True Crime Chronicles: The end of an eighteen-month relationship resulted in a verdict of manslaughter for Gentry man

Norman Sager

Norman Sager was eighteen when the last Saturday of his life began.

He was the middle son of Mrs. J. D. Sager, who kept a place twelve to fourteen miles west of Jay, off Highway 29, in the hills of Delaware County. His brothers were Ray and Leonard.

he family moved along the Missouri line the way a lot of farm people did then, shopping and visiting across the state line at Southwest City, then dropping back into Oklahoma.

On October 22, 1932, his mother made that trip. Norman rode with her as far as Jay and got out. By four that afternoon he was at Carl Reeser’s house on Spavinaw Creek, about fourteen miles southeast of Jay, sitting with Jesse Hanna while Leona Hendren kept the Reeser children.

That house was not a dance hall, and it was not a courthouse. It was a neighbor’s kitchen and front room on a Saturday when young people drifted between babysitting, talk of a dance in town, and the slow work of deciding who belonged to whom.

Leona Hendren lived in that same Spavinaw Creek country. She had gone with John Binns for about eighteen months. They had known each other nearly all their lives, the kind of knowing that comes from the same roads, the same kin, and the same Saturday nights.

They had been “at outs” about three weeks. In that window she had gone with Norman Sager once. She had written Binns that week and told him to come Saturday night. She told Sager, around five o’clock, that she had written John and expected him.

Sager’s answer, remembered by more than one person in the room, was that he was not running from anybody. Let him come. He would take care of him.

John Binns was nineteen and lived four miles west of Gentrys, just over the line from the Oklahoma hills where the Sagers and Hendrens moved. He later said this was the first time he had ever been arrested for any trouble. He arrived at the Reeser place about nine o’clock with Jim Kelly, who witnesses said was drunk.

Jesse Hanna had already gone toward the dance. Alice, one of the young women in the house, went to the dance and came back with word that John was down there, then that a car had pulled up and John was in it. Binns asked for Leona on the porch. She told him they had "quit" and if he was in such a hurry he could go on.

Someone asked for a tire pump. Leona said it was out in the car. The pump was heavy. She later marked it with three X’s and identified it as the same pump Binns had given her about three months before. He said it belonged to his father.

What happened next lasted only a few minutes and then lasted four days. Leona’s account for the State was that Binns called her into the kitchen with a letter he wanted her to read, then took her by the hand back toward the room where Sager sat on the foot of the bed.

Binns said hello. Sager said he was fine. Then Binns hit him with the pump, more than once.

She grabbed Binns and asked what he meant. He ran through the kitchen door and out. Sager rolled on the bed. Blood ran down his face and out of his ear. He never answered when she asked if he was hurt.

She sent Blue Hendren and the Reeser children for Alice, for a doctor, and for the law. The next morning, sweeping, she found an open pocketknife back under the foot of the bed and a long piece of iron like a car spring. She remembered Sager opening a black-handled knife earlier to cut a can of condensed cream.

Binns told a different few-minute scenario. He said he had no weapon when he walked in. He said Blue Hendren and Tobe Reeser warned him that Sager had "gotten the iron". He said Leona told him Sager was mad and had said he would take care of that son of a bitch, and that she told him to get Kelly and leave.

He said that as he came back from the kitchen, Sager rose off the bed with a pocketknife, struck at him, and said he would kill him. Binns said he hit twice with the tire pump, face to face, using no more force than he thought he needed, then told Kelly to come on and went out.

He said the blows landed on the left side of Sager’s head. He left east through the woods. Later he wrecked a car. When another car came up, he walked away. The appellate court would note that he was not taken into custody for some time after the killing.

Mrs. Sager reached the Reeser house near midnight. Her boy looked as if he were sleeping. She called him. He did not answer. Ray shook him. He did not answer. Blood came from the ear. About three Sunday morning they took him to Baptist Hospital in Miami. Dr. M. M. DeArman later read the hospital record into the trial. Norman Sager never came back to himself. He raved, did not know his mother, and had to be held. He died at 11:40 on Wednesday morning, October 26, 1932.

That is the victimology the record will support. He was not a public man. He was a son in a three-boy household on the Jay side of the county, old enough to ride to town and sit in another family’s rooms, young enough that his mother still expected to collect him at the end of a Saturday. He had been at Lafe and Beulah Starr’s not long before, according to Binns, cursing about what he would do until men in the house made him leave.

Beulah Starr, Leona’s sister, was said to have heard Sager boast that inside of three weeks she would hear of him killing Binns. Whether those words were heat or prophecy, they sit in the same small world as the letter Leona mailed, the dance down the road, the borrowed pump, and the knife under the bed.

The quarrel was not over land or money. It was over a young woman both men thought they had a claim on, in a house full of children, on a creek road far from any hospital that could undo a skull fracture.

Delaware County charged Binns with murder by beating Norman Sager with a dangerous weapon. The case was tried in district court at Jay before Judge Ad V. Coppedge. The State’s case rested on Leona Hendren and the people who had been in the rooms: that Binns came looking for her, that Sager was sitting, that the first words were ordinary, and that the pump came down from behind or from the side without a fight the others could describe as mutual.

The defense put on prior threats, the knife, the car spring, Leona’s warning to leave, and Binns’s claim of self-defense. The jury did not give the State a murder verdict. It convicted him of manslaughter in the first degree and fixed punishment at five years in the state penitentiary.

Five years was not the chair, and it was not freedom. In Oklahoma law of that period, first-degree manslaughter covered a killing in a heat of passion, or a killing without malice that still sat above excusable or justifiable homicide.

The jury heard enough danger in the house to step back from murder and enough of a one-sided beating to refuse acquittal. Binns appealed. His lawyers were Ernest R. Brown of Pryor and E. H. Beauchamp of Grove. They assigned eight errors. They filed no brief. They made no oral argument.

On April 21, 1938, the Criminal Court of Appeals affirmed in a per curiam opinion. The court said the evidence sustained the judgment, that Binns had admitted inflicting the wounds from which Sager died, and that nothing in the record showed a jurisdictional or fundamental error or an unfair trial.

The instructions, the court said, correctly stated the law.

The published opinion is almost the whole public file that remains. The 1913 courthouse fire in Jay had already taken much of the county’s early paper. Local weeklies from 1932 are incomplete online. No later opinion, pardon notice, or widely circulated obituary has surfaced that

follows John Binns out of McAlester with certainty.

The 1940 census at Gentry lists a Marshal and Della Binns of an age to have been his parents. It does not place a twenty-seven-year-old John in that household. A young man sentenced to five years in the mid-1930s, with an appeal hanging until 1938, could have been inside, just released, or gone to work somewhere the census taker did not find him.

After that the trail in open records thins to nothing that can be stated as fact.

What can be stated is the shape of the night and the shape of the punishment. Two boys from the same border country met in a neighbor’s house because a letter had been sent and a dance was on. One left on his feet. The other left unconscious and died in Miami four days later.

The State asked for murder. Twelve people in Jay called it manslaughter and measured it at five years. The high court, six years after the pump came down, said the record was enough. Norman Sager’s life stops on that Wednesday morning in the hospital ledger.

Sager was buried in the Ketchum Cemetery in Craig County beneath a simple, flat marker. He is buried just a few feet from his parents in a family plot alongside other relatives.

John Binns’s life, after the penitentiary door, passes out of the printed case and into the ordinary silence that covers most men who serve a mid-length sentence in a small county and then try to disappear back into the hills they came from.