Part 1Cold Open
Five past eight on a Saturday morning, the eighteenth of March, 1944. Weleetka, Oklahoma.
A man named Albert Gardner is carrying the milk.
He does this every morning. He knows the route and he knows the store — a grocery and filling station on the corner, the pumps out front, the door with the glass in it. And he knows the man who runs it, because the man is always in the same place.
Arley Keck sits in a chair just inside that front door, with the radio going. He is sixty years old. He sleeps in the back of his own store so the pump can stay on all night for the truckers coming through, and by five past eight he has been up for hours.
So Gardner comes in the way he always does. Sets the bottles down. Starts to say good morning.
And he looks over at the chair by the door.
The chair is empty.
By that afternoon there were bloodhounds in the street outside, brought up from the state penitentiary at McAlester. There was a fingerprint man on the road from Oklahoma City. There were officers from three towns in that store, and a county attorney, and a county judge, and a reward posted inside of a week.
It was going to be two years before anybody was arrested for this.
And when they finally took a man for it — I want you to hold onto this, because it's the whole thing — when they finally took a man for it, they had already had him. They'd had him in a cell. And they had let him go.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime, the True Crime Podcast where we tell the stories of crimes that happened long ago. If you are a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. That way, when we have new episodes, you will be the first to know. Also, check us out on our Youtube and Facebook pages "Forgotten True Crime." Visit our blog Section29.com where we post many cool things we found for each episode. This episode, The Pepper on the Trail, has the clippings, the grave, the prison record, and the front page of a Black newspaper out of Oklahoma City that named the man who actually solved this case when the wire services didn't. The links are in the description below.
Parts of this story may contain opinions and speculations and should be taken as such. What I'm going to do today is tell you this story the way I've come to believe it happened, built out of the newspaper record and the public documents that survive. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll try to tell you I'm doing it. These stories depict violent crimes of all types and may be a trigger for some listeners. This one has a death described plainly, it has language out of 1944 that I am not going to say out loud, and it has a photograph that officers made on purpose to fool a man in a room. Listener discretion is advised.
And let me tell you, this story has everything. A grocer who slept in his store. Red pepper thrown over everything a man touched. A boy of that family in a Japanese prison camp while it happened. Two years, three suspects, nobody charged. And a box of black pepper that nobody looked at twice for two years.
Eastern Oklahoma, spring of 1944. And almost nobody talks about it today. So let's fix that.
Part 3The Store, and the First Twelve Days
So here's where we are.
Weleetka, Oklahoma. Okfuskee County, the eastern half of the state. The Frisco line runs right through the middle of town, and a few miles off there's another road, the Fort Smith and Western, which runs out through Boley and Vernon and on toward Okemah, which is the county seat.
That railroad matters to this story twice, and I'll come back to it.
It is the spring of 1944, so the town is emptier than it ought to be. Everybody's boys are gone. The paper runs the induction lists and the service notes and the little items about who's home on furlough, and in between all that, life goes on — the school, the churches, the Red Cross drive, an outbreak of measles.
And on the corner there's a grocery and filling station that a man named Arley Keck has been running since 1934.
I want to tell you about him, because he is the only person in this story who never gets to say anything.
He was sixty years old. Born in January of 1884, though nobody in Weleetka seems to have known that — every account of him, every single one, calls him "about sixty-five." His own town was off by five years on him. That is not a mistake I'm correcting. That's a fact about how well anybody knew him.
Before the store he worked years for the Fort Smith and Western. Then he bought the corner and put his name on it.
He was a Mormon, in eastern Oklahoma, in 1934. He'd been a Mason twenty-five years. He had a wife he'd been married to for decades, and nine children.
Two of those children were in the war. Ford Keck was in the navy. And Truman Keck was a prisoner of the Japanese — taken at Guam, at the very beginning of it, which means that by March of 1944 that family had been more than two years without knowing much of anything.
I'm going to say that once more so it sits right. While all of this is happening in Weleetka, one of his sons is in a camp on the other side of the world.
Now. The store.
Keck slept in it. There was a bed in the back, and he kept the filling station open all night for truck traffic, which is why he sat in that chair by the front door with the radio on — so he'd hear a car pull in.
His daughter Alice worked beside him that Friday night. She left somewhere between ten o'clock and midnight and went home, and her father stayed, the way he did every night of his life.
The doctors who looked at him the next morning put the time at around one or two.
He was found eight or ten feet inside his own front door, with his feet toward the door.
He'd been struck first with a blunt instrument. Then with a meat cleaver from his own store.
His pockets were turned inside out. And here's the first thing about this case that doesn't sit flat: whoever did it missed the money. Missed two separate places Keck kept cash. Never forced the drawer. Turned a dead man's pockets out and walked past the till.
And then there was the pepper.
Red pepper had been thrown over virtually everything the killer had touched — the body, the floor, the way out. That is an old idea and it is not a stupid one. Red pepper is supposed to ruin a dog.
Officers went through what was on that floor and listed it out. Among the things they listed was a box of black pepper, opened, and not used.
Nobody thought anything of it. Why would you.
The dogs came up from the penitentiary at McAlester that afternoon, and here's the thing — the pepper didn't work. The dogs took the trail out of the store and carried it to the Frisco tracks, and lost it there, which tells you the man went out along the rail line, which tells you almost nothing else. The officers found footprints and said they'd been made by, quote, "high heel cowboy boots, or a woman."
An empty pepper can turned up some distance from the store.
So that's the scene. And now the county comes.
Sheriff Wes Kennedy of Okfuskee County. The county attorney, Bill Seawell, and his assistant, Dane Seran. The county judge, Roy Parham. The town marshal in Weleetka, R. B. Harper, who was lately home out of the navy and was working this thing quietly in his own town.
And the undersheriff. Sullivan Thompson.
Thompson is the man I'm going to walk you through this with, and I'll tell you now why I picked him. He is not the one who decides anything. He doesn't file the charges, he doesn't set the bond, he doesn't pass the sentence. He is just there — he is there in the store that first morning, he's there nine days later talking to a reporter, he's there in another state a year later, he's there in the room when the whole thing finally breaks in 1946. Every stage of it, and never once the man in charge of it.
So what he could find out is what we find out. And what he couldn't, we don't.
Here's the first thing he couldn't.
There was never a coroner's inquest in this case. The county attorney said there was no question about the cause of death, and that was the end of it. Two Weleetka doctors looked at the body at ten in the morning and said he'd been dead about eight hours.
That is the entire medical record of Arley Keck's death. Two sentences, in a newspaper. There is no autopsy report to go find. I looked.
Now, that first week, the officers did what officers do. They picked up a number of people for investigation.
One of them was a Weleetka man named Albert Simon. He was held in the jail a few days. He said he didn't know anything about it. They let him go.
They buried him that week.
And I want to give you this, because it is the only picture we get of what Weleetka thought of Arley Keck. He was a Mormon. He was buried out of the First Christian church, by the Baptist pastor, assisted by the Methodist pastor, with the Masons conducting the service at the graveside.
Four denominations and a lodge, for one man. That is not what a town does for somebody it merely knew.
Within about ten days the store was open again, and there was an advertisement in the county paper saying so. His daughter Alice — the last person who had been in that building with him — had taken it over and was running it.
The same corner. The same door. The same chair.
And the county posted a reward. Two hundred and fifty dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the party or parties responsible.
Nobody ever collected it.
Nine days in, a reporter caught up with Undersheriff Thompson and asked him where the case stood, and Thompson said there were no new developments.
And then he said one more thing, and it's the kind of thing you'd skip right past.
He said fingerprint experts were working on the case.
Experts. Plural. Nine days in.
Hold that too. We're going to need it.
Part 4The Man from the Other County
I have to take you out of Okfuskee County for a little while.
Sixteen days after Arley Keck was found on his own floor, and about sixty miles west of Weleetka, something happened that made every officer in central Oklahoma stop what they were doing.
Monday, the third of April, 1944. In one afternoon, three people were killed. A farm woman named Mrs. Walter Gorski and her three-year-old daughter Martha, on a farm in Lincoln County. And a farmer named Roy Schat, who was forty-seven, in Cleveland County.
If you listened to the last episode of this show, you know that story, and you know how it ends. I'm not going to tell it twice. What I need you to see today is what it did to the case we're actually following.
Because for four days there was a manhunt across two counties. And on the night of Friday the seventh of April, in the brush west of Shawnee, a posse of Pottawatomie County officers and twenty-five sailors out of the naval station there — because it's 1944, and that is who was available — put about a hundred and fifty shots into a river bottom, and pulled a man out of it alive.
At half past three the next morning they had him in a cell in Chandler.
His name was Amon Johnson. He'd done three terms at McAlester for stealing livestock, and he had been out about four months.
He was twenty-nine years old. Probably.
I say probably because I went looking for when this man was born, and I got four different answers out of four different records — his draft card, the wire stories, a prison census, and the stone they eventually put over him. Nineteen thirteen. Nineteen fourteen. Nineteen fifteen. Take your pick.
I'm not going to pretend to settle that for you, because I think the disagreement is worth more than the answer. Four separate arms of the state of Oklahoma wrote down this man's age, and no two of them wrote down the same one.
Here's the part I do know, and it's the part that matters.
Amon Johnson was born at Vernon, in McIntosh County — an all-Black town, one of dozens founded in this part of Oklahoma, sitting on a rail line called the Fort Smith and Western.
That's the second time.
The same railroad Arley Keck worked for, for years, before he ever bought a store. It ran from Weleetka out through Boley and Vernon and on toward Okemah, and it strung those towns together into one small world where a grocer and a livestock thief could grow up sixteen miles apart along the same set of tracks.
That is not a connection. I want to be clear that it is not a connection — it's a map. But it's the map everybody in this story is standing on.
And I want you to watch what Okfuskee County did next, because they did it immediately.
The wire story out of Chandler the next day runs about two hundred words, and near the bottom of a short item in a Muskogee paper that weekend there is a line that is the reason I am making this episode at all.
Four words.
The man's parents lived in Weleetka.
Not the next county. Not somewhere down the line. In Arley Keck's town — a town small enough that the grocer slept in his own store, and everybody knew which chair he sat in.
So Okfuskee County was not guessing at a stranger sixty miles away. They knew exactly whose son this was.
Now — Weleetka is the wire's word for it. The family's own paperwork puts his mother a little further down that same railroad, at Vernon and later at Boley, ten or fifteen miles out. The same small world, a slightly different dot on it.
But Weleetka is what Okfuskee County read that week. And Weleetka is what they acted on.
And that same night — the night he was caught, before he had been in a cell six hours — the county attorney, Bill Seawell, and Sheriff Wes Kennedy, and two deputies got in a car in Okemah and drove to Shawnee to ask him about Arley Keck.
Four officers. Sixty-odd miles. In the dark. Immediately.
And this was not somebody's private hunch. It was printed that week, in their own words: it was the theory of the Okfuskee County officers that the man they were holding might be the murderer of Arley Keck.
That is a county's entire senior law enforcement getting in a car in the dark, on the strength of a stated theory, the same night.
And for about a week in April of 1944, it worked.
Because look at what everybody had.
They had a man in custody. They had him for three killings sixty miles away, done with a blade, in a house, on an ordinary afternoon — and Arley Keck had been beaten and cut in his store on an ordinary night. The wire service itself made the comparison in print: Keck, it said, met death under circumstances similar to the three persons in the central Oklahoma area.
They had him confessing. Not to this — to the others, orally, four separate times that fortnight.
And they had him tied to the town. His people lived in Weleetka.
On the eighth of April, the Lincoln County attorney filed two counts of murder against Amon Johnson. And when the wire man asked him about the rest of it, he said something that put Okfuskee County on the record in a way it never got off.
He said Cleveland County and Okfuskee County both wanted to file charges.
And that wire story ends with one flat sentence out of the county seat:
At Okemah, authorities plan to charge Johnson with the murder late in March of A. Keck, Weleetka merchant.
Plan to charge. Not consider. Not look at. Plan to charge.
The paper one county over ran it in the headline. Negro Held For Murders In Cleveland County Linked With Weleetkan's Death.
So if you were in Weleetka that week, reading the paper on the corner where Arley Keck used to sit — you would have put it down thinking they had him.
They never filed a thing.
Not that April. Not that summer. Not ever.
And when I went looking for what changed, there is exactly one piece of it in the record, and it comes from the night those four officers drove to Shawnee.
Officers said the man had not confessed to the killing, and had not thrown any light on the matter.
That's it. That's the whole account of the conversation Okfuskee County drove sixty miles in the dark to have.
And hold that against the rest of that fortnight.
This is a man who confessed to three murders out loud, four separate times, and eventually put his name to a statement about them.
Arley Keck is the one he never claimed.
Not once. Not in Shawnee, not in Chandler, not later. They asked him the night they caught him, and whatever he said in that room, the county came home and quietly stopped.
I want to be careful here, because this is the place where an episode like this one wants to run off the road, and I'm not going to let it.
Nothing I've just told you says Amon Johnson killed Arley Keck. Having your parents in a town is not being in a store at two in the morning. It isn't evidence. It isn't close to evidence.
But that is exactly what makes the hole so big.
They knew he had people in Weleetka. They drove sixty miles the same night to ask him about it. Two counties said out loud they were going to file. And in two years, nobody ever put on the record where Amon Johnson was on the night Arley Keck died.
Not a check that failed. Not an alibi that held. Nothing at all. The question just stops.
Now let a year go by.
On the twenty-third of March, 1945, at eight minutes past midnight, Amon Johnson was put to death at the state penitentiary at McAlester for the murders in Cleveland County.
And whatever anybody in Okemah believed about Arley Keck, that door was shut.
Four days later, the county attorney, Undersheriff Harlan Avey, and a deputy sheriff named Sullivan Thompson were back in Okfuskee County from Little Rock, Arkansas.
Yes — deputy. Thompson had been the undersheriff when this started. Somewhere in between there was a county election, and the job moved. He didn't. He was still on this case a year later, in another state, with the same county attorney, chasing the same dead man's killer.
They had gone to Arkansas because Little Rock was holding a man named James Hall — on five separate murder charges, picked up there during a fight — and Seawell had told his own county's paper that Hall was a "likely suspect" in the Keck killing.
He wasn't.
Hall had been working in Little Rock the whole time. He was nowhere near Weleetka in March of 1944, and it took the officers about one conversation to establish it.
The line the papers ran was this: the officers have discovered he is not the man.
Not insufficient evidence. Not released pending. Not the man.
And then there's the part of this I can't get past, and it's small, and it tells you everything about what it was like to live in that county and try to follow this case.
Okfuskee County's own weekly newspaper ran the headline "Suspect Found In Keck Murder Case."
It ran it the day after he had been cleared.
So that's where we are, one year in.
Three men looked at. The man they held in the second week and let go. Amon Johnson, dead now. And James Hall, who was in Arkansas the whole time.
The county cleared, dropped or buried every one of them.
And nobody — nobody — had been charged with anything.
I told you at the start of this that I'd walk you through this case with Sullivan Thompson, and I owe you something honest about him before we go any further.
I can't tell you when he was born. I don't know where he came from, or what he looked like, or whether he's buried in that county. He was a small-county lawman in Oklahoma in the nineteen-forties. Nobody wrote his life down.
What I have is where he stood.
He stood in that store on the morning of the eighteenth of March, 1944, with a fingerprint man on the way from Oklahoma City and a set of dog tracks running out to the Frisco line.
He was the one who had to stand there nine days later and tell a reporter there were no new developments.
He drove to Little Rock, Arkansas, in the spring of 1945 and came home with nothing.
And somewhere in between, his own county voted, and the job moved out from under him — undersheriff one year, deputy the next. The title changed. He didn't. Same case, same county attorney, same dead grocer.
Two years. Three men. Nothing to show anybody.
I keep thinking about what that is like — to be there for every single thing that happens in a case, and to be the man who decides none of it.
Part 5The Man Who Read the File
Nothing happens for eleven months.
I want to be honest about how that felt from the outside, because it is most of what a cold case actually is. Arley Keck's daughter is running the store on the corner. The war ends. The boys start coming home — including, I hope, one of them. And the file sits in a drawer in Okemah with a pepper can in it and a set of fingerprints nobody has matched to anybody.
Then, sometime in that stretch, the state came into this case.
I can't tell you exactly when, and I can't tell you who asked them. That is not in the record. What I can tell you is that by the beginning of 1946 there are men working the Keck killing who do not work for Okfuskee County — the State Bureau of Investigation, out of Oklahoma City.
One of them was named C. C. Crabb.
And one of them was named W. D. Fuller. Everybody called him Deck.
Deck Fuller was a state agent. He was a well-known resident of the east side of Oklahoma City. And he was a Black man, in Oklahoma, in 1946, carrying a badge for the state.
I'd like to tell you more about him than that. I've been looking. What I have is what his own community's newspaper said about him, and what he did in February of 1946, and I'll take it, because what he did in February of 1946 is the only piece of real detective work anybody performs in this entire story.
Here's what he did.
He read the file.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Two years old, closed for all practical purposes, three men looked at and cleared — and Deck Fuller sat down and went through the 1944 reports the way you'd go through a stranger's mail, looking for the thing everybody who had already read it had stopped seeing.
And what he stopped on was the pepper.
Now — you remember the pepper. Red pepper thrown over the body, over the floor, over the counters, and a trail of it out the door and down toward the tracks. That's the part everybody knew. That's the part that got printed. A man who'd heard somewhere that red pepper ruins a bloodhound.
But there was one more thing on that inventory, sitting in the 1944 paperwork the whole time, that nobody had made anything of.
A box of black pepper. Opened. And not used.
The Black Dispatch, in Oklahoma City, reported how Fuller read it.
A man comes off that shelf in the dark with a box in his hand. He is looking for red. He opens it, and it is black — and black pepper does nothing to a dog, and he knows that, which is why he puts it down and goes back for another one.
And the question Fuller asked about that box is the question nobody else had asked in two years.
Why did he have to open it to find out?
The label was on it. It said what it was. It was on the shelf where it was supposed to be, in a store laid out the way every store in Oklahoma was laid out.
Unless the man holding it could not read the label.
That is a Black state agent, going through a crime-scene inventory that white officers had been through for two years, and drawing a conclusion out of a box of pepper that nobody else had looked at twice.
And on the strength of it — the paper's own words were purely on circumstantial evidence — Fuller went looking for a specific kind of man. Somebody local. Somebody with a record. Somebody who could not read.
In the third week of February, 1946, they took a man in Seminole County.
The man they arrested was about forty years old. He was from Weleetka. And his name was Albert Simon.
If that name went past you, that's all right. It was supposed to.
I said it once, near the start of this episode, in a sentence about the people the officers picked up that first week and let go again. I gave it no weight at all. I did that on purpose, because that is exactly how much weight it had at the time.
They had already had him.
They'd had him in the second week. In a cell in Okemah, in March of 1944, within about a day of Arley Keck being found on his own floor. They kept him a few days. He told them he didn't know anything about it.
And they let him go.
And then the county attorney told the newspapers something else, and I have read this sentence a great many times now and I still do not know what to do with it.
Seawell said that after Albert Simon was released in 1944, his whereabouts had been known at all times. He said Simon had been kept under constant observation.
For two years.
So take that at face value for a second, because the county said it on the record. That would mean this man was watched from the spring of 1944 until the winter of 1946, while the same office drove to Shawnee about somebody else, and to Little Rock about somebody else, and told its own paper it had found a suspect who turned out to be in Arkansas the whole time.
And there is one more thing, and I'm going to give it to you exactly as the county gave it, twice, two years apart, and then I am going to move on.
In March of 1944, officers said the man they were holding had been picked up in the hope he might have seen or heard something — and, they said, not because of any suspicion he was involved.
In February of 1946, the same office said he had been picked up as a suspect.
Those are both from the county. They cannot both be true.
Charges hadn't been filed yet. There was no statement, no signature, nothing but a two-year-old file, a box of black pepper, and a man who had already been in their jail once.
So on the Friday, they put Albert Simon in a car.
And they drove him to Tulsa.
Part 6Five Hours
Before I tell you what happened in Tulsa, I have to tell you about a photograph.
Some days before they drove him over there, officers showed Albert Simon a picture.
The picture appeared to be a close photograph of a human eye. And inside the eye, looking out, was a man's face.
The idea behind it comes out of a superstition — the belief that the last thing a dying man sees is printed on his eye, and stays there, so that a murdered man carries a picture of his killer. Officers in Okfuskee County and operatives from the state knew that story. And they knew who they thought believed it.
So they made one.
They took a photograph of an eye. They took Albert Simon's police mug shot. And they laid one over the other.
I want to be exact about this, because it is the single thing about this case that people are going to want me to be careless with. That photograph was manufactured by law enforcement. It was not evidence, it was not a mistake, it was not a bad enlargement somebody misread. It was made on purpose, to be shown to one man in a room, so that he would believe the dead had identified him.
And here is what nobody expects when they hear that story.
He looked at it and he told them it wasn't him.
He said he could see the man in the eye plainly — he agreed there was a man in there. He just said the man was not Albert Simon.
The trick failed. Completely.
And the men who made it went on believing it helped.
So that's where things stand on Friday, the twenty-second of February, 1946, when they take him to Tulsa.
Tulsa had a new machine. A lie detector — a polygraph — and in 1946 that is a modern marvel, the kind of thing a police department puts in the paper. It had a needle and a roll of paper and it drew a line while you answered questions.
I want to be clear about one thing before we go into that room. A polygraph was not evidence in an Oklahoma courtroom in 1946, and everyone conducting this knew it. Whatever that machine did, it was never going to be used to prove anything. It was not there to make a case. It was there to work on a man.
They started shortly before noon.
He went in willing. That's in the account too, and I don't want to skip it, because it's one of the only things in this whole story that is Albert Simon's own voice with nothing on top of it.
He said: "I want the truth and nothing but the truth to be known."
Then he sat in that chair from before noon until after four o'clock in the afternoon.
Nearly five hours.
Now — what did the machine find?
The paper that covered it, admiringly, on its front page, said this: he was one of the most difficult subjects ever to take the test there, and he showed little reaction. Little reaction, except that he became very nervous as the hours went on.
Read that again the way I had to.
Five hours on the machine produced nothing. Not a break, not a spike, not a moment where the needle jumped and they had him. What five hours produced was a man who got more and more frightened, sitting still, strapped to a device he had been told could tell whether he was lying.
He came out of that room shortly after four, and the description in the paper is that he was trembling with nervousness.
The photograph had failed. The machine had failed.
And then they put another man in the room.
His name was John Smitherman. He was a Tulsa police detective, and he was Black — the officers had run out of everything else, and what they had left was to send in somebody who looked like the man in the chair.
He talked to Albert Simon for a few minutes.
And Albert Simon said this:
"If you'll give me life I'll confess."
The account adds four words to that. Although no promises were made.
And I want you to understand why a man in that chair, in Oklahoma, in February of 1946, would open with the sentence give me life.
Eleven months earlier the state of Oklahoma had executed Amon Johnson — the first man this same county looked at for this same killing — at eight minutes past midnight, in McAlester, sixty miles from where Albert Simon was now sitting. It had been in every paper he could not read.
He wasn't negotiating a story. He was negotiating for the chair.
And afterwards, while he was giving the statement, he said one more thing.
"I guess you know all this. That little needle in there has been writing down what I've been thinking. I know it."
I have to stop here and tell you what I think I'm looking at, because if I just kept narrating you'd be entitled to ask why.
A man denied this killing for two years. He denied it to a photograph that had been built to break him, and he was right about the photograph. He sat five hours with a machine that found nothing in him. And then he confessed — and told them why he was doing it. He believed the needle had been writing down his thoughts.
That is what the record says happened. I'm not going to tell you what it means. But I'm not going to read it to you as though it were a clever piece of police work either, which is exactly how it was printed at the time.
There's one more thing, and only one newspaper in Oklahoma printed it.
Albert Simon could not read.
Not a word of it. Not the label on the box of pepper, not the papers he was about to put his name to. The Black Dispatch, in Oklahoma City, printed that plainly and the rest of them left it out.
Hold onto that, because in nine days it is going to matter more than anything else in this episode.
Now. He confessed twice that day.
In Tulsa he said Arley Keck came at him with the hammer first, and that there was a struggle. That is a man describing a fight he did not start.
Then they drove him back to Okemah — back to the county that had been looking for this killer for two years — and he gave a second, longer statement there.
And the officer who told the papers about it was Sullivan Thompson.
Thompson said the second statement contradicted the first one on that exact point. In the Okemah version, Albert Simon was the one who started it.
That is not a detail. In 1946, in Oklahoma, that is the whole difference between murder and something a great deal less than murder. And it changed inside of one day, in a car, between two towns.
The motive moves in that second statement too, depending on which paper you read — a grocery bill, a ten-dollar debt, plain robbery. And the county told the business with the bucket of water two different ways inside the same week: thrown to bring Arley Keck around, or thrown to wash the fingerprints off him.
They never told it the same way twice.
And when it was done, Okfuskee County did not put Albert Simon in the jail at Okemah, where they'd held him two years before.
They drove him to the state penitentiary at McAlester and left him there for safekeeping — which, in a county that had spent two years failing to find the man who killed a well-liked white grocer, meant one thing, and everybody involved knew what it was.
Part 7Eight Weeks
Everything that is left takes sixty-seven days.
The twenty-third of February. Charges of murder are filed in a justice of the peace court in Okemah. A preliminary hearing is set for the fourth of March.
The twenty-fourth of February. He is arraigned. And Albert Simon stands up and pleads not guilty.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because it goes by fast in the papers. Two days after confessing in Tulsa, and one day after confessing again in Okemah, this man went into a courtroom and said he was not guilty.
The fourth of March. Nine days later.
He waived his preliminary hearing and was bound over to district court without bail.
Now — I need to tell you what that is, because it is the most important thing in this act and it doesn't sound like anything.
A preliminary hearing is the proceeding where the state has to stand up in open court and show it has a case. It's where the confession gets put on the record. Who took it. Over how many hours. What he was told, and what he wasn't. It is the one built-in moment in the whole process where somebody has to explain, out loud, in front of a judge, how they got a man to say what he said.
Albert Simon gave that up.
And I told you to hold onto something, back in that room in Tulsa.
He could not read.
An illiterate man was charged, arraigned, pleaded not guilty, and then nine days later waived the one hearing designed to make the state prove its work.
And here is where I have to tell you what I don't know, because it is load-bearing.
Nothing in the record I can reach says whether Albert Simon had a lawyer on the fourth of March.
There is a lawyer in this case. His name was Sam Davis, an attorney in Okemah, and I'll get to him. But when he came into it — whether he was standing there at the waiver, or came in weeks later — is a question for the district court file in Okemah, and that file is the one document that would answer half the questions in this episode.
I don't have it. I've asked.
There is one more thing about that waiver, and I'm going to describe it and not draw a conclusion from it.
Two years earlier, in the same county's courthouse system, Amon Johnson asked for a preliminary hearing on the eleventh of April — and waived it on the fifteenth.
Two men. Two years apart. Both accused on the strength of a confession. And neither confession was ever examined at a preliminary hearing.
That's not a coincidence I'm alleging. It's a pattern I'm describing. Make of it what you want.
The twentieth of April. In district court, in front of Judge Jess I. Miracle, Albert Simon changed his plea from not guilty to guilty.
The first of May. Sentencing day.
Court opened at ten in the morning. The county-seat paper describes the room as an orderly and moderately sized crowd — which tells you something all by itself, in a town that had waited two years for this.
Ten witnesses were sworn. Peace officers from the county sheriff's office who had figured in the investigation — and by then Sullivan Thompson was the deputy sheriff posted at Weleetka, sixteen miles down the road from that courthouse, in the dead man's own town. He had figured in this investigation since about eight o'clock on the morning it started.
And one other.
Mrs. Alice McKinney. Arley Keck's daughter. The last person known to have been in that store with her father, who had gone home somewhere between ten and midnight and left him in his chair by the door — and who had spent the two years since running his store on the same corner.
She was sworn as a witness at the sentencing of the man who said he did it.
The exhibits went in. His sworn confession. The meat cleaver. And a partly filled bottle of whisky, which had figured in it somehow, and which nobody explains any further than that.
And late that morning, Albert Simon took the stand.
Under oath, in open court, with his lawyer present and every officer in the case sitting there — he did not take any of it back. He recounted the events surrounding the killing. Whatever the transcript of that testimony says, it exists somewhere, and it is not in my hands.
The paper watched him do it, and printed the one detail that has stayed with me longest out of the whole day. During the examination in the morning he was visibly agitated and nervous.
When the judgement came, he was stolidly calm.
Sam Davis, of Okemah, appeared as counsel for the defendant.
County Attorney William Seawell presented the case for the state — and asked for the death penalty.
At ten minutes past two in the afternoon, Judge Miracle sentenced Albert Simon to life imprisonment at hard labour in the state penitentiary at McAlester.
In February, in a room in Tulsa, this man had said: if you'll give me life I'll confess.
Sixty-seven days.
One last thing about that afternoon, and it's the thing I keep going back to.
The county-seat paper ran the whole story across the top of its front page, and in the middle of it, describing what it called the sensational investigation, there is one clause: a fingerprint expert from Oklahoma City and bloodhounds figured in the case.
That's it. That's the last time the fingerprints appear.
Two years. Experts, plural, nine days in. Print work still going on after that. And on the day the case closed, it is one clause in a sentence about atmosphere.
Nobody ever said they matched him. Nobody ever said they didn't.
The courthouse told the paper he'd probably be taken to the penitentiary the next day.
The penitentiary's own book has him received that same afternoon.
Part 8Closing Thoughts
So that's the case.
A grocer was killed in his own store in March of 1944. Two years later a man confessed, pleaded guilty, and went to the penitentiary for the rest of his life.
By any ordinary measure, that's solved.
I don't know whether Albert Simon killed Arley Keck.
And I want to be careful about that sentence, because it is not a clever way of saying I think he didn't. I don't know. What I've come to think, sitting with this for as long as I have, is that on this record, neither did the men who sent him away.
What they had was a confession. That's it. There was no fingerprint match anybody ever announced. No witness. No hammer — he said he threw it in Alabama Creek, and nothing anywhere says a soul went and looked. No clothes — he said he burned them. The one piece of physical evidence in that courtroom on the first of May was a meat cleaver from the victim's own store, which had been there the whole time.
And what I do know is how they got him to say it.
Here's what's still open, and every one of these is answerable by a document that exists or existed.
Were the fingerprints from that store ever compared to Albert Simon? Two years of print work, experts brought in from Oklahoma City, and on the day the case closed it's one clause about atmosphere. Nobody in 1946 said yes. Nobody said no.
Did anybody go into Alabama Creek for that hammer? He told them where it was. If they went and found it, that's corroboration. If they went and found nothing, that's something else. If nobody went at all — that's the whole case in one decision.
Was the front window of that store ever actually broken? He said in his confession that he broke it and then changed his mind about leaving that way. The 1944 accounts describe the scene in a fair amount of detail, and they don't mention a broken window.
When was Sam Davis appointed? Before the waiver, or after it.
And who else was in that jail in the second week of March, 1944? The 1946 story says officers picked up a number of people, and Albert Simon was among them. Nobody was ever named. Nothing says when any of them went home.
And one more, which is small, and which I only noticed because I'd read the 1944 papers first.
When the county told this story again in 1946, it said the body had been found by a newspaper carrier.
It wasn't. It was Albert Gardner, carrying the milk, who set the bottles down and looked over at an empty chair. That's in the 1944 account, from the week it happened.
Two years on, in its own retelling of its own case, the county had the wrong man walking through the door.
Now, before I say the last of this, I want to put one thing beside it, because I think without it you'd walk away believing what happened in that room in Tulsa was extraordinary.
It wasn't. It was the practice.
In June of 1944 — three months after Arley Keck died, while this case was sitting open in a drawer in Okemah — the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case called Lyons against Oklahoma.
W. D. Lyons was a young Black man in Choctaw County, down in the southeast corner of the state. Officers questioned him about a murdered family. He was beaten. At around one in the morning, they put the bones of the dead in his lap and kept asking. He confessed. Twelve hours later, in the state penitentiary at McAlester, he confessed a second time.
The argument on appeal was that the second confession was the first one wearing better clothes.
The Court let it stand. Two justices dissented.
The lawyer who argued it was Thurgood Marshall. He was thirty-five, he was working for the N.A.A.C.P., and he lost.
So when Okfuskee County put a man in a chair in Tulsa in February of 1946, nobody involved had any reason to think there was a line there to cross.
That is what the law of this state looked like while Arley Keck's killer was not being found.
Now, two more things, and then I'll let this go.
When Albert Simon was arrested, the Associated Press moved a story saying he'd been taken by two white officers — the county sheriff and a state bureau agent. Both real men. Both on the case.
Neither one of them worked out that the killer couldn't read a label.
Deck Fuller did that. And Roscoe Dunjee's paper in Oklahoma City printed his name, under a headline that said, in so many words, that this is what a Black press is for.
I'll be straight with you about what that paper was and wasn't objecting to. It was not crying foul over the interrogation. It ran the confession as a solved case, same as everybody else. What it was objecting to was the credit — that a Black state agent did the only piece of real detective work in two years and the wire service handed it to two white men.
That's a narrower complaint than the one I've been making all hour. It's also the one that got printed in 1946, by the only people in Oklahoma who were going to print it.
And there's one more name on that officer list, in the segregated paragraph the county paper put it in.
Bo Baker, of the Oklahoma City police department.
If you listened to the last episode, you know exactly who that is. He was one of the two Oklahoma City detectives who broke the Gorski–Schat killings in April of 1944 — Ernest Jones and Nathaniel Baker.
And here is how the court record carried them: "E. E. Jones and Nathan Baker, two negro policemen."
Two initials and a description. That is what the official record of the case gave two men who solved it.
Two cases. Two years apart. The same man, borrowed twice — and both times the record that mattered gave him initials, and it was a Black newspaper that gave him his name.
Albert Simon went to McAlester on the first of May, 1946.
He never filed an appeal. There's no opinion from the criminal court of appeals in this case — I went looking through those years and there is nothing. No parole. And as far as any document I can find shows, he never took any of it back.
On the eighth of September, 1954, he had a heart attack in his cell, shortly after three in the morning. They rushed him to the prison hospital and he died there.
He was forty-eight years old.
Eight years, four months and seven days of a life sentence.
The paper in McAlester gave him two paragraphs on page two. And the last line of it says that funeral arrangements were incomplete, pending instruction from relatives in California.
Part 9The Last Page
The instruction never came.
Albert Simon is buried in the Department of Corrections cemetery at McAlester, Oklahoma. Plot fifty.
It's a flat stone, set level with the ground. It has his name on it, and two dates, and nothing else. No epitaph. No relation. Nothing about who he was to anybody.
And it is the only photograph of Albert Simon that the state did not make.
Amon Johnson is in the same field.
The first man Okfuskee County looked at for the murder of Arley Keck, and the man who confessed to it two years later, are buried a few hundred yards apart in the same prison ground, and neither body was ever claimed by anybody in the county where the grocer died.
Plot fifty.
And plot one eighteen-D.
Part 10Outro
If you know anything about the Keck family of Weleetka — or about Albert Simon, or his people, who were in California by 1954 and may be there still — I would love to hear from you. I would especially like to hear from anyone who knows what became of Deck Fuller. And if you have an idea for a future true crime case you'd like us to dig into, reach out to me at Section29.com. I'm always looking for the next forgotten story.
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. Check out the blog at Section29.com, where I've posted the clippings, the prison record, and the photographs. All the links are in the description below.
Until next time, I'm Trevor Shelby. Stay safe out there. Just know you are unique, you are special and you are loved.