‘So young and so talented.’ Book brings story of slain Lexington golfer to life 80 years later.
Sun shines on the polished wood floors of the ladies’ dressing room at the Lexington Country Club, a serene space of sofas and bookshelves.
But one night 79 years ago on Monday, the floors and walls were covered in blood, a scene of carnage that ended two lives and the career of one of the most promising and famous women golfers in the country. The generation of people who remember the death of Marion Miley at just 27 is nearly past, but it’s a story that has gripped a number of others who haven’t been able to let it go.
One of those people is author Beverly Bell, who after spending years researching and writing about Miley has now produced a new book: “The Murder of Marion Miley,” published by South Limestone, an imprint of the University Press of Kentucky.
“I found it compelling for the same reason lots of different people find it compelling,” Bell said recently. “There’s this kind of undeniable aspect of how unfair the crime was — she was so young and so talented. It’s a story I couldn’t shake. Over the years, I kept looking into details of it, and with every discovery, the story grabbed me a little bit more.”
What really hooked her, though, was a strange coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence at all. In the late 1980s, Bell met a woman who lived on Fontaine, a house formerly owned by Frances Laval, one of Miley’s best friends. The woman had found several boxes in the basement full of scrapbooks compiled by Miley, along with her watch and several other keepsakes, and kept by Laval after Miley’s death. Bell looked through them and suggested the woman give them to the Lexington Country Club.
That’s where they live today, a meticulous record of Miley’s short life, programs of every tournament she played in to menus from her trip to England on the Queen Mary. They’ve been organized by Lisa Letton, a former chair of the Marion Miley Tournament, the amateur women’s golf competition put on by the club every year. She recently met with Bell at the club to look at the scrapbooks and even more newspaper clippings about Miley. A front room of the club is known as the Marion Miley room with cabinets filled with photographs and mementoes from her life.
“Your book has brought life back to her story,” Letton told Bell.
A movie star story
Marion Miley grew up in Florida, but moved to Lexington in 1930 when her father, Fred, got a job as the golf pro at the Lexington Country Club. By 1941, he’d moved on to a club outside Cincinnati, but his wife, Elsie Miley, stayed on as the Lexington Country Club manager. She lived in an upstairs apartment at the clubhouse with two bedrooms, a spot for Marion to stay in between golf tournaments.
Marion started playing when she was 12. Her talent, carefully crafted by her father, soon got sportswriters’ attention, combined with movie star looks and an outgoing personality. By age 27, she’d won almost every important women’s amateur championship except the national title.
She won six Kentucky women’s amateur championships between 1931 and 1938 and was on the U.S. Curtis Cup team three times. She beat six of the 13 women who founded the LPGA. Her charisma also got her a job as celebrity ambassador for Standard Oil, where she would make guest appearances at various gas stations.
But she was home with her mother on the night of Sept. 28, 1941, preparing for an exhibition match in Ohio.
One reason that Bell uses the word ‘unfair’ to describe Miley’s death is that in the end her murder was not the result of a passionate love triangle or a jealous rival. It was really very banal, a robbery gone wrong by three men still suffering from the economic downturns of the Great Depression. Club groundskeeper Raymond “Skeeter” Baxter conspired with Tom Penney and Bob Anderson, a Louisville bar owner, to steal the cash collected from a dance by Elsie Miley, Marion’s mother, who was the club manager at the time.
They broke into the club, climbed the stairs, and were surprised by Marion. They shot and killed her immediately, then attacked and shot Elsie while looking for the money. Despite gun shot wounds to her stomach, Elsie made it downstairs and crawled across Paris Pike to the sanatorium that operated across the road, where she got help. She lingered for two days before dying. All for $120.
A novel event
The national press exploded with the news of the deaths. Lexington police quickly snapped into action, and within weeks had arrested the three men, thanks to a blue Buick, and the obvious involvement of an insider who knew about the dance. All three were eventually convicted and executed in 1943. Bell tells the back story of Bob Anderson and Tom Penney, including Penney’s jailhouse religious conversion. As part of her research, Bell tracked down one of Penney’s children, who let her read his letters from prison to his mother.
“There were many people who were still struggling from the effects of the Great Depression that would not really end until production revved up for World War II,” Bell said. “They were looking for easy money. These were a desperate men and when you’re desperate, you don’t think things through.”
Bell has been working on the Marion Miley story for a long time; she published an e-book that coincided with a KET documentary “Forgotten Fame: The Marion Miley Story,” which premiered at the Kentucky Theatre. Bell’s familiarity with the material allows her to tell the story in a taut, engrossing manner that fills in the gaps that she and other researchers had not been able to; for example, the rumor, never confirmed, that Bing Crosby, who’d played golf with Marion, offered the reward money for her killers.
The novel form also let Bell explore the real characters’ stories, the tale of Frances “Fritz” Laval, who ended up with Marion’s scrapbooks, Curry Tunis and Louis Haggin, who led the club through an unimaginable scandal, and Fred Miley, as he worked through unimaginable loss.
“I am not what I would consider a true crime aficionado, but this story spoke to me for a lot of reasons,” Bell said. “I’m proud of forwarding her story. I thought it was something we shouldn’t lose.”
This story was originally published September 25, 2020 at 9:20 AM.
