. The Ponca City News reported one especially tantalizing detail: the conductor of the 10:10 train possessed a telegram addressed to Clara B. Hamon on that very train but could not find the woman to whom it was addressed. Officers searched again the following morning.
Nothing. Kansas City police watched the trunks. Oklahoma officers watched trains. Reports placed Clara in Tulsa. Others placed her in Oklahoma City. Two men later claimed to have seen her walking the streets of Ardmore after Jake’s death. Still another story had her bound for California. Newspapers began referring to the search as a “woman hunt,” and eventually police from Kansas City to the Pacific Coast were being asked to watch for her.
All the while, Clara was going south.
“That Was the Way She Outwitted the Officers” The first reasonably coherent account of Clara’s actual route emerged from a Dallas automobile driver named E. W. Sallis. His story, published after Hamon’s death, provided a dramatically different picture from the rumors then sending officers toward Kansas City and California.
According to Sallis, a young woman approached his service car at the Dallas terminal on Tuesday morning, November 23, and initially asked to be driven to an aviation field. Once there, she discovered that no aviators were immediately available and asked Sallis instead about hiring his automobile for a four- or five-day journey. She produced a $100 bill from what Sallis described as a large roll of money, and the two headed south and west through Texas.
Sallis said her behavior soon made him suspicious. At Waxahachie, the appearance of an officer in a restaurant visibly disturbed her. She ate little, returned to the automobile, and instructed him to “step on it.” Somewhere during the journey, according to Sallis, she began asking what would happen if someone killed a person and then crossed into Mexico.
Then, he said, she began to cry.
Sallis claimed that the woman admitted she had shot a man at a hotel in Ardmore the previous Sunday. His reported version of her explanation was startlingly direct:“Hecameintomyroom drunk and tried to make me do things, and I shot him.” She also allegedly told Sallis that only two people knew precisely why the shooting occurred:herselfandtheman who had been shot.
Whether every detail of Sallis’ later recollection was accurate would ultimately be a matter for lawyers and jurors. But one portion of his story corresponded remarkably well with what authorities already knew. Sallis said Clara told him that two men had packed her trunks and sent them north to Kansas City, and, according to the newspaper account, added: “that was the way she outwitted the officers.”
If Sallis’ account was true, the confusion surrounding Clara’s disappearance had not been accidental at all. While police were searching trains and detectives were watching baggage in Kansas City, Clara was traveling through Texas toward the Mexican border.
Sallis eventually became sufficiently uncomfortable that he refused to drive her farther than Cisco. He said Clara paid him another $150 andsenthimintotherailroad station to purchase a ticket for El Paso. He left her near the station early Wednesday morning and later contacted authorities. By then, however, the woman officers were seeking had another substantial head start.
There were other pieces of the puzzle. Clara’s brother was later detained near Fort Worthwhiledrivingherlarge red automobile. He told officers that he had obtained the car at Wilson, Oklahoma, and was taking it to El Paso, where their parents were staying because of poor health. He was eventually released. The automobile therefore traveled south. Clara traveled south. Her family connections pointed toward El Paso.
Her trunks went north. The result was exactly what one would expect. Law enforcement scattered in several directions at once.
There is another wrinkle that makes the episode still more intriguing. The Ponca City News reported on November 27 that Clara’s trunks had been packed “under [Jake Hamon’s] instructions” immediately following the shooting and checked to Kansas City. The same article observed that, whileHamonremainedalive, his friends had steadfastly maintained that the shooting was accidental. After his death, some of those same friends privately began insisting that Clara had shot him. The newspaper bluntly recognized the problem this created for any future prosecution: “Toomanystatements have been made the other way, including even that of Hamon himself.”
Thatsentencewouldeventually loom over the murder trial.
The Search Becomes International
By November 26, the nature of the case changed completely.
Jake Hamon had seemed to be recovering. On Thanksgiving Day, he reportedly asked for “a square meal and some ice cream,” telling those around him that he felt better. He ate potatoes on toast, cashed a $25 check because he “liked to have money around,” and apparently believed the worst had passed. Then his condition suddenly deteriorated. His wife Georgia and daughter Olive Belle had reached Ardmore and were with him when, at approximately 8:20 Friday morning, November 26, Jake Hamon died.
The physicians attributed his death to complications resulting from the gunshot wound. The assault case against Clara Smith had suddenly become a potential murder prosecution.
Brown did not immediately amend the charge. Newspapers repeatedly asked whether he intended to do so, and he initially remained noncommittal. The Ponca City News reported that he was “undecided whether he will change his charge filed against the pretty woman with assault with intent to kill Hamon, to murder.” But the stakes had plainly changed. The man Clara had allegedly shot was dead, and the search for her intensified.
By November 27, Brown had widened that search beyond the borders of the United States. He wired the State Department in Washington andrequestedthatAmerican consular officials be placed on alert. The Oklahoma Newsannouncedbeneaththe headline “INVOKE STATE DEPARTMENT” that the search had become international. The following day, the Tulsa Tribune reported that itnowextended“fromMexico to Canada.”
It was an extraordinary amount of law-enforcement activity directed toward a woman who, only days earlier, Hamon’s own representatives had insisted had nothing whatever to do with the shooting.
Even more extraordinary was the counterpressure developing in Ardmore. Several newspapers reported that friends of Jake Hamon were attempting to persuade Brown to abandon the prosecution altogether. The Miami Daily Record reported on November 28 that “Hamon’s friends continue their efforts to get him to drop the charge,” although Brown’s decision to expand the search internationally suggested that he had no intention of doing so. Another report stated that plans were being discussed tohaveBrownwithdrawboth informations—the shooting charge and the adultery charge.
The reasons for those efforts were never entirely clear. Perhaps Hamon’s friends wanted to protect his reputation. Perhaps they feared what a public murder trialwouldexposeconcerning his decade-long relationship with Clara. Perhaps some genuinely believed his repeated assertion that he had accidentally shot himself. Whatever the motive, Brown continued.
And Clara disappeared into Mexico.
Three Weeks in Mexico The story Clara later told was that she traveled from El Paso across the border and eventually reached Chihuahua City. There she found refuge with a prominent Mexican family whose identity was initially guarded from reporters. Her father later described the man who assisted her as a Chihuahua official who encountered Claraduringherjourneyand, despite a language barrier, recognized that she was in trouble. According to James Smith, the man’s family took Clara into their home, protected her and treated her almost as one of their own.
For approximately three weeks, one of the most sought-after women in the United States lived beyond the reach of Oklahoma authorities.
The newspapers, meanwhile, continued searching.
Then the story took another turn, and for the first time Charles Arthur Coakley moved from the edges of the Hamon affair directly into its center.
Enter Charles Coakley
ByDecember,Clara’sfamily and attorneys had begun discussing a voluntary surrender. The precise chronology of every conversation is difficult to reconstruct from the surviving newspaper accounts, but the broad outline is clear. This was not going to end with detectives discovering Clara’s hiding place and dragging her back across the border. Her return was negotiated.
Charles Arthur Coakley was the lawyer doing the negotiating.
That fact is particularly significant in the story we have been following because Coakley had been practicing in Ardmore for less than a year. He had come from Madill afteryearsasaprosecutor and increasingly prominent criminal-defense attorney. Now, within months of arriving in a larger city, he found himself representing the woman at the center of one of the most sensational criminal cases in America.
Coakley’s role extended far beyond preparing legal arguments for some future trial. By Christmas week, he was arranging Clara’s return to the United States.
TheLawmanWhoWent to Meet Her
The man who traveled south to receive Clara’s surrender was no ordinary county sheriff. Buck Garrett was already something of a legendinsouthernOklahoma by 1920, a surviving representative of the generation of lawmen who had worked the Indian Territory before statehood transformed it into Oklahoma. Tall, long-limbed and slow-spoken, Garrett apparently looked the part so completely that an Associated Press correspondent traveling with him and Clara later described him as “a typical western peace officer of moving picture traditions,” complete with the inevitable slouch hat.
The resemblance was more than appearance.
Garretthadspentthirteen years as a deputy United States marshal in Indian Territory, when carrying a badge could involve pursuing fugitives across enormous stretches of country where federal authority was thin and assistance might be many miles away. He had also worked for fifteen months as a train guard, served six years as Ardmore’s chief of police and, by the time Jake Hamon was shot, had served approximately ten years as sheriff of Carter County. Ardmore voters had just elected him to another term.
There was also a famous name in Garrett’s family. His uncle was Pat Garrett, the legendary New Mexico sheriff whose name became permanently linked with the Old West after he shot and killed the outlaw Billy the Kid in 1881. The connection placed Buck Garrett within a family already associated with frontier law enforcement long before he built his own considerable reputation in Indian Territory and Oklahoma.
BuckGarretthadacquired stories of his own.
Long before he came to Oklahoma, Garrett had been swept into one of the most notorious episodes in the historyoftheAmericanWest. As a young man in Wyoming, he became involved in the conflict between powerful cattle interests and alleged cattle rustlers that erupted into what became known as the Johnson County War. Garrett later recalled that he celebrated his twenty-first birthday as a prisoner at Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming, charged with murder.
He was not alone. According to the account Garrett gave in 1920, forty-five guards were indicted following the killing of two men during the conflict. Each was eventually released on an enormous $40,000 bond, and the prosecution ended in acquittal.
By the time Garrett arrived in Indian Territory, violenceandthemachineryof criminal justice were hardly foreign to him.
An Associated Press correspondent traveling with Garrett in December 1920 eventually asked the question that naturally followed such a résumé.
Had he ever killed a man? Garrett answered in the laconic manner of an old western lawman: “Yes, I’ve had some bad luck, but I might have had more.”
Then he explained. “Not that I’m particularly wise, but things just happened not to require bloodshed. I’ve been shot twice, and shot at a million times, I reckon.”
It is difficult to imagine a sentence that better captures the man.
Garrett belonged to the fading generation that connected the Oklahoma of 1920 with the Indian Territory that had existed only thirteen years earlier. Coakley belonged to much the same transitional world. Both had arrived before statehood. Both had watched frontier institutions become modern ones. One had spent those years carrying a badge; the other had spent them practicing law and prosecuting criminals. By 1920, both were established figures in Ardmore.
And now their paths converged around Clara Smith Hamon.
There is something else about Garrett’s role in the Hamon case that deserves notice. Despite his history, this was not going to end with Buck Garrett kicking down a door in Mexico, putting Clara in handcuffs and hauling her back to Oklahoma.
Quite the opposite. Clara’s surrender was being negotiated, and Garrett appears to have been an important reason the arrangement could work. Whatever Clara feared about returning to Oklahoma, she apparently trusted the Carter County sheriff. When arrangements were finally completed, Garrett traveled to El Paso and waited for her to come to him.
OnDecember22,Claraarrived in Juarez. Garrett was there to meet her, along with her uncle, Ben Harrison, and members of her legal team. After a brief conference on the station platform, Clara placed herself in Garrett’s custody. The party crossed the international bridge into El Paso, where Garrett permitted her to spend the night with her parents before beginning the long journey back to Ardmore.
The Daily Ardmoreite later reported an exchange between Clara and Garrett that, if accurately remembered, reveals something about the unusual relationship between fugitive and sheriff.
Garrett reportedly asked Clara whether she would have run from him had she seen him in Ardmore.
“Run away?” Clara replied. “I didn’t run away.”
She told Garrett that if she had seen him, she would have gone to him.
“You’re the very one I wanted to see.”
Garrett pressed the point. Ifhehadsomehowpassedher house in Chihuahua, would she have surrendered to him there?
“You bet I would,” she reportedly answered.
Then Clara added an important qualification. Garrett could never have forcibly taken her from the Mexican home where she had been sheltered, she said, unless she had been willing to go. But if she saw him in Ardmore,shewouldgotohim willingly.
Whatever liberties the newspapermayhavetakenin reconstructing the conversation, the larger fact is undeniable. After a nationwide, and eventually international, search failed to locate Clara Smith, she voluntarily returned to American soil and surrendered to Buck Garrett.
Thatwasthemanwhonow climbedaboardthetrainwith Clara Smith and Charles Coakley for the journey back to Oklahoma.
And what happened aboard that train provides one of the most remarkable surviving glimpses of all three. That train ride across Texas gives us something historians rarely receive: a scene in which the principal characters can actually be placed together at a particular moment.
Somewhere across the broadTexasplainsonDecember 23, an Associated Press correspondent was admitted into Clara’s stateroom. She had given no interview since surrendering. Sitting there with her while the reporter questioned her were Sheriff Buck Garrett and Charles A. Coakley.
It is worth pausing over that image.
For weeks, newspapers across the United States had printed Clara’s photograph, speculated about her whereabouts, described her as a fugitive, reconstructed her relationship with Jake Hamonandfollowedasearch that had stretched from Mexico to Canada. Now she was sitting aboard a train rolling east across Texas, voluntarily returning to Oklahoma to face a murder charge. Beside her sat the Carter County sheriff who had taken her into custody.
And beside him sat Charles Coakley.
Clara refused to discuss the shooting. Coakley and her other lawyers had wisely instructed her not to try the case in the newspapers. Instead, she spoke for nearly an hour about religion, philosophy, books, art, Mexico and the family that had sheltered her. She said the experience had changed her view of the Mexican people and described the kindness she hadreceivedthere.Shespoke aboutdevotingtheremainder of her life to making amends to her family “for the sorrow she has brought to it” and declared, “I shall never again waste even an hour of precious time left me.”
Only once did she mention Jake by name. Asked whether she might return to secretarial work, Clara said she had no plans, then reflected upon the importance of remaining active throughout life. “I do not believe peopleshouldeverretire from active work,” she said. “I have always opposed any suggestion that Mr. Hamon should retire.”
She then added a sentence that seems strangely appropriate coming from a woman whoseentirelifehadchanged within a month: “I believe everyone must grow even during old age. When people don’t grow, it is their fault.”
The reporter eventually asked about her reception upon returning to American soil. Clara became animated. She described seeing the men waiting for her at the Juarez station and called them “tall, upstanding westerners.” She praised Garrett and the El Paso sheriff and concluded enthusiastically: “Oh, these western men are wonderful.”
Then came one of those tiny newspaper observations that brings a century-old scene suddenly to life.
“Sheriff Garrett and Attorney Coakley beamed.”
There is Charles Coakley— not a name on a pleading, notalawyerremembered decades afterward for a famous verdict, but a living man aboard a train in December 1920, sitting beside his client as she returned from Mexico while a reporter recorded the scene.
It would not be the last time Coakley found himself betweenClaraSmithHamon and the press.
Coakley Takes Control
The journey back to Ardmore became increasingly difficult. Clara was exhausted and reportedly suffered a nervous collapse after reaching FortWorth.Thedelayimmediately generated rumors that the carefully negotiated surrender arrangement had somehow fallen apart and that Clara might refuse to continue to Ardmore.
Coakley moved quickly to kill the story.
He left Clara and the remainder of the party in Fort Worth and hurried ahead to Ardmore. By approximately three o’clock Christmas morning, he was back in the city speaking with reporters and preparing the legal machinery necessary for Clara’s arrival. His explanation was direct: “Everything is in harmony; the stop-over in Fort Worth was a physical necessity and not due to any rupture in our plans.”
Coakley explained that Clara was “in a complete state of exhaustion and her nerves are shattered.” He had come ahead, the Ardmoreite reported, specifically to arrange her preliminary appearance and bond. The magistrate, prosecutor, prospective bondsmenandother officials would be ready when she arrived.
That tells us considerably more about Coakley’s role than the later trial record alone. He was already functioning as more than the lawyerwhowouldeventually stand before the jury. He was coordinating the surrender, accompanying his client across Texas, dealing with the press, preparing the court proceedings, arranging the bond and, as much as anyone could, controlling the circumstances underwhichthemost famous woman in Oklahoma would reenter Ardmore.
The defense had begun long before a jury was selected.
Christmas Day in Ardmore
Christmas Day arrived in Ardmore, with the season's familiar rituals unfolding under circumstances that were anything but ordinary. Families gathered around Christmas tables. Churches marked the birth of Christ. Downtown streets that had beenfilledwithshoppersonly hours earlier were comparatively quiet.
At noon, a Santa Fe train pulled into the station.
Clara Smith Hamon had come home.
The Daily Ardmoreite described her stepping from the Pullman pale and exhausted, with “the dust of the llanos upon her garments.” Reportersandphotographers moved toward her, cameras clicking as her younger brother rushed forward and embracedher.EdithJohnson of the Daily Oklahoman, one ofthebest-knownnewspaper writersintheSouthwest,was waiting with a small camera and later wrote an extraordinary eyewitness account of what followed.
CharlesCoakleywaswaiting too.
Johnson wrote that Clara was “hurried by her attorney, Charles A. Coakley of Coakley & Mathers, to a closed automobile.” Coakley apparently anticipated the crowd’s expectations and used another vehicle than the one spectators assumed would carry her. Johnson observed that his “swift disposal of her was something of a surprise to the crowd.” Within moments, Clara was away from the station and headed toward the Carter County courthouse.
There, behind doors guarded against reporters and spectators, Clara met with her relatives, Sheriff Garrett and her attorneys. Coakley had gone from negotiating her surrender to accompanying her from Mexico to racing ahead of her from Fort Worth to meeting her at the train to now sitting with her inside the sheriff’s office while the final arrangements were made.
Johnson’s account offers one particularly small but revealing glimpse. Clara appeared faint during the proceedings. Coakley quietly placed a chair for her and suggested that she sit down.
“I am more ill than you know,” Clara told him.
Then the law took over. Clara waived the preliminary hearing and, through counsel, announced that she intended to plead not guilty. She was bound over to the Carter County District Court on the charge of murdering Jake Hamon. By agreement with the county attorney, bond was fixed at $12,000.
The woman whose whereabouts had baffled officers from Oklahoma to Kansas City, whose search had caused Brown to invoke the assistance of the State Department, andwhohadspent approximately three weeks beyond the border in Mexico was free within a short time of reaching Ardmore.
And the bond itself tells us something important about the atmosphere awaiting the prosecution.
Prominent Ardmore businessmen, including Wirt Franklin, Max Westheimer andL.H.Love,signedClara’s $12,000 bond. Another bond circulated by former state senator Fred B. Tucker reportedly attracted more than fifty signatures from local men whose combined wealth the Ardmoreite estimated at between four and five million dollars.
Clara Smith Hamon was accused of killing one of the most powerful men Ardmore had ever produced.
Yet some of Ardmore’s mostprominentcitizenswere willing to put their names and fortunes behind her.
“TooMuchHorsePlay”
That extraordinary local sympathy had already attracted attention at the state capitol.
On Christmas Eve, while Clara and Coakley were still making their way across Texas, Governor J. B. A. Robertson announced that the State of Oklahoma would assist in her prosecution. The governor said he believed public sentiment in Ardmore might be so strongly favorable toward Clara that additional prosecutorial assistance was necessary. He complained that there had been too much “horse play” in the preparation of the case and even publicly expressed the opinion that Clara ought to be convicted of manslaughter and sent to the penitentiary.
There was another complication. James H. Mathers, Coakley’s law partner and one of Clara’s attorneys, had just been elected Carter County Attorney and would take office January 1. Because he represented Clara, Mathers obviously could not turn around and prosecute her when he became county attorney. The court would therefore need other counsel for the State, and officials were already discussing whether the Attorney General’s office should participate and whether the case might have to be moved to another county.
Thus, before Clara had spent even one night back in Carter County, the outlines of the coming battle were already visible. The outgoing county attorney had accused her of murder. The incoming county attorney was one of her own lawyers. The governor was publicly criticizing the handling of the prosecution. State officials were contemplating intervention. Some of Hamon’s friends had previously urged that the case be dropped. Prominent Ardmore citizens were signing Clara’sbond.Newspapers had been trying the case in public for more than a month.
And Charles Coakley was now standing between Clara and all of it.
“Mather and Coakley for Defendant” Among the surviving entries in the early court record is a brief notation identifying the lawyers appearing in the case. Russell Brown represented the State. For Clara, the docket recorded simply: “Mather and Coakley for Defendant.”
For readers who have followed this series from its beginning, those few words represent the point toward which our story has been moving for thirteen weeks. We began with Charles Arthur Coakley as a young Iowa-born lawyer who came to Oklahoma before statehood and established himself in Madill. We followed him into the Marshall County Attorney’s office, where he learned to investigate crimes, evaluate witnesses, present evidenceandpersuadejuries. We watched him prosecute cattle thieves and murder defendants, enter private practice, work beside Franklin Kennamer, serve during the First World War and gradually acquire a reputation as one of southern Oklahoma’s formidable courtroom lawyers. Eventually we followed him westward to Ardmore, where greater opportunities awaited in a booming oil city filled with wealth, litigation and ambitious men.
Now history had placed one of the largest criminal cases in Oklahoma directly in front of him.
The notation itself is almost comically understated whenmeasuredagainstwhat followed. A clerk recording appearances in 1920 could not have known that people would examine those words more than a century later. There is no flourish, no prediction and no suggestion that anything extraordinary was happening. It simply records the lawyers representing the defendant.
Yet by the time those words appeared, Coakley was already doing far more than the notation suggests. He had helped broker Clara’s return. He had traveled to meet her. He had sat beside her aboard the train while she gave her first interview after surrendering. He had rushed ahead to Ardmore to prepare the legal proceedings. He had managed her arrival, conferred with her at the courthouse and helped secure her release.
The trial had not begun. Charles Arthur Coakley already had.
The Problem Facing the State
For all the sensation surrounding the case, Coakley would have recognized that the State faced a fundamental evidentiary difficulty. JakeHamonwasunquestionably dead from the consequences of a gunshot wound. Clara was unquestionably connected with the circumstances surrounding that shooting. Their relationship, the reported quarrel, her disappearance and her journey into Mexico gave prosecutors a powerful collection of circumstances from which to construct a case.
But nobody else had been inside the room when the pistol discharged.
Whatever happened there occurred between Jake and Clara, and one of those two people was dead.
That fact made the statements Jake and his friends had given immediately after the shooting enormously important. The first public story was not that Clara had attempted to murder him. It was that Jake had accidentally shot himself. Ketch repeated that account over and over. More importantly, Ketch attributed it directly to Jake: “I know that no one will believe it. But I shot myself accidentally.”
Even after Brown filed the criminal informations, Ketch called the allegations a “deliberate falsehood” and continued insisting that the wound was “self-inflicted and solely the result of an accidental discharge.” The Ponca City News, only one day after Jake died, had already recognized the future prosecution’s problem: “Too many statements have been made the other way, including even that of Hamon himself.”
The prosecution would have answers. Jake might have been protecting Clara. He might have been protecting Georgia and his children. He might have been protecting his political career or the incoming Harding administration from a scandal involving adultery and a longtime mistress. Indeed, any of those explanations could have been true.
But an explanation for an inconsistent statement does not erase the statement.
Then there was Clara’s flight. Ordinarily, prosecutors could argue that leaving Oklahoma, traveling under circumstances designed to conceal one’s whereabouts and crossing into Mexico reflected consciousness of guilt. But here again the facts were not simple. Contemporary reports said Jake himself instructed that Clara’s trunks be packed and shipped away. There were suggestions that others assisted her departure. Ifthewoundedmanand his associates helped create the very flight the State intended to use as evidence against her, Coakley could turn one of the prosecution’s strongestcircumstancesback upon it.
Even Sallis’ damaging account contained material a defense lawyer could examine. If Clara really told him, “He came into my room drunk and tried to make me do things and I shot him,” the statement might constitute an admission that she fired the weapon—but it was not necessarily an admission of murder. The words supplied their own potential explanation for why the weapon had been fired. Much would depend upon whether Sallis was believed, exactly what Clara had said, and what the law permitted the jury to infer from it.
Those were questions for another day.
On Christmas afternoon, Clara’s immediate legal ordeal was finished. Judge T. W. Champion signed the bondandtoldher,“Now,Mrs. Hamon, you are free to go wherever you like.” According to Edith Johnson, Clara smiled.
“We have just one intention,” Champion added, “to be fair to you and fair to ourselves.”
Clara left Ardmore for Wilson, where her sister lived and where the family intended finally to have Christmas dinner. She had been a fugitive in Mexico only days earlier. Now she was free on bond, surrounded by relatives and represented by lawyers who intended to take her case before a Carter County jury.
Johnson wrote that Clara appeared “absolutely confident of acquittal.”
That confidence would soon be tested.
For more than a month, the story of Jake Hamon’s shooting had belonged to rumor,newspapercorrespondents, detectives, political allies and people claiming to know what had happened. Clara’s trunks had traveled one direction while she traveled another. Police searchedtrainsshehadnever boarded. Detectives watched baggage she never claimed. Reports placed her in cities hundreds of miles apart. The search crossed state lines and eventually an international border. Jake’s friends had first insisted he shot himself, then some reportedly blamed Clara after his death, while still others urged the county attorney to abandon the prosecution altogether. Before Clara had even returned to Ardmore, the governor of Oklahoma had entered the controversy.
Now all of that would have to pass through a much narrower door.
A courtroom.
There,rumorwouldeither become evidence or disappear. Newspaper accounts would give way to witnesses under oath. Stories repeated for weeks would be tested by cross-examination. The wordsofadeadmanwouldbe examined one by one. Clara’s flight into Mexico would have to be explained. Her extraordinary relationship withJakeHamon—carefully concealed for years—would be dragged into public view.
And the State of Oklahoma would finally have to answer the question that had hung over Ardmore since the night of November 21, 1920: What happened inside the Randol Hotel?
It would not be enough to answer that question with suspicion, gossip or even probability. Clara Smith Hamon now stood accused of murder. The State would have to prove its version of what happened beyond a reasonable doubt.
And standing between Clara and a murder conviction would be a lawyer from Madill.
Charles Arthur Coakley had already spent years building a reputation as a formidable trial lawyer. He had prosecuted criminals as county attorney. He had defended men accused of murder. He understood witnesses, juries and the peculiar alchemy of a courtroom, where facts alone do not decide cases—the facts must be assembled, challenged, explained and ultimately made believable to twelve people sitting in a jury box.
But nothing in Coakley’s career had prepared him for a case quite like this one.
The defendant was one of the most famous women in America. The dead man had been one of the most powerful political figures in Oklahoma. Newspapersacrossthe country were following every development. The governor had publicly expressed his opinion about what should happen to Clara. Public sympathy in Ardmore appeared to favor her. And some of the most troublesome evidence facing the prosecution came from Jake Hamon himself.
The search for Clara Smith was over.
The fight over what happened to Jake Hamon was about to begin.
And in Part XIV, Charles Coakley walks into the most sensational courtroom of his career—where the State would attempt to prove Clara Smith Hamon a murderer, and Coakley would begin the task of convincing a jury that she was not.