Shortly after the spree of violence broke out in central Missouri, Choc Floyd and Adam Richetti entered the state. Sticking to the country roads, they arrived either on June 15 or 16, driving a Pontiac that had been stolen on June 8 in Castle, Oklahoma. The coupe’s Oklahoma license plate—number 154 027—han been swiped off a Chevrolet coach in the town of Maud. Hidden inside the vehicle was an extra set of stolen license plates. In the trunk, the outlaws stashed an army-style footlocker filled with a cache of spare guns and ammunition adjacent to the car owner’s new golf bag and clubs.
Unbeknownst to Floyd and Richetti, their names were tied to the murders of the peace officers near Columbia and the bank robbery at Mexico just as they slipped across the Missouri border. Their troubles had escalated when the Missouri woman told authorities that she had seen Floyd kill the Boone County sheriff and a state patrolman on June 14.
Despite the eyewitness’s claim, it can be safely ascertained that Charley Floyd and Adam Richetti had absolutely no role in either the slayings of the two lawmen or the bank robbery earlier that same day. When those crimes were being committed, Floyd’s relatives verified that Choc and Adam were hundreds of miles to the southwest, having a high time in their Oklahoma stomping grounds. Unfortunately, the true culprits, one of whom turned out to be another of the many Pretty Boy lookalikes, did not confess for almost a year and half. Floyd and Richetti were ultimately cleared of those misdeeds.
Several criminologists and historians who closely examined the case pointed out that Floyd inadvertently brought trouble upon himself when he left his sanctuary of Oklahoma in mid-June to visit Kansas City. It was all a matter of timing, they said. And in Floyd’s instance, his timing could not have been worse.
Some of Floyd’s kinfolk later explained that Charley and his friend merely intended to visit Kansas City for a tryst with Beulah and her sister, Rose, who by then was enamored with Richetti. Their plan was to have a few laughs, to let down their hair in Tom’s Town.
Choc and Adam either drove straight through from Oklahoma during the early-morning hours or else spent the night in a farmer’s barn in the Springfield area. Just after dawn on Friday, June 16, Floyd and Richetti traveled north out of Springfield on Highway 13, then a partially paved two-lane road with long stretches of gravel and oil mat. They had not yet heard that they were considered suspects in the recent bank heist and slayings of the lawmen. If they had, they unquestionably would have canceled their visit.
According to Floyd family members, the two bandits anticipated a leisurely drive into Kansas City and a few nights of pleasure with their girlfriends. Not satisfied with a mug of stout coffee from an all-night greasy spoon, Adam swigged a bottle of bootleg whiskey for a morning jolt. His partner’s increased drinking bothered Choc, especially so early in the day. He had often asked Richetti to pace himself and not allow his taste for strong drink to get out of hand. Those warnings fell on deaf ears.
Not far from Our Way, a small community a few miles north of Springfield, the stolen Pontiac broke down. Charley was forced to enlist the services of an old man who agreed to fetch his truck and tow the disabled automobile into the town of Bolivar, about twenty miles up the highway. Adam’s older brother, Joe Richetti, lived there and worked as an automobile mechanic.
Downtown streets were quiet that morning. The latest issue of the weekly Bolivar Free Press was loaded with local news, including a juicy item about a man living north of town who was jailed for being drunk and disturbing the peace. There were reports of folks catching exceptionally big catfish in the area rivers and a notice that blackberries would soon be ready for early harvest. The aroma of fresh bread poured from the bakery, where a large piping hot loaf sold for just a nickel.
The old farmer, pulling the crippled Pontiac with his truck, arrived in Bolivar with Choc and Adam about 7:00 A.M. Most shops were still closed and the streets mostly empty. Adam, frustrated because of the car problems, took to his bottle of hooch as a trusty ally. He directed the old man to drive first to J. E. Smith and Sons Garage, but some men there said Joe Richetti had taken a job with the Bitzer Chevrolet Company. They left and slowly drove past the imposing Polk County Courthouse, where rows of stores and businesses faced the town square. Atop the stately stone building, a statue of the blindfolded Lady Justice held her scales and sword. She stood perpetual guard, ruling a small army of pigeons cloistered in the clock tower.
At about ten minutes past seven, the old man, with the Pontiac in tow, arrived at Bitzer Chevrolet on the corner of West Broadway and Missouri Avenue, just a short distance off the square. Charley paid the old man for his services, and some of the mechanics pushed the Pontiac into the garage.
Joe Richetti greeted his brother and Choc, and then he set to work to fix their automobile. Although he had a wooden leg as the result of an accident, Joe overcame his disability and was adept at solving most mechanical problems. He put in long hours at the garage and became a respected member of the community. Like Charley Floyd, he was distressed to see his brother drinking alcohol so early in the day.
While Joe worked on the car, some of the salesmen, wearing saddle oxfords and summer suits, wandered from the showroom into the shop to check out the visitors and eyeball the big Pontiac. Besides Chevrolets, Bitzer had only recently added Oldsmobiles to his line. The sales force was anxious to peruse the competition.
“I arrived at the garage after the repairs had started upon Floyd’s coupe, and talked to him for several minutes,” related Ernest V. Bitzer, the proprietor, several days later. Bitzer asked Choc whether he enjoyed the Pontiac. He answered that he liked it just fine. “I recognized Floyd from newspaper pictures. I said, ‘That car looks as if it could travel pretty fast.’ Floyd said it would do eighty-five.”
A man who had just entered the garage suggested that the coupe appeared to have already gone eighty-five miles per hour one too many times. “It looks as if it had been traveling pretty fast,” said the newcomer. Choc and Bitzer turned to see Jack Killingsworth, the sheriff of Polk County, standing behind them in his new panama hat. Killingsworth scrutinized the Pontiac’s freshly dented fender.
Decades later, Killingsworth clearly remembered his encounter that warm June morning with Floyd. The former car salesman for Bitzer Chevrolet was only in his sixth month as the county sheriff, and he enjoyed returning to his former place of employment for early-morning talk and coffee with Bitzer and the boys. On this particular morning, as was his custom when not on official business, Killingsworth was not even carrying a gun.
“I saw this man and Ernest Bitzer sitting on a bench talking,” recollected Killingsworth, twenty-nine years after his chance meeting with Floyd and Richetti. He said he recognized Floyd from the criminal mug shots of the Oklahoma bandit filed away at the nearby sheriff’s office. “I knew from the look on his face that something was wrong. It took a second and I knew who it was.”
Adam Richetti, familiar with the sheriff from previous visits to Bolivar, became alarmed when he spotted Killingsworth giving Floyd the once-over. Adam reached into the Pontiac and brought out a handy submachine gun hidden beneath a blanket on the backseat.
“That’s the law,” he shouted to Floyd. Adam waved the weapon at the sheriff and the others. “Line up against that wall. If you try to get away, we will kill you.” Adam herded the three mechanics and three salesmen into a corner. Then he turned the gun toward the sheriff, but Joe Richetti jumped in front of Killingsworth.
“If you’re going to shoot the sheriff, you’ll have to shoot me first,” Joe told his brother.
“All right, get him out of here then,” said Adam. The drinking appeared to have muddled Richetti’s mind. The sheriff started for the door. Richetti urged him to move faster by poking his back with the muzzle of the submachine gun. Killingsworth had just opened the door and was stepping outside when he felt a hard object against the side of his head. It was the barrel of an automatic pistol.
“Take one more step and I’ll kill you,” Floyd told him.
“There I was with one of them in the back with a machine gun telling me to get out of the door, and the other one with a forty-five telling me to stop,” said Killingsworth, recalling the dilemma. However, Charley had no intention of allowing the sheriff to walk away and to alert his deputies that a pair of nationally prominent desperadoes were holed up at Bitzer’s garage. Angry and confused, Adam cursed and threatened the terrified men until Choc quieted him down.
“That liquor is getting the best of you,” Choc snapped at Adam. Floyd also apologized to Ernest Bitzer for the display of force.
“This is life and death for us,” Choc told him. “We had to do it. They would kill us if they could.”
The two outlaws stood around for several minutes, undecided what to do next. Then while Floyd stood guard, Richetti, eager to make a quick getaway, left the garage and climbed into Killingsworth’s car, which was parked outside. Then he noticed his brother Joe’s 1933 Chevrolet sedan just across the street. Adam decided the newer car would make a better escape vehicle. He drove to the dealership’s gasoline pump, where a man from the front office, thinking Adam was picking up the car for his brother, innocently filled the tank. Adam then drove around to the garage and retrieved his submachine gun while Choc ordered Killingsworth to get into the car.
“I asked him, ‘Why take me?’” recalled Killingsworth. “He said, ‘You know all the roads and you can keep me off the highways.’”
After the weapons were loaded in the car, Killingsworth got into the backseat with Charley, and Adam slid behind the steering wheel. “You can have my car, Joe!” Charley yelled to Adam’s brother as they roared out of Bolivar.
Meanwhile, the alarm spread across the square that Pretty Boy Floyd and Adam Richetti were in town. Claude R. Blue had taken his car to the garage to have it greased. When he discovered the situation in the repair shop, Blue dashed up the street to the City Drug Store. He phoned Roe Newsum, a deputy sheriff, who summoned other deputies and alerted law officers in Springfield and surrounding towns. Newsum arrived at the garage right after the departure of the two gunmen with their hostage. The deputy directed the pursuit from his car. State officers hurried out of Springfield. Other law enforcement agencies from around the region joined in the chase. Many were already on patrol looking for the alleged killers of the Boone County sheriff and highway patrolman.
“I was in the backseat with Floyd,” recalled Killingsworth of the harrowing ride through the Missouri countryside. “Richetti drove for about thirty-five miles, and I was afraid because he was drinking. Then Floyd took the wheel. He sure was a good driver.
“I wasn’t so much worried about what Richetti would do to me, but I knew that if someone caught up with us, there was going to be a desperate fight and someone was going to get killed. I figured there was a good chance I would be the first one. What worried me from the start was that the boys [other officers] would try to help me out. Floyd, I saw right away, would kill a man, but not unless he had to. They told me I would be safe if I would direct them to safety. We wandered over roads I knew would be hard to follow.”
The chase led north through Polk County, first up Highway 83 and then back and forth on farm-to-market roads into Hickory County. They raced by two-story frame farmhouses with lightning rods spiking each steep roof and a sleeping mutt on every porch. In some yards, manicured vegetable gardens were trimmed with showy zinnias and a border of pungent marigolds to ward off insects. In the shallow ponds, wading cattle stood motionless except for their jaws ruminating wads of cud. The hell-bent car left clouds of dust in country crossroads like Elkton, where farmers took breaks from their row crops to trade at a store that made lunch meat and cheese sandwiches. Passing travelers bought bushels of garden produce. Ripe melons lying in the shade looked like dark green cannonballs.
“Floyd talked a lot at first,” recounted Killingsworth. “He asked about the roads and talked about many things. Then sometimes I would ask him a question and he wouldn’t let on like he heard me. He was very polite and always called me ‘Sheriff.’ He never told me to shut up, but sometimes he would go a half hour without saying a word.”
At one point, when they reached a stretch of lakefront, Floyd suggested they stop and go fishing. “Don’t try it,” Killingsworth advised Charley. “There are posses after you now. I don’t want them to catch up with you while I’m in this car.”
By mid-morning the light tan four-door Chevy sedan was spotted near the towns of Wheatland, Quincy, and Harper as the desperadoes worked their way in a generally northwesterly direction toward Kansas City. They crossed into St. Clair County and scooted up Highway 13 northward by Osceola. Built on the Osage River and settled by Southerners, the town had been looted and burned by Kansas troops in 1861 but rallied to become a trade center and seat of justice for the surrounding farm country. Beyond Osceola and Lowry City, not far from the town of Brownington, the fleeing outlaws were overtaken by a lone state patrol vehicle.
Richetti grasped the submachine gun and Choc took the safety off his automatic pistol. “Wave them back,” Floyd told the sheriff.
“I stuck my panama hat out the window and waved as hard as I could,” recalled Killingsworth. “Pretty soon the patrolman began to get the idea and dropped back. I’m sure I saved his life. Another time we were hemmed in by possemen. I sure hoped they wouldn’t surround us completely because there would sure have been bloodshed.”
Again, the outlaws were able to outdistance their pursuers. Once inside Henry County, it was decided to avoid the larger county seat town of Clinton. Charley turned the car toward the Kansas border to the west. During the long journey, they stopped twice to get gasoline and candy bars. At one filling station, Floyd asked the woman attendant whether she had heard any news about the kidnapping of the sheriff. She reported that law officers, who had paused for fuel and drinks of water from the hose, had told her that they figured the desperadoes were headed for Oklahoma. This caused Charley and Adam to chuckle, but they decided they still had to be cautious. They could not let down their guard.
“I told Floyd he’d better get another car, because the one we had wasn’t so very fast,” related Killingsworth. “He thought it was a good idea and he pulled off to the side of the road.”
They were now on Highway 52, about two and a half miles west of the town of Deepwater. Charley and Adam, with weapons at the ready, watched for a probable candidate to motor by them. They did not have long to wait. “After a few minutes, a Pontiac came up the road,” remembered Killingsworth. “Floyd said, ‘That looks like a likely car,’ and chased it. Richetti held a machine gun against me and made me wave the driver down.”
Leaving Joe Richetti’s Chevrolet behind, the gunmen took their few possessions, including the guns in the trunk. They ordered Killingsworth into the Pontiac. “Move over!” Choc growled at the driver, a fifty-one-year-old Sunday school superintendent from Clinton named Walter L. Griffith. A widower since 1930, he had lately served as a farm supervisor for a life insurance company.
On this day, Griffith was making a business call. He was en route to the Annie McCoy farm near Appleton City when he was flagged down by Killingsworth. The two men who jumped out of their car waving pistols and a submachine gun startled the mild-mannered Griffith, whose greatest source of pleasure was the temperance prayer meetings he led at the First Baptist Church. As the big Pontiac roared down the dusty road, Floyd assured Griffith that they meant him no harm. They had only appropriated his speedy automobile to complete the journey to Kansas City.
“He [Floyd] took the wheel, and Sheriff Killingsworth and Richetti sat in the rear,” Griffith told the Kansas City Star the following day. “Floyd had one automatic pistol between his knees and another by his left side. Whenever anyone in another car looked at us, Floyd would release the safety catch on the automatic between his knees.” Gradually everyone settled back.
“You seem like pretty good fellas. I believe I’ll let you get out of this,” Floyd told the two captives.
“After a while, I began to think that if we kept our heads, we might get out of it all right,” Killingsworth later told reporters. “He’s a desperate man, this Floyd. But he was pretty pleasant to me all the time we were together. Floyd made no more threats. He told me to do what he asked and we would get along all right. But I don’t think any ten men can capture him alive.”
As the curious foursome—the sheriff, the deacon, and the two bandits—continued on toward Kansas City, the shiny new Pontiac rumbled across creeks on narrow bridges and sped past suntanned farmers who waved from their tractors.
“Sometime during the afternoon, an airplane flew down the road, about one hundred feet above us,” recollected Killingsworth. “That worried Floyd and it worried me, too, but apparently the pilot didn’t notice us, because he went on.”
They crossed into Kansas without fanfare. Griffith’s Pontiac took the curves gracefully, spraying loose gravel into the weeds. A fog of ashen dust billowed in its wake. The insurance agent was more worried about his new automobile and the paint being scratched than about his life. Griffith complained that Floyd was driving much too fast. Charley did not sass the older man, but Richetti became infuriated and wanted to dump the impudent Griffith from his own car. While Killingsworth smoothed Griffith’s ruffled feathers, Charley calmed Richetti down. There were no further outbursts.
In fact, by early evening, a mutual respect developed between Floyd and Killingsworth. Charley pulled the car off the road into a hidden ravine in a wooded area somewhere to the east of Ottawa, Kansas, so they could rest and wait for the cover of darkness before entering Kansas City. Griffith sat in silence in his beloved Pontiac while the others stretched out on the ground. Richetti consoled himself with more than a few snootfuls of liquor. Choc took a few nips to wash down the road dust he had inhaled all day. He quietly shared a few of his personal thoughts with the sheriff.
“We got to be plumb good friends,” Killingsworth later said of Floyd. “He got to talking a lot about himself. He told me, ‘It’s a hell of a life being dogged around, and having to hide all the time. There’s no turning back for me now. Too many policemen want me. I haven’t got a chance except to fight it out. I don’t aim to let anybody take me alive.’” Killingsworth rested his head on a rock and listened to every word. Propped on his elbow, Choc kept his .45 holstered and the submachine gun lay nearby.
“They’ll get me,” continued Floyd. “Sooner or later, I’ll go down full of lead. That’s the way it will end. I might not have to been this way, you know, but for the damned police. I might be going straight, be living with a family and working for a living. I finally decided, you’re determined I’m a tough guy, a bank robber—that’s what I’ll be. They [the law] have themselves to thank.” Killingsworth talked about his wife, but when he said that he missed his little boy, Floyd bristled. The sheriff remembered every word.
“You shouldn’t kick about one day,” Choc told him. “How would you like to be hunted night and day, day and night? How would you like to sleep every night with this thing [Charley touched the barrel of the submachine gun] across your knees? I have a son, too. Maybe you think I wouldn’t like to see him. When you get home, you can have your son with you every day and sit and talk with him. All I ever get to do is see mine once in a long while. Then all I can do is to stand off and look at him for a minute.”
After a few hours, they climbed back into the car. They drove north through the darkness. At Bonner Springs, they swung east, slowly circling Kansas City. They arrived shortly after 10:00 P.M. Splattered bugs caked the windshield as Griffith’s sacred Pontiac crept into the packinghouse district in the West Bottoms.
Floyd stopped the car on a darkened street and left for a few moments to make a telephone call. More than likely, Floyd family members later conjectured, he contacted Beulah. When Choc returned, he drove the hostages to an area near Ninth and Hickory streets. A black Chevrolet sedan drove up beside the Pontiac. Floyd and Richetti transferred the footlocker to the other car, presumably driven by Beulah or her sister. After the transfer was made, Floyd moved the Pontiac a short distance down the road and stopped. He ordered the captives out of the car.
“He told us to wait five minutes and then walk down and get the car,” recalled Killingsworth. “He said to drive on home and not to call anyone, because we would be watched.” Floyd also recommended that on their way home, Killingsworth and Griffith stop in Lee’s Summit for a bite to eat.
Then just before he and Richetti took their leave, Charley turned to the weary sheriff. “Floyd told me to take the golf bag he left in the car they abandoned at the garage to remember him by. But I told him I wouldn’t need anything to remember him by.”
Charley and Adam drove the Pontiac about one hundred yards down the road to where the Chevy waited. The last Killingsworth saw of them, they were speeding toward downtown Kansas City. He guessed that Richetti, in an alcoholic stupor, would soon pass out.
Killingsworth and Griffith walked to where Floyd had left the dust-covered Pontiac. The keys hung in the ignition. Only the stench of Richetti’s whiskey remained to remind the men of their captors. They followed Choc’s instructions and did not rush to notify the local authorities. Instead, they drove to nearby Lee’s Summit, where the sheriff called his home in Bolivar to let his wife know that he was safe. Griffith then drove south with Killingsworth and reached his hometown of Clinton about 2:30 A.M. The sheriff telephoned Ernest Bitzer, and the car dealer drove up from Bolivar to retrieve him. Killingsworth’s anxious wife and their two-year-old son waited at the family home. After he related the details of his fourteen-hour adventure with Pretty Boy through more than five hundred miles of Missouri and Kansas back country, Killingsworth collapsed in bed.
“For the business he’s in,” the sheriff said of Choc, “Floyd’s a perfect gentleman.”
The same afternoon that Floyd and Richetti zigzagged toward Kansas City, another group of law officers, reinforced by two companies of National Guardsmen, pressed their pursuit of Floyd and Richetti, certain that they were the bandits who had killed the two peace officers near Columbia. As three thousand mourners walked past the bodies of Booth and Wilson at their memorial service, Boone County’s prosecuting attorney vowed to seek capital punishment for the killers. Besides the Columbia woman who had already identified Pretty Boy as the triggerman, a farmer and his wife from Cairo, Missouri, just north of Moberly, came forward to say that Floyd and a companion had spent the night in the Grand Prairie Church near their place about a week before the lawmen’s murders. The couple knew it had to be Pretty Boy because of pictures of him they had seen in the newspapers.
The Mexico bank robbery and the slayings of the sheriff and state patrolman near Columbia, coupled with the capricious kidnapping of another county sheriff and a businessman, made Pretty Boy and Richetti as famous as members of the Gas House Gang playing ball in St. Louis.
While one drama was unfolding in Missouri, another was occurring at the same time in Arkansas. In the wide-open resort town of Hot Springs, a popular “safe city” for men on the run, federal agents were closing in on the elusive fugitive Frank Nash. Little did Floyd or Nash—who never even met each other—know it at the time, but they were destined to be linked in one of the most infamous displays of violence of the Great Depression.
Only nine hours after Charley and Richetti parted company with their two hostages, the bloodbath that shattered the calm in Kansas City emblazoned the names of Frank Nash and Pretty Boy Floyd in the annals of American criminal history. Smooth-talking Jelly Nash, the seasoned survivor from the six-shooter and cow pony days of Wild West banditry, never knew what hit him.
The Bureau of Investigation had been on Nash’s trail for three years, ever since he had slipped away from the warden’s home at Leavenworth and returned to a checkered career as a bootlegger and robber. Federal agents learned that Nash had since married Frances Luce, a divorcée with a small daughter. They received word that the couple had been seen in the company of other questionable characters and their spouses at known criminal hangouts throughout the Midwest. Further information provided by Holden and Keating, two of the bank robbers nabbed in 1932 at the end of a golf game in Kansas City, indicated that Nash was currently receiving protection from underworld contacts in Hot Springs, where he sometimes used the name Doc Williams.
In June 1933, two federal agents from the Bureau of Investigation’s Oklahoma City office, Frank C. Smith and F. Joseph Lackey, made plans to capture Nash.
Scuttlebutt on the snitches’ grapevine had it that Nash had taken extreme measures to alter his appearance. To make sure they captured their man, Smith and Lackey recruited McAlester Police Chief Otto Reed, a veteran peace officer familiar with Nash from the old days in Oklahoma, to accompany them to Hot Springs. Reed agreed to go along for the ride. He said it would be worth the trip just to see the look on Nash’s face when they nailed him.
The trio of lawmen set out for Hot Springs, the venerable spa with a thermal river under its main street. Located fifty-five miles southwest of Little Rock in the oak-and hickory-covered hills, Hot Springs had been for many years a haven for the rich, famous, and infamous, all interested in a soak at one of the luxurious establishments on lavish Bathhouse Row along Central Avenue.
Visitors as improbably grouped as Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Helen Keller, and Andrew Carnegie took therapeutic baths to unknit muscles. Others came to cure ailments ranging from syphilis to rheumatism. Some gambled for high stakes between dips in the healing waters. Occasionally, such prizefighters as John L. Sullivan, Jess Willard, and Choc’s idol Jack Dempsey used Hot Springs as a conditioning site. Several baseball teams came for spring training, most notably the Pittsburgh Pirates, who opened their seasons in Hot Springs from 1901 to 1933. Huey Long, Herbert Hoover, and Al Capone were among the highly disparate guests.
Despite the lure of the waters that beckoned nearby, Special Agents Smith and Lackey and Chief Reed had no time for bathing. They arrived in Hot Springs on the evening of June 15 and checked into the Como Hotel. The agents were careful not to make their presence known to the local authorities, as was the custom whenever they moved into another jurisdiction to apprehend a federal fugitive. They firmly believed that the local police force were thoroughly corrupt. Hot Springs was indeed hostile territory.
The next morning, Friday, June 16, they ate breakfast and went looking for Nash. An informant had given the lawmen a description of Nash’s automobile as well as the license number. At five minutes before high noon, they located the vehicle parked in front of the White Front Cigar Store, one of Nash’s favorite spots. Inside, the fugitive was drinking a bottle of 3.2 beer. Despite his altered appearance, Otto Reed recognized Nash immediately.
“Nash was bald as an eagle, but he had on a wig and was wearing a mustache,” related Lackey many years later. “He was holding a beer bottle behind his back. I walked up behind him and said, ‘Get on out there and get in that automobile.’ Reed covered the bartender with a rifle.” A Bureau of Investigation report from 1934 noted that in apprehending Nash, “the agents took him in an unceremonious manner due to the fact that the escaped prisoner was strongly entrenched with the local police department at Hot Springs.”
The legendary bandit offered no resistance, doing exacty as he was told. During the seizure, however, Nash obviously did not go unnoticed. As the three armed men whisked Nash into their waiting car and sped out of town, Richard Galatas, owner and operator of the White Front, dashed to the telephone and, through a series of calls, notified several of Nash’s outlaw friends about his capture in Hot Springs. When Nash’s wife, Frances, found out about her husband’s unscheduled departure, she also helped spread the word via the criminal network that extended from Hot Springs to Joplin and Kansas City.
“It was a wonder that we weren’t killed when we took Nash,” Smith recalled years later. “He had been there for some time, and was surrounded by his own gang of outlaws and criminals.”
Because of these clandestine phone calls, the car carrying Nash and his captors, traveling up to seventy miles per hour, was stopped at roadblocks manned by police officers with riot guns at the town of Benton and later at Little Rock. The officers said they had been notified that a man had been kidnapped at Hot Springs. In both instances, the federal agents displayed their badges and were allowed to continue on their way.
Late that afternoon, they reached the salty border town of Fort Smith, just across the Arkansas River from Choc Floyd’s home territory. The three lawmen, with Nash in manacles, planned to depart Fort Smith that evening on a Missouri Pacific train bound for Kansas City. They expected to be met at Union Station the following morning by fellow agents and local detectives who would provide backup for the short trip from Kansas City to the federal prison at Leavenworth. Although the special agents had kept their route secret, word apparently leaked out. A newspaper reporter nosed around the Fort Smith depot just moments before the train pulled away from the platform. Meanwhile, Nash and the other three men passed a quiet night in a stateroom as the train chugged due north through the darkness.
On Saturday morning, the train ground to a halt beside the august Union Station, a Kansas City landmark since it had first opened in l914. The Harvey House restaurant inside the depot was busy with breakfast diners. Smartly uniformed porters trudged through the great lobby with piles of luggage. Outside, it was a pleasant seventy-one degrees.
Upon arrival at the station, Special Agent Lackey left Smith and Reed to watch Nash while he went out on the platform. Reed E. Vetterli, who had been recruited by Hoover in 1924 and was now in charge of the bureau’s Kansas City office, and Raymond J. Caffrey, a thirty-one-year-old Nebraska-bred lawyer who became an agent in l928, greeted Joe Lackey. Also on hand to add some help if trouble arose were W. J. Grooms and Frank Hermanson, two Kansas City police officers who were trusted by the bureau. The agents surveyed the area and saw nothing to arouse their suspicion. The seven officers and Nash went inside the station. They proceeded through the lobby to the plaza area outside the east entrance, where Agent Caffrey’s personal 1932 Chevrolet and a police car were parked. Both Reed and Lackey were armed with shotguns. The others carried pistols. They walked directly to the Chevy sedan. Caffrey unlocked the door and Nash, still in handcuffs, started to get in the back, but Lackey stopped him. He wanted the prisoner to sit up front. Nash slipped behind the steering wheel while Lackey, Smith, and Reed climbed into the rear. At this point, Caffrey walked around to get in the driver’s seat, and Vetterli stood with Hermanson and Grooms at the right side near the front of the car. Before Nash could move over so Caffrey could take the wheel, however, two armed men suddenly emerged from behind a nearby car.
Then the officers heard a command: “Put ’em up, up, up!” Vetterli later said he saw another man crouch down with a machine gun trained on himself and the two Kansas City detectives. At that very instant, another voice yelled, “Let ’em have it!” Machine-gun fire commenced. Smith later recalled hearing Nash scream, “For God’s sake, don’t kill me!”
Nash was one of the first to die. Otto Reed, the old Oklahoma police chief, was also shot to death. Lackey had three bullets lodged in his spine but survived. Smith was unscathed, but the two local officers, Grooms and Hermanson, were killed instantly. Caffrey, shot through the head, died en route to a hospital. Vetterli received only a slight wound in the arm.
“Warm blood still trickled from the five bodies as I arrived,” wrote Margaret Richards, a United Press cub reporter at the time of the massacre. “Two men lay sprawled beside the car. Rivulets of blood ran along the pavement, lengthening in a slow ooze.
“In a moment, the area in front of the station was filled with running people. Crowds flowed around the parked cars. Men in overalls, in the uniforms of station porters and in business suits rushed up in wild confusion and ran off again, shouting questions at each other. There were no answers in those first moments. Something had happened that could happen—not on a bustling railroad station plaza in the heart of a big city on a busy morning.”
Before the blood had dried, curiosity seekers, like a flock of vultures, swarmed the plaza. They ran their palms across the pockmarked columns near the station doors.
Within days of this widely publicized slaughter, Kansas City authorities had suspects in mind. They included a few Midwestern tough guys and some of the Memorial Day escapees from the Lansing prison break. Several of the suspects, such as Wilbur Underhill, were known associates of Frank Nash or had direct ties to him.
Then key witnesses, whose impressions of the crime had been blurred, regained their memory. Over the course of time, still others changed their stories. Even a questionable underworld figure later came forward with a detailed scenario of the crime, which he swore was the whole truth.
Within months, Hoover fingered Pretty Boy Floyd, Adam Richetti, and Vernon Miller, a former South Dakota sheriff who had gone bad, as the killers. An array of secondary accomplices, including Nash’s wife, were also implicated on lesser charges. Bureau agents theorized that the hired gunmen either wanted to free Nash before he was returned to Leavenworth or else, as Hoover himself came to believe, were out to silence the talkative outlaw forever.
Many books and countless feature articles chronicling every known detail of the massacre have been published since that fateful morning in Kansas City. Almost without exception, Floyd, Richetti, and Miller are depicted as the crazed killers. In reality, probably only Miller had any involvement. Likewise, numerous motion pictures present only Hoover’s flawed version of the Union Station story.
The same is true of newspaper pieces published every few years on the anniversary of the massacre. A majority of the stories dramatically describe Pretty Boy Floyd and his pals making criminal history with blazing guns at Kansas City. In most case, the writers simply recycle yellowed clippings filed by their predecessors or else rehash the old Bureau of Investigation reports. Myths and half-truths are regurgitated ad nauseam.
Through the years, however, there have also been a few journalists and historians who have taken exception to the notion that “beyond a shadow of a doubt” Choc Floyd wielded one of the death weapons at Union Station.
“Floyd’s known presence in Kansas City accounts for the theory that he was a participant in the infamous Union Station Massacre,” wrote California State College history professor Kent Ladd Steckmesser in a 1970 magazine article published in The American West. “The FBI charged Floyd with being one of the gunmen, but they never proved their case. It now appears unlikely that he was guilty of this particular crime. The job is too much at variance with the usual Floyd pattern. The actual machine gunners were killed by the mob for having botched their assignment.”
Former associates of Charley Floyd also believe that Choc’s hands were free of the massacre victims’ blood. “It was just Choc’s bad luck that he happened to be in Kansas City when that shooting at the train station went down,” lamented Elmer Steele, one of Floyd’s former getaway drivers, almost six decades later. “All of us on the scout back then knew at once that he didn’t have anything to do with that mess. Others did it and he took the fall. Choc was never a hired gun.”
To his own dying day, Floyd swore on his father’s grave that he had no hand in the massacre. Soon after the mass murder, he even sent a postcard with a message to that effect to the Kansas City police. Surviving family members assert that not a soul who knew Choc ever believed he was involved.
In 1978, some of the Floyd siblings gave statements disputing their brother’s alleged role in the massacre to James Lea Lessley, grandson of Choc’s sister, Emma Lessley. James Lessley used their comments in a research report on the Kansas City Massacre that he prepared for a university graduate course. Never ones to make excuses for their brother or deny that he was indeed a bank robber and killer, the Floyd family members stressed that Choc always owned up to the crimes he committed. But, they added, he would also vehemently repudiate anything that he did not do.
“He wasn’t there, I know he wasn’t in Kansas City when that happened,” stated Bradley Floyd.
“I just don’t think he did it,” said Emma Lessley.
“He told us he wasn’t in on it,” reported Charley’s younger sister, Mary.
Ruby Floyd never believed her former husband was one of the Kansas City hit men, and she often said so to close friends and relatives. “I talked to my mother many times about the Kansas City Massacre and she always said that my father definitely had nothing to do with it,” related Dempsey Floyd in 1991.
Even at the time of the massacre, many law-enforcement officers and underworld figures agreed that Floyd was not the type to be drawn into such a deadly caper. Choc was never a “torpedo,” the name given to a professional assassin. Except for the execution-style slayings of the Ash brothers—if, in fact, Floyd was one of the executioners—he was a bank robber who never engaged in gunplay unless he was trapped, such as the incidents of violence in Ohio or when he shot and killed Erv Kelley near Bixby. The Union Station slayings did not fit his modus operandi.
Nonetheless, one of the bloodiest mass slayings of the gangster era remains on Charles Arthur Floyd’s official record.
Six decades later, when the grand old station stood empty and abandoned, a few old men returned to the scene of the massacre. They came to whisper the stories, to remember. They came to lift up their grandchildren so they could touch the scars in the smooth granite. Even with the passage of time, however, the questions that rang out on that June morning so long before still went unanswered.