WhenClaraSmithHamon stepped back onto Oklahoma soil shortly before Christmas 1920, the manhunt was over, but the legal fight had barely begun. During the previous month, Jake Hamon’s death had become a national newspaper sensation. Clara had been hunted through Texas and into Mexico, newspapers had published what they claimed was her private diary, and Sam Blair of the Chicago Herald and Examiner had found her in Chihuahua and obtained the lengthy interview we examined last week. By Christmas, much of America believed it knew Clara Smith Hamon. What remained was the far more demanding task of transforming rumor, newspaper stories, contradictory statements and private accusations into evidence that could survive inside a courtroom.
That process began almost immediately after Clara reached Ardmore on Christmas Day. Sheriff Buck Garrett brought her before Justice of the Peace Hal M. Cannon. The surviving docket identifies R. B. Brown as attorney for the State and “Mather and Coakley for Defendant.” The murderinformationwasread to Clara, and she entered a plea of “Not Guilty.” Brown announcedthattheStatewas ready to proceed with an examining trial, the early-day equivalent of what we now call a preliminary hearing. ThenCharlesArthurCoakley made one of the first important decisions of Clara’s defense. The docket records that “the defendant, by her attorney, C. A. Coakley, waives an examining trial.”
The Order of the court read: On this the 25th day of December 1920. Clara Smith Hamon, defendant herein, is brought before the Justice by Buck Garrett, Sheriff of Carter County, Oklahoma. And there being present, Mathers & Coakley, her attorneys and R. B. Brown, County Attorney, the defendant is duly arraigned; the information being read to her by the County Attorney, the defendant entersherpleaof'NotGuilty' to the charge of murder as set out in the information. The justice then asks if the State is ready for trial and the County Attorney announces ready but the defendant, by and through her attorney, C. A. Coakley, waives and examining trial: It is therefore ordered and adjudged that the defendant, Clara Smith Hamon, be committed to the custody of the Sheriff of Carter County, Oklahoma, for safekeeping to be held in custody pending action by the District Court of Carter County, Oklahoma, Hal M. Cannon, Justice of the Peace.
We do not have a surviving explanationfromCoakley telling us why he waived the examining trial, and we should resist pretending to know precisely what was in his mind. But the decision was not insignificant. An examining trial would have given the defense an early opportunity to force the State to present enough evidence to justify holding Clara for prosecution. Witnesses would have been sworn in. Coakley could have cross-examined them. Their stories could have been fixed in a formal record months before trial, creating material that might later prove useful if a witness changed an important detail. For a defense lawyer, that kind of early look at the prosecution’s case can be enormously valuable.
By waiving the hearing, Coakley gave up that opportunity. He declined the chance to question witnesses when memories were fresher and before the State had several additional months to prepare them. He also surrendered the possibility— however remote in a case of this notoriety—that the evidence presented at the preliminary stage might prove insufficient to justify holding Clara on the murder charge. Ordinarily, those are not advantages a defense lawyer gives away casually.
But waiving the examining trial carried its own potential advantages.
A preliminary hearing is not discovery conducted for the benefit of the accused. It is a public judicial proceeding. Whatever Coakley learned, the prosecution would learn too. His questions could reveal where he believed the State’s case was weakest. Cross-examination might disclose portions of the defense theory before he was ready to present it. Witnesses who performed poorly at the hearing would give prosecutors months to repair weaknesses, clarify ambiguities or prepare them more carefully before trial. Questions asked by Coakley could point the State toward witnesses, documents or inconsistencies it had not yet recognized as important.
And once a witness testified under oath, the testimony did not simply disappear when the hearing ended. A sworn account could become a powerful weapon later. If the witness changed his story at trial, either side might attempt to use the earlier version to challenge credibility. Moreimportantly,depending upon the law governing the circumstances, prior sworn testimony could become significant if a witness later became unavailable. A preliminary hearing therefore might preserve damaging testimony for the prosecution as readily as it preserved useful contradictions for the defense.
There was also the matter of publicity, and in Clara Smith Hamon’s case publicity was not some peripheral concern. By Christmas Day, her prosecution was already national news. Reporters had chased her through Texas andMexico.Newspapershad published accounts of Jake’s final days, Clara’s flight, her trunks, her supposed diary and nearly every rumor that attached itself to the case. The moment word spread that Clara had returned to Ardmore and would appear before a magistrate, another hearing promised another round of headlines.
Had Coakley demanded an examining trial, the State would have begun putting witnesses on the stand while the press was still at the height of its interest. Every accusation could have been telegraphed across the country that evening. Every damagingphrasemighthave become a headline before the defense had assembled its case. If Jake’s associates repeated statements implicating Clara, those statements would have been published. If the State offered a particularly dramatic version of the shooting, the public would have heard it months before a jury was selected. Coakley could cross-examine, certainly, but newspapers were undernoobligationtogivehis questions and the witness’s answers equal prominence.
A subtler strategic consideration also mattered. The State still had work to do. On Christmas Day, Jake had been dead less than a month. Clara had only just returned from Mexico. Sam Blair’s interview was fresh. The mysterious diary was still appearing in public discussion. Investigators were sorting through inconsistent statements, searching for witnessesandtryingtodetermine which version of Jake’s final days they could prove. An examining trial might have forced prosecutors to choose a theory and call key witnesses earlier than they preferred.
That sounds like an advantage for the defense, and sometimes it is. But Coakley may have concluded that he did not need to force the issue then. The contradictions already existed. Jake initially had said the shooting was accidental. Frank Ketch had repeated that explanation. Other accounts pointed toward Clara. Her flight could be interpreted in more than one way. The newspapers had created a mountain of material that the prosecution eventually would have to sort into admissible evidence. An early courtroom rehearsal mayhaveofferedlittlebenefit in helping the State organize that material.
The examining trial also would have given prosecutors an opportunity to watch Clara’s lawyers work. They could study which witnesses Coakley attacked aggressively, which subjects he avoided and which facts caused him concern. In a major criminal case, cross-examination itself can disclose strategy. A lawyer preparing for trial does not always want the opposition toknowinDecember which questions he intends to ask in March.
ForCoakley,therefore,the choice may have been less about avoiding a fight than aboutchoosingwhenthefight would occur.
HealreadyknewtheState could get Clara into District Court.JakeHamonwasdead from a gunshot wound, Clara had disappeared immediately afterward, and authorities possessed enough evidence to ensure that the prosecution was not going to end in a justice-of-the-peace courtroom on Christmas Day. An examining trial was unlikely to make the case disappear. It would certainly expose witnesses, arguments and parts of the defense strategy before the lawyers had completed their investigation.
So, Coakley waived it. That decision fits what we know of the lawyer emerging through this series. Coakley did not have to contest every issue merely because an opportunity to contest it existed. Trial practice sometimes requires knowing which battles matter and which merely consume ammunition. On Christmas Day, with reporters waiting outside and the State still assembling its case, Coakley apparently saw little reason to conduct a public rehearsal of the murder trial.
He entered Clara’s plea of not guilty, let the case move forward, and saved his questions for another day.
The State would have its opportunity to present its evidence.
But when it did, Coakley intended for the evidence to be presented only once— before the jury that would decide whether Clara Smith Hamon was guilty of murder. Clara was released on a $12,000 bond and initially returned to relatives near Wilson. Contemporary accounts said her lawyers hoped to get the case on the upcoming court docket, and in the weeks that followed, Clara moved in and out of Ardmoreforconferenceswith counsel while the prosecution and defense began preparing in earnest. One March account later described her as having spent much of the period after Christmas with relatives at Wilson and Ringling and “in consultation with her attorneys.”
The formal District Court prosecution took shape on January 3, 1921, when the murder information was filed in Carter County District Court. The charge alleged that Clara had “wilfully, unlawfully and feloniously, with a premeditated design” fired a pistol into Jake Hamon on November 21 and caused the wound from which he died five days later. That language mattered. This was no longer an assault case complicated by the victim’s death. The State was accusing Clara Smith Hamon of murder and would have to prove not merely that she fired the fatal shot, but the state of mind necessary for the offense charged.
Almost immediately, however, the State encountered a problem unlike anything ordinarily found in a murder prosecution.
The new Carter County Attorney had represented Clara.
The transition created one of the more unusual legal complications in the Hamon case. James H. Mathers, Coakley’s law partner, had participated in Clara’s defense before taking office as Carter County Attorney in January 1921. The surviving justice-court docket leaves no doubt about his position on Christmas Day. It identifies “Mather and Coakley for Defendant” when Clara appeared before Justice of the Peace Hal M. Cannon, entered her plea of not guilty and waived an examining trial.
However, an additional wrinkle makes the situation considerably more interesting. Mathers had not decided to become county attorney after taking Clara’s case. His political future was already determined. He had secured the Democratic nomination for Carter County Attorney in the 1920 election cycle and ultimately faced no opponent in the general election. Thus, when Jake Hamon was shot on November 21, and Clara became the focus of the investigation, Mathers already knew that within weeks he would take over the very office ordinarily responsible for prosecuting crimes committed in Carter County.
Nevertheless, before assuming that public office, Mathers participated in Clara’s defense. That fact can sound more troubling to modern ears than the surviving record necessarily makes it. Mathers was not yet county attorney when he represented Clara. He had no prosecutorial authority over the Hamon investigation, and no indication suggests he was privy to confidential prosecution evidence before taking office. The incumbent county attorney, R. B. Brown, handled the prosecution. Mathersapproachedthecase from the opposite side of the courtroom—as a private attorney representing Clara.
Indeed, confidential information flowed the other way. Whatever Clara told Mathers as her lawyer, whatever defense strategy was discussed, and whatever information he learned while representing her remained protected by the obligations arising from that attorneyclient relationship. Taking the oath as county attorney could not transform Mathers from Clara’s lawyer into her prosecutor. It instead created the opposite result: his prior representation prevented him from performing one of the most important duties that ordinarily would have accompanied his new office.
Only days after Mathers qualified as county attorney, the Ardmore Statesman addressed precisely that problem. On January 6, 1921, the newspaper reported that Mathers had qualified for office and “has no idea of resigning.” The paper explained that law disqualified him from prosecuting the Clara Smith case and recognized that Clara might not be the only former client whose prosecution created such a conflict. There could be other criminal cases on the docket, the Statesman observed, in which Mathers had represented defendants while still in private practice.
The newspaper then explained how it would handle suchconflicts.Matherswould not resign as county attorney merely because individual prosecutions involved former clients. Instead, he would be disqualified from those particular cases, and the district judge would appoint a special prosecutor to handle each one. Significantly, the Statesman emphasized that the appointmentbelongedto“the district judge (not the governor nor the attorney general of the state).” The distinction wouldsoonbecomeimportant in Clara’s case.
The report gives us an unusually clear contemporary picture of how Mathers’s situation wasunderstood.Noone apparently suggested that his earlier representation of Clara prevented him from serving as Carter County Attorney generally. Nor was there any indication that his election should be undone or that he intended to surrender the office. The conflict followed the case, not the man. Mathers could prosecute the ordinary criminal docket; he simply could not prosecute defendants he had previously represented.
Clara Smith Hamon happened to be the most famous of them.
That placed Mathers in an extraordinary position. Carter County voters had selected him as their prosecutor before anyone knew there would be a State of Oklahoma v. Clara Smith Hamon. By the time he actually assumed office, however, the county’s most celebrated pending murder prosecution involved his own former client. Theverylegalknowledge he possessed about Clara’s defense—the sort of knowledge that ordinarily would be valuable to a prosecutor preparing a murder case— waspreciselywhatprevented him from participating in the prosecution.
The conflict soon shifted fromnewspapercommentary to formal judicial action. In February, the District Court found Mathers disqualified “by reason of having been employed by the defendant to represent her prior to his entering upon the duties as county attorney.” Judge Thomas W. Champion then appointed Ardmore attorney H. H. Brown as special prosecutor. The surviving order described Brown as “a fit and proper person” to conduct the prosecution on behalf of the State and directed that he receive a reasonable fee for his services.
The language of Champion’s order closely mirrored the situation the Statesman had described a month earlier. Matherswasnotaccused of misconduct, divided loyalty, or attempting to use his public office to assist Clara. He was disqualified because he had been her lawyer. Once that relationship existed, he could not simply switch from the defense table to the prosecution table when he took office.
An additional irony is worth noting. Had the shooting occurred only a few months later, Mathers never could have become part of Clara’s defense team; he already would have been countyattorney.Hadthecase somehow gone to trial before his term began, he could have remained at Coakley’s side throughout the defense. Instead, Jake Hamon was shot during the narrow interval between Mathers’s election and his assumption of office. Mathers entered the case as Clara’s lawyer and left it because the calendar transformed him into the public official who ordinarily would have been responsible for prosecuting her.
There was another important consequence. Mathers entered office knowing something about Clara’s defense, but he had not spent December helping the State build its prosecution. The outgoing county attorney, Russell B. Brown, had handled the State’s side of the investigation. Russell Brown filed the charges, pursued Clara while shewasmissing,andhandled the developing prosecution while Mathers remained in private practice. Thus, Mathers did not arrive in office on January 1 carrying confidential prosecution information that somehow could flow back to Coakley and the defense. The problem ran the other way: Mathers possessed information acquired while representing Clara that the prosecution could not properly use. His disqualification protected that boundary.
ThemanJudgeChampion selected to replace Mathers was not an obscure lawyer pressed into service simply because someone had to prosecute the case. H. H. Brown was the brother of Russell B. Brown, the outgoing county attorney who had initiated the prosecution against Clara. That created a remarkable continuity. Russell had been county attorney when Jake was shot, had lodged the complaint against Clara, and had participated in the search that followed her disappearance. When he left office and his successor could not prosecute because he had represented Clara, Judge Champion selected Russell’s brother to carry the prosecution forward.
Contemporary reporting indicates that Judge Champion considered H. H. Brown exceptionally well suited to the assignment. In announcing the appointment, Champion reportedly described Brown as “one of the greatest lawyers of the entire southwest” and “a prosecutor of unusual ability.” He praised Brown’s courtroom presence and Kentucky origins, noting that Brown possessed “all the fighting blood of which that great commonwealth has a right to boast.” Most revealingly for our purposes, Champion described Brown as “a man who loses very few jury cases.”
The newspaper was scarcely less enthusiastic. It reported that Champion’s opinion was shared by the Ardmore bar and people of the surrounding area and predicted that Brown, “in wit, in sarcasm, in pathos, in logicandineloquence,”would measure up well against the entire collection of lawyers assembled to defend Clara. The language is florid by modern standards, but that is precisely why it is useful. It gives us a glimpse of what Oklahomacourtroomreputation meant in 1921. Lawyers were still judged publicly not merely by their knowledge of statutes and precedent but by their ability to stand before twelve people and command a courtroom—to reason, ridicule, persuade, evoke sympathy and, when necessary, fight.
ThatwasthelawyerJudge Champion selected to face Coakley.
The choice has an interesting symmetry. Charles Arthur Coakley had built much of his own reputation in exactly the same world. He had prosecuted murder cases as Marshall County Attorney and later developed a reputation defending them. Like Brown, he practiced in an era when a lawyer’s ability before a jury could become a public reputation extending far beyond the courthouse. TheHamontrialthereforebegan to assemble precisely the sort of lawyers newspapers of the period loved to describe: experienced courtroom advocates with sharply different roles but reputations built upon the same fundamental skill—the ability to persuade jurors.
The appointment also illustrates howcloselyconnected theArdmorelegalcommunity was. The same lawyers repeatedly encountered one another as partners, opponents, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges. In this case, those connections were particularly striking: Russell Brown had begun the prosecution; Mathers succeeded him as county attorney but could not continue it because he had represented Clara; and Russell’s brother, H. H. Brown,wasappointedtotake Mathers’s place.
And the relationships were about to become more remarkable still.
While the State was solving its Mathers problem by appointing H. H. Brown, Clara’s defense was assembling a formidable group of its own. The Fort Worth firm of McLean, Scott & McLean joined the case, bringing prominent Texas trial lawyers into an Oklahoma prosecution already receiving national attention. W. P. “Wild Bill” McLean would become one of the most visible members of the defense, joinedbyWalterScottandthe Oklahoma lawyers already associated with Clara. At the center of the local defense remained Charles Arthur Coakley, who had been there when Clara returned from Mexico, appeared with her on Christmas Day and waived the examining trial.
Then there was another Ardmore lawyer on Clara’s side: J. B. Champion.
The name was not coincidental.
J. B. Champion was the twin brother of District Judge Thomas W. Champion, the judge who would preside over Clara Smith Hamon’s murder trial.
To a modern lawyer, that fact immediately raises eyebrows. Today, a judge presiding over a major criminal trialinwhichhistwinbrother was part of the team representing the defendant would raise obvious questions about judicial disqualification and public confidence in the court’s impartiality. But we should be careful about projecting today’s judicial ethics rules backward onto a Carter County courtroom in 1921. The contemporary newspapers did not conceal the relationship. They reported it openly, apparently regarding it as an interesting feature of the case rather than an automatic reason Judge Champion could not preside.
The arrangement was extraordinary. Judge Thomas W. Champion was presiding over a murder prosecution in which the elected county attorney had been disqualified for previously representing the defendant. Champion had responded by appointing H.H.Brown,whomhepublicly praisedinunusuallystrong terms, to prosecute the case. Meanwhile,Champion’sown twin brother sat among the lawyers representing the accused.
If one were inventing a courtroom drama, an editor might reject that arrangement as too improbable.
Yet there it was. What matters for our story is not to impose a modern judgment upon Judge Champion but to understand how openly the arrangement existed. The relationship was known. Newspapers mentioned it. The prosecution knew it. The defense knew it. Yet the case proceeded before Judge Thomas W. Champion. Nor does the surviving record we have examined suggest that he treated the proceeding as a family affair. Quite the opposite: the early indications show a judge attempting to establish a prosecution capable of trying the case despite Mathers’s conflict. He did not appoint a nominal substitute. He selected a lawyer he publicly regarded as one of the strongest courtroom advocates available, a man Champion believed could match the collection of lawyers Clara was assembling.
That collection was becoming impressive. The Fort Worth lawyers brought experience and a measure of distance from the intensely interested Ardmore community. J. B. Champion brought another local lawyer into the defense. Coakley brought something the Texans could not: intimate familiarity with the people and legal culture of southern Oklahoma. He knew the courthouse, the lawyers and the sort of men from whom Clara’s jury would eventually be selected. He had already represented her during the crucial period following her return from Mexico and had begun making the strategic decisions that would determine how the case reached trial.
Across the aisle, H. H. Brown possessed many of those same local advantages. He knew Ardmore and its bar, enjoyed an impressive reputation before Oklahoma juries and inherited a prosecution his brother had helped begin. Soon he would have even greater assistance. Governor J. B. A. Robertson brought Oklahoma Attorney General S. P. Freeling into the case, and Freeling would personally participate when the State finally placed Clara before a jury. The precise legal distinction is worth preserving: Judge Champion appointed H. H. Brown as special prosecutor because Mathers was disqualified; the Attorney General’s later participation did not replace thatjudicialappointmentbut added the State’s resources and authority to the prosecution.
By the eve of trial, therefore, thelawyersthemselves had become part of the story. This was not going to be a routine murder prosecution conducted by a county attorney against a local defense lawyer. Clara had prominent Texas counsel, Coakley and otherOklahomalawyers—including the presiding judge’s twin brother. Opposing them were H. H. Brown, a highly regarded trial lawyer with deep local connections, and Oklahoma Attorney General S. P. Freeling.
The arrangement seems almost impossible by modern standards, yet it illustrates the comparatively small and closely connected world of the Oklahoma bar in 1921. The same names appeared repeatedly because the same men occupied overlapping circles of law, politics and business. They knew one another personally and professionally. They had tried cases against one another, practiced together and sometimes succeeded one another in public office. In the Hamon case, those relationships became unusually visible because virtually everyone involved was operating beneath the gaze of the national press.
For Coakley, the important fact was simpler. Whatever advantages Clara might havegainedbyassemblingan accomplished defense team, the State had answered in kind. H. H. Brown was no placeholder. Attorney General Freeling was no ordinary assistant prosecutor. The men preparing to prosecute Clara had reputations and resources equal to the importance Oklahoma officials were placing upon the case.
The trial that awaited Coakley would therefore test much more than his ability to exploit weaknesses in a poorly prepared prosecution. The State was bringing experienced lawyers to Ardmore, just as Clara was bringing experienced lawyers to defend her.Whenthecourtroom doors opened, accomplished advocates would be sitting on both sides of the aisle.
And presiding over all of themwouldbeJudgeThomas W.Champion—withhistwin brother sitting among the lawyers for the defense.
By February and early March, the surviving court papersbegintorevealthemachinery of trial preparation. The drama that had played out in front-page headlines was giving way to subpoenas, affidavits, witness lists and orders compelling people to travel to Ardmore. Those papers are not as colorful as Clara’s diary or Blair’s interview, but in some ways they tell us more about how each side intended to try the case.
The State’s initial witness list alone reads almost like an outline of its theory. It included Frank Ketch, Jake’s business manager; S. Dunlap; Will Harris; Dr. Cowles; Dr. Hardy; a sanitarium witness; E. W. Sallis of Dallas; Sam Blair of Chicago; Kelley Roach of Oklahoma City; and W. B. Nichols.
Each name represented a different link in the chain prosecutors were trying to construct.
The physicians and sanitarium personnel could describe Jake’s condition after the shooting, the nature of the wound and what he said while being treated. Those statements would become particularly important because the State intended to rely upon declarations Jake allegedly made as death approached. Frank Ketch was central for an entirely different reason. He had been one of Jake’s closest business associates and, immediately after the shooting, had publicly repeated Jake’s claim that the wound was accidental. If prosecutors now intended to prove that Clara shot Jake, they would somehow have to reconcile the State’s case with the fact that the dying man and his business manager initially told the public something else.
Ketch therefore was potentially useful and dangerous to both sides. He knew what Jake said after the shooting. He knew about money Jake directed him to give Clara. He knew what efforts weremadetogetherout of Ardmore. He knew what Jake’s associates were saying before Georgia and the children arrived from Chicago. By the time Ketch eventually testified, his account would provide some of the most remarkable evidence in the case, including Jake’s initial denial that Clara shot him and his direction that money be given to her so she could leave before his family arrived. But before any of that reached a jury, both sides had to anticipate what Ketch might say and prepare accordingly.
E. W. Sallis presented a different problem. Sallis, the Dallas chauffeur, claimed that during Clara’s flight she had admitted shooting a man in an Ardmore hotel. If believed, he could place words of apparent admission directly into Clara’s mouth shortly after the shooting. Yet even his account was not entirely simple. As we previously saw, the version attributed to Clara included the claim that the man had comeintoherroomdrunkand “tried to make me do things,” language that could be read as an attempt to explain or justify the shooting rather than simply confess to it. The prosecution wanted Sallis because Clara’s flight and allegedadmissionscouldsupport consciousness of guilt. The defense had reason to examine every detail of when he met her, what she actually said and how accurately he remembered it.
ThentherewasSamBlair. By now we know why his appearance on the State’s witness list mattered. Blair had tracked Clara into Mexico and obtained a detailed account of her relationship with Jake, including the remarkable statement that the bullet which killed him “should have been fired ten years ago.” But Blair also possessed information helpful to the defense. Clara had told him about alleged physical abuse, had shown him what she claimed were scars on her scalp, and had said Jake promised to tell everyone that the shooting was accidental. The same witness could therefore give the State a terrible quotation and the defense a story of years of abuse.
The State’s preparations extended far beyond that first list. Supplemental witness papersin the courtfile named people scattered across Oklahoma andbeyond,suggesting prosecutors were investigating nearly every part of Jake and Clara’s shared life. The list included businessmen, acquaintances, doctors and others whose testimony might illuminate their relationship, Clara’s conduct before and after the shooting or statements made during the five days Jake survived. One subpoenaefforteveninvolved a life-insurance official who was expected to produce documents associated with Clara. The sheer breadth of the witness preparation suggests that the State understood this would not be tried as a simple case of a woman, a pistol and a dead man. Years of history were goingtoenterthatcourtroom.
The defense was conducting its own search far beyond Carter County. In one affidavit, Mathers swore that several witnesses living outside the county were “material to the defense” and sought compulsory attendance for trial. The surviving document identifies witnesses from Waurika, Kansas City, Oklahoma City and Topeka.
Another affidavit sought witnesses from Lawton, the city in which Clara’s earlier life and her relationship with Jake had developed. The defense was plainly looking backward, not merely at the five days between the shooting and Jake’s death but at theyearsthatprecededthem.
That strategy made sense. If the State intended to portray the shooting as the act of a jealous mistress whose married lover was preparing to discard her, Coakley needed a fuller story. The jury would have to understand how Clara and Jake met, what role she played in his life, what promises she claimed he made, whether other people had seen or heard evidence of mistreatment, and what the relationship looked like before November 21. The defense case that ultimately emerged would depend heavily upon context. One night at the Randol Hotel could not be understood, Coakley would argue, without understanding the years that came before it.
Sometimes the dry paperwork in a court file gives an unexpectedlyhumanglimpse of how difficult trial preparation could be in 1921. One important defense witness from Lawton, Judge H. H. Blanding, became too ill to travel. On March 7, only three days before trial, his physician executed an affidavit stating that Blanding suffered from diabetes insipidus and that requiring him to travel to Ardmore could seriously endanger his health and perhaps imperil his life. The doctor believed Blanding would be unable to travel for at least twenty days. Somewhere in Coakley’s preparation, therefore, was the problem every trial lawyer recognizes: a witness whom the defense considered important might not be physically able to appear.
Subpoenas were moving in every direction. Witnesses werebeingorderedfromKansas City, Topeka, Oklahoma City, Waurika and Lawton. Reporters were becoming witnesses. Physicians were being asked to leave their practices. Business associates were being summoned to explain conversations most of them probably never imagined would someday be repeated before a jury. What had been private in November had become compulsory evidence by March.
The most revealing subpoena may still be the one we discussed last week. On March 8, with only two days remaining before trial, the defense ordered E. G. Williams of the editorial department of the Chicago Herald and Examiner to appear in Ardmore and bring the newspaper’s files covering the “diary and Blair Interviews.” It now fits into a much larger picture. Coakley was not pursuing the newspaper files in isolation. He was gathering them while witnesses from several states were being compelled to Ardmore, physicians were certifying who could and could not travel, and the State was preparing its own extensive list of people who could speak to Clara’s actions, Jake’s statements, and the long relationship between them.
The prosecution was simultaneously confronting one of the weakest points in its case: Jake’s own words. The first public explanation oftheshootinghadcomefrom the supposed victim himself. Jake said he had accidentally shot himself. Ketch repeated it. Other witnesses later testified that Jake kept repeating that explanation even as rumors circulated that Clara would be prosecuted. At trial, Sheriff Buck Garrett would testify that Jake told him the day before his death that he had accidentally shot himself “fooling with an automatic” and did not want Clara prosecuted.
Yet other witnesses would say Jake eventually told a completely different story— that Clara had shot him.
That conflict must have dominated the preparation of both sides' preparation. TheStateneededtopersuade jurors that Jake’s early accident story was false, perhaps intended to protect Clara, his family or his reputation and that his later statements told the truth. The defense could ask the opposite question: why should twelve jurors disregard the explanation Jake repeatedly gave while alive in favor of later recollections attributed to him by witnesses after his death?
The problem was made more complicated by the law concerning dying declarations. Jake could no longer be cross-examined. If the prosecution wanted to place statements made near death before the jury, it would have to establish the circumstances under which they were made, including whether he believed death was imminent. The final jury instructions show that Judge Champion ultimately submitted that precise issue to the jury, telling the jurors that statements attributed to Jake as dying declarations could be considered only if they concluded he had abandoned hope of recovery and believed death was approaching. The jurors also wouldhavetodecidewhether the witnesses had correctly understood and repeated what Jake said.
For Coakley, that meant the credibility of the living witnesses who claimed to carry Jake’s final words into court would become critical. He could not cross-examine Jake Hamon. He could crossexamine the people who claimed to remember him.
Another potential battlefield involved the physical evidence. The State had Jake’s clothing and medical evidence concerning the wound. The doctors could describe where the bullet entered, what organs had been damaged and how Jake’s condition deteriorated. But a small automatic pistol, an intimate struggle and conflicting accounts of the position of the two people inside the hotel room left room for competing interpretations. The State would try to use physical circumstances to support its version; Coakley would look for every place where those circumstances failed to establish who held the weapon, how it discharged and what was happening at the instant it fired.
The absence of a neutral eyewitness remained the central fact. Witnesses heard events before or saw Clara and Jake afterward. People could describe their relationship. Doctors, chauffeurs, reporters and business associates. But no disinterested third person was inside the room when the gun fired.
That gave the lawyers plenty to investigate and very little certainty.
ByMarch,publicattention was beginning to return to Ardmore. Clara had spent much of the winter away from the center of town, but as trial approached, she moved back from Wilson. A March 9 report described her as composed and anxious to have the case completed. She was seen driving through Ardmore, acknowledging acquaintances as she passed. Georgia Hamon also established herselfinArdmoreand announced that she intended to attend the trial and remain until the verdict.
The presence of the two women guaranteed that the national press would return in force. Clara was the accused woman whose disappearancehadgenerated weeks of headlines. Georgia was the lawful wife who had traveled from Chicago to Jake’s bedside and remained with him until his death. For months, newspapers had framed them as opposing figures in the same tragedy. Now they would occupy the same courthouse while lawyers foughtoverthemanwho had connected their lives.
Court officials understood what was coming. On March 9, court attaches were rearranging the courtroom in preparation for the crowds. Judge Champion announced that the Hamon case would have priority. Lawyers on both sides announced themselves ready and publicly insisted that neither intended to create unnecessary sensation. Attorney General Freeling indicated that he would ask the court to relax the usual rule excluding witnesses from the courtroom so Georgia could remain.
The statement that neither side intended to pursue “the sensational” was almost ironic. Nothing about the case had escaped sensationalism since November. A millionaire political figure had been shot in a hotel room. His longtime mistress disappeared into Mexico. His wife and children came from Chicago. A mysterious diary appearedinnewspaperseven though police said they found no diary in Clara’s trunks. Reporters chased Clara across an international border. One of them found her and published an interview. The Governor of Oklahoma and the Attorney General became involved. The county attorney had to be disqualified because he previously represented the defendant.
Now everyone promised the trial would be orderly.
Perhaps that was precisely what Coakley wanted.
The public had already consumednearlyfourmonths of sensation. Coakley did not need another newspaper spectacle. He needed twelve jurors who could separate what they had heard from what the State could actually prove. The tighter the courtroom became, the better the opportunity to force each allegation through the ordinary machinery of evidence: identify the witness, ask what he personally saw or heard, test his memory, expose contradictions and insist that suspicion could not substitute for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The defense team's composition also mattered. Contemporary accounts on the eve of trial named the Fort Worth firm of McLean, Scott & McLean alongside Coakley and J. B. Champion. That many lawyers did not mean eachwouldperformthesame role. A major trial often involves division of labor—one lawyer concentrating on particular witnesses, another on legal arguments, another on jury selection or the overall presentation. For our story, the key point is that Coakley would be working within an unusually strong defense group against a prosecution personally directed by Oklahoma's Attorney General.
It was a fitting stage for the lawyer we have followed fromMarshallCounty.Coakley had spent years learning the difference between what people said on the street and what could be proved inside a courtroom. As county attorney, he had dealt with reluctant witnesses, accomplices and conflicting stories. In private practice, he had built a reputation for defending people accused of serious crimes. Now almost every problem a trial lawyer could confront seemed to be gathering in one case: inconsistent statements, enormous pretrial publicity, disputed documents, alleged dying declarations, an absent eyewitness, questions about motive, a defendant who had fled, newspaper interviews and witnesses scattered across several states.
He also faced the practical problem beneath all of those legal issues. Clara Smith Hamon herself might ultimately have to testify.
If she did, the defense could finally place before the jury the only surviving firsthand account of what happened at the instant Jake was shot. But the decision would expose her to everything prosecutors had accumulated. Theycouldquestion her about Sallis, about Blair, about Mexico, about her departure from Ardmore, about her relationship with Jake, about Georgia, about the diary if it could be connected to her, and about the statements in which love, fear, anger and resentment appeared side by side.
The trial therefore could become a contest over credibility in its purest form. Who would the jury believe: the dead man through the witnesses repeating what he supposedly said, or the living woman sitting at the defense table?
For weeks, both sides had been preparing for that possibility. The State assembled the people who had seen Jake after the shooting and those who claimed to know what Clara said during her flight.Thedefenseassembled people who knew the earlier history, challenged the provenance of newspaper material and looked for witnesses who could contradict the State’s reconstruction. Each subpoena represented another possible piece of the story.
By Wednesday evening, March 9, the pieces were nearly in place. Attorney General Freeling was ready. H. H. Brown was ready. The Fort Worth lawyers had arrived or were arriving. Coakley and the Ardmore defense attorneys had spent weeks gathering witnesses and examining the extraordinary record created since November. Georgia Hamon was in Ardmore. Clara was back from Wilson. Reporters were converging upon the courthouse.
The file that began with a shooting in a hotel room had become enormous.
There were medical witnesses, business associates, chauffeurs, reporters and relatives. Conflicting statements were attributed to Jake. There were statements attributed to Clara. A mysterious diary remained whose origin was uncertain. There were newspaper interviews reconstructed from memory. Some witnesses could come to Ardmore; others' health mightkeepthemaway.There werelawyersfromOklahoma and Texas and an Attorney General determined to prosecute the case himself.
Yet for all the paper, all the witnesses and all the months of publicity, the fundamental problem had not changed since the night Jake Hamon was shot.
Two people had been inside that room.
One was dead.
The other was about to go on trial for his murder.
On Thursday morning, March10,1921,JudgeThomas W. Champion would take the bench in Carter County District Court. Sheriff Buck Garrett would call the room to order. The lawyers would take their places. Clara Smith Hamon would sit at the defense table while prospective jurors filed into the courtroom. For nearly four months, the case had belonged to detectives, politicians and newspapers. By then, nearly everyone in Oklahoma seemed to have an opinion about what happened at the Randol Hotel.
At nine o’clock that morning, opinions would cease to matter.
The State of Oklahoma would finally have to prove its case.