The Flying Bootlegger's Wife, Part 2

 

Orval Lindsey Chambless, “the flying bootlegger.”

Courtesy Oklahoma Today.

Orval Chambless, charged with the killing of his bootlegger pal Wilbert Charles Eltzroth, had no trouble organizing a defense because all the witnesses were friendly witnesses.The incident is rendered in the colorless language of the court.

There is little dispute in the evidence. The state necessarily had to rely upon witnesses which were very friendly to the defendant. The proof showed that the defendant Chambless, the deceased Eltzroth, Stella Orrell, Robert Scott, and Mary Lou Smith, a daughter of Stella Orrell, met at the Golden Pheasant cafe in Oklahoma City, about 2 a.m. on January 7, 1947. Eltzroth had been drinking. Stella Orrell and the defendant came into the cafe together. All of the parties had been acquainted for over a year. The Golden Pheasant cafe closed about 3 a.m., and the parties went across the street to Bishop's waffle house. There Robert Scott and Eltzroth got into an argument, and their talk became so loud that the cashier of the cafe told them to quiet down or leave; the party then left to go to Chambless' house at 2914 Northwest 17th street in Oklahoma City. Chambless, Mrs. Orrell, Mary Lou Smith, and Scott got in the car of Chambless. 

Among the pleasantness at the Golden Pheasant we note two guests that we know, Stella and her daughter Mary Lou. At this date, Mary Lou would have been sixteen. Not old enough to legally drink, but old enough to think for herself, as will be seen. 

The court record continues, “The deceased, who had been drinking heavily, drove his own automobile. On the way to the Chambless home, the people in the Chambless car left the daughter of Mrs. Orrell at her apartment.” Stella was living with Chambless, but Mary Lou at the age of sixteen had her own apartment. She was no longer a child.

 After arriving at the Chambless home, the parties had a few more drinks of intoxicating liquor (a picture of the livingroom of Chambless' home, taken early the next morning after the homicide by the police photographer, showed two empty pint whisky bottles sitting on a tray and three quart-size bottles of either whisky or brandy, two of them partially filled sitting on the floor and another on a dressing table). 

The drinking escalated and disagreement broke out among the men. Chambless stepped into the bedroom, got his rifle, and, according to Chambless, in the ensuing struggle with Eltzroth, the darned thing went off. Which was very curious, since it was a bolt-action rifle and had to be cocked. But this could be explained away, since as the court observed all the witnesses were “friendly.” In going off, however, the rifle mortally wounded Eltzroth. 

After the shooting occurred, Eltzroth was taken to Wesley hospital in Chambless' automobile. The defendant and other parties gave blood transfusions, but Eltzroth died about 24 hours later. Mrs. Orrell testified for the defendant that the deceased, just shortly before his death, told them at the hospital that he was sorry this had to happen and that it was an accident; that he did not blame the defendant.

Stella, according to the Oklahoman for 17 October 1947, testified that Eltzroth told her, “It was all my fault” and that Chambless was his “best friend.” If Eltzroth said this, it may have been his finest moment. He got Chambless off the murder hook, with the charge against him reduced to second-degree manslaughter. Eltzroth, it would seem, had a sense of honor.

The report observes that Stella Orrell stayed with Chambless, although not married to him, and that they had their names listed as Orval and Stella Chambless on the mailbox in front of the Chambless home. The detail of interest here is Stella’s relationship to Chambless. Getting her name on the mailbox is not exactly marriage, but bootleggers can’t be expected to observe legal niceties. During the trial for the killing of Eltzworth, Chambless and Stella denied that they were married, despite the names on the mailbox, but a 2008 Oklahoma Today feature on Chambless states that the two did marry. If so, it was a hurried affair, since it had to take place in the few months between the shooting of Eltzroth and Chambless’s incarceration. And indeed it was a brief affair, without stability or permanence, for the very next year, in 1948, Chambless married Stella’s daughter Mary Lou, who by this time was eighteen and not only old enough to know her own mind but to sign her name to a marriage contract, which remains in the public records. What did she think she was doing when she married her mother’s husband or paramour, Orval Lindsey Chambless?

***

Chambless was born in 1916 in Plainview, Hale County, Texas, in the northwestern part of the state, almost in the panhandle. His parents were Hiram Timothy and Edna May Chambless, drab but respectable people, both from Texas families. In 1940 his father was listed as a farm laborer, renting, and with a 5th grade education. Of Hiram’s five children--three born to his first wife, two to his second--Orval appears to have been the only one attracted to the glamour of crime.

Chambless was living in Oklahoma City by 1930, and in 1934 when he was eighteen he had his first documented brush with the law, resulting in a conviction for second-degree burglary. He served fourteen months in the Oklahoma State Reformatory at Granite, which probably prepared him for a life of crime. In 1940 Chambless appears in Leavenworth prison, where the census shows he had a high school education. Prison may have been his finishing school. Whatever crime put him in Leavenworth, he was out and quickly became the high-flying and flamboyant figure of his subsequent career. 

He was known as “the flying bootlegger,” a nickname he earned by flying whiskey from Louisiana into Oklahoma. He acquired additional glamour by hijacking shipments from other bootleggers--additional but dangerous glamour as would be proved when he got himself murdered in 1956. When Chambless became involved with Stella Orrell in 1946--the year Bobby Troup released “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”--he was probably at the height of his career. The  accompanying photograph below reveals his snakey charm. [You can see this photo on my blog.]

The danger in which Chambless lived, and which he invited, is best illustrated by the attack on his life on 4 October 1952. He’s a family man at this point--married to Mary Lou, blessed with two children by her--and may be supposed to be enjoying a convivial evening at home when buckshot blasts through a picture window, striking him in the chest and leg but not seriously injuring him. The blasts barely miss his four-year-old son Jimmie, stretched out on a divan, his head in his father’s lap. Another child, Ronnie, two years old, was also in the room. 

The shooting occurred because Chambless was suspected in a $248,000 “international robbery,” according to the Sarasota Florida Herald-Tribune, reporting on October 25. He “was named as trigger man in the big money robbery of two Cubans at a Ft. Worth motel earlier this month . . . . The Cubans said they came to the United States from Mexico to negotiate the purchase of munitions to be used in a revolution against the present Cuban government.” Chambless’s role in this heist was never clarified, but one thing is certain--he was playing with the big boys and the water was over his head. Given the Dallas-Ft. Worth location and the purchase of arms for Cuba, this sounds like the turf of Dallas’s own Jack Ruby.

I have no evidence directly linking Chambless to Ruby, but they had common acquaintances, for Ruby knew everyone. (A fine recent book on the assassination of JFK says of Ruby, “his contacts are so manifold as to defy enumeration.”) One of these mutual acquaintances was Jimmy Dolan, an enforcer for Santo Traficante, one of the most powerful bosses of the American mafia. Traficante himself was deeply dyed in the CIA efforts to involve the mob in anti-revolutionary Cuban intrigues. In 1952, with the mob’s puppet Batista still in power, it’s hard to imagine anti-Baptista arms purchasers in Dallas, but they could well have been pro-Batista men masquerading. And these efforts to involve the mob in anti-revolutionary intrigues continued down through the killing of JFK, to track them no further. Reputable sources believe that Traficante had prior knowledge of the presidential assassination, as did another big-time mobster with Oklahoma links. This was “Murray the Hump” Humphreys, whose wife’s family was from Norman and who maintained a hide-away house there. The nest of conspiracies around the JFK hit, however, has never been untangled and probably never will be. All we can do here is keep our eye on Chambless. Whoever tried to kill him in 1952 wasn’t going to be deterred by one failure.

Chambless’s enemies finally whacked him in July of 1956. On or about Independence Day, he disappeared completely, but no Roman rocket marked the event. Oklahoma historian Kent Frates tells the story:

Chambless disappeared for good on July 5, 1956. That night, Chambless, his wife Mary Lou, bootlegger Seth Stone, and his wife were having dinner at Chambless’ northwest Oklahoma City home when Chambless received a phone call. Mary Lou later told the police that she assumed he was going out on a job.

As was his habit, Chambless took a high-powered rifle with him. When his car was found a few days later in the airport parking lot, a pistol was in the glove compartment. Chambless’ hat--and, according to some news stories, blood--was also in the car. The rifle was not found.

During Chambless’ absence, there was speculation about whether he had been killed or was on the run. He reportedly was sighted more times than the dead Elvis, in Dallas, San Antonio, Lawton, Wichita Falls, Oklahoma City, and Mexico. 

At the same time an underworld informant told police that if Chambless was still alive, someone was in big trouble, since a hired assassin had been paid more than three thousand dollars to kill Chambless. 

The killer was very probably “the Southwest’s No. 1 badman,” a prolific hitman named Gene Paul Norris, believed to have killed 40 to 50 people in a long career before being outgunned by a team of Texas Rangers outside Fort Worth in April of 1957. 

Five heavily armed officers were in the first chase car, including Texas Ranger Captain Jay Banks, who was armed with an M-3 rifle, a modified M-1 that fired automatically. As Norris and [his accomplice W. C. “Wimpy”] Humphrey backed across a creek blazing away at their pursuers, both were gunned down. Norris was shot sixteen times and Humphrey twenty-three times, mostly tattooed by Banks’ automatic M-3. 

Norris’s death closed nine murder investigations. The Texas Ranger Dispatch said, “There are wells all over Texas that Norris stuffed bodies in.” If Chambless’s killer was Norris, the person who hired him will never be known.

In the first week of November of that year, fifteen months after Chambless’s disappearance, the Miami Daily News Record reported that his badly decomposed body was found “buried in a shallow grave at the foot of a tree 100 feet from the end of a dead end road, approximately 10 miles south and one mile east of the Oklahoma City Municipal Airport.” One of the two Oklahoma City deputies who found the corpse was our old friend Bob Turner, who participated in the Billie Grayson investigation.

The last ride of the flying bootlegger, as anyone could have predicted, was to the graveyard. Few persons were on hand for the funeral services, held in the Primrose funeral chapel at Norman. The Galveston Texas Daily News reported, “The bootlegger’s widow, Mrs. Mary Lou Chambless, Cisco, Tex.; his sister, Mrs. H. C. St. Clair of Roswell, N.M., and a few friends attended.” He was buried in Resthaven Cemetery, one of the largest cemeteries in Oklahoma City (properly, Cleveland County). At last report in September 2013, there was still no marker on his grave, but the head of the Oklahoma Outlaws and Lawmen Historical Association (OKOLHA) tells me that his organization has plans to erect one when funds become available. 

Stella did not attend the funeral with her daughter. 

***

The story of Stella, born Stella Embry, has already been told, has been told earlier. She was youngest of nine children. Her parents, nearing forty at the time of her birth, may not have reared her as strictly as they did her siblings. Even Dewey, the brother closest to her in age and with whom she was staying in Oklahoma City in 1941, kept out of trouble. Stella was the only one that went astray. 

In January of 1953, she married for the last time, this time to Robert Cloyd “Chick” Massey of Cisco, Eastland County, Texas, where the marriage took place. Massey was born in 1904 in Eastland County, where his parents were living by 1900. His marriage to Stella appears to have been his only marriage. They had no children, so Mary Lou, Stella’s child by Leland Smith, remained her only child. 

Stella’s obituary in the Abilene Texas Reporter for 3 February 1964 states that she had been a resident of Cisco for twelve years and was a member of the Methodist church. Of the survivors listed, one was as Mrs. Mary Lou Turner of Cisco, Stella’s daughter. Sometime, probably soon after the death of Chambless, Mary Lou married Leslie Glenn Turner of Cisco Texas, and she had a least one child with him. Mr. Turner passed away in Cisco in 1962, so that by the time of Stella’s death, Mary Lou was a widow. The reference to her in Stella’s obituary is the last record of Mary Lou that I’ve been able to find. Her death is not recorded online. She may still be living around Cisco, an octogenarian with many memories.

Coming to the end of this tale, I pause to question what made Cisco so attractive to so many of Chambless’s family and acquaintances. Cisco is known only as the town where the great chain of Conrad Hilton hotels had its beginning in 1919. I don’t know the answer, but rumor says that from the beginning, the hotels were favored by mobsters. 

[An extract from the title story in my book THE LONESOME DEATH OF BILLIE GRAYSON, available on Amazon.]