A 69-year-old UT murder mystery: Part I
by Jack Neely
There was a time when summer didn't end in the middle of August, when summer stretched well into September, and a lot of people, even students and teachers, used that time to take a vacation at the beach. That's what was on the mind of Professor Elisha Kane in the late summer of 1931 as he drove his roadster out of Knoxville. In the car with him was a .45 revolver painted with the words I am the remedy / I solve all. He also brought a book checked out from the UT library, a six-year-old novel by Theodore Dreiser called An American Tragedy. In the weeks to come, detectives would ask Professor Kane more questions about the book than the gun.
Professor Kane had lived in Knoxville for about two years. The well-traveled scholar must have found it an amusing place. He and his wife lived in a brick apartment building on Kingston Pike, near Lyons View. Not far from their home, just before he left, occurred an incident of a sort that wasn't unusual here in those days.
Three men had pounced on a man walking along the street and beat him severely with a hammer. The man survived the attack, and police found a bloody hammer and tie at the scene. The victim turned out to be J.T. Bruce, a federal informer. Police arrested some suspicious characters, "Dude" Austin, "Smoke" Medlin, and "Doc" Whaley—in 1931 Knoxville, all athletes and street hoods had colorful nicknames—who claimed that they and Bruce had just had a little argument.
A politician looking for evidence that 1931 America was in a state of advanced moral decay wouldn't have far to look. A prominent Knoxville minister accused of serial adultery. An 11-year-old Knoxville girl beaten and sexually assaulted by two strangers as she waited for her brother to finish his paper route. A man shot in his own house on Florida Street, killed by intruders who apparently mistook him for someone else they'd been chasing.
Meanwhile, former Senator Luke Lea was found guilty of defrauding the Central Bank & Trust for well over a million dollars. It was a complicated case, and you couldn't blame a guy for flipping past it to the sports page.
Despite the efforts of rightfielder Sy Rosenthal, whose batting average of .368 made him a contender for the title of best minor-league hitter in the South, the Knoxville Smokies weren't doing well. The only team with a worse record was the Nashville Vols. Knoxvillians had higher hopes for those other Vols at the university. Young Major Neyland was looking forward to a season coaching Gene "Wild Bull" McEver, Beatty Feathers, and Breezy Wynn.
Speaking of wild bulls, cattlemen still herded them down Gay Street to be butchered at East Tennessee Packing, across the river. That week, about 150 cattle got out of hand in the street. Three walked into the Burwell building, beside the Tennessee Theater. According to witnesses, the cattle paused in the lobby and looked for a moment as if they were going to take the elevator.
Professor Kane had lived in Spain and was familiar with Pamplona's annual Running of the Bulls. When he moved to Knoxville two years before, he probably didn't expect to find that sort of thing here.
In 1931, UT was still a small college, just a couple thousand students, all crowded onto the Hill. It had been a sad end-of-summer break; Dean James Porter, of the College of Liberal Arts, had died at his home on Cumberland Avenue. The popular physics professor, author of the classic, Selective Reflections of the Infra-Red Spectrum, had been a stalwart at UT for more than 20 years.
Professor Kane was the young head of the romance-language department. He'd come to UT two years earlier with excellent references. He attended Cornell and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard. Elisha Kane enlisted in the infantry during the Great War and saw combat at the Marne and in the Argonne. After the war, he had stayed in the army reserves and had reached the rank of major.
Kane was known for his studies of Spanish literature. He'd written a book, Gongorism And the Golden Age. Named for the Spanish poet Luis de Gongora, it was in a style characterized by elaborate allusions and deliberate obscurity. He'd also translated the Spanish Book of Good Love to English. Friends said Kane was working on a novel of his own.
A short, humorous "autobiography" had appeared in a Sunday News-Sentinel last year, accompanied by a self-caricature. Kane compared himself to Cyrano de Bergerac. He had an unusually long nose, and from some angles his face seemed to come to a point in front, like an awl. Despite that, and the fact that his bristly, close-cropped hair gave his head a resemblance to a porcupine, some women found him attractive.
Maybe it was his height, and military bearing, or the fact that he could speak French and Italian and Spanish. Or maybe it was his storied family.
Born in Kane, the hilly northern Pennsylvania town which was named for his ancestors, Elisha Kane was the grandson of Thomas Kane, a prominent Union commander, later a politician who defended both a new religious sect and his close friend Brigham Young, during the days when Americans feared polygamy and creeping Mormonism.
Professor Kane's own father, Evan O'Neill Kane, was a maverick surgeon, said to be the first man in medical history to remove his own appendix. He later fixed his own hernia, and allowed assistants to photograph the procedure. It may have seemed a daunting legacy to live up to.
Professor Kane's full name was Elisha Kent Kane III. His great-uncle, for whom he was named, was the most famous of them all. Elisha Kent Kane I was the Arctic poet-explorer who failed to find a sea route to the North Pole but came up with a theory that much of the northern hemisphere had once been covered with ice. He had died a young man on one of his expeditions. Professor Kane was now 37, the same age the original Elisha Kent Kane was when he died.
Professor Kane was reportedly very happy with the university. "I like the place so well that I hope to stay here forever," he wrote in that guest column in the News-Sentinel.
In Kane's office in Ayres Hall hung the well-known Browning verse, familiar in anniversary cards: "Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be." The sentiment was illustrated with one of Kane's ironic caricatures, a bedridden old man.
Kane and his wife, Jenny, lived in book-stuffed apartment number 10 in Kingston Manor. It was an apartment building on Kingston Pike near Lyons View, on the fringe of the relatively new development called Sequoyah Hills. Jenny was conventionally pretty, daughter of an old eastern Virginia family. She called her husband "Sasha."
With no children to distract them, they were a trendy, whimsically artsy young couple. In the fashion of the day, they had twin beds; over his was a sign that said "Blue Boy." Over hers, a matching sign said "Wild Bird." They had a high-tech marvel not all young couples could afford, an electric refrigerator. Mrs. Kane was a self-styled artist with a love of sentimental pictures of babies and little girls. They both loved to draw, and often went on sketching excursions together.
Jenny was best known around town as a singer and pianist; she played and sang for Elisha at home in the evenings. They had a German shepherd that was allegedly the son of a silent-movie dog hero, Strongheart. The dog was known, variously, as Vuga, Hobo, and Jesus Christ.
Some erstwhile friends were shocked when Kane poked Jesus Christ with a fork, apparently just to see his wife squirm. Other friends would protest that Kane loved both his wife and his dog dearly.
Dr. Kane stayed in Knoxville for most of the summer to teach at UT's summer school. Mrs. Kane spent the summer with her parents near oceanside Hampton, Va. and had written a couple of warm letters home to her husband. She signed them Babe. She was looking forward to her husband's arrival. The athletic professor was a strong swimmer. Jenny had been afraid of the water since her earliest years because of an unspecified childhood trauma. Friends said that, at 33, Jenny wanted to learn to swim.
Just before he left, Kane went to the UT Library and checked out An American Tragedy, the grim tale of a man who drowns his pregnant girlfriend. Sympathetic friends would explain to detectives that Kane wanted to read the novel just because he'd heard that Von Sternberg's controversial film version of it was coming to the Tennessee Theater.
Not long after he left, a letter addressed to Kane arrived in UT post office box 4104. Written in a stylistic hand that looked as if it belonged on an art-nouveau illustration, the letter was postmarked New York, and signed E.H.D. He may not have known that one was on its way to that P.O. box as he drove out of town. He surely didn't know that, in the following weeks, that personal letter would appear, in full, in the New York Post.
[To be continued.]
September 7, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 36
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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