ABA Journal: Witness for the Defense
Fricker’s business at the Glancy motel in Clinton, Oklahoma, was to ask former manager Gerald Klemke about an earring that allegedly turned up in Munson’s room there, an earring worn by Alma Hall, who was a night clerk at a local convenience store. Despite what he’d testified at Munson’s trial, Klemke couldn’t say where that earring actually came from. “I don’t know,” he told Fricker. “If a guy were hypnotized again . . . maybe, maybe not.”
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We won’t try to tell in one page the story the ABA Journal told in 11. But trust us that it shredded the case against Adolph Munson, a black mope guilty of passing through Clinton at the wrong time. Not only was Hall most likely not murdered by Munson, she probably wasn’t even murdered in Oklahoma–the body was found 120 miles west of Clinton in a Texas field. Oklahoma retained jurisdiction because of a cockamamy death theory advanced by a corrupt pathologist who’d soon be indicted and plead guilty to seven felony charges.
Do you have a low opinion of prosecutors? we asked.
“When you look at that case,” recalls Gary Hengstler, then and now the journal’s editor, “here was a guy charged in a conspiracy to bring drugs into Oklahoma. No drugs were ever brought in–there was only a discussion, and he wasn’t even part of the discussion. When he realized what they were talking about he walked out. Everybody else pleaded guilty and is now out of prison. He pleaded innocent and got 30 years. And we said, ‘Wait a minute! If this is what the war on drugs is about it’s wrong.’”
“We’re in the process of trying to change somewhat the editorial focus,” he said, agreeing with Fricker up to a point. “We’re writing all of our articles from the standpoint of mainstream journalism. We don’t try to focus our articles from an ABA policy point of view. Among the [new] mix would be the occasional investigative piece.”
But it isn’t reading time Fricker cares deeply about–it’s muckraking. The Journal might continue to make itself more pertinent and engrossing, but nonetheless choose to do less of what matters most: devoting soul and purse to stories such as a capital case in Oklahoma.
