The Year of Fear (29 page)

But Hoover was convinced that Kathryn was not only a willing participant, but the actual brains behind the operation. He wanted her brought down with equal force.

The press, however, was smitten with the comely gangster moll. Kathryn gave a jailhouse interview to Jack Stinnett of
The
Daily Oklahoman
that the paper bannered across their front page with a tight glamor shot of the gangster couple dressed to the nines and looking more amused than concerned about their impending trial.

Kathryn made for great copy, and Stinnett didn’t let his exclusive go to waste.

Quick-witted as a lynx, sharp-tongued as a vixen when aroused, Kathryn Thorne Kelly, wife of the notorious gunman George “Machine Gun” Kelly
[,]
hides behind the most disarming smile imaginable and literally talks with her light blue eyes. Sitting on a bunk in the heavily guarded county jail, coarse blankets wrapped around her, Kathryn Sunday night good-naturedly discussed her plight, talked with some heat about the “injustice done her mother,” and dismissed questions she did not wish to answer with “That’ll all come out at the trial.”

“I’m not worried about myself, I never have been. It is only mother. She had nothing whatever to do with this. A wife certainly has a right to stay around her home and tend to her own business and that is all she did.

“It is Kelly’s fault that mother and dad got mixed up in this. They are the best people you ever saw. I don’t know how that little community down in Wise County is going to get along without them.”

He described her eyes, which:

 … fairly snap. Little wrinkles run away from the corners of them and her mouth, which, under the pressure of anger presses into a cold hard line, curves upward at the corners. Anger flashed across her face when she mentioned that her daughter had been called to testify against her in the kidnapping case.

“They just think I’ll break down if they put her on the stand. I’d plead guilty in a minute if I could keep her out of the courtroom,” she said.

Kathryn complained to Stinnett about the lousy food she was getting and said she’d prefer that it be sent in from the outside. Twice during the interview she bummed a cigarette from Stinnett, which he said she “smoked slowly, deliberately, belying any hint of nervousness … in contrast to her action upon her arrival here from Memphis, when she lighted one cigarette off another.”

On the opening day of the trial, Kelly walked into the courtroom and glared at Urschel, who was sitting behind the prosecutors, legs crossed and relaxed.

Kelly ran his fingers across his throat and said, “This is for you. You’ll get yours!”

The guards snapped to attention and the crowd gasped, but Urschel didn’t flinch, returning Kelly’s glare without any display of emotion.

Jones and his team looked on in anger, wondering what else they could do to rein in the recalcitrant Kelly. The bloated alcoholic had been living on a diet of bread and water since his arrest and there wasn’t much else they could do to make his prison conditions less accommodating.

On her way into the courtroom, the heavily guarded Kathryn paused and walked toward her father, who’d come to the trial. She was intending to give him a kiss.

An agent roughly shoved her back and she stumbled. After regaining her balance, the indignant Kathryn slapped the agent. George, though shackled and cuffed, rushed forward to go to Kathryn’s aid. As he did, an agent clubbed him on the back of the head with the butt of his gun and proceeded to pistol-whip him vigorously.

Kathryn defiantly explained to the courtroom that she had “stopped to kiss my father and the agent hit me in the back. When George told him not to hit me again, he began beating George with his pistol. Sure I slapped him, and I’d like to do it again.”

For the rest of the morning, Kelly sat wordlessly in court dabbing the blood from his swollen face and head with a handkerchief as Kathryn and her attorneys tried to lay the blame for the kidnapping squarely on his shoulders.

The Urschels and the Jarretts positively identified Kelly as one of the men that had kidnapped them. Then the prosecutors went to work tying Kathryn to it.

First, they put the loquacious Geraldine Arnold on the stand, and she explained again how Kathryn and George were constantly writing letters and threatening to kill people.

“Whom did he say they were going to kill? What did Kathryn say about it?”

“Well, she said that—I don’t remember what she said about it.”

“Whom did he say he was going to kill?”

“Judge Vaught, Keenan, Urschel and Hyde.”

“Was Kathryn there when he said that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Then the prosecutors put Luther Arnold, who had agreed to testify in return for leniency, on the stand.

“Did you hear any conversations between George and his wife about the Urschel kidnapping matter?”

“No, I never heard any details of it at all, any more than I heard George remark that ‘If I had that to do over again, I would stick his head in a barrel of lime,’ or something like that. He said they should have took him out in Arizona and buried him—killed him and buried him,” Arnold replied.

“Who said that?”

“George.”

“What did Kathryn say when he said that?”

“She said, ‘That is what we ought to have done.’”

Then it was Flossie Mae Arnold’s turn. She claimed that Kathryn said she ought to “kill the son of a bitch, is what she said she ought to do to him.”

“When this statement was made, that she ought to kill him, did she mention anybody’s name?”

“Only one … Mr. Urschel,” said Flossie Mae.

“What did she say?”

“She said she would like to kill the son of a bitch herself, referring to Mr. Urschel.”

“Did she use Mr. Urschel’s name?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who was present at the time?”

“Her husband, Mr. Kelly.”

Flossie Mae told Hyde that she began cooperating with the Bureau’s agents because she wanted to get her “baby” back from the Kellys.

On cross-examination, Mathers asked, “When you were in Oklahoma City and talked to Mr. Roberts [John V.], after he was employed as attorney for Mrs. Kelly by your husband, did you say that you would trust your baby anywhere with Mrs. Kelly?”

“No.”

“Did Roberts suggest you ought to get your baby back?”

“No.”

“Did you ever hear the Kellys talk about surrendering?”

“No.”

Then agent Rorer, the Bureau’s agent from Birmingham who led the raid that captured the Kellys in Memphis, took the stand.

He recounted a string of important details he had gleaned from George Kelly after his arrest.

“Kelly told me that while he was living in Fort Worth, he and Bates and two other men who were wanted for robbing a Colfax, Washington, bank, discussed kidnapping ‘Frank P. Johnson of the First National Bank and Trust in Oklahoma City.’”

Somehow, the authorities had gotten wind of it and a warrant for the two was received. Rorer said a Fort Worth officer “tipped off” Kelly about it, and they backed off. Kelly paid him $500 for the information.”

Rorer said Kelly told him of other men they considered snatching: John A. Brown, department store owner and M. K. Goetz, a St. Joseph, Missouri, brewer.

“He said the reason they did not pick any of these men was because they felt they would have trouble raising a considerable amount of money immediately,” Rorer testified.

“Kelly said he and Bates came to Oklahoma City July 1 and registered at the Huckins hotel. On July 6 they moved to the Biltmore and cruised the vicinity of the Urschel residence.

“He said on July 14 they went to the home of an ‘old thief’ about 150 miles from Oklahoma City and made arrangements for the kidnapped man to be taken there. At the time it was said Wilbur Underhill, Ed Davis, Jim Clark, Harvey Bailey and Bob Brady, all notorious desperadoes, were at the home of the thief. He refused to give the name of the man harboring them,” Rorer said.

Keenan asked if he had said the name of the man was Boss Shannon, but Rorer said he never mentioned the name.

“Returning to Oklahoma City, Kelly said he and Bates cruised around the Urschel residence the nights of July 18, 19, 20 and 21,” Rorer stated.

“The night of July 22 they saw him playing bridge but were prevented from entering the home earlier than 11:15 p.m. because there were so many cars passing and because a couple of cars had come to and left the house.

“Kelly said the screen door was unlocked. After getting Urschel and Walter R. Jarrett—later letting Jarrett out—they went to the home of the old thief, but relatives were there and they couldn’t stay.

“They then went to Coleman, where Mrs. Coleman cussed them out and they left for Paradise, Texas, for the Shannon farm.

“The elder Shannon made them go to Armon’s house, where Kelly and Armon guarded Urschel while Bates went north to make arrangements about the ransom money.

“After they collected the ransom money from Kirkpatrick in Kansas City, divided it equally and released Urschel near Norman, Bates and Kelly agreed to meet up later in Minneapolis–St. Paul,” stated Rorer.

Kelly then went back to Paradise to get Kathryn.

“He told Kathryn to leave with him immediately, but she argued she ought to have some new clothes and wanted to go into Fort Worth to buy them,” Rorer said.

“Kelly said he went to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he saw Bates, then to St. Paul and on to Memphis.

“He said he passed $2,000 of the money in the north and gave $7,000 ransom money to a man to pass for them in a liquor deal, with his payment to be 20 percent for passing the money.

“Going to Cleveland, Kelly made a $1,000 deposit in good money on a Cadillac automobile for his wife. He said he read in the newspapers about some of the ransom money being traced to Minneapolis, and tried to call his friend there to determine what had happened, but was unable to get him,” he said.

According to Rorer, the Kellys were in Des Moines, Iowa, when they read newspaper accounts of the raid in Paradise and the arrests of the Shannons and Bailey. Kathryn insisted they return to Oklahoma to help her mother.

“Kelly returned to Oklahoma City and later went to south Texas where he bought an automobile in which he later went to New Orleans and then Biloxi, Mississippi,” Rorer testified.

“He said he returned to the Cass Coleman farm at Coleman, Texas, to pick up his wife … and took her and the Arnold girl from San Antonio with him. He said Kathryn was wearing a red wig.

“Kelly left an automobile in St. Louis, Missouri, and proceeded in another car to Chicago. He said he telephoned Gus Winkler [one of Capone’s lieutenants] and also saw Verne Miller, another desperado.

“Winkler told Kelly not to come near him … wouldn’t be seen with him for $10,000. Kelly said they returned to St. Louis where he borrowed money to employ lawyers to defend the Shannons,” said Rorer.

Then one of the Bureau’s agents who had questioned Kelly in Memphis after his arrest testified that Kelly had told him that he had contracted with his friend, Verne Miller, to kill Urschel if he was unable to do it himself.

On the stand, Ralph Colvin, of the Bureau’s Oklahoma City office, testified that Kathryn told him that Urschel had filed suit to seize her jewelry, which had been found in a Fort Worth safe-deposit box.

“She wanted me to ask Mr. Urschel to come and see her. She said she couldn’t afford to lose that jewelry because it was all she had left to provide for her daughter, Pauline, and she thought Mr. Urschel was a heartless man to try to do that,” Colvin testified. “And she went on to remark that if he won the suit, it would not do him much good because he wouldn’t have long to live anyway and that was about the extent of the conversation … She said this jewelry was not bought with the ransom money, that she had bought that long before.”

“But did she say that Mr. Urschel did not have long to live?”

“Yes,” Colvin said.

“How did she say she knew that to be the fact?”

“She said she knew some of George’s associates would get him.”

Next, the prosecutors put on the stand a series of Kathryn’s relatives, who would prove not only how unpopular she was with her own family, but provide damning testimony, as well.

Her eighteen-year-old cousin, Gay Coleman, grandson of Mary Coleman, whose house Kelly and Bates had stopped at en route with Urschel to Paradise, testified that Kelly had told him in July that there would soon be a kidnapping in Oklahoma City. To that, according to Coleman, Kathryn had quickly added, “We’re going to be in the big money before long.”

Then Kathryn’s stepsister, Ruth Shannon, recounted how Kathryn had dragged her, Armon’s wife and Kathryn’s daughter, Pauline, who was being raised by the Shannons, off to her house in Fort Worth, where they were required to reside for a ten-day “vacation.” These, of course, were the very same ten days that Urschel was being held at their farm.

Then Mary Coleman, Kathryn’s grandmother, entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. She corroborated her grandson’s testimony and added that Kelly and Bates had stopped at her farm the night of Urschel’s abduction and transferred him from one car to another.

Even Kathryn recognized the damning nature of the testimony. As her grandmother condemned her from the witness stand, she sat next to George at the defense table and wiped tears from her eyes. During the morning’s recess she ordered her lawyer to tell the judge she’d be willing to change her plea to guilty in exchange for her mother’s freedom.

But Judge Vaught scoffed at the offer and lambasted the attorney for even bringing it to him.

Chastened but unbowed, Kathryn collected herself and prepared to take the stand and testify in her own defense. It was the moment the court, the cameras and the press were waiting for, and Kathryn did not disappoint.

She approached the stand with the grace and poise of a Broadway star entering the stage. She sat down, crossed her legs, smiled at the jurors, recognized the judge with a demure glance and played to the exploding flashbulbs from the press pool and the newsreel cameras that were fixated on her every move.