Show Girl turned “Tiger Woman”.
Show Girl turned “Tiger Woman”.
Before Carol Baskin and Joe Exotic ended up with the titles of “The Tiger King/ Woman” there was another female in the 1920s whose crime earned her the nickname “Tiger Woman”.
This female captured my attention recently as we had the same surname as Phillips and she was killed in the name of love, she lived with the justification “if I can’t have you to myself, then no other female will have you”. However, instead of killing her husband, she decided to kill his mistress – a young bank teller.
I wonder if country singer Dolly Parton thinks about this as her husband had an affair with a bank teller and instead of choosing the route of murder like our killer Clara Phillips, Dolly chose to write and release a song which to this day has earned her millions.
Looking back at things, our killer was still a child herself when she was swept off her feet by Armour Phillips, a handsome and charming man who was ambitious and aspired to become an oilman and promised to provide the world to Clara.
The pair married on November 13th, 1913 when Clara was only 15 years old to Armour’s 22 years. The couple settled in California where Clara became a chorus girl at Pantages Theatre in Hollywood and did some modeling as a “bathing beauty” with her dark hair and coke-bottle figure and luminous smile and Armour settled into the oil industry where he made enough money for Clara to have servants and invited her sister and mother to come and live with them.
Life though wasn’t satisfying for Clara as she was emotionally dependent on Armour and with their schedules, she hardly saw him. Again, this was probably due to her young age and so Clara decided to quit her job, so they could spend more time together. This backfired on Clara though and was the start of her downfall which led her to become a murderess.
Armour started spending more nights away and was hardly ever home. Rumors in their community started to spiral and it was talked that Armour had started an affair with a 19-year-old bank teller named Alberta Meadows.
Alberta was born in Texas in 1903 and when she was 18-19 years old she married her first love, a guy named Jesse Meadows. The pair were happily in love and had big dreams with Jesse aspiring to become a Pastor and Alberta – a pastor’s wife. This dream though was cut short when Jesse was killed only ten months after the pair had married.
Now a widower, Alberta took a job as a bank teller which is where she met Armour which would lead to her demise and have her reunited with her husband in heaven. It was also said that possibly Alberta knew her own time was coming to an end as it was recorded that she wrote a diary entry on the 7 March 1922 – “Where will I be in a year from now, on 7th March 1923? Jesse told me we would surely spend our next Christmas together and maybe we will.
The fateful day was June 11th, 1922.
Consumed with jealousy and rage never seen before, Clara visited a local
hardware store and purchased a claw hammer. It is said that she asked the clerk
if it was able to kill someone, the clerk replied ‘yes, if you hit hard enough”
That poor clerk as he assumed she was joking.
That night, building up the courage. Clara visited her friend Peggy who was also a chorus girl and they got wasted and drunk Peggy was a great sounding board for Clara’s rants about Alberta. Later on, the pair decided to get the courage up to confront Alberta about the affair she had been having.
Armed with her claw hammer, Clara and Peggy took a taxi to the bank and waited for Alberta to finish work. When Alberta walked out to her car, she was ambushed by the two women who claimed they were stranded and needed a ride to Clara’s sisters’ house. As they were driving, they got to a road that was deserted and no one around. Clara asked Alberta to stop the car and get out, so they could have a little chat about how she was sleeping with her husband.
Of course, as most women who are caught in this situation Alberta denied it repeatedly and acted all shocked and haughty in which Clara’s temper had reached a boiling point and so she started punching Alberta.
Alberta stunned, turned to run but she tripped and wasn’t fast enough as this was the moment that Clara brought down that hammer on Alberta over and over again. The final act before Alberta stopped moving was to maim her with a giant rock to the face which is how Clara got the nickname “Tiger Woman” as the injuries looked like Alberta had been mauled by a tiger.
Clara calmly asked Peggy to drive her home where she was drenched in Alberta’s blood and upon arriving at home, Clara confronted Armour telling him the truth that she had killed Alberta and this was his fault since they were having an affair. Hearing Clara’s confession and not wanting to be convicted as an accessory, Armour turned her into the police.
Clara was arrested on July 17th, 1922, and sentenced to a trial in which they tried everything from accusing Peggy of murder to a defense of insanity. Finally, on November 16, 1922, Clara was sentenced to 2nd-degree murder and handed a sentence of 10 years to life in which she only served 13 years and was released in 1935 where she remarried, moved to San Diego, and started a career as a dental assistant which was a trade she learned in prison.
Further Reading
Murderess on the Loose: The 1922 Hammer Wrath of Clara Phillips (A Historical True Crime Short) — R. Barri Flowers
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