Miley Case in detail to try to detect any flaw in the case against Robert Anderson.
Now, Waller pulled a heavy file from his HOLD basket. Compiled from news clippings, court records, and transcribed private conversations, the file was marked MILEY CASE. He had read every word of every document at least a half-dozen times. Still, he decided to spend the remainder of this day doing so again. He opened the file and started at the beginning:
The crime that tormented the warden and occupied Tom Waller occurred during the pre-dawn hours of September 28, 1941. At 4:15 that Sunday morning, J. M. Giles, manager of the Ben Mar Sanatorium in the fashionable northeast section of Lexington, Kentucky, was awakened by the repeated ringing of his doorbell accompanied by faint cries for help. He threw on a robe, went to the front door, and opened it to horror. A woman, barefoot and dressed in a blood-drenched nightgown, took a feeble step inside and collapsed into his arms. Giles recognized her at once. She was Mrs. Elsie Miley, 52, director of the Lexington Country Club just across the highway. Barely able to talk, she gasped out a tale of being beaten, shot, and robbed.
“Marion . . .,” the woman cried, “shot . . . please, get help.”
Giles yelled for a member of his staff to summon an ambulance and the police, and began rendering first aid to the stricken woman.
The prestigious Lexington Country Club was situated on lush bluegrass acreage on Paris Pike, three miles from downtown. Fifteen minutes after being notified, Lexington police entered the clubhouse to find wires cut, phones ripped from the walls, and furniture smashed. Upstairs, the door to Mrs. Miley’s apartment was splintered from its hinges. Inside was carnage. The entry hallway and bedrooms had been ransacked. In the master bedroom the floor and bed were blood-soaked. At the head of the hallway, officers made a more gruesome discovery: lying dead in a pool of blood, clad in pajamas, was twenty-seven-year-old Marion Miley. She had been shot at close range in the back and again in the top of her head. An autopsy would show that she died at approximately 2:30 A.M. Physicians speculated that her mother had lain in a state of shock for over an hour before acquiring enough strength to make her desperate crawl for help.
Within hours, the murder in Kentucky was headline news throughout the United States and Europe, for Marion Miley was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic.
A winning athlete since age eighteen, Marion had risen steadily through the ranks of female golfers. Along the way she won every major American tournament open to women, garnering a reputation for being “cool under fire—a golfer without nerves.” In her early twenties she represented the United States in major European tournaments. Hailed by sportswriters as being on a par with her good friends Patty Berg and “Babe” Didrickson, both of whom she defeated in competition, Marion was officially ranked the number-two woman golfer in the country. She was well on her way to becoming number one. Vivacious, outgoing, and strongly competitive, the pretty brunette star was once asked by a reporter in London how it felt to be ranked among the top women golfers in the world.
She replied, “Why stop with women?”
It was that kind of spirit that endeared her to competitors and fans alike.
As news of Marion’s murder spread, golf patrons around the country reacted in shock, then anger. Spearheaded by the game’s most famous amateur, Bing Crosby, celebrities by the score contributed generously to the reward for the capture of her killer.
Slipping in and out of consciousness, Elsie Miley whispered a fractured account of what had happened. She had been awakened by the sound of something breaking. Police later determined that she had heard one of the intruders knock over a lamp at the head of the stairs. Then two men burst into her apartment, grabbed her roughly, and demanded to know where she had hidden the money. Before she could reply, one of the men shot her. In a voice so weak that the police detective had to place his ear directly over her mouth, she murmured a meager description of her assailants: two men, one tall and slender, the other shorter and stocky.
Had she seen which one of the men shot Marion? the detective asked.
Mrs. Miley nodded. But before she could speak again, she lapsed into a final coma. On October 1, three days after she had been shot, and seven hours after her daughter’s funeral, Elaine Miley died.
With no usable fingerprints found at the scene, investigators combed the Country Club area for any hint as to the killers’ identities. For the first couple of days, it was a fruitless search. Then, in rapid succession, two important clues emerged.
Each morning, while most people in Lexington were still sleeping, newsboy Hugh Cramer, 17, rose to deliver papers. The Lexington Country Club was on his route. Between 3:00 and 3:30 A.M. Sunday, he tossed Mrs. Miley’s paper onto the stoop of the clubhouse. There were three cars parked in the driveway. He recognized two. One was Mrs. Miley’s. The other belonged to her daughter Marion, who, Cramer knew, lived with her mother between tournaments. The third car, standing with its door open, was strange.
At first, Cramer didn’t consider the third car unusual. There had been a dance at the club the night before. Sometimes, after a social event, club members would leave their cars and ride home with friends. But as news of the Miley murders spread, Cramer remembered that third car and notified police.
Could he describe the car? police asked.
Like any teenage car buff, Cramer could. It was a 1941 Buick Sedan, two-tone blue and gray. He didn’t notice the plates, but was sure he would have had they been from outside Kentucky.
Police released an all-points bulletin on the Buick.
The second clue was even more incriminating. During a questioning, two Lexington men brought in for interrogation told investigators that a couple of weeks earlier, a scar-faced ex-convict they met in a bar tried to enlist them to help rob the Country Club. The ex-con’s name: Tom Penney.
Tom Penney was well known to Lexington police. The black-sheep son of a law-abiding family, he had been a troublemaker for years. At sixteen he was sent to reform school for car theft. Paroled, he pulled off a series of minor crimes until, in 1930, he was convicted of the armed robbery of a grocery store during which he shot two men. Following his release he worked around Lexington as a part-time carpenter but could not hold any job for long. Mean and belligerent, he was the principal suspect in several open cases on the police blotter. He was currently out of jail on another parole.
On the heels of the all-points bulletin on the Buick, police issued another on Penney.
The second APB was not necessary.
On October 9, eleven days after the Miley shootings, two police officers in Fort Worth, Texas, parked their patrol car in a vacant lot near an intersection where a number of speeders had been reported. Moments later, a blue-gray Buick with Kentucky plates roared through the four-way stop without slowing. The officers gave chase.
At the first wail of the siren, the speeder pulled to the side. While one officer radioed headquarters, the second approached the parked Buick. The driver was a tall, slender man with a jagged scar across his left cheek. His eyes were bloodshot and his speech was slurred. His drivers license identified him as Thomas Penney of Lexington, Kentucky.
The officer had just started back to the patrol car to check out the drivers license when the second officer replaced the microphone on the dash and stepped out. “We’ve got a hot one. That’s the car in the Miley murders.”
Both officers approached the car with their weapons drawn and ordered the driver to step out with his hands up. While one kept Penney covered, the other searched the Buick. From beneath the front seat he withdrew a .38-caliber revolver—loaded
