Authors: Joe Urschel
The Year of Fear (12 page)
A few miles later, they stopped the car again. Kelly tossed ten bucks at Jarrett and kicked him out of the car.
“Have a nice walk home, sucker.”
The car sped off into the night.
As it did, there was news of joy and celebration on the radio. Wiley Post, still serving his parole, had landed safely, becoming the first solo pilot to fly around the world, setting a new speed record in the process.
Urschel had not gotten where he was in life by being inattentive or careless. He was, in fact, quite the opposite—a meticulous accountant who was obsessed with details, whether they be numbers on a page, contours of the land, the direction of the wind or the chemical content of the soil. In the cutthroat oil business, he was a shrewd survivor and dogged as a bloodhound.
So with his eyes blindfolded and lying in the back of the car, he began doing what he always did: he started collecting details. Before they’d jettisoned Jarrett, his kidnappers had been driving in an easterly direction. Before they taped his eyes shut, he could see the lights of a power plant near Harrah, Oklahoma, some twenty miles east of Oklahoma City. Now, though, they were driving in what clearly was a circuitous route designed to confuse him. They were heading south over backcountry roads that he knew well from his constant travels back and forth to the oil fields and country farms where he held leases. He knew if ever he were to catch these bastards—and he would catch them—he would need to lead a team back to the place of his hideout. To do that, he would need every clue he could collect.
He was blind, but his other senses were working overtime, and everything was being logged in his memory bank.
About an hour into the journey, Urschel recognized the distinctive smell of an oil field. It was either a small field or they were on the edge of a very large one because the odor was distinctive, but faint. Thirty minutes later, a similar scent returned. Again, either a small field or the edge of a very large one. In the middle of the night, the car stopped. Probably about 3:30 a.m., he calculated. He was pulled out of the car and into the brush, where he was forced to sit out of sight in the weeds. Chiggers attached themselves to his legs and arms and bugs feasted on his sweaty skin. The other abductor grabbed what he guessed was a gasoline can and headed off. He was back in about fifteen minutes, so they must have been just a short three- to five-minute walk to the gas station. They guided him back into the car and were off again.
During the drive, one of his abductors kept referring to the other as “Floyd.”
“Hey, Floyd, gimme a smoke.” Floyd this, Floyd that. Funny. They were obviously trying to make him believe he was being abducted by Oklahoma’s infamous Pretty Boy Floyd, as he was called by the newspapers. But the inferences were so painfully obvious that he concluded the one person who definitely was not in the driver’s seat was Pretty Boy Floyd.
An hour later, they stopped to open a gate. Two or three minutes later they stopped and opened another, and then drove into a building that had the sound and smell of what must have been a garage or barn. They transferred the license plates to another car and put him into the backseat, which had been made up into a makeshift bunk where he could mercifully stretch out after being covered up. The car was obviously a lot bigger than the cramped Chevy sedan they’d been driving in. Probably a seven-passenger Caddy or Buick.
After about three hours of driving, they stopped at a filling station and made small talk with the woman who was gassing up the tank.
They asked about the heat, and what it was doing to the crops.
“The crops around here are burned up,” she said. “Although we may make some broomcorn.”
Broomcorn? That caught Urschel’s attention. Not much of that being grown around here. Most farmers were using what precious little water there was to grow food they could eat to survive. But broomcorn was hardy, and the way the damn dust was billowing through every nook and cranny, a good broom was getting to be as essential as a pickax and hoe.
The abductors got back in the car and again drove off until the sun started rising. At no point, Urschel noted, had the car been driven on pavement. By midmorning, probably 9:00 or 10:00, it started to rain, much to the irritation of Urschel’s abductors, who managed to get the car stuck as the rain poured down, turning the parched earth into rivers of mud.
The junior partner was then commanded to get out and push, a situation Urschel might have found almost comical were he not so hungry, tired and disoriented. Having extricated the car, the complaining mud- and rain-soaked assistant jumped back in and the journey resumed.
Hours later, they pulled into a garage and turned off the engine.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Two-thirty,” was the reply. In Urschel’s world it was still pitch dark. He was desperately trying to keep track of time. He was left in the car in the stifling heat for hour after hour. At least, though, he was free to come out from under the covers, get out of the car and try to relax. He sat on a wooden box that sagged into what was unmistakably a couple of bags of golf clubs. What he would give to be strolling the fairways with his golf buddies, hacking balls into the rough and laughing about the sorry nature of their game. But that fantasy was a brief respite from his current state. The sun beat down on the garage and the temperature rose like a baking oven until it finally set in the late evening and the air cooled to a breathable level.
At that point, they led him out of the garage and he felt the cooler air, though still in the upper eighties, on his face. They took him through a narrow gate, down a boardwalk and into a house. As he walked, he counted his steps. In a bedroom, he was told there were two beds. They sat him down on one. It felt more like an iron cot. They stuffed his ears with cotton and covered them with adhesive tape, as well. Unmistakably, this was a farmhouse. He could hear barnyard animals in the distance and began mentally cataloging their number and nature. There were horses, cows and several dogs with barks of different pitches. There were quail—lots of them—chickens, roosters. The usual assortment; nothing special or distinctive. They gave him a ham sandwich and a cup of black coffee in a china cup with no saucer. It was the first thing he’d eaten since they left Oklahoma City.
The man who had been calling the shots on the kidnapping sat on the adjacent bed and delivered a colorful lecture.
“If we thought you would ever see anything here, or ever tell anything when you go back, we would kill you now. That really is the safest way, but if we take your word and release you after the ransom money is paid, and you betray us by giving the federals any information, we will choose our own methods of punishing you,” he said.
Urschel was listening intently through his muffled ears, aiming his blinded eyes at the sounds that were filtering through. It was an odd and measured voice. The man had the vocabulary of an educated man, tempered with a slight Southern accent. It was not like the forceful, ineloquent threat one would expect from the kind of lowlife who’d pluck a man from his backyard and haul him off into the night. The man then continued, his voice almost theatrical, and his language as grammatical as a Catholic prep-schooler.
“I think the best method of punishment is the Chinese bandit system. They take a victim, strip him of his clothes and place him face downward on a board floor in some old shack where numerous wharf rats are extremely hungry. A hole is bored in the floor immediately under the victim’s belly, the hungry rats begin nibbling through the hole in the floor, and slowly but surely eat the lining of the belly and pull out the intestines. The process takes days and the victim has time to repent his error.”
A very colorful rant. But a logical listener would conclude that no one fearing capture would go to those lengths, risking both the escape of his prey and relying on the unpredictable behavior of a bunch of small-brained rodents. Urschel fully understood his life was in danger, but he also realized the most likely way his days would end would be the result of a bullet in the head and a shallow grave in some nearby burned-out wheat field. In the end, what does it matter anyway? Dead is dead. He worried more about the fate of his wife and children, and there would be plenty of threats made to them, as well.
Urschel remained on the cot for the rest of the night, but never slept. One of his captors was always in the second bed. Occasionally, he could hear the muffled voices of another man and a woman in some adjoining room. His world remained black and sounded sunken.
The next day, the two men led him to a car, put him inside and drove slowly over a very rough road for about fifteen minutes to another house.
“All right, let’s unload,” said one. They took him inside and made him lie on a bunch of blankets in the corner. He could hear the sounds of another man and woman in a different room.
Later, they handcuffed him to a chair and he tried to sleep. In the morning he heard the sound of propellers overhead. A plane passing by, heading west. He remembered hearing one the previous afternoon, as well, heading in the opposite direction. This, too, went into his memory bank. The farm likely was in someone’s flight path. When the plane doubled back in the afternoon, the excited aviation buff knew he was on to something. If he could learn the approximate times of the flyovers, he would have an important clue to the location of the farm. But, not wanting to give away his intentions to his captors, he devised a bit of trickery to determine the times. He began counting off seconds and minutes in his head. When he thought sufficient time had passed, he innocently asked what time it was. To further cover his intentions, he would occasionally anticipate the arrival of the flyover and ask the time in advance and then begin counting off. It was a clever dodge that escaped the notice of his captors. Within a few days, he had the flights timed almost exactly. The morning plane crossed over the farm about 9:45. It returned in the afternoon at 5:45. On Sunday, it rained steadily. By late morning, Urschel realized the plane had not passed over. Nor did it come back in the afternoon. Of this he made a special note.
After the first day, Urschel’s abductors had turned the guard duties over to an old man referred to as “Boss” and some kid named “Potatoes” (Boss Shannon’s son). The two were decidedly less astute and threatening. He found he could chat them up and shrewdly acquire more and more details about his locale. He talked to Boss about their mutual interest in hunting and fishing, innocently picking up details about the local environment and asking questions about the number of hogs and whatnot on the farm.
He’d ask Potatoes to unshackle him for a couple minutes so he could walk around the shack, stretch his legs and get some exercise. After Potatoes would oblige, Urschel would pace off the floor, getting measurements, identifying objects and leaving his fingerprints in strategic places.
Before long, he had enough details that he could draw the shack and the farm in his mind and identify and enumerate every animal that populated it. There were two chicken coops out back, a well with nasty, mineral-tasting water out front with a pulley that squeaked with a distinctive sound. There were four cows, three hogs, two pigs, a bull and a mule. There were cardinals and scarlets chirping.
The rundown farm stretched out for about 500 acres.
He overheard the name of the postman and cataloged it.
He knew just about everything about the farm where he was being held, except that it was in Paradise, Texas, and it belonged to Machine Gun Kelly’s father-in-law.
* * *
Within minutes of receiving Berenice Urschel’s call, Hoover was on the phone to the special agent in charge of the Bureau’s field office in Oklahoma City, Ralph Colvin. Get to the Urschel home. Give her any assistance she needs and wants. But, most importantly, get control of the investigation.
The so-called Lindbergh Law had been passed by Congress less than a month earlier. It gave Hoover’s men the authority to chase kidnappers across state lines. The Bureau was the only law enforcement agency empowered to do so. Hoover and Cummings had fought hard to get that authority, and now they would employ it to its fullest. Hoover would not be sidelined as he had been by the New Jersey State Police in the Lindbergh kidnapping, which was still dragging on without any leads. Hoover and his men had been turned into laughingstocks by the New Jersey State Police, who scoffed at their meticulous, “scientific” investigation and the ridiculous leads they were following. The public, too, was becoming exacerbated with law enforcement’s inability to solve the case and stem the kidnapping scourge. If the Bureau could solve this case, Hoover would have a significant leg up on his rivals in his push for power and the creation of the country’s national police force. The hotline that Hoover had established was a stroke of genius. When Berenice called it within minutes of her husband’s abduction, it gave the Bureau a head start on the investigation and the chance to get in on the ground floor, before local law enforcement could start gathering and hoarding evidence. This would not be a repeat of the Lindbergh kidnapping, during which rivals at the local level neutralized the Bureau’s efforts to take over the case. Hoover’s men immediately went to work on getting control of the investigation and lining themselves up for the credit when—and if—the case was ultimately solved.
Colvin met Oklahoma Police Chief John Watts and Sheriff Stanley Rogers at the Urschel home and explained the situation to them. The three well-acquainted colleagues resolved the issue without acrimony. Hoover’s men would lead the investigation and take charge of the case. Their problem would not be internal cooperation, it would be external. The national press would soon have hold of the latest chapter in America’s gangster chronicles, and they would exploit it to the fullest.
Oklahoma City’s police department was crawling with reporters even on a Saturday at midnight—especially on a Saturday at midnight. The city had two daily newspapers at the time, and both competed mightily for any nugget of news to sell the street editions that were routinely published throughout the day. The nearby cities of Tulsa and Norman and the neighboring counties had rags of their own all trolling for news, as well. Nothing sold a street edition like crime news, and Saturday night was when crime happened.