April 7, 1970, was a bad day for the “King.”

Clay Edward Ross, 46, was known around Bowling Green, for unknown reasons, as “King” Ross. On this spring night, he had a score to settle. He entered the Peppermint Lounge, a long-gone bar at Sixth and Kentucky streets with an unsavory reputation, with a .22-caliber pistol in his pocket. Ross had been fired from the bar earlier that day.

Waiting for him was the bar’s manager, Marion Parker Duke.

Duke, a 5-foot-6, gray-haired 64-year-old, was an unimposing presence. But as Ross was about to find out, Duke was anything but an easy target.

In his younger days, the “dapper” Duke was a gambler, nightspot operator – likely with mob ties – and daring criminal who was not above posing as a police officer to commit armed robberies.

So when Duke saw Ross, he pulled out his own gun – a .25-caliber pistol. A shootout followed.

In the end, Ross was dead and Duke and a bar patron had non-fatal bullet wounds.

Duke was arrested and charged with murder.

The incident was front-page news, but it was nothing compared to 1952. That year, Duke was charged with a triple slaying that the Daily News reported was “as brutal and savage a homicide as ever committed in Warren County.”

What followed were numerous court battles featuring well-known Kentucky figures, followed by allegations of police corruption that also made statewide headlines.

A life of crime

Not much is known about Duke’s early years, other than he was born on Oct. 22, 1905, in Paducah. He moved around often, living (when he wasn’t in jail) in various locations in Kentucky and, for a time, in Nashville.

When Duke’s activities are traceable, it’s because he was in the news for a series of criminal activities.

In 1942, the Courier Journal reported he was arrested on charges of grand larceny in Louisville for allegedly stealing $900 from a car. Three years later, he was accused of stealing 12 cases of whiskey from a warehouse.

A year later, he was in Nashville, charged with receiving and concealing stolen property.

One of his most noteworthy criminal capers came in 1950 in Nashville.

Duke, who was described at the time as a “light-skinned” Black man who sometimes was mistaken as being White, entered the New Era club in Nashville, along with two accomplices. The trio claimed they were police officers.

Once inside, the three men tied up four employees and broke into the club’s safe, getting away with $860. Duke was arrested a few weeks later in Indiana and was extradited to Tennessee.

Police told the Tennessean newspaper that they would interview Duke in connection to a rash of similar crimes, including an “alleged $5,000 mystery holdup of another Negro nightspot. … The latter robbery is alleged to have occurred during the World Series in 1949 and remained unreported for several weeks. It was understood threats had been made on the lives of the owners if the robbery was reported to police.”

It’s unknown how much time Duke spent behind bars, but by 1952 he was living part-time in Bowling Green, at a rooming house in the 300 block of Chestnut Street.

He was reportedly then a manager of a nightspot in Newport. The city across the Ohio River from Cincinnati was one of the most corrupt and crime-ridden cities in the country. “Sin City” was known for its rampant gambling, prostitution and other vices being readily available, thanks to the protection of mobsters from Cleveland and Chicago.

It’s not known exactly how Duke fit within the web of corruption in Newport, but his work there would have come under the umbrella of the mobsters running the city’s nightspots. The career criminal seemed to never have a shortage of funds at the time – he reportedly had a trunk with $6,000 cash in it (equivalent today to about $70,000), and once he was lodged in the Warren County Jail, he was known for having pricey rabbit and chicken dinners delivered to him and other inmates from local restaurants.

The murders

The boarding house in the Shake Rag area where Duke had a room was owned by Narcissus Bell, 67. Also living in the eight-room house were Bell’s sister, Josephine Abernathy, 65, and tenant Horace Buford, 26.

Bell was the widow of an L&N Railroad employee, Sherman Bell. Buford worked at the Mayhugh and McReynolds Garage on Louisville Road.

On Sept. 25, a Thursday, Duke called Bowling Green police. He told them he had returned from a trip to Newport on Wednesday night but found the doors to the Chestnut Street home locked, with no one answering his knocks. He returned several more times, to no avail, he said, so he went and spent the night in Franklin.

On Thursday, Duke said, he returned and asked neighbors if they had seen anyone at the home. When they replied that they hadn’t, Duke and another man opened a window and Duke entered.

Inside the ransacked house were the bloodied and battered bodies of Bell, Abernathy and Buford.

The first policeman on the scene was soon joined by Coroner Raymond McClard, Bowling Green Police Chief Murrell Waddle and Capt. Hubert Phelps. The men had to step carefully over pools of blood and household items scattered throughout the house.

McClard reported that Buford had been shot six times – five times in the head and once in the shoulder – apparently while he lay in his bed.

The coroner concluded Bell and Abernathy had been beaten to death, and then both bodies shot twice. Their bodies were in a bedroom of the house, which had been thoroughly ransacked.

Based on empty shells, Waddle determined two guns had been used in the shooting – a .38-caliber automatic and a .38-caliber “Special.”

The house, the Daily News reported, was usually tidy but today “was left in a shambles. … Even the door housing the refrigerator motor had been ripped off.”

But in the back of the house, an undisturbed table still had a pair of dice and a few coins on it.

It appeared that the women had been engaged in a “terrific struggle.”

Suspicion soon landed on Duke, the man with the lengthy rap sheet.

He was taken to police headquarters and interrogated, where he denied any knowledge of the killings.

But the trail of evidence was working against Duke. In the room Duke occupied, police found a pair of his shoes with blood on them stuffed in a suitcase.

Another break then came when Garnett Butts and Roy “Shorty” Edwards, employees at the Dixie Garage, saw a bag floating in Barren River under the College Street Bridge. Inside, police found a .38-caliber Special and a pair of pliers. Duke admitted he had owned a similar bag but said it had gone missing from his room “for some time.”

Duke was arrested the next day and charged with three counts of murder. He was taken to the Warren County Jail and relieved of almost $300 in cash and a knife he was carrying.

The prosecution

The task of prosecuting Duke fell to William H. Natcher. Natcher would soon go on to represent Kentucky in the U.S. House of Representatives for a record 41 years.

Duke, meanwhile, retained the services of the best-known lawyer in town, Rodes K. Myers. The brilliant and often flamboyant Myers served as lieutenant governor from 1939 to 1943 and had a national reputation for his involvement in many high-profile cases. Among his other clients was notorious brothel-keeper Pauline Tabor, who was able to keep her lucrative business open for decades despite frequent attempts, by Natcher and others, to close it down.

Despite being on opposite sides of the courtroom in many high-profile cases, Natcher and Myers were close social friends and united in their involvement in Democratic Party politics.

As he awaited arraignment, Duke gave an interview to the Daily News in which he restated his innocence. He said he had brought two friends from Louisville to get rooms at the house Wednesday, but after a bout of heavy drinking that night, later returned to the house to find the doors locked with no one answering his knocks. He then returned several times Thursday before finding the bodies.

The two men with Duke, Richard Clifford Woods and Taylor L. Slaughter, had in the meantime been found in Barren County, and after police found two revolvers and a sawed-off shotgun in their car, charged with carrying concealed weapons. The men, who also had criminal records, were brought to Bowling Green to face questioning.

Waddle presented his theory of the case to the Daily News: Duke and the two men (along with some female companions) had returned to the house around midnight. When Bell said Woods and Slaughter could not spend the night in her home, Duke “flew into a drunken rage” and killed the three residents.

He then changed clothes, leaving behind the bloody shoes, and ransacked the house to make it look like a robbery, Waddle theorized. Duke then threw the bag with the gun in it into the Barren River.

Waddle added that Duke had told him the nightspot in Newport he worked in allowed gambling, and he used to be a card dealer there before rising in the ranks to be a manager of the establishment.

While Duke was in the Warren County Jail, he reportedly regularly had expensive meals brought in for himself and other inmates. Food was reportedly at the heart of a jail incident involving Duke and another inmate, who was attempting to get extra food from the jail trustys. The disagreement became physical, and Duke slashed the other inmate with a knife, which he later said he had “found” in the jail. The inmate was stitched up and returned to jail, while Duke’s punishment was to be sent to a different cell.

Natcher announced in January he would seek the death penalty for Duke. The Daily News reported that the last execution from a Warren County case was in the 1890s and took place by hanging.

As was common at the time, Duke was to be tried separately for each alleged murder, with the prosecution first trying the case of Bell’s killing.

Myers, meanwhile, asked the court that the victims’ bodies be exhumed so further ballistic tests could be conducted and the bodies autopsied. The court agreed, and the bodies of the sisters were scheduled to be exhumed from the Mount Mariah Cemetery and Buford’s body was to be exhumed from a Glasgow cemetery.

On March 12, the process began. Overseeing it was BGPD Capt. Phelps, who told reporters no bullets, only fragments, were retrieved from the bodies. Dr. Richard Grise conducted autopsies on all three victims, who were then reburied the next day.

As the trial approached, Judge John B. Rodes ordered an extra 100 potential jurors be called to supplement the 30 already called to serve on juries. The larger pool was needed because potential jurors would be excluded if they opposed capital punishment.

In April, Rodes drew 101 names of potential jurors. The pool included “at least” two Black members and one women. The non-White male makeup of potential jurors was unusual enough at the time to be mentioned in newspaper articles.

The trial

On April 20, jury selection began at the Warren County Courthouse, in the room now used primarily by Warren Fiscal Court.

Duke, looking dapper in a light-colored suit with a handkerchief in his jacket pocket, stopped to be photographed on the steps of the Warren County Jail as he prepared for the short trip to the courthouse. In the picture, Duke shares a laugh with Myers, and the Daily News reported the accused “appeared in a jovial mood.”

The jury selection process in a packed courtroom took almost four hours as 26 potential jurors, including the only four women in the jury pool, were disqualified for saying they had already formed an opinion on the case. Eight potential jurors were excused for saying they opposed the death penalty, and one potential juror was dismissed because he had a hearing problem.

The jury was all White, with Myers using one of his challenges to exclude the one Black member of the jury pool.

Testimony in the trial began the next day, where the basic facts of the case were laid out.

Natcher told jurors that Duke flew into a drunken rage after being told his friends could not stay in the house and then committed the murders.

Ann Oldham, a 33-year-old Bowling Green woman, was a key witness for the prosecution, as she detailed the night before the killings.

Oldham said she was called from Louisville by Woods, asking her for a “date” (the word was repeatedly used in quotations in newspaper articles of the time). Woods and Slaughter met her at the Morocco Club, where she worked, at Third and Chestnut streets.

A few hours later, the trio went across the street to the Mustang Inn to also get Slaughter a companion for the night.

Duke, with fat rolls of cash stuffed in his pockets, walked in to the Mustang Inn accompanied by two women. The group drank beer and whiskey for several hours before heading to the Elks Club for more drinking. Finally around midnight, Duke, Slaughter, Woods, Oldham and another woman went to the Chestnut Street boarding house.

According to Oldham, Abernathy told Duke the two couples could not spend the night there, and urged him to go to bed.

Duke, Oldham testified, was visibly drunk and raising his voice.

He finally yelled out, “If my friends can’t stay, I won’t either,” according to Oldham.

The two couples decided to leave, but before they did, Duke retrieved a “pickle jar” from his room filled with “silver and a roll of currency” to show the couples.

When the two couples left minutes later, Duke stayed behind, Oldham testified. Others in the drinking party that night told essentially the same story.

A Yellow Cab driver testified that a woman had called for a cab from the house shortly after midnight, but when he arrived at the home and blew his horn, no one came out. He said the shades were drawn but he could make out someone moving in the house.

Another cab driver, Ollie Meffert, testified that he picked up Duke about 3 a.m. at the L&N Depot and drove him to Franklin.

For the defense, Duke was his own star witness. Under Myers’ careful questioning, Duke, described as “calm and self-assured,” recounted his version of events.

Duke said he had returned the week of the killings from a gambling trip to Detroit and Gary, Ind., with more than $6,000 in winnings. More than $4,800 in cash, wrapped in a pink towel, and a large amount of silver was in his trunk in the Chestnut Street home the night of the murders, he said.

Duke said he had told Bell about his good fortune that week and had given her some extra money to buy enough coal to last the winter.

On the night of the murders, Duke admitted to a long drinking spree with several women, along with Woods and Slaughter, before he returned to the home with the two couples. He said after the two couples left, he also left to visit a friend and fellow gambler, Lawrence “Pig Meat” Nichols. He then reiterated his story about not being able to get into the house until the next day. He added that the locker in his room had been opened and the money and silver was gone.

As for the bloodstained shoes, Duke said he had not worn them in weeks.

Myers told jurors that the real culprits were after Duke’s money and they dipped his client’s shoes in a pool of blood to frame him.

To bolster that claim, Myers called several witnesses to cast suspicion on others. One witness testified he had seen a man resembling an ex-con he knew loitering around the Chestnut Street home the day before the murders. The man was apparently still in a Georgia jail at the time of the murders, but Myers hinted that he had information that the man had escaped four days prior to the killings.

Also called was Dr. Grise, who had performed autopsies on the exhumed bodies. He testified that the victims had head fractures likely caused by a wide, blunt object. Myers pointed out that a brick was found in the car occupied by Woods and Slaughter when they were stopped.

The forensic evidence in the case was analyzed by two FBI special agents. Agent Robert M. Zimmer said the pistol found in the bag in the Barren River was one of the murder weapons. The other gun used was never located.

Agent Edwin Donaldson testified to finding human blood not only on the pair of Duke’s shoes, but on a pair of his pajamas and the suitcase.

Under cross-examination by Myers, Donaldson said he had found no blood on any of Duke’s other clothing, and he admitted that the shoes could have been placed in a pool of blood in an effort to frame his client.

In his closing arguments, Myers called Duke “an innocent man – a framed man,” and had harsh words for local law enforcement, calling police chief Waddle “Chief of the local Gestapo.”

Natcher claimed his friend Myers had resorted to a “centipede defense” to cast suspicion on numerous others.

The case ended after five days of packed courtrooms, with the Daily News calling it “one of the longest and most bitterly contested in Warren Circuit Court history.”

The 12 jurors were given the case for deliberation at 7:30 p.m. on a Thursday night. The jurors dismissed at 10:13 p.m. and reconvened on Friday morning at 8:30. After three more hours, the jurors “showing signs of weariness” told Judge Rodes they could not reach a verdict. He ordered them to return for more deliberations, but just 30 minutes later, they returned to say they were hopelessly deadlocked, and Rodes declared a mistrial.

Duke smiled and shook Myers’ hand. While Duke was spared a likely trip to the electric chair, Myers was perhaps almost equally pleased – he told reporters that he had handled 287 murder trials in his almost 30-year career, and never had a client sentenced to death.

Judge Rodes set Duke’s bond at $10,500, but the state Department of Probation and Paroles later ruled that Duke was a parole violator based on a previous conviction in Jefferson County. As the issue was litigated in the court system, Duke remained in jail.

The second trial

The second trial, slated to begin in November 1953, was delayed by Judge Rodes because it was “tobacco season,” and the majority of jurors were farmers.

Finally, in January 1954, jury selection began for the second trial.

While Myers was still defending Duke, the prosecution now fell to new Commonwealth’s Attorney Frank Goad. Natcher had in August been elected to his first term to Congress.

On Jan. 19, the all-male, all-White jury began hearing testimony. The prosecution case was essentially the same as presented in the first trial. Oldham again described the night of drinking and Duke appearing to be upset that his friends weren’t allowed to stay in the home.

To counter Myers’ defense strategy to imply that others, notably Slaughter and Woods, were the killers, the prosecution called a gas station attendant to testify that he sold gas to the men at about 12:30 a.m. at the Lost River service station. This bolstered the men’s claim that they were heading to Nashville after leaving Duke at the Chestnut Street home.

FBI agent Donaldson this time testified that Duke’s bloodstained shoes could not have been a product of someone simply placing the shoes in blood. He said the blood was so saturated in the leather that they must have been worn during the bloodbath.

During the testimony, Duke “appeared alternately bored and amused …,” the Daily News reported. He frequently yawned, stretched and smiled.

Duke was again the main witness for his own defense.

On the stand, he said he had a very close relationship with the slain women.

“I respected those ladies. They treated me like I was a member of the family, and I treated them the same way.”

Duke admitted he was “pretty well loaded” on the night of the murders but downplayed any disagreement about his friends staying the night at the home.

“There was not even a cross word,” he said.

The jury began deliberations on a Friday morning, and a little less than two hours later, reported it had reached a verdict: guilty of manslaughter. The conviction carried a 21-year sentence.

Duke remained defiant when briefly interviewed by a Daily News reporter.

“Anybody who would do a thing like that deserves the electric chair. Me or anybody else, and I didn’t do it,” he said. “I think it was a rotten verdict and it looks like a prejudiced jury was picked by the Commonwealth.”

Myers had once again kept a client from execution, but Duke was destined to spend the better part of the next two decades at the state penitentiary in Eddyville.

Goad eventually decided to not pursue separate trials for the murders of the two other victims, and the Duke case appeared to be over.

But just months later, it would reappear in an unexpected way.

The aftermath

In March, Police Chief Waddle asked the city to fire the man who had been the department’s lead investigator in many cases, Capt. Phelps.

Waddle charged that Phelps had violated numerous department policies. While the formal charges were lengthy, the primary allegation boiled down to this: Phelps, Waddle charged, had been feeding information regarding the Duke police investigation to Myers.

The chief had apparently asked Phelps to resign when the allegations first surfaced, but when Phelps said he intended to keep working, Waddle brought the charges to city officials.

Phelps said the allegations were false and he intended to “fight it out … take it to court if necessary.”

In anticipation of a potential court battle, Phelps knew he needed the best lawyer in town. Not surprisingly, he hired Myers, despite the seeming conflict of interest.

A “jury” comprised of members of the city’s “Board of Councilmen and Board of Aldermen” heard two hours of testimony, behind closed doors, regarding Waddle’s charges March 17.

Twenty minutes after the hearing ended, the jury announced its finding that Phelps was guilty of all charges and he was immediately fired.

Phelps soon fired back.

He charged in a complaint to city officials that Waddle engaged in a wide range of misconduct, including withholding evidence, undermining police department captains and protecting “gambling houses and houses of prostitution” in the city.

In terms of the Duke case, Phelps charged that Waddle had protected Woods, a key figure in the prosecution of Duke, from further investigations into crimes he may have committed. He added the charge that Waddle “knew Woods falsely testified,” in Duke’s trial.

Myers took the opportunity to issue a statement, admitting he had approached Phelps for information in the Duke case “because I knew him to be truthful … Chief Waddle perhaps takes offense because this evidence was not concealed from the public, the court and the jury.”

A week later, a three-hour hearing was held regarding the allegations. After just six minutes of deliberations, city officials voted 11-1 to clear Waddle, who remained police chief until 1959.

In 1969, Duke was released from Eddyville after serving almost 16 years.

Duke returned to Bowling Green and lived in the Downtown Hotel. He soon was running the Peppermint Lounge, a watering hole with a less than stellar reputation.

The establishment was the scene of a non-fatal 1969 shooting. The victim declined to tell police who had shot him. A year later, a man was found dead in the bar, slumped in a chair. The man’s death was later ruled to be due to natural causes.

The official owner of the bar was another Downtown Hotel resident named Ebon Ray Green. At the time of the Ross shooting, however, Green was under indictment for allegedly shooting and killing his common-law wife. Duke claimed he was purchasing the business from Green.

The numerous deaths associated with the bar and the people running it led the Daily News to editorialize that “there may be some reasonable explanation for the licensing and inspection procedures that have permitted a tavern at Sixth and Kentucky Streets … to operate as it has, but if there is, a lot of Bowling Green citizens probably would be interested in hearing it.”

Ross, a resident of Fourth Street, worked at the bar. Ross also had numerous brushes with the law, having been charged with carrying a concealed weapon, shooting and killing a dog and attempted murder after attacking a man during a baseball game at the Warren County Fairgrounds.

Duke had fired Ross, for allegedly stealing money from the business, the morning of the shooting.

That night, Duke was in the bar with one patron, a man named Excell Jenkins.

When Ross walked into the bar, Duke said to Jenkins, “Oh Lord, here comes trouble.”

Duke told Ross to leave, and the man seemed to be complying, turning to go out the door. But at that point, Ross spun around, pulled a pistol from his pocket and began shooting.

Duke pulled out his gun and returned fire. While both Duke and Jenkins had been shot once and suffered minor injuries, Ross had been hit “five or six times,” Coroner J.C. Kirby later reported.

At a preliminary hearing, Duke’s attorney, Robert Simons, argued that his client had acted in self-defense. But Warren County Judge Basil Griffin sent the case to a grand jury.

The grand jury indicted Duke on a charge of carrying a concealed deadly weapon, but declined to indict him on the murder charge, apparently believing he had acted in self-defense. Duke pleaded guilty to the weapons charge and paid a $25 fine plus court costs.

In June, Duke placed a legal advertisement in the Daily News signaling his intent to apply for a liquor license with the state to operate at the Peppermint Lounge location.

The business was to be renamed “Duke’s Cafe.”

But the cafe never materialized with Duke’s death a year later, at the age of 65.

Unlike his chaotic life, Duke passed quietly – his death failed to even garner a mention in the newspapers that had reported exhaustively on the gambler’s various exploits.