She replied, “Why stop with women?”
It was that kind of spirit that endeared her to competitors and fans alike.
As news of Marion’s murder spread, golf patrons around the country reacted in shock, then anger. Spearheaded by the game’s most famous amateur, Bing Crosby, celebrities by the score contributed generously to the reward for the capture of her killer.
Slipping in and out of consciousness, Elsie Miley whispered a fractured account of what had happened. She had been awakened by the sound of something breaking. Police later determined that she had heard one of the intruders knock over a lamp at the head of the stairs. Then two men burst into her apartment, grabbed her roughly, and demanded to know where she had hidden the money. Before she could reply, one of the men shot her. In a voice so weak that the police detective had to place his ear directly over her mouth, she murmured a meager description of her assailants: two men, one tall and slender, the other shorter and stocky.
Had she seen which one of the men shot Marion? the detective asked.
Mrs. Miley nodded. But before she could speak again, she lapsed into a final coma. On October 1, three days after she had been shot, and seven hours after her daughter’s funeral, Elaine Miley died.
With no usable fingerprints found at the scene, investigators combed the Country Club area for any hint as to the killers’ identities. For the first couple of days, it was a fruitless search. Then, in rapid succession, two important clues emerged.
Each morning, while most people in Lexington were still sleeping, newsboy Hugh Cramer, 17, rose to deliver papers. The Lexington Country Club was on his route. Between 3:00 and 3:30 A.M. Sunday, he tossed Mrs. Miley’s paper onto the stoop of the clubhouse. There were three cars parked in the driveway. He recognized two. One was Mrs. Miley’s. The other belonged to her daughter Marion, who, Cramer knew, lived with her mother between tournaments. The third car, standing with its door open, was strange.
At first, Cramer didn’t consider the third car unusual. There had been a dance at the club the night before. Sometimes, after a social event, club members would leave their cars and ride home with friends. But as news of the Miley murders spread, Cramer remembered that third car and notified police.
Could he describe the car? police asked.
Like any teenage car buff, Cramer could. It was a 1941 Buick Sedan, two-tone blue and gray. He didn’t notice the plates, but was sure he would have had they been from outside Kentucky.
Police released an all-points bulletin on the Buick.
The second clue was even more incriminating. During a questioning, two Lexington men brought in for interrogation told investigators that a couple of weeks earlier, a scar-faced ex-convict they met in a bar tried to enlist them to help rob the Country Club. The ex-con’s name: Tom Penney.
Tom Penney was well known to Lexington police. The black-sheep son of a law-abiding family, he had been a troublemaker for years. At sixteen he was sent to reform school for car theft. Paroled, he pulled off a series of minor crimes until, in 1930, he was convicted of the armed robbery of a grocery store during which he shot two men. Following his release he worked around Lexington as a part-time carpenter but could not hold any job for long. Mean and belligerent, he was the principal suspect in several open cases on the police blotter. He was currently out of jail on another parole.
On the heels of the all-points bulletin on the Buick, police issued another on Penney.
The second APB was not necessary.
On October 9, eleven days after the Miley shootings, two police officers in Fort Worth, Texas, parked their patrol car in a vacant lot near an intersection where a number of speeders had been reported. Moments later, a blue-gray Buick with Kentucky plates roared through the four-way stop without slowing. The officers gave chase.
At the first wail of the siren, the speeder pulled to the side. While one officer radioed headquarters, the second approached the parked Buick. The driver was a tall, slender man with a jagged scar across his left cheek. His eyes were bloodshot and his speech was slurred. His drivers license identified him as Thomas Penney of Lexington, Kentucky.
The officer had just started back to the patrol car to check out the drivers license when the second officer replaced the microphone on the dash and stepped out. “We’ve got a hot one. That’s the car in the Miley murders.”
Both officers approached the car with their weapons drawn and ordered the driver to step out with his hands up. While one kept Penney covered, the other searched the Buick. From beneath the front seat he withdrew a .38-caliber revolver—loaded and cocked.
Penney’s confession was so effusive that it aroused suspicion. As one investigator would later testify, the fleeing Kentuckian was “just too damned eager to talk.” He had indeed taken part in the Miley murders, Penney admitted. Without prompting, he named an accomplice: Robert Anderson of Louisville. The Buick, Penney said, belonged to Anderson.
Robert H. Anderson was well-known to the Kentucky officials. Proprietor of a blue-collar Louisville nightclub, The Cat and Fiddle, he was respected by his business associates and patrons alike. On weekends, Louisville swarmed with soldiers on pass from nearby Fort Knox. Anderson ordered his bartenders to serve the boys in uniform drinks at half price, and occasionally to serve one on the house. Among the GIs it was well known that any one of them down on his luck could always count on a sandwich and beer, gratis, at Bob Anderson’s place. More than once, Anderson paid the bus fare so that a soldier in danger of being listed AWOL could return to the fort on time.
The personable proprietor also had a dark side to his nature. Quick to anger, he could resort to violence on the slightest provocation. He kept a BB-filled blackjack behind the bar and wasn’t hesitant to use it to whip a rowdy customer into line. Once, learning that a local con artist was hustling soldiers in a back room with loaded dice, Anderson beat the man to a bloody pulp and tossed him into the alley behind the club with a warning to never step foot in The Cat and Fiddle again. Neither the con artist nor any of the others who suffered Anderson’s wrath dared complain to authorities.
Arrested by Louisville police on the day Penny implicated him, Anderson was indignant. He heatedly denied any involvement in the crime. He admitted knowing Tom Penney from the days the two of them served time together in the state reformatory. Following Penney’s latest release from prison, Anderson said, he had helped the ex-con with an occasional odd job and sometimes with an outright grubstake. More recently, Anderson admitted, he had been buying contraband whiskey from Penney, whose latest scam was hijacking delivery trucks serving one or more of the many distilleries around central Kentucky.
Why would Penney falsely accuse him? officers asked.
Anderson had an explanation. In September, he said, Penney arrived at The Cat and Fiddle with twenty cases of scotch. He said he needed a lot of money quick and offered to sell the whiskey at half his usual price.
“I tasted it,” Anderson said. “It was green.” He refused to buy.
“Penney got hot under the collar. He cussed me out and swore he’d get my ass. Check with my customers who were there that night, they’ll tell you. The guy was hollering so loud you could have heard him across the river in Indiana. I kicked him out of the club. I guess this ridiculous murder rap is his attempt to get revenge. Hell, why would I have to pull off a robbery? My club’s doing okay. Besides, if I had done it, do you think I’d be sitting here waiting for you coppers? I’d be in South America by now.”
Did he own the Buick?
“Yeah, and I reported it stolen over a week ago.”
The story checked out.
Where was he on the night of the murders?
“Where I am every Saturday night,” Anderson replied. “At my club.” He produced witnesses to corroborate the claim.
On the day the Lexington officials delivered Penney from Fort Worth back to Lexington, investigators informed him that