My Grandfather's Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City

Chapter 6

When the guard’s spotlight landed on James Lyons the jail announced that officers had looked in on him several times down there in the Hole and that he seemed to be fine, and they suggested that even though he was not yet forty years old, he must have had a stroke or a heart attack or something. Nothing unusual, they said. But because the Farm was city property and the guards were city employees, everyone thought it best to turn the investigation over to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department. That way there could be no hint of a conflict of interest, no suggestion that every tip and every lead was not followed to get to the bottom of what caused the man’s death. For Jackson County sheriff J. A. Purdome, it could not have come at a more awkward time. A Democrat, Purdome was up for reelection that year, and nothing was going right. Someone had broken into the double-door safe in the sheriff’s office at the courthouse and stolen $14,661.50 in checks and cash from a small metal box—money under the sheriff’s care from the sale of tax-delinquent properties. A year earlier someone dynamited another vault in the downtown courthouse, this one below the sheriff’s office, and made off with ballots and other election material being stored as legal evidence in a massive vote-rigging case soon to go to trial. At the time four of Purdome’s deputies were under indictment in the votefraud investigation. But when the ballots were stolen and Purdome and his staff could not find them, it meant only one thing—criminal charges against the deputies were going to have to be dismissed. In other words, they got off. Nevertheless Purdome promised swift and thorough investigations into both break-ins. He pledged to find the money and to recover the ballots. “We are pushing this investigation with 83 Chapter 6 84 Richard A. Serrano everything we have,” the sheriff said. “We will let the chips fall where they may.” Witnesses were hooked up to polygraph machines, and several deputies were taken before a grand jury. Depositions were recorded and evidence collected. But no one was arrested in either case, and no one went to jail. No chips fell. Purdome was Jackson County sheriff for eight years—from 1945 through 1952. He earlier had served briefly as county sheriff during another courthouse scandal in 1940. He worked his way up on two fronts, toiling as a deputy and then chief deputy sheriff under his predecessor, James L. Williams, and also, and more important, as a Democratic political operative. J. A. Purdome was a Pendergast man, and the machine took him far. He also fancied himself something of a homicide sleuth, and on occasion would give detailed stories to true-crime magazines, the kind of popular pulp trades that filled the imagination before television and the Internet stifled it. In one piece titled “Double Death at Sugar Creek,” Chief Deputy J. D. Purdome (they got his middle initial wrong) rode to the rescue of a stalled investigation into the body of a woman found among the bogs and the bullfrogs upside the Missouri River. He worked hard to learn the cool swagger of the big-city detective . This line alone in the magazine story he must have just loved, where it said, “Purdome took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it thoughtfully.” They ran his picture, too—his thinning black hair combed straight back, his piercing black eyes, and his cheeks already jowly. He had been born in Arkansas, and family members said he actually was named Purdom but that he added an e onto his last name to give himself a little savoir faire when he left the Ozarks for the bright lights of Kansas City. The big lights did him in. The sheriff’s throne in Jackson County, Missouri, has always been a cushy seat to settle into, and for decades it could be reached only through the old spoils system and political favoritism that pervaded Kansas City. It was like a musical chair, too, often up for grabs after one political scandal followed another. Joseph Reddeford Walker was first to claim the prize when the sheriff’s office was created in 1828. He was a lot more than just a sheriff, though. Over the years he worked as a trapper, an explorer, and a guide; he scouted for the cavalry, and...