The Kidnap Years:

by David Stout

  Urschel rang the front door of his house. A man he didn’t know opened the door, frowned at the dirty, unkempt visitor, then slammed the door.

  “I got a big laugh out of being refused admission to my own house,” Urschel recalled later. He made his way to the rear door, where the household help recognized him. How good it was to be home!101

  Investigators checked airplane schedules within six hundred miles of Oklahoma City. American Airways had a flight that left Fort Worth, Texas, each morning at 9:15 for the 340-mile trip northwest to Amarillo, Texas, and a flight that left Amarillo for Fort Worth at 3:30 p.m.

  Urschel had recalled hearing a plane for several days in a row at 9:45 a.m. and another at 5:45 p.m. But he had heard no plane on July 30, a day when there was pouring rain.

  The airline people told investigators the Amarillo-bound plane was normally over Paradise, a somnolent little town in Wise County, Texas, some seventy miles northwest of Dallas, about 9:45 a.m. The Fort Worth–bound plane was normally over Paradise around 5:45 p.m. But the flight to Amarillo left Fort Worth two hours late on July 30 because of a storm and took a more northerly route—to avoid heavy rain in the Paradise vicinity.

  Meteorological records showed the July 30 downpour was the Paradise area’s first rain since May 20. The region had been so parched that the corn had begun to burn in June. What had Urschel heard the woman say at the gas station? “The crops around here are burned up.”

  So the Paradise area seemed a logical place to look for the kidnappers’ lair. And since Urschel had seen cows, chickens, and pigs, it was a good bet he hadn’t been held captive in “downtown” Paradise, to the extent there was one.

  On his farm several miles outside Paradise, Robert Green Shannon raised cattle until the grass withered during the Dust Bowl years. Then, like many other farmers, he struggled just to survive. As some other farmers did, he happily sheltered bank robbers and other criminals on the run. They typically gave him a few hundred dollars—big money, precious money—to let them hide out on his property for a few days.

  Nothing had been easy for him. He was born in Arkansas in 1877, the sixth child of farming parents. Around the turn of the century, the family moved to Texas. Robert returned to Arkansas in 1904 to wed Mary Jackson, the daughter of a family friend, and the couple settled in Wise County, Texas. Mary died when she was only twenty-five, leaving Robert to raise their two young children. Soon, Robert went back to Arkansas and married his late wife’s sister, Maude, who was just nineteen. They had three more children, and then Maude died in 1923.

  In 1928, Shannon took up with a woman named Ora Brooks, a divorcée who had a daughter, Kathryn Brooks, from her first marriage. Ora’s great-grandmother, a Cherokee Indian, had married a veteran of the War of 1812 who received land grants in Mississippi for his service. Thus, Ora and her three sisters were well educated by the standards of the time. After her marriage to Robert Shannon, Ora was said to have played the piano and taught Sunday school at churches in the Paradise area.

  The family history is murky, but it is believed that Ora’s daughter, Kathryn, married one Lonnie Fry in Oklahoma in 1918, when she was just fourteen. The next year, they had a daughter, Pauline, and apparently divorced not long afterward. Kathryn was briefly married for a second time, then divorced and proceeded to marry a Texas farmer and bootlegger named Charles Thorne when she was twenty-nine.

  Charles Thorne soon died under puzzling circumstances, puzzling because he supposedly took his own life, leaving behind a perfectly typed suicide note that was grammatically correct—even though he was reputed to be illiterate.

  Emerging from grief, Kathryn had a gangster boyfriend before meeting and eloping with George Francis Barnes Jr. Barnes was born in Tennessee on July 17, 1897. He went to school for a while, then tried being a salesman. He found that work unrewarding. Bootlegging was more exciting…and lucrative. He dropped the surname Barnes and went by Kelly, his mother’s maiden name, or sometimes Kelley, perhaps to confuse lawmen when they were chasing him, which was often, as he liked to rob banks.

  Years before, Kelly had married a teenage girl, had two children with her, then abandoned his family after realizing he wasn’t cut out for domestic life. By the time he was in his early thirties, he had been arrested for liquor violations in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Tulsa, where he was also charged with vagrancy. He did time in New Mexico State Prison and in federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, for selling bootleg liquor on an Indian reservation.

  Upon getting out, he made up for his spartan existence behind bars. He loved fancy cars and other luxuries but didn’t like the humdrum of a nine-to-five job. Luckily for him, he had a like-minded wife and friends, including the gangster and prison escapee Harvey Bailey, who was known for meticulously planning his bank heists.

  Kathryn was handy with firearms and, according to legend, wanted to enhance her husband’s masculine image. So she obtained a Thompson submachine gun from a pawnbroker and encouraged Kelly to practice with it on the ranch. Again, according to legend, Kelly supposedly got so handy with the weapon that he could write his name with bullet holes on the side of a barn. Thus he became known as “Machine Gun” Kelly, although it is unlikely that he was ever that accomplished with the Thompson.

  Around this time, Kelly and Harvey Bailey were holding up banks with some frequency across the South and Midwest. Typically, they would head to Mexico after a heist, split up, and lie low for a few weeks, then hook up again to plan another job. Kathryn became an enthusiastic participant, taking part in the planning and helping to switch cars to stymie pursuers.

  Surely, Kelly and his wife were shocked by the Union Station bloodbath on June 17, 1933. Just as surely, they had followed the exploits, real and imagined, of Verne Sankey, who had graduated from bank robbery to kidnapping.

  Kathryn studied the society pages of several newspapers in the region, convinced that any of the “swells” who appeared in them must have money to spare. The oil baron Charles Urschel of Oklahoma City, about 185 miles due north of Paradise, was mentioned now and then.

  So the stage was set for the events that began on the night of Saturday, July 22, 1933, as Urschel and his wife and their friends the Jarretts were playing bridge.

  After Urschel was released and lawmen zeroed in on Paradise, Texas, and the surrounding area, they reasoned that an isolated ranch of several hundred acres just might have been the place where Urschel was held captive. Surveillance of the spread revealed that a conspicuous number of high-powered cars entered and left the ranch with some frequency.

  Early on Saturday, August 12, 1933, a dozen lawmen from the FBI and the Dallas and Fort Worth police forces raided the ranch. They had expected to nab George Kelly, but he wasn’t there. But to the lawmen’s delight, they found Harvey Bailey asleep on a cot in the backyard, a machine gun and pistol by his side, other guns on the porch, and a powerful car poised for a getaway.

  The man who had escaped so boldly from the Kansas State Penitentiary was prodded awake by the muzzle of a submachine gun and surrendered meekly. Perhaps he had lost some of his fighting spirit after being shot in the leg while robbing a bank in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, not long before. On his person was part of the Urschel ransom money, in marked twenty-dollar bills. Robert Shannon was arrested, as were several members of his extended family.

  Urschel accompanied the lawmen on the raid. “Yes,” he said after looking around the premises. “This is the room where I was held. There’s the tin cup I drank from.”

  Urschel’s fingerprints, which he had taken care to leave on as many surfaces as possible, confirmed his recollection.

  Around the time of the raid, Albert Bates, a career criminal soon to be established as Kelly’s partner in the Urschel kidnapping, was arrested in Denver. He, too, had some of the ransom money on him. Various other racketeers were swept up in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  But where was Kelly? Had the roads been better in that era, he might have been just about anywhere, from Alaska to Miami or Bos
ton to San Diego, considering that he drove a Cadillac with sixteen cylinders.

  Weeks later, the Kellys were tracked to Memphis, where they had been put up by the brother of George’s first wife. They were arrested early on the morning of September 26. Machine Gun Kelly never got to show his supposed expertise with the weapon that had given him his sobriquet. Instead, he surrendered his pistol as a tough Memphis police sergeant thrust the muzzle of a shotgun against his stomach.

  And how disheartened Kelly must have been when his wife immediately pronounced herself relieved to be rid of the man who had lured her into wrongdoing: her husband!

  Within months, more than a dozen people were convicted of taking part in the Urschel kidnapping, including several in St. Paul, Minnesota, where some of the ransom money had appeared. Besides the main players, George Kelly and Albert Bates, they included Kelly’s newly unhappy wife and various people accused of secondary or even peripheral roles in the Urschel kidnapping.

  One unfortunate soul was the brother of Kelly’s first wife, the man who sheltered the Kellys in Memphis and who had run errands for them. There have been questions in the ensuing years as to whether the young man was even aware that his long-lost, one-time brother-in-law, whom he had known as George Barnes, was the wanted desperado Machine Gun Kelly. The young man had recently passed the Tennessee bar exam, but his aspirations for practicing law were dashed. He lost his law license and served time in prison for his marginal role, intentional or not, in helping the fugitive Kellys.

  But Hoover was not overly concerned with legal niceties or collateral damage in his pursuit of bank robbers and kidnappers, or “sewer rats,” as he described them. Nor did many reporters seem much interested in digging into possible miscarriages of injustice. On the contrary; newspapers were full of praise for the FBI, after Hoover boasted that his agents had secured the convictions or guilty pleas of twenty-one men and women in the Urschel case, with six of those people getting life sentences and others being sent away for years.

  A movie newsreel was also unctuous. “Uncle Sam rolled up his sleeves and dealt gangland a swift, decisive blow,” the newsreel narrator declared. “They are going for rides, and with the federal government at the wheel,” the narrator said as the defendants were herded into a police van.102

  In fairness, there was a lot of crime for editors and reporters to keep up with. On the weekend that Harvey Bailey was arrested at the Shannon ranch, a white mob in Alabama seized three young black men who were charged with murdering a young white woman. The prisoners were being transported by sheriff’s deputies, their supposed protectors, from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham for safekeeping when they were ambushed on a dark country road.

  Not long after they were spirited away, two of the men were found shot to death. The third was also shot but survived. Governor Benjamin Miller ordered an inquiry into how such a thing could have happened. Tuscaloosa County Sheriff R. L. Shamblin said he already knew: the International Labor Defense, a far-left group with communist links, had stirred up local feelings by assigning three lawyers to represent the defendants.

  No inquiry was promised nor any comment offered on another fatal shooting that weekend, that of a black man killed by the police near Tuscaloosa while swinging a club as he was resisting arrest for stealing chickens.

  Harvey Bailey, who had escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary the previous Memorial Day, the traditional start of the summer season, chose the official end of the season, Labor Day, to escape again, this time from the Dallas jail where he was being held while awaiting trial. On the morning of September 4, 1933, he sawed three bars from his tenth-floor jail cell and fled, armed with a revolver.

  A reasonable person might have asked how one of the most wanted bandits in the country, a man who had already escaped from prison once, could break out again. Simple. A crooked deputy had smuggled hacksaw blades and the revolver into the jail and given them to Bailey. The fugitive was recaptured Labor Day afternoon in Norman, Oklahoma.

  The deputy and an accomplice who had bought the blades were soon found out. The deputy was sentenced to two years in prison and his accomplice to fourteen months. The deputy’s perfidy was a reminder, if any were needed, of the corruption that infected many police forces and sheriff’s offices in that era.

  The happy outcome of the Urschel kidnapping was a gift for Hoover, for even though he enjoyed wide support among the American people and seemed to be a master at shaping his own image, there were a few brave critics in the press corps. One was Ray Tucker, the Washington bureau chief of Collier’s magazine, who wrote in the issue of August 19, 1933, that Hoover’s agents were less competent than the director portrayed them to be, that Hoover kept them in “fear and awe by firing and shifting them at whim,” and that Hoover was a publicity hound who walked with a “mincing step.”103

  That last was a veiled but hard-to-miss allusion to the fact that Hoover, then thirty-eight, was single and was never seen in the company of a woman except his mother, with whom he still lived. That attack on his masculinity had to smart.

  Bailey was convicted just weeks later in federal court and sentenced to life for kidnapping. He was briefly confined to Leavenworth, but federal prison officials were not inclined to let him escape a third time. In September 1934, he was sent to a newly opened federal institution that was deemed to be escape-proof, perched as it was on a rocky island in San Francisco Bay: Alcatraz.

  Machine Gun Kelly was also sent to Alcatraz in September 1934, presumably to live out his days there. Albert Bates had been sent to the dismal island months earlier.

  Kelly’s by now estranged wife was sentenced to life in the Women’s Federal Prison at Alderson, West Virginia. Ranch owner Robert Shannon and his wife drew shorter but still substantial sentences.

  The quick solution to the Urschel case, Hoover’s well-publicized obsession with stamping out kidnapping, and the draconian sentences imposed on the defendants—would all those factors be enough to end kidnapping for ransom so that wealthy Americans could feel safe in their homes again? Hardly. At least not yet.

  But a former deputy police commissioner of New York City was sure that he knew a way to stamp out kidnapping: make it a crime to pay ransom.

  “After all, payment of ransom is accessory after the fact,” Dr. Carleton Simon told the convention of the International Association of Police Chiefs on August 1, 1933. “Kidnapping and all crimes would cease to be active when not lucrative and when the incentive is not there.”104

  Dr. Simon had become a criminologist for the New York Association of Chiefs of Police when he spoke those words, which showed no sympathy for someone who would pay money to get a kidnapped relative back.

  “To my mind, the man who pays a ransom is a selfish individual endangering the lives of untold numbers,” he went on boldly, if heartlessly. “He perpetuates and continues this nefarious traffic… This is a war against all crimes, and anyone who gives solace or information or contributes to the well-being of the criminal is as guilty as a traitor in actual warfare.”

  So, then, any parents whose child was kidnapped and who begged kidnappers to return the child unharmed and promised to pay money to see the child alive again—these people were traitors and selfish accomplices to crime. Far better, Dr. Simon seemed to say, for the parents to stand fast and refuse to pay a nickel. And if the child’s corpse was found by a roadside, well, it was for the greater good.

  Not surprisingly, Dr. Simon’s coldhearted proposal went nowhere.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A MOMENTOUS MONTH

  November 1933

  As Thanksgiving Day* drew near, President Roosevelt expressed a hope: “May we on that day in our churches and in our homes give humble thanks for the blessings bestowed upon us during the year past by Almighty God… May we be grateful for the passing of dark days; for the new spirit of dependence one on another; for the closer unity of all parts of our wide land.”105

  But the “dark days” were far from over. For many Americans,
a Thanksgiving Day feast with a golden turkey as the centerpiece was a vision hopelessly beyond reach. They would have to scrape to put any decent food on the table.

  And events oceans away were casting ominous shadows. Although most Americans wanted to avoid getting swept up in another war, it was getting harder to ignore what was happening in Germany. The assault on the American businessman Philip Zuckerman, who had been badly beaten by Nazi storm troopers in Leipzig in July, was looking less like an isolated occurrence and more like an ugly pattern.

  So warned Samuel Untermyer, president of the World Jewish Economic Federation, at a September dinner in his honor in New York City. “A once proud and cultivated nation has been converted into a den of savage beasts of prey,” he lamented, saying that the new regime was “bent upon the starvation and extermination of their own citizens.”106

  But former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith, who also spoke at the dinner, was less alarmed. The people in power in Berlin were so thuggish as to invite ridicule, he said, and “it is impossible for them to survive any length of time under ridicule.”

  Around that time half a world away, events in Japan seemed to portend an era of peace with the United States—or at least that was the opinion expressed in an interview in New York City with Count M. Soyeshima, described as “an outstanding Japanese liberal” who was an insurance executive in private life and was intimately familiar with the workings of his country’s government. He declared that war between the United States and Japan was “unthinkable and impossible” and predicted that the Japanese army’s influence in Tokyo would soon fade.107

  Surely Arthur Koehler, the man who loved trees, had reason to feel blessed. On Thanksgiving Eve, as he stood in a lumberyard, he learned that his tireless work over many months had traced the wood used by the Lindbergh kidnapper from a South Carolina sawmill all the way to the Bronx.