SALLISAW, OKLAHOMA
Men at some times are masters of their fate.
—JULIUS CAESAR (WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE)
Charley Floyd was stone dead but lawmen put handcuffs on him, anyway. Then they bound his legs with rope. It was as if they feared the Phantom Terror might come back to life and attempt yet another escape. Seconds after Choc died, Melvin Purvis hurried to the nearest telephone in the village of Clarkson. The other officers assumed he was summoning an ambulance to retrieve the corpse. However, when he returned, Purvis told them the only call he had made was to J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, D.C., dutifully to report that another public enemy had been felled.
By the time they removed Charley’s manacled body from the Conkle farm, a veil of evening fog shrouded the darkened field. Officers toted his body through the corn stubble and Choc rode silently into East Liverpool in a police car. It had been determined that he had fled without firing a single shot from either of his two fully loaded pistols. They carried the slain bandit to police chief McDermott’s Chevrolet. Choc was propped up in the backseat between Glenn Montgomery and Chester Smith, the marksman whose .32–20 Winchester rifle bullets had hit Floyd as he raced for the protection of the distant trees. Someone closed Choc’s eyelids. His head slumped forward on his chest. The drive from the farm to East Liverpool was less than ten miles, but the officers later said that it seemed to take an eternity. They drove in awkward silence down Sprucevale Road toward the town of Calcutta. Lamps burned in the windows of homes along the way. It was suppertime.
The police cars went directly to the Sturgis Funeral Home at 122 West Fifth Street, operated by E. G. Sturgis and his son Ernie, who also moonlighted as the county coroner. Frank A. Dawson, twenty-eight years old at the time, did much of the embalming at the funeral home. He had just returned from the barbershop when the officers carried Floyd from the garage entrance through a back door into a preparation room. “Give me a good haircut because I’ll probably be in the newspapers,” Dawson later recalled instructing the barber. He knew that if the G-men found their quarry, he would be called upon to prepare Floyd’s body.
“They had also just brought in a transient laborer they’d found dead in a field where they were building the airstrip,” recalled Dawson in 1979. “I took the clothes off both of them and threw them in a corner and began working on Floyd.” Later someone pitched the dead drifter’s clothing outside in the alley. Morbid citizens quickly pounced on the trash can and passed off the tattered clothing as Pretty Boy souvenirs. “Somebody, somewhere has a pair of shoes he thinks were Floyd’s,” remembered Dawson.
Police officers then cut Choc’s blue suit into scores of small swatches to give away as mementos. They removed $122 in cash from his pockets—twelve tens and two ones. The money would help defray the cost of preparing Floyd for burial. The ring that Ruby had given him and the watch with “Billy the Killer” Miller’s lucky fifty-cent piece attached were set aside for next of kin. Chester Smith and some of the others in on the chase took the spare .45 bullets from Floyd’s pockets for keepsakes. They found photos of Dempsey and Ruby tucked away inside Choc’s suit-coat pocket.
That evening, curiosity seekers and scoop-hungry reporters flocked to the Conkle farm, where forty-one-year-old Ellen Conkle announced she intended to keep the dollar bill Choc had given her for his last meal. “I have that dollar and I’m going to frame it,” she told them. “He [Floyd] seemed to know, as I appreciate now, that he was being hunted. He yelled to my brother when he saw the machines: ‘They’re after me!’”
For several days, the smiling widow obliged photographers who snapped pictures of her house and Stewart Dyke’s automobile still parked beside the corncrib. She posed with the tray bearing the plate of gnawed bones and a desert dish filled with rice pudding. Some people offered her as much as one hundred dollars just for the dinner plate. She refused. For two days, Mrs. Conkle even left the dishes unwashed. Then she packed them away along with the newspaper Floyd had read during his meal, as if they were treasured heirlooms. She also preserved the rocking chair that Charley had sat in while he ate.
In February 1935, nearly four months after Floyd died on her farm, Ellen Conkle received two letters from Ruby Floyd, thanking her for the hospitality she had showed Ruby’s former husband. “Charles was one of the nicest men you ever met if you only knew him,” wrote Ruby in her first letter. “If he had lived he would have repaid you a thousand times.” In her next letter, Ruby confided that one day she hoped to visit the farm where Charley had died. “I loved him so much and do hope that some day I am able to visit you and even come by the place where he died. He was not bad but he didn’t have a chance. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you feeding him because he really liked to eat. I am sending you my love and praying that God will reward you for your kindness.” Mrs. Conkle carefully packed away the letters. Ruby never came to the farm.
“I never dreamed our place would be the scene of anything like that,” Ellen Conkle explained to the reporters the same night Floyd died. Her sister-in-law, Florence Dyke, rejected a proposition from a stranger who coveted the powder puff Charley had used to camouflage his beard. Within hours of Floyd’s death, possemen and sightseers scooped up the ginger cookies and apples that had dropped from Choc’s pocket when he bolted across the field. By the time newsreel crews arrived on the scene from New York, rags fluttered from three stakes, marking the spot where Pretty Boy Floyd had fallen in his last attempt to elude the law.
In East Liverpool, large crowds gathered outside the Sturgis Funeral Home. “The hunt is over! Floyd is dead!” Purvis announced to the crush of reporters. Asked who had actually killed Choc, Purvis replied, “We all did.” Chief McDermott admitted that “it was just luck” that they even got Floyd. “He died like a rat,” the seasoned cop muttered. Then Purvis issued a formal press statement:
The killing of Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd brings to a close the relentless search and effort on the part of the department of investigation of the United States department of justice.
The search was directed by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the department, from Washington and I have been in constant contact with him by telephone and telegraph. Mr. Hoover has been particularly anxious as have we all to bring about the apprehension of this and other similar hoodlums.
Mr. Hoover and all the special agents were particularly interested in Floyd because he killed one of our men in the Kansas City massacre of June 17, 1933.
From his office in Washington, Hoover revealed for the first time that on four separate instances, Floyd had offered to turn himself in if the government promised not to seek the death penalty against him. Hoover divulged that Floyd’s last plea for immunity from a death sentence came just two weeks before he was killed. However, word was sent back to Buffalo by family members that no promises would be made and that Floyd had to face the consequences for what he had done. With Floyd out of the way, Hoover quickly let it be known that the title of public enemy number one now belonged to Lester Gillis, better known as Baby Face Nelson.
Little more than a month later, on November 28, Nelson’s bullet-riddled body was found in a roadside ditch outside Chicago after he engaged federal agents in a gunfight. And in January 1935, two more of Hoover’s targets, Ma Barker and her outlaw son Fred, long sought as killers and kidnappers, would die during a six-hour machine-gun battle at their Florida hideout. In 1936, Hoover—embarrassed by criticism for having never made an arrest himself—went to New Orleans, where he and some agents captured Alvin Karpis, a former Barker associate. These actions led to an avalanche of publicity favorable for Hoover. An era clearly was drawing to a close.
The outlaw of the hour in October of 1934, however, was still Pretty Boy Floyd. Inside the funeral home, Choc’s body was photographed. Several policemen stood behind the metal embalming table for the picture session. He was also fingerprinted, despite the fact Charley had sanded down his fingertips in an attempt to obliterate his prints. A pair of local physicians, Drs. Ed Miskall and Roy Costello, performed the postmortem examination. Their official findings contained in the coroner’s report certified by Ernie Sturgis six weeks later, on December 1, 1934, listed the cause of death as internal hemorrhage. Newspaper extras hawked on the streets the evening of October 22, and the following day, mentioned at least fourteen or fifteen bullet wounds. The autopsy report mentioned only three gunshot wounds—“two through the chest and abdomen and one through the forearm.” There was never any doubt that the number of wounds reported in some newspapers was greatly inflated.
Little was made of the fact that an examination of Floyd’s body showed no sign of a bullet wound to his left shoulder, as was claimed by the government’s star witness in the Kansas City Massacre case. It was a missing link that definitely weakened the case against Floyd. The only noticeable bullet scars, other than the fresh death wounds, were in the foot, sustained during the shootout with Erv Kelley. To add to the confusion, a mysterious notation, reportedly in Ernie Sturgis’s handwriting, was casually penciled on the funeral record dated October 22. It stated:
4 wounds
shot in stomach
Many years later, Dawson told veteran East Liverpool Review reporter Bob Popp that “probably” two rifle bullets had entered Floyd’s body from the side, then crisscrossed and went into his abdomen. The wound on his right forearm may have been made by one of those bullets, according to Dawson. But no matter whether three or four bullets found their mark, for decades questions remained about who had actually shot Floyd and how the bandit had died.
Almost forty-five years after the autopsy, a controversial version of Floyd’s death that had been long discussed in East Liverpool emerged in the nation’s press. In 1979, Chester Smith, by then an eighty-four-year-old retired police captain, broke decades of silence concerning what he contended to be the true circumstances of the Floyd slaying. Smith claimed that after Pretty Boy lay wounded in the field, Melvin Purvis had actually ordered another of the federal agents at the scene to execute Floyd.
“Back away from that man. I want to talk to him,” Smith recalled Purvis yelling as the agent ran up to the fallen bandit. Smith remembered that Floyd, although wounded, was sitting upright while Purvis questioned him. “Were you in on the Kansas City Massacre?” demanded Purvis. Floyd spat back, “I wouldn’t tell you son of a bitch anything.” According to Smith, Purvis at that point turned to Agent Herman Hollis and barked the command “Fire into him!” Smith said Hollis obeyed. He leveled his service revolver and blasted Floyd once in the breastbone. Some of the subsequent news stories quoted Smith as saying that the agent used a tommy gun to dispatch Floyd.
“It all happened very quickly,” Smith told reporters. Shocked by the swiftness of the execution, Smith said he asked Purvis why he had ordered Floyd shot. “Mr. Hoover, my boss, told me to bring him in dead!” Smith recalled was the cavalier reply.
“It was a cover-up,” Smith told the Lisbon Morning Journal in October of 1979. “They [the FBI] wanted the credit,” Smith related during other interviews. “Purvis reported to Hoover that they had killed him so nobody could collect the reward.” A story headlined BLASTING A G-MAN MYTH, in the September 24, 1979, issue of Time magazine, quoted Smith as saying that “they didn’t want it to get out that he’d been killed that way.” Smith explained that he felt compelled to clear the air since he was the last of the eight lawmen involved in the celebrated deed.
Unbeknownst to Chester Smith, who passed away on October 23, 1984—just one day after the fiftieth anniversary of Floyd’s slaying—he was not the sole survivor from the Pretty Boy death squad. W. E. “Bud” Hopton, one of four special agents at the Conkle farm when Floyd went down under fire, was still alive in Tennessee.
A twenty-one-year FBI veteran, Hopton was livid when he saw the news stories branding Purvis as Floyd’s chief executioner. A letter of protest was quickly fired off to the editors of Time, taking issue with Smith’s claims. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” wrote Hopton, who was twenty-eight at the time of Choc’s demise. “The allegation that Purvis ordered an Agent to ‘Fire into Floyd’ as described…is absolutely false. The truth is that when the several members of the East Liverpool Police Department came up to where Floyd was lying on the ground, he had already been mortally wounded.” The retired agent also pointed out that Herman Hollis, who was slain in the gun battle with Baby Face Nelson just a month after Floyd was killed, was “not even present” during the Floyd manhunt. “I knew Herman Hollis, and he wasn’t there.”
In 1991, when the eighty-six-year-old Hopton was again asked about Chester Smith’s allegations, he remained just as vehement in his denial. “That’s baloney,” Hopton commented. “That’s a bunch of crap!” Hopton recalled that federal agents’ bullets, and not those fired by Smith, actually brought down Choc Floyd. “When he ran across the field, Sam [Agent McKee] and I just cut down on him with a submachine gun. We dropped him and then the police came running down there. We told them not to get too close to him, because as he came down, he rolled on his side. He was still trying to take aim at us, but Sam McKee was a wonderful shot. He sawed him off with a single shot. It was a single shot that hit the arm he had raised with a gun in his hand. Sam was a hell of a good shot.”
In East Liverpool, many people who sided with Chester Smith, including his daughters, stood by Smith’s version of the Floyd story. “Our father just wanted to set things straight,” explained Naomi Nortrup, Smith’s eldest daughter. “He was tired of reading and hearing those things that weren’t true. He wanted it all said to get it over with. He wanted some peace of mind.”
Like the Kansas City Massacre, the true facts surrounding Floyd’s final moments on Ellen Conkle’s farm remain forever clouded by disputed tales of his death. Unlike Chester Smith, however, not all of those who were present when Choc Floyd passed into the ranks of the departed were able to find peace of mind. One of those was Melvin Purvis.
The famous FBI agent who tracked down Dillinger and Pretty Boy lasted in Hoover’s service for only ten more months after Floyd was killed. On August 5, 1935, Purvis retired from the FBI and headed west. The rumor out of Washington at the time was that Hoover had become jealous of Purvis grabbing all the headlines. The boss believed there was no excuse for anyone stealing limelight that he felt belonged on himself. Sources out of the capital reported that Hoover not only harassed his former golden boy but even assigned other agents to spy on Purvis. Many years later, Purvis family members publicly admitted that he and Hoover had become bitter enemies when the director attempted to push him into obscurity.
Purvis practiced law in San Francisco for three years. He also became involved in promotional campaigns of a variety of products, ranging from razor blades to cars. On a radio show he narrated for Post Toasties, he commanded the “Melvin Purvis Law and Order Patrol.” He invited youngsters to send in cereal box tops for Junior G-Man badges, whistles, and pistols. Purvis also wrote his autobiography, American Agent, published by Doubleday in 1936. During World War II, he became active in military intelligence work, gathering evidence to use against captured Nazis. After his discharge, Purvis went home to his law practice and ownership of a radio station and newspaper.
On February 29, 1960, at his residence in Timmonsville, South Carolina, the fifty-six-year-old Purvis, despondent because of poor health, picked up the same automatic pistol he carried when tracking down Dillinger and Floyd. His wife, Rosanne, was in the garden outside their home. She heard the shot ring out. In East Liverpool, when he was told that Purvis had committed suicide, Chester Smith frowned and shook his head. “I wonder if that was on his mind all these years,” Smith said to his daughter.
However, on the evening of October 22, 1934, twenty-five years before Purvis took his own life, he was still consumed with a sense of triumph. No ghosts had yet materialized. As he packed his bags at the Traveler’s Hotel and prepared to take on the next assignment, he basked in the glory. Outside, on the crowded downtown streets, newsboys screamed out, “Pretty Boy Floyd Killed by Police!”
A few blocks away at the funeral home, Frank Dawson completed embalming the body. The mortician shaved Choc and combed back his hair. He took note of Floyd’s manicured nails and neatly plucked eyebrows. Then Dawson summoned a local pottery worker who made a death-mask mold of Choc’s face. A number of cream-colored plaster casts were later distributed, like macabre hunting trophies, among some of the officers and Dawson’s friends.
In a telegram sent to Chief McDermott, filed at Sallisaw at 8:05 P.M. that evening, Mamie Floyd, Choc’s widowed mother, instructed the funeral home how to handle her boy’s body. McDermott gave the telegram to news reporters.
I am the mother of Charles Floyd. If he has been killed, turn body over to reliable undertaker and forbid any pictures being taken of him and bar the public. Pass this request to the United States department of justice. Hold body until I arrive.
Mrs. Walter Floyd
But Mamie’s wire arrived too late, and her wishes would not have been honored in any case. The photographs had been taken. Already curious crowds were jamming the Sturgis Funeral Home to see the man who had helped take their minds off the Depression, if only for a short time. Charley, with freshly rouged cheeks, was laid out on a small cot in the front room. A blanket of crushed velvet was pulled up to his chin. He looked in repose as though he were asleep. An estimated twenty thousand people, in all likelihood a greatly exaggerated number, filed through the parlor in double lines from 8:30 P.M. to 11:30 P.M., according to Dawson’s best guesses. Others said the crowd was only half that number. Men in overalls and business suits, women carrying babies, and students shuffled past for a quick glimpse of the desperado. Police officers and firemen tried to keep order. At times, the crowd got out of hand. “They tore down the hedges and ruined the carpet,” recalled Dawson. “They even came in through the coal chute.”
During the night, Mamie Floyd decided she could not afford to go to East Liverpool to claim Choc’s body. She and the rest of the family would wait for Charley at Sallisaw. “The prince of the underworld,” as one newspaper called him, would come home alone. A hat was passed around town and money was wired to Ohio. Even the Sallisaw bank that Charley and Birdwell had robbed two years before chipped in to bring the outlaw home. Along with the cash found on Choc, there was enough to cover rail shipment of the body and the other expenses. The bill for embalming and a shipping coffin came to $179. On the Sturgis record book Choc’s occupation was listed as “bandit.” The cost to transport the corpse was $71.18, two times the regular first-class fare.
On Tuesday, October 23, Frank Dawson and Ernie Sturgis prepared Charley Floyd for his final trip. They placed him in a cloth-lined shipping box, encased with unfinished pine. On one end was penciled the word Head. Tacked to the side of the box was an envelope containing documents signed by the city registrar, attesting to the fact that inside the pine coffin were the remains of Charles Arthur Floyd. The undertakers drove the body to the East Liverpool station, near the river. They watched as the crate was shoved inside a Pennsylvania Railroad baggage car. In Wellsville, just a short distance down the track, Adam Richetti wept when jailers showed him the newspapers and finally convinced him that his partner was dead. “I don’t see why he stuck around so long,” Richetti wondered out loud. Later that day, schools were dismissed early so the children could watch Richetti as he was transferred to the ancient county jail at Lisbon. Eventually, he would be returned to Kansas City to stand trial for murder for his alleged role in the Kansas City Massacre.
At 11:30 A.M. the train pulled away. By 2:00 P.M. a crowd of porters saw Floyd off in Pittsburgh as the coffin was shifted to the St. Louis Flyer. The train chugged westward, through the afternoon and evening, across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The next day, it crossed the Mississippi River at St. Louis, stopping at Union Station. The box was moved to another train, which continued through the Missouri countryside, virtually following the same route Choc had taken a decade before when he was sentenced to prison. As the train passed below the bluffs at Jefferson City, thousands of convicts heard the whistle sound. It was high noon.
Arriving at Kansas City, the train pulled into the sheds just a few hundred yards from the scene of the massacre. Coincidentally, a federal grand jury was meeting at that same time to consider indictments against conspirators in the attempt to free Frank Nash. After a fifty-minute stop, only a few workmen were on hand when Choc’s coffin was loaded once more, this time on a Kansas City Southern train, for the last leg of the trip. The train lurched forward and built up speed, heading due south.
Not everyone in Oklahoma lamented Floyd’s passing. Most law officers, editorial writers, and city folks rejoiced at the news. So did the bankers. The government’s aggressive war on bank robbers and bandits would produce swift results. In 1935, only nine banks in the state were robbed. And, in the four-year-period from 1936 to 1940, bandits were able to loot only ten more banks. Many of those who had been victimized or harassed by Pretty Boy were delighted with the news of his death. “I would much rather done it myself,” said a somber Howard Kelley, brother of Erv Kelley, the former lawman who Choc had gunned down near Bixby in 1932. “I approve of it one hundred percent. I am glad he is gone.”
Charley Floyd’s admirers outnumbered his detractors, however. In country villages scattered over the Oklahoma hills and in oil patch towns, people who had followed the bandit’s exploits for years had a difficult time accepting his death. They said they would not truly believe Charley was dead until they saw his body. His death seemed to symbolize for many folks, particularly the poor, something in themselves that was now gone.
Ruby Floyd remained outwardly calm the evening of October 22 when the first news stories broke. Reporters, armed with the fresh wire reports from Ohio, began showing up at her father’s home near Bixby, where she and Dempsey lived. “I haven’t a statement to make at this time,” Ruby said, sobbing. “When the information was phoned me at Okmulgee, where I was visiting, I didn’t believe it. They have been wrong so many times. Now I don’t know what to say.”
Several reporters turned to Dempsey, Choc’s nine-year-old son, who was busy with a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. “Who told you your daddy was dead?” a reporter asked Dempsey. “He can’t answer your questions,” interrupted Maggie Hardgraves, Ruby’s stepmother. “The boy feels bad, of course, and there is no statement he could make.”
When she regained her composure, Ruby managed a few words. “It is as I expected,” she whispered. “It is as I have told him countless times.” Then she had some friends drive her into Bixby so she could telephone Mamie Floyd at Sallisaw. After placing the call, Ruby broke into tears again. Her friends whisked her away in their truck, telling reporters their questions would have to keep.
“I guess it’s better as it is,” Bradley Floyd said when another reporter came to his Earlsboro home to tell him that his brother had been killed. Bradley and Bessie prepared their boys for the trip to Sallisaw to comfort Mamie and bury Choc.
Sequoyah County was in a state of mourning. “The pall of death fell over Sallisaw as a sorrowing hill country people heard the news that they had expected from day to day for a long time,” reported the Muskogee Phoenix. “It was a matter of speculation for street corner gossipers and hillfolk in and about Sallisaw today whether they would ever again see the sleek features of Charles A. ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd. It was hard for them to realize that at last the unswerving forces of justice had laid him cold and lifeless.”
Earlier that week, when Mamie first heard that her son had been killed, she tried to remain stoic. “It can’t be true,” she told a reporter. “Charles was not a bad boy at heart and he has always warned all boys to steer clear of violations of the law.” Friends and family gathered around Mamie at the small frame house where she lived with her youngest child, Mary. “They shot my brother down like a dog,” cried Mary, whose husband, Perry Lattimore, had died at age twenty-five of a heart attack only two months before, leaving her with their small son and daughter to raise on her waitress wages. “Charley never had a chance like other boys. He worked in the sand hills for a cornbread living. We have always been poor. Charley craved a few luxuries. That was his downfall.”
Shortly after 2:00 A.M. on Friday, October 26, the train arrived at Sallisaw. Folks were waiting for its arrival. The sound of the whistle carried over the hills and through the hollows.
“I’ve never forgotten those last days at Sallisaw when we buried my dad,” recalled Dempsey Floyd almost six decades later. “One thing that really stands out in my mind was that everybody got up in the middle of the night and went down to the station to meet him. I can remember that train coming and it kept blowing its whistle. Over and over again, that damn ol’ whistle blew. We were all standing there by the tracks. The whole family was there. I looked around us and there was a throng of people. Friends, neighbors, it seemed like everyone came to show their respect. It was very emotional. And, to this very day, whenever I hear a train whistle, that whole scene comes to my mind and I’m taken back to that time.”
Bradley and E. W. Floyd, with tears streaming down their faces, stepped forward to help the undertaker from the Moore Funeral Home unload the coffin. They grabbed the metal handles on the crate and gently lifted it from the baggage car.
The mourners returned to their homes in silence as the mortician took Choc to the funeral parlor to prepare him for burial. More than one thousand people walked by the coffin at the mortuary that day before the undertaker brought Choc’s body to Mary’s home. They laid his coffin in the front room. All of Charley’s brothers and sisters, his grandparents, an array of other relatives, and the closest family friends came. Ruby and Dempsey arrived from Bixby. Pies, cakes, and covered dishes filled the tiny kitchen. Bradley went to the open casket and gently undressed Choc from the waist up to see for himself exactly what had been done. The family sat with the body all through the night.
On Saturday, Jess Ring brought his family to the house and Bradley opened up Choc’s shirt again to show him the wounds. Dempsey, in the suit he had worn when he and his mother performed their stage show, took each of the young Ring girls by their hand and led them to the coffin to view his father’s remains. “Little Jackie gave us girls a red rose and our father lifted all of us up so we could see Charley’s bullet wounds,” remembered Ruth Morgan, one of the Ring daughters.
A huge crowd congregated outside. The city police chief hired extra men to help control all the people. Two signs were tacked on the front of the house: NO VISITORS ALLOWED. George Cheek, a nominee for county sheriff, sat in his car with a shotgun in his lap. He warned the curious to leave the family alone. Ironically, a petition opposing clemency for outlaw Matt Kimes was circulated throughout the crowd. Friends of the family took up another collection to buy flowers for the funeral. Others went out in the country and picked wild autumn blooms to take to Choc’s grave. That Saturday afternoon in nearby Fort Smith, Arkansas, a sedan pulled up in front of Lee’s Flowers and Seeds. Two men in suits walked into the shop and bought every blossom and stem in stock. They put their cash on the counter. “Send it all to Sallisaw,” one of the strangers told the clerk. “Send it to Pretty Boy.”
Charley Floyd’s funeral was the largest in Oklahoma history. It took place on Sunday, October 28. It was an Indian summer day, unusually hot for mid-fall. A crowd estimated at over twenty thousand showed up. Other estimates placed the number at closer to forty thousand people.
A grave site waited for Charley out in Akins, at the cemetery where the year before he had shown his mother the exact spot he wished to be buried. He would rest next to his father and baby brother. Sallisaw was preparing to host an American Legion convention, so the streets were fittingly draped in bunting. At 1:15 P.M., the casket was placed in a hearse for its last ride. Family members followed in their cars. A five-mile-long cortege of automobiles, trucks, and buggies followed the hearse down the country roads leading to Akins. Five cars were packed with floral displays. People came, according to newspaper accounts, from twenty states, some in taxis, others in buses carrying Sunday school classes. Many left their cars parked along the road and walked to the graveyard. One farmer claimed he actually walked thirty miles just to see them lower Choc’s coffin into the ground. It took the hearse an hour to make the seven-mile drive.
“You could look out from Sallisaw and see great clouds of dust rising up from around Akins,” recalled William Burns, at the time a teenaged neighbor of Mamie Floyd. “The sun was actually blocked by all the dust.”
The unruly crush of sightseers turned the funeral into a spectacle. People fainted in the October heat. There were fistfights. Officers labored to keep the traffic moving. The Floyds became so enraged, they cursed at the gawking strangers whose cars blocked the way. One of the Floyds even threw a rock through the window of an obnoxious driver who tried to cut in front of the procession. Another show-off driver received a bloody nose from one of Choc’s uncles.
Two dozen special guards waited at the cemetery. One of them had a .30–.30 rifle hidden in the brush, “just in case one of them newspaper fellas thinks he’s smart and tries to fly over here in an airplane,” he told the others. Some of the mob had camped overnight in the graveyard. Many brought picnic baskets. They sat on tombstones eating their lunches. Jugs of corn liquor were seen being passed around. The swarm of people overflowed into nearby pastures. Fences were torn down to make room for parked cars. “There ain’t nothin’ better than a good funeral to draw out folks in these parts,” one grizzled old man told an Okalahoma News reporter. “That Floyd, he was a great fella, he was.”
When they finally arrived at the Akins Cemetery, family members had to battle their way through the crowd to reach the log arbor where the service was held. Choc’s sister Mary yanked a news photographer out of a tree. Deputies chased outsiders from the cane-bottomed chairs reserved for the Floyds. An armed lawman stood at the head of the casket in a futile attempt to keep order. The pallbearers, all men who had grown up with Choc, removed the coffin, covered with a blanket of carnations, from the hearse. They carried it to the arbor. A quartet sang “God Will Take Care of You,” and the men’s choir from the Akins Baptist Church offered the standard hymns, “Old Rugged Cross,” “Rock of Ages,” and “Abide with Me.” The sobs of the family could be heard over the singers’ voices.
Reverend W. E. Rockett, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sallisaw, where twenty-seven members of the Floyd family worshipped every Sabbath, rose to admonish the thousands of people jammed around the arbor. He told them to show some respect to the family and the deceased. Then he delivered the eulogy, taking his text from John 19:30. “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up the ghost,” Rockett sermonized. “When he said, ‘It is finished,’ it meant that his life’s work in the form of man was ended,” explained Rockett. “It meant that he would walk the shores of Galilee and the hills no more. So it was with Charles Arthur Floyd when he was called upon to finish his work here on earth. It meant that never again would he return in this fleshly body to those loved ones who are some of the finest people it is my privilege to know.”
When the preacher concluded his remarks, long lines of people continued to pass by the coffin, until Mamie Floyd asked the undertaker to stop them. A young Indian girl tried to throw herself on the casket, but a law officer grabbed her and led her away. The casket was moved from the shelter to the Floyd plot, which had been dug through the hard shale. Choc’s body was slowly lowered into the earth. There were more prayers. “You can’t tell when a lost soul is saved, and Charles did try to change his life,” Reverend Rockett advised the family.
“My boy never hurt nobody,” screamed Mamie. Then she was quiet.
Ruby, draped in widow’s weeds, collapsed in the arms of Bob Birdwell, the wife of the late bandit. Wearing black dresses and veiled hats, Beulah Baird stood discreetly nearby with her sister, Rose. The two women drove down to Akins in the same Ford they had been in with Choc and Adam Richetti when the mishap occurred in Ohio. After they heard that Adam had been captured and Choc was on the run, they fled Ohio and returned to Kansas City. Beulah, the young woman who had given Choc his infamous nickname, had come to say goodbye. Ruby glared with swollen eyes across the grave at Beulah. After the funeral, the Baird sisters visited with some of the other Floyd family members. But within a few years, they disappeared in the mists of time and even the Floyds lost contact with them.
Long after the services were over, a swarm of people remained in the cemetery. Many looked for remembrances. They stripped leaves and bark off the cemetery trees. Some grabbed up handfuls of dirt from the mound of earth over Choc’s grave. Curtains were torn from the hearse. By nightfall, all the flowers had been taken to be pressed in family Bibles.
For several months after the funeral, local men armed with shotguns patrolled the graveyard to make sure no outsiders tampered with Charley’s burial place. A cedar tree, the Cherokee’s symbol of immortality, was planted near the grave. A grass fire later damaged the tree, and it was chopped down. A headstone was put in place, inscribed with Charley’s full name and the dates of his birth and death. Souvenir hunters attacked it. Through the years, several stones were chipped away. Once the entire headstone was stolen and had to be replaced. For many years on Decoration Day, a single .45 caliber bullet would always be found on Choc’s tombstone. None of the family ever knew who left the bullet.
One year from the day that Charley Floyd died, an advertisement, a poem, ran in the Kansas City Star. It was a memorial to Choc, placed by Beulah and Rose, and Adam Richetti.
We never knew what pain he had,
We did not see him die;
We only knew he passed away,
And did not say goodbye.
We are thinking of you Daddy dear,
Thinking of the past.
You left behind some broken hearts
That loved you to the last;
That never did, nor never will
Forget you, Daddy dear,
And while you rest in peaceful sleep
Your memory we shall always keep.
By that time, Adam Richetti had been brought back from Ohio and was jailed in Kansas City to be tried on a first-degree murder charge stemming from the Kansas City Massacre. On June 17, 1935—exactly two years after the massacre—the jury, despite contradictory testimony, returned a guilty verdict. Richetti was sentenced to be hanged. He appealed his conviction, but it was affirmed by the Missouri Supreme Court on May 3, 1938. Several months later, he was again sentenced to death, this time in the gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City.
The last day of his life, Richetti listened to the World Series and conversed briefly with a priest. He asked no favors and was served the same dinner as the rest of the inmate population—eggs, steak, potatoes, corn, pineapple, and a cookie. Shortly before midnight, he was taken from his cell to a small stone building that housed the gas chamber. He was to be the sixth man executed by lethal gas in Missouri. Stripped to his shorts, Richetti was blindfolded with goggles and led to the chamber as the lips of two priests in attendance moved in prayer. In an adjoining room waited thirty-five witnesses, including the son of the Kansas City cop Richetti was convicted of killing. As he was being strapped into the chair, Richetti murmured, “What have I done to deserve this?” A guard told Richetti to breathe deeply when the fumes reached his face.
The prison warden read the death warrant at 12:02 A.M. It was October 7, 1938. Richetti was twenty-eight years old. The lever was pulled to release the gas. Richetti tried to hold his breath, then he gasped and screamed. He was pronounced dead at 12:14 A.M. His body was sent to his brother in Bolivar, Missouri, for burial.
To the very end, Richetti denied that he and Choc had had any role in the massacre. So did the Floyd family. Until the day she died, June 16, 1978, at the age of ninety-seven, Mamie Floyd maintained her son had been unjustly accused of many crimes, including the massacre at Kansas City. So did Choc’s siblings.
E. W. Floyd, the kid brother who at one time had to endure a whipping when he wanted to go on the scout with Charley, was one of his staunchest defenders. In a twist of fate, the mild-mannered E.W. decided to pursue a career quite the opposite of his notorious brother. In 1948, he was elected to serve as Sequoyah County Sheriff. “He ain’t perfect, but he’s honest” was his catchy campaign slogan.
Remembered for seldom even carrying a gun, E.W. became one of the finest law-enforcement officers ever to wear a badge in the state of Oklahoma. Sequoyah County citizens liked to boast that the culprits their sheriff chased seldom resisted arrest, because of E.W.’s persuasive powers. In his later years, Bradley Floyd returned to Sallisaw and worked as his younger brother’s radio dispatcher. For twenty-two years and nine terms, E.W. served with distinction. He died on August 20, 1970, while still in office.
On July 29, 1970, just three weeks after E.W. passed away, Ruby Floyd died in a Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, nursing home of cancer at the age of sixty-three. Her life had been marked by turmoil. She suffered through several unhappy marriages and relationships. “My mother had to cope with so much throughout her life,” recalled Dempsey Floyd. “I know there were some very rough times, but she always told me that she loved my father and I have to believe those few good times they had together had to count for something.” Ruby was laid to rest at Bixby.
Dempsey graduated from high school in 1942 and served in the navy. Following his discharge in 1945, he resettled in California, where he started his own family and worked as a dealer in a casino. He has kept alive the memories of his parents, especially his father, who was immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath, and in a song by Woody Guthrie, “Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.”
Published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of the Joad family’s Dust Bowl journey from Sallisaw to California. In essence, the Joads could have been a fictionalized version of the Floyds, except that the Floyds were more prosperous and did not leave Oklahoma. Steinbeck had heard the tales of Pretty Boy from Oklahoma migrants in California during the late thirties. In the novel, the Joads talked favorably of Floyd. They discussed how he was driven to a life of crime by unbearable conditions. Likewise in 1939, Guthrie, in his famous ballad, mythicized Charley Floyd as a sympathetic folk hero. “There’s many a starving farmer the same old story told / How the outlaw paid their mortgage and saved their little home.”
Down in Sequoyah County, almost six decades after Pretty Boy’s burial, old-timers still stew over past lives. Many of them actually knew Choc Floyd or his kinfolk. They gather most mornings in Sallisaw at Lessley’s Cafe, a popular haunt operated by Choc’s nephews Lawton and Jim Lessley, located just down the street from the bank their uncle robbed. The bank building now houses a beauty salon and the nearby train station has been transformed into a public library. Over coffee and pie at Lessley’s where Floyd family photos adorn the cafe walls, the man and not the legend is remembered.
Among the press clippings and correspondence the family has received over the years about Charley is a copy of a letter sent to newspaper editors in 1960 by Mamie and Choc’s brothers and sisters. The letter challenges the misinformation that had been perpetuated about Floyd through the years. “We know he did some things that were wrong, but not nearly all he was blamed for,” the family wrote. “But in the final analysis, we also know, as he did, that crime does not pay. Yet, even the worst of us deserve justice, especially after the supreme penalty has been paid as Charley did.”
Hardly a soul in Sallisaw who knew the man ever calls him Pretty Boy. To them, he will always be Charley or Choc.
“There aren’t many of us left who really knew him,” Dempsey related in 1991 from his home in California as he held Choc’s ring and watch. “We still talk about my father, but we remember his good points. I think that must be the way many other people remember him. Maybe that’s the way it should be.”