The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  Kelly headed straight for the bus station and bought a ticket to Memphis, leaving behind his belongings, including a loaded .45, at the Tourist Hotel.

  When Hoover’s men got to the Tourist Hotel in Biloxi, they learned that Kelly had registered under the name of J. L. Coleman of Texas. He had been driving a 1928 or 1929 Chevrolet Sedan with Texas plates. Among the items he left behind in the room was the Gladstone bag that Kirkpatrick had given him with the ransom money. The staff described Kelly as extremely affable and friendly and noted that he had an extensive knowledge of the Gulf Coast and was sporting a thin moustache. They said that on Sunday, August 27, he had a date with a woman who they assumed was some kind of “pick-up” or prostitute.

  * * *

  When Kelly got to Memphis, he called his old brother-in-law, George Ramsey Jr. George wasn’t around, but the call got through to his younger brother, Langford. In the eight years since his sister and George Barnes had divorced, Langford Ramsey hadn’t heard a word from or about his former brother-in-law. In those intervening years, while Barnes was living outside the law and building the Machine Gun Kelly legend, Ramsey was learning the law and became the youngest man in Tennessee history to pass the bar. Whether he knew he was talking to Public Enemy Number One when Kelly called him from the Memphis bus terminal is unknown. But Kelly, no doubt using the more familiar surname, Barnes, told Ramsey he needed a place to stay and a good lawyer, as well.

  Ramsey told George that he was entertaining “Geneva, Frank, Hazel and the boys” and there was no room at his house. However, he had a friend whose family was out of town. “He’s a little short of cash,” said Langford. “I’m sure he will let you stay there for a few bucks.”

  Langford set Kelly up at Al Tichenor’s house on Raynor Street. He also set up a meeting with “the boys,” Kelly’s two children with Geneva, his first wife, whom he hadn’t seen in years. He showed up at their house wearing a handsome gray suit with a 38.-caliber pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket. He told them he was a federal agent on “a secret mission” and they should not mention his visit to anyone. When George had completed his visit with his sons, he told them to go outside and ride their bikes.

  But the boys didn’t have bikes. So George pulled an enormous roll of cash out of his pocket, which just awed the kids, who’d never seen so much cash in their lives. He gave them each a $20 bill and said they should go buy some bikes. It would be his treat.

  * * *

  On the morning of September 4, Labor Day, as the day shift jailer brought breakfast to the eighth-floor cellblock where Bailey was being held in isolation, he was surprised from behind by a man with a gun who promptly relieved him of his keys and locked him in a cell. Harvey Bailey, the Bureau’s trophy captive, was about to walk out of Dallas’ “escape-proof” jail.

  Gun in hand, Bailey walked down the stairs to the sixth floor and repeated his performance from the eighth. He grabbed a jailer and made him operate the elevator down to the ground floor. There he grabbed the booking clerk and the keys to the outer doors, then made the clerk walk him to his car. Bailey put him in the passenger seat and drove away.

  Gus Jones was in his room at the Baker Hotel in Dallas when the radio blared the story that Harvey Bailey, suspected machine gunner at the Kansas City Massacre and kidnapper of C. F. Urschel, had just escaped from the Dallas County jail, taking one of the prison guards as a hostage.

  Jones grabbed his machine gun, jumped in his car and joined the Dallas Police Department, which was already in pursuit. Jones was sure Bailey would head back to the cover of the Cooksen Hills to hide out. Police departments along the route in Oklahoma were alerted and lay in wait.

  The jailer’s car was hardly the type of driving machine Bailey was accustomed to when he was making his classic escapes over the dusty back roads of the Midwest. In fact, because it was raining, it couldn’t handle them at all, slipping and sliding in the mud. Consequently, Bailey had to stay on the paved roads and drove straight into a police stakeout in Ardmore, Oklahoma. The cops chased him for some five miles before he lost control of the car in a high-speed turn, clipped a lamppost and flipped.

  Jones and company arrived some twenty minutes later and decided to move their prisoner directly to Oklahoma City. Jones was to make certain the same kind of prison break did not occur in Oklahoma City. He threw cuffs and leg shackles on Bailey, put him in a car, got in and led a heavily armed, five-vehicle caravan north.

  On September 5, still wearing his gray prison suit, but now sporting chains and leg irons, Harvey Bailey was put on display. The members of the press were invited to take photographs.

  No worse the wear for his escape ordeal and flipped-car incident, the always-confident, wisecracking Bailey smiled into the firing flashbulbs and said, “Get a good one.”

  Wire service reporter Jack Stinnett was invited along for the ride to Oklahoma City so he could write a firsthand account of the transfer of Bailey out of Texas. When they got to Oklahoma City, Bailey was thrown into the same cell as Boss and Armon Shannon, later to be joined by Bates, who was being flown in from Denver. Jones surrounded the cell with a round-the-clock phalanx of agents armed with machine guns and tear gas.

  The county sheriff was embarrassed by Bailey’s bold move and immediately tried to throw suspicion on his attorney. He noted that Bailey was placed in the “death cell” and held incommunicado except for visits from his lawyer: “He was supposed to have a special guard watching him at all times. So far as has been reported to us no one not employed in the jail saw Bailey since his lawyer visited him last Friday.”

  James H. Mathers, Bailey’s attorney, was quick to respond.

  “When I visited him Friday, the cell looked to me as if it would be impossible to conceal even a hairpin there.”

  Mathers complained that the sheriff was insinuating that he had had a part in the escape preparations.

  “Why, I wouldn’t have done such a thing and even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have,” said Mathers. “I didn’t hand a saw or gun to Bailey nor have I ever done so for any other client.”

  The lawyer said he thought Bailey was foolish for trying to escape, because from his conversation he judged the outlaw had a meritorious defense to the charge in connection with Urschel’s kidnapping.

  Bailey had escaped his Dallas confines by bribing a deputy sheriff with the promise of a $10,000 reward at the completion of a successful flight. The deputy had complied by providing Bailey with the handgun and a wrench and hacksaw with which to open his cell’s bars.

  While Bailey was being transported into Oklahoma, Pretty Boy Floyd, another of the Kansas City Massacre suspects, was desperately trying to get out of it. He had stolen and crashed three cars in the process of fleeing police, who had engaged him and his three companions in a gun battle. Nine miles north of Alva, Oklahoma, Floyd’s car got stuck in a ditch. Despite the drought, it had been raining heavily in Oklahoma, making the back-road getaways favored by gangsters increasingly difficult. When a farmer stopped his car to help, Floyd’s group took his car, loaded in their weapons and drove away toward the Kansas border.

  When police arrived, they searched the car and found a letter on the backseat addressed to Harvey Bailey. Bailey was contemptuous of Floyd and the other gun-happy desperados who were shooting up banks and cops and in general making it hard for professionals like himself to go about their business. Some of his comments had made it into the press, in which he was quoted referring to Floyd as a two-bit hustler and a “small fry.”

  Floyd apparently took umbrage at that and had fired off a retort that he planned to mail once he figured out what jail Bailey was going to end up in. It read:

  Harvey Bailey:

  You’ve talked yourself into the joint. Now you’re trying to get heavy by talking about Pretty Boy, and it may be if you talk fast enough, you’ll miss the chair. I realize I’m not too tough. As far as kidnappers are concerned it has always been mysterious to me why they didn’t design tough guys like
you to catch me. Due to the colorful display of machine guns and for your transportation, you have allowed yourself to imagine people think you are tough but it is no object for the law to steal a harmless man.

  I don’t carry guns around with me to impress any one. I carry them as a dire necessity. When the time comes I am always positive of my capability to use them. I am not boasting I am too tough to die. I know some day I am going to lose, but when that time comes I will not throw up my hands and rely on brains to get me out.

  I may be a ‘small-time hister [sic]’ and you the brains of money, a $200,000 plot. Still, I’m outside enjoying the few dollars I make while you probably are wracking your enormous brain trying to beat the chair.

  The editors at The Daily Oklahoman just loved that. They ran the letter next to a large picture of Bailey in chains as he was beginning his journey to Oklahoma City for trial.

  And although the news media, prompted by the federal investigators, kept referring to Bailey as the “brains” behind the kidnapping, Boss Shannon kept telling them that Bailey had nothing to do with it. Bailey had used the farm various times in July, and once with Bob Brady and James Clark, his partners from the prison break, he said. But Shannon’s protestations didn’t matter. Based on the circumstantial evidence of the ransom money in his pocket and the fact that he was arrested at the farm where Urschel had been held hostage, the attorney general had decided that Bailey was going down for the kidnapping, and the trial would start in two weeks.

  Back in Texas, Kathryn was becoming increasingly distraught over the fate of her mother and stepfather. And without George around with his network of drop sites, safe phones and coded communication, she was having a hard time making legal arrangements on her own. Plus she was steamed that he had left her in the lurch and was probably whoring around with one of his old girlfriends in Mississippi. Her suspicion was heightened when she drove to the Biloxi hotel address he’d left with Coleman and found him gone. She headed back to Texas, still desperate to get in touch with her lawyer, Sam Sayers, and see if he’d made any progress on getting the indictment against her mother dropped. Frustrated, she decided to call him directly from Waco.

  “Hello, this is your girlfriend,” said Kathryn.

  “Which girlfriend?” Sayers responded.

  “Your best girl. The one with the Pekinese dogs.”

  Sayers, who rightly suspected his phone was being tapped, immediately panicked. “I can’t talk to you now. You know better than to call me on this phone!” Then he hung up.

  Kathryn got back in the pickup truck she was using for cover and continued on the road toward Fort Worth.

  She was driving the backcountry roads when she encountered a homeless couple and their twelve-year-old daughter hitchhiking. They were the classic victims of the drought, dust and depression that was afflicting the Oklahoma-Texas farm belt, an itinerant farm family who’d been thrown off their land after the bank had foreclosed on it.

  By 1933, 64 percent of Oklahoma’s farm production had dwindled away. Nearly 20 percent of the state’s population threw their belongings into whatever vehicle they had and just drove west out of the state in search of opportunities as far away as California. They became the despised and derided Okies that were traveling in such swarms that western states began setting up “bum blockades” along Route 66 to keep them out.

  Luther Arnold had been working on a farm owned by his uncle in the small town of Tussy, Oklahoma. When the hard times hit, his uncle was forced to sell the farm and Luther had to move out. He took his wife, Flossie Mae, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Geraldine, and started wandering around looking for work. But he didn’t find any. They didn’t even own a vehicle they could escape in. They had taken all the belongings they could carry and took to the road in search of work and the kindness of strangers. In the town of Graham, Texas, the city marshal took pity on them and bought them breakfast. In Temple, Texas, a Baptist minister gave them money for a room. Then they moved to the Salvation Army.

  On Monday, September 4, Luther had just finished shaving in a filling station on the outskirts of Itasca. He and the family had continued their journey and were about ten yards down the road when a woman in a Model A Ford pickup truck pulled up next to them and asked if they wanted a ride.

  After the family had climbed aboard, she introduced herself as Kathryn Montgomery and asked Luther what he had been doing.

  “Nothing, but I am looking for anything to do to feed three hungry people.”

  “I live on a ranch near Brownwood, Texas, and might be able to help you,” said Kathryn, resplendent in her red wig and overalls.

  Kathryn offered to get them a room where they could spend the night and offered to buy them dinner. Over dinner she grilled them with questions about their life and times. Specifically she wanted to know if Luther was wanted by the law. Luther said there was “nothing against” him and he was “not wanted for any offense.”

  After dinner they drove to a tourist camp with four bungalows. Kathryn sent Luther into the office to rent two of them.

  Luther and Flossie Marie Arnold could not have envisioned what Kathryn had in store for them and little Geraldine, but with only six dollars in their pockets and the prospect of sleeping outdoors that night, they readily accepted the stranger’s assistance. Kathryn knew the law was looking for her and her husband, and they might have figured that they’d split up. Traveling with a down-and-out couple and their pimply-faced kid would be good cover. But after treating them to dinner, she decided to lay down a bigger gambit.

  “I like you people, and would like to fix it so you could make a little money. Can I trust you?”

  “Absolutely,” said Luther.

  “I have driven three thousand miles to see my lawyer and he failed to meet me. I came all the way from Gulfport, Mississippi.” Kathryn looked at Luther and asked, “What would you people think if I told you who I am?”

  “Go ahead and tell me,” said Luther. “You can trust us.”

  “I am Kathryn Kelly, whom you no doubt have read about in the papers, and I am wanted for questioning,” she explained to the astonished Arnolds. “Mr. Arnold, I am going to place a big trust in you. I want you to go to Fort Worth and contact my lawyer, Sam Sayers, of the firm of McClain, Scott and Sayers. I want you to ask Sayers for the details of the situation up to date and to specifically ask him what has happened concerning my offer of compromise by surrendering Kelly for the release of my father and mother.”

  She told the Arnolds that she and her parents had been wrongly accused. They had nothing to do with the crime. Now, she explained, she desperately needed to get her innocent mother out of jail and cleared of all these ridiculous charges that had been laid against her. She told Luther to try to find out how they were doing and whether they needed anything.

  She gave him $50 and a note to Sayers explaining his role and letting Sayers know that Arnold was serving as her go-between. She told him to identify himself as “Ingersoll.” In addition, she told him to “find out if he got the diamonds and the $1,000 I sent by messenger from Mineral Wells.”

  Luther Arnold could not believe his good fortune. In a matter of hours he had transformed himself from a desperate homeless bum to contact man for the most wanted criminal organization in the nation. His wife and daughter were safely ensconced in comfortable accommodations and he had money in his pocket and an important job to do. When Luther got to Fort Worth he called Sayers from a coffee shop and said he was Ingersoll and needed to talk to him right away.

  “Come right on up now,” said Sayers.

  Arnold got to the Sinclair Building at about 10:00 a.m. and went to Sayers’s office on the twelfth floor. Sayers wasn’t used to doing business with homeless Okies, but as an attorney who specialized in dealing with a gangster clientele, he was ready for anything.

  Luther gave him Kathryn’s note, which he quickly read.

  “I am certainly glad to see you. I know Kathryn is plenty sore because I failed to meet her in
Waco. You can tell her that I went to Waco and got a lawyer friend of mine to go to the hotels there, but he could not find her registered there under the name she gave me.

  “Kathryn is probably sore because we have not obtained the release of the Shannons on bond. I want you to impress on her that this firm and all other lawyers connected with the case did everything they could, and are still doing all they can, but the judge just wouldn’t grant the bond.

  “You can tell Kathryn that I put her proposition up to them and talked trade but couldn’t get any satisfaction out of the judge or the United States Attorney. I am awful glad that she has got somebody she can trust to make contact and will not have to do it personally herself.”

  Arnold queried Sayers about the package that had been sent from Mineral Wells.

  “Tell Kathryn that I received the diamond ring and the money,” Sayers replied.

  Luther took a bus back to the tourist camp at Cleburne and delivered the bad news to a frustrated Kathryn. She wondered if her Texas attorney lacked the right connections in Oklahoma City to get the deal done.

  “You are an Oklahoma boy, you ought to know some good lawyer in Oklahoma that I could employ,” she said.

  In fact, Luther said he did know a lawyer. He lived in Enid.

  “Do you think he would be good in this case?”

  “I think so,” replied Arnold.

  Kathryn told him she would take him to Fort Worth and he could go to Oklahoma by “plane, train or automobile” to see if he could get the lawyer to do what Sayers had been unable to.

  “I’d rather travel by car,” said Luther.

  “I have a new Chevy Coupe that Sam Sayers has in Fort Worth,” said Kathryn, telling Luther he could use that to get to Enid. After she had driven to the edge of town, she stopped the pickup and wrote a note to Sayers instructing him to give the car to Arnold. She told Arnold she would take good care of Flossie Mae and Geraldine while he was gone and told him to check for further instructions at the General Delivery window at the San Antonio Post Office.