The Murder of Marion Miley

By Beverly Bell

A historical thriller based on the real-life 1941 robbery of a Kentucky golf club that ended in the murder of a young champion golfer and her mother.

Today, the name Marion Miley is largely unrecognizable, but in the fall of 1941, she was an internationally renowned golf champion, winning every leading women’s tournament except the elusive national title. This unassuming twenty-seven-year-old woman was beloved by all she met, including celebrities like jazz crooner Bing Crosby. With ambitions to become a doctor, it seemed Marion Miley was headed for greatness.

But on September 28, 1941, six gunshots broke through the early morning stillness of the Lexington Country Club. Marion had been brutally murdered. News of her death spread quickly, headlining major papers such as the New York Times. Support flooded in, spurring police in the hunt for her killers. However, the bombing of Pearl Harbor less than two months later would redirect public attention and sweep Marion's story to a forgotten corner of time?until now.

The Murder of Marion Miley recounts the ensuing manhunt and trial, exploring the impact of class, family, and opportunity in a world where steely determination is juxtaposed with callous murderous intent. As the narrative voice oscillates between Marion’s father, her best friend, and one of her killers, an ever-present specter of what could have been?not just for Marion, but for all those affected by her tragic death?is conjured. Drawing on intensive research typical of the true crime genre, Beverly Bell produces a passionate homage to one of the greatest golfers of the early twentieth century.

Praise for The Murder of Marion Miley

“Don’t let Beverly Bell fool you: she must have been reporting live in 1941 from the scene of Lexington’s most notorious crime. Bell writes with a golden erudition and preternatural imagination that keep the wide-eyed reader up all night—think Truman Capote.” —Patty Friedmann, author of Where Do They All Come From?

“In The Murder of Marion Miley, author Beverly Bell takes literary crime-writing to new heights. Unearthing the remains of an actual 80-year-old crime—the murder of a world-class golfer in her prime—Bell creates a lyrical, page-turning novel about chance, class, and the strains of family bonds. Set in Kentucky’s Bluegrass region in the weeks before and after Pearl Harbor, Bell’s book recounts the crime while plunging us into the minds of an assortment of American characters of the 1940s. From its riveting opening scene, The Murder of Marion Miley is story-telling excellence.” —Neil Chethik, author of FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms With the Deaths of Their Dads

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781949669190

Book preview

One

1

SEPTEMBER 28, 1941, 3:30 A.M. The first bullet entered her back on the left side of Marion’s spine, tearing through the lower fibers of her trapezius muscles, the beautiful piece of flesh that controlled her shoulder blades—those same shoulders that made possible the textbook turns in her golf swing, rotating from right to left. Those who knew nothing about golf or anatomy always assumed Marion’s power and distance off the tee came from her toned arms or the strength of her grip. Those people were wrong. This, the once sinewy, well-knitted tissue, was the source. The bullet ripped through Marion’s pectoralis major and exited three inches above her left breast.

The second bullet hit the parietal lobe of her brain and grazed the motor cortex, which controls body movement and coordinates motor skills. It decimated the ability of Marion’s hands and eyes to work seamlessly with the club and ball. She would never again deliver a 250-yard drive down the middle of the fairway or land a delicate pitch on the front of the green, rolling it up within two feet of the hole. Every shot, every stroke, every putt that had to occur in time and sequence—they were all gone now.

This same bullet tore through her temporal lobe and with it, she lost the memory of every measure of music she had played on the piano since she was five years old. As it pierced the corpus callosum, the two hemispheres of her brain could no longer communicate. Even if by some miracle she had still been able to peck out the keys, the notes would have been rote, like a child’s memorized alphabet, without timbre or emotion. The ancient Greeks believed that the soul resided in this portion of the brain. As the bullet exited through her cheek, it took with it all music and marrow. And in its wake, nothing but blackness and silence.

If someone else had been the victim, Marion would have reveled in the clinical observation of the damage. The dissection of neurons, blood vessels severed—she would have analyzed this breakdown of a system of systems with a dispassionate, scientific eye. The truth was that nothing—including golf—fascinated her more than the human anatomy. There was no doubt than when she had achieved her ultimate goal in golf, winning the National Championship, she would go back to school and become the doctor she was always meant to be.

If someone else had been shot—in a state other than Kentucky, in a place other than the isolated and exclusive Lexington Country Club—perhaps there would have been only one bullet. And with it, a chance to recover and imagine a different life. Marion would have known which path to choose: pursuing those long-dormant medical aspirations, riding horses again, without her father’s warning voice ringing in her ears telling her how one fall, one fracture, could jeopardize her golfing ambitions. And finally having the time to give Debussy his due.

But someone else wasn’t the victim of this random, deadly crime, Marion Miley was. The gifted daughter of a frustrated golf pro. A national celebrity who had dominated the game for the past decade and could still win the big one. A golfer who had met movie stars and a former king and thought it was normal. A girl who died two months before Pearl Harbor and whose name would be shuttered away after the war with all the other bad memories.

And it wasn’t just one bullet that hit her. The second one blew through her brain, stealing everything—power, finesse, life, breath, and her one chance for immortality, winning at nationals. There would be no recovery, no next act. The twenty-seven-year-old was dead before her body hit the club’s apartment floor.

Three hundred yards away, James Watson was dozing in his poster bed, caught between a nether land of sleep and consciousness, when gunshots in quick succession cracked the air and shook him awake. He peeled back the chenille blanket. His two-story frame house and thirty-one-acre farm bordered the south side of the Lexington Country Club where the shots had come from. As he stood at the window, a second set of shots rang out from the same direction.

Nights weren’t kind to the seventy-two-year-old widower. With the constant calls of nature and the indigestion that churned in him like a bubbling pot, he rarely slept through till morning. And now this.

Watson peered out over the stand of red maples that separated the two properties. The night had gone deadly quiet again. The club’s front light, usually burning, wasn’t on for some reason.

The problem was he didn’t trust himself anymore, what his senses said or what he thought they told him. With every passing day, the line between what was real and what his mind concocted in a haze of age and lack of sleep, grew fuzzier. Watson climbed back into bed, hoping his frail bones would allow him a few more hours of rest.

In the country club’s far bedroom, the robber rooted through the dresser drawer, his fingers groping for the stash of money his eyes couldn’t detect. I can’t see a goddamn thing, he mumbled.

Keep looking, his accomplice replied, directing their one flashlight toward the drawer.

I’m telling you, it isn’t here.

The second man pivoted around to Elsie Miley. The famous golfer’s fifty-two-year old mother was leaning against the twin bed’s headboard. She clutched her stomach as blood from gunshot wounds seeped through her nightclothes and onto the sheets and floor. With every intake of air, her breathing became more labored.

Where is it? he demanded. The short ex-felon wore a handkerchief over his face, but Elsie could still see his eyes, hard and vacant. When she didn’t respond, he struck her across the jaw with the butt of his gun. A gold filling shot out of her mouth. Her head ricocheted against the wooden frame, but she didn’t make a sound, as if there was nothing—no pain, no fear—left inside her.

Where is it? he asked again.

Elsie squinted against the flashlight beam. In the dresser, she stammered.

The taller thief ransacked through her slips, brassieres, panties.

No, the bottom one. The words were scarcely out of her mouth when her hands fell to her sides and her head slumped over.

The man at the dresser didn’t notice, instead moving his furious search to the third drawer. I got something, he said, pulling out a leather moneybag. A safety pin held the pouch’s broken zipper together. He had just unhooked it when light from an approaching car flooded the room. Both criminals dropped to their knees and the flashlight went dark.

Paperboy Hugh Cramer drove past the Lexington Country Club gate for his regular delivery. The seventeen-year-old followed the same routine every morning—leaving the newspaper building on Short and Market Streets at 3 a.m. for his long north side route.

There was no sun yet; only a cord of moonlight, but the cool, dry air hinted at the perfect fall day a few hours away. Cramer stopped at the clubhouse’s overhang on the south side and threw the rolled-up newspaper out the car window, near the door of the second-floor apartment where Marion and her mother lived. That’s when he saw the strange car.

The other two he recognized—the brand-new yellow coupe Marion had purchased this summer and the sedan that belonged to Mrs. Miley. The third—a large, two-toned dark Buick with Jefferson County tags—Hugh had never seen before. Its passenger door was open. The boy got out of his vehicle. The car’s driver was nowhere to be seen. Upstairs, the two robbers stayed in the shadows, but the shorter man—the one in charge—kept his .32 poised in case he needed to use it again. A few moments later, the paperboy gave up and drove away.

Let’s get out of here, the second robber said.

What about her?

Elsie hadn’t moved. Unconscious or dead, they couldn’t tell which.

She’s as good as gone. In the hallway, he led the way around Marion’s body, determined not to get any of her blood on his shoes and relatively new suit.

But as careful as he was, the second robber hadn’t escaped unscathed. The serious wound Marion had inflicted on him—before he fired a bullet into her head—was already throbbing.

2

Seventy-five minutes after the shooting. Price and Myra Lacy arrived at the Ben-Mar Sanitarium before the police did and minutes after the frantic call from J. M. Giles, who managed the tuberculosis hospital. Ben-Mar was the country club’s closest neighbor, located across Paris Pike and a quarter of a mile from the club’s main entrance. The Lacys also lived nearby.

Giles stood on the lit porch, bent over Elsie. She lay across the front-door threshold, her nightgown matted in blood. Her face was a map of wounds, with deep cuts and welts crisscrossing her swollen skin. Scratches and dirt covered the front of her bare legs. She wore no shoes, no coat, and even with the wool blanket that Giles had spread over her, she shook uncontrollably, as though her very skeleton were rattling.

She begged me to call you—and not to move her, Giles explained.

Is she conscious? Mr. Lacy asked.

Barely, Giles said. He recounted what Elsie had told him. How two men with handkerchiefs hiding their faces had broken into the apartment. They had shot both women and Elsie passed out; she didn’t know for how long. When she came to, they were gone. She reached for the telephone, but then remembered that the short, stocky robber had ripped the cable out of the wall.

She crawled the whole way here, he said. The bell rang and this is how I found her. She says that Marion is still in the apartment.

Myra Lacy knelt down. Elsie, can you hear me? She stroked her friend’s forehead.

The injured woman opened her eyes. Please help Marion, she whispered.

In the distance, a siren wailed, growing louder and stronger until a Fayette County Patrol car pulled up. Two officers rushed onto the front porch. Mrs. Miley, my name is John Doyle. I’m with the county patrol. Can you tell me what happened?

Elsie repeated her plea. Help Marion.

Marion is her— Myra began.

I know who she is, Doyle interrupted. He looked up at his partner, Virgil Mann. I’ll stay here and try to get a statement. You go to the club and check on Marion.

Mr. Lacy spoke up. You ever been in the country club before?

Why? Doyle asked.

Because the apartment isn’t easy to find.

Fine, you go with Virgil. Can you drive?

Mr. Lacy dug the keys out of his coat and motioned to the younger officer. Get in.

The two men were greeted by a gaping kitchen door and the clubhouse pitched in total darkness. They entered the building, where Officer Mann found a light switch and flipped it. Nothing happened. He tried another—still nothing. They must have cut the power, he said.

Mann had joined the force only a month ago and in his adrenaline surge, the twenty-seven-year-old had forgotten to bring a flashlight. The two felt their way along the walls of the kitchen and lounge.

Look for a desk, Lacy said. It’s right next to the apartment staircase.

As he rounded the corner, Mann spotted the stairs. There they are.

He took a book of matches from his pocket, struck one, and the two men started up to the second floor. Near the top was a white bath towel wrapped around a large object. Mann touched the towel with the toe of his shoe. Something heavy in there, he called to Lacy.

The door leading to the apartment was open. Half of its upper rectangular panel had been smashed through.

We know how they got in, Mann said, looking at the bath towel.

The broken section of the door panel was lying on the floor with smaller pieces of splintered wood scattered about. On the far wall, one end of a rug was bunched up against the leg of an armoire, the other end against the baseboard.

Somebody put up a fight, Mann said. He dampened his fingertips and squeezed the burned match before slipping it in his pocket and lighting another. Lacy kept his eyes on the officer, on the inches of floor immediately in front of him. Mann stopped, still holding the burning match. At the edge of the hallway was a bare foot.

Marion was on the floor, her face turned to the right and her left arm over her head. Blood surrounded her—beside her torso, next to her arms—and a pool of it enveloped her head. The top half of her pajamas were torn and, like the rest of her clothing, soaked in blood.

Mann threw his arm in front of Lacy. Careful where you’re stepping. A few inches from the older man’s shoe was a shapeless, soft mass the size of a half dollar.

The officer bent down to Marion. The sun had still not risen, but there was a subtle lifting of darkness. Monochromatic shades eclipsed the space, somehow neutralizing the slaughter at their feet with indifferent grays.

The hallway had become a vacuum of light and sound. And life, both men would soon realize. In the stony silence, they strained to catch any breath from the girl, but heard nothing.

We need some help, Mann said.

Lexington Country Club president Curry Tunis was sleeping when he received the call from the police. The officer didn’t provide much information, saying only that there had been a robbery and Tunis needed to come to the club immediately.

When he pulled onto the property, there were at least six police cars and two ambulances already there. A dozen uniformed officers as well as several other men in suits swarmed over the grounds. Detective Joe Hoskins met Tunis at his car and introduced himself.

Is all of this really necessary? Tunis asked. How are the members supposed to get in?

We’re going to have to close the club, Mr. Tunis.

Close it? Why? Where’s Mrs. Miley?

Before Hoskins could respond, the outer door on the club’s south side swung wide and two men in white uniforms carried out a stretcher with a body under a bloodstained sheet.

Who is that? Tunis asked as the stretcher was loaded into a Kerr Brothers Funeral Home hearse.

That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Marion Miley is dead.

Tunis braced himself against his car, struggling to take in what Hoskins was saying.

Mr. Tunis, do you know where Mr. Miley is?

Fred? Probably at Maketewah.

Where?

Maketewah Country Club up in Cincinnati. That’s where he works.

He’s not the pro here?

Not for a few years, since he took the Cincinnati job.

But Mrs. Miley and Marion live in the apartment?

Yes, Mrs. Miley is the office manager. Marion stays with her mother when she’s not traveling for her job or playing in tournaments.

We were told there was a dance here last night.

Every Saturday.

We’ll need a list of those who attended.

Alright.

And a list of all employees and members.

It finally dawned on Tunis what the detective was suggesting. You think someone associated with the club did this?

Anything is possible.

Club greenskeeper Raymond Skeeter Baxter watched as the corpse was lifted into the vehicle. He had driven onto the property minutes before and Officer Mann approached before he could open his car door.

You’re going to have to leave, Mann said.

But I work here, Skeeter said.

What’s your name?

Skeeter—Raymond Baxter. What happened?

Marion Miley was killed during a robbery. Mann wasn’t sure Skeeter had heard him. His eyes were glued to the hearse, still parked beside the main building. What do you do at the club? Mann asked.

Water the greens, park cars. Odd jobs.

Did you work last night?

Skeeter told Mann he had begun his shift at 10 p.m., parking cars for members who went to the dance. He finished setting out the golf course sprinklers at 1:30 a.m. and returned ninety minutes later.

Notice anything unusual? Mann asked.

When I came back and I was out on the far end of the course, a light flashed on and off in Mrs. Miley’s apartment.

What time was that?

Skeeter shrugged. I’m not sure. I didn’t think much about it.

Why not?

Mrs. Miley always flashes the lights when she hears me outside in the middle of the night. It’s her sign that she’s alright.

So you know Mrs. Miley?

I park cars for her when she has her special luncheons. Skeeter looked around. Hey, I need to find Bud. Can I go now?

James Bud Beirne was the golf pro at the club and Skeeter’s boss. When Fred Miley had left, Bud had replaced him.

Mann wrote down Skeeter’s name and address before letting him leave. Skeeter immediately drove to the back of the property, but returned a few minutes later and parked his car. Mann kept a close eye on him. So far, he was the only person who had admitted to being on the club property near the time of the crime.

Fayette County Patrol chief John McCord saw the skinny, redheaded man as well. Who’s that? he asked Mann.

Greenskeeper.

You talk to him?

Mann nodded. He worked last night, but says he didn’t see anything.

Call him in anyway.

Special to the New York Times

Marion Miley, Golf Star, Is Slain by Gunmen in Kentucky Clubhouse

HER MOTHER, WOUNDED BY MASKED PAIR WHO BATTER WAY INTO LEXINGTON APARTMENT, DRAGS HERSELF ACROSS LINKS TO CALL AID

Lexington, Ky., Sept. 28, 1941—Miss Marion Miley, 27 years old, nationally known golf star, was killed and her mother, Mrs. Fred Miley, was critically wounded just before dawn today by two masked men who invaded the secluded Lexington Country Club.

Lexington and Fayette County law enforcement officers, with few clues to guide them in a search for the killers, tonight engaged in one of the greatest manhunts ever conducted in Central Kentucky.

Mrs. Miley, who lived alone in the rambling colonial-type clubhouse except when her daughter visited her between golf tournaments, was in critical condition at St. Joseph Hospital with three bullet wounds in her abdomen.

Miss Miley, who had won practically every important golf tournament for women in the United States except for the national, was found dead in a hallway on the second floor of the clubhouse at 5 o’clock this morning after Mrs. Miley, despite her wounds, walked 200 yards to a near-by sanitarium to call for help.

Early evidence gathered by police pointed strongly to robbery as the sole motive, but they were not overlooking other possible theories.

County patrolmen, the first officers to reach the scene, found that the door to the second-floor Miley apartment had been shattered by the armed intruders. A telephone, ripped from its connections, lay on the bed on which Mrs. Miley had slept until awakened by the noise of the gunmen battering the door.

Fred Miley, a professional employed by a Cincinnati golf club, was notified that an accident had occurred and that he should come to Lexington immediately.

It was not until he got to Georgetown, a small town sixteen miles from Lexington, that he learned the real nature of the tragedy. He heard a newsboy hawking an extra that carried the story of the murder.

3

Two hours after the shooting. Thirty-five miles outside of Lexington, Tom Penney was behind the wheel of Bob Anderson’s Buick, heading west on Route 60. Beside him in the passenger’s seat, Anderson divided the money.

Here’s your share, Anderson said, giving Penney several bills. Fifty-nine bucks.

That’s it?

Either your buddy didn’t know what he was talking about or the old lady was holding out.

Penney glanced over at Anderson. The other man grimaced as his torn pants rubbed against the deep wound in his left thigh. Fucking bitch, Anderson mumbled.

You think the old lady is dead?

Probably. And then, without warning, Anderson laughed. I know the other one is.

What if the old lady isn’t dead?

Just drive.

Penney kept his foot on the gas and his eyes on the pavement. He tried to make sense of what had happened, but none of the pieces fit. The old lady screaming. Him crawling through the club’s kitchen window. Him and Anderson driving to Lexington. Someone jumping him in the apartment. A spray of gunfire, a loud thump in the hallway. The scattered images shot through his brain like lightning flashes.

The thirty-two-year-old went back to the beginning. Leaving Lexington earlier in the week. Coming to Louisville, desperate for a job. Meeting up with Anderson in his bar, the Cat and Fiddle. They had served time together during the mid-1930s at the penitentiary, but having a criminal record hadn’t hurt Anderson at all. He had built a thriving—and, as far as Penney could tell, legal—business.

What are you looking for? Anderson had asked him. Penney knew he wasn’t referring to a job. And just like that, the floodgates opened. He told Anderson about the other man he had met in the Lexington bar several months ago. The one from the country club with a scheme for robbing it. That man’s plan spilled from Penney’s lips and the wheels were set in motion.

Anderson stirred. Where are we?

Around Shelbyville.

Let me drive.

He gritted his teeth as he moved his injured leg and steered the automobile toward Portland, an area north of Louisville near the river.

Where we going? Penney asked.

The canal.

Built in the 1800s, the Louisville Canal was a fixture on the Ohio River. For years, it had been the main passageway for ships carrying all sorts of goods, but once railroads came into the picture, that all changed. Coal accounted for most of the river traffic now and business was brisk. Even early on a Sunday morning, many people were already congregating, some of them fishing, others standing around, waiting for something to happen.

Shit, Anderson said. Too many people.

For what?

Gotta get rid of these guns.

They tried Fountain Ferry Park instead. No one called it by its real name, Fontaine. Fountain made more sense because of the huge structure with its cascading water in the park’s swimming pool.

Anderson stopped on the outskirts of the property near a crumbling building. Behind one wall, he found a broken beer bottle and used it to dig a hole.

Penney kept watch. He had been to the park before. Four years ago, with his wife, Emma, not long after his parole from LaGrange. She was two months’ pregnant at the time, but the rides hadn’t bothered her at all. They were like kids, sprinting from the Carousel to Hilarity Hall. Emma’s favorite was the Comet, a wooden roller coaster with a ninety-foot drop. Penney liked Ride the Bumps, a ramp of rollers butted up against one another that jolted the rider until reaching the smooth slide. Hold on, the man working the ride had told him and Penney discovered he was good at that. Holding on and riding the bumps.

Gimme your gun, Anderson said. Penney relinquished the shiny nickel-plated .380. Now Emma wouldn’t give him the time of day and he hadn’t seen his kids in a month. The restraining order had taken care of that.

Behind him, Anderson smoothed the dirt over the hole where he had stashed the guns and brushed himself off. Even with the tear in his pants, Anderson struck Penney as a man always well put together. His pressed trousers, starched cotton shirt, and polished black leather shoes told Penney the bar owner didn’t tolerate a mess.

In the car, Penney noticed two buttons missing from his jacket and blood on his right shoe and sleeve.

Anderson saw it, too. Get rid of the jacket and shoes, he said. The thirty-six-year-old didn’t have a speck of blood on him. At 3rd and Market Streets, Anderson stopped the car.

What now? Penney asked.

Disappear, Anderson replied.

But—

Anderson interrupted. You worry too much. He reached across and opened Penney’s door.

Penney got out of the car and Anderson