Once again, March lived up to its tempestuous reputation in 1932. An epidemic of violence exploded across the nation with a great ferocity, like a sleeping junkyard dog someone poked with a stick. It was as though a late-winter storm, bringing with it thunder and rage, would not stop.
The most preeminent crime of this period was the Lindbergh kidnapping. During the first evening of March, Charles Augustus, the twenty-month-old firstborn son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, six months pregnant with another child, was kidnapped from his crib in a second-story nursery of the family’s newly built stone residence near Hopewell, New Jersey. Police found a muddy trail that led from beneath the open window to the edge of the woods, where a makeshift ladder was discovered.
Ever since his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Lindbergh had become a national treasure, an adored icon. In the intervening five years, he had come to epitomize the American dream. At a picnic in St. Louis, for example, a horde of society ladies had practically come to blows while fighting over a discarded corncob from his luncheon plate. It was downright inconceivable for the public to grasp that anyone was capable of stealing a child, much less his. The reaction was as though a baby who belonged to everyone in the nation had been taken away.
The search for America’s collective infant was led by Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, a man whose yet-unborn son would become an American hero to another generation. Lindbergh himself also joined in the effort. The prayers of millions from around the globe were offered in hope that the kidnapper would be placated by the fifty-thousand-dollar ransom demanded in a note pinned to the windowsill. President Herbert Hoover promised that a veritable battalion of federal agents would be employed to help solve the case. From his Cook County jail cell, even Al Capone, who was thought to have no scruples, pledged his organization’s assistance in the search. The Lindbergh kidnapping dominated the news like no other story for the next several months and stayed in people’s minds for years to come.
Despite the country’s absorption with the fate of the Lindbergh boy, bank robberies not only continued to occur in the late winter and early spring of 1932 but actually increased at an alarming rate. From Los Angeles to Iowa and Kentucky, a spree of high-wire bank robberies set depositors, already fearful for their savings, on edge and sent tremors through the besieged banking industry. No doubt, the state of the economy drove many of these robbers to despair. As prominent as the stories about Charley Floyd was that of a bank robbery conducted in Oklahoma on the ninth of March. On that day, two men walked into the First National Bank of Mill Creek in south-central Oklahoma, while two others waited in an automobile. After filling a handbag with cash, the robbers ordered three employees to accompany them outside. Instead of going with the outlaws, the employees, confident that a newly installed alarm system they had triggered would work, dashed into the vault. One of the enraged robbers fired at the vault door, but the bullets only ricocheted off.
As the bandits ran from the bank, they were met by withering gunfire from local vigilantes. The two holdup men fell to the ground along with the satchel containing only eight hundred dollars. The getaway car sped off in a hail of bullets. One bandit was killed instantly. He was identified as Fred Hamner of Wewoka, a former deputy sheriff and at one time a successful farmer in Seminole County. For the vigilante killing of Hamner, the Oklahoma Bankers’ Association would send the bank a reward check for five hundred dollars. The other desperado, who witnesses said appeared to be fatally wounded, was W. A. Smalley of Seminole, and the two accomplices who got away were said to be his brother, L. C. Smalley, and an ex-convict named Adam Richetti.
A few hours after the robbery, Smalley, suffering from bullet wounds, was captured without a fight in a pasture near Mill Creek. Later that day, authorities in Sulphur, Oklahoma, arrested Richetti. Less than a month after the holdup, he was sentenced on a bank-robbery conviction to the state pen at McAlester. No one knew it at the time, but by the end of the year, Richetti would be out of prison and soon after that he would be on the scout with Charles Arthur Floyd.
Two weeks after the robbery at Mill Creek, Charley and Birdwell returned to center stage. On March 23, they were picked as the most likely suspects to have blown into a bank at Meeker, Oklahoma, the hometown of onetime New York Giant pitching ace Carl Hubbell. Witnesses said the men who struck there fit the famous outlaws’ descriptions. The doors to the money cages were locked, so the bandit thought to be Floyd scooped up five hundred dollars in loose currency and, while climbing over a partition, accidentally set off the burglar alarm. A posse quickly formed outside, but the bandits marched four employees out in front of them and made them ride the running boards of the car as they drove away.
“If it wasn’t Pretty Boy and Birdwell, what difference did it make?” said an old-time Oklahoma deputy. “What was another robbery to their record? And, shoot, those poor ol’ bankers would rather say they was robbed by Pretty Boy than just some run-of-the-mill outlaw who didn’t have a famous name.”
Within weeks, however, the well-known, romanticized legend of Pretty Boy Floyd would turn sour. Even among some of his beloved country folk, the Robin Hood of the prairies would come to be known as a notorious killer.
Less than three hours into April 9, 1932, Charley Floyd indisputably shot and killed forty-six-year-old Erv A. Kelley, a former Oklahoma sheriff and an operative for the State Crime Bureau. The shooting occurred when Kelley and a posse of law officers set a trap for Floyd on the farm where the Hardgraves family lived near Bixby. For at least a few days, the murder of Kelley replaced the unsolved Lindbergh kidnapping as the most talked-about crime in Oklahoma.
Kelley was a lawman’s lawman and one of the most diligent peace officers ever to strap on a gun. “He is always on his toes,” said John Wolsey, a former Muskogee police chief, “but above all he is always a perfect gentleman.”
By 1932, he had retired from law enforcement and was operating a service station when he read about the sizable reward offered for the capture, dead or alive, of Pretty Boy Floyd. Kelley had a wife, three sons, and two daughters to care for, and since the income of a retired sheriff was hardly that large, the lure of thousands of dollars in bounty could not be ignored. Also, although he no longer wore a badge, Kelley found it was difficult to forsake the excitement and satisfaction he had found in law-enforcement work. He was considered one of the bravest peace officers in the state and, during his active years, Kelley was credited with the arrests of no fewer than fourteen bank robbers and six killers.
“He was one of the most fearless and successful law enforcers in Oklahoma,” said V. S. Cannon, the former Muskogee County sheriff who had spent time tracking outlaws with Kelley. “He could follow a man across the country almost by instinct.”
Kelley left his filling station and went to Oklahoma to offer his services to the State Crime Bureau. “Let me go after him,” Kelley reportedly told them. “I want your cooperation, but not one cent of your salary.” It was a gamble, but the amount of money on Floyd’s head was plenty of enticement. Kelley’s friends said that the state authorities were eager to have him join in the campaign to capture Pretty Boy and George Birdwell, as well as Fred Barker, one of Ma Barker’s sons.
On Friday afternoon, April 8, Kelley and William Counts, one of his former deputies from Eufaula, staked out the Floyd residence at 513 East Young in Tulsa. They watched as Dempsey came home from John Burroughs School, and about four o’clock, the two men shadowed Ruby and her son as they drove off in a green Ford sedan. Ruby headed south out of town, crossed the Arkansas River, and went to the town of Bixby, a small town surrounded by rich river bottomlands ideal for truck farms and pecan groves.
Careful to keep some distance so Ruby would not see them, Kelley and Counts followed her to the farm of Cecil and Gladys Bennett, three miles west and about three-fourths of a mile south of Bixby. Ruby parked the sedan. She and the boy walked about fifteen feet through a corral gate, crossed a small gully and bald field, and walked to the nearby house of her family. Kelley had recently received information from a pair of local men that Charley Floyd and Ruby used the farm as a trysting place.
Once they had established Ruby’s presence at the Bennett farm, the two ex-law officers left to bring in reinforcements. Kelley knew from the two local farmers that Pretty Boy had regularly visited his former in-laws in the past. The word was Floyd was due to make another appearance to enjoy an undisturbed weekend rendezvous with Ruby and his son.
Kelly contacted Crockett Long, a crack agent with the State Crime Bureau in Oklahoma City, to help with the stakeout. He also secured the services of A.B. Cooper, a private detective in Oklahoma City who represented the American Bankers’ Association. To fill out the ranks, Kelley recruited his old friend Sheriff Jim Stormont from Okmulgee and Tulsa police detectives M. L. Lairmore and J. A. Smith. The two men who had provided the tips about Floyd visiting the Hardgraves home also agreed to help and were duly deputized. With Kelley designated as the leader of the surveillance team, the nine men met in Bixby at 8:30 P.M. and made plans for a sortie on the suspected Floyd hideout.
They drove out to the Bennett farm and concealed their automobiles. Kelley stationed the men so that every conceivable avenue of approach was covered to the Hardgraves small frame home tucked away behind the Bennett’s farmhouse. Kelley, armed with a submachine gun equipped with a silencer and a .38 pistol, took what he thought was the most dangerous position—behind a chicken house approximately fifteen feet away from the corral gate. The two farmers hid nearby. Counts was about five hundred yards away, the closest post to the farmers and Kelley.
The long wait for Pretty Boy began. Midnight came and went uneventfully. There was no sign of any visitors except for some owls who cruised the skies in the wee hours of the morning. Kelley and the others knew there was still a chance the man they were after could appear.
About 2:15 A.M., the situation remained unchanged. The only sounds were the frogs peeping from the ditches. “Looks like a washout,” whispered one of the posse. His voice carried through the darkness. Four of the men on the stakeout—Cooper, Stormont, Lairmore, and Smith—decided to take a break. They drove into Bixby to get coffee and sandwiches at an all-night cafe. About five minutes later, a green Chevrolet drove down the road leading to the Bennett farm. The car turned off on the narrow lane and slowly made its way to the corral gate and stopped. At his hiding place, Counts glanced at his watch and saw it was 2:25 A.M.
Suddenly, the sound of gunfire rang out, shattering the eerie still of the night.
Later, Bill Counts and the pair of deputized farmers recalled hearing distinct pistol shots. Because of the silencer, the burst fired by Kelley’s submachine gun had been muffled and made whistling noises. Counts jumped into his car and sped toward the Bennett house, but before he could travel one hundred yards, he saw the taillights of an automobile flash. The Chevy had turned around in the narrow dirt lane, dragging down part of a barbed-wire fence. The getaway car traveled at a high rate of speed into the darkness.
Counts found Kelley’s lifeless form doubled over his submachine gun. He was lying on the ground near the gate in a large pool of blood. A semicircular design of rosettes, blasted in the ground by the bullets, silhouetted the body.
“When I got to the Chief, he was dead,” said Counts, “He gave them a break, and Floyd got him. I’m sure of that. Kelley had been an officer for years, and had never shot a man. He wanted to catch them alive.”
The two farmers who had been deputized to help trap Floyd came out from their hiding places. They told Counts and Crockett Long that they were unfamiliar with the weapons they had and were not able to get off a shot. Obviously shaken from the experience, the farmers also told law officers at the scene that there were two men in the car that stopped at the gate. They said that one of the suspects was Floyd and the other was likely to be Birdwell. Following the shootout, numerous law officers converged on Bixby. A dozen or more shiny black police cars barreled up and down the dirt roads. Spotlights flashed across the fields and danced in the weeds. All-points bulletins were dispatched to police departments and sheriffs’ offices throughout the region.
“We trailed the man we think was Floyd two miles south and a mile east of the scene of the shooting, and from that point we have gotten nowhere,” said Jack Bonham, the chief of Tulsa detectives. “We know the automobile the killer used turned south, but that is all.”
Officers found only seven rounds were left in the twenty-one-bullet clip they removed from Kelley’s submachine gun. A few miles from the crime scene, they also located a scarred area where a car, presumed to be the suspect’s vehicle, had careened into a ditch but managed to stay upright and returned to the road. While most lawmen searched for the suspects, other officers questioned members of the Hardgraves and Bennett families.
“I was in bed asleep when I heard those shots,” Cecil Bennett told the investigators. “I thought maybe there was something wrong outside and then again I thought maybe it wasn’t any of my business to see what was wrong, so I just naturally stayed in bed and didn’t bother to put my head out the door.”
When the lawmen told Bennett that one of the prime suspects was Pretty Boy, the farmer acted surprised and said he did not know him.
“Pretty Boy Floyd? No, I never saw him in my life,” replied Bennett without a trace of expression. “I wouldn’t know him if he walked in now. Yes, a woman drove in here yesterday, and asked if she could park her car in here. I saw no reason why she couldn’t. I don’t know her.
“Over yonder? Sure that’s Hardgraves’s place. He works for me. A good farmer, too. You say he is Floyd’s father-in-law? Well, that’s something I never knew. Well, well!”
The Tulsa World sent its ace reporter, Walter Biscup, and staff photographer Lee Krupnick to the Bennett farm Saturday afternoon in hopes they would get a scoop and enough pictures to sell out the Sunday edition. The editors were not disappointed.
After spending a few minutes with Cecil Bennett and visiting with the law officers, who were still looking for evidence, Biscup and Krupnick trudged across the field to the Hardgraves house. What they found there made peppery copy, even though it was mostly a series of questions and smart-aleck answers. Their depiction of Ruby left the readers with a less-than-flattering portrait of Charley’s former wife. She came across in the piece as a hard, uncaring person—a woman who was clearly beginning to have difficulty dealing with the pressure and whose tolerance for snooping city reporters was plainly growing quite thin. The article in the Sunday paper read as follows:
A shepherd dog barks his warning and leaps over the wire fence. A pat on the back and he wags his tail. “Come here, Bob,” shouts Floyd’s young son, Jackie. The dog meekly runs to him. The two begin to wrestle on the ground. Ruby Floyd, attractive despite house dress and uncombed hair, comes to the door.
“What do you want here?” she asks.
“Just a social visit,” she hears.
“What happened here last night?” she asks.
“Your husband knocked off Irv Kelly [sic].”
“Well, that’s fine,” she smiles.
The dog barks. “Did anyone else get killed?” she asks.
“No, no; no one else,” we reply.
“Too bad,” she sighs.
“Did you know Kelly [sic] trailed Pretty Boy for three months before he caught up with him this morning?”
“Well, the so-and-so won’t trail him any longer, will he?” she laughs.
Mrs. Floyd refused to pose for photographs but the photographer, ever careless of criticism, blithely continues with his snapshooting. She is asked where her husband is.
“How do I know where he is? If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. I don’t, though. I didn’t come here to meet him. I was asleep all night. I never heard any shots. I saw people there this morning so was kinda curious about what happened.
“Sure, my home is Tulsa. I like it here and Jackie goes to school. I don’t know how long I’m going to stay here. You might call it a weekend visit,” said Mrs. Floyd.
“Your old man certainly is a faithful cuss to take a chance on being knocked off trying to see you.”
“Is he?” she questions. “Who told you he tried to see me?”
“All right then, maybe I’m wrong.”
“You’re a newspaper reporter. Did you see that story they gave my husband in Startling Detective Magazine? That burned me up. They weren’t even fair to him.”
“What do you mean, fair to him?”
“They weren’t honest about his life,” she said.
“Well, maybe I could do better if you would arrange the interview with him.”
“If you want to see him, go look for him,” she offered.
“We’re too busy to be looking for anyone—least of all your husband.”
“What’s it to you?”
“It’s nothing to me. What do you intend for Jackie to be when he grows up?”
“That’s some more of your business, isn’t it?”
“Was it a case of love at first sight between you and Pretty Boy?”
“What do you think?”
“How does it feel to be a gunman’s moll?”
“Are you leaving soon?”
Between threatening the photographer and evading to answer questions Floyd’s wife said she was tired enough. She laughed a goodbye and entered the house.
In the meantime Floyd continues on the scout with the net tightening around him.
That afternoon, an autopsy performed at the Leonard Funeral Home in Bixby revealed that Kelley had been struck by five .45 caliber bullets, once in each knee, one below his right arm, and two rounds that entered his left side. Kelley’s body was then returned to his home in Eufaula. Thousands paid their respects when a funeral was held on April 11 followed by burial at the cemetery in Checotah. The state’s peace officers’ association presented his widow with their sympathy and a check for fifty dollars, a far cry from the thousands of dollars in reward money Kelley would have received had he captured Charley Floyd.
“The state lost a real man when it lost Kelley,” eulogized Muskogee Sheriff V. S. Cannon.
While posses, fueled by rumors and gallons of black coffee, checked out all leads, Charley and Birdwell moved from hideout to hideout. It was a difficult maneuver, since unbeknownst to the authorities at the time, Charley Floyd was badly wounded. Before falling dead, Erv Kelley had managed to strike the desperado with four rounds from the burst of submachine gunfire.
Less than seven months after the Bixby shootout, when Charley granted his famous interview to Muskogee writer Vivian Brown, the outlaw spoke about the skirmish and his close call with death.
Charley told the young woman that he and Birdwell had been prepared for trouble. They had had their guns ready when they drove out to Bixby in the early-morning hours of April 9 to see Ruby. He recalled that when they drove up to the gate, he saw Kelley step in front of the car lights. He heard him shout, “Stick ’em up!” the chances of Charley Floyd giving up were slim to none.
“Erv Kelley nearly got me,” Charley told Brown. “There was only one thing to do. It was either him or me, so I let him have it. He had the same idea, I guess. We fired at the same time. I never saw Kelley until he was falling. I fired five shots…and four of his shots hit me, one hitting me on the right hip and luckily striking a gun. The handle made quite a sore place on my hip and the bullet bent the gun but it did not hit me.”
A second shot nipped Charley’s scrotum and entered his right leg between his knee and thigh. Another of the rounds also struck his right leg, just above the ankle, and the fourth bullet lodged in his left ankle.
Charley further explained to Brown that after Kelley had been shot and was crumpling to the ground, the former sheriff kept his finger squeezed on the trigger of the submachine gun. He sprayed more rounds into the earth around his feet. Birdwell leaped from the Chevrolet and picked up Charley. He carried his comrade to the car, and then raced away like a madman for the safety of the oil-patch country to the southwest. They paused at Earlsboro to get Bradley, who took them to Seminole. He knew a friendly doctor there who asked no questions. Charley’s wounds were not life-threatening, but he was in tremendous pain and lost a fair amount of blood. The doctor sewed up his scrotum, cleaned and treated his wounds, and decided to leave the bullet in his ankle. He also gave him a healthy dose of painkiller and some fresh dressings.
With all the law officers and detectives descending upon Earlsboro in the wake of the Bixby shooting, however, Choc and Birdwell took their leave and moved to safer hiding places in Muskogee County and points east. They read the newspapers that spoke of the gun battle, their escape, and how a group of law officers heard the gunfire and rushed to the scene. The account about the posse amused Charley, it became one of his favorite stories.
“Was there really a posse?” Charley would ask his friends with a look of mock bewilderment. “Where were they, and which way did they run when they heard the shots? We never saw one of them.”
The Kelley killing was one of the few murders actually pinned on Charley Floyd. It was the lone homicide on his rap sheet that he ever publicly discussed, although he always maintained that Kelley had been foolish to attempt the ambush. Charley said it was a case of survival, and that he had no other choice but to shoot the former law officer. For the next several months, Charley and Birdwell tried to lie as low as possible, but that was tough to do. After all, these bandits were just like everyone else—they had groceries to buy and families to clothe. Choc also had some doctors’ bills to pay.
Shortly before noon on April 21, just twelve days after the killing of Erv Kelley and only a day after detectives had received a tip that Pretty Boy had been in Houston, two daring robbers, identified by several witnesses as Floyd and Birdwell, stole eight hundred dollars from the First State Bank in Stonewall, Oklahoma, the Pontotoc County town named in honor of Stonewall Jackson.
The pair, armed with pistols and submachine guns, took as hostages Furman Gibson, a cashier, and Ed Salee, an assistant cashier, and used the frightened bank employees for a human shield to protect themselves from the crowd of heavily armed citizens who had gathered outside the bank. With a captive on each running board, the bandits’ green sedan raced out of town. Once past the city limits, Gibson and Salee were released. About half a mile farther north on the highway leading to the larger town of Ada, the robbers stopped a motorcycle ridden by eighteen-year-old Estel Henson. They forced the young man to accompany them in their flight.
Deputies, state agents, and large civilian posses moved through the countryside and reacted to every sighting of Floyd and Birdwell. One report had them at Calvin, on the banks of the South Canadian River, east of Holdenville before they vanished into the wooded hills.
To aid in the hunt for Pretty Boy, the internationally famous aviator and round-the-world record flier Wiley Post offered his services. Post, a popular figure with his eyepatch, who would perish in a plane crash with Will Rogers in 1935, consented to lead what was called an “aerial posse” in hopes of spying Pretty Boy and Birdwell from the skies. Assisted by Lt. Robert Houston of the Oklahoma City police force, Post directed both of the airplanes that departed Oklahoma City and Pauls Valley and circled the hills where the bandits had last been seen. The other plane was piloted by Clint Johnson and carried several Oklahoma County deputies. As the two planes droned overhead, a huge posse on the ground was deployed toward the dark river bottoms. By nightfall, the trail was cold.
Henson, the young hostage, spent the night with Charley and Birdwell in a thicket where the bandits concealed their automobile with brush and tree limbs. He was released unharmed the next morning. He said they treated him “kindly” and were “jovial” during the thirteen hours he had remained their prisoner. Henson said at no time was he afraid of his captors, but he knew “they meant business.” The young man also told investigators that one of the bandits told him, “I guess those guys will learn it’s no use trying to catch us.”
Floyd and his partner vanished without a further trace. With the heat on, Birdwell went off to his own hiding places, and Choc stayed with friends and relatives, such as the Jess Ring family in rural Muskogee County, or others in the Okmulgee area. Never one to be without the company of a lady for long, Charley also went to see Juanita (Beulah Baird) in Kansas City, and crept into Tulsa, usually at the witching hour, to be with Ruby and Dempsey. Bystanders said they saw Floyd doffing his hat to the curb-service girl at the White House Cafe at Admiral Boulevard and Lewis Avenue. The girl said she recognized him, and when she brought a tray with the two sandwiches and mug of coffee, she asked whether he was Pretty Boy Floyd.
“Well, sister,” he answered with a sheepish smile, “I’m not so pretty but they call me Pretty Boy.” The carhop said he was cordial and made no attempt to hide the several guns in the backseat. “He gave me a thirty-five-cent tip, too.”
A little while later, Charley was also seen attending a dance with Ruby at Dustin, a rural town between the North and the South Canadian rivers. After the dance, Charley drove Ruby to the town of Henryetta so she could catch a bus to their home in Tulsa.
Charley’s way of survival was to stay on the move. He counted on the clannishness of the country people to protect him from the law. He depended on strong family ties for comfort. Besides keeping tabs on his former wife and child, he shuttled back and forth between the oil-patch area around Earlsboro and the growing fields of Sequoyah County to see his kinfolk.
With the various marriages of Charley’s six brothers and sisters, there were now enough nieces, nephews, and cousins to start a Floyd family posse. His two older sisters—Ruth Wofford and Ruby Spear—had a slew of kids between them, and down at Earlsboro, Bradley and Bessie Floyd added a fifth son to their family. Born February 20, 1932, his parents named him Charles Floyd, after his bandit uncle. Decades later, when the namesake nephew was a grown man running a successful oil-field equipment business, he was still proud of his name. He also still had tucked away the crocheted white knit suit that Choc had given him as a baby present.
Family tragedies served to bring the Floyds even closer together. Choc’s sister Emma and her husband, Clarence Lessley, had lost their five-year-old son, Bernie, in 1931 when his appendix ruptured. They never forgot that Charley came to the hospital in Fort Smith in their time of grief and slipped them one hundred dollars to cover the doctor’s bill. Despite the pain of their loss, the Lessleys still had their oldest son, Lawton, and daughters Dorthene and Charlene.
By 1932, even Choc’s younger brother, E.W., and youngest sister, Mary, had started their own households. In 1930, when she was eighteen years old, Mary Delta married Perry Lee Lattimore, a local boy born at Miller Ridge. He was a superb athlete before becoming a farmer and bootlegger. During the early years of her marriage, Mary gave birth to a son, Perry Floyd Lattimore, and a daughter, Pat.
E.W., who always looked up to his older brothers, wed Beulah Wickett in 1932. One of six daughters from a pioneer Sequoyah County family, Beulah had played with Mary Floyd on the championship girl’s basketball teams at Sallisaw High School in the late twenties. Like most young men in 1932, E.W. was happy to have any job he could get, be it laboring in the oil patch fixing cars, digging ditches, or working in a cafe. When he suggested to his older brother that he “go out on the scout” with him, Charley took him outside and gave him a sound whipping. There was no way Choc Floyd was going to allow his brother to take the outlaw trail. Years later, E.W. was the first to admit that the beating he got from his big brother was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Although law officers realized Floyd was constantly in flight and stayed with a host of family and friends, most of his family denied ever seeing him.
“It’s been quite a while since we’ve see him,” Charley’s sister Ruth told reporters in mid-April right after one of his visits.
Besides stopovers with his siblings and their broods, Charley also made risky midnight runs to Sallisaw to check on his widowed mother. There was even a popular tale that Charley sent the sheriffs office in Sallisaw a note saying, “I’m coming to see my mother. If you’re smart, you won’t try to stop me.” But the story seems spurious. Most law officers in the Cookson Hills of eastern Oklahoma did not require or expect a written warning from Choc. His openhanded generosity won him a host of friends who considered him a modern version of Robin Hood. He was like a sports hero who had come home for a quick visit, to be idolized briefly. Those who disliked him dared not risk his rancor by tipping off the law when they saw him appear at his sister’s home for a visit with his mother and other relatives.
“When Charley was a baby, he had pneumonia and nearly died,” related Mamie Floyd to a Tulsa reporter after one of her son’s visits. “If he had, I wouldn’t have to lie awake at night wondering where he is and jumping up after dreaming that he had been shot to pieces.
“Certainly I’m worried. What mother wouldn’t worry over her boy. The newspapers have been unfair to him. They’ve accused him of everything that’s happened in the state. I never want him to get caught because he wouldn’t get a fair break. I’ve got faith in him.”
In the early spring of 1932, Mamie also spoke about Charley when a Kansas City Times reporter paid a call. “I have seen him, off and on,” said Mamie as she folded and smoothed a piece of lace. “Every so often he must see his old mother, and he dares them all, and risks his life to come and see me.
“But he can’t stay long. We have a little visit together, time for him to hug and kiss me, and time for me to cry over him, and then he has to go. I never know whether I will ever see him again.”
Although he had to keep moving in order to remain free, Charley tried his best to live like a normal person whenever he could. That meant attending weddings, baptisms, and funerals.
In the spring of 1932 when George Birdwell’s father passed away near Earlsboro, law officers expected his outlaw son to show up to bid farewell at the funeral parlor. When Birdwell arrived, it was not known whether the local authorities were not present at the undertaking establishment out of respect for the family or simply because they were afraid of confrontation. With red eyes, George finally pulled up in front of the funeral home, accompanied by Pretty Boy Floyd. The two men walked in the front door, and Birdwell told the undertaker’s assistant his name. Charley still moved with some difficulty because of the recent wounds he had received at the Bixby shootout. The wound to his scrotum, however, had not prevented him from contracting a “social disease.” Floyd kinfolk remembered he spent a good deal of time seeing a country doctor he trusted for treatment and relief.
While George viewed his father’s body in an adjoining room, Choc stood guard near the entrance with a submachine gun cradled in his arms. Word quickly got around town about the illustrious visitors down at the mortuary, and soon a crowd of inquisitive townspeople was bunched around the front of the building. After he finished his prayers at his father’s casket, a tearful Birdwell put on his western-style hat. He and Charley emerged from the funeral home. Choc gave a wave of the weapon and flashed a grin, and the crowd pulled back. He and Birdwell got into their car and drove out of town. Not a single shot had been fired.
Family connections in Earlsboro usually worked to Choc’s advantage. Even women and children from the rough oil-field town showed no fear when they saw Charley Floyd on the street. One of those who came away with fond memories after a brush with Pretty Boy was Pauline Alfrey. She and her twin brother, Paul, better known as “Buck,” had been born in Earlsboro in 1915. The children of Bud Alfrey, a postal-delivery worker, the twins had two uncles—Duke Strain and Harry Alfrey—who ran stores in town.
“We were just young teenagers trying to get through the Depression, and after school Buck and I would head for the old drugstore and each of us would get a nickel ice cream cone,” recalled Pauline. “One afternoon we were sitting there with our cones and in walks Pretty Boy Floyd. Everybody was buzzing about him. He was so handsome! His clothes were neat and he wore gloves. He ordered himself a Coca-Cola and drank it down, and as he turned to leave, he gave us a wink. Well, we were ready to leave, too, and when we went to pay for our ice cream, we found out he had already taken care of it for us. Were we ever happy! We had enough money to get a slice of pie!”
On another occasion during 1932, Charley and Birdwell were led to believe that a man who was a town marshal and worked at a local lumberyard was actually one of the many private detectives out to snare the bandits in their own lair. When the man was driving to work, Choc and Birdwell appeared in their sedan. They stopped him, pulled him from his vehicle, and took him for a ride into the country. While he was getting beaten and kicked about, the man managed to whisper that he was the town marshal and not another bounty-hunting detective. Charley and Birdwell stopped their cuffing of the man at once. They apologized for their mistake, and took him back to town. Before the man struggled out of their car, Charley pressed a roll of bills into his hand.
“To pay the doctor,” Choc told him.
Even if it meant an innocent party got a good licking he did not deserve, Choc and his lieutenant could take no chances. Like the many rumormongers and gossips who abounded, the bounty hunters and hot-shot private dicks were multiplying like mice in a hay barn. All of them had a notion about how best to rid the earth of Pretty Boy Floyd and collect the reward money on his head.
In early May of 1932, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office received a letter written by Thomas E. Haines from Quebec. “Is there any truth about a young gentleman named Charles Arthur Floyd, a two-gun bandit, who already has to his credit 11 victims, and when he was cornered not long ago, those who were after him were afraid to shoot him down just because he had a steel vest on?” wrote Haines.
“Had I been there, he would have been in his grave long ago. If there is any substantial reward, dead or alive, I will do my best to come down to Tulsa to get him.”
Closer to Charley’s home territory, there were others who had all sorts of free recommendations for those interested in bagging Pretty Boy. S. F. Lindsay, a seventy-eight-year-old pioneer U.S. Marshal from Ardmore, who had spent half of his life tracking outlaws and had survived one hundred gun battles with the likes of the Daltons, had sage advice for the law officers who played hide-and-seek with Floyd.
“You wouldn’t have caught an old-time officer lugging around a machine gun even if we had them then,” said Lindsay. “Machine guns are dangerous right up against one, but move back twenty feet and the average officer can’t hit the side of a barn with one.”
As the month of May progressed, there were many reports that Pretty Boy Floyd was again on the prowl. Several more bankers claimed Floyd and Birdwell had robbed them, and each incident brought a predictable onslaught of news coverage. “The most intensive manhunt Oklahoma has seen since the days of Al Jennings and the Dalton Brothers is on in the hills for Charles (‘Pretty Boy’) Floyd, will-o’-the-wisp desperado, and his tall lieutenant, George Birdwell, wanted for murders, kidnappings, and bank robberies,” reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that May.
“When Floyd visited friends at Earlsboro…the Chief of Police confiscated the outlaw’s car and placed it in his garage. When the outlaw discovered it he forced a Negro to accompany him to the Chief’s home, where, using the Negro as a shield, he forced the Chief to put the car on the street. Disarming the officer, Floyd emptied his pistol, handed it back and fled.”
Law officers left no stone unturned. For instance, at a state banking convention that was held in Tulsa in early May, attended by hundreds of bankers from around Oklahoma and “distinguished guests,” the Tulsa police received a tip that Charley Floyd might show up to cause trouble. As unlikely as that sounded, the lead was checked out. Detective M. L. Lairmore, one of the law officers who had been out at Bixby when Kelley was gunned down, went to the convention headquarters at the fashionable Mayo Hotel. Lairmore chatted with a young man who worked there as a bellboy.
“Call for Mr. Charley Floyd!” the bellboy yelled in his loud bass voice. “Call for Mr. Charley Floyd!”
A hundred persons, most of them conventioneers, milled around the lobby, but ironically none of them seemed to recognize the name of the bandit who had caused them no end of trouble.
“I can’t find him, boss,” the bellboy reported back to Lairmore. “Does he live in Oklahoma City?”
Lairmore smiled. “Well, he did live in Tulsa, but I don’t know where he is stopping now.”
While the bankers met behind closed hotel doors to brood about their aches and pains over tumblers of bootlegged whiskey, the seventy-two-day search conducted by more than one hundred thousand police officers and civilians for the stolen baby son of Charles Lindbergh came to a halt.
On May 12, the decomposed body of the Lindbergh infant was found lying facedown in a depression, partly covered by leaves and windblown debris, in the stubbly Sourland hills of New Jersey, less than five miles from the Lindbergh residence. An autopsy showed that fatal blows to the head had probably been inflicted shortly after the baby was kidnapped.
A crime like the Lindbergh infant’s murder disgusted Charley, who told friends he could not sanction such a wanton act. Taking a bank teller or two for a brief joyride as temporary hostages on a getaway car’s running board may have been technically kidnapping, according to Floyd’s logic, but it was a long way off from stealing a baby in the middle of the night and beating his brains out. Kidnapping anyone for ransom, be the victim an adult or a child, was never part of Charley Floyd’s criminal repertoire. That was just one of the reasons why in September 1933 it was doubtful, despite witnesses who claimed the opposite, that Floyd had any connection with the futile attempt to kidnap Frank Phillips or a member of his family at the oil tycoon’s Osage ranch retreat named Woolaroc.
By the close of May 1932, as the mimosas broke into feathery blossoms, thousands of disgruntled veterans, including Bradley Floyd, formed the Bonus Army. They began their march to Washington, D.C., to demand payment of the bonuses promised to them by Congress for their service in the Great War. On June 7, thousands of veterans left their makeshift shanties near the nation’s capitol at Anacostia Flats and paraded through Washington to get what they felt was owed them.
While the veterans continued their assault on government in Washington, Pretty Boy moved like quicksilver through the Oklahoma countryside, stopping at farmhouses to eat a plate of supper. He always left behind some crumpled money and a lasting impression that his hosts would long treasure and pass along as part of their family’s folklore.
That June, Charley Floyd and George Birdwell met at a farmhouse near Stonewall. The clandestine meeting was at a farm owned by E. W. Echols, a farmer who knew both men and had worked with Birdwell in the Earlsboro oil fields. When word reached Pontotoc County Sheriff L. E. Franklin that the bandits were in his territory planning to rob the bank in Stonewall the following day, he formed a sizable posse and summoned the State Crime Bureau. O. P. Ray, of the state bureau, arrived with some of his best agents, including Crockett Long and C. M. Reber. A local man who knew the lay of the land around the Echols farm was enlisted and a plan of attack was mapped out.
That evening, the posse went to the farm one mile north of Stonewall. Echols was in a field with his team of horses. As soon as the law officers appeared on the prairie, the rest of the Echols family took shelter in a storm cellar, and Choc and Birdwell ran from the yard to a barn and took up positions in the loft.
Estel Henson, the young motorcyclist whom Choc and Birdwell had kept overnight after the Stonewall bank job in April, followed the posse to the Echols place. Other townspeople also drove out, and soon there were more spectators than officers at the scene, which had taken on all the elements of a carnival before a summer thunderstorm. Henson stood on a slightly elevated spot not far from the farmhouse and watched the proceedings. He waved to the bandits as they raced for cover, but he had to dive behind a large rock when Birdwell sprayed a burst of gunfire in his direction. Most of the officers found trees behind which to hide.
“Birdwell, carrying a machine gun, led the way, firing as he ran,” said Henson. “Floyd followed with a revolver in each hand. Officers continued to blaze away at them, but the bullets apparently failed to reach their marks.”
A furious gunfight continued for several minutes. Smoke and noise filled the air. Suddenly, an automobile backed out of the barn. Inside were Charley and George. Bullets shattered the rear glass and windshield, riddled the doors, slammed into the radiator, and blew out a tire as the car turned down a narrow lane, smashed through a gate, and headed north down the farm road. More than one hundred shots were fired but surprisingly not a person was wounded. Yet again, Pretty Boy and Birdwell had confounded the law and escaped untouched, disappearing in the countryside.
Employees at the First State Bank of Stonewall breathed sighs of relief. “They’d have had to borrow money to get out of town,” said one of the bank officials. Aware that their establishment had been again marked for robbery, the employees had placed a sign in the front window just in case Pretty Boy showed up.
NOTICE TO BANK ROBBERS
THERE IS NOT ENOUGH CASH IN THIS BANK
TO BE WORTH THE RISK OF ROBBING IT.
Following this escape, there were the normal number of Pretty Boy sightings from throughout the region. Floyd was seen camped in the Canadian River bottoms; in Earlsboro; at a filling station in Tulsa; at Leonard, a small community near Bixby; and at several other locations. Police officers in Tulsa checked out the Floyd residence on East Young and found that Ruby and her son had been gone ever since school was dismissed the week before.
Two days after the gun battle, E. W. Wood, principal of the Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, was driving with his wife and four children down Highway 64 near the Muskogee County town of Warner. The family was en route to Mississippi for a vacation when three men in a car drove up behind Wood’s 1931 black and tan Buick sedan and signaled for him to pull over. Thinking the men were law officers, Woods did just that, only to find he was looking at Pretty Boy Floyd, easily recognizable because his photographs frequently appeared in the Tulsa newspapers.
After driving Wood and his family to an isolated area, the trio of bandits transferred a large cache of weapons, several wooden boxes of ammunition, and cases of machine-gun cartridges from their blue Nash sedan to Wood’s automobile. They had already disposed of the bullet-scarred auto they had used to escape from the law at the Echols farm, but now they needed a “faster machine” to continue their flight. Floyd and his accomplices were described as “cheerful and courteous,” and ultimately decided to allow the school principal to keep his one hundred dollars in traveler’s checks. The outlaws wished the family well, and took their leave in the sleek Buick.
Police and sheriffs departments throughout Oklahoma and Arkansas were put on alert. At Fort Smith, officers were stationed at three downtown banks and guards were posted on the Garrison Avenue bridge leading from Oklahoma. Some of them had rifles, and others manned mounted machine guns. The wait seemed interminable, but Pretty Boy never came over the bridge.
A week later, at Fort Scott, Kansas, there were eyewitnesses ready to swear that Pretty Boy Floyd had been one of the five armed men who had looted the Citizens National Bank of $32,000, then an unbelievably large amount of money. Officers from Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma joined in the investigation, and police watched the major highways in the tri-state area for the bandits. By evening, three of the culprits had been arrested near Nevada, Missouri. None of them was Charley, and his participation in the robbery was considered doubtful.
By the summer of 1932, the hysteria about Charley Floyd’s doings reached a national level. While the Fort Scott bank heist took place, Pretty Boy was also supposed to have been in Kansas City. Eighteen policemen—carrying machine guns, revolvers, shotguns, high-powered rifles, and tear-gas guns—responded to a “solid lead” from one of their best street sources and searched a neighborhood where Floyd and Birdwell were reported to have rented a room. The law came up empty-handed.
Charley’s continued success at escape and evasion had lawmen throughout the Midwest pulling out their hair. They were stymied whenever they got on Pretty Boy’s trail. Most of the hot tips they received were exaggerated or just plain bogus. It was almost a laughing matter. Perhaps that is why in late June of 1932, when a farm boy from Watonga, in northwestern Oklahoma, wrote the State Crime Bureau asking for a chance to go after Floyd, Superintendent C. A. Burns made the youth’s letter public.
All that I ask is that I am furnished a car, two revolvers, a machine gun, a 30-30 rifle, ammunition and a steel jacket…. I have read every detective book and magazine and outlaw books that I could get ahold of. I know their ways and how they work.
P.S. If by any chance you cannot furnish me with all of this artillery, just give me the car and the steel jacket. I might be able to manage for the others.
Burns did not take the boy up on his bold offer, but he may have been tempted. It was a summer without pity.
On July 17, while Franklin D. Roosevelt, nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate at the convention in Chicago earlier in the month, gave his first campaign speech, one of the top State Crime Bureau agents was gunned down in a drugstore out in the drowsy town of Madill, between the Washita and Red rivers in Oklahoma’s Little Dixie. Crockett Long, the veteran law officer who had been involved in Pretty Boy’s Bixby shootout and also the scrap between Floyd and officers at Stonewall, was shot four times by Wiley Lynn, a former dry agent who had been acquitted in 1924 of killing Bill Tilghman, the U.S. Marshal who had ridden for “Hanging Judge” Parker. As he fell, mortally wounded, Long was able to pull his pistol and shoot Lynn, who died twelve hours later.
“We are almost persuaded that holding a commission as a peace officer is the worst thing that could occur to many men,” said the Tulsa World in an editorial about the death of Agent Long and the former lawman who shot him. “A great many wind up as Linn [sic] wound up. There are too many men carrying guns and not anywhere near all these men should be entrusted with guns or with law enforcement.”
When he heard about Crockett Long dying in a gun duel, Choc told some of his friends that he was surprised that he had not been accused of at least some sort of role in the state agent’s murder. It would not have been that farfetched. Accusations were flying through the July skies as fast and furiously as the home-run hits of sluggers Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmy Foxx.
In Washington, D.C., President Hoover, renominated by the Republicans in June for a second term, was fed up with critics attacking his performance. For weeks, he had watched the vagrant army of war veterans who walked, hitchhiked, and rode the rails into the city to tell Congress that the bonus promised to veterans in 1924 and scheduled to be paid off in 1945 was needed now if their hungry families were to survive. Hoover was less than sympathetic. He accused members of the Bonus Army, squatting in their shacks and tents along the Anacostia River, of being nothing but a mob of “Red agitators.”
In late July, acting on orders from Hoover, federal troops commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, assisted by two of his up-and-coming young officers, Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Maj. George Patton, used tear gas, fixed bayonets, swords, and tanks to evict the protesting veterans from the nation’s capital. The ragged marchers were stunned to see soldiers in the same uniforms they had once worn charging their ranks and torching their makeshift camp.
That summer, as the disillusioned veterans returned to their homes, Choc spent much of his time in Muskogee County, not far from the town of Boynton, at the plain and simple house of the Ring family, part of Ruby’s kin, who always had a bed and food for Choc. The tired bandit rested his limbs and massaged his bad ankle, still aching from the bullet put there months before by Erv Kelley. He was also still troubled with a nasty case of the clap, and he felt older than twenty-eight—much older, in fact.
At night, when all the Ring kids were asleep, Charley sat outside beneath the Milky Way. The only sounds were the crickets chirping from the shadows or some wild critter moving through the nearby fields. He would sit out there for a long time, alone in his thoughts, maybe wishing he had stayed a farmer and wondering how everything had gotten to be so goddamn crazy.