The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  But the back of Nash’s head was blown away, a massive wound characteristic of a shotgun blast from behind at point-blank range. Caffrey and Hermanson also suffered huge head wounds consistent with a shotgun fired at close range. The windshield glass of the car in which Nash was sitting was blown apart and out onto the hood, again suggesting a shotgun blast—from behind.

  How to explain all this? The two lawmen who were carrying shotguns were the Oklahoma police chief, Otto Reed, and FBI agent Joe Lackey. Reed was known to be intimately familiar with shotguns. His favorite was a piece that he fitted with a short barrel for law enforcement and a longer barrel for small-game hunting. He even made his own ammunition for police work, cutting open the ends of shotgun shells, removing the standard pellets meant for birds and small game, and inserting ball bearings—the better to bring down human prey.

  By contrast, Lackey seems to have been inept with shotguns. In a memo to Hoover after the shooting, he claimed that he had just borrowed a shotgun that morning from the Oklahoma City police department, that the weapon had “jammed” during the shootout, and that he couldn’t get it to function at all.

  But it seems far more likely that he was so unfamiliar with the weapon that he didn’t know how to get it ready to fire, because as the lawmen and their prisoner were about to get off the train, Lackey mistakenly picked up Reed’s personal shotgun, which functioned differently from the gun Lackey had borrowed. (Presumably, Reed quickly realized that Lackey had taken his weapon by mistake. So Reed carried the weapon that Lackey had borrowed.)

  Most tellingly, ball bearings of the kind that Reed used in his custom-made ammunition were found at the massacre scene. But it seems unlikely that Reed took his own shotgun from Lackey in the car and then fired it. It seems much more likely that Lackey panicked, fumbled with Reed’s gun, and when he finally did manage to pull the trigger with effect, fired wildly, first accidentally killing Nash, who was sitting in front of him, then Caffrey and Hermanson. (Apparently, Reed was killed before he could fire at all.)

  For his 2005 book The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Robert Unger analyzed the ballistics evidence, the accounts of bystanders—one of whom saw Lackey fumbling with a shotgun—and the contradictory statements that Lackey gave.

  Most significantly, Lackey changed his account of where he was sitting. Referring to himself in the third person in his initial memo to Hoover, he wrote, “Agent got in the backseat on the left-hand side [emphasis added].”65 In another early internal memo, again in the third person, Lackey reinforced his recollection: “The agent was crouched down back of the driver’s seat.”66

  But two years later, when Richetti was on trial for the train station shooting, Lackey changed his recollection again: “I was on the backseat on the right or west side [emphasis added],” he testified.67

  The question of where Joe Lackey was sitting is all-important. If indeed he was sitting in the left rear, “crouched down back of the driver’s seat,” as he stated originally, he was sitting directly behind Nash, from which position he inadvertently blew off the back of the prisoner’s head and, seconds later, accidentally killed Caffrey and Hermanson.

  The contradictory accounts that Robert Unger unearthed are from the FBI’s own files and were apparently unnoticed for decades, although some in the FBI’s inner circle—Hoover and his sycophants—were aware of them. So, apparently, were some Kansas City FBI agents, who out of fear of the tyrannical director carried their dark secrets into retirement and to their graves.

  One FBI man who was aware of what really happened at the train station confided later to Federal Judge William H. Becker of the Western District of Missouri. As Robert Unger recounts, the judge shared his recollection just before he retired in 1990. “Our agent sitting in the backseat pulled the trigger on Nash,” the judge recalled the FBI man as saying. “That started it. The machine-gunners didn’t shoot first. Our guy panicked.”68

  If the press of that era had closely probed what happened at the train station, Hoover might have been cashiered and forgotten, especially considering the embarrassments that lay ahead. But the director was able to control the narrative and portray his agents as heroes at the Union Station shooting—when, in fact, they were victims of their own incompetence.

  Ingeniously, if cynically, Hoover was able to turn a debacle into a triumph and use public sentiment for his own ends. “The audacity of daylight slaughter in a city center could not be excused as the work of oppressed country boys in depressed times,” as Unger put it. “Suddenly killers and thieves were judged as killers and thieves. And the public verdict was harsh.”

  “Demands for reform were heard in cities and towns all over the country, but the focus quickly settled on Hoover and his small bank of federal agents… The carnage in Kansas City embedded a Hoover versus Gangland image in the public mind. And if the country wanted a gangbuster, J. Edgar Hoover desperately wanted the job.”69

  And he wanted vengeance for the death of an FBI agent at Union Station. The people responsible, he declared, would be “exterminated, and exterminated by us.”70 Should the Kansas City police break the case before the FBI caught up with the killers, Hoover warned an aide, “it would spoil it for us.”71

  On that Saturday morning of the Union Station Massacre, Blackie Audett was sitting in a car with Mary McElroy, the strikingly pretty twenty-five-year-old daughter of city manager Henry McElroy.

  Mary lived with her widowed father and was very close to him. A somewhat impetuous woman, she was attracted to danger and excitement. She had heard there would be plenty of both at the train station that morning and had persuaded Audett to accompany her there to watch.

  Mary was acquainted with John Lazia and other gangsters, whose company she enjoyed and whose exploits she liked to hear about, so it is not hard to believe that she would have heard something in advance. What is hard to believe is that she would want to flirt with danger, considering the ordeal she had gone through just three weeks earlier.

  *Here, I am indebted to the crime writer Jay Robert Nash (no relation to Frank) for his essay “Who Was Behind the Kansas City Massacre?” (http://www.annalsofcrime.com/index.htm#03–05).

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  MARY’S ORDEAL

  Kansas City, Missouri

  Saturday, May 27, 1933

  Mary McElroy was enjoying a bubble bath in the upstairs bathroom of her father’s home, looking forward to going to the track later on. She liked betting on the horses, in moderation.

  She heard a knock at the door, then heard the maid, Heda Christensen, answer. Mary couldn’t hear what was said, but she sensed from the tone of Heda’s voice that the maid was suspicious.

  Mary found out later that there were two men. One of them explained that they were delivering cosmetics that Mary had ordered.

  The men sure didn’t look like cosmetics salesmen. When Heda balked and started to close the door, one of the men aimed a pistol at her. “Either open that door for us, or I’ll shoot through it,” he said.72

  Both men barged in. One brandished a sawed-off shotgun. They went upstairs.

  Mary had heard the ruckus below and was alarmed. “Who’s there?” she said.

  “We’re kidnappers,” a man answered. “We’re going to take you away, and if you behave yourself, you won’t get hurt. Hurry up and get dressed.”

  The men let her go to her bedroom unmolested to put on clothes. Then they ushered her downstairs and out the door after promising the maid they would be in touch.

  The kidnappers drove across the state line into Kansas, stopping at a house and escorting their captive to a dingy basement room furnished with a bed, chairs, and a radio. The room had an unpleasant smell, not surprising as it had been used to keep chickens.

  The kidnappers gave their prisoner detective magazines to read. They handcuffed one of her hands to a wall by the bed.

  That night, Henry McElroy got a special delivery lett
er. It was a note from his daughter, stating that her captors wanted $60,000—or $100,000 if the police or newspapers were told that she’d been taken, in which case, Mary warned, “I may not be returned.”73

  And don’t mark the bills in the ransom package, she warned. The kidnappers had threatened to harm her father or her brother, Henry Jr., if the bills were doctored.

  When a kidnapper got in touch by phone, McElroy said he could come up with only $30,000, much of it raised by his friends.

  The kidnapper hung up and called back two hours later to say that $30,000 would be acceptable. He assured McElroy that his daughter had not been harmed.

  The next day, the kidnappers told McElroy to meet them on a lonely road in Wyandotte County, Kansas, just across the Missouri state line. McElroy and his son handed over a package with $30,000; in return, they were promised that Mary would be freed within two hours.

  Sure enough, around four o’clock, Mary was blindfolded and driven to the entrance of a country club. She was put out of the car and given a small bunch of flowers. She removed her blindfold and saw the kidnappers driving off. She waved to them. They waved back.

  After her father picked her up, she emphasized that she had not been harmed and described her abductors as gentlemanly.

  Mary said she had almost enjoyed her time in captivity as a break in her daily routine. She said she joked with the kidnappers over the initial ransom demand of $60,000. “I’m worth more than that,” she recalled telling them. “That’s not as much as they got for Mike Katz!”

  Mike Katz was a Kansas City, Missouri, druggist who was kidnapped in 1930 and reportedly paid a ransom of $100,000 to gain his freedom.

  Speaking to reporters shortly after her release, Mary said her kidnappers had “treated me with such consideration, I have no malice toward them. They were just businessmen.”74

  Was it odd that Mary McElroy, who had been handcuffed to a basement wall and whose life had been threatened, described her kidnappers as almost chivalrous? She talked so sympathetically about them that those close to her feared she was having a nervous breakdown.

  Since the ransom money had been delivered in Kansas, it appeared that Mary might have been taken across a state line. So the FBI stepped in, using surveillance methods not available to the locals. They soon intercepted a telegram from a car dealer in Amarillo, Texas, to a junk dealer in Leavenworth, Kansas. The telegram mentioned a W. H. McGee who wanted to trade in a 1932 Oldsmobile, which he said he had bought from the junk dealer. Would the junk dealer please verify?

  There was nothing damning in itself about the telegram, but the agents asked themselves why anyone who had bought a car in Kansas would be trading it in in Texas. What’s more, the Amarillo car dealer said W. H. McGee and several friends had arrived at his dealership on the morning of Saturday, June 3, in a car with a burned-out bearing. The travelers looked as though they’d been driving all night, pushing their car to the limits.

  The Kansas City police chief called the police in Amarillo, who tracked down Walter H. McGee, a thirty-seven-year-old ex-convict who had served time in Oregon. He had in his possession $9,000 in cash—including bills that friends of the McElroy family had contributed toward Mary’s ransom after first writing down the serial numbers.

  At first, McGee denied taking part in the kidnapping. Brought to Kansas City for more intensive questioning, he was confronted by Henry McElroy, who recognized him as one of the men who had accepted the ransom money.

  “We’ve met before,” McElroy said.

  “I want to tell you everything and get it over with,” McGee said amid sobs.

  He admitted his crime, implicating his younger brother, George, as well, plus Clarence Click, owner of the house in Shawnee, Kansas, where Mary had been held. A fourth man suspected of having a role in the kidnapping was never caught.

  Not surprisingly, the plot to kidnap Mary had been thought up while the men were drinking beer. As McGee told it, they were inspired in part by the kidnapping of Charlie Boettcher in Denver.

  In 1933, courts functioned at a speed that seems inconceivable today. Within two months of the kidnapping, the McGee brothers and Clarence Click were on trial in state court in Kansas City, with an assistant U.S. attorney general aiding Missouri prosecutors.

  By then, it was clear that the kidnapping had indeed been an ordeal for Mary, despite her initial description of it as a bit of a lark. Escorted to the house in Kansas where she had been held, she collapsed and wept when she saw the basement room.

  In questioning the victim’s father during the trial, a defense lawyer tried to create the impression that Mary hadn’t really been harmed.

  “Yes, my daughter was injured,” Henry McElroy testified. “To the extent that I fear she will never get over it.”

  The McGee brothers and Click were all convicted. George McGee was sentenced to life in prison, and Click got eight years. But Walter McGee, whom prosecutors portrayed as the ringleader, was sentenced to hang, despite the fact that Mary had not been harmed physically. The judge said kidnapping was a scourge that had to be stamped out.

  Walter McGee appealed his sentence, to no avail. But he had gained a seemingly unlikely ally: Mary McElroy.

  “Walter McGee’s sentence has hung as heavily over me as over him. Through punishing a guilty man, his victim will be made to suffer equally,” she wrote to Governor Guy Park in April 1935. “He will have this advantage—he would not have to think about his execution afterward. In pleading for Walter McGee’s life, I am pleading for my own peace of mind.”75

  The governor heeded her plea and commuted McGee’s sentence to life.

  But there was no emotional relief for Mary, whose behavior became increasingly erratic. In one incident, she disappeared from her home and was found eleven hours later in Normal, Illinois. Brought back to Kansas City, she offered vague explanations for her absence and insisted that she held “no personal hard feelings” toward her kidnappers.76

  Oddly, she added, “I am sure they do not hold hard feelings against me… I have nightmares about these men and the fates they brought upon themselves. I was part of the drama that fixed their destiny.”

  She even visited the McGee brothers in prison occasionally. “Something drives me to do this,” she explained. “I cannot let them go.”

  Her behavior may have been a reflection of what would later be called Stockholm syndrome. The condition takes its name from a bungled 1973 bank robbery in Sweden’s capital. Two bandits held four bank employees hostage in a vault for six days, threatening them with nooses and sticks of dynamite to keep them submissive. The siege ended when the police used gas, capturing the bandits and freeing the captives. The authorities were startled when the four hostages expressed concern, even sympathy, for the pair who had brutalized them.

  Psychologists who have studied the Stockholm syndrome believe a bond is created when a captor threatens to kill or harm a captive, then relents—creating a feeling in the captive not only of relief but of gratitude. Little acts of kindness in awful circumstances are interpreted as good treatment—which is what Mary insisted she had been given, despite being chased from her bath, taken from her home, and handcuffed to a wall in a basement room that smelled of chicken droppings.

  The years after the kidnapping were unkind to Mary. The power of the Pendergast machine, which had enabled her father to live large despite a modest official salary, was ebbing. The 1933 train station bloodshed had outraged good-government idealists. Tom Pendergast sensed that his muscleman, John Lazia, who was rumored to have helped plan the ambush, was becoming a liability, so Pendergast began to distance himself.

  Lazia, facing vicious new competition from other gangsters and without Pendergast’s support, was assassinated by men with submachine guns and shotguns on July 10, 1934, after a night inspecting his nightclubs and gambling dens with his wife. He was thirty-seven.

  In 1934, a reform-minded federal prosecutor, Maurice Milligan, became the U.S. attorney for the Western District o
f Missouri and set his sights on Pendergast and his cronies. President Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., marshalled his bureaucracy against the Kansas City machine.

  In April 1939, Tom Pendergast was indicted for tax evasion.* Days later, Henry McElroy resigned as city manager. On May 5, the body of Edward L. Schneider, a bookkeeper for the Pendergast organization, was found in the Missouri River. Suicide notes were found in his car.

  An investigation revealed that millions of dollars in city money had evaporated while Henry McElroy was city manager. On June 29, 1939, he was indicted by a county grand jury on embezzlement and fraud charges. Meanwhile, federal agents were picking over his tax returns. Knowing that he would soon face federal tax-evasion charges, McElroy sank into despondency. He died of a heart attack on September 15, 1939, at the age of seventy-four.

  Mary was devastated by the disgrace and death of her beloved father. She was occasionally pestered by reporters who wanted her to tell the “real story” about the kidnapping.

  On the morning of January 21, 1940, she wrote a note that said: “My four kidnappers are probably the only people on earth who don’t consider me an utter fool. You have your death penalty now so—please—give them a chance.” Perhaps not even she knew just what she meant.

  After writing the note, she went into a sunroom, held a pistol near her right ear, and pulled the trigger. Mary McElroy was dead at thirty-two.

  When notified of her death, the McGee brothers seemed heartbroken. “I wouldn’t have felt the loss of my own sister more,” Walter said.77 He died in prison in 1949, two years before he would have been eligible for parole. His brother, George, was paroled in 1947. Clarence Click completed his sentence in 1938.

  *Pendergast was convicted on tax charges and served fifteen months in prison. He died on January 26, 1945, at seventy-two.