Part 1Cold Open
Muskogee, Oklahoma. A street called Tamaroa. There's a house on it. A shotgun house. Three rooms in a line, one behind the other. A front room, and behind that, two more. And running across the middle of it, a wall. One-by-twelve boards stood up side-by-side and papered over. That's the whole of it. That's the wall. Two men lived on either side of it. In the front room, a man of about sixty. In the two rooms behind, another man of about sixty and his wife. The two men were cousins. They had known each other most of their lives. Now that house had two doors. One out of the front, one out of the back. And both of them opened onto the same yard. There was no other way out of either end of it. And a wall made of boards and paper does not stop sound. Anything one of those men said in his own room, the other one heard in his. Every day. For years. That was just how they lived.
Monday, the 3rd of March, 1952
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime. My name is Trevor Shelby. And this one is close to home. It happened in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and it is a case that nobody has carried for 70 years. In March of 1952, a man was shot dead in his own front yard by the man who lived on the other side of his wall. That is the whole of it. And the papers gave it a little over three months and then they were finished with it. There is no book about this. There is no documentary.
There is nobody's grandmother telling it at Thanksgiving. The entire record is about a dozen short newspaper articles and one court opinion. And if you read all of that in an afternoon, you would come away thinking there was nothing here. I want to tell you why that's wrong, because there is a person who was in that house from 10 o'clock in the morning until the officers came for her. And she told it out loud under oath. Her name was Mabel.
And there is a second thing about this case, and it is the reason it is an episode. Almost everything in it is argued. The newspapers and the court cannot agree on the weapon. Four reports call it a pistol. The trial record says a rifle. They cannot agree on the time. Two papers put the shot at about half past five. The woman in the house put her husband home at half past two. And the man himself said four o'clock in one document and five in another. They cannot agree on where the bullet went in and they cannot agree on how to spell his name.
So this is what we did, and this is what we found. It is all in the record. The newspapers, the court file, the sworn testimony and the documents, nobody had gone and got. And where the record fights with itself, I'll tell you, it's fighting rather than pick a side and let you trust it. And we found where it ended. The record does not stop in 1952.
It runs on to 1966, and it finishes somewhere that nobody in that courtroom would ever have guessed. A few words before we go, the way we always do. Everything in this episode is a true story and it is built from the record. Some scenes are recreated the way they must have played out, because that's the best way to live a story. The opinions you hear are my opinions. And this one carries a killing, a courtroom and a prison. So listener discretion. It always has been. And this one earns it. All of it. The front pages, the court opinion, the documents. Is up at section twenty nine dot com. Go and look for yourself. I would rather tell you the story than read you the footnotes. And if you want to help the show, subscribe and leave a review wherever you found this. Now, let's get on with the show.
Part 3The Wall
Let's start with the house, because in this case the house is the whole thing. 1714 and a half Tamaroa Street. The half matters. The half means the back part. It was what people then called a shotgun house. Three rooms and a string. One behind the other. No hallway. The front room opened onto the yard and it opened nowhere else. One door from the front. Behind it, two more rooms with their own door onto that same yard. And between them, that wall.
One by twelve boards stood up side by side and papered over. In the front room lived Nathaniel Pannell. Somewhere over six feet tall. In the two rooms behind it lived Augustus Shoals and his wife, Mabel. The two men were second cousins. They had known each other most of their lives and the record calls them long time friends. Two men out of the same family in the same house on two sides of one wall. And that wall was boards and paper. So there was nothing either of them could say in his own room that the other one didn't hear in his. Not an argument. Not a radio. Not a word. They had lived like that a long time and it had been fine. Now, Augustus.
Ten years before any of this, in the spring of 1942 he filled out a registration card at a draft board in Muskogee. And in the blank for occupation he wrote, in his own hand, Carpenter. Under employer he wrote one word, self. He had a telephone too.
Number 2049. A working man with his own tools and his own number in the book. And then in 1947 his hands went, arthritis. He built things for a living. And then he couldn't hold anything. By 1952 the government had him rated totally disabled and was sending him $60 a month. And that was all the money there was. He and Mabel rented two rooms of somebody else's house. He was five foot seven. In 1942 he had weighed 130 pounds. By now he was down to about 120. He had a scar on his left cheek.
That's the man. Small, sick, broke, and 58 years old for one more day. Mabel was 42. And the sum total of what anybody wrote down about her in her whole life is a handful of lines. That includes the only physical description of her that exists anywhere. Which is two words. A crippled woman.
She is going to be the only person in this story who is there for all of it. And she is the reason any of it is known at all. Muskogee had two daily papers that year. The Phoenix came out in the morning. The Times Democrat came out in the evening. Between them they could tell you what happened on a Monday twice before Tuesday.
Hold on to that. It matters later. All right. Sunday the 2nd of March. Augustus wasn't home. He hadn't been home since some time that day and he wasn't there that night. Where he was he never said and as far as the record shows nobody ever asked him. Mabel was home.
And so was Pannell on his side of the boards. And that night Pannell bothered her. That's the word in the record. Bothered her. Whatever it amounted to it was enough that two women came into it. A woman named Bessie Prince. And Daisy Wofford who was the landlady. Between them they put him out of the house.
That was Sunday night. The next morning was Monday the 3rd of March 1952. And it was Augustus Shoals's 59th birthday.
Part 4The Beans
Quarter to ten in the morning. Sarah Muldrow lived next door east. She was 52 years old, and she came over to that house for one reason. She wanted to borrow some soda. That is the whole of why she was there. A neighbor, a cup of soda, and a dinner already on the fire at home.
Augustus was not at home. Mabel was. And while the two women were talking, the man on the other side of the wall joined the conversation. This is her account of that morning, in her own words. Well, she came to my house to visit, and I had already had my dinner on the fire cooking. And so Pannell, he called from his room and asked me, what did I have to eat? And I told him I had some beans, but I said, they are not done.
That is the wall doing exactly what a wall of boards and paper does. Two women in one room, a man in the next room who can hear every word and who answers without getting up. And the answer was beans. Then he got up.
Well, we sat there quite a few minutes, and Pannell comes out of his house and comes on around and opens my screen and walks right in. And he said, God damn you, I am hungry. He came around the outside of the house to reach her door because the front room and the two rear rooms had separate doors onto the same yard. And there was no way through from one to the other. He was drunk. He started to the kitchen and I said, my beans is not done. He says, you are a God damn liar and I will knock your God damn head off. The record summary of that morning says he made a threat and used some vile language toward Mabel. That is the threat.
And then Sarah Muldrow got up and left. Mabel's words, three sentences. He was going to the kitchen and I told him not to go and he turned around. Sarah Muldrow got up and left. She could not stay and left me there alone. That is the woman who came for the soda. She lived next door. She was 52 years old. And when it turned, she went home. After she left, Mabel told him to go home. After she left, I told him to go home and he said he wasn't going no God damn where. And I went to the door and called my landlady.
She called her landlady, not the police, not a neighbor, not her husband. The woman who owned the house, Daisy Wofford, was the landlady. She lived close by and she did the thing that worked. Daisy Wofford, her landlady, came over to see what the trouble was and told Pannell to come on over to her house and she would give him something to eat. And she shoved him on out the door. She offered him food and pushed him out of the house, which is how you move a drunk man.
You do not argue with him. You give him somewhere else to go. And it was around noon and then there is nothing. From around noon until half past two, two and a half hours, nobody wrote down a single thing. Mabel did not describe it. The neighbors did not describe it. The officers were not there and the man himself never said a word about it to anybody.
Two and a half hours in a house with a wall down the middle of it and nobody wrote any of it down.
Part 5Half Past Two
Half past two in the afternoon, Augustus came home. He found her sitting on the side of the bed with her head down, and he asked her what the matter was. That is the whole scene, and it is worth stopping on. A man comes home, finds his wife sitting on the edge of the bed with her head down, and asks her what's wrong. That is the most ordinary thing in this entire story, and it is the last ordinary thing that happened in that house. And she told him.
And then the wall did what walls of boards and paper do. She told her husband what had happened that morning, not loudly, not for anybody's benefit. A woman in her own room, telling her husband about a man who had come around the outside of the house, opened her screen door, walked in, and threatened to knock her head off. And there was no such thing as her own room, because the man she was telling him about was on the other side of a wall of one by twelve boards and paper. And he heard all of it, and he said something back through the boards. If you fool with me, I will take my old scatter gun, and I will shoot you through the wall. A man in the next room, saying he has a gun, and that he will fire it through the wall that the two of them are standing behind. And her husband answered him, No, don't do that, Pannell. Meet me outdoors.
That is what she says. He said six words, and they are not a refusal, and they are not a warning. They are an appointment. Then she heard the door open in Pannell's room. This is her account of the next few seconds. It is short, and it is precise.
When the door opened, Augustus got up, took his gun, and walked outside of his door, and Pannell was meeting him around the corner of the house. In that order, Pannell's door opened first. Her husband got up. He took his gun. He walked out of his own door, and Pannell was coming around the corner of the house. She did not go outside. Her account says so plainly, in the same breath, she didn't go out of the house. And then in her account, one sentence, and it is not about what she saw.
After the shot was fired, that is all she gives it. She does not say what she saw because she is not claiming to have seen anything. She heard it. She did not see it. And she never at any point claimed otherwise. Then her husband came back inside, and he laid his gun on the dresser. And then he left. And that is where this part ends. With her in that house, on her own. The gun was on the dresser. The man on the other side of the wall had not come back into his room. And Mabel stayed inside.
She did not go out. She did not look. And what happened in that that the next part of this story cannot come from her.
Part 6What the Yard Held
Quarter past five in the afternoon, Officer Charles Hefner was driving alone in a police car when the call came in. Go to 1714 and a half Tamaroa Street. He got there and found a man lying in the yard near the front of the house.
Blood was oozing out of his head from under the edge of the hairline. His head was to the southwest, his feet were toward the front of the house, and there was no weapon anywhere near him, no gun, no knife, nothing in his hands and nothing on the ground beside him. Eight feet from the southwest corner of the house, an officer picked up a hat, an old black hat, and in the front of it, where the brim comes out of the crown, there was a hole. A hole you could put a pencil through. The hat went into evidence. Then the officers went around to the back of the house.
That door opened onto a two-room apartment, and in it they found two things. The first was a woman sitting on the side of a bed, Mabel Shoals, sitting there when they came in, where she had been for the last several minutes and where she still was. The second was in the corner of the northwest room, a .22 caliber Winchester pump action rifle with an empty shell in the chamber and a loaded shell still in the magazine. One shot fired, one still in the gun, and no sign of Augustus Shoals.
They took the man in the yard to the Provident Hospital, Muskogee's Black Hospital. Dr. J. S. Chandler examined him at about a quarter past five and found a wound in his forehead. The newspapers would say the shot went through the top of his skull. The doctor wrote down the forehead.
Nobody ever settled it, and the skull was never probed for the bullet, and at about a quarter to six that evening Nathaniel Pannell died. The newspapers put it at 20 past. Both accounts are in the record, and they do not agree, and a citywide alarm went out.
Officers were sent chasing wherever he might have got to. At about a quarter to seven, two officers went back to a house just north of the Shoals house and found him in hiding and took him, and then in the police car, without anybody asking him a single question.
Well, I guess I am gone for a long time. Nobody had read him anything. Nobody had asked him anything. He said that himself, unasked. And then he said something else. To the officer in the same car. That he and Pannell had got into it, and that Pannell had threatened to shoot him through the partition in the wall with a shotgun. In the police car. Before he was questioned. Before anybody wrote anything down. The man had started building his account of that afternoon before he was even back at the station. And in about two hours, somebody was going to write that account down and put a pen in his hand.
Part 7The Captain’s Room
And that is where Mabel leaves this story. They put her in a police car and took her to the City-Federal Jail. She had been drinking that day, the record says so, and she never denied it. They kept her there overnight. And from that point on, this is not her story anymore. She is in a cell. Everything that happens next happens in rooms she was not standing in. Seven o'clock that evening, the captain's room at the Muskogee Police Department. There were a lot of people in it. John D. Luton, the assistant county attorney, R.T. Sypert, the sheriff of Muskogee County, Officer L. L. Parks, and a number of uniformed police officers standing in the room. And Augustus Shoals sitting down. He was told two things, that he did not have to make a statement if he did not want to, and that he was entitled to consult a lawyer if he wanted one. Both of those things were said to him. Both are in the record and nobody has ever disputed either one. And then Mr. Luton asked him questions and wrote down the answers. And when it was finished, Deputy Ronnie Rector read the whole thing back to him. And Augustus Shoals signed it. The sheriff signed underneath as a witness. So did others. And this is what the statement says. It is read here substantially as it was written. It is not summarized. March 3rd, 1952. I, Augustus Shoals, give this statement to John D. Luton, Assistant County Attorney Muskogee County, Oklahoma, in the presence of R.T. Sypert, Sheriff of Muskogee County, Oklahoma, and L.L. Parks, Muskogee Police Department, after I was informed of my rights and that I was entitled to call an attorney if I wanted to. I give this statement freely and voluntarily, and I have not received any promises, nor has there been any threats made to me. I had not been home since yesterday, March 2nd, 1952. I came home about 4 p.m. today. Mabel, my wife, told me that Nathaniel Pannell had been bothering her the night before and that Bessie Prince and Daisy Wofford had thrown him out of the house. About that time, Nathaniel started cursing Mabel through the wall of the house from his room. I told him to stop it and behave himself.
He told me to come outside and he would show me something. I got my gun and went outside to see him. He came out and began to curse me, and I told him he shouldn't act like that, but he kept it up, so I shot him. I killed him because he cursed me. I wasn't afraid of him. I took the gun back in the house and went to the toilet and hid.
Nathaniel didn't make any move to hit me and didn't have his shotgun or any other gun that I saw. I give this statement freely and voluntarily. I have heard this statement read to me by Ronnie Rector, Deputy Sheriff, and it is true and correct.
That is the whole statement. And this episode is named after one line of it, and there is nothing to add to it.
Part 8Upstairs to County Court
He was charged in City Court and he pleaded not guilty and he could not make bond, which meant that unless something changed, Augustus Shoals was going to sit in that jail until a jury decided what happened to him. The 11th of March, 1952, the preliminary hearing was supposed to happen that morning.
It did not. It was postponed to the 25th of March and meanwhile, that same day, Augustus Shoals went upstairs to County Court and there he was adjudged an incompetent person and put under the care of a guardian. The petition for incompetency said one thing. It said that his sole income was $60 a month for his services in the First World War and that he needed a guardian to manage his affairs.
$60 a month for his services in the First World War. That was the whole of it. One income, one amount, one reason. The guardianship was granted. The 25th of March, 1952, City Court, Judge J.F. Beavers, Augustus Shoals pleaded self-defense and Judge Beavers disagreed with him and ordered him held for trial in District Court. And the judge said, why? From the bench. On the record. I believe that that liquor crazed mind of yours was just as much inflamed as the liquor crazed mind of the dead man.
He stepped out of his own house and you killed a man before he gets away from his own doorway. That is the judge's ruling and it is 16 months before any appellate court says a word about this case. And then Augustus Shoals made a decision and it is the kind of decision a man makes when he has no money and no way out.
He chose to go before a district court jury in the term that was already running. The paper calls it an unusual action. He could have waited for the next term in the late fall or early winter, but he could not make bond. And waiting meant months more in a cell. So he took the term that was in front of him. And here's the sentence the newspaper printed about that decision. Earl Boyd Pierce, Shoals' attorney, took every precaution to make certain that Shoals was making the decision for an early trial all by himself. Every precaution to make certain that the man was making the decision for himself.
And that is where this part leaves it. On the 11th of March, a court declared him incompetent to manage his own affairs and gave him a guardian. On the 25th of March, his lawyer took every precaution to make certain that he was deciding for himself, and after that, the guardianship is never mentioned again. Not at the trial. Not on appeal.
Not anywhere in the record this case has been able to reach. The 21st of May, 1952. District court, Judge Francis Stewart. Augustus Shoals pleaded not guilty to murder. And the brief jury term was set to start the following Monday.
Part 9One Day in May
Monday, the 26th of May, 1952. One day. That is what it took. A jury of twelve, a day-long trial, and a verdict. The state's case was simple. Two assistant county attorneys, John Luton and Joe Cannon, stood up and said that Augustus Shoals had shot an unarmed man down in cold blood at 1714½ Tamaroa Street. Down in cold blood. That was the phrase they used. The defense was two men, Cecil Robertson and Earl Boyd Pierce, and their case was simpler still. That Shoals acted in self-defense. That he fired only after Nathaniel Pannell had threatened to kill both him and his wife with a shotgun.
And then Augustus Shoals took the stand. He told them that he came home and found Pannell had cursed his wife and tried to make her fix him supper. That Pannell overheard her telling him about it and cursed her again. And then said this through the wall. Why that damn black son of a bitch, I will take my gun and come over there and kill both of you. He said he asked Pannell whether he had lost his mind and Pannell said, hell no, I am not crazy.
And then Pannell got up and walked around the house. And when he got near the door, he said, come on outdoors, I will show you something. So, I got up and went on out. And then the questions, and this is the part of the transcript that matters.
He was asked whether Pannell made any move when he saw him. Yes, he was continuing cursing and he ran his hand in his pocket when he saw me and put his head down and kept coming. Which hand did he put in his pocket? His right hand. What did you do? Well, then I shot him. Why did you shoot him? Because I was afraid.
Because I was afraid. Two months earlier in the captain's room at the Muskogee Police Station, this man had signed a statement written down by the county attorney, read back to him by a deputy sheriff, signed by him, witnessed by the sheriff. And the statement says this. I killed him because he cursed me. I wasn't afraid of him. He told the police he was not afraid. And he told the jury he was. Those are the two things this case is made of. And both of them are his.
On cross-examination, he was asked more. He said Pannell's hand went into his pocket and that Pannell had an overcoat on and the overcoat was over his hand. He said he was 20 to 25 feet away when he fired. And he admitted that he did not see a shotgun or any other weapon in Nathaniel Pannell's hand when he came around the corner of the house. And then Mabel took the stand. Her husband had told the jury that Pannell called him out. Come on outdoors. I will show you something. That was the invitation and the invitation was the whole of the self-defense case.
And his wife got up and said that he did the inviting. That is what the paper printed. It is one sentence long. Mrs. Sholes, a crippled woman declared that Sholes did the inviting. And here is what makes that the center of this entire story. The listener has heard her say it once already. In her own words, in her own account. Nearly half an hour ago. Answering a threat to shoot through the wall.
No don't do that Pannell. Meet me outdoors. The horror of that moment is not that she lied. It is that she didn't. She said one more thing on that stand. That while her husband was away from home. Pannell had forced her to cook him a meal. And that was the case.
The jury went out and 35 minutes later they came back. Not guilty of murder. Guilty of manslaughter in the first degree. 35 minutes to reject murder. Reject self defense and land somewhere in between. And they could not agree on what the punishment should be. So they left it to the judge.
Part 10Something in Between
The 9th of June, 1952, District Court, Judge Francis Stewart, this was the sentencing, under Oklahoma law, a manslaughter sentence could run as low as four years or as high as life, and the jury had not been able to agree on which. Earl Boyd Pierce stood up and made the point. He told the judge that the jury obviously had not reached agreement on the maximum sentence, and Judge Stewart agreed with him. The jury did not agree that he should receive life imprisonment and I am not going to give him life imprisonment. Neither did they agree on four years and I am not going to give him four years. I am going to give him something in between. And then the defense said something else. They told the judge that Augustus Shoals was afflicted, and the judge answered that.
So was the white man that I sentenced last week, more so than this man. The white man he had sentenced the week before was 66 years old. His name was Charles Pitts. He came into that courtroom on a stretcher. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter for shooting a man named Allie Blair, his former carpentry partner, with a pistol on South Main.
Blair was unarmed, and Judge Stewart gave him 15 years. And the judge said at the time that 15 years for a man of Pitts' age was the equivalent of a life term. And here is the thing worth putting down plainly. Charles Pitts was a carpenter, and so was Augustus Shoals, self-employed, with his own tools and his own telephone number in the book, until his hands went in 1947.
Two carpenters in the same town, one white, one black. Each of them killed an unarmed man, and the same judge sentenced them a week apart and put them side by side himself, by race. The sentence was 12 years, and Judge Stewart set an appeal bond. $5,000. It was the same $5,000 Augustus Shoals had not been able to raise in March, which is why he was sitting in that jail at all, and why he had taken the court term in front of him instead of the one in the fall. He could not make it in March. He could not make it in June. And the defense said what they were going to do next. They said they would ask the state criminal court of appeals to tell Augustus Shoals what he should have done under the circumstances, whether he should have tried to crawl out through a window and escape, or whether he should have gone outside to meet him. That was the question.
It was a fair one, and it was the only one that mattered, because the man's whole defense was that he had no other door and nowhere else to go. And 16 months later, the court of criminal appeals answered. It affirmed the conviction, and it never addressed the question.
What that court did say in two sentences was this. The officer failed to warn the defendant that the statement, if he should make one, might be used against him. It is not too clear when the defendant was advised that he could see an attorney, whether before the statement was made or after.
The court wrote both of those sentences down, and then it affirmed the conviction.
Part 11The Same Ground
The bond was $5,000 and it was never made. 28 days after Judge Stewart said it, on the 7th of July, 1952, the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester received Augustus Shoals from Muskogee County, age 59. And then 13 months later on the 29th of July, 1953, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction and held that the statement he had signed in the captain's room had been freely and voluntarily given.
He had been in prison for 13 months when they decided that. The order of those two dates is the whole of the comment. And then he came out. On the 6th of June, 1956, Augustus Shoals was released from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He was paroled.
He was 63 years old, three years and 11 months of a 12-year sentence. Who decided that is not recorded? Why is not recorded? And who spoke for him is not recorded. The card carries the date and nothing else. So it is not mercy and it is not luck. It is a date on a card and parole is not discharge. He did not walk out of there a free man, but put the arithmetic down and then leave it alone.
A judge stood in open court and reasoned out loud between four years and life. He chose 12 and he explained the choice by pointing at a white man he had sentenced the week before. That number lasted three years and 11 months, undone by people whose names are in no record. And here is the name. The state of Oklahoma wrote his name on that prison card. S-H-O-A-L-S. The prison that held him for four years could spell it. The court that took 12 years off him never once did. Not on the judgment, not in the briefs, not on a single page of the opinion that still carries his name. He went home. Back to Muskogee, back to the same town, and on the 24th of September, 1964, at 71 years old, Augustus Shoals married a woman named Emma Greer. And then there is the other one. He had married Emma Greer once before.
The 5th of July, 1949. Two years and eight months before he stepped out of that door and shot Nathaniel Pannell. And this is where the record stops being able to help. So it is worth being careful because it would be very easy to make that sound like something it may not be. Everybody in Muskogee called Mabel his wife. The newspapers did. The police did. The county attorney did. She swore to it on the stand, and he never said otherwise. And outside of one court opinion, there is no Mabel. Not in the marriage books, not in the death records, not in the census, not in nine newspapers, not a line. What the record does say before and after is that the woman on the paperwork was Emma. That is a hole in the record. It is not an accusation. And somewhere in the 12 years between, Mabel was gone, died or divorced or simply gone. The record does not say which. And it is not going to.
He died on the 14th of November, 1966. He was 73 years old. And on the 21st of November, 1966, the United States buried Augustus Shoals at Fort Gibson National Cemetery, Section 10, Site 2448 under a government headstone that reads, Private United States Army, World War One.
He had been drafted in the last summer of the war, and he was out by Christmas. Nathaniel Pannell had been in that same cemetery since the 10th of March, 1952. Same ground, same war, same government, same kind of stone. And there is one more thing he said from the stand about that room on the only day anybody ever asked him about it. That is the only door I had. And if I stayed in there and never came out, he could have hemmed me up in there. He came out of that door on the 3rd of March, 1952.
And a man died in the yard. 14 years later, they carried him through the gate of a cemetery that already held that man. And the government paid for the stone. Thank you for listening to Forgotten True Crime. Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.