Weary Willie: from laughter to murderby Bill Kelly, www.crimemagazine.comThe character clown is unmistakable. He usually dresses like a tramp, has a grayish-black uneven beard painted over a reddish face, a white mouth, red nose and pathetic, soulful eyes. His clothes are too large and frequently tattered and torn, often with strips held together by safety pins. There is an air of hopelessness about him -- nothing in his act ever seems to turn out right as he strolls in bewilderment around the sawdust arena. The most famous of all tramp clowns was Emmett Kelly, who in 1933 conceived and first began to perform the role of Weary Willie. As a character, Weary Willie was an extraordinary clown, a bright and talented comic, highly sensitive to the social and political climate, whose bedraggled clothing and floppy shoes gained him great popularity as he delighted the kiddies at Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. Emmett Kelly Jr. furthered the role of Weary Willie when his father went into semi-retirement, and his son, Paul Anthony Kelly (Emmett Kelly III) carried on the family tradition. To each in his turn, Weary Willie became something of an alter ego, capable of taking over the life of the Kelly he happened to inhabit at the time. For the young grandson, the distinction between playing Weary Willie and being the pathetic hobo in ragged suit and battered hat evaporated entirely within months of his taking on the role. Moreover, the 21-year-old became his grandfather in voice, looks, personality and soul. To best understand Weary Willie's bizarre evolution, it's best to go back to the beginning. Emmett Kelly Sr. was born Dec. 9, 1898, in Sedan, Kan., where his father worked as a section foreman for the Missouri-Pacific Railroad. From there his family moved to a farm near Cabool, Mo. In 1917 Emmett set out for Kansas City to become a professional cartoonist. With little to offer the major newspaper syndicates, he turned to a variety of jobs such as selling the Kewpie dolls he painted to field hands and lumberyard workers. But he loved to entertain and did so by giving "chalk-talks" -- comic illustrations and caricatures (later duplicated by Red Skelton) -- for church suppers and social functions. After years of resistance by circus owners, he was allowed to perform in his original guise of the sad-faced silent hobo whom he describes in his book, CLOWN, as "a forlorn and melancholy little hobo who always got the short end of the stick and never had any good luck at all, "but who never lost hope and just kept on trying." By 1937, his face made up with a growth of beard, his hair hanging in wisps from beneath his hat, he hit it big in New York. He went on to tour Europe, performing before royalty. In 1942 he joined Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus and became the only clown in history to be allowed to perform while other acts were taking place. Quite an honor. In 1950, Emmett Kelly was offered the role of the villain in a Warner Bros. film, The Fat Man. He was to play a killer-clown who murders three people, then takes his ill-gotten money and starts a circus. He is finally caught when detectives spot him without his makeup. What becomes spooky is that the extraordinary personality of Willie actually took over his body and pleaded with him not to let him become a killer. "Willie seemed to be pleading with me," Kelly wrote in his book. "He was lying in his trunk up in the Roosevelt Hotel, and while it may seem that all there was to Willie was a threadbare suit, a putty nose, some greasepaint, a busted derby and a pair of big, flapping shoes, I knew Willie had a heart, too. We were one and the same and I felt like I?d be a heel if I sold him out and made a real bum of him even in the crazy land of make-believe." Refusing to portray Willie as a killer, Kelly did the movie in whiteface as an entirely different character, and, for the time being, Weary Willie continued to live a quiet, law-abiding life. In the late 1920s Emmett Kelly Jr. was born. His father and mother preformed together on a trapeze. Eva finally had to quit the act to raise her children while Emmett Sr. took "Willie" on the road. Eva finally sued for divorce because her husband's obsession with Willie frightened her; he thought Willie needed sex just like anybody else and he dressed up like Willie occasionally to make love to her. Emmett Kelly Jr. spent his early youth working on the railroad. Living in Peru, Ind., the headquarters for five circuses, he finally succumbed to an urge to perform and debuted on Sept. 12, 1960, in the local Circus City Festival parade. He began performing his version of the tramp character and was the star-overnight story. By early 1961, he had preformed in countless state fairs, and came to the attention of his father who sent him a telegram of congratulations. They met in Detroit, and Emmett Sr. gave his son tips on makeup. Emmett Kelly Jr. rapidly became the greatest pantomime circus clown in history. He took Weary Willie into the Big Top and made millions happy, made them laugh and keep on laughing. In 1978, another clown who had worked with his dad, told him that his father ( Emmett Kelly Sr.) had told him just before his death that he was very proud that his son had the opportunity to keep Weary Willie alive. Paul Anthony Kelly was born October 8, 1957, in Peru, Ind., the youngest of five children of Emmett Jr. and Dorothy Kelly. In 1964 his father took Willie on the road, against the pleas of his wife. Their marriage gradually disintegrated and she sued for divorce, telling the judge that Willie had taken over her husband's personality. "I'm living with Jekyll and Hyde," she said. His parents' divorce had not been settled when 7-year-old Paul met with a terrible accident. The boy was playing in the railroad yard with some children when he fell off a railroad car, and the wheels of the train sliced off one of his legs. When Emmett heard about his son's accident he headed home. But after a short visit he announced, "Willie's got itchy feet," and returned to the circus. After graduating from Savannah High School in 1975, Paul Kelly went on tour with his father's circus. He marveled at the cheers and thunderous applause from the audience and longed to be Weary Willie, the recipient of that applause. It gave Paul a special delight to make children laugh. But there was only enough room for one Willie in the circus, so Paul had to settle for the lowly job of a prop boss: someone to tell the musclemen what to do, to rig the tents and cook meals, During his father's performances Paul would sneak out and watch him charm the audience just as his father before him had done. Paul would then return to his cookery all teary-eyed and downhearted. Like his father and grandfather before him, he wanted to be the humorous clown, and nothing else was on his mind. "I do a lot of thinking about my other self, the little hobo," Paul would later tell Lowell Thomas. "I start feeling sorry for the poor little guy: seems more like he is somebody I know instead of just me working for a living. I'm really getting so I feel like two people -- me and the little tramp. And, so help me, I'm beginning to like the little guy better than I like myself! And I kind of hope he feels the same way about me..." Sometime in 1977 the now 20-year-old Paul Kelly served a stretch in jail for assault. While nestled in jail he met a priest who became his counselor and converted him to Catholicism. When he got out, his father's circus was barnstorming, so he returned to his mother in Savannah. It was there one night, while sleeping, that Willie came to him in a dream. His father would soon retire, and Willie told him: "Don't let me die." He awoke in the morning determined to be the third Weary Willie and started calling himself "Emmett Kelly III," a name Willie could relate to. His mother suggested he go down to a local Savannah television station during a telethon and appear as silent Weary Willie. In an air of delight, he teamed with a young television star, Lani O'Grady from Eight is Enough. They were applauded with enthusiasm. Lani's mother, a TV talent agent, told Paul she could get him appearances if he came out to California. He called his sister in California and asked if he could live with her family in Oceanside, "until I get on my feet." She agreed. In March of 1978, Paul arrived in Oceanside with an appetite for work. He bumped into Janie Creel, a friend of his sister's. She was pushing 40 and lived in nearby Carlsbad with her husband and two sons. They hit it off and Paul gave her children clown performances. "I guess I'm his best friend, and his mother, and a little bit of everything to that boy," Creel said. "He's the most wonderful man I ever met. He'd give a friend the shirt off his back. When I needed help, he was always right there." Creel said he told her all he ever wanted was the love and attention he never got it at home. Through Willie, he got the love and attention he longed for. Creel had a special name for Paul. "I called him Paw-Paw because he had two personalities," she said. "There wasn't just one Paw; there's two of 'em." So he was Paw-Paw. "The first Paw was sweet and loveable and nice to everyone and everything," she said. But the second Paw was ornery and mean. He was sitting in the chair when I seen that look cross his face. The second Paw would have a long, sharp face. Even the skin would change to hard and rough. And his voice would change to old nasty Paw. I'd go over and tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Paw-Paw, I don't like the second Paw. Bring the first Paw back!' And he'd go off in a corner and say, 'Willie, you have to leave now,' then he'd be all better." She told of the joys of his nightly clown acts. However, in the middle of one, Creel noticed that Emmett Kelly III suddenly became more than Weary Willie. He became his grandfather -- in voice, looks, personality and soul. "Paw-Paw used to tell me the thing he wanted to do more than anything else in the world was to keep his grandfather alive through Willie." Paul had always felt uptight, but when he was Willie he felt released and free. It was an ambiguous feeling, touched with vulnerability and even a little fear at times, as if he were no longer his own man, his own fortress. "Sometime I felt as through Willie is taking over my body," he once said. "Just as he did my father and grandfather." In August a friend from his father?s old circus arranged for Paul to perform. For three days he performed as Emmett Kelly III at the Smithville Fair in Ontario, Canada. He gave three performances daily as Weary Willie and got rave reviews. When he returned to California he had enough money to get his own apartment. When his friends asked him why he needed a two-bedroom flat, he would say, "One for me, and one for Willie." By now, the good Paw was visibly grappling with the problem of Weary Willie. There was an inner turmoil that pushed him to be better than his father or grandfather. Paul wanted to escape from the situation that had ruffled the lives of three generations of Kelly men, but he felt powerless to do so. The problem would seem trivial to anyone else, but intolerable to him. Good Paw was not the kind of person who would commit murder. Anybody who knew him would have told you that. He had too much going for him -- a budding career, many friends who loved him, enough money to live on. The only thing going against him was his roommate, Weary Willie. Willie brought out the Bad Paw. Bad Paw had a drug habit, and he drank to extreme. Of course, he kept this from Good Paw and his friends. Willie was much closer to Bad Paw. He went to the Capri bar with him, and preformed offhandedly -- for Bad Paw's homosexual friends. Bad Paw introduced Willie to the world of homosexuality. On Halloween night, Paul Kelly went to a costume ball at the Capri dressed as Weary Willie. There he met 22-yer-old Brent David Bailey, an antique dealer from adjacent Leucadia, who was dressed as Charlie Chaplin, the loveable tramp who had inspired the young Emmett Kelly when he went to his first movies in the silent screen days. As the only experienced performer at the ball, Paul Kelly immediately took the crowd by surprise and walked off with the $50 prize. Charlie Chaplin took second prize of $20. Weary Willie was pleased with himself. Bailey had rented a room in a private home in the South Beach section of Oceanside. Three other boarders, including Paul Kelly, shared the house. On Nov. 4, 1979, this side of midnight, two drunks peered into the back seat of a parked car in downtown San Diego and saw a battered, naked body. Police were summoned. Sgt. John Kennedy, who headed the investigation, told reporters that the man "was the victim of a homosexual robbery." [*note: as opposed to a heterosexual robbery ;-)] After rummaging the 900 block of Columbia Street for clues, the investigators trooped back to headquarters. The blood-drenched Plymouth was towed to the Market Street station where lab technicians went over it. The State Department of Vehicles listed the vehicle as registered to Brent David Bailey. The detectives quickly drove to Bailey's rooming house and questioned all four renters. Paul Kelly seemed to know more about Bailey than the others. He told Sgt. Kennedy: "Bailey was here about 7 p.m. He came to my room and we had a chat, then he left. He didn't seem worried or upset about anything. I don't know where he went." A search of the victim's room was quickly carried out. The detectives noted there was no dust and the bed was free of wrinkles. Nothing was found that would indicate Bailey was mixed up in any shady dealings that could have cost him his life. The detectives next visited the Capri bar. Shown a photo of Bailey, the bartender said he didn't know the victim's name, but he remembered he stopped in once in a while for a drink. "I don't remember seeing him last night, but I was busy as hell, and might have missed him." Meanwhile, shortly after the murder, police lab technicians found traces of blood outside the car and on the car's floor. They theorized that the victim was beaten to death elsewhere, then his body dragged into the car and driven to Columbia Avenue where it was found. Dr. David Masamuchi Katsuyama, a forensic pathologist who worked with county coroners, told the detectives that Bailey had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy instrument. "He received five or six vicious blows that opened his skull so that you could see the brain," Katsuyama said. "Since there is no evidence that he put up a fight, the killer must have attacked without warning and dealt several swift blows before the victim could react." The elegant beach and cheap rents attracted people to Oceanside. In November, 1979, Rev. Henry Kuizenga, a 67-year-old minister who had recently retired as a professor at Claremont Theological Seminary, rented a cottage there. He wanted to disappear in the beautiful scenery, near the ocean, to work on a book he was writing. The big bay window gave him an enormous view of the splashing sea and offered many hours of passing pleasure for days at the typewriter. But the slender life thread would snag for the minister two chapters into his book. On the morning of Nov. 16, a neighbor on her way to the grocery store noticed the minister's cottage door ajar. Curiosity won out. She walked over and slowly pushed the door open. Momentarily, she was paralyzed by the sight before her eyes. Kuizanga lay across his bed, face up, totally naked, his round hazel eyes wide open and staring into oblivion. Smears of blood covered his face and sun-tanned shoulders. She screamed and ran to a neighbor's house. Homicide Det. James Wood and his partner, Det. Ralph Kohrbacher, responded to the call. They theorized Kuizanga had been struck a dozen hard blows to the skull, neck and shoulders, all inflicted by a club-like weapon or baseball bat. Since the body showed no rigor mortis and no signs of degeneracy, the beating had to have been inflicted sometime during the wee hours of that morning. Observation of the cottage showed there was one thing conspicuously missing. There was a TV stand, but no set. Det. Wood asked the landlady if Kuizanga owned a TV set. "Yes," she said. "It was a nice Quasar television with a very clear picture." The dead man's empty wallet lay on the floor. The drawers in the desk had been rifled. "At least we have a motive," said Wood. "It's a clear case of a bungled robbery." Crime photographer Larry Fregia took pictures of the murder scene, then technicians from the police department in San Diego dusted for prints. Afterwards, Wood and Kohrbacher canvassed the area, interviewing residents of the seaside resort. After he had been sufficiently settled in his dream cottage, Kuizenga went to the Capri Bar on North Treemont. The bartender remembered him. "Yeah, older guy. Said he was a writer. Nice guy. He spent most of the night talking to a kid, a regular, about 22. He said he was the grandson of that famous clown...what's his name... Emmett Kelly. He might be related. He talks a lot about the circus. He has no left leg. Said he lost it in a train accident when he was little. Pretty weird kid, if you ask me. He said he lived with a guy named Willie." Quite a coincidence. Paul Kelly had also been questioned about the Bailey murder, which occurred only 10 days before Kuizenga's murder. Detectives decided to have a talk with the circus clown. He wasn't home, so they talked to his neighbors. "The guy spends a lot of time getting stoned and watching his new TV," said one neighbor. "Don't ask me where he got the money for a color TV when he asked me for a loan of $2 the day before he came home with it." Ten days after the beginning of the investigation, on Nov. 26, police followed Paul Kelly to a house in Carlsbad. He was arrested, taken to Oceanside in handcuffs, and questioned at the police station. That night they went to his room and found a Quasar TV set, a watch, and identification papers from the wallet of the slain Presbyterian minister. Kelly told investigators that he went on two or three acid trips a week, both before and after the murders. He said he used amphetamines, marijuana, acid, cocaine and other pills, and when he drank, which was often, he would have 10 drinks a night. He had an accomplice he said, and he blamed his hard luck and drugs on him. After prodding, he gave up his accomplice's name. "It was Weary Willie," he said. "His mad lust for fame and fortune brought out the Bad Paw." Booked into the county jail in Vista on two counts of murder, he refused to talk with detectives, but agreed to talk with court-appointed psychologists and psychiatrists. One of these was Dr Walter Griswold. He found that Paul Kelly and Weary Willie were one and the same, which saved gumshoes a wild goose chase for a character who only existed in Paul's mind. Griswold's official report said that Kelly had a split personality, but ruled that he was not psychotic. This effectively blocked a defense of diminished capacity. Evaluation doctors agreed that there seemed to be numerous schizoid tendencies and stated further that "organically" something was a little amiss, but they wouldn't say there was organic damage either. On Jan. 4, 1980, Griswold testified at a preliminary hearing in Judge Michael Burles' San Diego courtroom that during his interview with Kelly, the young man admitted that he "flipped out" and killed Brent Bailey. He said Kelly told him it was Willie, not him, that tried to smother Bailey, but when it didn't work, Willie asked him to club Bailey to death. He and Willie drove the body to downtown San Diego and abandoned it. Ten days later he and Willie were both on acid trips when they entered the bar where homosexuals frequently went. They were both "flying high" when they met Kuizenga. "During the later part of the evening we mutually agreed to have sex together," said Kelly. They undressed and went to bed. Kelly related the "Minster grabbed at me, tried to force me to have anal intercourse. I am only into oral sex. I clubbed him over the head." Dr. Miguel Lozano testified that Kelly told him he only hit Kuizenga once, but Willie hit him 15 times until blood and gore splattered the entire room. Kelly told the psychiatrist that after he killed the minister, he took the contents of his wallet, television set and car keys and sped off in the dead man's car. He ditched the car, but keeping the watch and TV set was Willie's idea. Psychologist Abigail Dickson testified that Kelly was "not psychotic," that he "has a recognition of right and wrong far above normal capacity." She said he had good control over reality. "However," she admitted, "there is obviously something organically amiss." Bad Paw sat through the two-day preliminary hearing as if he were waiting for a streetcar. He sat staring at the polished veneer of his counsel's table top, listening to a parade of witnesses testify that his elevator did not go to the top floor. He said nothing. His face did not change; he kept looking at he door, as if he were expecting Weary Willie to walk in and take the blame. Defense Attorney Tom Senters said when Kelly had his day in court he would present "an affirmative defense" based on the "diminished capacity" of his client, Emmett Kelly III. Bad Paw was lodged in the Vista North County jail to await his trial. He was allowed visitors for a half-hour every week. A few relatives, including his brothers and sisters, stopped by. Janie Creel, his best friend, came every chance she got. He wrote her a poem:
DEATH HOLDS NO FINAL FEAR FOR ME, MERELY A FEAR The teary-eyed Creel said, "That's Paw-Paw telling me he's going to kill himself in prison. And for me not to be sorry for him." Emmett Kelly III said he spent many long nights asking himself what he could have done to prevent this catastrophe, but concluded the wrong man was in jail. Weary Willie deserted him when he needed him the most. Thinking about it all the time could drive a man crazy, he said. When he went to jail, Paul weighed 120 pounds. When he sent greeting cards to Creel he jokingly admitted he had ballooned to 190 pounds. On Aug. 18, 1980 Bad Paw admitted his guilt in Superior Court in Vista, Calif. On Sept. 16th, the 23-year-old grandson of famed circus clown Emmett Kelly listened impassively as Superior Court Judge Michael Greer sentenced him to the maximum sentence of 25 years to life for each of the first-degree murders. The judge said he would leave it up to the California Board of Prison Terms to decide if the terms would be carried out consecutively or concurrently. Outside the courthouse his older sister told reporters: "For someone who was so messed up about himself, he had more sensitivity about reaching out to others more than anyone I know. But he didn't realize how long it took his father and grandfather before they finally made it big. Paul expected to make it right now, and when he didn't he became bitter. The thing is, if he would have stuck it out for 15 years, he could have been the best of them all. I've seen his grandfather perform and his father perform and they were both truly great. But Paul could have been the best of them all." |