True Crime or Tall Tale?

James Springer Sr. was a Stillwater, Oklahoma, attorney with a colorful career.

He defended William Hale, the mastermind of the Osage Reign of Terror depicted so brilliantly in “Killers of the Flower Moon” by David Grann. He also went to New York to plead the case of Madeline Webb, the young Stillwater woman who got caught up in a sensational murder case (the focus of our forthcoming true crime book, “Madeline Gets Life.”

When Springer was asked in the late 1940s what his most interesting case was, he chose neither of those. Instead, he told the following story:

A pampered young woman in Shreveport, Louisiana, ran off with a young man, first to Florida and then to Stillwater. There, she used an inheritance from her wealthy mother, who ran a brothel, to open a pawn shop. Life was good until her beau left her for another woman – and sold the pawn shop without telling her.

One day she encountered them on the street. She went to the pawn shop she used to own, bought a pistol and accosted the pair. The other woman tried to hide behind the man, and his former love interest pulled the trigger, killing them both with one shot.

She was arrested and hired Springer to defend her. He told his interviewer that he won an acquittal: “It was good riddance.”

Technology puts the contents of hundreds of newspapers at our fingertips today, and I could find no article about such a case. Surely, if it had happened, someone would have reported on it.

Too good to be true?

Perhaps.

Also too good not to share.

Prosecutors charged them with first-degree murder but allowed them to plead guilty to second-degree murder and avoid the electric chair because Ford’s family, living in Virginia, wanted to avoid the scandal of a trial.

I learned about the Ford case when I visited the Hotel Sutton a few years ago to research the 1942 murder at the center of “Madeline Gets Life,” the true crime book I’m writing with M.J. Van Deventer.

The hotel is now called AKA Sutton Place, and a desk clerk shared clippings about the 1936 murder as well as a homicide in 1955 – a chef at the Sutton killed a dishwasher. The clerk was unaware of the 1942 killing.

Ford’s murder also gets a mention in “Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall,” an engaging examination of violence against gay men in the 20th century by James Polchin.