Authors: Joe Urschel
The Year of Fear (15 page)
The crank calls and phony tips kept coming in, but Jones advised Berenice to keep dealing with each in the same manner she had in the past. So, fighting her instincts to lash out at the con men and criminals who were trying to exploit her situation and further burden her with what she now knew were empty threats and criminal schemes, she kept up a good front.
Jones was still worried about details leaking out. There were now reporters from all over the world poking around the city trying to turn up any lead. The circle of people with details of the kidnapping was tight and small, but it was growing. Arthur Seeligson was racing around to local banks trying to come up with enough used $20 bills to make the ransom. Collecting ten thousand $20 bills? That would certainly arouse suspicion. Kirkpatrick would be buying train tickets and leaving town. If reporters were tailing him, they’d certainly wonder why. One errant phone call on a party line and god knows what kind of headlines might be made.
Jones suggested a ruse to Berenice. Call a press conference. Tell the gentlemen of the press that you fear their presence in the neighborhood is making it difficult for the kidnappers to make contact. Ask them to please leave. They might actually cooperate, but even if they don’t it will make a story and send a message to the kidnappers.
Seeligson called a press conference and delivered the request. He told the reporters that the family feared that the kidnappers would make no contact as long as there was so much activity around the house.
“We believe,” he said, “that no contact will be attempted through any medium as long as it is known the house is under observation.
“We are not attempting to suppress anything. Our whole desire in asking the removal of the press being to hasten the safe return of Mr. Urschel. Our cooperation with police, the sheriff’s office and the government forces has been such that we hope to have the same cooperation with the press.”
He told the reporters he believed the kidnappers would lie low for at least a week before attempting to contact them. “We have no basis, as nothing has been received, for believing we will not hear something before then, but everyone now is resigned to waiting several more days.”
He said it was his belief that having anyone around the house except members of the family would not “suit the convenience” of the kidnappers. That, he said, “was one of the driving motives in our request that the press as well as representatives of law enforcement agencies be withdrawn.”
It worked. The press horde began to disassemble almost immediately. Some, who had been stationed in tents with telephone hookups, established, packed up and moved out. A radio reporter offered the use of his station in the event Mrs. Urschel wanted to send a broadcast message out seeking contact from the kidnappers and asking that her husband not be harmed.
And, as Jones predicted, it gave everybody something to write about that the kidnappers would be certain to read. The press conference was the lead story in the next day’s
Daily Oklahoman
under the headline:
WAY CLEARED AS KIDNAPERS STAY IN DARK
Oklahoman Staff Quits Watch over Mansion to Aid Urschels
Next, Jones wanted to know if Kirkpatrick was up for the job of delivering the ransom.
“Put me in any group of eight people,” said Kirkpatrick, “and I will give you odds that seven of them will be braver than I. But these ransom notes were addressed to me and that makes it a personal affair between them and me. I’ve got to be the man who delivers the money. If anybody else did it and got hurt, I’d never forgive myself.”
Kirkpatrick was putting on a brave front. In fact, the prospects terrified him. He was well aware that traveling to Kansas City meant that he’d be walking into the gang capital of the Midwest and that whoever he would be giving the money to would have not only Johnny Lazia’s permission, but also his protection. If Lazia knew that some unarmed out-of-towner was walking into Kansas City with $200,000 cash, other people would know, as well. Would some rival try to steal the cash before he could make the delivery? Life was cheap in Kansas City. The going price for a murder-for-hire was less than $500. Even if he successfully made the drop, the safest thing for Charley’s kidnapper to do would be to hire someone to bump him off later. Eliminating eyewitnesses was a common practice in the underworld.
He resigned himself to the fact that he most likely would never return from Kansas City. He wrote a good-bye letter to his wife with instructions to deliver it to her if he hadn’t returned by Tuesday.
With the members of the press decamped, the Urschel neighborhood was eerily silent as darkness fell on Saturday night. Kirkpatrick, the Seeligsons and a deputy sheriff armed with shotguns hid in the bushes and shrubs in the mansion’s backyard along the driveway. From an upstairs bedroom window, Berenice peered down at the scene below, awaiting delivery of $200,000 ($3.6 million in contemporary value) in used $20 bills from the First National Bank of Oklahoma City. It was a staggering amount of money. More cash than even a woman of her means had ever seen collected in one place. Arthur Seeligson had gone to herculean efforts to raise it and catalog it. It was now being transported secretly across town by bank employees without the benefit of a police escort or any real protection. If the car was hijacked or the money stolen along the way, it was doubtful she’d be able to secure an equal amount in time to save her husband’s life. No one had ever agreed to pay so high a ransom, and she knew Charley would be embarrassed that she had.
She nervously scanned the street behind the house, and when the designated car surreptitiously appeared, she flashed a light indicating it was safe to proceed. The car pulled into the drive and a banker from the car stepped out, walked toward the shrubs, handed the bag to Kirkpatrick, turned and left.
Kirk brought it inside and opened it for Berenice. After checking the contents and double counting the amount, Kirkpatrick took it and a second bag with cut-up newspapers in the same shape and weight as the money bag to the Oklahoma City train station. There he was joined by Catlett, and the two walked to their reserved seats in the observation car of the Katy Limited due to depart for Kansas City at 10:10 p.m. But already there was a complication in the plans. Two extra cars had been added to the train to accommodate tourists bound for the World’s Fair in Chicago. The Chicago-bound passengers would have to change trains in Kansas City. Because the train was traveling at night and there was nothing to see anyway, the railroad men had added the extra cars behind the observation car, which normally would be the last car.
As an expensive diversion to the wearying Depression, the World’s Fair in Chicago was proving to be a remarkable success. Attendees were flocking there from all over the country and the world. With the theme “A Century of Progress,” it celebrated the city’s astonishing growth and accomplishments from the time it was incorporated as a village in 1833 with a population of fewer than 400 people to its status in 1933 as the fourth-largest city in the world, eclipsed only by New York, London and Tokyo. It was the transportation center of the nation, with the world’s largest rail hub and shipping access to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. It was the most technologically advanced city in the nation and a gleaming example of the beauty of modern architecture. But it was also famous for its colorful gangsters, wild nightlife and criminality of all degrees. That, too, was attracting throngs to the fair.
Kirkpatrick and Catlett moved anxiously to the end of the train and outside, onto the cramped exposed vestibule of the last car, hoping to use it as a substitute and also hoping that the spotters would see them there and not think something fishy was going on.
“Do you think this will foul up their plan, Kirk?”
“I wish I knew,” he replied, explaining that he planned to stay outside, under the signal light, so he could be seen by the kidnappers or their lookouts and try to spot the fire as the train rolled on.
When the train left the station, a porter came back and said no one was allowed to ride outside.
“My friend and I just want to do a bit of quiet, social drinking,” Kirkpatrick responded, slipping a few dollar bills into the porter’s palm. “Think you can forget we’re out here?”
“Sure can,” he said, heading back into the car. A short time later he brought two stools for them to sit on. The two sat, talking, chain-smoking and staring off the right side of the train, checking for the signal fire.
When they approached a town or a station, Catlett would slip inside the car to be out of sight and Kirkpatrick would stand under the light, cigarette ablaze, hoping to make himself visible to anyone who might be checking for his presence.
They passed through the little burgs of Arcadia, Luther, Fallis, Carney and Tryon and into the lands where Tom Slick made his first fortune: the Cushing oil fields. Kirkpatrick, a former newspaper reporter and student of history, reflected on his good fortune in joining up with the great Tom Slick, even though it had led him to this dreadful predicament, in which he was convinced he would soon meet his death by assassination.
As they crossed the Cimarron River, Kirk pondered the ironic circumstance he found himself in, entering the territory of the notorious Western outlaws of the recent past.
The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, the M-K-T (later shortened in the popular vernacular to “Katy,” after its stock symbol,
K
-
T
), was the first to penetrate into Texas after the Civil War and now stretched from Houston to Kansas City and St. Louis. The Katy was a popular target for train-robbing outlaws Jesse James, the Daltons and the Al Spencer gang.
Kirkpatrick considered the legendary train robbers respectable professionals—“gentlemanly miscreants,” he called them. Nothing like the loathsome scum in the current-day Snatch Racket.
Under the clear night sky alive with a thousand stars, Kirkpatrick and Catlett passed the time making small talk about hunting and fishing. Catlett was a crack shot with a hunting rifle. He was one of the Urschel team that knew his way around tough situations—and how a quickly drawn sidearm and a well-placed round could get you out of them. Kirkpatrick was glad to have him around; he added immensely to his comfort level. Something of the poet, Kirkpatrick mused about the Indian burial grounds the train was cutting through and how they were once punctuated with tribal signal fires, hoping he’d see his own critical signal fire light up the night. But it never did.
As they headed into the Osage Hills—current-day gangland hideout territory—their hopes were raised. Surely this was the most likely spot for the kidnappers to signal the train. But as they passed through Bartellesville, Dewey and Coffeyville there was nothing.
The sun began to rise and Kirk began to believe they’d been played. The grimy soot from the engine exhaust was caking on his face and the dust clung to his suit. He was well into his third pack of cigarettes and god knows how much coffee. He was tired and panicky. If they’d lied to them here, would they do it again? Would he be snatched along with the ransom and held by the kidnappers as protection against any lawmen who might be in pursuit?
The train was approaching Union Station in Kansas City, where just a month earlier, four lawmen and their prisoner, Frank Nash, had died in a fusillade of machine-gun fire.
Were he and Catlett walking into a similar trap?
They disembarked and headed warily across the platform, through the great hall and waiting room and out onto the plaza, virtually the same path taken by the federal agents as they marched Nash to the car in which he would die.
But today would go without incident. They grabbed a cab to the Muehlebach Hotel, a beautiful, twelve-story luxury spot favored by presidents dating back to Teddy Roosevelt. Babe Ruth had been a recent guest, as had most of the notorious gangsters and playboys of the ’20s, who flocked to the city to enjoy the burgeoning jazz and blues clubs, along with the more scandalous delights the city offered. Kirkpatrick registered under the assigned alias of E. E. Kincaid, as instructed. Catlett registered in another room, but joined Kirkpatrick in his suite. The two played cards to pass the time as they awaited further instructions.
Shortly after 10:00 a.m., Kirkpatrick’s phone rang and a bellman announced the arrival of a telegram. He would bring it right up.
It was from Tulsa, addressed to E. E. Kincaid. It read:
UNAVOIDABLE INCIDENT KEPT ME FROM SEE YOU LAST NIGHT. WILL COMMUNICATE ABOUT 6:00 O’CLOCK.
E. W. MOORE
The two repaired to the lobby café for breakfast, coffee and more cigarettes. They hadn’t slept all night, and when Kirkpatrick returned to his room, he still couldn’t. He lay in bed and worried about Charley’s fate. He worried about his own fate. He wondered whether it had been a bad idea to bring Catlett along. The man had kept him reasonably sane and calm, but had he spooked the kidnappers? How was Berenice holding up? His mind raced as Sunday morning church bells rang out and the classical strains of Schubert and Mendelssohn wafted through the halls from the Muehlebach’s pianist playing in the lobby.
At 5:45 p.m., he picked up the ringing phone.
“Who’s talking?” demanded the voice on the other end.
“Kincaid.”
“This is Moore. Did you get my wire?”
“Yes.”
“Well, are you ready to close the deal?”
“I should be, if I knew that I was dealing with the right parties.”
“You ought to know by now,” came the reply. “Listen now, follow these instructions. Take a Yellow Cab, drive to the LaSalle Hotel, get out, take the suitcase in your right hand and start walking west.”
Catlett was standing across from him, gesturing and silently mouthing a request to ask if he could come along.
“I have a friend who came up here with me. May I bring him along?”