The Flying Bootlegger’s Wife (Part 1)

Her maiden name was Stella Embry, the youngest child of a poor farm couple who had acquired a farm east of Chandler. They were imposingly named Clinton Van Buren and Luvenna Angeline Cardwell, from Morgan County Kentucky, and they had arrived in Lincoln County about 1910. More importantly, two of Clinton Embry’s brothers had also made the migration to Lincoln County, and they were not poor farmers. They were the well known attorneys John and James Embry, who along with James’s lawyer son John were a legal force to reckon with around Chandler. Stella had married Corky Orrell, Billie Grayson’s killer, who had taken a room with her mother in mid-1941 while he was staying in Chandler. (Her father had passed away in 1926, the year that Route 66 received its numerical designation.) Family being family, especially in Kentucky, James Embry would be Orrell’s defense attorney. Of the two brothers, it was he who practiced criminal law.

Orrell had been brought back to Chandler by the Sheriff, “Bulldog” Marvin Roberts, from Sandusky Ohio where he had fled. As reported in the Chandler News Publicist by its cub reporter Bette Dean Boggs, “Waiting on the steps of the county jail was Orrell’s wife, Stella. She was permitted to see her husband for the first time with the press. Orrell was brought from his cell and embraced his wife when he saw her. Tears were in his eyes. Mrs. Orrell appeared to take the meeting better than her husband.” As well she might. It wasn’t the loyal wife who was about to be arraigned and tried for murder one.

Orrell and Stella in front of the Chandler jail, September 1941.

Bette Boggs describes the appearance of the accused. “Dressed in a white shirt, a white slip-on sweater, dark trousers and two-tone gray shoes, Orrell was most cooperative and courteous to the press.” Stella, whom the Republican called “an attractive brunette,” is dressed to kill. Elegantly, she displays gloves, purse, buttoned-up collar, a snood-like hat, a visible wedding ring, and a twelve-carat smile.

Between Orrell and Stella an estrangement had occurred before the August murder. As a consequence, and as a way of trying to hide his tracks, after Orrell fled to Ohio he wrote Stella a letter that was subsequently entered into evidence at his trial. In it he makes a reference to Stella’s twelve-year old daughter Mary Lou, a child from a previous marriage. He wrote, “School will be starting next week and I'm just wondering what you are going to do with Mary Lou. Every time I see a girl about her age or size I get the funniest feeling I've ever had.” Having these words read aloud in court may have caused Stella to hear them in a new sense. Billie Grayson had been a young girl too, 17 years old. This could have combined with the even more frightening thought that Orrell was going to be convicted of murder one, which combination  may have made her think about moving on. Up to this point it had been a case of “stand by your man,” but the ground where she was standing was turning to quicksand beneath her feet. She entered an action of replevin to get possession of Orrell’s 1941 Ford and she left town. She probably had multiple motives. Not only did she want to get Mary Lou away from Orrell, she may have wanted to find a man who could earn more money than Orrell had as a part time roughneck, a man who could satisfy the yearnings for glamour suggested by her figure in that August 1941 photograph in front of the Chandler jail.

Stella’s career was to take her through a series of five husbands before she died in Texas in 1964. She had her eyes on the prize, the prize was money, and she wasn’t particular about the man’s morals if he could provide what she wanted. She had first married a farmer, Leland Smith, but no small farmer in Oklahoma ever made money. Perhaps she merely married him to get away from the farm and into town, for by 1935 she was living in Shawnee--more than a town, a small and growing city. Courtney Orrell, whom she married in 1938, was her next attempt to better herself. He was only a roughneck, but he had an uncle who was a drilling contractor and doing well. But Orrell had taken a hard fall, and Stella wasn’t going down with him. Her next two husbands would be men who understood how to make money as well as how to deal with the law. They would be bootleggers.

There was wealth in Oklahoma for smart bootleggers. Prohibition had arrived in 1907 with statehood and the constitution, so neither national prohibition nor its repeal had any effect on the local economy. Oklahoma voted dry, but it drank wet. With so much money to be made from whiskey, bootleggers bought off local law enforcement, and business flourished. As Will Rogers remarked, Oklahomans would continue to vote dry as long as they could stagger to the polls. This situation lasted until 1958, when the administration of Governor Howard Edmondson legalized liquor and started enforcing the laws. 

New to the game, Stella didn’t pick a winner the first time. About 1943, when Orrell’s conviction was still languishing before the Court of Appeals, she took up with Wilbert Eltzroth, a small time hood from the big city--Kansas City, Missouri--and lived with him for three years. Born in 1904 in Missouri of Ohioan parents, Wilbert Charles Eltzroth (whose first name is often miswritten as “William”) was in Leavenworth prison by the age of twenty-one. He couldn’t have served too many years, however, because the 1930 census shows him as a garage proprietor in Kansas City, and within a year he married Helen Perrin. 

The next decade of his life is missing, but in 1945 he’s listed in the directory for Oklahoma City with his wife Stella, where his occupation is given as engineer. How he got from garage proprietor to engineer in fifteen years without benefit of education is a good question. Most likely he learned to “engineer” shipments of whiskey. He was working with a big name in the bootlegging business, a man who engineered a lot of transportation and made a lot of money, Orval Lindsey Chambless. In fact, Eltzroth today is only remembered, if at all, because in October of 1947 he was shot dead by a deer rifle held in the hands of Chambless, the Flying Bootlegger. It will be Chambless that fate selects as Stella’s next mate.

To be continued. Extracted from “The Lonesome Death of Billy Grayson” from my book of the same title, available at Amazon.com.