Murder in Linn County, Oregon: The True Story of the Legendary Plainview Killings
By Cory Frye
()
About this ebook
On June 21, 1922, Linn County sheriff Charles Kendall and Reverend Roy Healy drove out to the town of Plainview to arrest a moonshining farmer named Dave West. By the end of the day, all three men were dead. First responders found Sheriff Kendall facedown with his pistol still holstered. The court appointed William Dunlap as the new sheriff, but within a year, someone killed him, too. Author and journalist Cory Frye delivers a riveting, detailed account of these shocking and tragic crimes that haunted Linn County for decades.
Includes photos!
Cory Frye
Cory Frye is an award-winning writer and editor based in Oregon's Willamette Valley. His work has appeared in the Albany Democrat-Herald, Corvallis Gazette-Times, Oregonian, Under the Radar, Stereo Subversion, Yahoo! Music, iTunes and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Related to Murder in Linn County, Oregon
Related ebooks
Duchess of Palms: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMegrahi: You Are My Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMilitary Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSchwatka's Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIntent to Kill: A Novel of Suspense Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Treasure Islands: True Tales of a Shipwreck Hunter Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ruthless Northlake Bank Robbers: A 1967 Shooting Spree that Stunned the Region Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Chronicles of Mob Wives: Lee D'Avanzo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMountain Justice Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMurder and Mayhem in the Napa Valley Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWillful Misconduct: The Tragic Story of Pan American Flight 806 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Streets of Fire Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Along the Kirkwood Highway Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Woman in the Yard: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Seattle Prohibition: Bootleggers, Rumrunners, & Graft in the Queen City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNotorious Antebellum North Alabama Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMurder on Long Island: A 19th Century Tale of Tragedy & Revenge Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCodes of Betrayal: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe McGlincy Killings in Campbell, California: An 1896 Unsolved Mystery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPlymouth and Washington County Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWillis Newton: The Last Texas Outlaw Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBad Henry: The Murderous Rampage of ‘The Taco Bell Strangler’ Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMurder at the Roosevelt Hotel in Cedar Rapids Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Spine-Chilling Murders in the Quad-Cities: Spine-Chilling Murders, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeath on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Brief History of Mount Dora, Florida Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNapa County Police Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPerhaps Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAt Home with the Armadillo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Murder For You
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Under the Bridge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer: An Edgar Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In with the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder at McDonald's: The Killers Next Door Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/518 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Journey Into Darkness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Haunted Road Atlas: Sinister Stops, Dangerous Destinations, and True Crime Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Three Sisters in Black: The Bizarre True Case of the Bathtub Tragedy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Are You There Alone?: The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anatomy Of Motive: The Fbis Legendary Mindhunter Explores The Key To Understanding And Catching Vi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death Row, Texas: Inside the Execution Chamber Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Trial of Lizzie Borden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hunt A Killer: The Detective's Puzzle Book: True-Crime Inspired Ciphers, Codes, and Brain Games Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire's Wife, and the Murder of the Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Murder in Linn County, Oregon
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Murder in Linn County, Oregon - Cory Frye
Published by The History Press
Charleston, SC
www.historypress.net
Copyright © 2016 by Cory Frye
All rights reserved
Cover: Ghosts of Plainview,
Mark Ylen, Albany Democrat-Herald, 2014.
First published 2016
e-book edition 2016
ISBN 978.1.62585.793.4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016932069
print edition ISBN 978.1.46713.522.1
Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Prologue. The Final Morning, 1922
The Minister
The Sheriff
January 1922
February
March
April
May
June 1–20
June 21 (Prelude)
The Farmer
June 21 (Afternoon)
June 21 (The Aftermath)
Rest in Peace
A New Sheriff in Town
The Fate of Russell Hecker
May 20, 1923 (and All That Followed)
Russell Hecker’s Luck Holds Out
The Resurrection of Cloy Alvin Sloat
Epilogue. 1979–1989
Notes
About the Author
Linn County sheriff C.M. Kendall (right) and his crew dissemble stills in the early 1920s. Courtesy of Judy and Terry Broughton.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I couldn’t have embarked on this three-year odyssey without the indulgence, abetting and encouragement of at least the following: Addie Maguire and the Albany Regional Museum, my home away from home, often swarming with the harmonies of Crosby, Stills & Nash as I labored over century-old documents (and which generously authorized use of historic photographs); journalism colleague and friend Susan Bodman, whose harrowing trudge through the Salem Statesman-Journal morgue helped me track Ada Healy into the 1980s; Steve Druckenmiller and the staff at the Linn County Courthouse, who didn’t seem to mind the overexcited man-child exulting over dust; Oregon Historical County Records, for obvious reasons; the Linn County Genealogical Society at the Albany Public Library, perennially shocked that I knew my way around (it’s a small room, people!); the Linn County Sheriff ’s Office, of course; the almighty Paula Martin, who took a keen interest in Russell Hecker and plucked fact-bouquets from databases unknown; Dinee Alexy, whose counsel kept me from binning the manuscript in frustration; various editors, specifically Rachel Beck and Nancy Raskauskas-Coons, who kept that red ink wet, slashing bloviation into a leaner beast; retired Linn County sheriff Art Martinak, who helped me understand what it meant to be a lawman in the ’20s; David Sullivan, the current owner of Clark Kendall’s final residence; the Linn County Historical Museum in Brownsville; the East Linn Museum in Sweet Home; the Albany Democrat-Herald, which green-lit a Sheriff Kendall test run in the final Sunday edition of 2014; staff photographer Mark Ylen, who accompanied me into Shedd (i.e., Plainview) one dreary December morn and, with Jesse Skoubo, took most of the contemporary photos featured here; Amazon.com, which helped me locate and purchase copies of Cloy Sloat’s long-out-of-print Sunset Valley—I read it so you didn’t have to—and, somehow, the November 1924 issue of Woman’s Home Companion; Allen Parker, whose family has owned most of the former Dave West property for seventy-plus years; Wendell Manning, who offered rich context on Plainview through his grandfather’s stories; Danny Young, who now lives on the West land and allowed two interlopers to slosh about, taking pictures and notes; This American Life’s The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar,
which I listened to every night as I fell asleep; and Christen Thompson and the folks at The History Press, who read my pitch and handled my late-game panic with aplomb.
Clark Kendall playing lawman at the Fifth Street house in 1914. Photo taken by Estella Kendall. Courtesy of Judy and Terry Broughton.
Truthfully, however, none of this was possible without the participation of the families involved. Carla Healy offered her time, knowledge and genealogy. In fact, she was the first living person with whom I spoke, a year into research, a revelation she found amusing. Gary and Ingrid Margason graciously provided the only known photo of Dave West, the man Gary’s grandmother called her brother, and were nothing but kind to me. Terry, Judy and Joy Broughton were the project’s true champions—without their preservation of the Kendall family’s archives (hundreds of letters, documents, photos and ephemera), Murder in Linn County, Oregon couldn’t exist at all, in any form. At my side, literally, through most of it: the ever-patient Michelle Jory, weathering my obsessive, sometimes futile pursuit of ghosts, real and imagined.
I dedicate this to the boys in blue, particularly my late great-uncle Lowell, an old-school Albany cop with a gruff manner but a great sense of humor—a Frye to the marrow.
Also, Clark Kendall, wherever you are: this one’s for you.
PROLOGUE
THE FINAL MORNING, 1922
Sheriff Charles Kendall met the day alone. His wife was up north, visiting a sister, taking in the palette of the Portland Rose Festival. Their only son joined her, enjoying his first summer after his freshman year at Albany College.
Sheriff Charles Kendall met the day alone. But that was fine. He had plenty to keep him busy: multiple warrants to serve for violations of the Volstead Act, that notorious law that spawned Prohibition and, according to Brownsville’s Good Citizenship League, had birthed a menace across Linn County. In fact, he and county district attorney L. Guy Lewelling had conferred with this coalition only a week earlier to discuss this very issue. Now Kendall was making good, demonstrating a willingness to make a statement.
The Linn County jail exterior in the early 1920s. Photo taken by Estella Kendall. Courtesy of Judy and Terry Broughton.
Sheriff Charles Kendall met the day alone. Affixed and straightened his badge. Patted it down, pulled his jacket tight. Filed his warrants into an inside pocket. Topped his head with a hat, straightened it into place. Left the quarters he shared with his family above the Linn County jail. Closed the door behind him.
Sheriff Charles Kendall met the day alone. So no one heard him as his footfalls met the stairs, echoing, fading, never to return.
THE MINISTER
The ghosts of the past have not all betaken themselves to the otherwhere.¹
Near the end of December 1921, the Reverend Daniel Poling sat in his Corvallis home, corralling observations for the coming year. The kind-eyed fifty-six-year-old led Albany’s Presbyterians, but this weekend his canvas was larger: the Sunday edition of the Albany Democrat. Charles Alexander oversaw the paper on those days—a good fellow, a printer and novelist who on the Sabbath mixed sober reportage with languid perusals, promoting and feeding Linn County’s literary ambitions.
Reverend Roy Healy. Courtesy of Carla Healy.
Tomorrow I shall step across the threshold of 1922,
he wrote, and I ask for courage to march straight into it, and its experience…I pray thus for myself in the year 1922. I pray for my friends unto the uttermost borders of the world. May this be a ‘year of the Lord,’ a prosperous, happy, progressive year.
²
Initial signs pointed toward abundance. As Poling’s pronouncements went to press, Roy Healy, his brother in Christ, met with the board of his First Christian Church. The gathering’s tone was celebratory. A basket lunch topped the agenda, followed by an encouraging dessert: 1921’s final numbers, the best the church had ever known. Increases abounded in every department. Some 104 new faces had filled the pews, and collectively the congregation had raised more than $9,000 against expenses. Not bad for Healy’s first full year. He’d proven a godsend, and the assemblage expressed confidence that the new year would build on the old.³
Roy Healy seemed destined to answer The Call,
entering the world on Christmas Day 1886 in the nearby town of Lebanon (not exactly Bethlehem but quaint and charming).⁴ Yet he’d traveled well in his thirty-five years, ministering from the Willamette Valley to the upper reaches of the Pacific Northwest and then down through Northern California before returning once more to his native soil and to this twin-towered temple at the corner of Fourth and Broadalbin.
Hardship, naturally, moved with blessing. His birth mother, Emma, would never know of his godly achievements, would never watch with pride as Roy and his older brother, Leonard—whom many knew affectionately by his middle name, Bert—matured into upstanding men. She died in February 1898, when Roy was twelve and Bert fourteen, lain to rest in Lebanon’s IOOF Cemetery, where her headstone, pristine as the day it was shaped, reads simply, Wife of O. Healy.
⁵
Oscar Healy didn’t play grieving widower for long. When the twentieth century began, he met it with his own fresh start. He took a bride, the former Harriet Pygall, that summer of 1900 and pushed the brood west to Corvallis, where Roy spent the rest of his adolescence.⁶
The end came for the fifty-year-old Oscar in 1907,⁷ and Harriet herself seemed to separate from the narrative (she died in Portland in 1916).⁸ The brothers were adults by then. Bert had left Corvallis’s Oregon Agricultural College (Oregon State University) two years earlier for a job in Cathlamet, Washington, hoping to return with enough money to finish school. He became a permanent resident instead, starting a family with his wife, Gertrude, and their children, Barbara, Leon and Roy, named as tribute to Bert’s brother. Bert plied various trades for the rest of his life, from bookkeeper to county commissioner to stationary engineer. He was eulogized upon his 1934 passing at the age of fifty as one of Cathlamet’s best known citizens
; attorney J. Bruce Polwarth recalled, As a friend he was steadfast and loyal; as a husband kindly, sympathetic and considerate; as a father he made of his children his best friends, and he entered in their hopes and happiness as his own.
⁹
The Reverend Roy Healy served the First Christian Church from 1920 to 1922. The ornate towers, as seen here, were taken down in 1935, and the building itself fell in a March 1960 fire. Courtesy of the Albany Regional Museum.
Roy stayed in Oregon, joining his aunt and uncle, Martha and Robert Healy, in Coburg.¹⁰ There he met and courted Ada Belle Sidwell, the second oldest of Robert and Laura Sidwell’s four daughters (a fifth, Bessie May, had died in 1903).¹¹ The Sidwells were a large family—eleven children¹²—and the women, perhaps through sheer number, couldn’t help but enchant those Healy boys, as sparks soon flew between Ada’s sister Edna and Roy’s cousin Frank.¹³ But the original union reached the altar first, tying the knot on the morning of June 20, 1911, in time to make that day’s Eugene Daily Guard.¹⁴ Ada was twenty-three and her husband twenty-four; Roy stands proud in a subsequent portrait, beside his smiling bride.
A 1914 directory finds the lovebirds at 1365 Onyx Street, a thirteen-minute stroll to Eugene Bible University (now Northwest Christian University), where Roy was enrolled as a student.¹⁵ The college had expanded considerably beyond its 1895 origins as Eugene Divinity School, a rented building ample enough to house its five-strong student body. Nearly twenty years later, Healy and 120 of his peers paid $150 to $200 in annual tuition to wander the growing campus, whose crowning glory was its library’s rare Bible collection.¹⁶
Traces lingered of humble roots. Its three original professors remained active: university president Eugene Sanderson, Hebrew instructor Ernest Wigmore and David Kellems, head of the Oratory Department, where the aspiring pastor sharpened his elocution. Healy graduated with a BSL degree in 1917 and later stood with the institution’s most illustrious alumni in C.F. Sanders’s Making Disciples in Oregon (1928).¹⁷ A church newsletter described his values thusly: "Brother Healy preached the Word with force