The Burning Deaths of Willard and Viola Blades

   The lot where Willard and Viola Blades lived at the corner of Grant Avenue and Catalpa Street in Springfield was so ringed with trees and shrubs that, when their home caught fire late Saturday night, June 16, 1984, no one discovered the blaze until it was out of control. A passing motorist finally noticed the fire and called it in, but the house was already consumed in flames. After the fire was extinguished, investigators found the charred remains of the couple in the rubble, but the bodies were so badly burned that investigators said they might never know the exact cause of their deaths. Fire and police detectives did not suspect foul play, and an initial examination of the bodies yielded no clues, leaving authorities to speculate that the couple must have died of smoke inhalation.
   But some things didn’t quite seem right from the very beginning. The couple were known as “sticklers for fire safety” and had several smoke detectors in their home. Mrs. Blades’s body was found in an upstairs room stretched out in the middle of a bed in an unusual position, while her dead husband was found on his back nearby in the bedroom floor. Victims of fire were more often found in a curled up position.
   Suspicions were further aroused when forensics tests revealed that Viola had two head injuries. She also had a piece of rope tied around one wrist and what appeared to be a piece of cloth tied around her neck, suggesting that she might have been assaulted and tied up prior to her death. Investigators concluded from the burn pattern beneath the bed that the fire had probably started there, and tests later confirmed that an accelerant had been used under the bed.
   Unlike his wife’s body, Willard Blades’s body had no signs of injury, and investigators tentatively concluded that he had, in fact, died of smoke inhalation. Officials now strongly suspected that they were looking at either a homicide-suicide or a double homicide.
   But which one? There were no signs of forced entry and no signs that anything of substantial value had been taken. Had Blades assaulted his wife and then burned her and himself up in the fire, or was the arson an attempt to cover up a heinous double murder? Investigators leaned toward the double-homicide theory, despite no evidence of a break-in or a robbery.
   Based on interviews with friends and relatives of the Bladeses in Oklahoma, investigators soon identified an acquaintance of the couple as a person of interest in the case. The man, whose name was not revealed at first, was known to have been in Springfield on the Saturday that the Blades house burned down.
   The “acquaintance” of the couple turned out to be Willard Blades’s nephew Ronald Conn. By July 24, Springfield officers had accumulated enough evidence to charge him and two accomplices with two counts each of capital murder in the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Blades. The accomplices were Ann Marie Dulany and Paul Richard Schmitt, both from Illinois. Conn and Ms. Dulany, who’d been living together, were already in custody in Illinois when the charges were filed, and Schmitt was arrested later that day. The suspects were brought back to Springfield and arraigned in circuit court.
   The defendants’ cases were separated, and Conn’s came up first. He finally went on trial for capital murder in early June 1986. Just after the trial opened, Conn pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in a deal that allowed him to escape the death penalty. As part of the plea-bargain, Conn gave a statement admitting to stealing stuff from his uncle and aunt. He placed primary blame for the crime on Schmitt, however, claiming that he and Ms. Dulany were already outside the house when Schmitt set the fire. Conn was sentenced to two concurrent life terms.
   At her trial in December 1986, Dulany admitted being present at the fire, but she laid nearly all the blame for the murders on Conn. The defense claimed she’d only helped Conn because she was under his control. It didn’t help Dulany’s cause, however, that she had given a conflicting statement shortly after her arrest in which she laid most of the blame for the murders on Schmitt.
   The jury found Dulany guilty, and she was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for fifty years. Her subsequent appeals were ultimately denied.
   In February 1987, Schmitt, the third defendant, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in keeping with a previously negotiated arrangement in which he’d agreed to testify against Conn, if necessary. Schmitt received two concurrent twenty-year prison terms with no possibility for parole.
   So, even though the evidence suggested Conn was the one who actually started the fire that burned up his uncle and aunt and destroyed their house, Ms. Dulany ended up getting a tougher sentence than her male sidekick in that he was eligible for parole sooner. Perhaps that’s the risk she ran by refusing to cop a plea. However, Mother Nature stepped in to rectify the seeming inequity. Conn died of natural causes at the age of sixty-eight in 2014 while still serving time at the Farmington Correctional Center.
   This post is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.

 

 

Bombing of Wilder's Restaurant in Joplin

   Since moving to Joplin many years ago, I've occasionally read or heard reference to a bombing that took place in the 1950s at Wilder's Restaurant on Main Street, but I'd never actually read a detailed account of the incident until yesterday, when I started researching it for this blog.
   On Thursday night, September 3, 1959, a dynamite explosion ripped through the upstairs office, apartment, and lounge above the restaurant, injuring six people, one of them critically. Apparently, five sticks of dynamite had been placed on the roof of the two-story building, directly above the office of the restaurant owner, Vern Wilder. Police theorized that the explosion was an attempt on the life of Wilder or his associate, Harry Hunt.
   But Wilder was downstairs in the restaurant at the time and was not injured, and Hunt was also not injured. All six of the injured people were in the upstairs part of the building, including 70-year-old Charles Greenwood, who was critically injured. The blast showered bricks and glass onto Main Street street outside the restaurant and shattered the windows of several neighboring businesses. "It shook the hell out of everything," said a man who happened to be passing by on the sidewalk and barely missed being killed or seriously injured. Greenwood, an employee of a cigar store next door to the restaurant, died on the morning of September 5.
   Police immediately undertook an investigation of the explosion. It was suspected that either someone with a personal grudge against Wilder and/or Hunt or underworld figures involved in illegal gambling were responsible for the bombing, because it was an open secret that Wilder's was one of the main "casinos" in Joplin. In fact, one report said that Wilder's was among the three largest gambling establishments in the entire state of Missouri. Wilder had even admitted during a civil action in 1950 that Hunt operated a gambling room above his restaurant, and the two men had both been indicted in 1951 for setting up gambling devices, although the indictments were later quashed. At the time of the explosion, Wilder was suing an insurance company, claiming a safe containing $10,000 ($7,000 of which belonged to Hunt) had been stolen from the restaurant property and that the insurance company had refused to pay for the loss. This was cited as another possible motive for the crime.
   According the the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the upstairs part of Wilder's was Joplin's "only big-time gambling casino." The previous year (1958), Missouri governor James Blair had named Joplin as one of the "worst spots in Missouri for gambling." Although he had not identified Wilder's specifically in his formal statement, he had reportedly mentioned the restaurant in private remarks. Informed of the governor's remarks, Wilder denied that he ran the biggest gambling operation in Jasper County. He just "ran a friendly game," Wilder said. "I just try to run a good restaurant."
   The Post-Dispatch went on the assert that there had recently been "considerable jealousy among gamblers" in the Tri-State area of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, as some of the gamblers not associated with Wilder's resented the fact that the restaurant had apparently been granted an exclusive right to operate in Joplin with police turning a blind eye to Wilder's activities while clamping down on others.
   In addition, after Blair's 1958 report, some of the big-time gamblers in Kansas City had felt the heat because of the governor's vow to crack down on gambling in KC and had allegedly invaded Joplin as a more lucrative and wide-open field for their gambling operations. Several months before the restaurant bombing, the Kansas City high-rollers had begun demanding a cut of Wilder's gambling proceeds. Despite these allegations, little proof was offered, and no one was indicted for the explosion or the murder of Greenwood.
   In early 1960, a Jasper County grand jury launched an investigation not only into the explosion but also into gambling activities in the county. The investigation uncovered evidence of gambling not only at Wilder's but also in Carthage and at one or two other locations in the county. Wilder and several associates, including Hunt, were indicted for gambling, but the grand jury report, issued in February, failed to uncover a definite motive or to name a suspect in the September explosion.

"Big George" Herrelson

   One of the chapters of my book Midnight Assassinations and Other Evildoings: A Criminal History of Jasper County, Mo. is about the murder of Joplin watchmaker R. T. Thompson in late October 1929 during a robbery attempt gone bad. George Herrelson; his wife, Bertha; Bertha's brother, Earl Osborn; and two other men were arrested in connection with the crime two years later, in October 1931. The Herrelson couple and Osborn were ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder in the case, and they received sentences of life imprisonment, while the other two men, who were younger and who testified against the other defendants, were given lighter sentences for second-degree murder convictions.
   The two younger men testified that Osborn was the trigger man in the murder and that Herrelson was the leader of the gang. They said that Herrelson and Osborn had been involved in a number of previous robberies. So, I knew, or at least suspected, that Herrelson and Osborn had been involved in other crimes, but only recently did I uncover some of the details of those crimes.
   Residents of Cherokee County, Kansas, George and Bertha Herrelson were, from all appearances, fairly upstanding members of society during the early to mid-1920s. They had two popular and pretty teenage daughters, one of whom was selected a school queen at Galena. But somewhere along the line, "Big George," as he was sometimes called, got sidetracked, and his life took a criminal turn.
   Herrelson's illegal shenanigans first came to public attention in the spring of 1928, when he allegedly set fire to his own house in an apparent attempt to collect the insurance. Charged with arson, he was acquitted at trial in the spring of 1929. By this time, though, or shortly after, he had become involved in other criminal activities.
   The murder of Thompson, as previously mentioned, took place in October 1929.
   Then, in late December of 1929, a gang of men robbed a prominent, elderly businessman named William Cottengin and his daughter at Cottengin's home in Hartville, Missouri. The gang pulled up outside the home, and when the daughter came to the door, they forced her at gunpoint back into the house. They forced the old man and his daughter to lie on the floor and bound and gagged both of them. With their victims incapacitated, they chiseled open a safe Cottengin kept in his home and took about $700 from it. They then jumped back into their car and sped out of town.
   As with the Thompson murder, there were no suspects in the Cottengin case at first, but in early January 1930, just days after the Hartville caper, a jewelry store in Herrelson's hometown of Galena was robbed, and he was arrested in connection with the heist. Then, in March 1930, before the Galena case could be prosecuted, several men were arrested in northwest Oklahoma as alleged members of a robbery ring that had been operating in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri for several months, and one or more of the captives named Herrelson and Osborn as fellow members of the gang. Herrelson was also fingered as the leader of the group who had robbed Cottengin.
   The Missouri governor filled out a requisition to have Herrelson returned to Missouri to face charges in the strongarm robbery of Cottengin, and Kansas authorities, who already had the defendant in custody for the jewelry store robbery, honored the request. Herrelson was taken back to Hartville to face assault and robbery charges and was lodged in the Wright County jail. However, he somehow got free of the charge or perhaps was released on bond, because he was back home in Cherokee County when he and his wife were arrested in October 1931 on charges of murdering Thompson. And that was the end of "Big George" Herrelson's criminal career. 

Sports Broadcaster Vern Hawkins

   One of my earliest memories is listening to the Southwest Missouri State Bears basketball games on Springfield's KWTO-AM radio station. The voice of the Bears back then, in the early 1950s, was Vern Hawkins, and he continued calling the Bears games for another thirty years or so after that.
   A native of Dallas County, Missouri, Hawkins attended Buffalo High School, where he was a star basketball player during the late 1930s and early 1940s. He played one season of basketball for Missouri Valley College in Marshall before he was called into military service during World War II.
   After the war, he transferred to SMS, where he lettered for two years under legendary coach Andy McDonald (after whom McDonald Arena was named). Hawkins started his broadcasting career while still in college, calling Bears games on KGBX radio during the 1949-1950 season, McDonald's final season as head coach. In 1951, Hawkins moved to KWTO, becoming news and sports director.
   One of the highlights of Hawkins's career was broadcasting Bears games during the team's back-to-back NAIA championship years of 1951-52 and 1952-53. In addition to announcing Bears basketball games, he also broadcast Drury College basketball games for several years, and later he added SMS football games to his schedule. Hawkins retired from broadcasting in 1985, having announced approximately 900 Bears basketball games.
   While he was still broadcasting, Hawkins also went into partnership with Bill Virdon (former Major League Baseball player) and Beryl Swan in a sporting goods store in Springfield. He also became a stockbroker and investment advisor.
   Hawkins died in 1993, and he was posthumously inducted into the Springfield-Area Sports Hall of Fame two years later.

   To be sure, there have been several other long-time play-by-play sports announcers in Springfield over the years. These include Bill Maynard and Dick Bradley, both contemporaries of Hawkins. Another name that comes to mind is Ned Reynolds, whose career giving sports news and announcing sporting events for KY-3 TV in Springfield spanned almost fifty years from about 1967 to 2014.
   But I always associate Vern Hawkins, first and foremost, with Springfield sportscasters, because he was the one I listened to as a little kid and he was still going strong long after I grew to adulthood.