Murder During the Week and Divorce on Saturday
My job requires me to do research in old newspapers on occasion. And I am constantly amazed at what I find printed.
This week found me researching a murder that took place here in Oklahoma City in the early part of the 20th century. I found the story in a regular column in the newspaper that reported the court news. The columnist referred briefly to a couple of men who’d been sentenced to life and 20 years in the state penitentiary for murder. But the focus of the article was the “Patterson case,” predicted to be the “center of interest for a week or more.“ This convoluted story may be the subject of a later post, involving a young female school teacher named Vernon, Wade, a young man with whom she had been “keeping company,” Wade’s father, with whom Vernon was also evidently simultaneously “keeping company,” and the school teacher’s father, whom Wade had shot and killed the previous year. The current story told of the young woman’s suicide, and her brother Orban, a local attorney, shooting and killing Wade’s father, probably as retribution for his own father’s murder as well as his sister’s suicide.
That sensational story required that I follow it up for a few weeks, of course, to find the outcome. I thought it was interesting, though, that the column ended with
Outside of the Patterson murder trial, only a few minor state cases are set to come up for trial this week. The courts will be closed on Friday. Saturday is divorce day in in the district court, and twenty-seven divorce suits are set for hearing.
It was almost too big a gap for me to process–going from the murder case to informing the reader that, by the way, court was closed Friday but since Saturday was the day appointed to deal with divorce, and there were 27 cases, court would be held.
Life, and the search for justice, goes on.
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