The Year of Fear (26 page)

At about 3:00 a.m. Rorer boarded a flight from Birmingham to Memphis. When it landed at 5:30 a.m., he was met at the airport by the Bureau’s local agent and a squad of local police he had rounded up. They immediately headed off to East Raynor Street.

It was a smaller force than Rorer would have wanted to be going after the crazed machine gunner who’d been identified as the shooter in the Kansas City Massacre and had been accused of gunning down a Chicago cop during a botched bank robbery. There was nothing to suggest that Kelly would allow himself to be taken alive. For the last six weeks, Hoover’s men had chased the Kellys over twenty-thousand miles as they crisscrossed the nation’s midsection. More than sixty agents and hundreds of police officers had been involved. Phones had been tapped, telegrams had been intercepted, yet every time the Bureau had them in their sights, they managed to slip away. Was it about to happen again? Did Kelly have an inside informant at the Memphis cop shop? Rorer did not know what to expect. Would he be walking into an empty house or a murderous trap set by “an expert machine gunner”?

At the house, George, after a day and night of heavy drinking, was having a hard time sleeping. He awoke early and wandered out to the front yard to pick up the newspaper to catch up on the latest mythology that was being created about him by the feds and their willing accomplices in the press. On his way back in the house, he neglected to relock the doors.

The street of small, neat homes was quiet when Rorer and his men arrived. Rorer, in completely unfamiliar territory and with a squad of personnel he didn’t really know, sent the Memphis cops around the back to get the place surrounded. He and Memphis detective William Raney drew their guns and gingerly opened the screen door at the front of the house. Once inside, they quietly navigated the cluttered living room, which was strewn with empty liquor bottles and cigarette butts.

To one side of the living room was a bedroom with two men passed out on the bed in their underwear. It was Tichenor and his brother-in-law, T. A. Travis. Rorer motioned for one of his fellow agents to cover the room.

Rorer and Raney hustled into the hallway and opened a second door into another bedroom, where the comely Kathryn was asleep on the bed in some green silk pajamas.

Still, no Kelly. No machine guns.

As they turned to make their way back to the front of the house, they encountered the groggy Kelly in only his underwear, a .45 limply dangling at his side as he rubbed his dyed yellow hair with his free hand.

Raney raised his sawed-off shotgun and aimed it at Kelly’s belly.

“Drop the gun!”

Kelly smiled. “I’ve been waiting all night for you.”

“Here we are,” said Raney, gun trained.

As the other officers of the law poured in, Kathryn emerged. Before they could cuff her, though, she threw a fit, insisting she needed to put on something decent and get herself ready for the trip downtown. Raney gave her fifteen minutes.

With a half-dozen guns trained on her and her husband, she walked over to him and draped her arms around his neck. “Honey, I guess it’s all up for us. The G-men won’t ever give us a break.”

While the lawmen milled around like a collection of aggravated husbands waiting for their primping wives, Kathryn finally emerged, resplendent in a skinny black dress with bright buttons and furry epaulets. She complained that her best clothing was still on its way from Texas, along with her beloved Pekinese pups. She looked at one of the lawmen as if he were a personal servant and asked him to please make sure these things were taken care of in case she was not back on the premises when they arrived.

9

THE KELLYS’ TRIAL

After the Kellys were hauled off to the jail downtown, the International News Service sent the following alert to the nation:

George “Machine Gun” Kelly, America’s no. 1 desperado, sought for a series of abductions, bank holdups and massacres that have terrorized the nation, fell into the clutches of the law today.

The man who sent the organized forces of law of the 48 states and the federal government on the greatest manhunt in history, taunting his pursuers with scornful, threatening letters, surrendered meekly to Department of Justice agents who trapped him in a Memphis hideout.

While locked up in Memphis, George was reacquainted with the cops who’d arrested him in high school and throughout his early bootlegging career. They all came by to say hello to their new celebrity prisoner and to reminisce about old times, astonished that George Barnes, the high school bootlegger, had grown up to become the notorious Machine Gun Kelly.

Before long, throngs of Memphis denizens were swinging by the county jail to get a glimpse of the famous local outlaw who’d just been arrested by the hometown cops.

As the crowds swelled outside the jail by the hundreds, police officers had to leave the jail to direct traffic. Kelly quipped to his jailers that they ought to set up a barbecue stand outside and make some side money.

While Kelly was busy yukking it up with his jailers, Kathryn was busily trying to save her own skin, repeating her claim that she had nothing to do with the kidnapping and that Kelly had forced her and her family to help him under threat of death.

“I was going back [to Oklahoma City] tomorrow to give myself up. Kelly told me he would kill me if I did, but I was going anyway,” she claimed.

“I feel responsible, not for the kidnapping, because I’m absolutely innocent of any part in that, but it’s all my fault that my parents are in this because I married him in the first place. I’m glad of one thing though—that we’re both arrested, for I’m not guilty and can prove it. Afterward I’ll be rid of him and that bunch. I don’t want to say anything about that guy Kelly, but he got me into this terrible mess and I don’t want to have anything more to do with him.”

She also offered a bribe of $15,000 to one of her jailers to arrange her escape. He wisely declined.

*   *   *

The chatty Geraldine Arnold had told the Bureau’s agents where Kelly had hidden his loot. On September 27, the day after Kelly’s arrest, Gus Jones, Ralph Colvin, Frank Blake, Charles Winstead and a posse of county deputies drove down to Cass Coleman’s farm to collect it.

They arrived around midnight, and Jones did not like the looks of what he found. The farmhouse was lit up and appeared to be a hubbub of activity. A large number of cars were parked outside.

Jones had the group surround the farmhouse as he grabbed his machine gun and approached the house. Meeting up with Coleman, Jones asked what the hell was going on. Coleman explained that his daughter was inside about to deliver a baby.
Well isn’t that swell
, thought Jones. But he had a different assignment for the new grandfather.

“Cass, we have come for that money. Lead us to it.” When Coleman started to protest, Jones cut him off.

“No explanations, no excuses. Take us directly to that money. And bring something to dig with.”

Coleman walked the group through the cotton field to a small mesquite tree, stopped and looked back at Jones, who lowered his machine gun, pointing it at Coleman’s midsection.

“Where is the money?” he demanded. Coleman walked off five paces and pointed down.

“Right here,” he said.

“Dig,” said Jones.

After ten minutes of chopping through the hardened earth, the sweating Coleman hit the thermos and molasses jar that contained the loot.

The agents spent the next hour counting and labeling it. When they were finished, it totaled $72,240 in marked bills from the ransom, and another ten that had been inexplicably thrown in, bringing the sum to a neat $72,250.00.

They packed up the money and walked Coleman back to the house, where the arrival of his grandchild was being celebrated. They led him to the car and Winstead hauled him off to the county jail. Jones, Blake and Colvin drove off to Dallas where they had a quick breakfast before proceeding on to Oklahoma City. By the time they got there, they had driven nearly one thousand miles in twenty-four hours in the service of the Bureau and its mission to bring Urschel’s kidnappers to justice.

*   *   *

Later that day, the Associated Press moved a story that sent Hoover through the roof.

Memphis, Tenn., Sept. 27 (A.P.) George Kelly, reputed machine gunner for the underworld of the Western bad lands, tonight confessed, officers said, to a part in the kidnapping of Charles F. Urschel, Oklahoma oil millionaire, and named Albert Bates as the actual accomplice.

“You got me right on the Urschel kidnapping,” Kelly was quoted by W. A. Rorer, Department of Justice agent as saying tonight.

Kelly admitted the kidnapping, Rorer said, “but not the Chicago robbery or the Kansas City union station job.”

“Kelly made no formal confession but he told the Department of Justice agents that he and Bates were the ones who did the actual kidnapping and that they took Urschel to Paradise, Texas and returned to Oklahoma City to collect the ransom,” a source close to the Department of Justice agents said.…

Kelly’s alleged statement on the Chicago robbery referred to the holdup of Federal Reserve bank messengers and the slaying of a policeman on the night of September 21. His reference to the “Kansas City Union Station job” was to the machine-gun slaying of four officers and Frank Nash, notorious criminal whom the officers had in custody.

Police forces linked Kelly’s name with both slayings.

John M. Keith, federal agent from Chicago, confirmed the confession as reported by Rorer and by implication connected Kelly with the Chicago holdup.

The story went on in great detail about Ramsey’s confession as to what he had done and where he had gone, whom he had talked to and what was said. He told of how he had transported young Geraldine to the Coleman farm and that he had sent her back to her parents on a train to Oklahoma City. It was later, the story said, that “the little girl tipped officers as to the whereabouts of the Kellys.”

Hoover was shocked, first of all, because he was reading news of the most important case of his career in the press before he was hearing it from his agents themselves. Agents were under strict orders to call in daily with their whereabouts and information about how the case was proceeding. Secondly, they were not to share information with the press without clearing it through Washington first. Now he was reading about his agents’ work in wire reports and seeing his agents quoted by name giving critical information that needed to be kept secret for use at trial and to protect the identity of government witnesses. But the information was leaking out at flood-stage levels. Now one of his agents had publicly identified a twelve-year-old government witness. What was her life now worth? And would she stay alive long enough to even make it to trial to testify? And how willing would any witness be to help government investigators if their identities would be revealed so carelessly by the very agents who had sworn to protect them?

Hoover assigned one of his minions to call Chicago agent Keith to express the director’s displeasure and read him verbatim the lines from the Washington papers that Hoover found most upsetting.

The chastised Keith could only say that he’d been misquoted. He said the courthouse was “absolutely surrounded by newspapermen from all over the country” and that every time he went near the jail or the courthouse he was “mobbed by dozens of newspapermen.” He said they asked if Kelly had confessed, and he said no. He told them Kathryn had made no statement. They told him that the Associated Press moved a story that Ramsey had gone to Texas, and he did not mention the money, but stated he had gone for some furs. Keith said the story in the papers sounded suspiciously like a telegram he had sent to the division. Obviously, somebody in the press had gotten hold of it.

Why hadn’t he sent the telegram using the Bureau’s code as instructed? Keith confessed that the Memphis office did not have a codebook and he hadn’t brought his with him.

Hoover had a codebook rushed to Memphis. The Kellys would soon have to be transported to Oklahoma City, and any information about those plans would need to be kept secret lest the nation be subjected to a repeat of the Kansas City debacle, when loose-lipped agents boasted to the press about their high-profile prisoner and their travel details had been revealed.

Rorer told Hoover that it would be impossible to get their prisoners out of the jail without the reporters finding it out, since there were scores of them around the jail day and night. Rorer wanted to meet with the editors of the local papers and wire services and give them some kind of ultimatum that all information about the removal of the prisoners be withheld until they got them to Oklahoma. Hoover was now convinced he’d get no more cooperation from the press, that there was no way they could effectively keep a lid on this story any longer. He told the agents in Memphis to have planes ready to go at a moment’s notice and to keep throwing up smoke screens in front of the press.

Meanwhile, the President himself was leaning on the Secretary of War to see if military planes could be used to get the Kellys out of Memphis.

As their exit plans were being arranged, the Kellys started talking. Kathryn pressed her case that she was not involved in the kidnapping and that she and her family had only helped George, to the extent that they did, because he threatened to kill them if they didn’t. She told the agents that her husband had arranged the escape of Holden and Keating from the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth, and that while they were hiding out in Chicago, George had met with Verne Miller and made arrangements for the assassination of Charles Urschel. The Bureau’s failure to capture Miller was looming large. He could be organizing a military-style assault to free Kelly, as he’d tried to do with Frank Nash in Kansas City, or he could be laying plans to take out Urschel, using the skills he’d so frequently put on display against so many other members of the underworld.