J. Edgar Hoover and his Bureau of Investigation agents marked Pretty Boy Floyd for annihilation in 1933. Although his demise was not a fait accompli until October 1934, his death warrant was signed and irreversibly sealed sixteen months earlier. Ironically, the single event that ultimately proved his downfall occurred in Kansas City, where Floyd had maintained a tenuous relationship with fellow criminals ever since his release from prison in 1929.
Shortly after 7:00 A.M. on the morning of June 17, 1933, just outside the front entrance of Kansas City’s mammoth Union Station, the crackle of submachine guns diminished any hope Choc Floyd may have held for survival. In the span of only a few minutes, two men were wounded and five others were shot and killed, including a federal prisoner. Also among the dead was an agent of the Bureau of Investigation.
No other act of violence, except the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, so stunned the nation and galvanized authorities in their persistent warfare against the outlaws spawned by the Great Depression. Neither the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 nor even the slaying of six lawmen by the Young brothers near Springfield in 1932 affected the way the public looked at the brutality of the criminal world.
Based on slim evidence and marginal eyewitness accounts, Hoover and the authorities in Kansas City eventually placed a large share of the blame for the mass murder at Union Station squarely on the shoulders of Pretty Boy Floyd. Allegations rained like a series of Sunday punches, each one more devastating than the one before. Charley Floyd did not even see them coming.
The sequence of events that transpired that June morning at Union Station remain forever shrouded in controversy. Much of the rancor centers on the identity of the actual triggermen and their motive. Whether Floyd was present or not remains a mystery. He was never tried, so the federal government never proved its case against him. Decades after the bloody incident, several jurists and legal scholars contend that a halfway bright criminal attorney fresh out of law school probably would have won an acquittal for Floyd had he ever been brought to trial. However, even if he was a scapegoat, as some criminal historians and underworld figures have suggested, the Kansas City Massacre was Charley Floyd’s proverbial kiss of death. Just the mere association of his well-known name with the crime proved fatal.
Choc had spent most of the first six months of 1933 in the Cookson Hills and the oil patch area around Earlsboro. Following the death of his bandit lieutenant George Birdwell at Boley in November 1932, Floyd had taken up with yet another partner, Adam C. Richetti. He would be the last of many companions to ride with Charley Floyd.
Richetti had grown up in a large family, one generation removed from Italy. His parents had left the old country for the United States in order to earn enough money to start a new life. They settled in Coal County near the town of Lehigh in the coal-mining district of south-central Oklahoma. The Richettis raised several children. Among them was Adam, born in Lehigh in 1909, and a year later, a daughter named Eva, who was always called Eve by the other kids because of her brother’s biblical name.
In the 1800s, Choctaw Indians, facing bitter winter storms, had been the first people to discover the value of the coal outcroppings found in the area where the Richetti family lived. The Indians gave the place a name that meant “where the black rocks burned.” Mining companies had torn coal from the extensive fields in the old Choctaw Nation starting in the 1880s. The bonanza of the shallow coal beds began to decline following a 1912 mine disaster, however. Continuous labor unrest further snarled the mining operations. Richetti’s father spent most of his productive years as a coal miner out on strike. The country folks who came to know the family gave their surname an Oklahoma pronunciation, Rich-ity, and made them feel welcome. Despite the congenial neighbors and the names of their last two children, Adam and Eve, the Richettis found Oklahoma to be less than a paradise on earth.
Just to keep some pasta, beans, and a little garlic in the cupboard, Adam’s parents hawked bottles of hearty choc beer, the miners’ preferred beverage. They also picked up odd bits of coal and sold them to other poor families for winter fuel. Both Adam and his older brother, Joseph, used their talent for tinkering with engines to earn a little money. Like many tenant farmers and out-of-work miners, the entire Richetti clan gathered each year at Hudson’s Big Country Store in the nearby county seat of Coalgate. Starting in the early 1920s, Hudson’s annually attracted large crowds by tossing five hundred dollars in dimes from the roof of the emporium. Shiny coins fell like manna from heaven. The gimmick was finally suspended because the crush of men scrambling for the free money injured too many women and children. Young Adam Richetti always came away with a bloody nose but pocketfuls of dimes.
“Adam was one tough cookie,” recalled Dick Holland, a former resident of Coalgate who was five years Richetti’s junior. “He was already a drinker and a fighter when he was only about thirteen or fourteen. Richetti had this reputation, even as a boy, of being mean. He wasn’t a very big fellow and he was dark-skinned and had straight black hair. If he put a cap on, he looked like he just got off the boat.”
Not everyone took Adam Richetti for a hooligan. He was also thought of as a ladies’ man. He was especially popular with the girls from around Lehigh, Coalgate, Tupelo, and the small farm communities near the Muddy Boggy Creek bottoms, where fingers of smoke persistently spiraled from hidden moonshine stills. Adam’s swarthy looks got him noticed at the big theatrical shows staged at the Lehigh Grand Opera, or the downhome parties where guitars, mandolins, and accordions made swell dance music.
“Adam was just an ordinary kid but he was charming and handsome,” recalled Ruby Dobson Branom, a classmate of Richetti. “He was popular with the girls. He loved to dance. Those were hard times when we were all growing up and even though we didn’t have much, my dirt farmer daddy always said that we were ‘rich in everything but money.’ Adam got himself a motorcycle and he gave everyone rides. I’ve never forgotten that the only time in my life that I ever rode a motorcycle, I was behind Adam Richetti and he was tearing down a country road.
Ruby Branom also recollected seeing Adam just after he was caught committing his first serious criminal offense. He and some pals had broken into the high school and carried off all the typewriters. Another boy snitched and the sheriff confronted young Adam. “Poor ol’ Mrs. Richetti was standing there by the school flagpole,” recalled Ruby Branom. “She was talking to the sheriff and Adam was nearby with his head down and his eyes on the ground. She was plump and had a thick Italian accent. She was wailing, ‘Oh, me Adam! Oh, me Adam! Why? Why?’ She said it over and over again.”
After a good scolding, the law released the contrite typewriter thief. Neither that act of mercy nor the many candles Mrs. Richetti burned in prayer at Our Lady of Good Council church kept Adam out of hot water, however.
Richetti ventured forth as a professional criminal in his late teens. His first serous brush with the law came at Hammond, Indiana, where he was arrested on August 7, 1928, on a bank robbery charge from Crown Point, Indiana. Sentenced to a term of one to ten years in the State Reformatory of Pendleton, he was paroled on September 22, 1931. Richetti’s next arrest took place on March 9, 1932, at Sulphur, Oklahoma, for his role in the robbery of the First National Bank at Mill Creek earlier same day. Tried and convicted, he served only a little over four months at “Big Magic”—from April 5 until August 25, 1932. He was released and placed on a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond, which he ultimately forfeited when he was implicated in yet another robbery, this time at Tishomingo, Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray’s hometown.
By his twenty-third birthday, Richetti, an immigrant’s son seasoned and savvy in bandit ways, was on the scout with Pretty Boy.
Friends of Richetti said he was honored to be tapped as Pretty Boy’s sidekick. They had first met a few years earlier when Richetti was between bank robberies, working as an oil-field hand near Seminole. Hooking up with Floyd was, however, an unwise decision of Richetti’s part. Every law officer in Oklahoma, much less the Midwest, was gunning for Floyd. The wiry young Richetti who spent much of his life battling alcohol addiction, could not have made a poorer choice for a partner. From their first job together—the stickup of a dance hall at Wewoka in late 1932—and throughout their frenetic twenty-three months as allies on the outlaw trail, the duo faced only the wrath of the nation’s law-enforcement agencies.
The name Pretty Boy Floyd continually surfaced as the prime suspect in bank robberies across the country. Less than a week after the death of Birdwell at Boley, the November 28, 1932, theft of fifty thousand dollars from the Citizens State Bank of Tupelo, Mississippi, was credited to Floyd. No charges were ever filed and no case against Floyd was ever proved. Although some authorities doubted its authenticity, a letter sent from Hot Springs, Arkansas, allegedly written by Floyd, repudiated his complicity in that incident. Scrawled in pencil and snuffed into an envelope taken from an Ottawa, Kansas, hotel, the letter was sent to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Besides denying any role in the Tupelo robbery, the letter also referred to the bungled Boley bank job.
“The man who killed my pal Birdwell will never live to see Christmas,” read the letter. In the postscript, the author referred to his own holiday plans. “I have fine men with me and will be over in Oklahoma, my own home state, to spend Christmas with my folks.” Law officers could not figure out whether that meant Charley’s folks at Sallisaw, Earlsboro, Bixby, or Ruby’s kinfolk in Muskogee County. The return address stated, “Address me Sallisaw, Okla.”
Throughout the early thirties, as the bank-robbery rate continued to mount, so did the number of presumably reliable eyewitnesses who argued that Pretty Boy Floyd most frequently was a perpetrator. For the few crimes in which his name was cleared, such as the Henyretta bank job that resulted in the arrest of Ford Bradshaw in December 1932, another half-dozen new accusations materialized. The cycle could not be broken, as the media perpetuated the legend of Floyd, who had by this time acquired still another sobriquet—the “hoodoo hoodlum.”
Even the Literary Digest added to the Pretty Boy mythology. In the December 10, 1932, issue, the publication grandly described Choc’s felonious deeds. “His name is Charles Arthur Floyd and they call him ‘Pretty Boy.’ But he’s the ‘bandit king’ of Oklahoma, the latest of that state’s long line of outlaw chiefs.
“He robs and laughs. Jeering the polico [sic], and even Governor, he swoops down on a town, holds up a bank, and dashes away again by motor. In two years he has held up at least a score of banks…. But nobody has been able to bring him down. And this despite the tremendous risks he takes. That he is one of the luckiest bandits in criminal history is obvious from a reading of his exploits. And that he loves to ride his luck is proved by his noon-day robbery of a bank in his home town of Sallisaw, Oklahoma.”
It became increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction when it came to tracking the lawless movements of Pretty Boy. Oftentimes, there was not much to go on but hearsay and sketchy witness accounts.
On January 22, 1933, a major feature story about Choc written by H. G. Hotchkiss appeared in the Wichita Beacon, complete with a photograph of Charley and his girlfriend, Beulah, as well as portraits of Ruby, Dempsey, and Governor Bill Murray. A large illustration depicted a shadowy Charley with his hat brim snapped down, holding a tommy gun. Across the top of the page was the headline “PRETTY BOY” FLOYD—OKLAHOMA’S ENEMY OR ROBIN HOOD? An editor’s note explained that the story, considered by the Floyd family to be one of the more balanced reports about Choc, resulted from Hotchkiss traveling deep into the heart of Oklahoma’s Pretty Boy country. Hotchkiss did his homework well. Based on interviews with Charley’s friends, he discussed such tidbits as Floyd’s preference for Ford automobiles (“…because they are inconspicuous”), and his chameleonlike ability to avoid capture. Almost sixty years after it was first published, Dempsey Floyd was still diligently sending full-size photocopies of the feature story about his father to interested history researchers, authors, and criminal buffs. Hotchkiss wrote:
Officers admit that “Pretty Boy” probably is the most cunning, the most resourceful bandit in the history of a state that has become famous for its bad men. Daring, but never reckless, Floyd maps his life by carefully laid plans. It has been more his own cunning and resourcefulness, rather than luck, that keeps “Pretty Boy” a free man today. How many men Floyd has killed probably is not exactly known by anyone but “Pretty Boy” himself. How many banks he has robbed is also in doubt. He has been credited with scores of killings and scores of bank robberies, many of which he knew nothing about.
Floyd is a popular hero among the children. He never fails to give them a lift to school. And many a child had been clothed and fed thru [sic] the generosity of “Pretty Boy.” Friends declare he is generous to a fault. His bank loot is divided, one-half going to his wife, the other half he retains for his own use but most of this is spent to help destitute families and individuals. Friends tell that Floyd was eating in a restaurant one day. A man came in and begged for a meal, stating it had been days since he had had anything to eat. “Give that fellow all he wants,” spoke up “Pretty Boy.” Then addressing the stranger, he said, “Here is a twenty. Perhaps that will stake you until you can get on your feet.”
During the winter of 1933, the nation was in a holding pattern, anxiously waiting for Franklin Roosevelt to take the helm after his March 4 inauguration with Texan John “Cactus Jack” Garner as his vice president. In his first hundred days, Roosevelt would move swiftly to combat the Great Depression by creating a remarkable series of New Deal “alphabet agencies.” In the meantime, the country’s collective stomach—shrunken by 1933—impatiently growled. Proud men and women did whatever they could to keep their families alive.
While money was in short supply, ingenuity was not. For instance, the publisher of the Sallisaw Democrat-American renewed yearly subscriptions by accepting either a bushel of sweet potatoes, three dozen eggs, two chickens, two pounds of butter, one gallon of sorghum, one and one-half gallons of honey, or seven pounds of hog meat.
Common fare at the supper tables throughout rural Oklahoma, along with the main course of biscuits and gravy, were the latest yarns about Pretty Boy. Everyone had their own personal theory about where the twenty-nine-year-old bandit was hiding or how the authorities could capture him.
In the spring of 1933, Bradley Floyd walked into an Earlsboro joint to quench his thirst. Jack Birdwell, the teenage son of the late outlaw, tagged behind. He never forgot what he witnessed there that day.
Bradley was nursing a drink when he heard a liquored-up roustabout bragging about what he would do if he ever got his hands on Pretty Boy Floyd. After quietly listening to the loudmouth run down his younger brother and the entire Floyd family for several minutes, Bradley approached the man. He asked him whether he knew Choc Floyd. The fellow said he did not. Bradley asked whether he had ever met any of Floyd’s brothers. Again, the man said he had not, but he allowed that if they ever came around, he would make “short work of them,” as well.
“Bradley drained the last of his drink and set the glass down,” recounted Jack Birdwell. “Then he turned and he hit that guy just about as hard as I ever saw a man get hit. He knocked that fella plumb through the air and he crashed into the wall and slid down to the floor. Bradley got himself another drink and sat down next to the man and waited for him to come to. When the guy opened his eyes, ol’ Bradley looked over him and said, ‘Well partner, now you can say you’ve met one of Choc Floyd’s brothers.’”
Charley Floyd continued to be everywhere at once. In Bartlesville, a town that oil made prosperous, Russell Davis remembered the morning when one of his sisters and several other local young ladies were having coffee at the Rightway Cafe. Some men they did not know walked in and looked around. “A nice-looking man from the group went over to the girls sitting at a table out in the open and he politely suggested they move to another table concealed beneath a stairway,” recalled Davis. “The girls thought it was an odd request but they didn’t want to make a fuss, so they complied. The men took their original table and sat drinking coffee and talking in muffled tones. Later on the girls discovered that the nice young man was none other than Pretty Boy. They were told he asked them to move so they’d be out of harm’s way in case some law officers came in and there was a confrontation. He was just being thoughtful.”
That same spring, George Cheatham was a young cowboy on horseback driving cattle to market. He was about sixty miles west of Kansas City when he came upon a farmer who ran from his house waving his hands and hollering at the top of his lungs. “The old-timer said he had put up a couple of men the night before,” recalled Cheatham. “One of them slept in the car and the other one stayed inside. They took turns eating supper at the farmer’s table. When they left that morning, they slipped the farmer some money and one of the men said, ‘Tell ’em that Pretty Boy slept in your bed.’ I was the first person that old farmer saw and he couldn’t wait to tell me the news.”
Sightings and stories about Charley continued. About mid-spring of 1933, Jesse Berryhill, a young Oklahoma teacher in Choctaw County, ended up, much to his surprise, spending a night with Pretty Boy Floyd. Berryhill, who had just finished the term at his rural school, drove north to Pushmataha County to do some night fishing along the Kiamichi River. His old Chevrolet coupe was loaded with camping gear. A bundle of twelve-foot-long cane poles was strapped on the side of the car. He crossed the Kiamichi ten miles east of the town of Antlers and turned down a little-used trail to a favorite hole he had often fished as a boy. After setting up a camp deep in the brush, Berryhill followed some car tracks until he stumbled across another coupe, half-hidden in a thicket. That is when the schoolteacher met Mr. Floyd. Many years later, Berryhill published his remembrances of the meeting in an Oklahoma newspaper.
“I spun around to stare squarely into the barrel of a machine gun backed by a square-featured, handsome face that I recognized all too well from the dozens of pictures I had seen,” wrote Berryhill more than forty years later. After several tense minutes of interrogation, Floyd seemed satisfied that the intruder was not a “law” but only a harmless angler. They returned to Berryhill’s camp. They shared a pot of coffee and passed the night snagging catfish by lantern light. Over plates of panfried fish and tin mugs of coffee, Berryhill asked Floyd why he stayed on the scout. Charley glanced up at him through the flames of the camp fire with a look of surprise.
“Man, I can’t give myself up,” Charley told Berryhill. “I’d never live to face a judge. These lawmen aren’t carrying a warrant of arrest, they are carrying a license to kill me. I’m big game. The man who gets ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd will be a celebrity, a public hero. And, they will get me, I know that. I can’t last much longer. A man gets too tired to be careful. They’ll close in on me and shoot me to death without warning and in the back, if possible. Oh, the papers will report that I was shot running away, but it will be a lie.”
Shortly after dawn, Floyd let the air out of Berryhill’s tires. He took the teacher’s shotgun and car keys. “You’ll find your keys on the gatepost, and the other things close by,” Choc told him. He asked Berryhill to wait at least an hour and not to spread the story of their chance meeting too soon.
“I spent another day and night alone there by the old Kiamichi,” wrote Berryhill, “and never even mentioned the incidents described here for almost five years.”
Seemingly always on the move, Choc actually spent a great deal of time throughout 1932 and 1933 with the Rings, Ruby’s aunt and uncle, who had a house filled with growing children not far from Boynton in Muskogee County. Jess Ring worked around the oil patch, and also served ironically as a special deputy for Muskogee County Sheriff V. S. Cannon, one of Erv Kelley’s old friends. Although he was sworn to uphold the law, Ring admired Choc and considered him to be a good friend. Sheriff Cannon respected Ring’s dilemma.
“My dad and Sheriff Cannon often talked about Charley,” recalled Ruth Ring Morgan, one of the Ring daughters. “The sheriff said that although he knew Dad would never turn in Charley, he would still be coming out to our house to try to catch him. And the sheriff did come, too. He made repeated visits. Sometimes Charley had to hide in a nearby cotton patch but there was never any gunplay.
“One time the sheriff knocked on the front door and stepped inside because it was so cold outside. As he did, Charley slipped out the back door. I looked outside and saw the taillights of his car going down the road. Another time, a bunch of us were home making popcorn. Charley was sitting in a big chair right in front of the fireplace with one of my cousins on his lap and Sheriff Cannon comes in again and asked my dad if he’d seen Charley. ‘Well, not in the last few minutes,’ my dad told him. After the sheriff left, they all laughed about it because that was the truth—my dad hadn’t actually looked at Charley in several minutes. There were some close calls, but Charley promised my mother that he’d never fire a shot around our house. She knew that he’d not endanger our family.”
In truth, the Rings always welcomed Choc. A visit from Charley and one of his friends brightened a dull afternoon, especially during the bad times of the thirties when rain was as scarce as cash money. The family got to know George Birdwell, and after Floyd formed his association with Adam Richetti, the Rings also hosted the swarthy bandit at their residence. Adam, an accomplished freehand artist, entertained the children with his pencil sketches drawn at the kitchen table. In the mornings, there were always Milky Way bars under every child’s pillow. The candy bars were left by Charley, and were as good as gold bars to a youngster of the Great Depression. On Sunday mornings, he gathered up all the kids and read them the funny papers. Sometimes he would take the older children out to a field and allow them to fire a short burst from his submachine gun while he held the weapon for them. Although Floyd’s ex-wife was actually a first cousin to the Ring children, she and Charley seemed more like an aunt and uncle.
“One of my best memories of Charley Floyd was the time my mother gave him a list of groceries to buy at the store for a needy family,” remembered Ruth Morgan. “I went along with Charley and we drove to a little country store in Boynton and he filled up a bushel basket with all kinds of food and put it in the car. Then I showed Charley where the people lived. My mother had also told him that these folks were so poor that their kids had no shoes and had to lay out of school.
“So, we got to their place and Charley carried that basket of groceries to their porch and set it down. He got back in the car and sat there for a minute. Then he took out some money, rolled it up, and put it in my hand. He said, ‘Go give this to the man and tell him to buy his kids some shoes.’ I went up and knocked and the man came out and I did just what Charley said to do and the man thanked me. Years later I heard that one of the boys in that family not only finished school but went on to become the superintendent of all the schools in the state of Kansas.”
Sixty years later, then grandmothers, Ruth and her younger sister Lavona could still clearly recall Charley Floyd baking pies in their mother’s kitchen. It was his favorite way to relax.
“He loved to bake, especially those good fruit pies,” recalled Lavona. “In 1933, my sisters wanted to take one to a pie supper and Charley made them a great big apple pie. Well, that pie was the hit of the supper. Sheriff Cannon ate a big slice and declared it the best pie he’d ever put in his mouth. Little did he know that it was baked by Pretty Boy Floyd!”
Sometimes Ruby and young Dempsey drove down from the Hardgraves place near Bixby to spend a weekend with Choc at the Ring home. Both Ruth and Lavona remembered several emotional reunions. “Charley would be so happy to see his son that tears flowed down his cheeks,” said Lavona.
In May of 1933, just a couple of months following Roosevelt’s inauguration, Charley visited his mother in Sallisaw. He took her out to Akins to decorate the graves of Walter, baby Chester Lee, and other family and friends who were buried there. As if he knew his own end was near, Charley took the opportunity to point out a spot not far from his father’s resting place where he wished to be buried. The following year, Mamie Floyd recounted her son’s instructions.
“Right here is where you can put me,” Choc had told his mother, who later related his words to reporters. “I expect to go down soon with lead in me—perhaps the sooner the better.”
Although Mamie never disclosed the precise date when her son picked out his grave site, more than likely it was the fourth Sunday in May. This was always the traditional decoration day for the community of Akins, when residents and kinfolk from near and far returned to honor the dead.
If that was indeed the correct date, then there is no question that the May 29 bank robbery and murder in New York state that many criminal historians have blamed on Pretty Boy Floyd was yet another case of mistaken identity. The crime occurred that Monday during the noon hour. Six masked bandits, armed with submachine guns, raided the Rensselaer County Bank in Rensselaer, New York. While in the act of rifling the case drawers, the holdup men were surprised by two detectives answering the bank alarm. A gun battle commenced. One officer, Frederick Rabe, was badly wounded, and the other, James A. Stevens, was shot and killed. The bandits dashed away in a blue sedan, eluding armed pursuit cars that chased them through Albany and then south toward New York City.
Thirty-five miles southeast of Rensselaer, at Lee, Massachusetts, police had flashed word at 4:00 A.M. on that same date that Pretty Boy Floyd was supposedly seen in the area driving in an automobile with Nebraska license plates. When he was shown a photograph of Floyd, the wounded detective tentatively identified him as one of the bandits.
In the years before commercial airplanes were common, it would have been physically impossible for Choc to get all the way from Oklahoma to far eastern New York state in less than twenty-four hours. But even if his visit to the Akins graveyard had been earlier that month, there is still a great deal of doubt that one of the gunmen was Floyd. This robbery took place far away from his territory and was completely out of character with his method of operation.
Charley would soon be plagued with far greater difficulties than the Rensselaer robbery allegations, however. A seven-week period of unmitigated criminal violence, from late May until mid-July of 1933, ripped through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri. Although it would not be evident for some time to come, this series of gun battles, prison breaks, kidnappings, and murders—highlighted by the well-publicized Kansas City Massacre on June 17—were all indirectly related.
The corrupt power structure that presided in Kansas City suddenly had been plagued by internal dissension since May 27, just two days prior to the Rensselaer robbery. On that Saturday, Mary McElroy, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Judge H. F. McElroy, the city manager under the thumb of Tom Pendergast, was kidnapped from the family’s South Side residence in broad daylight. The kidnapping of Mary McElroy helped to set events in motion that would unfold throughout the turbulent summer.
The day started innocently enough. Miss McElroy had plans to attend the gala opening of the fourth season at the Riverside racetrack. About 11:00 A.M., she was upstairs taking a bath when there was a knock at the front door. A maid admitted a young man, later identified as Walter McGee, posing as a cosmetic salesman delivering samples. Once inside, McGee brandished a gun and announced his intention to kidnap Mary McElroy. After calmly finishing her bath, she dressed in a summer frock, powdered her nose, and left with her captor. McGee covered the young woman with a lap robe, and he and several accomplices whisked her away to a stucco house on the county line road north of Shawnee, Kansas.
Soon, Judge McElroy received notes in his daughter’s own handwriting, demanding sixty thousand dollars in ransom. He bargained the kidnappers down to thirty thousand dollars, and Johnny Lazia was given the assignment of collecting that sum from his loyal following. Reporters, detectives, and politicians crowded into the McElroy home. Boss Pendergast himself stopped by to offer sympathy to his distraught stooge. The situation was particularly frustrating because the kidnappers were strictly amateurs and were virtually unknown in the underworld channels of Kansas City.
Following more negotiations, the ransom was delivered by McElroy and his son to a lonely spot off Muncie Bluff Road. There the masked kidnappers, wearing overalls and carrying shotguns, took the money and told the McElroys to return home. Finally, more than thirty hours after she had first been kidnapped, Mary McElroy was released unharmed near the entrance to the Milburn Country Club.
McGee, his brother, and another man and woman were among those linked to the crime. Five days later, McGee and two of the suspects were arrested. Justice was swift. Stiff jail terms were given for the kidnapping and McGee was sentenced to be executed. However, because of pleas for mercy from Miss McElroy and her father, that punishment was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Even after the safe release of Mary McElroy, tension continued to run high in Kansas City. The McElroy kidnapping was an insult to the pride of the suave Johnny Laiza. The incident undermined the confidence many corrupt Kansas Citians had placed in the chief enforcer of Judge McElroy’s Home Rule policy, which tolerated petty violations of the law. Rival gangs, already angered by the concessions shown the Lazia organization by local authorities, screamed that the out-of-town punks and neophyte hoodlums were a growing threat. Tension was building in Tom’s Town.
Three days after the McElroy kidnapping, while detectives and Lazia’s henchmen still searched for the abductors, there was yet another shock to Kansas City’s already-queasy system. The surprise came on May 30—Memorial Day. Eleven big-time convicts, eight of them convicted murderers and bank robbers, escaped from the Kansas state prison at Lansing, less than forty miles outside Kansas City.
Some of these escaped convicts, especially ringleaders Wilbur Underhill and Harvey Bailey, were soon to be considered prime suspects in the Kansas City Massacre. Given their violent backgrounds, it was easy to see why.
Underhill, a thirty-three-year-old cop killer known in the Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri region as the Tri-State Terror, was no choirboy. A convicted bootlegger and hijacker as a youth, he later served time for burglary and armed robbery and had previously escaped from the Oklahoma state penitentiary, where he had been incarcerated for killing a drugstore clerk and an oil field worker. He had been serving a life term at Lansing for murdering a Wichita policeman. Three out of his four years in the Kansas prison he had spent in solitary confinement.
Bailey, at one time a hardworking family man, had prospered as a bootlegger after World War I, before turning to bank burglary and armed robbery in the early 1920s. He was part of the team that struck at the U.S. Mint in Denver on December 18, 1922, escaping with two hundred thousand dollars in five-dollar bills. The undisputed king of bank robbers, Bailey operated at various times with several old pros, including Thomas Holden, Francis Keating, Verne Miller, Frank “Jelly” Nash, and a young bootlegger named George Kelly Barnes, who would later become known as Machine Gun Kelly.
Bailey had been implicated for a time in the Chicago gang massacre on St. Valentine’s Day of 1929 and had also been identified as one of the robbers who looted the Lincoln Bank and Trust in Nebraska of a staggering $2.6 million in cash and negotiable securities in 1930. Following his conviction in the June 17, 1932, raid of a bank in Fort Scott, Kansas, Bailey was serving twenty to one hundred years for murder and bank robbery. His accomplices included Freddie Barker and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. Called Old Harve because of his prematurely gray hair, Bailey was well into his forties at the time of the prison break.
Of the others who escaped from Lansing, convicts James Clark, Frank Sawyer, Alvin Payton, and Edward Davis were serving twenty-to one-hundred-year terms for murder and robbery. Kenneth Coon faced a life term for murder and Robert Brady was a lifer convicted of being an habitual criminal. Lewis Bechtel, Clifford Dapson, and Billy Woods were doing time on five-to twenty-year sentences for robbery and automobile theft.
The gang of hard-core cons, armed with pistols that had been smuggled into the penitentiary, made their break while the rest of the 1,861 inmates watched a Memorial Day baseball game between American Legion teams from Topeka and Leavenworth. Underhill and his cohorts took the warden and two guards hostage. Using grappling hooks and a rope ladder made in the prison twine shop, they slipped over the penitentiary walls and returned to the outside world. Several of the convicts were recaptured in the massive manhunt that followed, but the worst of the lot managed to find refuge in Oklahoma.
The Lansing incident put the authorities in mind of the sensational escape of seven federal prisoners from the nearby Leavenworth Penitentiary on December 11, 1931. Included among that group of grizzled outlaws were Earl Thayer and several former members of the old Al Spencer gang dating back to the wild six-shooter days in Oklahoma. The runaway convicts were soon shot or apprehended.
A prime suspect as the mastermind behind both of the big Kansas prison breaks was none other than Frank “Jelly” Nash, the notorious Oklahoma bandit who had been sent to Leavenworth in 1924 to serve a twenty-five-year term after his conviction in the Okesa train robbery led by Al Spencer. Nash had been on the loose ever since October 19, 1930, when he escaped from the big federal penitentiary. A prison trustee because of his exemplary behavior, Nash was working in the warden’s residence and had just prepared a sumptuous dinner for the warden’s family when he simply walked out the back door with a three-volume set of Shakespeare under his arm and never returned. Law officers conjectured that Nash had fled the grounds in an automobile driven by some of Johnny Lazia’s henchmen.
Warden Thomas White, embarrassed by Nash’s departure, told reporters: “We let Nash put it over on us. Anyone who could talk his way out of two life sentences, well we should have known better.”
In 1931, Nash had also been instrumental in the escape of two other Leavenworth convicts, the bank robbers Thomas Holden and Francis Keating. They fled to Kansas City and teamed up with the violent Barker-Karpis gang, robbing several banks over the following year.
For rest and recuperation between bank heists, these men and other criminal cronies enjoyed rounds of golf at the Old Mission Country Club, a Kansas City resort that was popular with underworld figures. On July 8, 1932, Holden and Keating joined Bailey and Nash for a leisurely eighteen holes. Federal agents, including some who would be involved in the Kansas City Massacre less than a year later, and a few local detectives had been shadowing the outlaws. They swooped down on the bandit golfers just as they finished the last hole and were headed to the clubhouse to join their wives and sweethearts. Bailey, Holden, and Keating were taken into custody. The other member of the foursome, Jelly Nash, was still out on the eighteenth green. When he witnessed the arrest of his three friends, Nash quickly ducked into some brush and made his escape. In no time, Nash hooked up with the Barkers and continued his bank-robbing ways. Bailey soon found himself in the Kansas state prison, where he remained until he and Underhill and the rest of their cutthroat crew made their Memorial Day departure over the high prison walls.
In the aftermath of the eleven desperadoes escaping from Lansing, Charley Floyd’s continued capers were reduced to minor mentions buried deep in newspapers. On June 3, however, while the search continued for the Mary McElroy kidnappers as well as the prison escapees from Lansing, a dispatch out of Oklahoma caught everyone up on Choc’s latest escapade. “The ‘Pretty Boy’ listed in a thousand rogues galleries as Charles Arthur Floyd, and sought for more than three years by peace officers in a dozen states, again tonight was the object of a search concentrated in one of his favorite hiding places near Seminole.”
Floyd and several companions were out for a Saturday afternoon drive on a country road when their stolen automobile had a flat tire. A trio of Seminole County deputies happened along and stopped to make a routine check. One of the officers was suspicious and asked Floyd to identify himself. He did—with his submachine gun. Choc whipped the weapon out from beneath a blanket and stuck it in the deputy’s face. “It’s none of your business,” snarled Choc. “Go to hell!”
The frightened deputies jumped into their car and dashed back to Wewoka for reinforcements. When they returned, the lawmen took into custody Ruby Floyd and Marie Smalley, wife of Blackie Smalley, just as the women poured gasoline over the stolen vehicle. The women were charged with harboring criminals and theft. Officers drove out to Bradley Floyd’s home near Earlsboro and also arrested Bradley, Blackie Smalley, and Troy Keesee, the brother-in-law of State Representative C. L. Hill of Seminole County, who owned the stolen automobile. Young Dempsey Floyd, neatly dressed in overalls, was found at the Smalley residence. All of them were taken in for questioning and also charged with car theft.
“No son ever had a more affectionate father and no wife a more dutiful husband than Charley Floyd,” spouted Ruby from her jail cell. She and the others were thoroughly grilled and were then released after making bond. The charges were dropped. Choc and Adam Richetti escaped capture and were nowhere to be found.
At the time of this incident, a rumor also circulated that Ruby was preparing her memoirs. Most folks outside the tight circle of Floyd friends and family were not aware that Ruby had divorced Charley back in 1929, much less that she had married a banker from Coffeyville, Kansas. If she actually put down on paper some of her impressions of life with a hunted bank robber, that project was soon put aside, however. There were other distractions, such as show business.
Ruby and her eight-year-old son went on the road with a stage show ironically called Crime Doesn’t Pay. In June of 1933, the mother-and-son act appeared before sizable audiences at both Seminole and Wewoka. The crowd was so large at Seminole that a special late show was held just to accommodate the overflow of people anxious to see Pretty Boy’s son and wife and hear about their tribulations.
“Oftentimes my mother and I would appear on stage between movies at theaters in different cities,” remembered Dempsey Floyd. “We went all over Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, wherever they could book us a show. I’d get all dressed up in a nice white suit, and I’d walk right out on the stage and tell the people who I was and then I’d introduce my mother. We would stand out there together and she’d talk about crime and how it had ruined our lives and kept us separated from my father. I guess people wanted to know what we looked like.”
The idea of Ruby and Dempsey appearing in public to talk about Choc did not go over well with all the Floyds. Mamie Floyd was especially upset and made her feelings known, but her feelings about Ruby, especially after she married the Coffeyville baker, were not terribly fond, anyway. Charley, however, apparently was not bothered at all by Ruby’s attempt to earn a little money.
“I can recall one time when Ruby and Jackie had a big show to do in Muskogee,” reminisced Ruth Ring Morgan. “This particular time, Charley himself took me to see the show. He drove me over to Muskogee and dropped me off right in front of the theater. There were big ol’ posters about their talk up everywhere. As I was getting out of the car, he smiled and said, ‘I hope you enjoy the show.’ He wasn’t put out one bit.”
On June l4, a series of violent acts transpired in the Show Me State that gave Charley Floyd little to smile about. At 2:15 P.M., a trio of men held up the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Mexico, Missouri. The bandits entered the bank with drawn revolvers and confronted C. F. Merrifield, the bank cashier, and two customers. After looting the vault, cash drawer, and money changer, the robbers even took sixty-five dollars from Robert Lyons, who had stopped to make a deposit. A total of $1,750 was gathered in only a few minutes and then the desperadoes drove south down Highway 54 in a Buick sedan.
Within minutes of the robbery, a statewide alarm went out. Jefferson City police officers stationed guards at the Missouri River bridge to watch for the bandits. Lawmen throughout the central part of the state jumped into their automobiles and scoured the back roads and highways.
Only forty-five minutes after the bank robbery, Boone County Sheriff Roger Wilson and Sgt. Ben Booth, a highway patrolman, pulled over a suspect vehicle on the outskirts of the city of Columbia. As the lawmen began to question the occupants, gunshots erupted from inside the car and both officers fell dead.
By late that afternoon, one of the largest manhunts in Missouri history had commenced. Great posses made up of University of Missouri students, farmers, and businessmen joined with peace officers in search of the killers. Weapons ranged from shotguns to pearl-handled pistols. One old man carried an antique blunderbuss with a flared muzzle. From the university campus at Columbia, the colonel in charge of the Reserve Officers Training Program ordered rapid-fire army rifles to be issued to the possemen. Supply sergeants handed out arms and ammunition to long lines of ex-soldiers who had been deputized. In downtown Columbia and in the nearby city of Fulton, large crowds of incensed citizens milled about while waiting for any word about the progress of the manhunt. Maj. Phil Love, buddy of Col. Charles Lindbergh during their mail-flying days in the twenties, flew in from St. Louis to lead an aerial search. Riverboats were pressed into service to patrol the banks of the broad Missouri. Rewards for the slayers, dead or alive, mounted.
The following morning, a hemp hangman’s noose was seen dangling from a signpost near the scene of the double murder. It symbolized the temperament of the grim-faced men on the hunt. Col. Marvin Casteel, head of the state highway patrol, ordered barricades to be maintained on almost every road and bridge in Boone and Callaway counties. In Columbia, swarms of mourners paid tribute to the fallen officers whose bodies lay in state in the rotunda of the Boone County courthouse. Badge number thirteen was pinned on Booth’s dress uniform.
A few days after the murders, no suspects had been located, but the United Press found a Columbia woman who came forward with new information. She claimed that she was an eyewitness to the double slaying of Wilson and Booth. Lucy Clark provided reporters and law officers with a detailed account of the crime. She said that she had been walking across the lawn of a tourist camp at the intersection of Highways 63 and 40 and was only about twenty-five feet from the scene of the shooting.
“I saw an auto come over the top of the hill driving slowly,” recalled Mrs. Clark. “They seemed to move around a bit and put something up on the ledge behind them in the car.”
She watched as Sergeant Booth flagged the car down, and the highway patrolman walked to the right side of the vehicle and leaned on the door. Mrs. Clark heard the officer speak. “Hello, gentlemen, which way are you headed?” questioned Booth. She could not make out the response, but only an instant later Booth jerked open the car door and pulled out the man sitting on the right side. Sheriff Wilson ran up at this point, and the driver of the car fired through the windshield. Two of the bullets struck Wilson and he plunged forward. The suspect turned the gun on the patrolman and shot him once. Booth fell and pulled down the man he was grappling with on the roadside. He also managed to shout for help. The driver raced around the car and both men pushed Booth back down and shot him twice more. Then the two men jumped back in their car and fled.
Mrs. Clark described the driver of the car in detail—down to the cap he wore at a jaunty angle and the snarl on his face. When police officers showed her a photograph of a known criminal they thought might be involved, she quickly agreed it was a portrait of the killer.
“I’m sure that is one of the men,” said Mrs. Clark. “He drove that car.”
She was staring at a mug shot of Charles Arthur Floyd.
As a result, law officers from throughout rural America to Washington, D.C., considered Choc to be nothing but a wanton killer. Within only a few days, even the double murder of the Missourians was overshadowed by a crime in Kansas City that stirred the nation to give more power to J. Edgar Hoover. It also guaranteed Choc’s life would soon be ended.