The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  After the first day, Urschel’s abductors had turned the guard duties over to an old man referred to as “Boss” and some kid named “Potatoes” (Boss Shannon’s son). The two were decidedly less astute and threatening. He found he could chat them up and shrewdly acquire more and more details about his locale. He talked to Boss about their mutual interest in hunting and fishing, innocently picking up details about the local environment and asking questions about the number of hogs and whatnot on the farm.

  He’d ask Potatoes to unshackle him for a couple minutes so he could walk around the shack, stretch his legs and get some exercise. After Potatoes would oblige, Urschel would pace off the floor, getting measurements, identifying objects and leaving his fingerprints in strategic places.

  Before long, he had enough details that he could draw the shack and the farm in his mind and identify and enumerate every animal that populated it. There were two chicken coops out back, a well with nasty, mineral-tasting water out front with a pulley that squeaked with a distinctive sound. There were four cows, three hogs, two pigs, a bull and a mule. There were cardinals and scarlets chirping.

  The rundown farm stretched out for about 500 acres.

  He overheard the name of the postman and cataloged it.

  He knew just about everything about the farm where he was being held, except that it was in Paradise, Texas, and it belonged to Machine Gun Kelly’s father-in-law.

  * * *

  Within minutes of receiving Berenice Urschel’s call, Hoover was on the phone to the special agent in charge of the Bureau’s field office in Oklahoma City, Ralph Colvin. Get to the Urschel home. Give her any assistance she needs and wants. But, most importantly, get control of the investigation.

  The so-called Lindbergh Law had been passed by Congress less than a month earlier. It gave Hoover’s men the authority to chase kidnappers across state lines. The Bureau was the only law enforcement agency empowered to do so. Hoover and Cummings had fought hard to get that authority, and now they would employ it to its fullest. Hoover would not be sidelined as he had been by the New Jersey State Police in the Lindbergh kidnapping, which was still dragging on without any leads. Hoover and his men had been turned into laughingstocks by the New Jersey State Police, who scoffed at their meticulous, “scientific” investigation and the ridiculous leads they were following. The public, too, was becoming exacerbated with law enforcement’s inability to solve the case and stem the kidnapping scourge. If the Bureau could solve this case, Hoover would have a significant leg up on his rivals in his push for power and the creation of the country’s national police force. The hotline that Hoover had established was a stroke of genius. When Berenice called it within minutes of her husband’s abduction, it gave the Bureau a head start on the investigation and the chance to get in on the ground floor, before local law enforcement could start gathering and hoarding evidence. This would not be a repeat of the Lindbergh kidnapping, during which rivals at the local level neutralized the Bureau’s efforts to take over the case. Hoover’s men immediately went to work on getting control of the investigation and lining themselves up for the credit when—and if—the case was ultimately solved.

  Colvin met Oklahoma Police Chief John Watts and Sheriff Stanley Rogers at the Urschel home and explained the situation to them. The three well-acquainted colleagues resolved the issue without acrimony. Hoover’s men would lead the investigation and take charge of the case. Their problem would not be internal cooperation, it would be external. The national press would soon have hold of the latest chapter in America’s gangster chronicles, and they would exploit it to the fullest.

  Oklahoma City’s police department was crawling with reporters even on a Saturday at midnight—especially on a Saturday at midnight. The city had two daily newspapers at the time, and both competed mightily for any nugget of news to sell the street editions that were routinely published throughout the day. The nearby cities of Tulsa and Norman and the neighboring counties had rags of their own all trolling for news, as well. Nothing sold a street edition like crime news, and Saturday night was when crime happened.

  Given his druthers, Colvin would have kept news of the kidnapping quiet for as long as possible, at least until the ransom demand arrived and its authenticity could be verified. But when the wife of the city’s richest denizen calls in with word her husband has been kidnapped at gunpoint, people snap to attention, orders are barked, cars are dispatched, sirens blare and desperate reporters want to know, “What the hell is going on?”

  Watts and Rogers dispatched every car and officer they had. They put cars on U.S. Highway 66 and Highway 81 toward Chickasha, Oklahoma. But Kelly, the old rumrunner, was not on any major highway. He was hauling his victim south along the unpaved dirt roads he knew so well, and where the law rarely ventured. (In fact, the only eyewitness to spot the getaway car was an alert Associated Press reporter, Hugh Wagnon, who saw a Chevy sedan followed by a large green Packard speeding west on Northwest Tenth Street, just minutes after the kidnapping.)

  Within minutes, the wires of the Associated Press, United Press and their regional affiliates were humming with the news that yet another wealthy American had been kidnapped by brazen criminals, this time right from the safety of his back porch.

  At the Urschel house, Colvin interviewed Berenice. Fully expecting to find a hysterical female, he was relieved and impressed with the cool, somewhat stony woman he found himself deposing. She was calm and relaxed for a woman who’d just witnessed her husband’s kidnapping. She recounted the incident with clarity and detail.

  She told the lawman that the kidnappers were “swarthy” and “foreign-looking.” They were “professional.”

  “There was nothing amateurish about these men,” she said. “They knew just what they were doing. I’m sure they were foreigners, too. Both were very dark complexioned. I know I could identify them without any trouble.

  “They were both nervous, though. When they saw that we just sat there sort of calm about the whole thing, that seemed to disturb them. We thought we had heard something, but none of us thought to get up to look at the car when it first drove in. The men didn’t even try to be quiet; they slammed the doors.”

  Berenice’s sixteen-year-old daughter had returned home at about 11.00 p.m. that evening, and when they let her in through the screen door leading to the sunporch, they had neglected to relock it.

  “The screen wasn’t even locked, and we had let the guard man go several weeks ago. He just slept all night,” she added with irritation.

  “Lots of threatening letters used to come to the house, but we haven’t had any lately. Most of them just came from cranks, and we didn’t worry much about it.”

  She told Colvin that her daughter had thought two men in a blue Chevy had been following her earlier in the week, on Tuesday.

  “I’m so thankful that it isn’t Betty,” she said with relief, before adding what Colvin could not have realized the portent of at the time: “I’m not so afraid for Charley. Charley is a grown man. And he’s so resourceful and sensible.”

  Jarrett got back to the house about ninety minutes after his abduction and hustled his way past the growing crowd of reporters and onlookers, who the police had corralled across the street. Despite the threats from Kelly and Bates, he described his ordeal in the car and confirmed the details of the abduction. Colvin told him not to give any information to the press, family or friends. They would need to hold as many facts as possible close to the vest to help confirm the veracity of the kidnappers when they came forward with a ransom demand.

  When he left their custody, Jarrett’s statement to the press was terse: “They treated me like gentlemen. There is nothing more I can tell you now.”

  On Sunday morning, the bare bones of the story ran under inch-deep headlines in papers throughout the South and the Midwest and were blanketing the radio airwaves. The Daily Oklahoman screamed:

  KIDNAPERS HOLD URSCHEL

  JARRETT ALSO SEIZED

  BUT IS QUIC
KLY FREED

  Two Machine Gunners Invade Card Game on Sunporch

  Victim Who Is Freed Able to Tell Police Little

  Charles F. Urschel, wealthy trustee of the rich T. B. Slick estate was in the hands of kidnapers early Sunday morning while his companion-victim, W.R. Jarrett, oilman, later released, sealed his lips on ransom demands.

  The two were kidnaped at 11:30 p.m. Saturday and were forced by two men, armed with machine guns, from the sun porch of the Urschel home, 327 Northwest Eighteenth St., into a waiting large blue sedan standing with motor running on the Urschel driveway.

  Wives of the two men witnessed the kidnaping. Mrs. Berenice Slick Urschel is the widow of the late T.B. Slick, millionaire “king of the wildcatters.”

  Jarrett, released by the kidnapers, appeared at the Urschel home at 12:45 a.m. Sunday morning.

  In Oklahoma City, this news bumped the story of local boy-made-good Wiley Post, who had just become the first man to fly solo around the world while setting the record for the fastest time to do so as well.

  Within twenty-four hours of the kidnapping, the press pool across the street from the Urschel’s stately manse had grown to a horde of photographers, reporters, radiomen, newsreel cameramen and various assistants and onlookers. The local and state papers were there in force, as were the wire services and the newspaper chains. They came from Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois. Scripps Howard sent their star reporters, Lee Hills and Noel Houston. Hearst sent its top crime reporter, James Kilgallen, from New York. The London Daily Mail sent Sir Percival Phillips.

  Colvin eyed the assembled mob warily. The mob was going to complicate the kidnappers’ efforts to contact the family. They were going to complicate his efforts to investigate the case. They were going to print every shred of evidence they could get about the case, and if they couldn’t get any facts about it, they would print speculation, rumors and lies.

  He gathered the family and its inner circle and tried to explain the situation: The people assembled outside are hungry. Desperate for news. Anything and everything they print or broadcast will complicate efforts to solve the case and find Mr. Urschel, he told them. Beyond the folks in the room, no information should be shared with anyone, whether they seem trustworthy or not. The men and women across the street will make their reputations by what they can publicize about this case. They are extremely competitive and will stab each other in the back as quickly as they will stab yours if they think it will give them an edge, a story or an exclusive. They will follow you when you leave the house. Right now they are interviewing your friends and neighbors and business associates. They are bribing telephone operators to monitor your calls. Anything they learn or invent will be knowledge the kidnappers will pick up. Secrecy, stealth and obfuscation will be of paramount importance. Trust no one, say nothing, he concluded.

  The lawmen couldn’t have realized it, but they were speaking a language Berenice knew and understood well. Tom Slick had been a man who hated publicity, shunned the spotlight and spent his whole life trying to avoid those nosy bastards in the press who were constantly poking around about his oil discoveries, his wealth, his taxes, his charitable contributions and everything else that was none of their business. Berenice would be a most composed and intuitive victim.

  On Sunday, when news of the kidnapping hit the national press, Hoover was further convinced that he had just been handed the crime that would accelerate his quest for expanded powers. Jarrett had been shown mug shots and he thought one of the abductors looked a lot like the notorious George Kelly—bootlegger, bank robber, expert machine gunner and prime suspect in the Union Station shootout that left four dead. The investigation in Kansas City was going nowhere, and Hoover’s best agents had been dispatched there to deal with it. Kansas City was just a short plane ride from Oklahoma City. He called Gus Jones and pulled him out of Kansas City. Get to Oklahoma City immediately and take over. Hoover wanted results, and he wanted Jones to get them fast.

  “With what?” Jones asked. “Peashooters?”

  Hoover let Jones know there was no need to comply with the agency’s prohibition on firearms. Jones, he knew, would never have thought otherwise.

  Colvin picked up Jones at the airport Sunday afternoon and drove him to the Urschel home, where he walked in on a meeting Berenice was holding with her brothers-in-law, Arthur and Lamar Seeligson, and E. E. Kirkpatrick, one of Tom Slick’s and Charles Urschel’s closest friends. He was also coexecutor of the Slick estate, along with Urschel.

  It was the perfect collection of key characters in the case, and Jones wasted little time in charming them with his wizened Texas lawman confidence and reassurance.

  “Mrs. Urschel,” he said with deference. “This thing you are up against is brand new to you, and you feel licked. I can tell it by looking at you. You haven’t heard from the kidnappers yet, and you are concerned about that. No one seems to be doing anything to help you, and you are concerned about that. I know exactly how you feel because I have been through this before. It may be brand new to you, but it is an old story to me.

  “First of all, let me tell you that no one is doing anything, and no one is going to do anything, until we hear from the kidnappers—and we are definitely sure it is the kidnappers, not just some gang trying to chisel in—and that is the way we, as police officers, should act at this stage of the case. Right now our prime concern has to be with getting Mr. Urschel back home safely. We have no other concern at this time.

  “I have been instructed by my superiors to tell you that every facility of the Department of Justice is at your disposal in this case. I have been told to tell you that the Department will do nothing which will in any way impede the kidnappers from getting in touch with you or prevent Mr. Urschel’s release. It is not the policy of the Department to advise whether or not any ransom payments should be made—that is a matter which is strictly up to the family. But we will be available for any other matter for which you may need us. Knowing that we will in no way interfere with any effort to secure Mr. Urschel’s safe release, we only ask that you keep us fully informed on any contact you make, or any plans you form. The moment Mr. Urschel is released, we go to work.”

  Berenice stared across the table at the cocky lawman. “You say you’ve had experience in other kidnappings. Did they come home alive?”

  Jones didn’t miss a beat. He smiled and said, “Every one.”

  There was no way to know if he was lying, but the man sure was convincing. She thanked him warmly, and he headed back downtown with Colvin to set up a command center in the Bureau’s office.

  On Monday, a flood of tips, offers of help, shakedowns, false leads and phony ransom demands began to flood in. Berenice insisted on taking any call that remotely suggested it might be from the true kidnappers. But it was hard to separate the opportunists from the real thing.

  One caller had information about Urschel’s whereabouts and was offering to take Berenice or her representative to the location and arrange the settlement. Jones deduced that this was a brazen attempt to set up a second kidnapping, piggybacking on the first, and warned her off.

  On Tuesday she took a call from a man who demanded $50,000 for Charley’s return. Berenice was to meet him one mile west of the bridge on West Tenth Street. He said he would bring Urschel’s watch as proof that he was the abductor. It was the watch, he said, that she had purchased for her husband while they had honeymooned in Europe.

  Colvin, who was listening in on another phone, coached her through it.

  “I don’t drive,” she said. “Can I have my brother-in-law drive me?” After a long pause, the caller agreed, but warned her that if he was armed, or anything tricky should occur, she’d never see her husband again.

  Colvin didn’t like the sound of the call, and he advised Berenice against complying with the demands. To him, the guy sounded like a fraud.

  But Berenice was adamant. “If I don’t go and anything happens to Charley I’d never forgive myself.”

  Beren
ice had to sneak out of the house and into the car lest she be followed by a parade of reporters and photographers in a string of cars behind her. She snuck along the trellis and vines in the backyard garden and lifted herself through the window of the garage. She silently slid into Arthur’s car and covered herself up with a dark blanket.

  Arthur calmly sauntered toward the car a short time later and backed out into the street, where he explained to the curious reporters that he was heading to the office and would be back soon.

  At the appointed time, a car pulled up beside them.

  “Do you have the money?” he demanded. Seeligson explained that the timed locks on the bank vault had not yet opened for the day and they couldn’t get the funds just yet. “Do you have the watch?” he asked.

  The man didn’t, but said they should return at 2:00 p.m. with $5,000 of “good faith” money and he would show them the watch.