Who Killed Betty Gail Brown? by Robert Lawson

HerKentucky Whiskey Glass Rating: 🥃🥃🥃🥃

Publisher’s synopsis: On October 26, 1961, after an evening of studying with friends on the campus of Transylvania University, nineteen-year-old student Betty Gail Brown got into her car around midnight―presumably headed for home. But she would never arrive. Three hours later, Brown was found dead in a driveway near the center of campus, strangled to death with her own brassiere. Kentuckians from across the state became engrossed in the proceedings as lead after lead went nowhere. Four years later, the police investigation completely stalled.

In 1965, a drifter named Alex Arnold Jr. confessed to the killing while in jail on other charges in Oregon. Arnold was brought to Lexington, indicted for the murder of Betty Gail Brown, and put on trial, where he entered a plea of not guilty. Robert G. Lawson was a young attorney at a local firm when a senior member asked him to help defend Arnold, and he offers a meticulous record of the case in Who Killed Betty Gail Brown? During the trial, the courtroom was packed daily, but witnesses failed to produce any concrete evidence. Arnold was an alcoholic whose memory was unreliable, and his confused, inconsistent answers to questions about the night of the homicide did not add up.

Since the trial, new leads have come and gone, but Betty Gail Brown's murder remains unsolved. A written transcript of the court proceedings does not exist; and thus Lawson, drawing upon police and court records, newspaper articles, personal files, and his own notes, provides an invaluable record of one of Kentucky's most famous cold cases.

HerKentucky review: Betty Gail Brown was a Lexington native, a Transylvania University student, and a member of the Delta Theta Chapter of Phi Mu. She was on campus late one Thursday night in October studying for a biology exam; the following morning, she was found dead in her car. Intense media coverage, a thorough police investigation, and a prolonged trial ensued. In Who Killed Betty Gail Brown?, Mr. Lawson, longtime criminal law professor at UK College of Law, recreates the crime, the investigation, and the legal proceedings from his perspective as the defense attorney for the accused killer, an alcoholic drifter named Alex Arnold.

I was immediately drawn to this story because I love any story about Lexington's past, and I loved my years as a Phi Mu in the Transy chapter. Of course, I needed to read about what happened to my sorority sister! 

The book is extremely respectful of Miss Brown, and takes pains to explain why the author and his law partner were committed to the belief that Mr. Arnold was, in all likelihood, not the killer. Professor Lawson's most-read work is Kentucky's Penal Code, and I will say that the story is, at times, very lawyerly and dry. There is no sensationalism in the work -- in fact, there are times when more details would have aided the story -- and the book often reads like the recitation of facts in a legal brief. It's an interesting exercise for a reader: I find myself coming to the story with an interest in Lexington history, and the victim's school and sorority, while the author is interested in finding answers to an unsolved crime and legal proceedings that ended in mistrial. It's an interesting exercise in perspective. For example, I found in follow-up research that the victim was a niece to the late Kentucky-born actor Harry Dean Stanton. I found this detail fascinating; of course it was omitted from the narrative of the book because it had nothing to do with the story.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes stories true crime, legal nonfiction, or Lexington history. If you're familiar with Transylvania's campus, it's eerie to think that this terrible crime took place in an area where you've walked so many times. Professor Lawson tells a great story from the perspective of his own involvement in the story, and his own uncertainty about who actually killed Miss Brown.

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Madam Belle: Sex, Money and Influence in a Southern Brothel by Maryjean Wall

HerKentucky Whiskey Glass Rating: 🥃🥃🥃

Publisher’s synopsis: Belle Brezing made a major career move when she stepped off the streets of Lexington, Kentucky, and into Jennie Hill's bawdy house―an upscale brothel run out of a former residence of Mary Todd Lincoln. At nineteen, Brezing was already infamous as a youth steeped in death, sex, drugs, and scandal. But it was in Miss Hill's "respectable" establishment that she began to acquire the skills, manners, and business contacts that allowed her to ascend to power and influence as an internationally known madam.

In this revealing book, Maryjean Wall offers a tantalizing true story of vice and power in the Gilded Age South, as told through the life and times of the notorious Miss Belle. After years on the streets and working for Hill, Belle Brezing borrowed enough money to set up her own establishment―her wealth and fame growing alongside the booming popularity of horse racing. Soon, her houses were known internationally, and powerful patrons from the industrial cities of the Northeast courted her in the lavish parlors of her gilt-and-mirror mansion.

Secrecy was a moral code in the sequestered demimonde of prostitution in Victorian America, so little has been written about the Southern madam credited with inspiring the character Belle Watling in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Following Brezing from her birth amid the ruins of the Civil War to the height of her scarlet fame and beyond, Wall uses her story to explore a wider world of sex, business, politics, and power. The result is a scintillating tale that is as enthralling as any fiction.

HerKentucky review:

If you've spent any time at all in Lexington, then you've certainly met at least one person who considers herself a "Belle Enthusiast" -- someone who simply can't get enough of the legend of Miss Belle Brezing.

Belle was, of course, a Lexington madam of the late 19th and early 20th century whose shrewd business sense and commitment to opulence and decorum led to the establishment of what was widely known as "The Most Orderly of Disorderly Houses." Widely believed to be the inspiration for the Belle Watling character in Gone with the Wind, Belle rose from humble beginnings to own a successful brothel that was frequented by judges, horse breeders, and society gentlemen of the day. I count myself among the Belle Enthusiasts who are fascinated by her life story, so I was excited to get my hands on the latest Belle biography, Maryjean Wall's Madam Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel. 

Ms. Wall, who covered the turf beat for the Lexington Herald-Leader for nearly four decades, brings a well-researched account of Lexington in the 1880s and 1890s. Her work brings an interesting perspective of the era's horse business to Belle's story. However, with little new information about Belle and a wealth of stories about seemingly peripheral racing stories, the book functions better as a history of Lexington than as a Belle Brezing biography. The knowledgeable Belle enthusiast will find little new information in this work, with much of the story devoted to pedantic details found in receipt books and a heavy reliance on Buddy Thompson's seminal Brezing biography, Madam Belle Brezing. [Ed. note: my college bookstore stocked a few copies of Thompson's book when I was matriculating there. I always meant to buy it but at the time, list price seemed exorbitant; now it's impossible to find a copy of the long-out-of-print work for under $70...]

I found myself simply wanting to like this book far more than I actually did. There was little new information and Ms. Wall's text is cumbersome. The language which the author employs is particularly problematic. The overuse of "demimonde" adds an aura of pretension, while the repeated referral to Ms. Brezing's employees as "whores" undermines the commonly-held (and seemingly accepted by the author) conceit that Belle was a sharp businesswoman who added a touch of elegance to her enterprise. The historical context of Kentucky horsemen often seems forced, bringing awkward phrases like "But [Belle's] opening night gala still lay in the future on that Derby night of 1890" or the reference to 1890s thoroughbred horses as "four-legged Ferarris." [Driver Enzo Ferrari was not born until 1898, and his eponymous sports car company was founded in 1929.] At times, I simply found myself wondering where the point lay in Ms. Wall's exercise.

For this reader, Ms. Wall's most interesting addition to the Belle Canon is an anecdote regarding Belle's final days. Aging, alone, and fighting a morphine addiction, Belle found herself in the frequent care of James Herndon, an orderly at Lexington's St. Joseph Hospital. Mr. Herndon is perhaps better known as Lexington's original drag queen, Miss Sweet Evening Breeze; it's fascinating to imagine how this connection kept the Belle legend alive in Lexington. Ms. Wall's quote of Lexington artist Bob Morgan, who says "All the old queens loved Belle. She was powerful and a sexual outlaw..." tells a fascinating story of gender politics and historical interpretation. I found myself wishing that this storyline had been better developed, with less emphasis on the same perusal of auction records that appears in every Belle timeline.

Madam Belle adds little to the body of Belle writing. I would recommend it only for those who are new to the Belle legend or who are interested in an overview of the vices of historical Lexington.