Part 1Cold Open
Sunday night. July the sixth, 1952. Oklahoma City.
Somewhere after eleven o'clock, a police lieutenant named Robert Grimes walks into the emergency room at Mercy Hospital.
I can't tell you much about Grimes. The record gives me his rank, his last name, and one night of his life. This is the night.
There's a man on the table. He's twenty-seven years old. He's been shot once, low, through the abdomen, and the gun that did it was a .38 caliber service revolver.
A police revolver.
Because the man on the table is a police officer. He rides a scoutcar for the Oklahoma City Police Department. His name is Delbert Beaman.
Grimes does what you do when a man is hurt this badly and there's a chance he won't be able to tell you later. He gets close, and he asks him what happened.
And Delbert Beaman talks.
He tells Grimes about an argument. He tells him where the gun came from — a dresser drawer, in the apartment where he lives. He tells him what was said to him in that room.
And he names the person who shot him.
Then — and I want you to hear the order of this, because the order is everything — after all of that, Delbert Beaman says one more thing to Lieutenant Grimes.
It isn't a fact. It isn't an accusation. It's a request.
He says:
"I don't want anything to happen to Jackie."
Seven months from now, in a district courtroom in Oklahoma County, twelve people are going to stop what they're doing, file back in, and ask to have Robert Grimes's testimony read to them one more time. Out of a three-day trial. Out of everything they heard.
That.
And then they're going to make a decision that a prosecutor spent the next year and a half trying to get somebody — anybody — to explain.
To understand what that sentence meant, and what it was about to cost, we don't start in the apartment.
We start about twenty months earlier. At a country church five miles south of Edmond, on the day after Thanksgiving.
Part 2Introduction
Welcome to Forgotten True Crime. I'm your host, Trevor Shelby.
Before we get into it, I want to take just a second to tell you what this show is. Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast — and I mean independent. There's no network, no studio, no staff. It's one man. I do the research, I write the episodes, I record them, I edit them, and I get them out into the world — every step of it. So if you enjoy what you hear today, the single best thing you can do is simple: share it. Tell a friend about the show. Post an episode on your social media. Leave a review wherever you're listening right now. It takes you thirty seconds, and for a show like this one, every little bit helps more than you know. Thank you for that — and thank you for being here.
If you're new here, make sure you subscribe so you know when new episodes drop, and come find us on YouTube and Facebook under "Forgotten True Crime." And I want to point you to the blog at Section29.com, because this one is worth looking at. This episode is called Murder or Nothing: The Death of Officer Delbert Beaman, Oklahoma City, 1952 — and on the blog I've put up the newspaper clippings this whole story is built from, the marriage license, the census page, and photographs of both of these people, restored and colorized, including one taken in a courthouse hallway that I have not been able to stop looking at. All the links are in the description.
One more note — this is a crossover episode with my other podcast, Okie Investigations, which is a new effort to focus on local stories from my home state.
Now — the usual reminder before we begin.
Everything in this episode comes from the record: Oklahoma newspapers, court documents, census pages, a marriage license. What I'm going to do today is tell you this story the way I've come to believe it happened, built out of that record. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll tell you I'm doing it. And where the record simply doesn't know — and in this story it doesn't know a lot — I'll tell you that too. This episode involves the shooting death of a young man and a marriage that went very wrong very fast. Listener discretion is advised.
Let me set the scene for you. July, 1952.
America is in its third summer of the Korean War, and the truce talks have been dragging on so long the papers have half stopped covering them. It's an election year. In fact, on the very morning this story begins — the small hours of Monday, July the seventh — the Republican National Convention is opening in Chicago, and for the first time in American history, a political convention is going out live, coast to coast, on television. Families are gathering around a piece of furniture in the living room to watch democracy happen in real time.
And it is the worst summer for polio this country has ever had. Nearly fifty-eight thousand cases in 1952. Mostly children. Parents are keeping their kids out of swimming pools and movie theaters and away from each other, all summer long, in the heat.
That's the world outside. Inside a garage apartment in the twenty-one-hundred block of Northwest Eleventh Street in Oklahoma City, a twenty-seven-year-old police officer and his twenty-one-year-old wife are having an argument about five dollars.
Five dollars. Hold onto that. In 1952 that's real money — sixty-some dollars today — but it is not the kind of money anybody dies over.
By the following morning, the wire services had moved the story out to every corner of Oklahoma. It ran up in Blackwell and out in Elk City and clear up in the Panhandle at Guymon. And a couple of days later, a paper way over in Miami, Oklahoma, ran it under a headline I want to read to you exactly as it was printed, because it tells you everything about how this was going to go:
"O. C. Woman Who 'Dislikes' Officers Held for Murder."
That's the whole thing, isn't it. Before a single witness had been sworn, before a lawyer had stood up, that was the headline.
I found this case the way I find most of them — sideways. I was reading an old Oklahoma court opinion, four paragraphs long, so dry it could start a fire, and buried in it was one sentence that stopped me cold. I'll read you that opinion before we're done. But I went looking for the story behind it and found something I did not expect: a case that had a dead policeman, a dying man's last words, a medical condition nobody in 1952 wanted to say out loud, a justice of the peace threatening to throw a defense attorney in jail from the bench, a jury of seven women, a judge who made one decision that changed absolutely everything, and a prosecutor who appealed a case he had already lost — and then never showed up to argue it.
All of it happened right here. And almost nobody talks about it today.
So let's fix that.
But we're not starting in that apartment. To understand what happened in that room, you have to know how those two people got into it — and that starts about twenty months earlier, on the day after Thanksgiving, at a little country church out past the north edge of town.
Part 3The Day After Thanksgiving
Delbert Ira Beaman was a country boy.
He grew up south of Spencer, out on the eastern edge of Oklahoma County, where the city runs out and the section roads start. He went to a place called Star school — one of those little rural schools that used to dot every township in this state and have almost all been consolidated out of existence since. His parents were Mr. and Mrs. A. I. Beaman. He had a brother named Bill Gene.
That is genuinely most of what I can tell you about the first twenty-some years of his life, and I want to be honest about that, because it bothers me. There's no yearbook photo I've found. I don't know if he played ball. I don't know whether he went into the service — he was born around 1924 or '25, which would have made him draft age in the last stretch of the Second World War, and a lot of Oklahoma boys his age went. I can't confirm that he did.
What I know is that at some point the country boy from Star school put on a uniform for the Oklahoma City Police Department, and by 1952 he was riding a scoutcar. That's the patrol car. That's the job where you take the calls as they come, all night, and you never know what's on the other side of the door.
And I know he carried a .38.
Now the other one.
She was born Jacquelyn Kay Collins, on the thirty-first of January, 1931, and she grew up a hundred miles southeast of Oklahoma City in a town called Sasakwa, down in Seminole County.
Everybody who actually knew her called her Jackie. The newspapers called her Jacquelyn. The courts called her Jacquelyn. The census taker who came to her door wrote it down a third way. But her sister-in-law called her Jackie, and her neighbor called her Jackie, and — we'll get to this — her husband called her Jackie. So that's what I'm going to call her.
Her father was Luther D. Collins, born over in Arkansas. Her mother was Opal. She had one brother, Kenneth, about a year older than her. Seminole County in the years Jackie was small was oil country — the big field had come in a few years before she was born and it had made and unmade a lot of people down there. Her brother would grow up to keep the books for an oil field tool company.
And somewhere in there, when Jackie Collins was eleven years old, something started.
I'm not going to tell you what yet. I'm going to tell you that it started when she was eleven, and that it never stopped, and that it is the single most important fact in this entire story.
Remember that. Eleven years old.
By the spring of 1950 the Collins family had left Sasakwa and come to the city. In April, a census taker named Cleo Banks walked up to a house at 1909 Northwest Thirty-first and wrote down four people. Luther, fifty-two. Opal, forty-two. Kenneth, twenty, bookkeeper, forty hours a week. And Jacqueline, nineteen, at home, no job.
One small thing on that page has stayed with me. Luther Collins was fifty-two years old, and in the column asking whether he worked last week, the answer is no. Whether he was looking for work: no. Whether he had a job at all to go back to: no. The census doesn't say why, and I'm not going to guess. But in that house, in the spring of 1950, the paycheck was coming from the twenty-year-old.
I don't know how Jackie Collins met Delbert Beaman. I've looked. The record does not say, and I'm not going to make something up for you.
What the record says is this. On Tuesday, the twenty-first of November, 1950, the two of them went down to the Oklahoma County courthouse and swore out an application for a marriage license. He gave his address as 229 Northeast Fourth. She gave hers as 1909 Northwest Thirty-first — her mother and daddy's house. He put his age down as twenty-five.
She put hers down as nineteen.
And three days later — on Friday, the twenty-fourth of November, 1950, the day after Thanksgiving — they were married at a place called the Lone Star Baptist Mission, which the certificate describes as rural, five miles south of Edmond, out on Eastern. A country church. Not a church in town. Not a church back home in Sasakwa. A little mission out past the north edge of the city, on the day after Thanksgiving, by a minister named D. W. Hobbs.
Two people signed as witnesses. A man named Joseph Marbut and his wife Helen.
Not a Beaman. Not a Collins.
I've looked at that certificate a lot. It's a completely ordinary document. Nineteen and twenty-five, a country church, the Friday after Thanksgiving — half the marriages in Oklahoma in 1950 probably looked exactly like it.
Delbert Beaman had five hundred and ninety days left.
Part 4What She Told His Family
They set up in a garage apartment at 2112½ Northwest Eleventh.
I want you to notice the half. Twenty-one-twelve and a half. That's the upstairs unit — the one over the garage, or behind the house, reached by an outside stair. In 1952 Oklahoma City there were hundreds of them, and they were where young couples started out. One or two rooms. Thin floors.
Thin enough that the woman downstairs could hear what happened up there.
Her name was Mrs. Orna Vaughan, and I want you to remember her, because in about ten minutes she's going to open her door in the middle of the night and find something she was not prepared for.
Twenty blocks north, Jackie's mother and daddy were still in the house on Northwest Thirty-first.
Now. Here is everything I can tell you about five hundred and ninety days of that marriage.
He worked nights in a scoutcar. She was twenty, and then she was twenty-one. They rented the upstairs of a garage apartment. There were no children that I can find any trace of. And at some point they got into an argument about a five-dollar bill.
That's it. That's the whole marriage, on the record.
I've been doing this a while now, and that gap is the thing I've come to hate most about these old cases. You can find out what a man's badge number was and never once find out what he was like at his own kitchen table. Nobody wrote down whether they were happy. Nobody writes that down until something goes wrong.
But something did go wrong. And months later, in a courtroom, two people got up under oath and gave us one small window into that apartment.
They weren't her people. They were his.
In the spring of 1952 — about sixteen months into the marriage — Jackie Beaman said something to her husband's brother, Bill Gene, and to Bill Gene's wife, Mabel. And later, sworn in as witnesses for the State of Oklahoma, both of them repeated it.
Mabel Beaman said it like this:
"Jackie said, 'one of these days I'm going to have to shoot him.'"
Now I want you to hear that sentence one more time, because there's a word in the middle of it that I cannot get past.
One of these days I'm going to have to shoot him.
Not I'm going to shoot him. Not I'd like to shoot him. Not I'll shoot him if he doesn't quit.
Have to.
That is not the grammar of a person making a plan. That is the grammar of a person who believes a day is coming when she won't have a choice.
And listen to who she said it to. She didn't say it to her mother, twenty blocks away. She didn't say it to a girlfriend. She said it to her husband's brother and her husband's brother's wife — the two people in the world most likely to go straight back to him with it.
Bill Gene Beaman testified to a second one. He said: "She told me and my wife she would take a blackjack and beat him."
And I'm not going to smooth that one over for you, because I don't think it goes the same direction. A blackjack is a policeman's tool. It's the thing on his belt. I'll take a blackjack and beat him is not the language of a frightened woman. It's the language of somebody who is angry, and who knows exactly which object in that apartment would hurt him the most.
Both of those quotes are in the record. I'm giving you both.
Here's the part that stopped me, though.
When it was the defense's turn, her lawyer asked Bill Gene and Mabel a simple question. He asked whether Jackie had said those things in a joking manner.
And both of them — the dead man's brother, and the dead man's sister-in-law, sitting there as witnesses for the prosecution —
both of them said yes. They thought she was joking.
So think about where that leaves us.
A twenty-one-year-old woman tells her husband's own family that one of these days she is going to have to shoot him. And they laugh. And nobody calls anybody. And nobody asks her what she means by have to. And three months later he is on a table at Mercy Hospital with a bullet in his stomach.
Was she joking? Were they right?
Or was that the only way a young woman in 1952 could say a thing like that out loud — as a joke, at a family visit, so that if it landed wrong she could laugh too?
I don't know. I want to be careful here, because there is no evidence in this record — not one police call, not one hospital visit, not one witness — that Delbert Beaman ever laid a hand on his wife. I have looked for it. It isn't there.
What's there is one sentence, remembered by his brother's wife, with the words have to sitting in the middle of it.
Sunday, July the sixth, 1952 was a hot day at the end of a hot week.
That night, in the upstairs of a garage apartment on Northwest Eleventh, Delbert and Jackie Beaman started arguing about five dollars.
Part 5Sunday Night
Here is what Jackie Beaman told the police happened.
They were arguing about the five dollars. A five-dollar bill that was supposed to be somewhere and wasn't. And during that argument she went looking for it — she started going through the drawers of a dresser in that apartment, pulling them open, looking for the money.
And in the top drawer of that dresser was her husband's service revolver.
She said she moved it. She said it went off as she was putting it back.
Her words, from the newspaper, four days later:
"I heard the gun go off but I did not pull the trigger intentionally. I don't know where he was standing when the gun went off. I heard him cry out."
I don't know where he was standing.
I heard him cry out.
That is the whole event, in her telling. She never sees it. She hears it. A woman looking for five dollars in a dresser drawer, a gun in her hands for a second, a noise, and then her husband making a sound.
Now — I'll tell you plainly that this account has a problem, and the problem is that a gun going off while it's being set down in a drawer tends to leave physical evidence about how far away the person was and at what angle. Powder burns. Trajectory. The police in 1952 knew how to look for that, and I have not been able to find a single line in the record about what they found. It may be in a court file in Oklahoma County. It is not in the newspapers.
Hold that thought. It's going to matter later, in a way you won't expect.
Because while that was happening upstairs, there was a woman downstairs.
Mrs. Orna Vaughan lived in the unit below. And what she said — what she told police, and what the wire services printed within about thirty-six hours — is that she heard the gun go off.
And then somebody came to her door.
Think about what that means for a second.
Delbert Beaman has just been shot in the stomach. He is a police officer. He knows exactly what has happened to his body. He knows he needs help, right now, faster than anything.
And he does not stay in that apartment.
He gets himself out the door, down the stairs, to a neighbor's door — a woman whose apartment he has probably never been inside — and he knocks.
Now, what he said when that door opened comes down to us in two versions, and I'm going to give you both, because the papers did not agree and I'm not going to pretend they did.
The first version ran on the Associated Press wire the very next day, and it's attributed to Mrs. Vaughan by name. In that version, Delbert Beaman says:
"Help me. Jackie has shot me."
The second version ran a day later, also on the AP wire, and this one is hedged — it says he "reportedly" told "a neighbor." In that version, what he says is:
"Don't let me die. Jackie shot me."
I don't know which one of those is the exact sentence. Probably nobody ever did. A woman standing in a doorway in the middle of the night with a bleeding man in front of her is not taking dictation.
But look at what both versions have in common.
He asks for help.
And he says her name.
The scoutcar came. His own kind of car. And the officers who answered that call — men who did the same job he did, on the same shift, in the same town — those men later told reporters what the wounded man said to them.
They said Delbert Beaman told them he was shot after his wife told him she was going to shoot him.
They put him in an ambulance and they ran him to Mercy Hospital.
And that is where we came in.
Somewhere after eleven o'clock, in the emergency room at Mercy, a police lieutenant named Robert Grimes got close to a dying man and asked him what happened. And this time I'm going to give you all of it.
Grimes testified — months later, under oath, in a district courtroom — that Delbert Beaman told him his wife grabbed his gun from a dresser and said, quote:
"I'm going to kill you."
Grabbed it. Not moved it. Not put it back. Grabbed it — and said four words.
That is the exact opposite of everything Jackie Beaman told the police. She said she was looking for money and the gun went off. He said she took the gun and told him what she was about to do with it.
One of those two people was not telling the truth. That's not a subtle case. That's a head-on collision, and it's the case the State of Oklahoma was going to have to win.
And then — after saying that, after naming her, after telling a superior officer that his wife announced she was going to kill him and then did it —
Delbert Beaman said one more thing to Lieutenant Grimes.
"I don't want anything to happen to Jackie."
I have turned that over in my head more times than I can tell you.
He had every reason to be angry. He had every reason to want somebody to answer for it. He was twenty-seven years old and he was dying on a table over five dollars, and the last thing he chose to do with the breath he had left was ask a policeman to go easy on his wife.
Why?
Was it love? Twenty months of marriage and he still couldn't bear the thought of what would happen to her?
Was it guilt — did Delbert Beaman know something about what had been going on in that apartment that made him feel he had it coming?
Or did he know something about Jackie that Lieutenant Grimes didn't know yet? Something that would explain what happened in a way that nobody standing in that room understood?
At one o'clock in the morning, on Monday, July the seventh, 1952 — about two hours after the shot — Delbert Ira Beaman died at Mercy Hospital.
He was twenty-seven.
And before the sun came up, his wife was in a cell.
Part 6“I Didn't Like Policemen”
Monday morning, July the seventh, 1952. Delbert Beaman had been dead for a few hours.
Jackie Beaman was arrested and held without bond.
The man in charge of the case was the head of the Oklahoma City homicide bureau, a captain named Wayne Harbolt, and on Monday Harbolt told reporters he was going to ask the county attorney to file charges. It's Harbolt who gave the press the detail about the five dollars. That's how we know that part at all — a homicide captain told a reporter what the fight had been about.
And somewhere in there, in an interview room, with her husband's colleagues sitting across from her, Jackie Beaman said something that the Associated Press decided to put in the headline.
She told the investigating officers she "didn't like policemen."
Okay.
Let's just sit with that one for a minute, because I have gone back and forth on it more than anything else in this case.
Here is the situation. She is twenty-one years old. Her husband has been dead for a matter of hours. She is in custody, held without bond, in a police building, being questioned about the death of a police officer, by police officers.
And what she says is that she doesn't like policemen.
Now — read that one way, and it's the single most damaging sentence she could possibly have produced. It's motive, volunteered, for free, to the people building a case against her. A prosecutor could take those five words into a courtroom and do an enormous amount of damage with them, and one of them was going to try.
Read it another way, and it's something else entirely. Because who says that? Who, in that chair, in that building, on that morning, tells a room full of police officers that she doesn't care for their kind?
Not somebody being careful. Not somebody performing.
Somebody who is past all that.
And here's my honest problem with it, which I have to put in front of you: I have seven words. That's it. Didn't like policemen. I don't have the sentence before it or the sentence after it. I don't know what she was asked. I don't know if she said it flat and cold or said it crying. I don't know if she said policemen meaning her husband, or meaning the men in that room, or meaning something that had happened to her that we know nothing about.
A wire service in 1952 needed a headline, and that was the headline. Everything around it is gone.
I want that full statement. It may exist, in the Oklahoma City papers of that week, and if I ever get it I will tell you.
That same Monday, they took her in front of a justice of the peace named Paul Powers — and remember that name, because Paul Powers is going to matter a great deal, and not in a way you would guess.
She pleaded innocent.
The wire copy says she did it "between sobs."
And then they took her back to her cell in the county jail.
Now the machine gets going.
Within thirty-six hours this story was everywhere in the state of Oklahoma. It ran up north in Blackwell. It ran west in Elk City. It ran clear out in the Panhandle at Guymon and away over in the northeast corner at Miami. It ran in Ada and Enid and Alva and Frederick and Wewoka and Seminole and Holdenville.
Every corner of the state. Inside of two days.
And this is where the story stops being about two people and starts being about what people decided those two people were.
The paper in Miami, Oklahoma, ran it like this: "O. C. Woman Who 'Dislikes' Officers Held for Murder."
A little later, a paper up in the Panhandle at Guymon ran a story about her under the words: "Slayer Of Husband."
Slayer.
She was twenty-one years old. She had been charged, not tried. There would not be a jury in a box for another six months. And a newspaper printed the word slayer over her name.
I'm not going to be too hard on those editors — that's how they wrote in 1952, and every one of those papers was working off four paragraphs of wire copy and a deadline. But I want you to hold onto those headlines, because when we get to the end of this episode, I'm going to ask you to remember what the papers called her.
And here's the part of the coverage that got to me.
Two little papers in this state covered this case differently than everybody else, because to them it wasn't a crime story. It was a hometown story.
Down in Seminole County, the Wewoka paper and the Seminole Producer ran their stories under headlines about a "Former Sasakwan." They dropped their own little boxed paragraph right into the middle of the wire copy to tell their readers who she was: Mrs. Beaman is the former Jacquelyn Kay Collins, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Luther Collins, and lived most of her life in Sasakwa, attending school there.
That's not crime reporting. That's a small town saying: we know her.
And out on the other end — out east of Oklahoma City, in the country where Delbert grew up — the little papers in that township did the same thing for him. They ran his story and then added the part the wire never carried: that Delbert Beaman had lived south of Spencer, and gone to the Star school, and that his parents were Mr. and Mrs. A. I. Beaman.
Two country kids. And in July of 1952, two sets of country neighbors, a hundred miles apart, opened their local papers and read about them.
One more thing from that week.
On Tuesday, July the eighth, the Daily Oklahoman ran photographs of both of them. And I've spent a lot of time with that clipping, because of what the paper chose.
They did not run a police photograph of Delbert Beaman in his uniform. And they did not run a jail photograph of Jackie.
They ran studio portraits. Both of them. The kind you'd sit for at a shop downtown and give to your mother. He's in a suit and tie, in three-quarter profile. She's in a light blouse with a lace collar, dark hair, looking down and slightly away.
I had both of those restored and colorized, and they're up on the blog if you want to see them. And I'll tell you what struck me: they look like a young married couple. Which is what they were, nineteen months earlier, at a country church out past Edmond.
So that's Monday. Charges coming, a plea entered between sobs, a cell in the county jail, and her name in every paper in Oklahoma over the word slayer.
Then came Tuesday.
And on Tuesday — one day after she was arraigned, with her husband not yet in the ground — Jackie Beaman's attorney walked into a district judge's courtroom and did something that nobody covering this case saw coming.
He didn't argue that she was innocent.
He put on evidence about her.
Part 7The Thing That Started When She Was Eleven
Tuesday, July the eighth, 1952.
Her lawyer's name was Dave Shapard, and on Tuesday he walked into the courtroom of an Oklahoma County district judge named Albert C. Hunt, and he put on testimony.
Not about the gun. Not about the dresser drawer. Not about the five dollars.
He put on testimony that Jacquelyn Beaman had suffered from epileptic fits for the past eleven years.
Eleven years.
Remember what I told you back at the beginning? That when Jackie Collins was eleven years old, something started, and it never stopped, and it was the most important fact in this entire story?
That's it. That's the thing.
She was born at the end of January, 1931. Eleven years old puts us in 1942 — a little girl in Sasakwa, Oklahoma, in the first year of the war. And from that year forward, for the rest of her life, Jackie Collins had seizures.
Six months later, at her trial, her attorney would put it to the jury in almost exactly those words: that she had been subject to epileptic attacks since she was eleven.
Now. I need you to understand what that word meant in 1952, and I'm not going to lecture you about it — I'm going to let the newspapers do it, because the newspapers are brutal and they're right there in the record.
When the papers wrote about what happened next — a young woman with a seizure disorder being sent for medical evaluation — here is how they headlined it.
A paper in the Panhandle ran: "Slayer Of Husband Goes To Asylum."
A paper down in Ada ran: "Expect Ruling On Slayer's Sanity."
Asylum. Sanity.
That's what epilepsy was in 1952. It wasn't a neurological condition you managed with medication and a driver's license restriction. It was a question about your mind. It went in the same box as insanity, and the box was called an asylum, and the newspapers didn't think twice about printing it that way.
So when I tell you that Jackie Beaman had epilepsy from the age of eleven, understand that she grew up in a country that had decided what that meant about her long before anybody in Oklahoma City had to make a decision about her.
Judge Hunt granted the request. He ordered a mental examination.
And I want to flag something about that, because it took me a second read to catch it.
The defense asked for it.
Think about that. Normally, in a murder case, it's the prosecution that wants a defendant examined, or the court that orders it over an objection. Here, nine days after her husband died, it is Jackie Beaman's own lawyer standing up and asking a judge to have his client examined by doctors.
That is not a delay tactic. That is a man who has looked at the facts of his case and decided that the medical question is the case.
So here is where the summer of 1952 went for Jacquelyn Kay Beaman.
Around Friday, July the eighteenth — eleven days after her husband died — she was committed to a private psychiatric clinic in Oklahoma City. The papers called it the Coyne Campbell hospital, or the Coyne Campbell-Sleeper clinic. She was there under observation for two weeks.
Then, on Thursday, July the thirty-first, they moved her. They transferred her to Central State Hospital, down in Norman, for a second examination.
She was there until Monday, the eleventh of August, when they brought her back to a cell in the Oklahoma County jail.
Add it up. From the middle of July to the middle of August, a twenty-one-year-old widow spent the better part of a month inside two mental institutions, being looked at by doctors, and then went back to jail.
And notice the shape of those two examinations, because it tells you something.
The first one was at a private clinic, and the defense chose it. The second one was at the state hospital. And when Judge Hunt finally made his ruling, the report he acted on was the report from the state psychiatrists.
Somebody wanted their own look. The record doesn't tell me who asked for it or why. But the defense picked the first doctors, and the State got the last word.
Here's a small thing I love.
The day before Hunt ruled, the Associated Press ran a story saying the judge was expected to decide "today" — and then this line: "Usually reliable sources speculated she would be judged sane and bond set for her release."
Usually reliable sources. Somebody in that courthouse told a reporter the answer before the judge said it out loud.
And they were exactly right.
On Tuesday, the twelfth of August, 1952, District Judge Albert C. Hunt ruled that Jacquelyn Kay Beaman was mentally competent, and ordered her released on a ten-thousand-dollar bond to await trial.
Ten thousand dollars. In 1952. That is something like a hundred and twenty thousand dollars today, for a girl from Sasakwa whose daddy hadn't worked in two years.
Somebody found that money. I don't know who. But somebody in her life put up the equivalent of a house to get her out of that jail, and I think that's worth saying out loud, because it means that whatever the papers were printing about her, there were people who did not believe it.
Now — the defense had swung for something, and it looked like they'd missed.
But here's the thing, and it's the thing that makes this whole case work, so stay with me for thirty seconds.
Being ruled mentally competent answers one question and one question only: is this person able to stand trial? Can she understand the charge, sit in the room, help her own lawyer?
The court said yes. She could.
That is a completely different question from: what was happening in her body and her brain at eleven o'clock at night on July the sixth, in that apartment, with a gun in her hand?
Nobody had ruled on that. Nobody had even asked it yet.
The epilepsy didn't die in August. It just stopped being a reason to avoid a trial —
and became the thing she was going to be tried on.
She walked out on bond on the twelfth of August.
She had exactly seven weeks of freedom in front of her. And then a justice of the peace named Paul Powers was going to hold a hearing that got so far out of hand the prosecution eventually threw the whole thing away and asked to start over.
Part 8Kangaroo Court
Jackie Beaman was out on bond from the twelfth of August, 1952.
Where she went, I don't know. Back to her mother's house on Northwest Thirty-first is my guess — she was twenty-one, newly widowed, and charged with murder, and I have a hard time picturing her going back to that garage apartment. But the record doesn't say, and I'm not going to pretend it does.
What I know is that she had seven weeks.
Her preliminary hearing got set, and then it got continued. And then it got set again, and continued again.
For those of you who haven't sat through one: a preliminary hearing is where the State has to show a judge that it has enough to send somebody to trial. It's not the trial. There's no jury. But it's the first time the prosecution has to put its evidence out loud, in a room, with the defense sitting right there — and that makes it, very often, the most revealing day in the whole case.
Hers finally happened on Wednesday, the first of October, 1952, in the justice court of Paul Powers.
Remember him? He's the one who took her innocent plea between sobs, back in July.
It started badly.
The hearing was supposed to open at a certain hour and Jackie Beaman was not there. Her lawyer, Dave Shapard, stood up with a physician's affidavit saying his client was ill, and asked for another continuance.
And Paul Powers had had enough. He pointed out — correctly — that this hearing had already been put off twice. And he told Shapard he had a choice: produce Mrs. Beaman, or forfeit that ten-thousand-dollar bond.
She walked in forty-five minutes late.
Then the State put on its case. And the State's case, that morning, was his family.
You already know what they said, because I told you in the beginning. His brother, Bill Gene Beaman. His brother's wife, Mabel. Both of them testifying that back in the spring, Jackie had told them she was going to kill or beat her husband. One of these days I'm going to have to shoot him. A blackjack.
And both of them, on cross-examination, agreeing they had thought she was joking.
That's what the State had. That, and a dying man's words.
Now Dave Shapard went to work, and the man was relentless.
He asked for another delay. Denied. He asked again. He asked Powers for a change of venue — he wanted this case tried somewhere other than Oklahoma County, and you can understand exactly why. A police officer had been killed in Oklahoma City. His fellow officers were witnesses. His department was in the building. Shapard did not believe his client could get twelve fair jurors in the dead man's own town, and he said so, over and over.
And Paul Powers got sick of hearing it.
At one point Powers looked at him and said:
"You talk too much."
And Shapard — and I love this man a little, I'll be honest with you — Shapard fired straight back:
"Yes sir, I do. But my client's taking a raw deal."
And Paul Powers came half out of his chair and shouted at him:
"You sit down and shut up before I put you in jail."
Shapard sat down.
Picture that room. A justice of the peace, half out of his seat, screaming at a defense attorney that he'll throw him in a cell — at a preliminary hearing — in a case where a policeman is dead — with the dead man's brother and sister-in-law sitting right there having just testified.
And a twenty-one-year-old girl at the table, who got there forty-five minutes late with a doctor's note.
That is the room.
At the end of it, Powers bound her over to district court to stand trial for murder.
Without bond.
She went back to jail that afternoon.
Two days later — Friday, the third of October — they took her up to district court in front of Judge Hunt, and she pleaded not guilty.
And Shapard stood up and moved to dismiss the whole charge. He argued the State didn't have enough evidence. And then he said, on the record, exactly what he thought of the proceeding he had just sat through in Paul Powers's court.
He called it "nothing more than a kangaroo court."
Judge Hunt overruled him and set the case for a jury trial.
But — and this matters — Hunt let her out again. Ten-thousand-dollar bond, restored. She was inside for about two days.
Now. The county attorney's office told reporters they expected to try this case in November.
That is not what happened. And here is why, and it is the single strangest thing in this case that has nothing to do with the shooting.
On Wednesday, the fifth of November, 1952, an assistant county attorney named Hubert Gibson — remember that name, he is going to be with us to the very end of this story — announced that the State of Oklahoma was going to ask for a brand-new preliminary hearing.
Not the defense. The prosecution.
Gibson said he was going to ask a different district judge, Clarence M. Mills, to send the case back down to a different justice of the peace — a man named Elmo McCallister — and hold the entire preliminary hearing over again from scratch.
And he gave his reasons out loud, to a newspaper. He said he had decided on it after studying the testimony given at the first hearing — and because Mrs. Beaman contended her constitutional rights were violated.
Read that again.
Somebody in the county attorney's office sat down with the transcript of what Paul Powers did on the first of October, read it all the way through, and concluded that it would not hold up.
Prosecutors do not volunteer to redo a hearing they believe in. Ever. It costs them time, it costs them money, it gives the defense another crack at their witnesses, and it makes them look bad. You do it when you have looked at what happened in that room and decided that a higher court is going to look at it too, and you are not going to like what they say.
So think about where that leaves Dave Shapard.
He lost the continuance. He lost the change of venue. He lost the motion to dismiss. He got told to sit down and shut up before he was put in jail. He lost every single ruling in that room.
And five weeks later the prosecution walked into the press and gave him the whole hearing back.
The loudmouth was right.
Now, I have to tell you something I don't know, because it bothers me.
I cannot tell you whether that second preliminary hearing ever actually happened.
Gibson said he was going to ask for it, on the fifth of November. And the next time this case surfaces in the newspapers, it is the middle of January, 1953, and Jackie Beaman is walking into a district courtroom to be tried for murder. Whatever happened in between — whether Judge Mills granted it, whether Elmo McCallister held it, what came out if he did — I have not found. It's in a court file in Oklahoma County, and I'd love to see it.
What I can tell you is that the delay is how a killing in July of 1952 does not get to a jury until the following winter.
Tuesday, the twentieth of January, 1953.
Six and a half months after Delbert Beaman died at Mercy Hospital, the State of Oklahoma finally put his wife on trial for murder.
It took three days.
Part 9Three Days in January
Tuesday, the twentieth of January, 1953. Oklahoma County District Court. The Honorable Baker H. Melone presiding.
And the first thing I noticed about that courtroom is that Dave Shapard wasn't in it.
By January, Jackie Beaman had two new lawyers. George Hill, out of McAlester. And Frank Grayson, out of Holdenville.
Look at a map for a second. McAlester and Holdenville are both down in southeastern Oklahoma. And Holdenville — Frank Grayson's town — is about fifteen miles from Sasakwa.
Her family had gone home and gotten lawyers from home.
For the State: Hubert Gibson.
And before the trial started, Gibson told a reporter what his case was going to be. He said he planned to call ten witnesses — and I'm going to read you how the wire described them, because it's everything:
"mostly police officers and medical men who talked with the victim, Delbert Beaman, 27, before he died."
Remember back in Act Three, when I told you I couldn't find one line in the record about powder burns, or range, or the angle of that shot? And I told you to hold that thought?
Look at the witness list.
The State of Oklahoma did not go into that courtroom with a ballistics case. It went in with the words of a dying man. Ten witnesses, and most of them are there to tell twelve strangers what Delbert Beaman said in the last two hours of his life.
That's a powerful case. It is also a narrow case. And narrow cases can break.
Then Frank Grayson stood up and told the jury what the defense was.
He told them Jackie Beaman had been subject to epileptic attacks since she was eleven years old. He told them that during that argument over the five-dollar bill, she was thrown into a seizure — and that she blacked out.
And here is the full shape of it, as the Daily Oklahoman later summarized it:
They said she was brought back to reality by the gunshot, and her husband's scream.
Sit with that image, because it's the defense's entire case in one sentence.
In their telling, Jacquelyn Beaman was not in that room. Not in any way that counts. She goes into the dresser drawer looking for five dollars, something happens in her brain that has been happening since she was eleven years old, and the next thing she is aware of in this world is a gunshot and the sound of her husband screaming.
Now — you can believe that or not believe it. But understand what it is, legally. It isn't self-defense. It isn't an accident in the ordinary sense of a clumsy mistake. It's a claim that there was no conscious act at all. That nobody, in the legal sense, did anything.
Hold onto that. In about ten minutes it is going to become the most important thing in this entire episode.
Wednesday, the twenty-first of January. Day two.
Jacquelyn Beaman took the witness stand in her own defense.
They started her easy. Grayson asked her the simple things first — the things you ask to settle a nervous witness down. Her weight. Her age.
Where she was from.
She said her former home was Sasakwa, Oklahoma.
The reporter in that courtroom wrote down two details about how she said all of it. He wrote that her voice was barely audible. And he wrote that she sobbed frequently.
Now — she had already testified, earlier, to the bones of her account. That her husband was killed when his service pistol accidentally discharged. That the pistol had come out of a dresser drawer while she was going after the five-dollar bill they'd been arguing about.
(And I'll note in passing that the way she put it on the stand — the pistol fell out of the drawer — isn't quite the way it was reported back in July, where she said it went off as she was putting it back. The papers give both. Six months apart, a twenty-one-year-old under oath, and I'm not going to make more of it than that.)
And then Frank Grayson asked his client the question the entire trial had been built toward.
He asked her to turn and tell the jury everything that happened on July the sixth.
Jackie Beaman turned in the witness chair and faced the jury.
And she froze.
Grayson asked her again.
Nothing.
He asked her a third time.
And a woman came out of the gallery.
Her mother — Opal Collins, who the papers only ever called Mrs. Luther Collins — got up and rushed to her daughter's side.
And Frank Grayson, her attorney, a lawyer from Holdenville in the middle of a murder trial, picked his client up in his arms and carried her back to her chair.
George Hill went out and talked to the reporters. And what Hill said is one of the most human things in this entire record:
"This is just one of those epileptic attacks. Her hands are cold as ice. They come on like that."
He also told them something else. He said he had been afraid all along that she would collapse under the strain of the trial.
Judge Melone recessed the proceedings.
Alright. Let's talk about what just happened, because this is the hinge of the whole case and I want to be fair to everybody in that room.
Her defense was that she blacked out at the moment her husband was shot.
She was then asked, in front of twelve people, to describe that moment.
And she blacked out again.
There is no cross-examination for that. There is no question Hubert Gibson can ask. He has ten witnesses lined up who can tell that jury what a dying police officer said, and not one of them touches a young woman who cannot speak.
Now — I've read this two ways, and I'm going to give you both, because the newspapers themselves couldn't decide.
Read it one way, and it is the truest possible corroboration of a defense. You can't fake cold hands. You can't fake going away. Everything the defense claimed about her, the jury just watched happen.
Read it the other way, and notice the timing. Grayson told that jury on Tuesday that his client blacked out during the shooting. She collapsed on Wednesday. Whatever the jury saw, they had been told the day before exactly what it was going to mean.
And look at how carefully the reporter wrote it. He didn't write "she had a seizure." He wrote that she suffered "what her attorney termed" an epileptic attack. He wrote that she froze in "an apparent trance." Hedged, twice, in one paragraph.
Even the man in the room wasn't sure.
One last thing about that day, and then I'll let it go.
That story went out on the wire, the same words, to papers all over Oklahoma. And you can tell exactly how close each town was to Sasakwa by the headline they put on it.
Up in Alva, three hundred miles away in the northwest corner, the headline was: "Beaman Trial Is Recessed."
Fifteen miles from her hometown — in Holdenville, Frank Grayson's own town — the headline was: "Mrs. Beaman Is Unable to Talk; Falls in Trance." And under it, a second line: Voice Barely Audible.
Same story. Same day. Same words on the wire.
One of those towns was reading about a case. The other one was reading about a girl.
Part 10Murder or Nothing
Thursday, the twenty-second of January, 1953. Day three.
The trial came back together, and the lawyers made their closing arguments.
Hubert Gibson stood up in front of that jury and said this:
"There are too many coincidences here — too many to make it ring true."
And that is, honestly, a pretty good closing. Because look at what he's got. A gun in a drawer. A woman who told his family she'd have to shoot him one day. A woman who told police she didn't like policemen. A dying man who said she grabbed the gun and told him she was going to kill him. And a seizure — a seizure! — at the exact instant a trigger got pulled.
Too many coincidences.
And then Frank Grayson got up and answered him with one sentence. And I have to tip my hat, because it's a hell of a sentence:
"If she had wanted to kill Delbert Beaman she could have pumped his body full of bullets — but only one shot was fired."
One shot.
If you mean to kill a man, you don't stop at one.
And then, with the testimony finished, before the jury got the case — a legal argument happened in that courtroom that I would give almost anything to have a transcript of.
The County Attorney's office asked Judge Melone to add something to his instructions. They asked him to tell the jury they could also convict Jacquelyn Beaman of manslaughter in the first degree.
Now stop and think about how strange that is.
The State charged this woman with murder. Murder means she meant to do it. That's the whole case Gibson just argued — the threats, the dying declaration, too many coincidences.
Manslaughter is the lesser thing. Manslaughter is what you call it when somebody dies in the heat of a moment, in a quarrel, without a design to kill. It carries years instead of a life sentence.
And it is the prosecutor asking for it.
Prosecutors do that for exactly one reason. They do it when they can feel a jury slipping away from them, and they would rather have a conviction for something than an acquittal for everything. Hubert Gibson had sat in that room for three days. He had watched his own witnesses. He had watched the defendant collapse on the stand. And somewhere in there he stopped playing to win and started playing not to lose.
And her lawyers objected.
Read that again — the defense objected to the lesser charge. They stood up and told Judge Melone that the State didn't get manslaughter. That on this evidence, they said, the crime —
and this is their phrase, out of the appellate record —
"would be murder or nothing."
Murder or nothing.
There's your title.
And that is not a bluff. That is not lawyers being greedy. Once you understand their theory, it is the only thing they could have said.
Because manslaughter still requires a person doing something. A culpable act. A wrongful choice in a hot moment.
And the defense's whole case was that there was no act at all. A seizure. A blackout. Nobody home. If the jury believed that, there was no crime of any size in that apartment — not murder, not manslaughter, nothing.
So they told the judge: don't give them a middle. There isn't one. She's a murderer or she's innocent, and you cannot be a little bit unconscious.
Judge Baker H. Melone heard the argument.
And he sided with the defense.
In his instructions, Melone held that a first-degree manslaughter verdict could not be rendered in this case.
Which means that when the jury of Oklahoma County took this case, they had exactly two doors in front of them.
Turn Jacquelyn Beaman loose.
Or send a twenty-one-year-old woman to the state penitentiary for life.
Nothing in between.
At 11:27 on Thursday morning, the case went to the jury.
Seven women. Five men.
And I want to stop on that for one second, because in 1953 Oklahoma that is not a small thing. Seven women, in a box, deciding what to do about a wife who shot her husband.
Their foreman was a man named C. E. Dixon. He was a mail carrier. He lived at 124 Southwest Forty-sixth. I like knowing that. Somewhere in Oklahoma City there was a guy who delivered the mail all week and then had to decide this.
They deliberated for forty-eight minutes.
And at 12:15, the jury of Oklahoma County came back into that courtroom — not with a verdict, but with a request.
They asked to have one witness's testimony read back to them.
Out of a three-day trial. Out of ten State witnesses. Out of the defendant's own collapse on the stand. Out of everything they had heard.
They asked for Lieutenant Robert Grimes.
The man from the emergency room at Mercy.
And you know what's in that testimony. You've known since the first two minutes of this episode.
Robert Grimes told that jury that Delbert Beaman said his wife grabbed his gun from a dresser and said, "I'm going to kill you."
And Robert Grimes told that jury that Delbert Beaman said, "I don't want anything to happen to Jackie."
Both of those sentences were read out loud, a second time, to twelve people who were about to decide whether that woman went home or went to prison for the rest of her life.
I have thought about this a great deal, and I want to be honest with you: I do not know which half of it they came back for.
Maybe they wanted to hear the accusation again, to be sure. Maybe they wanted to hear the other thing again — the thing the dead man asked for.
Nobody wrote it down. Nobody asked them.
They went back in at 2:30 in the afternoon.
At 4:35 p.m. on Thursday, the twenty-second of January, 1953, they came out.
Not guilty.
The Daily Oklahoman reporter noticed that Jacquelyn Beaman had sat through nearly all three days of her own murder trial with — his words — little show of emotion.
Then Judge Melone read the verdict that C. E. Dixon handed him.
And she came apart. She burst into violent sobbing on her mother's arm. And as they led her out through what the paper called a group of jubilant friends and relatives, she was crying on the shoulder of a woman named Bonnie Biggs — described in the paper as her life-long friend.
Life-long. That means Sasakwa. That means this woman had known Jackie Collins since they were little girls in a town of a few hundred people, and she was standing in a courthouse hallway in Oklahoma City on a Thursday afternoon in January holding her up.
There's a photograph of that moment. It's on the blog. Everybody around her looks happy. She doesn't.
Now.
Afterward, some of those jurors talked to a reporter. And what they said is the single most important thing in this entire case.
They said that on the very first ballot, the jury stood nine to three for acquittal.
Nine wanted to let her go. Three did not.
And the three who did not — listen to this — the three holdouts came over to acquittal because they could not render a manslaughter verdict.
There it is.
Three people on that jury looked at this case and did not think Jacquelyn Beaman was innocent. Three people wanted to convict her of something. They wanted the middle door — the heat-of-the-moment door, the quarrel-that-went-wrong door.
And Judge Melone had nailed it shut that morning. At the State's own request, over the defense's objection.
So those three people had a choice between sending a twenty-one-year-old to prison for the rest of her life over a five-dollar bill, and letting her walk out the front door.
They let her walk.
The defense's gamble — murder or nothing — did not just work. It worked exactly the way it was designed to work, on the exact three people it needed to work on. And we don't have to guess about that, because the jurors said so out loud to a newspaper.
Two more things about that Thursday.
The first one is a piece of irony I can't get over. Back in October, Dave Shapard had fought like a badger to get this case out of Oklahoma County. He was certain — certain — that his client could not get a fair jury in the city where the dead man wore a badge.
An Oklahoma County jury acquitted her in about three hours.
And the second thing is this.
Just before the verdict was read — before anybody in that room knew what those twelve people had decided — Hubert Gibson stood up and served notice that he was appealing Judge Melone's instructions to the Criminal Court of Appeals.
Before. The. Verdict.
He told the reporters he knew it couldn't touch her — she'd been tried, and under the law of this country she could never be tried again for it. But he said a ruling from the higher court "will have affect on future cases."
He wanted the law fixed.
Hold that thought too. Because what Hubert Gibson did next is the reason nobody has heard of Jacquelyn Beaman.
Part 11What Came After
Jacquelyn Beaman walked out of that courthouse on the twenty-second of January, 1953, a free woman. Under the law of the United States she could never be tried for her husband's death again, no matter what anybody found later.
Four months went by.
And then, on the thirteenth of May, 1953, somebody filed a lawsuit in Oklahoma County District Court. Case number 130720.
The plaintiff was a woman named Maude I. Beaman, and she was suing as the administratrix of the estate of Delbert I. Beaman, deceased.
I can't prove this yet, and I'll tell you that up front — but Delbert's parents were listed in the papers as Mr. and Mrs. A. I. Beaman, and I am fairly confident Maude Beaman was his mother.
And the two defendants in that lawsuit were the Occidental Life Insurance Company of California —
and Jacquelyn Beaman.
What they were fighting over was a group life insurance policy. Number 753150.
Two thousand dollars.
About twenty-three, twenty-four thousand dollars in today's money. A young patrolman's death benefit.
Now, I want to be careful here, because I have the filing and I do not have the petition, so I can't quote you their legal theory. But when the estate of a dead man goes to court to stop a life insurance payout from reaching his widow — and the widow is the person who was accused of killing him — there is really only one thing that argument can be.
It's a very old principle: you cannot profit from a death you caused.
And here's the part that matters. A criminal jury has to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. That's the highest bar in American law, and Jacquelyn Beaman had already cleared it.
A civil court is different. In a civil case you only have to convince the court that something is more likely than not.
Lower bar. Different room. Second try.
His family went back to court to prove what the State of Oklahoma could not.
And I want you to hold two things next to each other for a second.
Delbert Beaman, on a table at Mercy Hospital, in the last two hours of his life, with a bullet in his stomach, told a police lieutenant: "I don't want anything to happen to Jackie."
His mother sued her.
I'm not going to sit here and judge Maude Beaman for that. Her twenty-seven-year-old son was dead, shot with his own gun, and twelve strangers had just told her that nobody was responsible for it. If it were my son I don't know what I'd do either. That family had nowhere left to go and they went to the only place that was still open.
There's one more small thing in that filing that tells you how bad it had gotten. An administratrix is what a court appoints when somebody dies without a will — and normally the surviving spouse has first claim on that job.
It wasn't Jackie. It was Maude.
So somewhere in the Oklahoma County records there's a second case file, a probate case, where that family and that widow fought over who got to bury him and settle his affairs. I haven't seen it.
And I have to tell you the most frustrating sentence in this entire episode: I do not know how that lawsuit came out.
I have the day it was filed. I have the answer date. And then the trail goes cold. It's in a courthouse in Oklahoma City, and it is the thing I most want and don't have.
Which brings us back to Hubert Gibson.
Remember, he gave notice of appeal before the verdict was even read. He wasn't trying to touch Jackie Beaman — he knew he couldn't. He wanted the Criminal Court of Appeals to settle the law for the next case. Whether a trial judge can take manslaughter away from a jury like that.
And the county paid for it. Somebody sat down and transcribed that entire three-day trial into a formal record and sent it up to the higher court, at Oklahoma County's expense, because Hubert Gibson wanted a ruling.
The case was docketed. Number A-11966. State of Oklahoma versus Jacquelyn Kay Beaman.
It was set down for oral argument.
And nobody came.
The State of Oklahoma never filed a brief. On the day it was called, no one appeared for the State. Not Gibson, not the county attorney, nobody.
The court's language is dry as a bone. "Under such circumstances we treat the appeal as having been abandoned."
I don't know why. But I've got a theory that fits everything, and I'll give it to you for what it's worth.
Gibson said he only wanted the law settled for future cases. Well — on the twentieth of January, 1954, the Criminal Court of Appeals decided a different case, called Igo versus State, and in it they answered his exact question. Six months before the Beaman appeal was ever going to be argued.
He'd already gotten his ruling. In somebody else's case. So there was nothing left to argue.
That's a guess. But it's a guess that explains every fact I have.
And here's the thing. The court answered the question anyway.
On the seventh of July, 1954, the Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals handed down four paragraphs in State versus Beaman. And I want to note the date on that, because I sat and stared at it for a while.
Delbert Beaman died at one o'clock in the morning on the seventh of July, 1952.
The opinion came down on the seventh of July, 1954.
Two years to the day.
And the court said — quoting that Igo case — that where a defendant is charged with murder, it is the duty of the trial court to instruct on manslaughter if there is any evidence that the crime might have been committed under circumstances that would reduce it. And it doesn't matter whether that evidence came from the State's witnesses or the defendant's or both.
Any evidence.
So let's be clear about what that means.
Judge Baker H. Melone got it wrong.
And it wasn't a technicality, and it wasn't academic, and we know that for a fact — because three people sat in that jury room and wanted to return exactly the verdict he had taken away from them.
The Criminal Court of Appeals put it in writing in July of 1954. Eighteen months too late for it to mean a thing.
Two days after that opinion came down, the legal newspaper in Oklahoma City printed it for the lawyers of this state to read. I have that clipping.
And I want to describe it to you, because it is the reason this episode exists.
It's a column of type under the heading "Criminal Court of Appeals." Case number A-11966. The State of Oklahoma, plaintiff in error, versus Jacquelyn Kay Beaman, defendant in error. Appeal from the District Court of Oklahoma County, the Honorable Baker H. Melone, Judge. Opinion by Jones. Powell and Brett concurring.
And then a syllabus — one long sentence about the duty of a trial court to instruct on manslaughter.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
There is nothing in it about a garage apartment on Northwest Eleventh. Nothing about a five-dollar bill. Nothing about a woman downstairs opening her door in the middle of the night. Nothing about a little girl in Sasakwa who started having seizures when she was eleven years old. Nothing about a man on a table at Mercy Hospital asking a police lieutenant to go easy on his wife.
Nothing about the fact that the State never showed up.
Read it cold, seventy years later, and it looks like any other decided case. A tidy rule for lawyers to cite.
That document is where Delbert and Jackie Beaman went to be forgotten. And it worked — it worked completely, for seventy-three years.
Part 12Closing Thoughts
So that's the case.
An Oklahoma City police officer was shot in the stomach with his own service revolver during an argument about five dollars, and he died two hours later, and his twenty-one-year-old wife was charged with his murder and acquitted in three hours by a jury of seven women and five men.
Now let me tell you what I actually think.
I'll start with what I don't believe, because it's shorter.
I do not believe this was murder. I don't think the State proved it and I don't think it happened. If Jackie Beaman went into that dresser drawer intending to kill her husband, then Frank Grayson's question in closing has never been answered by anybody: why is there one shot? One. Out of a loaded revolver, in a room the size of a garage apartment, against a man she'd apparently been planning this for months. You don't fire once and then run down the stairs behind him.
And the murder charge asks me to believe that a woman who had been having seizures since she was eleven years old had one at the precise instant that was most convenient for her, and then had another one on the witness stand six months later, in front of a jury, on cue, complete with hands that a lawyer described as cold as ice.
That's a lot.
But I'll tell you what I also don't believe, and this is the harder half.
I don't fully believe the blackout either.
Not because I doubt the epilepsy — the epilepsy is real, it's documented, it goes back eleven years, and her own lawyers were putting it in front of a judge nine days after the shooting, before anybody had figured out what the defense would be. That's not manufactured.
It's the seams that bother me.
Her account changed. In July she told police the gun went off as she was putting it back in the drawer. On the stand in January, the pistol fell out of the drawer. Small, but not nothing.
And her account and Delbert's cannot both be true. She said she didn't pull the trigger intentionally and didn't even know where he was standing. He told Lieutenant Grimes she grabbed the gun and said I'm going to kill you. Those are not two people remembering a chaotic moment differently. Those are two completely different events.
And there's the thing the State never seems to have had, and that I could not find in a single newspaper: the physical evidence. Powder burns. Range. Angle. A gun that discharges while it's being set down in a dresser is a very different piece of evidence from a gun fired at a man across a room. Somebody must have looked. Nobody ever printed what they found. And Hubert Gibson walked into that courtroom with ten witnesses who were there to repeat a dying man's words, which tells me the physical proof was not the strong part of his case.
So here's where I come down.
I think something was badly wrong in that garage apartment, and I think the truth of what happened in it is somewhere the law of 1952 had no box for.
I keep going back to one sentence — and it's not the dying declaration. It's the thing Mabel Beaman testified to. Sometime that spring, Jackie Beaman looked at her husband's brother and her husband's brother's wife and said: one of these days I'm going to have to shoot him.
Have to.
That is not the sentence of a woman making a plan. That's the sentence of somebody who thinks a day is coming that she won't be able to get out of. And she said it to his family — the two people most likely to carry it straight back to him. Which is either a threat delivered by proxy, or it's a woman putting a thing on the record with the only people she had, in the only way she could, and hoping somebody would ask her what she meant.
Nobody asked. They thought she was kidding. They said so under oath.
And I have to be straight with you here, because it would be easy for me to take that sentence and build you a story about a battered young wife, and you'd probably believe me, and it might even be true.
But there is nothing in this record — not one police call, not one hospital visit, not one neighbor, not one relative, not one line in any newspaper — that says Delbert Beaman ever laid a hand on his wife. I looked hard. It is not there. And a woman also told his family she'd take a blackjack to him, which is not the language of someone who's afraid.
So I don't get to tell you that story. I only get to tell you that the sentence exists, and that it has the words have to in the middle of it, and that it has bothered me for two weeks.
Here's what I keep coming back to.
Three people on that jury got it right.
Three of those twelve looked at all of it — the dying declaration, the threats, the seizure, the one shot — and they landed in the middle. They didn't think she was a murderer. They didn't think she was innocent, either. They wanted manslaughter. A death that happened in a hot, stupid, cornered moment over five dollars in a one-room apartment on a Sunday night.
And I think that's probably what it was.
That verdict was available. It was the right size for this case. And it was taken off the table on Thursday morning at the request of the man prosecuting her and over the objection of the men defending her, and eighteen months later a higher court said out loud that taking it away had been a mistake.
So the truest verdict in this case is the one nobody was allowed to return. Murder or nothing wasn't just a defense strategy. It was the whole problem.
And when you only leave twelve people two doors, don't be surprised which one they walk through.
There's a lot I still don't know, and I'd rather admit it than dress it up.
What was the five dollars actually about? Not the money — the money isn't the point. What was the fight underneath the fight?
What did she mean when she told those officers she didn't like policemen? I have seven words and no context, and I want the rest of that sentence more than anything else in this case.
What did the physical evidence show?
Did that second preliminary hearing ever happen?
How did the insurance lawsuit come out — did his mother win?
Where is Delbert Beaman buried? I have not found his grave. A twenty-seven-year-old Oklahoma City police officer, killed with his own service weapon, and I cannot tell you where he's lying. I'd like to fix that.
And the biggest one. Why did he protect her?
A man is dying. He knows he's dying. He's already told a police lieutenant that his wife took his gun and told him she was going to kill him. And then he spends some of the little breath he has left asking that nothing happen to her.
Was that love? Was it guilt — did Delbert Beaman think, in some corner of himself, that he had earned it? Or did he know something about his wife that nobody else in that emergency room understood yet — something about what happens to her when she goes away — and was he trying, in the last minutes of his life, to explain it to a man who didn't have the words yet?
I don't know. I've thought about it a lot. I don't know.
Now. Let me tell you what happened to them.
Delbert Ira Beaman was twenty-seven years old.
Jacquelyn Kay Beaman was acquitted on the twenty-second of January, 1953 — nine days before her twenty-second birthday.
Her father, Luther Collins, died three years later, in 1955, in New Mexico. That family did not stay in Oklahoma. They went west, and they kept going, and they ended up in California.
And I believe — I want to be honest with you about the word believe — I believe I found her.
There's a woman in the Social Security death records named Jacquelyn K. Skrobis. Born the thirty-first of January, 1931. Social Security number issued in Oklahoma, before 1951 — which is exactly what a girl living on Northwest Thirty-first would have gotten as a teenager.
She remarried. A man named Richard John Skrobiszewski, born in Wisconsin in 1927. He died in San Francisco in 1996.
And Jacquelyn K. Skrobis died on the fifth of August, 2003, at San Rafael, California, in Marin County — up above the Golden Gate, about as far from a garage apartment on Northwest Eleventh Street as a person can get in this country.
She was seventy-two years old.
That's not proof. It's the right name, the right middle initial, the right birthday, and a Social Security card issued in Oklahoma in the right years, and if it isn't her then it's the most remarkable coincidence I've run into doing this show. But I want you to know exactly how sure I am, which is: pretty sure, and not certain.
If it's her, then Jackie Collins of Sasakwa, Oklahoma, lived another fifty years and six months after twelve people let her go.
She was widowed twice. Once at twenty-one, in a garage apartment. Once at sixty-five, in California.
And she outlived Delbert Beaman by fifty-one years.
He got twenty-seven. She got seventy-two.
So let me leave you where I came in.
July the sixth, 1952. A garage apartment. Five dollars. One shot from a police revolver.
A man gets himself down a flight of stairs and knocks on a stranger's door and tells her his wife has shot him. His own kind of men come and load him into a car. And in an emergency room at Mercy Hospital, a police lieutenant named Robert Grimes leans over him and asks him what happened, and Delbert Beaman names her.
And then he says one more thing.
"I don't want anything to happen to Jackie."
The newspapers of this state called her a slayer before a single witness was sworn. A justice of the peace threatened to jail her lawyer for saying she was getting a raw deal. She spent a month of that summer in two mental hospitals. His mother sued her for two thousand dollars. And the law of Oklahoma remembers all of it as one dry sentence about jury instructions with her name on the front of it.
But that dying man got the last word, and nobody has ever noticed.
He asked that nothing happen to Jackie.
Nothing did.
Part 13Outro
Before I let you go — I need help on this one.
There are real holes in this story and I think some of you can fill them. I would love to know where Delbert Beaman is buried. I would love to find his obituary, or a photograph of him in uniform, or anything at all from the family he grew up in south of Spencer. If anybody out there is connected to the Beaman family of eastern Oklahoma County, or the Collins family of Sasakwa, or the Skrobis or Skrobiszewski family in California — I would very much like to hear from you.
And if anybody has access to the Oklahoma County court records, there are two files I want: case number 130720, the insurance lawsuit from May of 1953, and the trial record in A-11966, which is the only place the full testimony of that three-day trial still exists, if it exists at all.
You can reach me at Section29.com. And if you've got a forgotten case of your own you'd like me to dig into, reach out there too. I'm always looking for the next one.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of Forgotten True Crime. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves true crime. Head over to Section29.com for the clippings, the marriage license, the census page, and the restored photographs of Delbert and Jackie — including the one from that courthouse hallway. All the links are in the description below.
Until next time, I'm Trevor with Okie Investigations.
Stay safe out there.
Just know you are unique, you are special and you are loved.