March 25, 1932 wasn't a particularly historically significant day. When you enter that day into online sources that normally give you the events that would have happened on the day in particular, very little is revealed.
Other than the birth of Harlem Globetrotter basketball star Meadowlark Lemon and American film critic Gene Shalit, the date is almost an afterthought in National and international events.
But for one Sequoyah County family, who lost their son to a tragic murder that day, March 25, 1932 was as horrific and devastating as anything that could have happened that was recorded in the history books.
Nineteen-year-old Robert "Hayney" Wall, the son of judge W.B Wall and his wife Viva, had spent the evening of his murder in the company of his childhood friend, Ted Patton, and a 20-year-old young lady by the name of Vera Frazier.Â
Sometime around 10:00 p.m. on the Monday night of the murder, Robert, had telephone his mother and told her that he probably wouldn't be home for the night that he was out with friends and would contact her in the morning. According to information from court records, Wall, Patton, and Frazier were out in his families 1920 Ford coupe driving the back roads of Sequouah county, drinking beer an indulging in typical springtime behavior for young people of that era.
Sometime during the evening, things went tragically awry.Â
On Tuesday morning, a farmer named Lester Sparks, who lived near Wild Horse Mountain about three and a half miles south of Sallisaw, found a body on a wagon road that intersected the highway running south from Sallisaw to the Arkansas River. Horrified by his discovery he went to the Sheriff's office in Sallisaw and sheriff George Cheek and others rushed to in
At first THE body was not identified. The victim had been shot through the heart one time with a .22 caliber bullet that had been fired downward into the body. Powder bones on the victims clothing indicated the weapon had been fired at very close range.
Once the body had been transported to a local funeral home, it was identified as that of young Wall. Ironically, Wall's mother Viva, a reporter for a Fort Smith newspaper, had been the correspondent that phoned in the description of the body to that publication, never realizing the victim was her own son.
Walls' funeral two days later was said to be the largest in Sequoyah County to that point, eclipsed only by the graveside service in Akins for Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd just a few years down the road.
Police immediately said they had traced Walls' movements from 10 p.m. on and had "gained sufficient information to implicate several of his acquaintances in the crime."
Within a few days, Sheriff cheek and his investigators had determined that Ted Patton, 22, had perpetrated the murder but the suspect, and his female companion the night of the killing, was nowhere to be found.
Police eventually traced the couple to Dallas where they set up a sting operation at a post office facility. Aware that Patton had been receiving mail under an assumed name, Oklahoma officers traveled to Dallas and worked with the Dallas Police Department to arrest the suspect when he came to the post office to pick up his mail on May 1.
Patton revealed the whereabouts of his traveling companion and police located her in a park automobile behind a brushy area near Five Mile Creek south of Dallas. When interrogated, the couple told to entirely different stories about the night of the murder.
Frazier claimed that she was not with Wall and Patton when the murder occurred. She told police investigators that she had been dropped off approximately 2/3 of a mile from where the body was eventually located.
Patton had an entirely different story. He claimed that during the course of the evening Wall had made advances on Frazier and at one point had attempted to rape the girl, leading to the fatal shooting.
Evidence in the case indicated that patent had purchased .22 cartridges during the evening before the killing. The ballistics on the bullet retrained from Walls' heart matched the cartridges Patton had bought exactly. Both the murder weapon and the unspent bullets were located in the vehicle when it was found in Dallas.
After the shooting, Patton had driven the 1900 Ford coupe to an out-of-way spot at the foot of Wild Horse Mountain and then carried the body of wall some distance from the road and tried to hide it in the rocks and brush. He then returned to Sallisaw and told his mother that he and Wall were going to Tulsa for the night, securing some clothing and fleeing the scene in the Wall family vehicle.
The car, when located in Dallas also contained a fountain pen and other property that belonged to Wall.
The jury in Sallisaw didn't buy his story. Patton was sentenced to death in the electric chair at the State penitentiary McAlister despite his tearful story on the witness stand of killing Wall in self-defense after they got into an altercation about the attempted rape.
Patton filed an appeal on the case, claiming the court had aired and not granting a change of venue and insufficiency of instructions in entirety to the jurors. On September 29, 1933 the Oklahoma supreme Court upheld his conviction clearing the way for his death in the State electric chair.
In less than a month after that State Supreme court ruling, Patton was executed at McAlester. Oklahoma governor William H. Murray received petitions containing more than 2,100 signatures asking for clemency for the murderer, but Murray refused to take any action.
When they strapped patent into the electric chair his only words were "if the same thing was to do over again, I'd have to do just what I did."
At trial, Frazier did change her story to align with that of Patton, but no credence was given to her recantation because she had told her father, who testified at the trial, that no attempt at a sexual assault had occurred.
No record can be found concerning Vera Frazier and if she was ever criminally charged in the case.
Robert Wall was buried in the Sallisaw Cemetery in an unmarked grave that is now flanked by the graves of his parents. His fater served in Sequoyah County as a jurist for a number of years and his mother eventually became a school teacher at Sallisaw.
