Was she dead or wasn’t she dead? She was naked on the bed, bruised from
head to foot. Somebody’d wrapped her in a blanket and turned out
the light. Spade Cooley, the once King of Western Swing, stood
white-faced and shaking, eyes rolling like red balls. He kept
saying, “She can’t be dead! My wife just can’t be dead!”
Richard Stickle, the ambulance driver from Mojave, wasn’t so sure. She’d
fallen in the bathroom shower, Cooley insisted, hit her head, and
got a concussion. He said he could tell. He knew. Stickle had
arrived at the Willow Springs Ranch just after eleven that night and
hadn’t
been in the bedroom more than a minute. He says, “I told Spade
Cooley I couldn’t get a pulse. I said she didn’t seem to be
breathing, but Cooley kept saying there were noises coming out of
her throat. ‘You see! You hear her?’ he’d say. I said,
‘Let’s get her to the hospital as fast as we can. ’ Cooley
demanded we take her to the Tehachapi Valley Hospital — it was the
closest. I didn’t honestly think there was any life in her but in
case of a chance, slim as it seemed, I didn’t argue as we got her
loaded into the ambulance.”
The first time Stickle saw Ella Mae Cooley in person was at a Mojave
meat market. “It was a while ago,” he says “and I also saw her
in Rosamond by the Air Force base. She’d been real pretty, the
same as on television in The Spade Cooley Show long before that. She
still looked fairly young, and pretty, even if maybe she wasn’t
alive — banged up like she was, like she’d fallen down a flight of
stairs and hit every part of her body.” There weren’t any stairs
in the Willow Springs Ranch for one to fall down. “It was a new
place — big,” says Stickle. “Part of the Water Wonderland
project Cooley’d been developing since his television show folded
and he’d gone off the air. Gone broke as well.”
Spade rode in the back of the ambulance, Stickle says. “He was right at
my back telling me she’d been out of her mind for week, and days
before that she’d jumped out of the car he was driving. ‘She’s
had a lot of emotional problems,’ he was saying, and that’s why
she’d jumped out of a moving car a few weeks earlier, even before
the first time she’d tried to do that. Cooley kept patting his
wife gentle-like, kind of covering her eyes. He didn’t seem so
shaken as he’d been at the ranch, and as we drove to the hospital
he seemed to calm down a little, talking in an almost normal tone.
‘If she’s not going to make it,’ he was saying, ‘life
isn’t worthwhile without her. It isn’t worth living.’
Dr. Vincent Troy at the Tehachapi Valley Hospital said, “I’m sorry,
Mr. Cooley, but your wife is dead . . .” Examining the body of
thirty-five-year-old Ella Mae further, the doctor noted that she
appeared to have been dead for some time before being brought to the
hospital. “When I was told the circumstances of how this woman
died,” the doctor says, “that she’d suffered a fall in the
shower, I found this to be inconsistent with the condition of her
body. She was badly bruised and these appeared to have been
inflicted, repeatedly so. It was my judgment that the coroner be
notified and an investigation ordered before any further
determinations could be made as to the cause of Ella Mae Cooley’s
death.” 
That same night, the Kern County coroner’s office was notified, as was
the Sheriff’s department in Mojave. Sergeant Tom Shuell and Deputy
Marion Dickey left the substation for the hospital in Tehachapi.
“We found Spade Cooley in what I’d describe as a state of
shock,” says Dickey. “I noticed right away that his hands were
swollen and bruised, and he was shook up, saying the fact that his
wife was really dead was hitting him bad. Maybe excited is the
better word to describe his condition. I got him some water and,
sort of coming apart at the seams, he told us his wife had jumped
from the car a few days earlier, but he didn’t give much detail.
Then she fell in the shower, he said, and hit her head. He said he
believed she had a concussion.”
The deputies were then told by the physician that the condition of the
woman’s body was inconsistent with someone falling in a shower. Or
even jumping from a moving car. He said, “Mrs. Cooley might very
well have fallen in a shower as Mr. Cooley says, or received
injuries from jumping from a car sometime earlier, but what I’m
seeing has nothing to do with either such kind of accident.” He
went on to say, “The bruises on her neck are consistent with
strangulation, and there’s these burn marks on her breasts . . .”
“I looked at the body,” Dickey says, “and she looked like
somebody’d clobbered her. I didn’t need any medical confirmation
to see that this woman had been beaten to death”
Cooley
was informed that until things were cleared up by the coroner he’d
have to accompany the deputies to the substation and wait for the
results. “He expressed that it was an inconvenience,” Dickey
says, “but agreed to come with us. In fact, he had no choice,
though we didn’t say that right out to him, or that we were
holding him as possibly the one responsible for his wife’s
death — if the coroner’s report showed that to be the case. We
took pictures of Ella Mae’s body, and pictures of Cooley’s
hands, his swollen and bruised fists.”
Spade was questioned for three hours in Mojave. “He stuck to the story
about her falling in the shower,” Sergeant Shuell says. “We
didn’t believe him, and during the recorded interview, talking
about his swollen hands, he did finally admit to having struck his
wife. He said, ‘. . .slapping her maybe a couple times because she
was hysterical, but that was it . . . That was all.’ I asked,
‘How many times did you slap her? You hit her once? You hit her
twice or more than twice?’ He confessed he might’ve struck her
more than once but denied having done anything that could’ve
caused any serious injuries. He was lying. We knew it and I figured
he knew that we suspected it, but we also knew he was going to hold
to his story about the shower and her hitting her head. Looking at
the photographs, which we had rushed out, I even said to him one
time, ‘Looks to me, Spade, like she’s got bruises on her neck,
and like she was choked. How’s a shower door gonna get a pair of
hands around a woman’s neck?”
Ignoring the question and shaking all over, Spade said, “There’s been
this awful fightin’ that’s been going on for a while. A long
time — these tensions, the wrangling and fighting, and it’s been
an impossible situation . . .” He shook his head sadly and said,
“I can tell you, boys, I’ve been half crazy with it, but I’ve
never ever meant to cause Ella Mae harm or certainly what’s
happened. This is the most awful thing that’s ever happened to me
in my life.”
Dickey says, “Again we asked him if he’d hit her with his fists and he
kept saying, ‘No!’ and rubbing his hands. ‘I’ve told you, boys, I hit things when
I am hopelessly lost. I don’t hit people — I never hit people. Why can’t you understand what I’m saying?’
It was learned that Spade’s son from a previous marriage, John Cooley,
had received a call at his home in Los Angeles hours earlier that
evening. “About nine o’clock,” the son said, and he’d been
told that Ella Mae was dead — approximately two hours before the
ambulance was called.
Spade’s son John and daughter-in-law arrived in Mojave close to three
o’clock that morning. Both had to wait until four before the
deputies finished questioning Spade. Weak and exhausted, Cooley was
brought out of the office and it was announced that he was under
arrest.
“Oh, Dad!” John cried, hugging his father. Spade and his son shared a
whispered conversation until Spade used the phone to call his
lawyer. “They’re trying to blame me — me!” he said into the
phone. “It’s — it’s crazy! I loved her — I cherished her . . .
My God, what am I going to do without her?”
"Oh, Dad . . .” Cooley’s son said again, and asked the deputies,
“What’s going to happen?”
(Robert) Young says, “He should never have been convicted of first-degree
murder. But no, those hypocritical, hand-picked jurors were pulled
along by the DA and by the county that had a lot at stake in their
own locked-up quarters — a way of defeating any sort of infiltration
into Kern County by any undesirable elements, meaning the
investments Spade was looking for out of Fort Worth. All he wanted
to do was get back into the spotlight. “He should’ve done a
couple years for the involuntary manslaughter, as tragic as the
situation was. I believe he would’ve killed himself if he’d been
acquitted. He had to suffer, and suffer good’s what he did. But he
made the most of it — a tortured soul in a cage. Him and Ella Mae
were caught in an awful situation, all bound up in a whirlpool and
torturing each other to death by the tragic love they shared. It was
plain poison.”
Ken Curtis said, “Spade’s wife drove him crazy because he couldn’t
trust her. Whether that’s him or her, nobody’s going to know. I
knew her from the first when she went to work for Spade, and she was
barely out of her teens. Take a sweet girl with a pretty face and a
darling figure and you fall head over heels in love but you never
know what’s inside that person. Never really know what they’re
like in their heart. I heard that after the first year of them being
together, the girl was driving Spade up the wall. Take his failing
at what he wanted to do most, making music, the kind of music
that’s the soul of this country and proves the uniqueness and
originality of the American spirit, all that, and I’m saying take
a few hard blows to the heart of Spade’s life, and you start
beating him down, and soon he’s flat on the canvas and out for the
count.”
