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Terminating Oklahoma’s Smiling Killer

by Robert M. Utley

Since the 1935 formation of the Department of Public Safety, which combined the Highway Patrol and the Texas Rangers, Company B in Dallas had been one of the two most active Ranger units. First under Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas and then under Robert Crowder, Company B vied with Company A in Houston as the new breed of “concrete Rangers” or “city Rangers.” In fact, they strove to be more urban detectives than the old breed of frontier Rangers. In the spring of 1957, however, Company B met a daunting challenge at the same time as organizational uncertainty imposed a jarring daily tension.
Ranger Jay Banks

In the first nine months of 1957, Texas Rangers warily anticipated a major reorganization of the Department of Public Safety, which badly needed streamlining. The span of control had become too great for even the legendary director Homer Garrison. Beginning in 1955, the nonprofit Texas Research League worked with Garrison to devise a new organization structure. Officially submitted in January 1957 and immediately consigned to the legislature, the report suited the director, who so confidently expected its adoption that he began to put it into effect.

One measure Garrison implemented was to move Captain Crowder to Austin as “acting chief, Texas Rangers.” This is puzzling, for the Texas Research League’s report made no provision for such a position. It may be speculated that Colonel Garrison negotiated it with the report’s authors and was disappointed at its omission. When the legislature enacted the law based on the report in May 1957, therefore, Crowder’s title vanished. Crowder then accepted the post of regional commander in Lubbock, effective September 1, whether by choice or pressure from Garrison is not evident.

The regional innovation disturbed the Rangers. Under the new arrangement, Ranger captains would report to regional majors rather than to Director Garrison, as they had done before. The relationship proved unworkable and was abandoned by the end of 1957. In any event, Bob Crowder, even though a major, almost at once discovered that he preferred his old Ranger company.[1]

Crowder had made an outstanding captain, treasured by Colonel Garrison, beloved by his men, and ideal for the top Ranger post Garrison had in mind. But in the spring of 1957, Crowder could not return to Company B. His sergeant, E. J. “Jay” Banks, had taken over as acting captain of Company B, a title he held until September 1, 1957, when he gained the permanent captaincy. Arthur Hill transferred from the Big Bend as Banks’s sergeant.

Having been nurtured by Crowder, Banks boasted a fine record as criminal investigator and tough lawman. A master of pistol and rifle, he had demonstrated more than once that he did not shrink from blasting any gangster inclined to resist. Also, as Glenn Elliott remembered, “Jay was a very high-profile type person. He was always on the cover of a magazine or newspaper.” Banks even stood as the model for the statue of the ideal Texas Ranger that still graces the terminal lobby of Dallas’s Love Field.

Still, Banks was not Bob Crowder, and his men did not leave the record of praise they had heaped on Crowder. Nor did Sergeant Hill think highly of Banks.[2]

Like Crowder, Jay Banks is mainly remembered for one bloody event, despite starring in a string of well-publicized cases. Banks faced this incident as an untested acting captain with a newly promoted sergeant who lacked experience as a “city Ranger.” The foe was perhaps the most vicious gangster in the Southwest.

Gene Paul Norris, the “Smiling Killer,” was an Oklahoma mobster with a long record of murder, burglary, bank heists, and sadism. He seemed to enjoy killing, and the slightest provocation could trigger his revenge, which was often preceded by torture. Big-time criminals hired him as a hit man, and lawmen credited him with about fifty homicides. The FBI kept track of the comings and goings of Norris and his sidekick William Carl “Silent Bill” Humphrey.

Outside Oklahoma, Fort Worth was Norris’s principal area of operations, and he drove there in March 1957. Norris had conceived a scheme for robbing the payroll of the branch of the Fort Worth National Bank at Carswell Air Force Base. He knew that James E. Papworth, who ran a collection agency out of a Lake Worth office on the northwestern edge of the city, had served prison time with John W. Taylor. Taylor was the former manager of the branch bank and had been convicted of embezzlement.

Norris and Papworth met late in March at the Beachcomber Tavern, located at the intersection of Meandering Road and the Jacksboro Highway, just north of the lake from which the suburb took its name. Norris demanded (or proposed) that Papworth get a floor plan and other inside information about the bank from Taylor. Papworth would later contend that he agreed to do this because Norris threatened to kill his wife and child if he didn’t. However, Fort Worth Police Chief Cato Hightower believed Papworth was in on the scheme from the beginning. In any case, Papworth delivered. He handed over the floor plan and the name and address of the cashier, Mrs. Elizabeth Barles, who lived on Meandering Road near the Beachcomber Tavern.

The plan was for Norris and Humphrey to take Mrs. Barles and her twelve-year-old son John hostage early on Tuesday April 30, 1957, the morning of the scheduled payroll delivery. Almost certainly, in view of Norris’s style, the two were to be murdered at once. What he wanted was not hostages but Mrs. Barles’s auto and bank keys. Her car, bearing a base-entry sticker, would get them into the base, and the keys would get them into the bank. There, they would wait for the payroll couriers to arrive with $500,000 in cash and tie them up. Then Norris and Humphrey would return to pick up their own car at Mrs. Barles’s residence.[3]

But first, Norris had unfinished business in Houston. The mission was to carry out a twenty-year-old vow: a revenge killing of gambler John Brannan, whose testimony in 1937 had sent Norris’s brother to prison for ninety-nine years. On April 17, Norris and Humphrey entered the Brannan home, threw blankets over the heads of Brannan and his wife, and pounded their heads to a pulp with hammers.

Police discovered the deed the same night. Before long, they and veteran Ranger Captain Johnny Klevenhagen, head of Company A, had enough evidence to support arrest warrants. Aside from pistols that linked the two to recent robberies, police had twice spotted Norris’s souped-up, green, 1957 Chevrolet in Brannan’s neighborhood and had once given chase, only to be outrun by the powerful Chevy.

Ranger Johnny Klevenhagen

The Carswell bank scheme had hardly been worked out before the FBI knew about it, alerted by a tipster whose identity was not officially revealed. Captain Banks later identified the informant as Papworth himself. In Fort Worth, the FBI, Texas Rangers, Fort Worth police, and Tarrant County sheriff met to work out a plan. They knew where Norris and Humphrey were holed up, and they arranged a listening device connected from their motel room to Norris and Humphreys’s next door. Thus, they knew exactly what the two gangsters planned.[4]

The law enforcement response to Norris’s design exemplified the long-time Ranger policy of cooperation with other agencies. Company B’s acting captain, Jay Banks, worked smoothly with Tarrant County Sheriff Harlon Wright, Fort Worth Chief of Police Cato Hightower, and FBI Special Agent in Charge W. A. “Bill” Murphy.

The FBI tracked Norris and Humphrey from Houston to Fort Worth, where they arrived on Saturday, April 27. With the surveillance link in place, they learned that the two outlaws intended to make a dry run of escape routes on Monday afternoon. Officers laid plans to apprehend the two hoodlums then. Banks called Johnny Klevenhagen in Houston and invited him to take part. The captain grabbed his shotgun and arrest warrants and sped north to Fort Worth.

On Monday afternoon, April 29, the local officers converged on the Lake Worth community in three cars. Captain Banks drove his new, high-powered Dodge with Captain Klevenhagen, Chief Hightower, Sheriff Wright, and city detective Captain O. R. Brown as passengers. Ranger Jim Ray was at the wheel of the second car with Arthur Hill (Banks’s sergeant) and city Chief of Detectives Andy Fournier in tow. (Ray had been a Ranger for only two weeks but a Highway Patrolman for twelve years before that.) In the third vehicle were Ranger Ernest Daniels, City Detective George Brakefield (later a Ranger), and Sheriff’s Deputy Bobby Morton.[5]

Banks’s car contained the top law officers because they would man the ambush. Posting Sergeant Hill and his two Rangers at Casino Beach, an amusement park a short distance up Meandering Road from the Jacksboro Highway, Banks and his carload of four other officers drove two miles southwest down Meandering Road to Mrs. Barles’s home. She and her son had been moved to another house on Sunday. Banks and his companions lay in wait to spring the trap once Hill radioed that they had turned from Jacksboro Highway onto Meandering Road. The lawmen at the Barles house readied themselves. They hoped to take the gangsters alive but knew, in all probability, it could not be done.[6]

The FBI spotted the two outlaws in Fort Worth and radioed, “Norris and Humphrey are stopped at the corner of Northwest 28th and Main. They are in a 1957 Chevrolet. Now Norris and Humphrey are driving down 28th.” The FBI followed the men until Hill spotted the fugitives turning onto Meandering Road. He radioed that he had them in view. “Take over, Rangers, we are out of it, now,” was the FBI reply.

Hill swung in behind Norris and Humphrey at a distance, but he quickly warned the others that the scheme had gone awry. A Cadillac and the green Chevy had turned right off Meandering Road onto a residential street. Hill turned, too, maintaining a discreet distance.

The officers sighted a man getting out of the front car and into the second, and they misinterpreted what they saw. Actually, the first car was Papworth’s, and he was taking Norris to show him the location of the Barles house. Humphrey was following in the Chevrolet. Papworth, according to his confession, had second thoughts and deliberately took a wrong turn. An enraged Norris, hurling threats, got out of the car and ran back to get in the car with Humphrey. At this time, they spotted Hill’s car behind them. Swiftly turning in a driveway and backing out, they sped back to Meandering Road and swerved northeast toward the Jacksboro Highway. Banks and his Dodge full of locals were on their tail.

Suddenly, Humphrey veered left off Meandering Road and bumped across an open pasture toward the Jacksboro Highway, which here ran almost parallel and about one-fourth mile from Meandering Road. Banks followed. Humphrey smashed through a fence, bounced across a ditch, and headed up the four-lane Jacksboro Highway. Banks kept on his tail.[7]

In the meantime, Sergeant Hill, with Jim Ray driving, raced back up Meandering Road to the Jacksboro Highway. At the left turn, Ray miscalculated and found himself speeding north in the southbound lanes of the Jacksboro Highway. Soon, he had pulled abreast of the two cars across the median, but he then slowed to cross into the northbound lanes and fell behind. The third car, monitoring the radio traffic, now joined the chase, close behind Ray.

The pursuit reached speeds of 120 miles per hour, sirens wailing but no red lights flashing, thanks to budgetary stringency. Norris leaned out and exchanged fire with three officers hanging out the windows of Banks’s car. The race slowed not at all as they streaked down the main street of Azle, scattering autos and pedestrians but avoiding collisions.

A mile and a half south of Springtown, in Parker County, Humphrey swerved right onto a country road, spraying mud across the highway. This was probably not a sudden decision but part of the escape plan earlier mapped. Banks turned, too, but spun in two complete circles before recovering and heading in the right direction. A light rain fell, making the caliche-based road slick as it twisted along the banks of flood-swollen Walnut Creek.

Bullets and blasts from Klevenhagen’s shotgun continued to slice the space between the vehicles. Suddenly, Humphrey took a curve too fast, slid on the rain-slick road, plowed into a ditch, and smashed into two trees. He and Norris leaped from the car and ran toward the creek, firing pistols at Banks as he sought to bring his Dodge to a stop.

Rangers Banks & Klevenhagen

With their car crossway on the road, the officers piled out, firing with all the weapons at their command. Klevehagen had his shotgun, and Banks grabbed his M-3 (an Army M-1, converted to fully automatic with a large clip), but the magazine fell out, and he had to run back to retrieve it.

The two fugitives fired from behind the creek bank and then struggled to cross the raging water. Bullets downed Humphrey, whose body later washed up on a small, flood-made island.

Body of Silent Bill Humphrey and Unidentified Police Officer.

Screaming laughter, Norris backed across the creek, firing at the lawmen, all of whom sprayed bullets from every weapon they had. Banks let go the entire clip of his rifle. As he later stated, “The bullets started stitching Norris, and he didn’t have enough hands to stop up the holes. He died, screaming like a baby, on the banks of muddy Walnut Creek.” Norris fell backward in the mud. All the officers later maintained that they did not know who had downed Norris, but the consensus awards the distinction to Banks and his automatic.[8]

At this moment, Jim Ray topped a little hill at high speed and saw Banks’s car broadside across the road. He hit the brakes, swung in a complete circle, and came to a stop three feet from the side of the other vehicle. As Ray rolled out, Klevehagen shouted, “I’m out of ammunition! He’s getting away; give me a gun!” Ray pitched him his own shotgun.

The third pursuit car rolled to a stop, but the firing had ended before Ray even got there. The bodies of both gangsters could be seen in and across the creek, about thirty yards apart. Norris had slipped back down the slope, his feet in the water. Fearing Norris would be swept away by the floodwaters, Sergeant Hill dragged the body back up the hillside.

Norris' Corpse on the Creek Bank

Attendants at the Fort Worth funeral home where the corpses were taken told the press that Norris took sixteen hits, mostly in his chest and body. Humphrey had twenty-three wounds in his mouth, chest, and left leg. “He shot him to pieces,” concluded Jim Ray of Banks’s burst of automatic rifle fire.

The furious chase of twenty-five miles had put many citizens at risk. Even the sheriff had urged Banks to call off the pursuit, to no avail. After years of work, Banks and his fellow officers had ended the rampage of two of the deadliest criminals in Texas history.[9] Chief Hightower declared that the death of Norris enabled him to clear nine murder cases from his books. The operation testified to the merit of agency cooperation and revealed the planning skills of the Rangers as well as their ability to push an auto chase to the limit and prevail in an exchange of gunfire.

Jay Banks served three more years as captain of Company B. On March 2, 1960, Homer Garrison called Banks to Austin and informed him that he would have to be let go. According to Banks, Garrison offered neither explanation nor a hearing. Banks promptly submitted his application for retirement. When protests from law enforcement and judicial officials all over Texas began to inundate Garrison’s desk, he released the explanation that Banks had failed to follow repeated orders to shut down gambling in Fort Worth.

Whether true or not, this was merely a cover story. Banks’s self-serving explanation may have contained a kernel of truth, but it was so suffused with bitterness that it aroused skepticism. Banks named no names, but he clearly blamed Homer Garrison, Assistant Director Joe Fletcher, and Public Safety Commission Chairman C. T. McLaughlin. Their motivation stemmed from the discontent of Bob Crowder in his post as major of the Lubbock region and his desire to return as the Company B captain. Banks also accused this “older Ranger,” who had once led the company, of using his captaincy for personal gain and bribing federal Internal Revenue agents to ignore his misdeeds. “Anyone else would have been immediately fired from that position,” Banks protested.

Bob Crowder did, in fact, return to the captaincy of Company B. This was a move Garrison and Fletcher had surely favored and arranged after Banks’s resignation. Despite widespread protests, Rangers themselves did not complain. They knew the real reason lay in personal misbehavior the director and the chairman of the Public Safety Commission believed would bring discredit to the service. The Ranger rumor mill throbbed with speculation, but the theories never become public.

Bob Crowder captained Company B until his retirement in 1967. He served as effectively and commanded as much respect and affection of his men as before 1957. He died in 1972 at the age of seventy-one.

Jay Banks went on to serve as chief of the Big Springs Police Department and head of public safety for Southern Methodist University. He died in 1987.[10]

Notes

1. Texas Research League, the Texas Department of Public Safety: Its Services and Organization (Austin, 1957). Company B’s new sergeant, Arthur Hill, recorded in his weekly log that he conferred in Austin with Chief Crowder in October 1956; Hill Family Papers, courtesy Sharon Spinks; Lewis C. Rigler and Judyth W. Rigler, In the Line of Duty: Reflections of a Texas Ranger Private (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1995), 154.

2. Glenn Elliott with Robert Nieman, Glenn Elliott: A Ranger’s Ranger (Waco: Texian Press, 1999), 73; Linda Jay Puckett, Cast a Long Shadow: A Casebook of the Law Enforcement Career of Texas Ranger Captain E. J. (Jay) Banks (Dallas: Ussery Printing, 1984), 102. Banks mentions his position as acting captain of Company B, although his memory of dates is faulty.

3. Papworth finally confessed his role, although in self-serving terms. He explained the content of the confession to a reporter, and that report appeared in the evening edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 1, 1957.

4. Accounts by participants differ in some major ways. At the time, all refused to identify the tipster. Banks later named Papworth when he talked to crime writer Stan Redding for a biographical article about Klevenhagen, “Top Gun of the Texas Rangers” for True Detectives magazine, February 1963. Contemporary sources in the newspapers claimed to have planted an informer as a third robber who kept them posted on what Norris and Humphrey were up to. The informer was not identified at the time. This seems less plausible to me than Papworth. Norris and Humphrey were cagey, cautious criminals. That they would have so readily accepted a third accomplice seems unlikely unless he were, in fact, Papworth, who was complicit in the scheme from the beginning. The surveillance between motel rooms is the recollection of Sergeant Hill in an interview by Andy and Sharon Spinks, December 30, 1986, for Hill Family Papers, courtesy Sharon Spinks.

5. Most sources have Hill, Ray, and Daniels in Hill’s car and the three city detectives in the third car. However, Sergeant Hill’s weekly activity notebook for April 29, penned that day, names Fournier as the third officer in his car. Hill Family Papers, courtesy Sharon Spinks.

6. Most sources have Hill at the intersection of Meandering Road and Jacksboro Highway, the location of the Beachcomber Tavern. Hill’s daily log, however, names Casino Beach. Jim Ray’s interview with Robert Nieman on October 18, 1999, identifies a small park up Meandering Highway from the intersection.

7. Most accounts have the chase occurring entirely on Meandering Road. This is Banks’s account (Puckett, Shadow, 116). Banks has the two cars swerving onto a frontage road, headed the wrong direction. The chase sequence is difficult to work out plausibly, however, especially since the contemporary Fort Worth map shows the frontage road ending before it could have been accessed from a pasture. It seems unlikely to me that Banks could have invented the pasture story.

8. This seems plausible because Norris’s wife, who appeared the next day, could have brought murder charges against a named lawman, and this was a simple way to avoid litigation.

9. This episode has been difficult to reconstruct. Vital sources are contemporary accounts of participants in both the morning and evening editions of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 30 and May 1, 1957, and the same dates of the evening paper, the Fort Worth Press. I am indebted to J’Nell Pate of Azle for researching these papers for me and also providing a copy of the relevant portion of a Fort Worth city map of 1957. In later accounts of participants, memories differed both on events and geography. The sources are Banks himself (Puckett, Shadow, chap. 19); Hill in an interview with Andy and Sharon Spinks, December 30, 1986; and Hill’s weekly activity notebook for relevant dates, courtesy Sharon Spinks. Good if journalistically phrased detail is in Stan Redding, “Top Gun of the Texas Rangers,” True Detectives Magazine, February 1963; Douglas V. Meed, Texas Ranger Johnny Klevenhagen (Plano: Republic of Texas Press, 2000), chap. 17; and Jim Ray, interview with Robert Nieman, October 18, 1997, copy provided by Nieman. Another version based on Ray’s memory is contained in Nieman, “Capt. Johnny Klevenhagen,” Texas Ranger Dispatch magazine, Issue 10 (Spring 2003), found online at Texas Ranger Hall of Fame Web site www.texasranger.org. Meed based his account on the Houston Post, May 1, 1957, but wrongly attributed the killing of Norris to Klevenhagen. The accounts of Banks, Hill, and Ray are much more plausible, especially since the crime-scene photograph of Norris’s body (which I have seen) belies the notion that he was killed by a shotgun. These later recollections proved valuable in filling in details contained in the contemporary newspaper accounts, especially Banks’s account.

10. Puckett, Shadow, chapters 23-24 contain Banks’s self-justification.