When Judge Thomas W. Champion adjourned court on Thursday evening, March 10, 1921, the preliminary battle was over. Twelve men had been selected in a single day to decide whether Clara Smith Hamon was guilty of murdering Jake L. Hamon. Given the extraordinary publicity surrounding the case, evencontemporaryobservers were surprised by how quickly the jury was chosen. For nearly four months, newspapers across the United States had published stories aboutHamon’sdeath,Clara’s disappearance, the search through Texas and Mexico, the mysterious diary, the interviews from Chihuahua andthepreparationsforwhat promisedtobeoneofthemost sensational criminal trials Oklahoma had yet seen. Yet by a little after five o’clock on the first day, twelve men were in the jury box.
The next morning the real trial began.
Friday, March 11, arrived beneath a dark Oklahoma sky. Rain fell over Ardmore, and thunder rolled in the distance as spectators again crowded into the Carter County courtroom. The Daily Ardmoreite could hardly resist the symbolism. Across its front page, it announced: “While Heavens Weep and Threatening Thunders Mutter, With Phalanx of Attorneys About Her, Clara Smith Sheds Bitter Tears as Attorney General Freeling Ruthlessly Rends The Veil and Exposes Sickening Details of Her Life’s Story.”
The language was extravagant even by the standards of 1920s journalism, but it captured something important about the trial that was now beginning. The jury was not merely going to hear evidence about a pistol shot. It would hear the history of a relationship that had lasted the better part of a decade. Almost nothing would remain private. Jake Hamon’s marriage, Clara’s relationship with him, their hotel rooms, their money, their quarrels, their travels, their business arrangements and eventually their most intimateconversationswould become evidence or potential evidence. A private relationship whispered about for years was about to be dissected publicly before twelve jurors, a packed courtroom and a national press corps.
Attorney General S. P. Freeling began for the State. His problem was apparent from the beginning. No disinterested eyewitness had seen Clara shoot Jake. The only two people who could have supplied a firsthand account ofwhathappenedinsidetheir rooms at the Randol Hotel on the evening of November 21 were Clara and Jake. Clara was sitting at the defense table. Jake had been dead since November 26.
More troublesome still for the prosecution, Jake had lived for five days after receiving the wound. During that time, he had spoken to physicians, friends, employees and law-enforcement officers. At least initially, he had insisted that he had accidentally shot himself. The State therefore faced an unusual burden: it had to convince the jury that Clara had unlawfully shot Jake while also explaining why Jake himself had repeatedly told people that she had not.
Freeling’s opening statement made clear that the State intended to solve that evidentiary problem by reconstructing the shooting from everything surrounding it. The prosecution would begin before the shot was fired, with the years-long relationship between Jake and Clara, her possession of a pistol and the changing circumstances of Hamon’s personal life. It would then move through the shooting, Hamon’sfivedaysinthesanitarium, the statements he allegedly made there, Clara’s departure from Ardmore and her journey through Texas and eventually Mexico. No single witness could tell the whole story. Freeling proposed instead to assemble it from pieces.
Freeling told the jury that Hamon had initially denied Clara shot him but later, according to the State’s witnesses, acknowledged that she had. He previewed the testimony of Frank Ketch, Hamon’s business manager, who would say that Hamon wanted the truth concealed and wanted Clara given moneyandsentaway.Healso previewed what Errett Dunlap would tell the jury about Hamon’s statements from his hospital bed. As Freeling described the State’s version, the prosecution was laying out not merely a shooting but an attempted concealment in its immediate aftermath.
The Attorney General also carried the story beyond Ardmore. Clara had remained in town only briefly after Hamon was wounded. She then moved through Texas and eventually into Mexico. The State intended to use that journey as part of the circumstances from which the jury could infer guilt. The defense, of course, would have much to say about why Clara left and, particularly, about the fact that Hamon’s own associates had helped herdoit.ButFreelingwanted the first impression planted firmly in the jurors’ minds: after Jake Hamon was shot, Clara Smith Hamon left Ardmore.
The State was therefore asking the jury to evaluate its case as a chain. Clara possessed a pistol. Her long relationshipwithHamonwas changing. A shot was fired in theroomstheymaintainedat the Randol. Hamon initially claimed an accident but, according to the State’s witnesses, privately identified Clara as the person who shot him. Clara then left Ardmore with money supplied by Hamon’s closest business associate and ultimately went to Mexico. Each link could be attacked separately. Freeling’s task was to persuade the twelve men that, taken together, they told the story of a crime.
The State Builds Its Case The prosecution’s answer would emerge witness by witness. According to the State’s theory, Hamon had not been telling the truth when he initially claimed responsibility for the shooting. He was protecting Clara and trying to get her safely out of Ardmore before his wife and children arrived. If the State could establish that proposition, the dead man’s statements ceased to be proof of an accident and became evidence of something very different—the final act of protection by a man who, even mortally wounded, was still trying to shield the woman with whom he had shared so much of his life.
Attorney General Freeling could not begin there, however. Before the State could ask the jury to believe what Hamon supposedly said from his hospital bed, it had to establish the history of the relationship, the arrangement at the Randol Hotel, Clara’s possession of a pistol, the shooting itself and Hamon’s condition afterward. The prosecution therefore began with witnesses whose testimony seemed almost pedestrian compared with what would come later. Each supplied another piece of the foundation upon which Freelingintendedtobuildthe State’s case.
The first witness was J. S. Mullen of Ardmore, a longtime associate of Hamon. Mullen placed Jake and Clara together in Ardmore years before the shooting and described their living arrangement at the Randol Hotel. He testified that Hamon came to Ardmore in 1913,thathesawHamonand Clara together on numerous occasions, and that he knew the rooms they occupied at the hotel. According to Mullen, the two had taken those rooms in 1913 and continued to maintain them thereafter. The testimony did not prove murder, but it did something the State considered necessary: it established before the jurythattherelationshipwas longstanding and that the roomstheymaintainedatthe Randol were not some temporary arrangement created shortly before the shooting.
Next came Mike Gorman, whose testimony carried the State a step closer to the gun. Gorman recalled visiting the hotel suite occupied by HamonandClaraandfinding Jake in his room with Clara standing in front of him. Something was in Clara’s right hand. Gorman thought it might have been a pistol, although he could not say so with certainty. The defense objected, arguing that such uncertain testimony was incompetent. Freeling nevertheless wanted the jury to hear it because it supported a larger proposition he intended to establish through several witnesses: Clara possessed andcarriedahandgun before November 21.
That theme continued with Dr. E. C. Harlow, an Ardmore optician who had treated Clara. Harlow testified that approximately a month before the shooting, Clara came into his office. When she opened her handbag, he saw a small pistol inside. Atsomepoint,according to the contemporary account, Clara removed the weapon while looking for money and then returned it to the bag. Again, nothing about the episode established that Clara intended to kill Hamon. Its significance to the State was cumulative.Freelinghadtold the jury he would prove that Clarahabituallywentarmed, and Harlow was one of the witnesses through whom he attempted to do it.
The prosecution then traced the pistol still farther back. W. E. Meyers, an employee of Storm & Erickson, an Oklahoma City hardware business, testified that in November 1920 he sold a .25-caliber Colt automatic to a woman named Clara B. Smith, with her address as 1721 West Tenth Street in Oklahoma City. Meyers produced the store record of the sale. When asked to look across the courtroom and identify Clara as the purchaser, however, he could not swear that she was the woman. The defense eliminated the issue by admitting that Clara had purchased the pistol. Thus, by the end of the first morning, the State had established both that Clara had purchased a .25-caliber automatic shortly before Hamon’s death and that witnesses had seen her carrying a small pistol.
The prosecution’s first witnesses therefore had not produced a confession or an eyewitness to the shooting. They had done something less dramatic but legally important. Mullen established the long relationship and the Randol Hotel arrangement. Gorman described seeing something resembling a pistol in Clara’s hand. Harlow said he saw a weapon in her handbag. Meyers supplied the record showing that she had purchased a .25-caliber Colt automatic shortly before the shooting. Piece by piece, the State was constructing the circumstances surrounding November 21.
Thenthetestimonymoved from the pistol to the dying man.
The Doctor Who Treated Jake One of the State’s most important witnesses was Dr. Walter Hardy, the Ardmore surgeon who treated Hamon afterhewalkedfromtheRandol Hotel to the sanitarium on the night of the shooting. Hardy could describe the wound and Hamon’s physical condition, but the most consequential portion of his testimony concerned what Hamon had told him about how he had been shot.
That testimony exposed one of the central problems in the State’s case.
Hamon initially wanted the shooting concealed. According toHardy,Hamontold him Clara had shot him but instructed the physician not to reveal it until necessary because he wanted to protect his family. Yet when then-County Attorney Russell B. Brown investigated the shooting, Hardy had given him the accident version. Under cross-examination, the defense forced the doctor toacknowledgethecontradiction. Contemporaryreporting preserved the exchange. Defense counsel asked whether Hardy had told Brown that Hamon said he had accidentally shot himself and then putthequestionplainly:“You did not tell Russell Brown the truth, then, did you doctor?”
“No,” Hardy answered. That admission gave both sides something valuable. To the prosecution, Hardy’s testimony supported its theory that Hamon was deliberately concealing Clara’s responsibility for the shooting. The doctor had participated in the concealment because the woundedmanhadaskedhim to protect his family from scandal. To the defense, however, Hardy had just admitted under oath that he had lied during the official investigation. If he gave one version then and another now, the defense could ask the jury which version deserved belief. The difficulty would recur throughout the State’s case. Again and again, prosecutors produced witnesses who said Hamon eventually blamed Clara. Again and again, the defense could answer that the story being told from the witness stand was not necessarily the story those same people had told immediately after the shooting. The State characterized the discrepancies as evidence of Hamon’s effort to protect Clara and his family. The defense could characterize them as reasonable doubt.
Before the prosecution moved to its next group of witnesses, however, the trial briefly left Judge Champion’s courtroom. The twelve jurors were about to see for themselves theplacearoundwhich every version of the shooting revolved.
The Jury Goes to the Randol The jury’s inspection of the Randol Hotel had been arrangedthenightbefore.On Friday, the twelve men left the courthouse and walked through downtown Ardmore to the hotel where Jake and Clara had maintained their rooms. It must have been an extraordinary procession. The murder trial that had attracted reporters from across the country suddenly moved out of the courtroom and onto the streets of the city where the story had begun. A contemporary account described the jurors walking “in close formation” for two blocks, preceded by Sheriff Buck Garrett and Clara.
Once at the Randol, access became much more restricted. Only the jurors, Sheriff Garrett and the bailiffs entered the rooms. They first viewed Clara’s room and the connecting door leading into the room occupied by Jake. Before the jurors entered, Clara personally arranged the furniture and other effects as nearly as possible in the positions they had occupied on the day of the shooting. The contemporary account added a telling detail: Clara appeared to maintain her composure only “by extreme effort.” For the jurors, the inspection transformed the Randol from a name repeated in testimony into a physical place. They could see the dimensions of the rooms, their relationship, the connecting doorway and the confined surroundings in which the shooting had occurred. That would matter later. Much of Clara’s defense would turn on movement and position— where Jake stood or reclined, where Clara was, whether he approached her, whether there had been a struggle, and how a pistol held between two people mighthavedischarged.When Clara eventually stood before those same twelve men and physically demonstrated her version of the encounter, they would not have to imagine the room. They had stood inside it.
There was something almost eerie about the exercise. For months, newspaper readers throughout the country had known the Randol Hotel as the setting for the Hamon scandal. Reporters had described its rooms, its hallwaysandthemovements of the people who passed through them on the night of November 21. But the jurors were not newspaper readers anymore. They were fact finders. For a short time, they stood in the place where the two competing stories—the State’s story of an intentional shooting and the defense story that had yet to be formally presented—would have to fit within the same walls.
When the inspection was completed, the jurors returned to the courthouse. From then on, every witness whospokeoftheRandolHotel was describing a place the jury had seen with its own eyes.
Clara and the Gun
When court reconvened Saturday morning, Jerry Foster, an Ardmore garage man, became the first witness of the day. Foster’s testimony returned the jury to the prosecution’s theme that Clara routinely carried a weapon. He said he had seen her with a gun several times during the preceding year. More importantly, he said he had seen Clara on the day after Hamon was shot and observed no injuries to her hands or throat. That directly anticipated a defense the State already knew was coming: Clara would claim that Hamon had beaten and choked her during the struggle that ended with the pistol firing. Foster’s testimony was meant to make the jury ask where the physical evidence of such an attack was.
Foster also described the financial relationship in a small but revealing way. Hamon, he testified, ordinarily paid Clara’s garage bills. On cross-examination, however, he was pressed on whether the Hamon estate had subsequently paid bills Clara incurred before Hamon’s death. Foster could not remember. It was a minor exchange, but it foreshadowed a larger issue that would surface repeatedly: Clara’s relationship with Jake had not been purely romantic. Their financial affairs were intertwined as well.
The next witnesses took the jury back to Hamon’s hospital room.
“Honest She Did, Bill” W. D. Nichols, a former Ardmore police chief and one of Hamon’s friends, testified about a conversation with Hamon shortly before his death. Nichols said Hamon was convinced that he would not recover. Nichols tried to cheer him up by suggesting they would soon be in Palm Beach. Hamon answered with grim humor: there would be “plenty of palms,” he reportedly said, “but no beach.”
Then Nichols told the jury what Hamon had said about the shooting.
According to Nichols, Hamon said he had been lying across the bed when Clara approached him. The contemporaryaccountquoted the wounded man as saying: “Shecameuptome,honest she did, Bill, and put the gun to my breast and shot.”
Nichols said Hamon told him he picked up the gun as he was leaving the room and that Clara told him to say the shooting had been an accident.
If the jury believed Nichols, this was powerful evidence for the State. It was not a description of a gun accidentally discharging during a violent struggle. It wasHamon,throughNichols, describing a deliberate shooting. Yet the defense again had an obvious response: the jury was hearing Hamon’s words through another man. Hamon himself had publicly maintained the accident story, and the defense would eventuallyproducewitnesses who had heard that version directly from him.
Nichols’s testimony also wandered briefly into Hamon’s political life. Under cross-examination, he testified that he and Hamon had discussed politics shortly before Hamon’s death and that Hamon had asked him to go toWarrenG.Hardingandsee that some of Hamon’s friends were taken care of with appointments. Nichols offered sweeping assessments of Hamon’s national political influence, but those were Nichols’s characterizations, not established facts. What mattered to the murder case wasmoreimmediate:Nichols claimed that Hamon, believing death near, had told him Clara deliberately shot him. Contemporary coverage attributed to Nichols the claim that Hamon had asked him to carry out this request after his death.
The Chauffeur from Texas The State next called E. W. Sallis, the Texas chauffeur who had driven Clara after she left Ardmore. His testimony was important becauseitconcernednotwhat Hamon said, but what Clara herself allegedly said and did during her flight.
Sallis testified that he drove Clara from Dallas toward Cisco, Texas. During the journey, he said Clara sat beside him in the front seat. At one point, he saw two pistols lying in her lap. More importantly, Sallis testified that Clara told him shehadshotaman.TheState plainly wanted the jury to connectthosestatementsand circumstances with Clara’s rapid movement away from Ardmore: she had left the city after Hamon was wounded, was traveling under unusual circumstances, was armed, and, according to Sallis, admitted that she had shot someone.
But Sallis was vulnerable on cross-examination. Defense counsel attacked his credibility and asked whether he had ever been convicted of a felony or charged with a crime; Sallis denied it. The defense also brought out that Sallis had sold an account of Clara’s flight to a newspaper for $60. The defense’s point was unmistakable: this was a witness who had already converted his association with Clara into money, and the jury should consider that when deciding how much weight to give his recollection.
The Sallis story became stranger after his testimony. When the defense later sought to recall him, he could not immediately be located, and reports appeared that a perjury charge had been filed against him. Contemporary coverage said Sheriff Garrett reported that Sallis had disappeared. That later development did not erase his testimony, but it gave the defense still another reason to question the reliability of one of the State’s witnesses.
Hamon’s Minister
Then the State called a witness of an entirely different kind: Rev. T. J. Irwin, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church at Lawton and Hamon’s minister.
Irwin had been with Hamon during his final illness. His testimony was not primarily about ballistics or the physical circumstances of the shooting. It concerned confession, repentance and the relationship that had produced the tragedy.
According to Irwin, Hamon acknowledged the nature of his relationship with Clara before he died: “I have been living in adultery with Clara Smith. I am sorry. We were both equally guilty.”
That last sentence was particularly striking: “We were both equally guilty.” Hamon, as Irwin remembered it, did not place the moral responsibility for the relationship entirely upon Clara. He included himself.
The defense fought hard to restrict Irwin’s testimony. The cross-examination also produced an uncomfortable contrast between what the minister had said immediately after Hamon’s death and what was now being presented in the murder courtroom. At Hamon’s fu- neral, Irwin had preached while the shooting was still publicly being described as accidental. Defense counsel read portions of that sermon back to him, including the minister’s statement: “Why God permitted this accident I do not know.”
Irwin had also spoken in glowing terms of Hamon’s spiritual condition. Now, months later, the same minister was appearing as a State witness in a prosecution premised upon the proposition that the shooting had not been the accident the public had originally been told it was.
Again, the pattern repeated. The prosecution’s witnesses could explain the early accident story as part of the secrecy Hamon demanded. The defense could point to those same early statements and ask why the story changed only after Hamon was dead and Clara had become the accused.
By the time court adjourned Saturday, the State had presented considerably more than the testimony of one or two witnesses. It had established Clara’s purchase and possession of a pistol, presented witnesses who claimed Hamon privately blamed her for shooting him, attacked the anticipated claim that she had been physically assaulted, introduced evidence of her flight and placed before the jury statements she allegedly made while leaving Oklahoma. Yet the prosecution had not finished. When court resumed Monday, Freeling would call the men closest to Hamon’s business affairs—and finally Hamon’s widow.
“You Boys Take Me Out” On Monday morning, Errett Dunlap, Hamon’s friend and business associate, took thestand.Dunlaphadvisited Hamon in the sanitarium after the shooting and testified that the wounded man understoodtheseriousnessof his condition. “Jake Hamon was sure he would die,” Dunlap told the jury. Hamon had said that he would never leave the hospital “until you boys take me out.”
Then Dunlap supplied another version of the shooting attributed directly to Hamon.
According to Dunlap, Hamon said Clara approached him while he was reclining, placed one hand on his head and another on his shoulder, and shot him as he looked up at her. In the contemporary account, Dunlap put it this way: Hamon said Clara“putherlefthandonhis head and her right hand on his shoulder; that he looked up and she shot him.”
That description was important because it was fundamentally inconsistent with the defense story that would soon be told by Clara herself. Dunlap’s version contained no choking, beating or desperate struggle for a weapon. It described an unsuspecting Hamon reclining while Clara approached him and fired.
McLean attacked the obvious weakness. If Hamon had told Dunlap that Clara shot him, why had Dunlap not immediately gone to the authorities?
The defense also explored Dunlap’s knowledge of the relationship. Dunlap admitted that he knew Jake and Clara were intimate and had seen them together on trains and in other cities. McLean then asked whether Dunlap had gone to County Attorney RussellBrownandaskedhim to dismiss the murder charge against Clara.
“No,” Dunlap replied. He said he had asked Brown to dismiss the adultery charge against Jake and Clara.
That distinction mattered. Dunlap was not a detached observerwhohappenedupon the case. Like Ketch and several others, he belonged to Hamon’s world. He knew about the relationship. He knew about the scandal. And he had participated, at least to some degree, in the effort to contain its legal consequences.
Then came Frank Ketch.
“Tell the World Any Kind of a Story” Ketchwasnoordinarywitness. He had been Hamon’s longtime business associate, close confidant and, after Hamon’s death, administrator of his estate. He was also one of the people who had helped Clara leave Ardmore after the shooting. His appearance produced one of the prosecution’s strangest moments.
Before Ketch testified, J. L. Hodge, an assistant county attorney, objected to the State’s own witness taking the stand. Hodge said developments in the case indicated Ketch might be charged as an accessory after the fact if Clara were convicted. Judge Champion nevertheless permitted Ketch to testify. Afterward, Attorney General Freeling stated that Ketch’s compelled testimony had rendered him immuneunderthelaw.Thus, one of the prosecution’s most important witnesses took the stand while another member of the prosecution team was openly suggesting that the witness’s own conduct might have been criminal.
The episode exposed a difficulty buried inside the State’s own theory. If Hamon had really told Ketch that Clara shot him, and Ketch then gave Clara $5,000, arranged for her luggage to be sent away and helped her leave Ardmore while the public was being told that the shooting was accidental, Ketch’s conduct could be viewed as considerably more than the innocent assistance of a business associate. Yet the same conduct was central to the prosecution’s explanation for why Clara escaped. The State needed Ketch. Without him, one of the most damaging facts against Clara—her departure from Ardmore immediately after the shooting—could be portrayed simply as flight. With him, the jury learned that her departure had been organized and financed by Hamon’s own closest associate, allegedly at Hamon’s express direction. The witness who helped the prosecution explain the cover story was therefore also the man who had helped carry it out.
Ketch testified about confronting Hamon at the hospital. Hisaccountwasconsiderably more complicated than the simple public story that Hamon had accidentally shot himself. According to Ketch, when he arrived at the hospital, he immediately asked about Clara.
“Jake, where is she?” Ketch recalled asking.
“I did it myself,” Hamon replied.
Ketch did not accept the answer. “Don’t tell me that,” he said he responded. According to Ketch, Hamon then admittedwhatKetchalready suspected: Clara had shot him. But Hamon still did not want her prosecuted. Ketch recalled Hamon instructing him to give out the accident story, give Clara money and get her out of Ardmore before Georgia and the children arrived. A contemporary account quoted Ketch’s recollection of Hamon: “Tell the world any kind of a story; that I dropped the gun; anything.”
The significance was enormous. If Ketch was believed, Hamon’s accident story was not evidence exonerating Clara at all. It was a deliberate cover story dictated by Hamon himself.
Ketch said he returned to the office, sent for Clara and told her she had to leave.
“Clara, you’ve got to go,” he remembered saying. “The parting of the ways has come. You’re going away to stay.”
She agreed. Ketch arranged for her trunks at the Randol Hotel to be packed and checked toward Kansas City. He met her at the station and gave her $5,000, money he said Hamon had instructed him to provide.
Ketch also gave the prosecution another piece of evidence against the self-defense story it knew was coming. Like Foster before him, he testified that he noticed no scars on Clara’s hands or face after the shooting. Standing alone, the observation proved little; an assault does not necessarily leave immediately visible marks, andthejurywouldultimately hear Clara describe injuries of her own. But the State was plainly building the point cumulatively. Foster said he saw no injuries to her hands or throat. Ketch now said he noticed no scars on her hands or face. When Clara eventuallytookthestandand described a violent beating and struggle with Hamon, the prosecution intended to have those earlier observations waiting for her.
Ketch then described another conversation with Hamon after reporting what he had done. According to Ketch: “Frank, don’t forget it, I’m goingtodie.Iwasinmyroom; she shot me in the dark. We had a struggle over the gun.”
That was yet another variation on Hamon’s account. Nichols had described Clara approaching Hamon while he lay on the bed and deliberately shootinghim.Dunlap described her placing her hands upon him before firing. KetchrecalledHamonsaying there had been a “struggle over the gun.” Those differences would give the defense something to work with. But all three witnesses supplied the State with the essential propositionitneeded:Hamon had privately said Clara shot him.
Ketch’s testimony about Clara’s departure also complicated the State’s reliance upon flight as evidence of guilt. Clara unquestionably left Ardmore. But she had not simply grabbed a suitcase and vanished on her own. Hamon’s closest business associate packed her trunks, arranged their shipment, met her at the station and gave her $5,000 at Hamon’s direction. If flight suggested consciousness of guilt, the defense could ask what the jury should make of the fact thatHamon’sownpeoplehad financed and facilitated it.
Ketch also testified about Clara’s continuing financial interests. She held interests in oil properties and other ventures connected with Hamon’s business affairs, and some income continued toaccruetoherafterHamon’s death. Contemporary accounts described interests in oil leases, stock and a motion-picture business. The evidencedemonstratedsomething both sides could use: Clara had not merely been Jake Hamon’s companion. Over the years, her economic life had become intertwined with his.
The financial details made that relationship more tangible. Ketch described Clara as having interests in several ventures connected with Hamon and with Ketch himself. Contemporaryreporting described oil-lease interests, $5,000 in stock in another oil company and an interest in a motion-picture theater at Healdton. At least one of the oil interests had produced substantial monthly income. Clara had even received income from jointly held oil property after the shooting, while other money accruing to her was being credited against drilling expenses. She was therefore not simply a woman who had shared Hamon’s hotel rooms. After nearly a decade, she occupied a place within the financial world he had built as well. The State could portray money and property as additional strands binding Clara to a relationship she feared losing. The defense could point to the same evidence as proof that this had been no fleeting affair: Jake had woven Clara into his business life as well as his personal one.
The State had one witness left.
The Wife Takes the Stand Then came a witness whoseverypresencechanged the courtroom's atmosphere.
Georgia Hamon took the stand.
For months the national story had revolved around a triangle: Jake Hamon, the wife to whom he remained legally married, and Clara Smith Hamon, the woman with whom he had maintained the long relationship that had become one of Oklahoma’s worst-kept secrets. Now the wife and the accused woman were in the same courtroom, only a few feet apart.
Georgia had been present during portions of the trial, but taking the witness chair was something else. Contemporary reporters described her dressed in mourning and visibly strained by the proceedings. Clara watched as the widow approached the stand. The Eugene Daily Guard described Clara’s face as “expressionless” and “calm,” while Georgia began telling the jury about the years in which her marriage had existed alongside Jake’s relationship with Clara.
Georgia testified about visiting Jake’s rooms at the Randol Hotel. On one occasion, she said, she found a photograph of Jake and another of Clara wearing a beautiful dress. She described returning to Ardmore with her daughter, Olive Belle, and later going to Jake’s rooms. There she encountered Clara.
“I saw Clara Smith throw her hat and gloves on the bed and rush out,” Georgia testified.
She saw Clara’s clothing and fur coats in the rooms. Then came an especially important detail: “I took a revolver out of her trunk.”
Shortly afterward, Georgia testified, Jake told her to take the midnight train back to Chicago. According to her account, that occurred only about an hour and a half after she had seen Clara run from Jake’s room.
The testimony gave the State much more than another reference to Clara possessing a gun. Georgia’s story allowed prosecutors to present the reality of the triangle itself. Jake had a wife and two children. Clara was occupying a place in his life that Georgia believed belonged to her. Georgia had come to Ardmore, entered Jake’s rooms, encountered Clara’s belongings and then been sent away again.
The prosecution wanted the jury to understand what that history meant by November 1920. After years of waitingforthefutureshesaid Jakehadpromisedher,Clara faced the possibility that the arrangement was ending. Harding had won the presidential election. Hamon’s national prominence had increased. Georgia and the children were moving back toward the center of his public life. According to the State, that changing circumstance supplied motive: Clara was about to lose the man around whom much of her adult life had revolved.
But once again, the same evidence could be turned around.
If Jake had spent years promising Clara that he would divorce Georgia and marry her, those promises helped explain why Clara remained. If Georgia herself couldentertheRandolrooms, find Clara’s clothes and possessions there and then be sent away by Jake, the episode also demonstrated how openly and completely Jake had maintained two different lives. And if Clara had once possessed a revolver that Georgia herself removed from her trunk, that fact did not by itself establish what happened years later on November 21.
That was becoming the defining characteristic of the case. Almost every important fact seemed capable of supporting two stories.
The State Rests
When Georgia Hamon stepped down from the witness chaironMonday,March 14, the prosecution rested. Three days of testimony had produced a case far broader than the testimony of Hamon’s widow or the dramatic account of Frank Ketch. The State had begun with J. S. Mullen, establishing the years-long relationship and the rooms Jake and Clara maintained at the Randol Hotel. Mike Gorman had described seeing Clara facing Hamonwithsomethinginher hand that he believed might have been a pistol. Dr. E. C. Harlow had seen a pistol in Clara’s handbag. W. E. Meyers had produced the record showing her purchase of a .25-caliber Colt automatic shortly before the shooting. Dr.WalterHardyhadtreated Hamon and testified about what the wounded man told him, while admitting under cross-examination that he had previously given County Attorney Russell Brown the accident story.
Jerry Foster testified that Clara carried a gun and that he saw no injuries to her hands or throat after the shooting. W. D. Nichols gave the jury one version of Hamon’s private account of the shooting. E. W. Sallis described Clara’s flight through Texas, the pistols he saw with her and her alleged admissionthatshehadshota man. Rev. T. J. Irwin told the jury of Hamon’s confession concerning his relationship with Clara. Errett Dunlap supplied another account blaming Clara. Frank Ketch supplied perhaps the most importantexplanationforthe original accident story and admitted that he had given Clara $5,000 and helped her leaveArdmore.Finally,Georgia Hamon placed the wife herself before the jury and described the triangle from the other side. Contemporary reporting confirms that Georgia was the State’s last witness and that the prosecution then rested.
It was, on its surface, an imposing accumulation of testimony. The prosecution had shown that Clara owned and carried a pistol. It had shown that she and Jake had maintained an intimate relationship for years. It had offeredseveralwitnesseswho saidHamonprivatelyblamed her for shooting him. It had introducedevidenceintended to weaken the anticipated claim that Jake had beaten her. It had traced her departure from Ardmore and her journey across Texas toward Mexico. And through Ketch, the State had supplied an explanation for perhaps the most troublesome fact in its entire case: Jake Hamon’s own repeated insistence that the shooting had been accidental.
But the three days of testimony had also exposed weaknesses that no amount of newspaper sensation could erase. The witnesses did not always recount the same version of the shooting. Nichols remembered Hamon saying Clara approached him and put the gun to his breast. Dunlap recalled Hamon saying she placed her hands upon him and shot him as he looked up. Ketch remembered Hamon saying Clara shot him in the dark and that there had been “a struggle over the gun.” Dr. Hardy had admitted that he previously gave the county attorney something different. Rev. Irwin had once stood over Hamon’s coffin and publicly referred to the shooting as an “accident.” Even the evidence of Clara’s flight was more complicated than it first appeared, because the State’s own witness admitted that Hamon’s closest associate had arranged her departure andsuppliedherwith$5,000.
Above all, after every witness had testified and every versionofHamon’swordshad been repeated, the State’s case still contained one enormous empty space.
No witness had seen the shooting.
The State had produced people who saw Clara with guns before November 21 and people who saw her afterward. It had produced men who visited Jake in the sanitarium and remembered what he told them. It had produced the chauffeur who drove Clara across Texas, the minister who spoke with Jake as he faced death, the business associates who had known about the relationship, the man who helped Clara leave Ardmore and finally the wife whose marriage had endured in the shadow of Jake’s second life. Together they could describe almost everything surrounding the shooting. The jurors themselves had even walked the two blocks to the Randol Hotel, entered the rooms and stood inside the physical space where it happened.
Almost everything. None of them had been inside the room when the pistol fired.
That distinction mattered because the prosecution was not required merely to establish that Clara Smith Hamon was responsible for the shot that ultimately killed Jake Hamon. The real contest was over why and under what circumstances the pistol had fired. Was it the deliberate act the State contended? Had it occurred during the kind of “struggle over the gun” Ketch said Hamon himself mentioned? Was it an accident? Or had Clara acted because, as her lawyers were preparing to contend, she believed she was defending herself from a violent attack? The State’s witnesses could repeat what Jake had told them, but none could answer those questions from personal observation.
And there was an irony in the prosecution’s case that the defense lawyers could hardly have failed to recognize. In order to explain away Jake’s original accident story, the State had been forced to establish that some of its own witnesses had participated in concealing the truth. Hardy admitted he had not told County Attorney Brown the truth. Ketch admitted that he helped get Clara out of town and gave her $5,000. The State’s explanation was perfectly coherent if its theory was accepted: Jake had ordered those around him to protect Clara and his family from scandal. But the same evidence allowed the defense to ask a simpler question. If the stories told immediately after the shooting could not be trusted, why should every story told months later be accepted without question?
For three days, Attorney General Freeling and the prosecutionhadbeenallowed to construct their version of what happened inside the Randol. They had done so through the people who surrounded Jake Hamon during the final five days of his life. They had given the jury motive, a weapon, flight and statements attributed to the dying man. They had shown the jurors the rooms themselves. But they had necessarily reconstructed the central event from the outside, because the prosecution could never put Jake Hamon on the witness stand.
The defense possessed something the State never could.
It possessed the only surviving person who had been inside that room.
But Clara would not take the stand immediately. First, her lawyers would begin dismantling the prosecution’s case from the inside. They would call men who had also stood beside Jake Hamon’s hospital bed and who remembered hearing a very different story. They would return to the original account of an accidental shooting. They would challenge the credibility of the men upon whom Freeling had relied. And they would begin laying the foundation for the story Clara herself would eventually tell.
For Charles Arthur Coakley and the lawyers surrounding her at the defense table, the task was no longer theoretical. They had listened while the State placed a pistol in Clara’s possession, described her departure as evidence of flight, repeated Jake’s accusations from his hospital bed and portrayed a relationship collapsing at the moment Hamon’s public fortunes were rising. But they had also heard the openings: the conflicting versions attributed to Jake, Hardy’s admitted deception, Ketch’s extraordinary role in helping Clara escape, the original accident story and, most important of all, the absence of anyone who had actually witnessed what happened.
On Monday afternoon, March 14, the State of Oklahoma rested. Across the courtroom sat Clara Smith Hamon, the womanaboutwhomvirtually everyone had been talking for four months. Newspapers had described her. Detectives had hunted her. Jake’s friends had accused her. His minister had spoken of her. Hiswidowhadconfrontedher from the witness chair. Prosecutors had reconstructed her movements from Ardmore through Texas and into Mexico. Yet the twelve men who would decide whether she was a murderer had not heard her explain a single moment of the encounter that had brought them all together.
That was about to change. The prosecution had told its story.
Now Coakley and the defense would tell theirs.
Next week: The Lion of the Courtroom,PartXVIII—The defense answers the State, Jake Hamon’s original story returns to the courtroom, and Clara Smith Hamon finally takes the witness stand.