The Severs Hotel Murders

Another chapter in my Murder and Mayhem in NE OK book https://amzn.to/3BIKAw0 concerns the Severs Hotel Murders in Muskogee. What follows is a greatly condensed version of that chapter.

About 8:30 on the evening of Saturday, April 26, 1930, the telephone operator at the elegant Severs Hotel in Muskogee received a call from a guest in Room 817 saying that his friends had been robbed and killed. The assistant hotel manager called police, and he and the hotel engineer hurried to the eighth floor to investigate. 

They opened the door to Room 187 and found an elderly man in the room with shaving cream on his face, a second man lying nearby on the floor with his hands bound, and two other men lying lifeless on the floor across the room near the door of adjoining Room 819.

The man with his hands bound and the elderly man identified themselves as John L. Wike and P. G. Seeley respectively, and the two dead men were brothers David and George Smith. The four men had traveled together on business from Connecticut. Wike said that two men had forced their way into the adjoining room, attacked and killed the Smith brothers after a furious struggle, and left him tied up. Seeley said he was in the bathroom at the time and didn't hear the sounds of a struggle but did hear four gunshots. 

Police tentatively accepted their story but grew skeptical as they began investigating the crime. The first question that arose was the mystery of why, if robbery were the motive, the bandits took only a small portion of the money and valuables the four men had in their possession. Why did Seeley not hear the commotion, and why did he not untie Wike? Why was the room relatively undisturbed if there was a violent struggle as Wike said. 

Seeley calmly explained that he was hard of hearing, and Wike said the reason he was still bound when help arrived was that he wanted authorities to see the scene exactly as it was after the crime was committed.

Calls to Connecticut confirmed that the four men from that state were prominent and trustworthy citizens. Arguing in their favor, also, was the fact that neither the murder weapon nor the room key had been found. If Wike and Seeley murdered the Smith brothers, how did they dispose of those items? 

Wike and Seeley were arrested and held for intense questioning for a couple of days before most of the lawmen involved in the case came to believe that they were not implicated in the murders, and they were released with an understanding that they stay in Muskogee and cooperate with officers in the investigation.

Later, officers found a diamond in Seeley's luggage that Wike had previously reported as having been taken by the killers. Seeley swore he knew nothing about the ring or how it got in his luggage, but he and Wike were re-arrested. Authorities still felt the two were probably not guilty, but the prosecutor thought indicting them would be the best path to move the investigation forward. 

At a preliminary hearing for the two men in the district courtroom at Muskogee before an overflow crowd, the prosecutor focused much attention on the fact that the missing ring was found in Seeley’s luggage, but he had little solid evidence to present. The defense, on the other hand, suggested that some “suspicious characters” who had been seen loitering around the hotel shortly before the murders might well have committed the crime. The sheriff said he was sure the defendants were not guilty, and Wike and Seeley, testifying in their own defense, calmly told their stories very much as they had told them from the outset. By the end of the hearing, even the prosecutor was won over. In his closing argument, he admitted there was not enough probable cause to hold the two men. When the judge announced that the charges against the Connecticut men were dismissed, the courtroom erupted into applause.

The Severs Hotel murders remained a mystery until early June when R. L. Benton, an alleged member of a holdup gang that was known to be in the Muskogee vicinity on the night of the murders, was arrested in Miami, Oklahoma, in connection with a series of robberies in southwest Missouri and northwest Oklahoma. Wike journeyed back to Oklahoma from Connecticut and identified Benton as one of the men who attacked and killed the Smith brothers. Held on charges of robbery and suspicion of murder at the Muskogee County Jail, Benton escaped in August.

In mid-November, a gunman shot and killed a police officer in Kirksville, Missouri, and the killer was later identified as veteran criminal Lawrence Devol (alias R. L. Benton), the same man wanted in connection with the Smith murders. A large manhunt for Devol, a known associate of notorious criminals like Harvey Bailey and Alvin Karpis, was launched throughout the Midwest, but nothing was heard from Devol until about a year later when he joined the infamous Barker gang. In late 1932, Devol killed two policemen outside a Minnesota bank during the gang’s robbery of the place. Devol was captured, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane in June 1936. Later the same month, he and a companion, Albert “Scarface” Soroko, tried to hold up a café in Oklahoma City, and Soroko was killed in a police shootout. The following month, Devol killed a policeman and seriously wounded a second one in Enid, Oklahoma, when two officers tried to question him. Devol was then killed in a second gun battle with police just moments later.

Gangster Jimmy Creighton was eventually identified as the other prime suspect besides Devol in the Severs Hotel murders, but he was already serving a life sentence in the Missouri penitentiary. Since no one was ever tried or convicted for the murders of David and George Smith, the crime officially remains an unsolved mystery.