Part 1Cold Open
Friday night, the seventh of April, 1944. The river bottoms west of Shawnee, Oklahoma.
If you've never been down in a bottom like that after dark, it is not open country. It's blackjack and brush and standing water, and the ground gives under you, and you cannot see nine feet.
There are officers from two counties down there. There are bloodhounds that somebody drove up from the state penitentiary. And there are twenty-five sailors from the naval firing station at Shawnee, because it is 1944 and that is who was available.
They had been at it since three o'clock the afternoon before. At four in the morning the officers gave it up and went to rest. A group of farm boys stayed out. It was the farm boys who found the new tracks and called the sheriff back.
And somewhere in that brush is one man, alone, carrying a pocket knife with a five-inch blade.
Before the night is over they will fire about a hundred and fifty shots into that bottom.
At half past three in the morning they put him in a cell in Chandler, Oklahoma — in the county jail of a man named Andrew Orr.
Orr was the sheriff of Lincoln County. He was going to hold this man for eleven days. He was going to be standing in the room when he signed his name to eight pages of paper. He was going to take a witness stand in front of a packed courtroom and tell them how it happened.
And on the last afternoon of all of it, Sheriff Andrew Orr was going to do something I did not see coming, and have not stopped thinking about since.
But none of that is where this starts.
It starts the week before, on an ordinary Monday, with the people who were already living in his county.
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 Twelve Days, has the clippings, the graves, and the front page of a Black newspaper out of Oklahoma City that got this case right when nobody else did. 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, the court testimony, 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. Listener discretion is advised. One of the people in this story is three years old. I'm going to handle that as carefully as I know how, but if that's not something you can sit with today, this is a good one to skip.
And let me tell you, this story has everything. Two farm families. A hundred and fifty shots in the dark. Two Black detectives who solved it and got two initials for it. A confession signed on Easter Sunday. And twelve days — twelve — from three bodies to a guilty plea.
Central Oklahoma, spring of 1944. And almost nobody talks about it today. So let's fix that.
Part 3The Sheriff of Lincoln County
I want to tell you about Andrew Orr first, and I want to be straight with you about something up front: I know less about him than I would like.
That happens. He was a county sheriff in 1944, not a governor. Nobody wrote his life down.
But I know exactly what he did. I know where he stood and when. I know what he said under oath. And by the end of this hour you're going to understand why, out of everybody in this story — the prosecutors, the judges, the detectives, the governor — he's the one I decided to walk you through it with.
So here's his county.
Lincoln County, Oklahoma. County seat at Chandler. It sits about forty miles east of Oklahoma City, and it is farm country — cotton and corn and cattle, section roads, little towns strung out along the rail line. Stroud. Davenport. Prague. Wellston. Agra.
And in the spring of 1944, it is a county at war.
Every week the local paper prints the names of the men the draft board has sent. Just a list, run down the page. And here is the thing I want you to hear, because it tells you what kind of place this is better than anything I could say about it.
The board published those lists in two parts.
One of them was headed — and I'm reading this exactly as it was printed — "The following 38 county white men were inducted into the army."
Nobody had to explain that to a reader in 1944. It wasn't an editorial position. It was just the format of the news.
Remember that. Not because it explains anything yet. Because it's the water everybody in this story is swimming in, and it's going to matter later in ways I don't think anyone at the time would have admitted out loud.
Now. Down in the southwest corner of Sheriff Orr's county there is a place called Kickapoo Township.
If you drive south out of Kickapoo Township about two and a half miles you cross into Pottawatomie County and you hit the town of McLoud. Which is why, for eighty years, almost every account of this case has said "the farm near McLoud" — and almost every account has put it in the wrong county.
It wasn't in Pottawatomie. It was two and a half miles north of that line, in Lincoln County. In Andrew Orr's county.
And on that farm lived a family named Gorski.
Walter Gorski went by Pete. He was born in Texas in 1905, and his father was born in Poland. His wife was born in Texas too — in August of 1901 — and both of her parents were born in Poland.
So these are not immigrants. These are the American-born children of Polish immigrants, out of the Polish farm settlements down in Texas, who came north and took ground in Oklahoma. There's a whole community of them out there — you can see it in the names all through the family: Zachare, Lutomski, Mayer, Kubiak, Magott. They married each other. They buried each other in the same churchyard.
Which, incidentally, is at Harrah — Saint Teresa's, the Catholic church over the line in Oklahoma County. Hold onto Harrah for me. That town is going to come back around in a way you won't like.
Her name was Victoria.
And I have to stop here for a second, because getting her name took me longer than getting anything else in this case.
Every newspaper account calls her "Mrs. Walter Gorski." A few of them get as far as "Victoria." Not one of them — not one — prints her own name.
It was Zachare. Victoria Zachare. Her father was named Wacław, and he died when she was six years old. Her mother remarried into a family called Mayer and had six more children, so Victoria grew up somewhere in the middle of about eleven kids in a blended Polish household in Oklahoma, with no father in it after she was six.
And there's one more thing on her, and I want to put it in front of you flat, without dressing it up.
On the 1940 census there's a column for the highest grade of school a person completed. Walter's says six. Their oldest girl, at ten years old, says four.
Victoria's says zero.
She never went to school. Not for a year, not for a day.
By 1944 the Gorskis had been on that place a long time. In 1930 they were renting. By 1940 Walter was farming on his own account, which in census language means he was working for himself and not for somebody else. Same township, same ground, both times. The neighbors had known them for fourteen years at least.
Their oldest was Pearl Eva, born in November of 1929. Then Helen, born about 1934. Helen was ten, and Helen's job after school was to go out and gather the eggs. Every day. That was the chore that was hers.
And then, on Christmas Day of 1940, Victoria had a baby girl. They named her Martha Ann.
Now let me tell you what that farm actually was, because you need to be able to see it.
There's the house. There's a barn with a hallway running through the middle of it — that's how a lot of them were built, so you could drive stock straight through and work out of the weather. There's a cellar dug into the dirt, the kind you go down into when the sky turns green. And there are cattle.
The cattle matter.
They kept a small herd — a few head, the way a family place did. Milk, beef, and money if you needed money. And I want to be very specific about something, because it is going to be the hinge this entire story turns on.
Those cows were hers.
Not in a deed sense. I'm not telling you Victoria Gorski held paper on livestock. I'm telling you that on that farm, the cattle were understood to be Victoria's business, and everybody who lived there knew it.
I know that because of what she said about them. But we are not there yet.
Here's one more piece of farm arithmetic and then I'll let you go into the week.
Cattle eat, and in the spring in central Oklahoma pasture is thin. So you buy feed. And the cheap feed in cotton country is cottonseed — the hulls and the meal, what's left after the gin and the oil mill are done with the seed. You drive to town, you back the truck up to a mill, and they load you out by the hundred pound.
It's the most ordinary errand a farmer does. It's dull. Nobody writes it down.
I need you to remember it anyway.
So that's the week of the twenty-seventh of March, 1944, in Kickapoo Township, Lincoln County, Oklahoma.
Walter Gorski is farming his own ground. Victoria is running the house and the cattle, and she is forty-two years old, though you will not find a single newspaper that gets that right. Pearl is fourteen. Helen is ten and gathering the eggs. Martha is three.
Easter is a week out. In a Polish Catholic family that is not a small thing — that's the biggest Sunday of the year, and there would have been plans for it.
And about seventy miles east of them, in another county entirely, a twenty-nine-year-old man had been out of the state penitentiary for a hundred and ten days.
Part 4The Man in the Other County
Andrew Orr's county stops at a line on a map.
Go west out of Lincoln County, down past Harrah and across Oklahoma County, keep going about thirty miles, and you come to Norman. Cleveland County. Different sheriff, different county attorney, different courthouse.
And I need you to hold onto that, because it is going to cost somebody everything.
Out in the country near Norman there was a farmer. He was forty-six or forty-seven years old in the spring of 1944, and he had a wife and seven children.
Every newspaper account of this case calls him Roy Schat.
His headstone says William.
William R. Schat, Senior. And I can prove the R, because his second boy is named William Roy Schat, Junior — so the father was a William who went by his middle name, which in that generation was about as common as owning a hat.
So I'm going to call him Roy, because that's what he was called. But I want you to notice, right at the start, that the record of this case could not get the first man's first name right. That is not the last time that's going to happen.
Now let me tell you about his family, because for eighty years nobody has.
In 1914, Roy Schat married a girl named Dewey Hopkins. He was seventeen. She was fourteen.
I'm going to say that plainly and then move on, because it was legal, and in rural Oklahoma in 1914 it was not remarkable, and I'm not here to hand out grades to people who have been dead seventy years. But it tells you where they started. Two kids on a farm.
They were married thirty years.
Their first was Juanita Etta, born in 1915, when Dewey was fifteen years old. Then William Roy Junior in 1917. Then Charles Ray in 1919. Then a baby girl they named June, born in 1923.
June died in 1924. She wasn't quite a year old.
Then eight years with nothing — and I don't know what's in those eight years, and I'd rather tell you that than fill it with something I made up.
Then Joe Neal in 1932. Paul Edward in 1937. And their last, a little girl named Mary, in 1942.
Seven children across twenty-seven years.
By the spring of 1944, the older ones were grown and gone. Juanita was twenty-nine. Bill Junior was twenty-seven. Charles Ray was twenty-five.
Three were still at home.
Joe Neal was eleven. Paul Edward was six.
Mary was two.
Here's what I want you to understand about all of that.
I did not get a single one of those names out of a newspaper. Not one. There are three dozen articles about this case, in papers all over Oklahoma, over the better part of a year — and across every one of them, the man's family does not exist. No wife. No children. Nobody is quoted, nobody is described, nobody is even counted.
I got them off a headstone and the records behind it.
Hold that thought. We're coming back to it, and when we do it's going to be worse than it sounds right now.
So what did Roy Schat actually do?
He farmed, and he ran hogs.
And that second part is the reason this story happens at all, so stay with me for a second on the economics of it. A man with hogs to sell in central Oklahoma in 1944 does not sell them at home. He loads them up and he hauls them to the Oklahoma City stockyards, which at that time was one of the biggest livestock markets in the country — acres of pens, commission houses, men who did nothing all day but buy and sell other people's animals.
You drive up. You sell. You come home with money in your pocket.
And while you're up there, you buy what a farm needs — which in the spring means feed.
Remember the cottonseed from Act One? That's this errand. That's the same trip.
Now. The truck.
Roy Schat drove a 1934 Chevrolet with a livestock bed on the back. Ten years old. Worked hard.
And that truck had one thing wrong with it that I need you to file away: on the back axle, where there should have been dual wheels, one of the wheels was missing. Just gone. He'd been running it that way.
You could pick that truck out of a line of a hundred trucks.
Two different people are going to do exactly that.
There's a cemetery outside Norman called Blackburn. Roy Schat is buried there, and so is Dewey — she outlived him by thirteen years — and their stone is not a plain one.
It's red granite. The name SCHAT across the top. Two panels underneath, his and hers.
And carved into the face of it, filling the whole middle of that stone, there's a picture. A little church with a steeple. Houses. A row of trees. A field with the furrows running across it.
And a man walking behind a two-horse team, plowing.
Somebody paid for that. Somebody sat down with a monument dealer, in the worst year of their life, and decided that what this man's grave was going to say about him was: he worked ground, and he went to church, and that was the shape of his days.
The courts gave him one word. In the entire appellate record of this case he is "the farmer." No first name. No case number. Nothing.
His family gave him a picture of his own life, cut into stone, and it is still standing out there.
On Monday morning, the third of April, 1944, Roy Schat got up on a farm near Norman, in Cleveland County, where the sheriff's name was not Andrew Orr.
He had hogs to sell.
Part 5Vernon
Now I have to tell you about the third person, and I'm going to do it the same way I did the other two.
Which is to say: I'm going to tell you who he was before any of this, in the order it happened, and I am not going to put my thumb on the scale in either direction. You'll have plenty of chances to make up your mind.
He was born in a town called Vernon.
Vernon is in McIntosh County, out in the eastern part of the state, and it is one of Oklahoma's all-Black towns.
If you're not from here, that phrase might not mean anything to you, so let me take thirty seconds on it, because it's one of the genuinely remarkable things about this state and almost nobody outside of it knows.
Oklahoma had more all-Black towns than anywhere else in America. Dozens of them. They were founded by freedmen of the Five Tribes, and by Black families who came out of the South after the Civil War looking for somewhere they could own the ground and run the government, and for a while it worked. These towns had their own mayors, their own newspapers, their own banks, their own baseball teams. Boley, up in Okfuskee County, was the best known of them and people came from all over the country to look at it.
Most of them are gone now, or nearly. Statehood in 1907 brought Jim Crow with it, then the boll weevil, then the Depression, and the towns emptied out.
Vernon is still there. There's not much of it.
And that's where he was born, on the twenty-third of May.
I can tell you the day. Nobody ever settled on the year.
His mother's name was Mittie Johnson. When he had to write down on a government form the name of the person who would always know where he was, that's the name he put — his mother, at Vernon, Oklahoma.
His name was Amon Johnson. No middle name. He wrote it out himself in a decent cursive hand.
He was six foot one and a hundred and eighty-five pounds.
And by the spring of 1944 he had been to the state penitentiary at McAlester three times.
The first time was 1935. Then 1939. Then 1942.
All three for the same kind of thing: larceny of domestic animals. He stole livestock. Cattle, mostly. That's what he did, and he was not good at it, because he kept getting caught.
He had a prison number — 39820 — and he carried it across all three terms.
And in 1936, during the second stretch, something happened that I have to tell you about, and I'm going to tell you exactly as much as I know and not one word more.
He had just been made a trusty at the Stringtown subprison. That's a mark of good standing — trusty status is what you give a man who's earned some rope.
Days later he got into a fight with another inmate. There was an axe involved. The other man was badly hurt, and two days after the fight, he died.
Amon Johnson was charged with murder in the district court of Atoka County.
He was never tried for it. A district judge discharged him, and he went back to serving out his sentence for stealing cows.
He came out of McAlester on the thirteenth of December, 1943.
Write that date down. The thirteenth of December.
In February of 1944 he turned up in Oklahoma City.
He took a room in a house at 708 North Missouri, sharing the place with a couple named Elmer and Viola Jones. They'd known him about five weeks. That's it — five weeks. They were not old friends. They were people he lived with.
And living there with him was a nineteen-year-old girl named Elouise Chandler.
She'd been with him about a month.
Some of the papers called her his wife. One of them, more carefully, put the word "wife" in quotation marks and called her Miss Chandler. She was nineteen years old and she was living with a man who had been out of the penitentiary since December.
Elouise Chandler is going to break this entire case wide open inside of five days, and she is going to be arrested for it, and then she is going to disappear out of the record so completely that it took me longer to find her first name than it took to find anything else in this story except one.
But that's Friday. We're not there yet.
On Monday morning, the third of April, 1944, Amon Johnson got up in a rented room on North Missouri Street in Oklahoma City.
He was twenty-nine years old, or thirty, depending on which document you believe.
He had been out of the state penitentiary for a hundred and ten days.
Part 6Monday
Everything I've told you so far happened over about forty years.
Everything I'm about to tell you happens in one day.
Monday, the third of April, 1944, is a working day in central Oklahoma. Cool morning. Spring planting weather.
Roy Schat is up early because he's got hogs on the truck. He drives them the twenty-odd miles up from Cleveland County to the Oklahoma City stockyards, and he sells them, and by mid-morning he's got the money for them.
Then he drives across town to buy feed.
The place he goes is called the Southland Cottonseed Oil Company. And they load him out: twelve hundred pounds of cottonseed hulls, and two sacks of cottonseed meal. Into the back of a 1934 Chevrolet with a livestock bed and one wheel gone off the rear duals.
It is about ten o'clock in the morning.
And somewhere in that mill yard, a man asks him for a ride.
Now — I'm going to tell you what happened next the way Amon Johnson told it when he sat down five days later and signed his name to it.
I want to be clear that this is his account. It is the only account there is, because the only other man who was there did not come home. And I'll tell you now that he did not tell it the same way twice — but that's a problem for later in this episode, and I'd rather you hear one version cleanly first.
He said they made a deal.
He'd help load the feed. In exchange, Schat would run him out to a vacant house down near the Cleveland County line, where he had some whisky stashed. Oklahoma was dry in 1944 — had been since statehood — so a man with a bottle buried somewhere was not unusual and not something you advertised.
So the two of them drive south out of the city together, and they find the vacant farm house, and they dig up the whisky.
And then Roy Schat would not take him back.
There was a fight. And in the way Johnson told it, Schat reached for a knife, and Johnson got to his first.
He cut his throat.
He left him in that abandoned house, half a mile south of the county line, and he took the truck.
There was money in that man's pocket from a load of hogs. Remember that. It's going to come up.
He drives north — back into Oklahoma City first, which is a detail that turns up in exactly one account and that nobody has ever explained — and then east.
At about one o'clock in the afternoon he pulls into Harrah.
Harrah. I told you to hold onto that name.
There's a garage there, and a man named Lewis Drew is working. The truck's got a bad battery cable. Drew fixes it.
And while he's doing that, he does what a garage man does — he looks at the truck, and he looks at the man driving it.
A 1934 Chevrolet. Livestock bed. One wheel missing off the back.
Lewis Drew is going to remember that truck for the rest of his life. He is going to pick it out of a photograph, and he is going to point at the man who was driving it, in a courtroom, in front of everybody.
From Harrah he drives north and east, about eight miles, across the Pottawatomie line and out again into Lincoln County.
And he turns in at a farm two and a half miles north of McLoud.
There's nobody in the yard. The man of the place is gone — Walter Gorski is at a Triple-A meeting over at Midway, signing farmers up for a government program, and he'll be there all afternoon.
Johnson backs the truck up to the barn and he starts unloading the cottonseed. Twelve hundred pounds of hulls and two sacks of meal, off the truck and onto the floor of a barn they don't belong in.
He's making room. Because there are cattle in that lot.
And that's when Victoria Gorski comes out of the house.
She has her three-year-old with her.
I need to tell you where the next part comes from before I tell it to you.
Every word Victoria Gorski says for the rest of her life comes to us through the man who killed her. He repeated it to a prosecutor, five days later, and a court reporter took it down. That is the only reason we have any of it.
So you should hold it the way you'd hold anything a killer says about the person he killed.
But I'll tell you what I noticed, and you can decide what it's worth: every single thing he said she did makes him look worse. Not better. He is not excusing himself. He is explaining why he had to keep going.
Here's what he said happened.
She asked him what he was doing.
He told her he'd seen her husband — that he'd sold him the cottonseed hulls and the meal, and bought the cows off him in the trade. And he pointed at the feed in the barn as proof, because the feed was in the barn.
And she said this.
"No. I wouldn't part with my cows."
And then she said — and this is the line I have not been able to put down since I found it —
"It is not right for any man to make a trade without his wife knowing of it."
I want you to hear what's inside that sentence.
That is not a frightened woman. That is not a confused woman. A stranger has just told her that her husband sold the family's cattle out from under her, and her answer is that a man does not do that without his wife.
She is not asking him to leave. She is telling him he has the law of that farm wrong.
Forty-two years old. Never spent a day of her life in a schoolroom. Standing in her own yard, with a three-year-old holding onto her, correcting a stranger about property.
They argued.
She hit him on the hand with a board.
He picked up another piece of board — about a foot and a half long, he said, something that looked like part of a neck yoke — and he hit her over the head with it.
The little girl started screaming, and she bit him.
He struck them both.
Victoria Gorski got back up and came at him again. She told him she was going to tell her husband what he'd done.
And he used the knife.
Then he loaded the cattle.
Two cows and a two-year-old heifer, up into the bed of Roy Schat's truck, on top of what was left of the cottonseed.
He pulled out of that yard sometime around four in the afternoon.
A man named Clyde McLaughlin, who lived over near Midway, met the truck on the road and looked at it as it went by. Three head of cattle in the back.
At about four fifteen, the school bus dropped Pearl Gorski at the end of the road. She was fourteen. She went in the house and up the stairs to read a book.
At about four thirty, Helen came home.
Helen was ten, and Helen's job after school was to go out and gather the eggs.
Two years later — no. Twenty-two days later, in a courtroom in Chandler with her father sitting in the room, a ten-year-old girl was put on a witness stand and asked what she saw when she walked into that barn.
And this is what she said.
She said her mother and her baby sister were lying on the ground as if asleep.
She ran back to the house screaming, and Pearl came down the stairs.
At about a quarter to five, a neighbor got to the Triple-A meeting at Midway and told Walter Gorski.
While all of that is happening, the truck is back at the Oklahoma City stockyards.
The man driving it sells three head of cattle to a commission company. He gives his name as Robert Jackson. He tells them to send the check to Jones, Oklahoma — a little town northeast of the city where, as far as anybody has ever been able to tell, he did not live.
A stockyards employee named Bob Lackey helps him unload the animals.
And as the truck pulls away, Bob Lackey does something that I don't think anybody asked him to do.
He writes down the license number.
The seller also has to sign a weigh bill. So somewhere in the paperwork of that stockyard, on the third of April 1944, there is the name Robert Jackson in a man's own handwriting, three hours after two people died in a barn.
Then he ditches the truck. Down near the South Canadian River, southwest of the city, off in a thicket near the Newcastle bridge.
A school bus driver named L. C. Fishburn, and a farmer named Raymond Davis, both see a man walking away from an abandoned truck near the river that evening.
A couple named Jefferson pick him up south of the county line and drive him into town, and let him out at Twenty-Ninth Street.
He gets back to the house on North Missouri sometime around seven thirty or eight that night.
And he has blood on him. On his sleeves, and down the front of his shirt.
Elouise Chandler asks him about it.
He tells her he cut his hand.
Later that night the two of them get into it, and it escalates, and he pulls a knife on her — and Elmer Jones, who lives in that house, comes into the room and gets between them.
And what Elmer Jones heard him say, he repeated on a witness stand three weeks later:
"I've already killed three people. And if I could blow breath back into their bodies, I'd do it over again."
Three.
Not two. Three.
At that hour on Monday night, nobody in the state of Oklahoma knows that Roy Schat is dead. His body will not be found for two more days. There is no third victim yet — not as far as any officer in three counties knows.
The first person to say out loud that there were three was the man who did it, in a rented room, to a nineteen-year-old girl.
Elmer Jones talked him down. The two of them walked out to a pool hall and got cigars and cigarettes, and by the time they came back he was calm.
Everybody in that house went to bed.
And forty miles east, in Andrew Orr's county, a farmer named Walter Gorski sat up with two of his daughters in a house with nobody else in it.
Part 7Four Days
Tuesday morning, the fourth of April.
Two Lincoln County deputies named Leo Moulin and Abby Moore drive into Oklahoma City and start walking the stockyards and the slaughtering plants.
They are not looking for a man. They are looking for cottonseed.
Because somebody dumped twelve hundred pounds of hulls and two sacks of meal on the floor of a barn where it did not belong, and Sheriff Orr's deputies have worked out that the feed is the only thing at that farm that came from somewhere else. Find where it was sold, and you find who bought it.
That is good police work, and I want to give it its due, because of what people said about these officers later.
Meanwhile a man from the state Department of Public Safety named Robert Travis is at the Gorski place with a camera, photographing tire tracks. There's a good one across the dirt cellar.
And in Oklahoma City that same morning, Amon Johnson takes his clothes out into the back yard and burns them.
He tells Elouise Chandler he burned them because he was angry with her.
Then he goes out and looks for work, and he works that night.
Tuesday night, police in Chickasha arrest two men on the description. They'll hold them two days and let them go.
Wednesday, the fifth of April, somebody finds Roy Schat.
He's in the abandoned farm house down at the county line, where he'd been since Monday. The coroner's jury returns a verdict of death at the hands of an unknown assailant, which is the legal way of saying: we have a dead man and no idea.
And here is where I want you to stop and look at what the state of Oklahoma actually had by Wednesday.
They had tire prints from the Gorski barn that matched a truck found abandoned twenty-five miles away.
They had the name of the business where the dead man bought the feed that was lying next to two bodies.
They had three head of cattle traced to a commission house in the stockyards.
And they had a weigh bill — a piece of paper the killer signed himself, three hours after the murders, in his own handwriting.
Four days in, no suspect, and the physical case is essentially built.
Remember that. It's going to matter enormously at the end of this.
Because on Thursday, the sixth of April, the man running the State Crime Bureau told reporters what he thought was happening.
His name was Ivan Kennedy, and he said the killings were "undoubtedly the act of a deranged person." A maniac. Officers went and pulled the records of the state's institutions looking for somebody who'd walked away. A statewide alert went out to peace officers — and to railroad guards, which tells you they thought he was moving.
And Kennedy said one more thing, out loud, to the newspapers:
that unless there was a quick arrest, there might be more murders.
You can watch what that did. Within a day people across central Oklahoma were calling in their neighbors as missing. A war plant worker who'd gone to Tulsa. A man out in Cleveland County. Three counties' worth of officers running down people who had simply gone somewhere.
Sheriff Orr put up five hundred dollars of Lincoln County money for information. The governor and the attorney general started talking about adding a state reward on top of it.
Nobody had any idea who they were looking for.
And then on Thursday, a man in a house on North Missouri Street picked up a telephone.
Elmer Jones had been sitting on this since Monday night. He'd heard what his lodger said in that room. He'd seen the blood. And on Thursday he called two Oklahoma City police officers and asked them to come out.
Their names were Ernest Jones and Nathaniel Baker. Everybody called Baker "Bo."
They were detectives, and they were Black, and in 1944 that meant something very specific about what they were allowed to do.
When Ernest Jones testified about this later, under oath, he described how he started. He said that when he heard about the murders, he began an investigation —
in his section of the city.
His section. That's the phrase. Nobody in that courtroom needed it explained either.
So here's what those two men did with their section of the city.
They went to the Jones house and got a description. They checked the trash can in the back yard and found where clothes had been burned. They pulled the man's record and found three terms at McAlester for stealing livestock. And they took what they had straight to the chief of police.
Then they sat on that house all Thursday night.
Friday morning, the seventh of April, they arrested Elouise Chandler.
She was nineteen years old. She had known this man about a month. And she told them everything.
She told them about the blood on his sleeves, and that he'd said he cut his hand. She told them he'd burned his clothes in the yard. She told them he'd sent her out to buy a newspaper so he could see whether he was in it, and that when he read it he told her, "I'm going. The law is looking for me."
And she told them where he'd gone.
He'd gone home. To Vernon. He'd said he'd send for her in about a month, and that he was going to Vernon for Easter.
By Friday afternoon they had a name, a record, a photograph, a direction, and a witness.
Amon Johnson was in the river bottoms about seven miles north of McLoud, and he had been for two days.
Somewhere out there he crept up to a farmhouse mailbox and took the newspaper out of it — and the woman of the house saw him do it, and watched him tear it up after he'd read it, and telephoned officers.
You already know how that night ended. The dogs, the sailors, the farm boys who stayed out after the officers rested, and about a hundred and fifty shots fired into the dark.
At half past three on Saturday morning they put him in Andrew Orr's jail.
Part 8Twelve Days
I want to do this next part by the calendar, because the calendar is the whole argument.
Saturday, the eighth of April. Walter Hill, the county attorney of Lincoln County, files two charges of murder — one for Victoria Gorski, one for Martha.
And he talks to a reporter, and this is what he says about the man in his jail:
"He has repudiated his confession again now. He won't sign any sort of statement."
Again. That word is doing a lot of work. Because between Friday night and Sunday morning, by the prosecutor's own count, Amon Johnson confessed four times and took it back four times.
He'd also told the police chief over in Norman that he was afraid of being mobbed, and asked for protection. That officer cleared the room down to three men, and got this:
"Mister, I done it."
There's one more thing that happens on the eighth of April, and I'm going to tell you and then set it aside.
Hill mentioned to a reporter that officers from Okfuskee County, way over east, wanted to file a charge of their own. A merchant named Arley Keck had been killed at Weleetka three weeks before this. Two days later the county attorney over there called Johnson a very likely suspect.
No charge was ever filed. That case is still open. It is a different story, and I'm going to tell it properly another time.
Sunday, the ninth of April.
Sheriff Andrew Orr later testified that Johnson called him over to his cell that day and asked to be taken to the assistant county attorney.
So Orr walked him down, and in a room in the courthouse at Chandler, with Orr there and the assistant county attorney there and a state highway patrolman named Raymond Harrison there, Amon Johnson gave a statement eight pages long, and signed it, and a notary public named Mrs. Etta Atkins witnessed his name.
That is the confession. That is the document this entire case rests on.
The ninth of April, 1944, was Easter Sunday.
Tuesday, the eleventh. He goes before a justice of the peace for the first time. And he asks for a preliminary hearing.
Now hold on to that, because two days before, Walter Hill had told the papers exactly what he intended to do with a preliminary hearing. He said the state would demand one whether the defendant wanted it or not. He said they'd put on the major part of their evidence — and he used this phrase — "to preserve it." And he said that enough people had already identified Johnson to make a confession unnecessary.
Unnecessary. The prosecutor said that out loud, four days before he had one.
Wednesday, the twelfth.
Johnson tells the magistrate he wants to waive the preliminary hearing — so that he can go before the district judge and have a jury trial.
And he asks for a lawyer to take him there.
He asks twice.
The court tells him counsel is being appointed — and the phrase in the transcript is "No just for this."
Just for this. Just for the waiver. Not for what comes next.
And then the state waives too. Hill, who four days earlier was going to force a hearing to preserve his evidence, says: "State waives preliminary hearing at this time."
Thursday, the thirteenth. The informations are filed. Lincoln County numbers 2747 and 2748.
Saturday, the fifteenth of April.
Amon Johnson stands up in district court and tells the judge he does not want an attorney.
One is appointed anyway.
And he pleads guilty. Twice — once for Victoria and once for Martha.
So walk that with me.
On Wednesday he wanted a jury of twelve people to hear this case, and he asked twice for a lawyer to help him get there.
On Saturday he wanted neither.
Three days.
And there is nothing — not in the newspapers, not in the docket, not in the opinion the appeals court wrote about it a year later — that explains what happened in between.
There is a record of it. A transcript exists of that Saturday hearing. When the Court of Criminal Appeals wrote up this case, they mentioned that transcript, described it as "quite lengthy," and chose not to print it.
Here's my read, and I'll flag it as a read.
In April of 1942, in Hughes County, this same man was put in a jail on a livestock charge, and the very next day he pleaded guilty. No lawyer mentioned anywhere. He got three years for a stolen horse.
He'd run this play before, and it had worked. A quick plea got you out of a county jail and into the penitentiary, and it made the number smaller.
I think he was trading. And I don't think anybody sat him down and told him there was nothing on the table.
But I want to be fair about the other side of it, because there is one. Sheriff Orr testified under oath that the confession was Johnson's own idea — that he was the one who asked to be taken to the county attorney. That's the state's account, given by the man who was holding him, at a hearing where nobody spoke for the defense at all.
All three of those things are true at once. I'd rather hand you all three than pick one.
Part 9The Twenty-Sixth of April
Twenty-three days after Victoria and Martha Gorski died, the district court at Chandler held a hearing to decide what to do with the man who had pleaded guilty to killing them.
The room was packed. People stood. They overflowed into the jury box —
the jury box of a trial that was never going to happen.
Walter Gorski was in that room. So were two of his daughters.
County Attorney Hill started calling witnesses at about half past ten in the morning.
The first witness he called was Helen Gorski.
She was ten years old. Her father was sitting there. And they asked her to tell the court what she saw when she came home from school and went out to gather the eggs.
Her sister Pearl testified. Their father testified, and when they handed him photographs taken at the scene and asked him to identify them, the reporter in the room wrote down that he showed his emotional strain.
The garage man from Harrah, Lewis Drew, picked the truck out of a photograph and picked the man out of the room.
Bob Lackey from the stockyards testified about three head of cattle and a license number he'd written down for no particular reason.
Ernest Jones testified about his section of the city.
And Walter Hill himself took the stand, to talk about a knife.
The knife had come to him from the sheriff over in Pottawatomie County on about the seventh of April. An ordinary pocket knife. Johnson had admitted it was his.
And when somebody asked him about the blood on the blade, he'd said it might have come from his cut finger.
Or, he said, from Eloise Chandler cutting meat.
Eleven days after he signed a confession to three killings, he was still explaining away a knife.
The assistant county attorney read the confession out loud to the room.
The defense called nobody.
At a quarter past three in the afternoon, Judge Kenneth Jarrett asked the defendant whether he had anything to say.
"I enter a plea of guilty and will rely on the mercy of the court and the Lord."
He was wearing a khaki shirt and khaki trousers and brown shoes, and the reporter wrote that he remained emotionless throughout.
Judge Jarrett sentenced him to death twice. Execution was set for the sixth of July.
And then the paper printed one more sentence about it, and I'm going to read it to you exactly as it ran, because it does not need any help from me:
"As Johnson is electrocuted, he will be the first person given the death sentence in Lincoln county actually to die. Two other persons previously were sentenced to the chair, but sentences of both were commuted."
That same afternoon, Sheriff Andrew Orr put him in a car and started driving east to McAlester.
And on that drive, Amon Johnson told the sheriff that parts of his confession were not true.
Not the part about whether he did it. He never took that back. He wanted to change how.
He said he hadn't just pulled into the Gorski place. He said he'd sold Victoria Gorski the cottonseed — that she'd handed him a five dollar bill and he'd given her two dollars back. And then he asked to buy the cows, and she said no, and he went to the truck and got a wrench.
And he told Orr why he'd wanted Roy Schat's truck in the first place.
He said he'd wanted to tie the man up and take it. Not kill him. Take the truck, and make some money hauling with it.
Because he and Elouise Chandler were going to go to Vernon at Easter, and get married.
He was caught on the Friday. Two days short of home.
And he signed the confession on Sunday.
He never got the sixth of July.
In June the governor moved the date to October — not out of mercy, but because the law gave a condemned man six months to appeal and the clock had not run out. The appeal was filed on the twenty-fifth of July.
In October, four days before he was due to die, a judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals named Dick Jones stayed the execution — on the grounds that Johnson had not actually been given the time the constitution allows to file an appeal.
That is the only occasion in this entire case where anybody official looked at how this man had been handled and found something wrong with it.
The appeal was argued on a Wednesday in December. His lawyers had put in writing that he'd been denied counsel and that he'd been forced to plead guilty by threats.
At the argument, they raised neither one. They told the court the trial judge had done nothing wrong.
And I have to tell you what else that court heard the same day.
A lawyer named George B. Forrester, from Sulphur, appointed by the court to defend another Black man under sentence of death, stood up in front of those same judges and told them that when his client pleaded guilty there were men in that courtroom threatening violence. That he and his client had both been afraid. That one man had a rope.
The court gave him thirty days to put it in the record.
Different case. Different county. Different man. There is no rope in any account of the courtroom at Chandler, and I am not telling you there was one.
What I'm telling you is that on the day Amon Johnson's lawyers dropped the claim that he'd been threatened into a guilty plea, those judges were sitting there listening to another lawyer make it — and taking it seriously.
On the tenth of January, 1945, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed both death sentences. The opinion was written by Judge Jones.
The execution was reset for the twenty-third of March.
Part 10Closing Thoughts
So that's the case. A man killed three people on a Monday, confessed on Easter Sunday, pleaded guilty twelve days after the murders, and was sentenced to death twenty-three days after them. The appeals court affirmed it and the state carried it out.
Nobody, then or since, has seriously argued he didn't do it. I'm not going to argue it either. By the Wednesday of that first week — before anybody knew his name — the state had tire prints matching two scenes, the business where the feed came from, cattle traced to a buyer, and the killer's handwriting on a weigh bill. Then nine people identified him.
So this isn't a story about whether they got the right man.
It's a story about what happened after they did.
Because here's what I can't put down.
Why does a prosecutor announce he's going to put his whole case on the record to preserve it, and then waive the hearing four days later?
Why does a man ask for a jury trial and a lawyer on Wednesday, and want neither one by Saturday? What happened in those three days — and why did the only court that ever looked at this decide that the transcript of it was too lengthy to print?
Why did his own lawyers write down that he was threatened into pleading, and then stand up in front of three judges and say nothing about it?
And why is Roy Schat not in any of it?
That last one is the one that got under my skin.
Roy Schat was killed first. He is the reason there was a truck at all. The county attorney down in Norman said publicly he'd file first degree murder for him, and a charge was filed, and it was still listed as pending in July.
And then it just stops. There is no trial for Roy Schat. There is no conviction in his name. In the entire written opinion of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, he is not a person — he is "the farmer."
He had a wife of thirty years and seven children, and three of them were under twelve, and the youngest was two years old. Not one newspaper in the state printed a single one of their names.
The state of Oklahoma executed a man for these murders. It never once did it for him.
Here's what became of them.
Walter Gorski lived another thirty-five years. He died in 1979.
Pearl, who was fourteen and upstairs with a book, married a man named Kubiak and lived until 2008.
Dewey Schat was widowed at forty-four with three children under twelve, and she lived another thirteen years.
And the Schat children lived a long time. Juanita, who was twenty-nine when her father was killed, died in 2015. She was a hundred years old. Joe Neal, who was eleven, died in 2018.
Which means that for most of my life there were people walking around Oklahoma who remembered this, and nobody ever asked them about it.
And I could not find out what happened to Elouise Chandler.
She was nineteen. She's the reason they caught him. She was arrested for it, and she was never called to testify, and after April of 1944 she is not in anything I have been able to put my hands on.
If you know that name, I would like to hear from you.
There's one more thing, and then I'll let you go.
Part 11The Last Afternoon
Go back to that car for a second. The twenty-sixth of April, 1944, running east out of Chandler toward McAlester with a sheriff and a man who had been sentenced to die about an hour before.
Andrew Orr said afterward that he was talkative the whole way.
And about three miles short of the penitentiary, Amon Johnson asked them to stop the car.
He asked if he could get out and touch the earth one more time. He said he knew it would be the last time.
And they let him.
Eleven months later, at five minutes past midnight on the twenty-third of March, 1945, the state executioner turned on the current.
It stayed on for forty-one seconds.
He was pronounced dead at eight minutes past twelve.
It was the first execution for the warden, for the prison chaplain, and for two deputy wardens.
Earlier that evening he had refused to see the chaplain, and he told them he had not received a fair deal. He asked for the McAlester paper. And he asked for a copy of the Black Dispatch, the Negro newspaper out of Oklahoma City — the one that had printed Ernest Jones and Bo Baker's names when nobody else in the state would.
A quartet of men from inside the prison came and sang for him, and the paper said he seemed to enjoy it.
He was buried in the prison cemetery at McAlester, because his mother, Mrs. Mittie Johnson of Boley, was unable to claim the body.
There's a flat stone out there with his name on it. It gives a birth year.
It does not match any document he ever touched. Neither do the other three.
The State of Oklahoma executed a man and never established how old he was.
Part 12Outro
If you know anything about the Gorski, Schat, or Johnson families — or if you have anything that might fill in the pieces we're still missing, especially what became of Elouise Chandler, or the two men sentenced to death in Lincoln County before 1944 whose sentences were commuted — I would love to hear from you. 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 census pages, the draft card, and photographs of all four graves. 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.