He was taken to a farm, he was certain. Roosters crowed. He could hear pigs squealing. He had been given water to drink in a battered tin cup. Well water, he guessed. He could hear the well’s pulley squeak. The water tasted strongly of minerals. When his blindfold loosened after several days, he was able to snatch glimpses of the shack where he was held. Jones made a sketch. Urschel nodded. It was close.
Jones pushed for more. An airplane passed overhead twice each day, Urschel remembered, in the mornings around nine and the afternoons at five or six. Jones’s interest grew. Airline schedules could be checked. Finally, Urschel remembered a terrific rainstorm the Saturday night before his release. He had asked his guard—a young man, he thought, not one of the kidnappers—whether it was a tornado. “No,” the man had replied. “But they have a lot of those down in Oklahoma.”
Jones smiled. “That was a plant,” he said. “You weren’t north of Oklahoma, you were south of it.” He leaned forward. “Now I want you to think hard, Mr. Urschel. This may be the most important question of all the ones I’ve asked you here today, so take your time before you answer it. Did you hear the airplane the night of that windstorm?”
Urschel closed his eyes, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m sure I didn’t.”
Jones smiled. “For a man who was blindfolded and chained,” he said, “I’d say you saw one helluva lot.”
15
Jones’s debriefing of Charles Urschel became famous within the Bureau, and for years afterward, while rarely crediting Jones by name, Hoover cited his work as a shining example of the FBI’s “scientific” approach to crime solving. In fact, as canny as Jones’s deductions proved, they proved unnecessary. As Jones launched a furious effort to find a North Texas farm that matched Urschel’s description, the Fort Worth detective, Ed Weatherford, had persuaded agents in Dallas that the Kellys were the kidnappers.
The morning after Urschel’s release, Weatherford coaxed a Dallas agent named Kelly Deaderick out to the town of Paradise, where they interviewed the woman who ran the town switchboard.
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She reported that Kathryn Kelly, whom she knew well, had been at the Shannon Ranch with her mother all week. Everyone in town was suspicious of the Kellys and their flashy cars and the twenty-dollar bills they threw around like confetti, she said. The man at the telegraph office said much the same thing. He said Kathryn boasted that her husband was a bank robber.
Agent Deaderick returned to Dallas convinced they were onto something. He called and briefed Gus Jones. But Jones continued to ignore the Kellys; he had secured a plane from Phillips Petroleum and was busy flying agents across North Texas, trying to find the farm Urschel described. Despite all Weatherford had learned, an FBI case summary prepared August 5 made no mention of the Kellys. The Dallas office’s frustration peaked two days later when its number two, Dwight McCormack, wrote a report summarizing the evidence. In place of a title for his memo, McCormack put an argument: “Investigation of activities of George Kelly and gang at Fort Worth and Paradise, Texas, indicates strong possibility they were involved in Urschel kidnapping.”
Still, Jones didn’t listen. He continued peppering the Dallas office with requests for airline schedules and weather reports all across Oklahoma and North Texas. FBI legend, and Jones’s own version of events, holds that it was only after a rigorous analysis of this data that the Paradise area was identified as the kidnappers’ probable hideout. In fact, what was happening was something more subtle: each time Jones asked for data, the Dallas office checked conditions at Paradise and pointed out how they fit Urschel’s descriptions. The clincher came late on Wednesday, August 9, when Dallas forwarded data on rain patterns at Paradise. They fit Urschel’s memory exactly.
At last, Jones saw the light and ordered the Dallas office to reconnoiter the Shannon Ranch. Early the next morning, Thursday, August 10, Ed Weatherford drove an FBI agent named Ed Dowd to the town of Decatur, five miles from Paradise, where they interviewed an officer at Boss Shannon’s bank. Dowd became convinced of the officer’s honesty and decided to take a risk. He explained that Shannon might be mixed up in the Urschel kidnapping. The bank man called in his credit investigator, and Dowd laid out a map Urschel had drawn of a small shack. The investigator said he knew just such a shack on Shannon’s property.
A plan was devised. The bank officer drew up a meaningless document for Shannon to sign. The credit investigator said he would take Dowd to the ranch and ask Shannon to sign the document; Dowd could masquerade as a bank examiner. Dowd slid into the man’s Ford coupe and was taken along bumpy dirt roads to the Shannon Ranch, where they found Boss Shannon’s son Armon standing outside his shack. While the credit investigator talked with Armon, Dowd asked for a drink of water. Armon helped him draw it from the well. Dowd noticed that the well’s pulley squeaked. The water had a mineral taste. Armon’s wife emerged from the shack and offered everyone a plate of freshly cut watermelon. After a moment Dowd rose and wandered inside the house. It matched Urschel’s description exactly. Afterward, Dowd raced back to Dallas and reported his findings to Gus Jones in Oklahoma City.
Jones decided to raid the Shannon farm the next day, Friday, August 11. When Urschel demanded to come, Jones reluctantly consented. Everyone rendezvoused Friday afternoon in Denton, north of Dallas. There were fourteen men in all: Jones and three Dallas agents, four detectives from Fort Worth led by Ed Weatherford, four Dallas cops, plus Urschel and an Oklahoma City detective. By the time they reached Decatur, the light was fading. Jones stopped the caravan and gathered the men around him.
“Boys, we’ve got about twenty-six miles to go over slow roads,” Jones said. “We might reach the place before dark, but even if we did I doubt we’d be able to finish the job before it got black.” He dropped to one knee and drew a map of the Shannon Ranch in the dirt. “This is the way the place is laid out,” Jones said. “There is only one road into it, and that’s as plain as the devil. We can’t creep up on the place because it’s so flat you can see an ant a mile off. The only way to get in there is to just bang straight in, and for that we need daylight . . . I’ve done enough shooting in my time not to want to go barging into a strange place where the odds are all on the other side. My judgment is to back off, go down to Fort Worth and get a little sleep, then hit this place right at sunrise.”
16
In Oklahoma City that night the SAC, Ralph Colvin, was so confident of success he cabled Hoover, WE CAN’T GO WRONG. EXPECT IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS BY NOON SATURDAY.
17
In Fort Worth, Jones and his men ate dinner and grabbed a few hours of sleep at the Black-stone Hotel. At 4:00 A.M. they reconvened in the hotel’s parking lot and drove to the town of Rhome, seventeen miles from Decatur, where they waited for ninety minutes to be joined by a local sheriff. When the sheriff hadn’t arrived by six, Jones decided to proceed without him.
On radio station WBAP the new day began with a song by Cecil Gill, the Yodeling Country Boy. As the eastern horizon reddened, the three-car caravan sped north along dirt roads toward Paradise, clouds of dust billowing in its wake. The Shannon house was dark when the lead car skidded to a stop in front. Jones leaped out carrying a submachine gun, with Charles Urschel behind him; amazingly, the agents allowed Urschel to carry a sawed-off shotgun. They ran around the side of the house, where they encountered Boss Shannon pulling on his suspenders.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” Shannon demanded.
“That’s the old man who guarded me!” Urschel blurted out.
As agents trained their guns on Shannon, Jones glimpsed something odd in the rear yard: a makeshift cot atop two sawhorses. Someone was sleeping on the cot. Jones ran toward the figure, machine gun ready. As he approached, he saw it was a man, sleeping in his underwear. A pair of pants and a white shirt lay at the foot of the cot, alongside a Winchester rifle and a Colt .45 pistol. The man wasn’t moving. Jones crept up and looked down on the face. He recognized the features—the wavy hair, the concrete jaw-line—and quietly cursed in surprise.
Jones brought the tommy gun’s barrel down inches from the man’s face until the tip brushed against his nose. The sleeping man’s nose twitched. His eyelashes fluttered, and suddenly Jones was staring into the blinking brown eyes of the man who had mentored Verne Miller, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker brothers, the man who had emerged as the primary suspect in the massacre case. It was Harvey Bailey. For several seconds, as they peered at each other in the dim light of dawn, neither spoke. Bailey’s eyes took in the submachine gun, now pointed at his chest. His Colt lay on the ground, inches from his right hand. A Dallas agent, Charles Winstead, was standing to one side.
“Go ahead!” Winstead snapped. “Reach for it!”
Bailey didn’t move.
“Get up, Harvey,” Jones finally said. “Who’s here with you?”
Bailey said nothing.
“Harvey,” Jones went on, “if a head bobs up anywhere around here, or a shot is fired, I promise I’ll cut you in two with this machine gun.”
“I’m here alone,” Bailey said. “You have me.” Slowly he sat up and stretched. A weak smile crossed his face. “Hell,” he said. “A fella’s gotta sleep sometimes.”
18
Agents poured into the Shannon house and its outbuildings, handcuffing the Shannon family. Kathryn’s mother, Ora Shannon, was fierce in her denials of wrongdoing. “Don’t you tell ’em nothing!” she snapped at her husband. It was no use. Gus Jones took the Shannons’ son Armon for what he called “a fatherly talk,” and the young man soon broke down and told him everything. It was the Kellys, he said—the Kellys and Albert Bates. And they were all long gone.
Harvey Bailey and the Shannons were taken to the Dallas jail, where Boss Shannon soon joined his son in a full confession. Hoping to catch the Kellys unaware, Jones managed to keep a lid on the story for almost seventy-two hours, but Monday night the news broke in the
Dallas Times-Herald,
and by the next morning it was all over the country. Most papers heralded Bailey as the mastermind behind the kidnapping, as well as the Kansas City Massacre. In fact, Bailey had nothing to do with the Urschel case. He had simply dropped by the Shannon Ranch, as he had done once or twice before at Kelly’s behest, because he needed a place to sleep.
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It was a lucky arrest, but the FBI’s luck was overflowing that weekend. Saturday afternoon, just hours after the Shannon raid, police arrested Albert Bates in a downtown Denver parking lot.
u
Bates, however, gave no useful information on the Kellys, or on the whereabouts of his share of the ransom money.
Thanks to Ed Weatherford, the hunt for the Kellys got off to a fast start. For two weeks an agent had been noting return addresses on the Shannons’ incoming mail—addresses that only now did the FBI begin running down. Two letters had come from Kathryn, one sent from St. Paul on August 4 and a second mailed from Madison, Wisconsin, three days later, bearing a return address of General Delivery, Indianapolis. An agent was assigned to watch the Indianapolis post office, while a bulletin describing the Kellys’ car was dispatched nationwide.
The first scent of the Kellys’ trail came in Cleveland, where on Sunday, August 13, agents inquired about a bill found at the Shannon Ranch from a Cleveland Cadillac agency. A salesman told agents the Kellys had visited him just three days earlier, on August 10, to pay off the balance on the Cadillac they were driving and to inquire about purchasing a new one. But they left before buying a new car, saying they were driving to Chicago. Agents in Chicago and Cleveland descended on garages and airline offices in both cities.
The hunt for Machine Gun Kelly had begun.
Years later Kelly told his son of the wondrous few days he and Kathryn enjoyed following delivery of the ransom money. He said they had fled across the Mexican border to Chihuahua, where they spent ten days lying in bed and drinking tequila. Kelly described how he had learned of Bailey’s arrest on the radio in his Mexican hotel room.
Kelly’s story, like so many he told, was pure fantasy, probably concocted to impress his son. In fact, after releasing Urschel outside of Oklahoma City on July 31, the Kellys drove north to St. Paul, where they rented an apartment and began looking up underworld contacts to launder the ransom money. Harry Sawyer’s partner, a casino owner named Jack Peifer, took $7,000 of it, charging Kelly 20 percent. Peifer, in turn, parceled out the money to a half-dozen runners to exchange the cash through area banks. Kelly took the proceeds and bought Kathryn a fur coat and jewelry, paying $1,150 for a bracelet of 234 tiny diamonds and $850 for a ring set with eight round diamonds.
From St. Paul the Kellys drove to Cleveland, where they were staying when they heard the news that the FBI had arrested several of Peifer’s confederates. They bought a Cadillac and drove it to Chicago, and then on to Des Moines. They were hiding at the Fort Des Moines Hotel when news broke of the arrests at the Shannon Ranch. Kathryn was enraged that her mother was now in custody and swore she would do anything to free her. From that point on, in fact, Kathryn seemed far more concerned about her mother’s welfare than her husband’s.
Determined to find a lawyer to represent her mother, Kathryn and Kelly drove south to West Texas, where Kathryn had relatives in the town of Coleman. On August 16, they arrived at a tumbledown ranch owned by Kathryn’s forty-three-year-old uncle, Cass Coleman. Kathryn got out of the car, lugging two leather cases containing the ransom. With her uncle’s help, they transferred the remaining money to a water jug and a bucket, then buried it beside a willow tree behind Coleman’s barn.
The next morning Kelly slept late while Kathryn drove to the town of Brownwood to buy a car. She returned that afternoon with a beat-up Chevy sedan. The next morning she left it with Kelly, and then left Kelly with her uncle, saying she was driving to Dallas to hire an attorney for her mother and would return in a few days. Cass Coleman, less than thrilled to find himself alone with a wanted man, deposited Kelly at another ranch, outside the neighboring town of Santa Ana, where a sixty-year-old farmer named Will Casey agreed to let Kelly stay in a vacant house on his property. Coleman brought Kelly bedsheets and cooking utensils, then sat back to await Kathryn’s return.