It was one of the most unusual weddings in southcentral Kentucky history. The impromptu vows drew a host of spectators and a newspaper reporter and photographer. The subsequent story was reprinted in newspapers across the region.

But the nuptials started out on the wrong foot as about a dozen local ministers declined to officiate because they didn’t want to be involved in the marriage of one of the most prolific criminals in Kentucky history – Ruben “Tennessee” Wooten.

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Wooten spent about half of his adult life in jail – it would have been more, but he was an accomplished escape artist. He had many female accomplices during his criminal career and often relied on them to help him escape from behind bars. All told, Wooten was sentenced to serve more than a combined 100 years in jail, but he either escaped or was repeatedly released before serving the bulk of his sentences.

How he got the nickname Tennessee is unknown, although he wound up spending quite a bit of time there, along with any other state where he could find a safe to crack, a business, train, home, bank or post office to rob or sanctuary from law enforcement.

A Postal Service inspector called him “one of the best safecrackers in the South.”

In 1937, the Glasgow Times quoted a local police official as saying that Wooten “has probably caused (police) more grief than any other lawbreaker in this section.”

And at that point, he was just getting started.

Wooten used at least one alias – Joe Kidd. He likely used others, and undoubtedly got away with many crimes, making his exploits difficult to track.

Not even getting married made Wooten change his ways.

The story started in 1911 in Barren County when Ruben (sometimes later spelled Rueben or Rubin in news reports) Wooten was born. He was named after his grandfather. Not much is known about his early life, but we can surmise that the young Wooten was exposed early to the criminal life.

His father, Marcus Wooten, was a known moonshiner who had many of his own run-ins with law enforcement. His brother, Woodrow Wooten, also had a rap sheet the length of a football field for crimes ranging from safe cracking to murder.

Although we don’t know the full extent of Wooten’s crimes, later news reports indicate that he was no stranger to the state reform school growing up. As a young man, he was being arrested regularly on charges of being drunk and disorderly; more serious crimes would soon follow.

At various times, Wooten and members of his family made their home in Bowling Green.

When he was just 20, Wooten and three other men (one with the unique name of Popcorn Moore, and another brother, Robert Wooten) were caught trying to break into a grocery store safe in Franklin at 2 a.m. 

Four years later, in 1935, Wooten was in the State Reformatory in Frankfort. It’s unclear if Wooten was in jail for the grocery store robbery or other crimes attributed to him.

Wooten decided to cut his stay short. In December, Wooten and his cellmate smuggled a crow bar from the jail’s “engine house” into their cell. That night, they pried open a window and slid down into the prison yard with a rope made of tied-together blankets.

They then found a ladder and placed it against the back wall. As they were just feet from freedom, shots rang out. 

Prison guards had been tipped off about the escape attempt and were waiting in the darkness with a rifle and a shotgun. Wooten and the cellmate were not hit, but their escape attempt was over. The men were placed in solitary confinement as punishment.

Two years later, Wooten was paroled, but not free. He was sent to Lafayette, Tennessee, to await trial on charges in that state.

But he persuaded two women visitors to somehow obtain and then slip him a key to the jail. He then quietly walked out.

While a multi-state manhunt for him continued, Wooten kept on committing crimes. His fingerprints were found at a Mitchellsburg store after the safe was blown and $100 stolen.

Throughout the 1930s, he was bouncing from crime to crime and jail to jail. 

Along with local law enforcement, Wooten was regularly being pursued by detectives with the federal Postal Inspector’s Office because of his record of breaking into post offices, including in 1941, when Wooten and accomplices broke into the post office in Lewisport. Several weeks later, a South Carolina state trooper spotted a suspicious vehicle near Newberry, South Carolina, and attempted to pull it over. The car sped off and eventually wrecked. The trooper arrested the two men in the car, Wooten and a man named Earl Smith.

Inside the wrecked car was dynamite, fuses, crowbars, a pistol, almost $400 in cash and some nitroglycerin.

Back in Bowling Green to await a federal trial, Wooten made news for another reason. He and a few other federal prisoners had the distinction of being transported in the Bowling Green Police Department’s new patrol wagon, equipped with a state-of-the-art, two-way radio.

Wooten eventually earned a 12-year sentence for the Lewisport heist, but was released early and returned to southcentral Kentucky.

In June of 1951, a man named Herman Barker was walking near the Adairville Drug Company store in Logan County at about 3:30 a.m. when he heard a terrific explosion. He ran three blocks to the home of the Adairville police chief to notify him. Police discovered someone had blown open the safe at the store and made away with $500 in cash and a large quantity of drugs. Police across the region were notified to be on the lookout for any suspicious persons or vehicles.

That morning, a Russellville police officer noticed a car with four people in it by the city limits. He tried to pull the car over, but the driver fled. A chase ensued with police firing several shots at the fleeing car. Finally, a shot blew out a tire and the car stopped, but the occupants ran into nearby woods.

Inside the car, police found some of the stolen drugs. Bloodhounds were called to the scene from Nashville but had no luck tracking the fugitives.

The car’s registration was traced to one of Wooten’s regular accomplices, Lola Mae Spinks. She was found and arrested near where the car had been stopped later that morning. Under pressure by investigators, Spinks finally admitted she and Wooten were responsible for the Adairville robbery and recent post office robberies in Finchville and Lebanon, Tennessee.

Wooten was tracked down in Auburn and arrested. Under questioning, Wooten reportedly confessed to a series of the latest crimes, including the post office robberies and the Adairville robbery. Wooten told police where the cash from that robbery was hidden, and they found all but $45 of the loot.

Wooten was taken to the Warren County Jail in Bowling Green for safekeeping. He didn’t waste any time trying to escape.

A few days after Wooten’s incarceration, Bowling Green police arrested a 24-year-old man named Hubert Anderson on charges of public drunkenness. Anderson requested he be put in a cell on the second floor of the jail, where Wooten had been placed. Suspicious police conducted an especially thorough search of Anderson and found two hacksaw blades hidden in his shoes.

Asked to explain their presence, Anderson replied, “You might find anything on me.”

His escape plan foiled, Wooten, 40, was still in jail in July when he was visited by a “pretty” 23-year-old from Louisville, Kathleen Pridemore.

According to what she later told reporters, she met Wooten in a seemingly unlikely place – the Louisville public library – about 10 months earlier. Wooten had apparently used some of his illicit proceeds to purchase a small grocery store in the city in between his incarcerations.

At the time of the July jail visit, Pridemore was seven months pregnant, but not with Wooten’s child. Despite that fact, and the chance that Wooten would spend the next 25 years in jail, Pridemore apparently asked Wooten to marry her.

Wooten declined.

But after a few days, he decided, “What have I got to lose? Here is a chance to do one good deed,” he told reporters.

The good deed was giving “her unborn child a name.”

Pridemore returned to Bowling Green for the wedding, but it wouldn’t be easy. First, Warren County Clerk Oval Motley refused to issue a marriage license without the consent of the judge in Russellville, E. J. Felts, who was handling Wooten’s latest case. The judge gave his consent, but then Motley said he also wanted approval from state Attorney General A.E. Funk. 

Funk also consented, but the challenge then was to find someone willing to perform the ceremony. Ten local ministers declined. A magistrate was then found who agreed to perform the ceremony, but he too balked after learning he would have to climb four flights of stairs at the jail to reach the couple.

Several hours went by before the Rev. J.E. Bruce finally agreed to do the brief ceremony.

Afterward, the couple both broke down, “jerking convulsively as they sobbed.”

Bruce had some parting words, telling Wooten he hoped he would mend his ways and give his life over to God.

Ironically, Spinks, Wooten’s accomplice, was being taken from the jail to Louisville for treatment at a drug rehab facility that morning. By then, everyone in the jail knew about the planned nuptials. As she passed under Wooten’s cell window, she “derisively shouted the offer to act as bridesmaid for the Louisville girl.”

Numerous elected officials had gathered to watch the unusual ceremony. While they had been laughing at the spectacle at the outset, they wound up taking a collection to pay the $6 for the marriage license.

After the brief ceremony, Pridemore took a bus back to Louisville, where she was slated to help run her new husband’s grocery store. She admitted to reporters she had little hope that she would wind up seeing much of her new husband.

It’s unclear if Wooten and Pridemore ever reconnected after Wooten’s release from jail in 1959. Wooten, however, definitely reconnected with his criminal past.

In 1960, Wooten was stopped in Auburn, where police found a half-case of moonshine whiskey on his back seat. He was fined $50.

A year later, he was in North Miami Beach, Florida. He claimed he was in the Sunshine State to do “construction work,” but one early morning, he and two accomplices were arrested by police as they crawled out of a window of a local bank. A silent alarm had activated when the bank vault was breached.

The trio had almost gotten away with $87,000.

Five years later, back in Kentucky, Wooten was looking to make another big score.

In the fall of 1966, Wooten and three accomplices, including George Allen of Warren County, decided to break into the Louisville home occupied by wealthy businessman Max Oppenheimer and his family.

Oppenheimer owned a chain of O&L variety stores in the Louisville area. The men began casing Oppenheimer’s home in the Seneca Park area of Louisville.

The men, however, had been spotted by neighbors, who alerted police.

Louisville police, correctly suspecting a break-in was imminent, asked the Oppenheimers to let them know whenever they were not going to be in the house at night. On those occasions, police stationed detectives in and outside the house.

Finally, after about a month of such surveillance, the effort paid off.

On Saturday, Nov. 12, the Oppenheimers left the house for the evening. Four Louisville police detectives armed with sawed-off shotguns took their place – two inside and two outside.

At about 8:50 p.m., there was a noise at the back door. Then Wooten, followed by Allen, walked into the dark home.

“Police! Stand still,” yelled one of the detectives.

According to Louisville police, “Wooten pulled a .38 caliber pistol and cocked the hammer as he shouted a warning to the others (that) police were in the house. Wooten had the gun out in his hand and the two detectives … opened fire, downing him.”

Allen ran out the back door as the shooting began and was able to escape, but he and the two other accomplices were soon apprehended. 

Wooten, who had been hit by nine shotgun pellets around his left shoulder, was still alive and rushed to Louisville General Hospital. He was pronounced dead, however, when he arrived at the hospital at 9:05 p.m.

Police found that Wooten was carrying a vial of nitroglycerin, apparently to blow a potential safe in the home. The phone lines to the home had been cut, as was a chain at the back door. 

After getting away with an untold number of crimes, and spending decades behind bars for the crimes he did get charged with, Wooten’s colorful life was over at age 55.

His body was returned to southcentral Kentucky and was buried at Glasgow Municipal Cemetery in a simple grave.