Public Enemies (14 page)

The bridge game was winding down when suddenly there was a noise in the darkness outside. Urschel turned in his chair. “It’s me, Betty,” came a voice. Jarrett rose and unlatched the screen door. In walked sixteen-year-old Betty Slick, Mrs. Urschel’s daughter. Betty, who had been visiting friends, said a few words and disappeared upstairs.

Mrs. Jarrett glanced at her watch. “It’s almost eleven-thirty,” she said. “Time we were going home, Walter.”

Jarrett pushed his chair back. “I suppose so,” he said.

“No, wait,” Berenice said, placing her hand on Jarrett’s wrist. “One more rubber.”
¹⁴

The first floor of the Urschel mansion was aglow with yellow light when the big Chevrolet coasted to a stop beside the house about eleven-thirty. The driver, Albert Bates, a pug-faced jack-of-all-crimes with a foot-long rap sheet, gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles whitened. The stout, handsome man sitting beside him noticed. “Okay, Al, calm down,” he said. “It’s gonna be a piece of cake.”

The handsome man, who wore a snap-brim Panama hat, was five-feet-nine, about 180 pounds, with a fraternity man’s fleshy apple cheeks, bedroom eyes, and a Thompson submachine gun. He and Bates stepped from the car. The night was still, the expensive neighborhood quiet.

“Okay,” said the handsome man. They walked up the driveway toward a vine-covered garage. Ahead, on the sunporch behind the house, they could see the two couples at the card table. As they peered through the darkness, Bates couldn’t tell who was who. “Jesus!” he whispered. “Which one’s Urschel?”

The handsome man couldn’t tell, either.

“Come on,” he said, and walked toward the porch.
¹⁵

 

 

Berenice Urschel drew the card from her hand, lifted it gingerly above the table, then stopped. Her brow furrowed.

“What is it?” Urschel asked.

“I thought I heard something,” she said. “Someone moved outside.”

Urschel considered the screen door, then peered into the darkness beyond. They’d all heard the car drive up; probably just the neighbors, they decided. They finished the hand, dealt another, and began to bid. Berenice had just uttered the words “two hearts,” when the screen door opened. Everyone turned. Two men stepped inside, both holding guns. Berenice let out a little yell and threw up her hands.

“Stop that! Keep quiet or we’ll blow your heads off,” said the handsome man. “Now which one’s Urschel?” When no one answered, he repeated the question. Still no one spoke. The hint of a smile crossed the man’s face. “All right,” he said, “we’ll take both of you then.” He pointed his submachine gun at the two men.

Urschel and Jarrett slowly rose. “Hurry,” the handsome man said. The two complied, stepping outside. The gunman lingered at the door. “Don’t move now,” he told the women. “And keep away from that phone.”

A minute later Berenice heard a car start and drive away. Both women sprang to their feet. “Hurry!” Berenice said. “Up the stairs!” They ran up the staircase, locking the bedroom door at the top behind them. Berenice grabbed the first telephone she saw, dialed the police, and told them what had happened. Then she remembered an article on kidnapping in a recent issue of
Time
magazine. She and her husband had discussed it just that afternoon. It was on her dressing table. She flipped to the article and dialed the hotline number it mentioned.

A woman’s voice came on the line.

“National 7-1-1-7,” she said.

“I need to report a kidnapping!” Berenice said.

A few moments later a man’s voice came on the line.

“National 7-1-1-7,” he said.

“This is Mrs. Charles F. Urschel in Oklahoma City. I wish to report a kidnapping.”

“This is J. Edgar Hoover, Mrs. Urschel,” Hoover said. “Give me every detail you can.”
¹⁶

 

“I couldn’t get a look at their features, but they both seemed dark and had full round faces,” Berenice Urschel was saying. “They appeared to be foreigners.”

It was 1:00 A.M., ninety minutes after her husband’s abduction, and Mrs. Urschel was back at her bridge table, reciting every detail she could remember for the Oklahoma City SAC, Ralph Colvin.

“I want you to be assured,” Colvin intoned, “that our first thought will be your husband’s safe return. Every highway within a hundred miles of Oklahoma City will be watched.” What they needed now, Colvin continued, was for her and Mrs. Jarrett to come to police headquarters to look at mug shots. “I’ll go at once,” Mrs. Urschel said, standing. “Wait until I get my coat.”

The phone rang. She reached for it. Colvin stopped her. “Is there an extension?” he asked.

“Yes, in the hall.”

It was Walter Jarrett, calling from police headquarters. He had been released outside of the city after the kidnappers searched his wallet and found he wasn’t Urschel. “They took Charlie,” he said. “He’s not hurt. They say they’ll get in touch with you. I found a pickup and rushed to police headquarters.”

Downtown, Mrs. Urschel and the Jarretts sorted through mug books; a few photos looked vaguely familiar. Footprints outside the sunporch were inconsequential. There were no fingerprints on the screen door. By daylight Jarrett and a group of FBI agents managed to retrace the kidnappers’ route northeast out of the city about ten miles, but there the trail was lost. “This kidnapping has the look of a job carefully planned by highly trained professionals,” Colvin told Mrs. Urschel. “They are not local men or they would’ve known your husband by sight. It should reassure you to know that they are professionals, because there’s less chance of your husband being harmed.”

After daylight Hoover telephoned Kansas City and ordered Gus Jones to Oklahoma City to take charge of the case. Colvin met him at the airport. On the drive to the mansion, they discussed possible suspects. Colvin was already suspicious of Walter Jarrett and one or two of Urschel’s employees. If it wasn’t an inside job, they agreed, their best suspects were probably Harvey Bailey and the gang of escapees who had fled the Kansas pen that May.

At the mansion, Jones gave Mrs. Urschel a fatherly lecture on what to expect. They would wait for the kidnappers to contact them. They would deliver the ransom. Her husband would be returned. “The moment Mr. Urschel is released,” Jones said, “we go to work.”

 

 

It was the FBI’s good fortune that Charles Urschel had been kidnapped by the man who was probably the most inept of Depression-era criminals, the handsome George F. Barnes, better known as Machine Gun Kelly. Seventy years after the crime that made him famous, the most impressive thing about Kelly remains his nickname. He was never the menacing figure his moniker suggests. He was glib, a dreamer and a joker, the kind of man who said things like “Working hard or hardly working?” It’s unlikely he would have risen to prominence if not for his wife, Kathryn, a sly blonde whom J. Edgar Hoover would repeatedly demonize in press accounts.

Though his talents were few, Kelly’s career trajectory was unique; he was the only major criminal of 1933-34 who came from an upper-middle-class background and had attended college. Born in Chicago in 1900, Kelly moved with his family to Memphis when he was two. His father was a successful insurance agent. Kelly grew up in an affluent neighborhood, attended Sacred Heart Catholic Church, and earned money throwing a paper route and caddying. At Central High School he was called a “jellybean”—a sharp dresser and skirt-chaser, who enjoyed throwing around money.

When his mother died and his father took up with another woman, Kelly began getting into trouble. After dropping out of high school, he became a bootlegger, reselling shipments of whiskey he bought in Missouri and Kentucky. He made a stab at college, a single semester at Mississippi A&M, but dropped out; his father disowned him. An ambitious young man who longed for finer things, Kelly soon eloped with Geneva Ramsey, a Memphis millionaire’s daughter. He went to work for his father-in-law’s construction company and fathered two, but his life began to crumble after Geneva’s father was killed in an accident.

His mother-in-law bought him a parking garage and a dairy farm to run, but Kelly preferred bootlegging. In 1924, when he was twenty-four, he was arrested, and the judge sentenced him to six months in a work camp. Geneva left him. Despondent, he attempted suicide, swallowing a bottle of bichloride of mercury, but succeeded only in making himself sick. Rather than face jail, Kelly fled to Kansas City, where he soon embezzled enough money as a supermarket clerk to buy a truck.

He used it to transport whiskey as far afield as New Mexico, where he was briefly imprisoned in 1927. When he was arrested selling liquor on an Indian reservation, a federal judge threw the book at him, sentencing him to five years in Leavenworth. It was in prison that Kelly fell in with a group of St. Paul yeggs, at one point lending help on an escape attempt orchestrated by Frank Nash. After his 1930 parole, he headed for Minnesota, where he was quickly accepted at the Green Lantern tavern and began tagging along on bank jobs.

That September, Kelly married Kathryn Thorne, an Oklahoma-born party girl whose second husband—Kelly was her third—died under mysterious circumstances. Kathryn was a haughty self-indulgent alcoholic whose daughter was being raised by Kathryn’s mother. Of all the women the FBI pursued in 1933 and 1934, she was to gall Hoover like no other. “Kathryn Thorne Kelly was one of the most coldly deliberate criminals of my experience,” Hoover wrote in his 1936 book,
Persons in Hiding.
To Hoover, Kathryn was Kelly’s Svengali, “man-crazy,” “clothes-crazy,” a “cunning, shrewd criminal-actress” who created, marketed, and dominated her husband. “If ever there was a henpecked husband,” Hoover wrote, “it was George [Machine Gun] Kelly.”
¹

As compelling as this portrait sounds, there is no evidence in FBI files that Kathryn was anything more than her husband’s knowing accomplice. She could do little to improve his criminal skills. Kelly was a lousy bank robber, so nervous he sometimes vomited before bank jobs, and was eventually shunned by Harvey Bailey, Verne Miller, and other St. Paul yeggs. He was no better at kidnapping. In January 1932, Kelly and a partner kidnapped an Indiana businessman named Howard Woolverton; Kathryn had picked his name out of a phone book. Kelly was forced to release Woolverton when his family was unable to raise the ransom.

Between forays to Chicago and St. Paul in search of partners, Kelly lived at Kathryn’s home on East Mulkey Street in Fort Worth, Texas, where the couple quickly attracted the attention of police. The good-natured Kelly befriended a cop or two, at one point even helping police apprehend a neighborhood burglar. But he longed to be a bank robber. According to Hoover, Kathryn acted as a kind of press agent for her husband, boasting of Kelly’s exploits in an effort to get him work. This may have been true; Kathryn did like to brag about Kelly, especially when she drank. Eventually Kelly hooked up with the Jazz Age yegg Eddie Bentz, and with Bentz and a crook named Albert Bates robbed banks in Washington, Texas, and Mississippi during 1932.

In time Kathryn’s boasting caught the ear of a canny Fort Worth detective named Ed Weatherford, who led Kathryn to believe he was corrupt. When Verne Miller was identified in the massacre case in July 1933, Weatherford recognized the name as one of the bank men Kathryn bragged of knowing. He contacted the FBI. The Dallas SAC, Frank Blake, passed the tip to Kansas City, the first time Kelly came to the Bureau’s attention.
^o
“[Fort Worth] tells me that Kelly is most proficient with a machine gun,” Blake wrote, “it being said he can write his name with the bullets discharged from such a gun.”
²

Overnight, Kelly became a suspect in the massacre case; in Kansas City, agents wrote Leavenworth asking for his record. Blake, meanwhile, drove to Fort Worth one afternoon and watched the East Mulkey Street house for several hours, jotting down the license number of a Cadillac in the driveway. On July 13, Agent Charles Winstead was sent to reconnoiter a scraggly ranch outside Paradise, Texas, north of Fort Worth, where Kathryn’s mother lived with a cantankerous old rancher named Robert “Boss” Shannon.Winstead found it, arranged with the postmaster for a cover on incoming mail, and returned to Dallas.
³
With nothing linking Kelly to the massacre case, the FBI lost interest.

 

 

It was to the Shannon Ranch that the Kellys brought the blindfolded Charles Urschel nine days later. In return for a cut of the ransom money, Boss Shannon and his son Armon agreed to watch Urschel while Kelly handled ransom negotiations. Kathryn, meanwhile, took her daughter Pauline to Fort Worth. That Sunday morning, July 23, she invited Ed Weatherford to her house; if anyone was watching them, Kathryn suspected, he would warn her. Weatherford found Kathryn on her front steps in a chatty mood; she said she was just back from St. Louis.

It was a short talk. Walking down the driveway, Weatherford glanced at Kathryn’s car. He noticed an Oklahoma paper on the front seat, the headlines blaring the Urschel kidnapping, and red dirt caked on the wheels. Oklahoma was red-dirt country, Weatherford reflected as he drove off. Back at his home, Weatherford studied the
Fort Worth Star Telegram
’s stories on the Urschel kidnapping. The more he read, the more convinced he became that the Kellys were behind it. The next morning he again telephoned the FBI office in Dallas, which passed the tip to Gus Jones in Oklahoma City.
⁴
Jones ignored it.

That Sunday, as Gus Jones assumed command at the Urschel home in Oklahoma City, a man named Henry Nye took a walk near his farm outside of Dexter, Iowa, a town twenty miles west of Des Moines. Walking down a country lane, he approached an open field where ten years earlier there had been an amusement park called Dexfield Park. These days the twenty-acre field, bordered by tall maples, heavy underbrush, and a coil of the Middle Raccoon River, functioned mostly as a lovers’ lane. Through the trees, Nye spotted a 1933 Ford. There were people beside it. At first he thought they were campers. Then he spotted a shirt thrown on the ground. It was caked in what appeared to be blood. Nye hurried to his house and telephoned the town night watchman.