It has been two weeks since we last visited the remarkable story of Jake Hamon and Clara Smith, so perhaps we should begin by remembering where we left them.OnNovember21,1920, Hamon—oil millionaire, railroad builder, Republican National Committeeman and one of the most politically powerful men in Oklahoma— was shot inside the Randol Hotel in Ardmore. He initially insisted the shooting had been accidental, but after lingering for five days, Hamon died on November 26. By then Clara Smith, the womanwhohadsharedmuch of his life for nearly a decade, was gone. What followed was an extraordinary manhunt that stretched across several states and eventually into Mexico, accompanied every step of the way by newspaper reporters who were often moving as quickly as the detectives searching for her.
For nearly a month, Clara remained beyond the reach of Oklahoma authorities while the story surrounding Hamon’s death grew larger by the day. Witnesses gave statements, stories changed, rumors multiplied, and political allies became involved as newspapers across the country competed for every new development. Clara was finally located in Mexico, where reporters reached her even before Oklahoma authorities did. After negotiations for her surrender, she crossed back into the United States and returned toArdmoreonChristmasDay to face a charge of murdering Jake Hamon. The chase was over. What remained was the far more difficult question of what had actually happened inside that Ardmore hotel room—andwhethertheState of Oklahomacouldprove that Clara Smith Hamon had murdered one of the most powerful men in the nation.
For Charles Arthur Coakley, however, the coming case would not begin with the swearing of a jury. In a very real sense, his client had already been on trial for weeks. From the night Jake was shot, virtually every development hadbeenreported, magnified, contradicted and reported again. Clara’s disappearance, her wandering trunks, the confusion over whether she had fled west or south, the pursuit through TexasandintoMexico,Jake’s original claim of an accidental shooting and the accusations that followed his death had transformed a homicide investigation in Ardmore into a national spectacle. By the time Clara returned to Oklahoma, readers from Kansas City to Chicago and New York had been given more than enough rumor, speculation and purported evidence to reach their own verdicts.
Of everything published during those remarkable weeks, no piece of supposed evidence was more important— or more mysterious— thanwhatnewspapersbegan identifyinginearlyDecember as the private diary of Clara Smith Hamon. Portions appeared prominently in the Oklahoma City Times, the Kansas City Post and newspapers across the country from roughly December 3 through December 8, 1920, withpublicationrightstraced primarily to the Chicago Herald and Examiner. The newspapers did not present the diary as a minor curiosity. It was advertised as a window into Clara’s private thoughts during the months before Jake was shot, the confession of a tortured soul, a warning to other women and a revealing chronicle of the relationship between the fugitive woman and the dead millionaire.
If genuine, its importance could hardly be overstated. This was supposedly Clara speaking before there was a murder charge to defend against, before lawyers could shape her story and before the newspapers had spent weeks constructing theories about what happened. The diary appeared to record her anger, loneliness, fear and resentmentastheydeveloped over the months preceding Jake’s death. But it possessed a quality that would make it both useful and dangerous to Clara:dependinguponwhich pages were emphasized, it could tell two very different stories. It could be read as a record of mounting hatred toward Jake Hamon, or as a record of a woman increasingly frightened of the man with whom she had spent almost ten years.
Before either interpretation mattered,however,there was a more fundamental question: where did the diary come from?
That mystery began with Clara’s luggage. After the shooting, Clara traveled south while two trunks attributed to her traveled north. The trunks eventually reached Kansas City, where police watched them in the hope that Clara or someone acting for her might attempt to claim them. When authorities finallyopenedthetrunks, contemporary newspaper accounts described clothing, photographs, newspaper clippings, personal items and books of verse. One report quoted Kansas City Detective Boyle as saying he had searched them thoroughly and found “no diary or other paperswhichmighthaveany bearing on the case.” Another report was equally explicit: no diary had been found.
Yet almost simultaneously, newspapers began publishing one.
The contradiction did not escape notice in 1920. While police were telling reporters that Clara’s trunks contained no diary and no personal papers bearing upon the case, other newspapers were announcing that her intimate private journal had somehow been obtained and would be published in installments. At least one Oklahoma newspaper dismissedtheentirething as a “pure fake” and accused Chicago newspaper writers of manufacturing the material. That accusation was opinion rather than proof, but it establishes something important:doubtsconcerning the diary’s authenticity are not the product of historians looking backward a century later. People were questioning it while Clara was still a fugitive.
There was another reason the diary could so easily acquire a life of its own. Clara was not there to answer it. When the installments began appearing in early December,thewomanwhose most private thoughts supposedly filled those columns remainedsomewherebeyond the reach of Oklahoma authorities. Detectives were still chasing reports through Texas and Mexico. She could not readily walk into a newspaper office and produce the original journal. She could not point to a sentence and say, “Yes, that is mine,” or another and say, “I never wrote that.” Whatever the newspaper possessed—and whatever an editor chose to publish—went before the public with the supposed author largely absent from the conversation.
For several extraordinary days, therefore, the diary spokeforClaraSmithHamon while Clara herself could not. Readers were invited into her hotel rooms, onto her trains andautomobiles,throughthe oil fields she traveled with Jake and, most importantly, into the most private reaches of their relationship. They were told whom she loved, whom she feared, what she regretted and what she believed Jake had done to her. Long before Clara sat beside Coakley in a Carter County courtroom, a newspaper version of Clara Smith Hamon had already introduced itself to the country.
The Chicago Herald and Examiner’s role made the mystery even more interesting. Chicago was where Georgia Hamon and the Hamon children had been living. Jake’s lawful family life was centered there while his life with Clara had largely unfoldedinOklahoma.There is no evidence before us that Georgia gave the diary to the newspaper, participated in its publication or even knew howithadbeenobtained,and it would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. But a trial lawyer could hardly ignore the circumstances. Clara’s trunks were searched in Kansas City and supposedly contained no diary. A Chicago newspaper nevertheless acquired and copyrighted what it represented as that diary, while Jake’s wife and children lived in the same city. Coakley did not need a conspiracy theory to become interested. He needed only the instinct of a trial lawyer: find the source.
Part of what made the published diary persuasive was its very ordinariness. Much of it did not sound like adocumentwrittentoexplain a future killing. Clara wrote about late trains, missed connections, hotels, shopping trips, beauty parlors, automobile rides and excursions into the oil fields. She described dinners, travel across Oklahoma and long hours aboard trains. She recorded visits to Duncan, Walters, Waurika and other places associated with Hamon’s business interests. At times there was almost nothing remarkable about it.
One early entry described a “long, lonesome trip to Ardmore,” followed by a late arrival because the train had been delayed. Clara made telephone calls, went to bed early and recorded that she was unhappy. Another entry described “the Colonel,” as Hamon was frequently called, arriving from Ranger and spending the afternoon with her. Even amid those ordinary details, however, dissatisfaction kept appearing. Clara wrote repeatedly that she was unhappy, that she thought too much and that she did not know what the future held.
She also wrote about the oil-field world she shared with Jake. In one entry she rose at six in the morning and left at seven for Duncan Field in a Pierce-Arrow automobile. She visited a producing well, ate one of what she called their “famous grocery store lunches,” traveled to Walters and returned late at night. On another trip she bought oil property at a court sale in Duncan before continuing to Cement, where she recorded her disgust with a miserable hotel: a poor bed, bare floor, dresser without knobs and a curtain where a door should have been. These are precisely the little irritations people put into private journalsbecausetheyhaveno expectation that thousands of strangers will someday read them.
The diary contained other touches that made the woman onthepageseemveryreal. Clara drank corn whiskey and commented upon its remarkable “kick.” She rode automobiles for hours over rough roads, slept in cars and complained when exhaustion caught up with her. She visited beauty parlors with almost ritual regularity. She noticed clothes, restaurants and hotel rooms. She met friends for meals and described men and women who today would be little more than forgotten names except that Clara placed them on a page. Famous actors caught her attention as readily as oilmen. Charlie Chaplin could appear at dinner on one page, while an Oklahoma lease or court sale occupied the next.
That mixture of the important and the inconsequential gave the diary texture. If a person wanted to fabricate onlyamotiveformurder,why bother recording whether a hoteldresserhadknobs?Why preserve complaints about train schedules, beauty treatments or the price of meals? Of course, a clever fabricator might include ordinary details precisely to create an impression of authenticity. Yet the accumulation of those details is one reason the published document fascinated readers then and continues to intrigue anyone who reads it now.
Betweenthemissedtrains and bad hotels, however, another story gradually emerged. Clara was restless and increasingly dissatisfied. Her mind continually returned to Jake and to the uncertain nature of their relationship. She described one ride to Wilson as “miserable” and the evening that followed as one long quarrel. After another trip she wrote that she was “very, very tired,” not simply from physical exhaustion but from “disgust with my life.” The sentences were still surrounded by ordinary life, but something darker was beginning to move beneath them.
Then came the entry that changed the character of the diary altogether.
The published versions place it in May 1920, although the precise date varies among newspaper reproductions— one of several inconsistencies thatwouldlater complicate the document. Clara supposedly wrote that she awakened with a “vague sense of trouble coming.” By afternoon, trouble had arrived. She declined to record precisely what occurred, saying only that those hours would remain a nightmare in her memory.
Then she described the man involved: “In the form of a man there was a demon,” she supposedly wrote, “who tried to frighten and terrorize me.”
The language became darker from there. Clara claimed her life had hung “by a slender thread” and that she nevertheless had refused to show weakness. Then came a passage which, when newspaperspublisheditafter Jake’s shooting, must have seemed almost prophetic. If Clara should someday be found “stabbed or choked or beaten to death,” she wanted the world to know that she had made a fight for herself.
If those words really were placed on paper six months before Jake Hamon was shot, their significance to Coakley was obvious. Clara would not merely be claiming after a homicide that she had feared Jake. She had supposedly documented that fear long before either of them knew therewouldbeamurdertrial.
The entry then became something almost larger than a diary. Clara offered a warning to other women: “Know your man before you give him your soul.”
She urged women not simply to know the pleasant public face of a man but to discover the hidden one—the “good and sunny side,” the “sugar-coated side,” the flattering face presented to the world, as contrasted with the one revealed only in private. In one published version, Clara described the latter as thesideofamanthatappears only in the presence of “four walls and you.”
The warning was particularly striking because Clara did not absolve herself of responsibility for entering the relationship. She did not portray herself as a completely passive young woman swept helplessly into Jake’s world. Throughout the purported diary, she repeatedly acknowledged that she had made choices, ignored warnings, remained after she knew the relationship was destructive and continued hoping for a future that increasingly seemed unlikely. There is self-pity in the diary, certainly, but there is also self-accusation. That complexity made Clara harder to reduce to the simple characters newspapers often preferred: seductress, victim, jealous mistress or murderer.
To modern readers, her language immediately suggests concepts associated with intimate-partner abuse and coercive control. The legal system of 1921 did not use that terminology. Coakley had no recognized “battered woman syndrome” doctrine available to him, nor could he summon an expert to explain a body of psychological literature that would not develop for decades. But the human behavior later described by those terms did not begin when lawyers and psychologists finally named it. Fear, dependence, humiliation, promisesofchangeand repeated attempts to leave followed by reconciliation were as possible in 1920 as they are today.
If genuine, the diary gave Coakley the raw material for precisely that human argument. Clara claimed she had tried to leave Jake. She claimed he pursued her and brought her back. She said hepromisedchangeandmarriage. She described a public Jake Hamon very different from the man she claimed to know behind closed doors. Most importantly, she wrote of fear long before the night of November 21.
She also claimed the relationship itself had begun under false pretenses. Clara swore that she never would have become Hamon’s sweetheart if he had not repeatedly told her that he intended to divorce Georgia and marry her. “I swear here before the All Knowing God,” she supposedly wrote, “that I would never have become his sweetheart if he had not told me—again and again—that hewasgoingtogethisdivorce anyway.”
Then came the accusation in its simplest form: “He lied to me. He deceived me from the beginning.”
Clara wrote that she had given Hamon “ten of the choicest years of my life”—her youth, health and beauty—andwonderedwhat would remain if she finally left him. She claimed that she once had tried to end the relationship, only for Hamon to pursue her and persuade her to return with renewed promises. She stayed, according to the diary, because she continued hoping that someday he would give her the future he had promised.
Thosepassageswerehardly unqualified gifts to the defense. Aprosecutorcouldread them as motive: a woman believed a man had deceived her for ten years, stolen the best years of her life and was now preparing to abandon her. Coakley, however, could use the same passages to explain why Clara remained with a man she later claimed to fear. Instead of simply being an angry mistress who refused to accept that a married man would not leave his wife, she could be portrayed as a woman who had become emotionally dependent upon a powerful older man, repeatedly attempted to leave and repeatedly returned when he promised that things would change.
That tension—love beside hatred, dependence beside resentment, fear beside attachment— runs through the diary and is perhaps its most striking characteristic.
During Clara’s travels to California in the spring and summer of 1920, the journal shifted again into descriptions of Los Angeles, Pasadena, beaches, hotels and movie stars. She wrote of seeing Charlie Chaplin in a dining room and thinking he looked sad. She visited Forest Lawn, attended shows, watched crowds at seaside resorts,sawthePacificOcean and rode through Hollywood. The world around her could be beautiful and glamorous, but the sadness followed her west.
One evening she sat in an observation car beneath a moonlit sky and described it as a night made for lovers, only to add that she was dreaming but had no lover. In Los Angeles, she called motion pictures a “Godsend for the unhappy” because they moved so rapidly that they left no time for thought. It was a revealing observation because throughout the diary thinking seemed to be Clara’s enemy. While traveling or surrounded by people she could distract herself. When still and alone, she returned to Jake.
At one point she wrote, “I purchase my happiness by the hour,” and then described what remained as “the halflife.”
The irony was obvious. Clara traveled with money, stayed in expensive hotels, rode in fine automobiles and enjoyed a lifestyle inaccessible to most women from her background. Yet she repeatedly wrote that money could not purchase what she wanted most. Whatever else Jake Hamon had given her, she did not possess the public, permanent place in his life that she believed he had promised.
The diary also reveals how thoroughly Clara’s world had become intertwined with Jake’s.Thesewerenotmerely secret meetings conducted between two otherwise separate lives. Her travels followed his businesses. Her acquaintances overlapped with his. Political events appeared alongside personal entries. Oil transactions, elections, social engagements and private unhappiness existed on the same pages. If the diary was hers, it helps explain why simply “leaving Jake”maynothaveseemedto Clara like ending a romance. It would have meant leaving a life she had spent years helpingorganizearoundhim.
By August the tone had grown substantially darker. Clara described herself as surrounded by friends who would willingly help her but nevertheless incapable of happiness because she believed she had given away everything important within herself. She asked what had become of her soul and character and answered with one word: “A devil.”
She then produced one of the diary’s most vivid images. Clara compared herself to someone who had seen a spider and nevertheless walked willingly into its web. She did not portray herself as having been dragged into the relationship. She admitted that she had entered it herself,trustingamanwhom she later came to believe had deceived her. The passage ended with a question that a prosecutor might have lingered over: “Shall I alone pay?”
Those words could be heard as grievance and perhaps even a demand for retribution. Why should she bear the consequences while Jake remained wealthy, successful and respected? But the same passage could be read as despair rather than threat—the protest of a woman asking why she alone should carry the social and emotional consequences of a relationship involving two people.
InSeptember,Claracalled herself a fool and looked backward at how simply the relationship had begun. They talked. She helped Jake with his business. She admired his intellect and ambition. Then came love, followed by what she described as “hell.” From that reflection came perhaps the most memorable description in the entire diary: “Jake Lewis Hamon, ‘empire builder,’ and Clara Hamon, his court fool, grimacing under the weight of a broken life.”
“Empire builder” was exactly the sort of description being used for Jake Hamon after his death. He had built railroads, invested in oil, accumulated wealth, developed towns and helped build political organizations. He had played a significant role in the Republican politics surrounding Warren G. Harding’s rise, and at the time of his death was being discussedasamanwhomight have a place in the incoming administration. The diary turned that public image on its head. Jake might have built an empire, Clara suggested, but the private life surrounding that empire had broken her.
By November, public events and Clara’s private anxieties were converging. Harding had just won the presidential election. The political triumph that promised to elevate Jake to the greatest prominence of his career also threatened to make Clara’s position increasingly untenable. Georgia could accompany him into Washington as his lawful wife. Clara could not openly occupy the place beside a Cabinet officer or presidential adviser without creatingpreciselythescandal
(See LION , page 7A) Jake’s political future could not afford.
According to the diary, Clara sensed him pulling away. Jake gave her little time, seemed cold and distant, andfoundexcuseswhen she wanted his company. “Always he puts me off,” she wrote. She had never seen him quite this way. He appeared to be in a “sort of trance,” seemed unnatural and distracted, and in Clara’s estimation had somehow “lost his balance.”
Whether those observations reflected the pressures created by Harding’s election or merely Clara’s perception of events cannot now be known. The timing, however, was unmistakable. Just as Jake’spublicfutureappeared to be opening, Clara believed her private future with him was closing.
There is a temptation when reading these final entries to race directly toward November 21. It is better not to. The diary becomes more unsettling when read at the pace Clara supposedly wrote it. Nothing announces that a shooting is approaching. There is no dramatic countdown scratched across the page. There is simply a woman becoming progressively more unhappy while the calendar quietly advances toward a Sunday night at the Randol Hotel.
On November 13, children came to see her. Clara described them with affection and especially mentioned “Baby Jack,” her “wonderful dream baby.” She wished she could have him as her own and hoped that someday she might help make him into a good man. The passage revealed an aspiration far removedfromthesensational portrait of Clara that often appearedinnewspapers.She wantedafamily,permanence and the ordinary domestic life she believed had been denied her. There is something particularly poignant about that entry because it sits so close to everything that followed. Clara was imagining the kind of future she wanted while increasingly convinced that the future she actually possessed was disappearing.
On November 14, she wrote that Jake “neglected me dreadfully.” She had intended to attend church but felt too nervous and unwell, so she walked for fresh air and then spent much of the day waiting for him. She paced the floor hoping he might come and provide “a little comfort and cheer.” Eventually he appeared, but only to announce that he was going to a duck dinner, where Clara wrote that he became “awfully drunk.” There is no threat in the entry, no declaration that she intended revenge. What appears instead is the almost humiliating routine of waiting for a man who repeatedly found somewhere else to be.
The next day the emotional language sharpened considerably. Clara recorded that all of her “disgust, fear and hate” remained trapped inside her. Those three words could hardly have been ignored in a murder prosecution. They described an explosive mixture, but they also perfectly illustrated the diary’s two-edged nature. A prosecutor could emphasize “disgust” and “hate.” Coakley could insist that the jury not overlook the word between them: “fear.”
On November 16, Clara described moving through Ardmore almost in a trance. She shopped, encountered acquaintances and barely acknowledged them. Outwardly she remained functional, but inwardly she felt exhausted. “It is a tired soul that I suffer from,” she wrote. The distinction between outward appearance and private turmoil echoed one of the diary’s recurring themes. People could see Clara walking the streets, shopping and performing her ordinary responsibilities. They could not see what she claimed was happening inside her.
The following day she did something particularly striking: she looked backward through her own diary. She recognized the same transformation that later readers would see and wrote, “I am astounded at the growing bitterness of my viewpoint.” That sentence was potentially devastating because it did not require a prosecutor to characterize Clara as increasingly bitter; the diary supposedly had Clara making that diagnosis herself.
Yet even there, the entry remained more complicated than a simple confession of hatred. Clara wrote that she could no longer identify the single event that had started the descent. Perhaps some small slight had begun it, although she could think of many larger reasons for despair. She had reached what she described as the “depths of unhappiness.” Her bitterness did not appear as a sudden emotion created by one quarrel. If the diary is believed, it had accumulated gradually.
By November 18, the future looked “ugly.” Her faith had been “cruelly shattered.” She had sought comfort in Christian Science writings and poetry but found little relief. She knew, she said, that ultimately she would have to turn to God, but even that had become difficult because of her bitterness. “I must have rest,” she wrote. She had given what she could give, “freely, willingly,” and received “not even gratitude— nothing.” Then came November 19.
It was two days before Jake Hamon was shot. Clara was idle with the diary nearby and wondered what remained to write. Her cold was improving, but physical illness no longer seemed important. Wealth did not matter. Poverty did not matter. Failure did not matter. What remained was her unhappiness and her conviction that the future held nothing.
She described an illness beyond the power of physicians because “they can neither iron out souls nor patch up hearts.”
With that, the published diary essentially ended.
TherewasnoNovember20 entry published alongside it that carried the reader neatly into the final confrontation. There was no November 21 entry describing a pistol or announcinganintention.The voice simply stopped. Then, two days after Clara’s final publishedentry,JakeHamon wasshot.Fivedaysafterthat, he was dead.
Thatsilencemaybeamong the most unsettling features of the entire document. The diary supplied its readers with a nearly perfect dramatic arc and then stopped just before the climax. A young woman becomes involved withapowerfulmarriedman. He promises marriage. She gives him ten years of her life. She attempts to leave and returns after new promises. His fortunes rise while her bitterness deepens. Then he stands at the threshold of national political power, she senses him withdrawing from her, and her final entries speak of disgust, fear, hate and a future containing nothing.
The diary stops, and then comes the gunshot.
If someone had set out after the fact to construct a narrative leading toward November 21, it would have been difficult to write one moredramatically.Thatdoes not establish fabrication; life occasionally produces patterns more extraordinary than fiction. But the nearperfect fit between the diary and the later murder case made the document's unexplained origin impossible to dismiss.
There is, however, a problem with any simple theory that the entire diary was manufactured for one side or the other. If someone created it solely to help Clara, that personincludedanextraordinary amount of material that could destroy her. A friendly fabricator trying to prepare a self-defense case surely could have described Jake’s violence without also handing a prosecutor Clara’s “hate,” her “disgust,” her acknowledged “growing bitterness,” her belief that Jake had taken ten years of her life and the ominous question, “Shall I alone pay?” Those were dangerous wordstomanufacture for a woman who soon would stand accused of murder.
The opposite theory suffers from the same difficulty. If someone hostile to Clara created the diary solely to establish motive, why give her some of the strongest possible material for self-defense? A hostile author could have filled the pages with jealousy, anger and threats. Instead, the supposed diary had Clara fearing months before the killing that Jake might beat, choke or kill her. It described terror behind closed doors, attempts to leave the relationship and promises that drew her back. Those were hardly the obvious inventions of someone whose only goal was to send Clara Smith Hamon to prison.
Noneofthatauthenticates the diary. A sophisticated fabrication might deliberately contain damaging material to make it appear real, and an authentic journal might later have been selectively edited to emphasize particular themes. But the contradiction is worth noticing. The diary is almost inconveniently complicated. It does not read like a document designed entirely for the prosecution or entirely for the defense. It contains too much ammunition for both.
If Clara really wrote it, she unknowingly created a remarkably intimate record of a relationship approaching catastrophe. If someone else wrote it, that person understood Clara, Jake and the future murder case remarkably well. If the newspapers began with genuine material but altered, arranged or supplemented it, then somewhere between Clara’s pen and the printing press existed a version of the story that may now be lost.
There was yet another oddity. Newspapers reported that a letter had been attached to the diary’s final page. They called it a “mystery letter.” It was signed simply “Frances” and dated only the “20th.” If that meant November 20, it had been written one day before Jake was shot.
The writer addressed someone as “My Dearest Pal” and spoke of loneliness, packing, separation and continuing loyalty. The “cord is still golden,” the writer said, before promising continued devotion whatever might occur. One line declared, “I love you and will always be FOR YOU,regardlessofwhatmay happen.” The language was emotional enough to guarantee newspaper attention, particularly when paired with a diary that seemed to end on the eve of tragedy.
Naturally, reporters speculated that the letter might somehow bear upon the events of the following day, butitspresencemerelyadded another layer of unanswered questions.WhowasFrances? Who was the intended recipient? Why was the letter attached to Clara’s diary? Had Clara received it, had Jake received it, or had it come into Clara’spossessionsomeother way? How did the newspaper obtain it? Was it attached to the original diary, attached to copies supplied to a reporter, or merely published with the diary because someone believed the two belonged together? Did it have anything at all to do with Jake Hamon’s death?
The letter made the package more sensational, but sensation and proof were two very different things.
Bythentherewereseveral possible explanations for the diary, none of which can presently be established as fact. Someone hostile to Clara might have wanted it published because its references to deception, bitterness, disgust and hate supplied a compelling motive for murder. Someone sympathetic to her might have recognized that the same pages created a remarkably effective history of fear, abuse, repeated attempts to leave and promises that drew her back. If the latter was the purpose and portions had been manufactured or embellished, it was an extraordinarily sophisticated piece of groundwork for a self-defense case. A third possibility may be less dramatic but entirely plausible: the diary was substantially genuine, while the versions printed in newspapers were incomplete, rearranged, edited or otherwise altered in the process of publication.
That last possibility deserves attention because the surviving newspaper versions do not always agree. A series of travel entries appears under March dates in one version and substantially similar material under April dates in another. The entry concerning the “demon” likewise appears with differing dates. Some versions contain philosophical passages absent from others. Words vary. Portions appear longer in one paper than another.
Some of those differences undoubtedly can be blamed on ordinary newspaper practices and the difficulty of preserving century-old print. Syndicated stories were shortened to fit available space. Editors changed introductory material and headlines.Compositorsmade mistakes. Dates were misprinted. Damaged microfilm and modern efforts to read deteriorated newspaper pages introduce additional opportunities for error. Not every discrepancy requires a sinister explanation.
But every discrepancy returnedCoakleytothesame evidentiary question: where was the original?
If an original handwritten diary existed, who possessed it? If the Chicago Herald and Examiner had only a copy, who made that copy? If it received excerpts rather than the entire journal, who selected them? Were Clara’s poems part of the original volume? Was the “Frances” letter really attached to it? Werethepolishedphilosophical passages Clara’s actual words or the work of an editor improving copy? What was omitted? What might have been rearranged? Was anything added? Had anyone compared the handwriting with known examples of Clara’s writing?
Those were not questions for historians alone. In a murder prosecution they could determine whether the diary ever reached a jury.
The importance of private documentsintheHamoncase became even more apparent when another strange event occurred in Chicago. Only days after publication of the diary began, a December 7 newspaper report described four unidentified men forcing their way into an apartment connected with Georgia Hamon’s landlord. According to the account, the men restrained the occupants, searched the rooms and specifically demanded Mrs. Hamon’s letters and papers. Approximately seventy-five letters and other documents reportedly were taken.
Nothing else was stolen. There is no evidence presently linking that break-in to Clara’s diary, and we cannot responsibly suggest that the same people were involved. But the episode tells us something important about the atmosphere surrounding the case. Private correspondence hadbecomevaluable.A letter could expose an affair, reveal a promise, contradict a public statement or become tomorrow morning’s frontpage exclusive. A diary could potentially alter a murder prosecution. Personal papers that ordinarily would have mattered only to a family suddenly carried enormous legal, political and commercial value.
Someone, if the report was accurate, was willing to commit a forcible intrusion to obtain Georgia Hamon’s papers. At almost the same time, newspaper readers across the country were consuming what they were told were Clara Smith Hamon’s private papers. One set had been taken from a Chicago apartment; the origin of the other remained uncertain. There is no basis for connecting the two episodes, but their timing illustrates how completely the Hamon story had become a struggle over documents.
By December 1920, part of the battle over Jake Hamon’s death had become a battle over paper.
Then another figure associated with the Chicago Herald and Examiner entered the story.
Sam Blair, a correspondent associated with Universal Service and the Herald and Examiner, accomplished in December what lawenforcement officers, private detectives and newspapermen scattered across the Southwest had been unable to do: he found Clara Smith Hamon. Reports had placed her in city after city. Trains had been searched, hotels and railroad stations watched, and rumors carried her across Texas and eventually over the international border. Blair finally located her in Chihuahua, Mexico.
The connection is difficult to miss. The newspaper holding publication rights to the mysterious diary was the Chicago Herald and Examiner. Later that same month, a correspondent associated with that newspaper located the missing woman herself. Thatdoesnotprovethenewspaper was involved in any scheme concerning the diary or Clara’s defense, and the available evidence does not justify such a conclusion. But it unquestionably made the paper a particularly important repositoryofinformation about Clara Smith Hamon.
And when Blair found her, Clara talked.
She did not simply proclaim innocence and end the interview. She discussed Jake, their years together, his treatment of her, the shooting, her flight and the relationship that had consumed nearly a decade of her life. According to Blair’s published account, Clara portrayed herself not merely as Hamon’s mistress but as a woman who had helped him build the business and political empire for which he was famous. “Every dollar he had, every political influence he had,” she reportedly told Blair, “I helped him achieve.”
The claim was not entirely out of character with other descriptions of Clara. Acquaintances had portrayed her as Hamon’s secretary, confidante and adviser, and contemporary newspaper accounts described a woman who had progressed from limited formal education to involvement in his railroad, oil, townsite and political affairs. In Clara’s telling, she had helped create Jake’s public success while remaining largely invisible within it.
There was an element of grievance in that claim, but also pride. Clara did not see herself as an ornament Jake carried through prosperous years. She believed she had contributed. She had been with him during business negotiations, traveled to oil properties, followed his political fortunes and learned the machinery of his enterprises. Whatever the legal or moral character of their personal relationship, Clara regarded herself as a participant in the construction of the Hamon empire.
Far more important to the coming murder case was what she told Blair about Jake’s treatment of her. Clara claimed he had been physically abusive. According to Blair, she did more than make the accusation: she took his hand and placed his fingers against her scalp so that he could feel what she said were scars left by Jake’s violence.
“He was always cruel and mauling with me,” Blair quoted her as saying.
Then she made a statement that any prosecutor would remember.
“That bullet which killed him should have been fired ten years ago.”
Readbyitself,thesentence wasdevastating.Thewoman charged with shooting Jake Hamonhadsupposedlytolda reporter that the bullet that killed him should have been fired a decade earlier. It could easily be characterized as an admission of longstanding hatred, the verbal equivalent of motive delivered by the defendant herself.
Clara, however, reportedly supplied context. She told Blair that people who knew how Jake treated her had previously advised her to kill him, but that she had refused because, despite everything, she loved him. Even with Jake dead and Clara hiding in Mexico under the shadow of a murder charge, she professed love for the same man she described as cruel.
That contradiction was not incidental. It may have been the emotional center of the entire case.
Here the Blair interview and the supposed diary intersected in a remarkable way. The diary portrayed love existing beside resentment and fear; Clara told Blair essentially the same thing. The diary warned of violence occurring behind “four walls and you”; Clara claimed to Blair that Jake had beaten her and offered supposed scars as evidence. The diary had Clara fearing months before the shooting that she might someday be found “stabbed or choked or beaten to death”; after the shooting, Blair found her telling a story of physical mistreatment.
One possible interpretation is that the consistency supports the diary’s authenticity. If Clara truly had been recording the relationship for months, naturally the story she told Blair afterward might resemble those earlier writings. Another possibility is that Clara had seen or learned of the published diary by the time Blair found her and adapted her public account accordingly. Yet another is that the diary itself had been assembled around a narrative already known to people familiar with Clara and Jake. The surviving evidence does not permit certainty.
What it does permit is the observation that by December, two remarkably similar accounts of the Hamon relationship had entered the public record through the orbit of the same Chicago newspaper.
The Blair interview also addressed one of the enduring mysteries of Jake Hamon’s death: why Jake initially insisted that the shooting had been accidental. Hamon had told people around him that he had shot himself. Frank Ketch, his trusted business manager, publicly repeated that explanation, and the earliest newspaper accounts treated the wound as an accidental discharge of a small automatic pistol. Only later did accusations focus squarely upon Clara.
Clara gave Blair an explanation. She claimed she had seen Jake after the shooting while he was receiving medical treatment and that Jake, recognizing the seriousness of his condition, urged her to leave. More importantly, she said Jake told her he would tell everyone that he had accidentally shot himself.
If true, that would make the original accident story extraordinarily important. It would not have been a convenient explanationinvented by Clara after Hamon’s death. It would have originated with Jake himself, just as the first public reports suggested. It also could explain why Frank Ketch and other Hamon associates initially repeated the accident version even as authorities began suspecting that Clara had been involved.
Her account of their supposed final meeting became even more dramatic. Jake, shesaid,toldherhehadmade his peace with God. Clara forgave him. According to Blair, she recalled Jake saying that he would meet her in heaven, and she promised that she would meet him there.
It was the sort of passage editors must have recognized immediately as irresistible copy: the dying millionaire, the fugitive mistress, years of love and violence reduced to a final act of forgiveness, followed by a promise of reunion beyond the grave. It had everything a newspaper story could want.
A courtroom would want something more.
Proof. By March, therefore, Sam Blair was no longer merely a reporter who had secured a sensational interview. He was a potential witness whose recollection of Clara’s statements might become evidence against her. If Clara took the witness stand and told a materially different story, the prosecution might attempt to confront her with statementsBlairsaidshehad made in Mexico.
That made Blair’s method of recording the interview critically important.
Apparently, Blair did not take contemporaneous notes while Clara talked. When the matter later arose at trial, he acknowledged reconstructing the account afterward, once he had left Clara and returned to El Paso. Blair maintained that his published article accurately represented the substance of what Clara had told him, and contemporary reporting indicates she may have been shown or asked to approve some version of the interview before publication.
For an experienced trial lawyer, those circumstances invited questions. Were the statements placed inside quotation marks actually Clara’s precise words? Or were they Blair’s best recollection hours later? How long was the conversation? How much time passed before he wrote it? What had he forgotten? What had he condensed? Did he make notes immediately afterward, or reconstruct the conversation wholly from memory? What happened after his copy reached an editor? Were answers shortened for space? Were sentences joined? Was language sharpened? Did a headline make a statement sound more accusatory than it appeared in context?
And what did Clara supposedly approve? Had she read the precise story later printed across the country? Had she merely agreed that Blair had correctly captured the general substance of the interview? Was she shown a draft? Was that draft preserved? If the published version differed from what she saw, how did it differ?
These questions matter because there is a fundamental difference between a reporter saying, “This is essentially what she told me,” and a witness testifying, “Thesewereherexactwords.” Newspaperscanlivecomfortably with the first. Crossexamination often makes the distinction between the two painfully important.
The answers, if they still existed anywhere, might have been sitting in a newspaper office in Chicago.
That brings us to one of the most revealing documents in the surviving court record.
On March 8, 1921, only two days before Clara’s trial was scheduled to begin, a telegram was directed to E. G. Williams of the editorial department of the Chicago Herald and Examiner. It commanded him to appear in Carter County District Court at nine o’clock on the morning of March 10 as a witness for the defense. More importantly, Williams was ordered to bring the newspaper’s “files … covering diary and Blair Interviews.”
More than a century later, we can debate endlessly over what the diary was. Charles Coakleydidnothavethatluxury. Hehadawomanaboutto stand trial for murder.
He needed answers, and the March 8 subpoena tells us what he did about it.
With only two days remaining before trial, Clara’s defense caused a representative of the Chicago Herald and Examiner to be summoned hundreds of miles fromChicagotoArdmoreand ordered to bring the files concerning two subjects: the diary and the Blair interviews. That was not idle historical curiosity. The final days before a major murder trial are consumed with witness preparation, exhibits, jury selection, subpoenas, legal arguments and strategy. A defense lawyer does not spend those hours pursuing newspaper files in another state unless he believes they may matter.
Coakley plainly believed these did.
Notice also what the subpoena sought. He did not simply ask Williams to bring copies of published newspaper articles. Coakley did not need someone to travel from Chicago merely to hand him newspapers he could obtain elsewhere. The order demanded the newspaper’s “files.”
That distinction may be critical.
The printed pages showed what editors had permitted the public to see. The files might reveal what existed before publication. If the Herald and Examiner possessed correspondence from whoever supplied the diary, those papers could identify the source. If the paper had photographs of handwritten pages, they might permit authentication. If it possessed only a typewritten transcript, that fact would raise a different series of questions. If thereweretelegramsdiscussing the acquisition, purchase or publication of the diary, those communications could explain how it reached Chicago. If editors had marked portions for deletion or alteration, the files might show what the public never saw.
The same was true of Blair. Drafts, notes, telegrams or dispatches could reveal what he originally wrote compared with what ultimately appeared under a headline. If Clara had reviewed a version of the interview, perhaps that version remained. If Blair had reported uncertainty about a particular quotation and the published version expressed certainty, the distinction could be invaluable to the defense.
We do not presently know exactly what those files contained.
But Charles Coakley wanted to find out.
There is something wonderfully characteristic of a trial lawyer in that subpoena. Newspapers had spent three months telling the country what Clara Smith Hamon said and what those statements meant. Coakley was asking a more elemental question: what do you actually have?
That question went to the heart of both the diary and the Blair interviews.
With the diary, the threshold issue was authorship. Did Clara really write it? If so, did the newspaper print her words accurately? What was the chain between Clara’s hand and the copy appearing in the Oklahoma City Times or Kansas City Post? If no diary had been found in the Kansas City trunks, from whom had the Herald and Examiner obtained it?
With Blair, authorship was not the principal question. Clara unquestionably had spoken with him. The problem was fidelity. How closely did the published story reflect the conversation? Had memory, reconstruction or editorial judgment altered it between the park in Chihuahua and the printing press?
One was a problem of provenance.
The other was a problem of recollection.
Both could become problems of admissibility and credibility.
The March 8 subpoena also shows how completely the case had moved beyond the walls of the Randol Hotel. The physical shooting had occurred in one room in Ardmore, but by March the evidentiary trail stretched through Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico,KansasCityandChicago. Chauffeurs, reporters, detectives, businessmen, doctors, political associates and family members possessed fragments of the story. Each fragment had its own problems, and Coakley’s task was todeterminewhichpiecesthe State could actually prove.
The diary remained perhaps the strangest of them all because it could be assembled into two radically different arguments. Its references to Jake as a “living devil,” Clara’s “disgust,” her “hate,” her own recognition of “growing bitterness,” and her conviction that the future held nothing could provide a prosecutor with a powerful narrative of motive. Add the statement Blair attributed to her—that the bullet “should have been fired ten years ago”—and the State could portray the shooting as the final eruption of a relationship poisoned by resentment.
But Coakley could assemble another story from theverysamerecord.Months before the shooting, Clara supposedly wrote that she feared she might be beaten, stabbed or strangled. She describedamanwhobehaved differently behind closed doors, claimed she had tried to leave and been brought back by promises, and recorded fear alongside anger. After Jake’s death, she told Blair that he had physically abused her and showed the reporter what she claimed were scars. If the final confrontation on November 21 involved another act of violence, thedefensecouldargue that the gunshot represented not ten years of murderous hatred but ten years of accumulated fear.
The Blair interview added one more complication. Clara’s statement that the fatal bullet should have been fired years earlier could sound horrific in isolation. But if she followed it by saying that others had urged her to protect herself and that she refused because she loved Jake, Coakley could insist that the context transformed the meaning. A sentence sounding like revenge might become an expression of regret that she had tolerated years of mistreatment.
Context is often where trials are won and lost.
Newspapers thrive on sentences.
Lawyers thrive on what came before and after them.
That difference between newspaper storytelling and courtroom proof had hovered over the Hamon case from the beginning. For months, the press had been free to print allegations almost as quickly as reporters could obtainthem.Anewspaperdid not need a judge to determine whether the purported diary had been authenticated. Blair did not have to submit his story to cross-examination before sending it to an editor. A headline could announce certainty where the underlying information contained ambiguity. Rumor could be reported as rumor and still shape public opinion almost as effectively as proven fact.
Thecourtroomwouldoperate differently.
There, someone would have to prove things.
If the diary mattered, someonewouldhavetoestablish what it was, who wrote it and where it came from. If Blair repeated Clara’s supposed words, Coakley could ask how he remembered them, when he wrote them and what happened between his first draft and the version readers saw. If witnesses changed their stories, earlier statements could be examined. If the State relied upon Jake’s declarations before death, the precise words, timing and circumstances in whichtheywerespokencould matter enormously.
That was where Charles Arthur Coakley lived.
By the time of the trial, the rest of the prosecution was also beginning to take shape. The State had witnesses who claimed Jake eventually made statements implicating Clara despite his original assertion that he had accidentally shot himself. Dallas chauffeur E. W. Sallis claimed Clara made damaging admissions while fleeing through Texas. Doctors could describe Hamon’s wound and his deteriorating condition. Frank Ketch remained important because of his insistencefromthebeginning that the shooting had been accidental. Georgia Hamon could bring the lawful marriage and its painful history directly into the courtroom. Sam Blair could potentially repeat the extraordinary things Clara told him in Mexico.
What the State did not have was a neutral eyewitness who had been inside the room when the pistol fired.
That fact gave Coakley room to work.
Prosecutors could reconstruct the hours before the shooting. They could call witnesses who saw Jake and Clara separately or together. They could establish what happened afterward. They could offer Jake’s alleged statements, Clara’s flight, Sallis’s account, Blair’s interview and the physical evidence surrounding the wound. But they could not put a disinterested witness in that room at the instant the pistol discharged.
Ultimately, much might depend upon Clara herself.
That meant Coakley faced one of the most consequential decisions a criminal defense lawyer can make: whether to place his client on the witness stand.
If Clara testified, the jury would finally hear from the only living person who had been inside that room when Jake was shot. She could describe the argument, the physical confrontation, the pistol and the circumstances under which it fired. She could explain why she fled. She could tell the jury what Jake allegedly told her afterward and why she believed the original accidental-shooting account had come from him.
But putting her on the stand would also open the door to everything attributed to her during the preceding months. The State could question her about the diary if it could establish a proper basis. It could confront her with Blair. It could bring up Sallis’s account of what she supposedly said while fleeing through Texas. Prosecutors could ask about her departure for Mexico, her years with Jake, her feelings towardGeorgia,thepromises she claimed Jake made, her growing bitterness and the statement that the bullet should have been fired ten years earlier.
Every inconsistency could matter.
One answer could explain another.
One careless answer could undo hours of careful testimony.
The decision would require Coakley to weigh not only whether Clara could tell her story, but whether she could withstand what followed.
And the diary itself created an unusual problem if Clara testified. If she acknowledged writing it, she might authenticate some of the strongest evidence supporting her claim that she had feared Jake months before the shooting. But she also might authenticate statements the prosecution could characterize as proof of motive. If she denied the diary or portions of it, Coakley might gain an opportunity to attack the newspaper’s provenance but would have to explain why the published material contained so many detailsseeminglydrawnfrom Clara’s life.
That is what makes the mysterious diary much more than an interesting footnote to the Hamon prosecution. It sat at the intersection of fact, publicity, strategy and psychology. It contained enough apparent truth to demand attention, enough uncertainty to provoke suspicion and enough damaging material for both sides to fear what might happen if it reached twelve jurors.
For more than three months, the Hamon case had largely been tried in newspapers. Reporters gathered statements, printed alleged admissions, published supposed diary entries, interviewed friends and enemies and reconstructed events for readers who had no obligation to reserve judgment. By the time Judge Thomas W. Champion called the case for trial, prospective jurors would come from a community in which it was nearly impossible not to know something aboutJakeHamonand Clara Smith Hamon.
It had been a trial before the trial, conducted under rules very different from those governing a courtroom. No evidentiary foundation had been required before the diary was published. No handwriting witness had identified Clara’s writing. No chain of custody had been established. Sam Blair could reconstruct his interview from memory without first answering questions about what he remembered and what he might have unconsciously supplied. Editors could shorten, rearrange and headline material without askingwhetherajudgewould permit the same language before a jury.
The press could publish first and leave questions of proof for another day.
That day had arrived. For years Charles Arthur Coakley had built his reputation in courtrooms where cases ultimately came down to witnesses, evidence and a lawyer’s ability to persuade twelve people that the other sidehad—orhadnot—proved what it claimed. Yet even Coakley probably had never encountered anything quite like the Hamon case. Jake’s death was national news. Clara’s private life had become public property. Political figures hovered around the story. Reporters were becoming witnesses. Newspapers had become repositories of potential evidence. A purported private diary had somehow traveled from Clara’s possession—or from somewhere else entirely— to front pages across America, while a reporter associated with the same Chicago newspaper had crossed into Mexico, found themostsought-afterwoman in Oklahoma and returned with another collection of her supposed words.
Somewhere in the files of the Chicago Herald and Examiner, Coakley hoped, there might be answers. If the diary was genuine, he needed to know precisely what existed and how it had reached the newspaper. If it was false or altered, he needed evidence with which to expose it. If Blair accurately preserved Clara’s words, Coakley needed to know exactly what she had said. If memory, reconstruction or editing had changed those words, he needed the material from which to demonstrate it.
A great trial lawyer wants more than the story the other side intends to tell. He wants to know where the story came from, who first told it, whether it has changed and what remains when every embellishment is stripped away.
On March 10, 1921, months of newspaper speculation were finally supposed to give way to evidence. Reporters who had followed Clara across the country would descend upon Ardmore. Witnesses would arrive. Lawyers would cover their tables with papers. Prospective jurors would enter a courtroom in a town where scarcely anyone could have been unfamiliar with the names Jake Hamon and Clara Smith Hamon.
For months, newspapers had told the country who Clara was, what she thought, what Jake had done to her and why Jake Hamon had died. The mysterious diary had supplied one version. Sam Blair had supplied another. The State had its witnesses, and Clara had her story.
Now, for the first time, all of it would enter a place where headlines were not evidence, suspicion was not proof, and every important statement could finally be challenged.
And standing between Clara Smith Hamon and a murder conviction would be Charles Arthur Coakley.