The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  He then told Urschel that he’d heard oil had been discovered in Wise County in the area where he and the Shannons had their farms—the very place where Urschel had been held captive. He asked Urschel to get the “lowdown” on it and if it was true he’d be eager to sell oil leases on the land. Realizing that Urschel might not be willing to go into a business arrangement with the man who kidnapped him and threatened to kill his family, he tried to make amends.

  Now before I go further don’t think I am merely writing this letter to try to get in on your good graces. You can rest assured I will never ask you to do anything towards getting me out. Naturally I realize that your enmity could become a detriment in later years. So, to be truthful, I hope you do not feel too vindictive; although I hardly think that you are a person of malevolent disposition. After so many years, I must admit that I am rather ashamed of the grandstand play that I made in the courtroom. I was good and mad at the time. Need I remind you of the enthusiasm of the days during my trial. You and your friends shared in it; seemed to revel in it. What produced it? The Department of Justice’s love of the dramatic? The public’s desire for a good free show?

  I feel that at times you wonder how I am holding up under my penal servitude, and what is my attitude of mind? It is natural that you should be infinitely curious. Incidentally, let me say that you’ve missed something in not having had the experience for yourself. No letter, no amount of talk, and no literary description in second-rate books—and books on crime cannot but be second rate—could ever give you the faintest idea of reality.

  No one can know what it’s like to suffer from the sort of intellectual atrophy, the pernicious mental scurvy, that comes of long privation of all the things that make life real; because even the analogy of thirst can’t possibly give you an inkling of what it’s like to be tortured by the absence of everything that makes life worth living …

  Maybe you have asked yourself, “How can a man of even ordinary intelligence put up with this kind of life, day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year?” To put it more mildly still, what is this life of mine like, you might wonder, and whence do I draw sufficient courage to endure it. To begin with, these five words seem written in fire on the walls of my cell: “Nothing can be worth this.” This—the kind of life I am leading. That is the final word of wisdom so far as crime is concerned. Everything else is mere fine writing.…

  I suspect that there is in all of us, always, an obscure sense of fate, inherited from numberless ancestral misfortunes, which whispers: “We are not sent into this world to live too happily. Where there’s nothing to worry us, it’s not natural, it’s a bad sign.” A little misfortune gives us the assurance that we are paying our “residence tax” so far as this world is concerned—not much to be sure, but enough to ensure us against the jealousy and thunderbolts of Heaven.

  A person in prison can’t keep from being haunted by a vision of life as it used to be, when it was real and lovely. At such times I pay, with a sense of delicious, overwhelming melancholy, my tribute to life as it once was.…

  I hope you will not consider my writing impertinence. If you do, just tear this letter up and forget it. Of course, I should enjoy hearing from you anytime. With best wishes, I am

  Very truly yours,

  George R. Kelly

  Reg. No. 117

  Urschel never responded to the letter, in part because virtually all of Kelly’s share of the ransom had been recovered, and if he knew where the missing amount of Bates’s share was, he’d never rat out his partner. He’d already been to the Shannon farm several times with Kirkpatrick and Vaught to talk to Armon to see if he had any idea where it might be. He told Armon he’d be handsomely rewarded if he could lead him to the money. But Armon didn’t have a clue.

  Instead of responding to Kelly, he wrote to Bates, telling him that no oil had been found in the vicinity of Kelly’s farm. At Kelly’s request, Bates had also written to Urschel to give him a strict accounting of his share of the ransom and where he had last seen it, but also to plead for leniency for Ora Shannon, who had no role in the kidnapping and was being punished harshly for not turning in her husband, daughter and son-in-law when she learned of it. Surely, this was not a crime punishable by life in prison.

  “I, of course, feel terribly sorry for Mrs. Shannon,” wrote Bates. “She is getting well up in years, in poor health, and after all, she took no active part in the crime—other than to carry out her husband’s instruction to cook a dinner for you on Sunday while Kelly and I were absent.”

  He told Urschel in the letter that he had received from Kelly $94,250, his cut of the $200,000.

  I gave Bailey $500 out of my pocket and Kelly did likewise. I left the farm with $93,750. When we released you at Norman, Kelly and I separated. I drove via Chickasha to Amarillo, thence to Denver. My wife was in Portland, Oregon, where I communicated with her, advising her to return to Denver immediately. I put $50,000 in a bag with surplus clothes, locked it, and left it with friends to keep until my wife called for it. I left instructions in a letter addressed to her in my post office box for her to rent an apartment upon arrival and to leave the address in that box.… When I was alone in the apartment my wife had rented, I put $41,000 in the same bag with the $50,000. I probably spent about $2,000 all told and had $700 on me when I was arrested three days after returning to Denver. I told my wife when I left the apartment on the date of my arrest that there was over $90,000 in a locked bag in the clothes closet.

  I did not authorize her to pay any money to anyone after my arrest, with the exception of $200 to a trusty by whom I sent a message warning her to leave.

  He said he had no idea how much she spent, or was bilked out of, while she was on the road for sixteen months eluding capture, but that she had never been extravagant.

  Because he had stopped communication with her after his arrest, Bates didn’t know that Clara Feldman had led Urschel, Fitzpatrick and some law enforcement officers to three sites where she had buried portions of the ransom money outside Portland, Oregon, in Washington State and California. Her five-year sentence for conspiracy in the case was then reduced to probation. Nevertheless, nearly $60,000 was still unaccounted for.

  * * *

  In 1939, three hundred of Boss Shannon’s neighbors in Wise County sent a petition to President Roosevelt seeking clemency, but Roosevelt denied it because Shannon hadn’t served the ten years necessary to be considered for parole. Five years later, when he had, Roosevelt reduced his sentence and he was released from prison.

  On his release, he continued to press his innocence with anyone who’d listen. He told reporters, “I’m just as innocent as that dog. I did what I did because I couldn’t help myself.… Kelly and Bates, they’re the ones who did the kidnapping.… We had to do what they told us.”

  He told reporters his wife had been writing to him every week and he was trying desperately to get her out, but was having no success. He said Kelly was writing him monthly. “At first, I thought I’d never answer him, but he’s in there for life and will probably never get out. I can’t hold anything against him.

  “I never would have gotten out if it hadn’t been for Mr. Roosevelt. Now there was a president for you. A fine man and close to the common people. I wrote him letter after letter, and I’ll say this much for him. I never wrote one that he didn’t answer,” said Boss.

  * * *

  By the mid-1940s Al Bates’s health was in serious decline. The lack of sun and exercise and the rich, fatty prison diet were taking a toll on his heart, as they would on many others on the island. He was experiencing chest pains, probably angina, and was taking daily medication for it.

  Bates had a mild heart attack on March 24, 1948. He was then admitted to the prison hospital on Alcatraz. Two days later, he had a more serious attack, from which he was not expected to recover. The doctor told the warden to notify Bates’s family, but Bates countermanded the order, saying that he wanted no one to be notified.


  From his hospital bed, Bates clung to life for months, but his condition worsened. By June he was wracked with pain, pleading with the doctors for medication that would ease his suffering, but they declined to up the dosage.

  Prison officials were hoping that on his deathbed, Bates might reveal the location of the still-unrecovered ransom money. In exchange for his promise to try to extract the information, Kelly was allowed to visit his old partner regularly, sometimes sleeping in a bedside chair to help him get through the night.

  On July 4, Bates awoke at 3:30 a.m. in a tranquil, pain-free state. He asked the attendant for a cigarette. He smoked it calmly. Finishing it, he stubbed it out, closed his eyes, fell back asleep and died.

  The headline on his obituary read, Urschel Kidnapper Takes Ransom Secret to Grave.

  Ten years later, James Bennett would allow Kelly’s transfer off the island back to Leavenworth, as his health had succumbed to the harsh conditions on The Rock. Even then, after eighteen years in prison, his reputation held, and any leniency in his case had failed to materialize. When word of his impending transfer was made public, the county attorney from Fannin County, Texas, protested that Kelly should not be transferred or paroled lest he be free to “further prey on the innocent citizens of this country. Never again do we want to see the terrible destruction that was wreaked on this nation by the gangsters of Kelly’s ilk.” He claimed that Kelly had robbed the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Ladonia, Texas, and during the holdup he “machine-gunned the town, leaving bullet holes which have not been erased.”

  The Oklahoma City sheriff reminded everyone involved in the case that he could still file charges against Kelly for robbery on the night of the kidnapping—taking money from Urschel and Jarrett—and those charges could still result in convictions carrying the death penalty. Kelly knew this was an empty threat because the statute of limitations had run out on that charge. Still, because the sheriff had filed detainers against Kelly, should he be released, they served as a hindrance to his possible parole.

  Hoover wrote to the FBI office in Oklahoma City advising them to “be certain we watch closely and take steps to see Kelly does not get parole. We can expect anything from Bennett’s outfit.” Years earlier, Father Joe Clark had traveled to Washington to personally meet with Hoover and begged him to consider parole for Kelly. He was politely dismissed, but for his efforts he was put under the watchful eye of the Bureau’s agents.

  “Watch closely and endeavor to thwart efforts of this priest who should be attending to his own business instead of trying to turn loose on society such mad dogs,” said Hoover.

  Urschel notified the parole board that he wanted to appear at any hearing in which Kelly’s parole was being considered. But he was selective in his vindictiveness. Years later, when Bailey petitioned for parole, Urschel supported him, as did Kirkpatrick, who told the parole board that Bailey had nothing to do with the kidnapping and everybody involved knew it. Bailey was paroled in 1962 and was immediately arrested by Kansas authorities for his role in the Memorial Day prison break that had occurred almost thirty years earlier, in 1933.

  The governor pardoned him in 1965. He moved to Joplin, Missouri, where, using the skills he perfected doing time at Alcatraz, he went to work as a skilled cabinetmaker. Urschel and Kirkpatrick had arranged the job for him, as well as subsidized housing at the local YMCA. He lived an uneventful life there until his death at age ninety-one in March 1979.

  Urschel’s largesse also extended to Kathryn’s daughter, Pauline. Left without parents or grandparents at the end of the kidnapping trial, Urschel arranged to pay anonymously for her schooling through college. Judge Vaught administered the account, never revealing the donor, whose identity did not come to light until years after his death.

  On June 1, 1951, Kelly boarded a prison railcar with several other inmates from Alcatraz and made the journey back to Union Station in Kansas City, the scene of so many notorious activities of the gangster era nearly twenty years earlier. From there he was transferred, without incident, to Leavenworth.

  After years of living in a single cell, he had trouble adjusting to life in Leavenworth with five cellmates.

  He got a job as a clerk and was able to earn money for commissary items, which he saved up and sent to Kathryn. He was also allowed to write her longer letters, and more often.

  And he could read uncensored newspapers and listen to the radio which he so loved, though the great jazz and blues which served as the soundtrack to his adventures in crime were increasingly being eclipsed by rhythm and blues, country western and something they were calling rock ’n roll, which the younger inmates inexplicably loved.

  But the years on Alcatraz had ruined his health. He was in and out of the prison hospital with heart and respiratory problems. On New Year’s Day 1951, he wrote to Kathryn from his hospital bed.

  I got up for about five minutes today but I was a lot weaker than I thought so I had to crawl back in bed. I think in another week I’ll be able to go back to work.… Like you said, Angel, after this is over we will be immune to anything and nothing can hurt us … Excuse the poor notes lately, sugar, because your husband isn’t up to doing a very good job of writing just now. I’ll do better next week. I’ll write as usual Sunday and in the meantime, I’ll be thinking of you and loving you with all my heart. My love to your Mother and lots of kisses to my adorable wife.

  Yours,

  Geo

  On July 17, 1954, Kelly was checked into the prison hospital suffering from chest pains and shortness of breath, most likely from a heart attack. The prison doctors gave him a shot of morphine and put him on oxygen. By midnight, the pains intensified. Shortly after, he began to vomit and suffocate. Twenty minutes later he was dead.

  He was fifty-four years old. It was his birthday.

  Leavenworth authorities notified Kathryn at the Alderson Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, where she and her mother were being held. She arranged to have his body shipped to Boss Shannon, who was back at the farm in Paradise.

  She wrote the warden asking for a keepsake from his personal effects.

  “I thought you might be able to mail a few little keepsakes of his personal property home for me,” she wrote. “I know he had a fountain pen he loved, which he wrote me with, that I would like to have.”

  Boss buried the infamous machine gunner in the family plot at Cottondale Community Cemetery. His headstone was immediately stolen by souvenir hunters, as would several others that he replaced it with.

  The news reports of his death and the obituaries that followed it described him as “the most notorious of the hoodlums who terrorized the Midwest,” a man who could write his name on a wall with a machine gun, and who pleaded, “Don’t shoot, G-men!” at his arrest in Memphis.

  He would be remembered throughout history for something he never was, things he never did and words he never said.

  EPILOGUE

  After George Kelly’s death, Kathryn and her mother continued to serve their time and protest their innocence from prison in West Virginia. Also serving time there was Mildred Sisk Gillars, who was convicted in 1949 of treason. Gillars was the notorious “Axis Sally” who had done radio broadcasts for the Nazis during the war.

  Gillars introduced Kathryn to her attorney, James J. Laughlin, who went to work on her behalf seeking parole, which Hoover continued to oppose and Urschel continued to fight.

  Laughlin then changed strategies and asked for a new trial, claiming that the government had used false evidence to tie Kathryn to the threatening letters that had been sent to Urschel. Laughlin also charged that during the trials, Kathryn and Ora Shannon suffered from “inadequate assistance of counsel, use of testimony known to be false, denial of compulsory service of process, and conduct of the trial in an atmosphere which prevented a fair and impartial trial.”

  Perhaps fearing that his files did contain evidence of false testimony, Hoover refused to release them. The government’s case was further hampered by the i
nexplicable fact that no transcript of the original trial could be located.

  Much to the surprise of Kathryn and her mother, the frustrated judge granted their request for a new trial and released them on a $10,000 bond on June 16, 1959.

  A new trial was never scheduled, in part because the Justice Department and Hoover wanted to avoid embarrassment over the content of their files and their conduct in the case. So Kathryn and her mother remained free.

  Kathryn took a job at the Oklahoma County Poor Farm, where she earned $200 a month, which she used to support her mother.

  She continued to proclaim her innocence and that of her mother. She died in Tulsa in 1985. She was eighty-one. Ora had died five years earlier at age ninety-one.

  * * *

  Urschel went back to running his oil company and did everything he could to put the ordeal behind him and avoid publicity of any sort—and instructed his offspring to do the same. He continued to secretly fund Pauline’s education through college, providing her with money for tuition, room and board and clothing.

  He and Berenice traveled the world collecting antiques and fine art. He served on a number of boards and helped his stepson, Tom Slick Jr., establish the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education. The research center, now called the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, is one of the largest independent biomedical research institutes in the world.

  Urschel died on September 26, 1970, four months after Berenice. He was eighty.

  * * *

  In 1958, the legendary B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman released his classic underground hit Machine Gun Kelly. In it, the murderous, machine-gun-wielding Charles Bronson, in his first leading role, is manipulated by his domineering wife into kidnapping the child of a millionaire. The film has little in common with the actual facts of the Urschel kidnapping, but it seared the image of a violent, psychopathic George Kelly into the popular consciousness that persists today. Made in just eight days, the film launched the career of Bronson, who for years was one of Hollywood’s highest paid actors.