October winds swept across the Canadian border into Buffalo, lying below the thundering falls of the Niagara River in far western New York State. Choc Floyd already felt winter’s approach deep in his bones, especially in the ankle where Erv Kelley’s slug remained lodged. He wrote to his family in the autumn of 1934 that he enjoyed watching the sun make its nightly descent beyond Lake Erie. Perhaps the fiery sunsets reminded him of twilights in Oklahoma’s Cookson Hills.
The skeins of Canada geese were already winging their way south in the night skies. The Fall Classic had come and gone, with the Dean brothers, Dizzy and Daffy, having pitched the St. Louis Cardinals to victory, four games to three, against the Detroit Tigers in the 1934 World Series. The odor of burning leaves and factory smoke crept through Buffalo’s streets and alleys. It oozed beneath the doors of homes where supper pots simmered. The smell seeped into corner taverns packed with shift workers. Steelworkers and grimy steamfitters leaned against the scarred wooden bars. They drank shots of whiskey, legal since Prohibition had finally been repealed in December of 1933. The feel of a schnapps chased down with cold ale somehow softened the pain caused by the depressed economy.
Over a year of hiding in a bleak Buffalo neighborhood had made Floyd stir-crazy. He was not alone. Life in a cramped apartment had taken its toll on the three others with him, Adam Richetti, Juanita Beulah Baird, and Rose Baird. All four of them felt like climbing the dingy walls. Charley said so in the infrequent letters he wrote to his brother Bradley and other kinfolk. He told them it was as though he had gone back a decade and was locked away, once again behind the stone walls of the penitentiary at Jeff City.
Living on the lam was worse than doing hard time, Choc explained in his letters. His heart jumped at each knock at the apartment door. Every stranger who paused to light a cigarette by the streetlamp below the window caused him to reach for his pistol. On rare nights, when he emerged for some fresh air, he saw ghosts in the eyes of the tramps stumbling toward the railroad tracks. It seemed less threatening to stay put in the confines of the flat.
At the wobbly kitchen table, he played card games of pitch and double solitaire with the girls while Richetti, his mind thick with drink, sulked over his pencil drawings. Choc cooked pots of spaghetti and baked apple pies. He listened to the radio and read detective magazines, many of them containing purportedly true stories about Pretty Boy that read to him only like pure fiction. Mostly, he paced, however. Neighbors later recalled hearing him tramp back and forth at all hours of the day and night. He stalked about the tiny apartment like one of his father’s penned-up Oklahoma wolfhounds—anxious for the start of another hunt.
Charley and Adam had gone into self-imposed exile in Buffalo with their girlfriends in the fall of 1933 after they realized the authorities were determined to charge Floyd and Richetti with murder—for helping mow down the four officers and their prisoner at Union Station.
Floyd vehemently denied any complicity in the Kansas City Massacre. Just three days after the murders, he even dashed off a note disavowing any knowledge of the crime. Floyd’s message, addressed simply to the Kansas City Police, was printed in pencil on the back of a plain business postcard. Dated June 20, 1933, and stamped with a Springfield, Missouri, postmark, the card read:
Dear Sirs:
I—Charles Floyd want it made known that I did not participate in the massacre of officers at Kansas City.
Charles Floyd
Police experts compared the writing on the card with samples of Floyd’s handwriting in their files. They declared the note to be genuine. Some investigators scoffed. They said Floyd might have written the disclaimer but that he probably had a confederate mail it to throw the authorities off his trail. Immediately after Floyd’s note was made public, however, three persons told law officers that they were positive they had seen Pretty Boy and two other men eating supper in a Springfield restaurant the evening the correspondence was mailed.
Thomas J. Higgins, the chief of detectives in Kansas City, believed Floyd not only sent the note but that his denial was sincere. Higgins had followed the bandit’s movements since 1929. He told the Kansas City Star that he unequivocally did not consider Charley to be a suspect. Like several others who knew Floyd’s criminal habits, Higgins was cocksure the mass murder was not his type of job. So was Harry Chaney, a close friend of Otto Reed, the McAlester chief of police who had died in the plaza. “Floyd is just a country boy,” explained Chaney. “It is unlikely that he has had the big time connections with gang members who probably were responsible for Saturday’s slayings.”
Jackson County Sheriff Thomas B. Bash, considered one of the top law-enforcement officers in the Kansas City area, disagreed, however. So did a phalanx of Bureau of Investigation agents, who poured into Kansas City in the wake of the murders. They were convinced otherwise largely because of the testimony of one Lottie West, a Traveler’s Aid worker at Union Station, who claimed she had witnessed the shooting. Mrs. West, who no doubt had seen countless shots of Floyd in the newspapers, selected a photograph of Floyd as that of one of the machine gunners. “That’s the man!” she exclaimed when Bash spread some mug shots before her. However, her physical description of the suspect she believed to be Floyd was flawed.
According to Mrs. West, the Pretty Boy she had talked to inside the station just prior to the shooting and later saw again during the turmoil in the plaza weighed “nearly two hundred pounds.” Several Kansas City law officers knew that Charley weighed, at the very most, 160 pounds. They realized the woman was way off the mark.
Other witnesses to the massacre were more reliable. However, their statements do not appear to have carried as much weight with federal agents as the West testimony. Critics of the investigation later suggested the statements of Lottie West were given more credence because of her race. She was Caucasian, while several of the other witnesses were, in the words of one bureau report, “colored.” Many of the other accounts appear in a bureau file dated July 29, 1933, a little more than a month after the murders. They do not show up in subsequent reports that were periodically updated over the years, however.
One of those witnesses, Kansas City businessman Samuel Link, stated that about 7:15 A.M. on June 17, he was driving near the east end of Union Station when he saw a man with a submachine gun emerge from a green 1932 Reo sedan. Link said he parked his own car, and a moment later, he watched as another armed man got out of a black Chevrolet sedan. Link said both of these men lifted their guns as if to fire just as the peace officers and Frank Nash walked out of the depot into the parking lot. At that moment, Link ducked. He heard the firing but did not see the shooting. Afterward, he watched the Reo and Chevrolet flee the scene.
When shown police photos, Link identified the subject in the Reo as Harvey Bailey. He said there could be no mistake, since he had once worked as a deputy constable in Kansas City and had met Bailey while serving some legal papers. Link recognized the driver of the car as Wilbur Underhill. He then spied a photograph of Verne Miller and told the agents that Miller was also the one who had given the signal to start shooting.
Another witness, Margaret Turner of Olathe, Kansas, arrived at the station about 2:30 A.M. to meet a cousin arriving on a 3:30 A.M. train that had been delayed for several hours. She provided federal agents with a detailed statement about activities in the parking lot, where she waited prior to the massacre. Mrs. Turner stated that at about 3:00 A.M. she spotted a Reo automobile and a black Chevrolet parked in front of the depot. She said parties in the two cars conversed and, at one point, a woman left the Chevrolet and went into the depot for about ten minutes. Then the woman returned to the car and it drove off. The mystery woman was not seen again, but the Chevy periodically returned to cruise the parking lot. Each time, the men inside exchanged greetings with those in the other car.
According to Mrs. Turner, she got a good look at two of the men in the Reo. She positively identified them as Bailey and Underhill. When the shooting started, Mrs. Turner was already inside the depot. She dived for cover. Until her death many years later, Mrs. Turner never deviated from her original statement. Agents noted in their file that she “appears to be a very reliable colored woman,” yet her comments were eventually purged from official reports.
J. D. Jameson, employed as a Union Station redcap, could not positively place either Underhill or Miller at the scene. However, Jameson told the agents that early during the morning of the slayings, a man, whom he later identified from police photos as Harvey Bailey, accosted him. Bailey inquired about the arrival of a Missouri Pacific train from Arkansas. Jameson learned it was the same train that carried Nash. None of these witnesses identified Richetti or Floyd.
Neither did the actual survivors of the massacre—at least not at first. In the original bureau reports filed by the surviving trio of agents, two of them, Lackey and Smith, stated that they positively could not identify any of the individuals who had opened fire on them. Vetterli, the third agent, wrote that he was “convinced” one of the assassins was Bob “Big Boy” Brady, one of the eleven convicts who had escaped the Lansing prison on Memorial Day. More than a year later, however, these same agents had changed their minds and were to say unequivocally that Charles Floyd was one of the culprits.
James “Blackie” Audett, a member of John Lazia’s organization and at one time Mary McElroy’s bodyguard, insisted the true killers at the train station included Verne Miller and the brothers Homer and Maurice Denning. He also implicated William Weissman but refused to name a fourth culprit. “Floyd was nowhere near the station that day,” wrote Audett in his book Rap Sheet, published in 1954. “The FBI had to solve the case fast because one of their own men got killed so they pinned it on two guys [Floyd and Richetti] who were already wanted and widely known.” Audett somewhat dampened the veracity of his story by claiming he and Miss McElroy had actually observed the massacre from a vantage point in the parking lot.
Another staunch advocate of the theory that Pretty Boy and Richetti were not involved in the Union Station murders was Jack Killingsworth, the Missouri sheriff abducted by the pair of Oklahomans on June 16, 1933. “I don’t believe they had anything to do with the Kansas City killing this morning,” Killingsworth told reporters only hours after the massacre. “I think they are figuring on ‘holing in’ somewhere for awhile.” Killingsworth also took exception to Lottie West’s description of the man she had identified as Floyd. “I think they got it wrong. Floyd don’t weigh two hundred pounds, he’s nearer to one hundred sixty.” Killingsworth added that he had asked Floyd point-blank about the slayings of the Boone County sheriff and the state patrolman. The bandit replied he had had nothing to do with those prior murders of law enforcement officers.
Killingsworth was attacked for his remarks, especially by Republican foes, who said the sheriff placed Floyd “in the role of dramatic hero.” They called for his removal from office, as did several newspaper editors. When Killingsworth’s term expired, he did not seek public office again until 1958, when he was elected by a three-to-one margin as mayor of Bolivar, Missouri, a job the Democrat proudly held for many years to come.
While Killingsworth, the unassuming country sheriff, was humiliated for speaking honestly, the career of the nation’s top law enforcement officer, J. Edgar Hoover, was enhanced as a result of the mass killings at Union Station. Hoover became the man of the hour. On June 20, he sent a letter to Joe Lackey, one of his wounded agents, which read, “It is needless for me to say to you that no time, money or labor will be spared toward bringing about the apprehension of the individuals responsible for the cowardly and despicable act of last Saturday morning. They must be exterminated and must be exterminated by us, and to this end we are dedicating ourselves.”
Although Hoover personally grieved over the loss of life, the massacre was exactly the cause célèbre he knew how to exploit. Many suspected that Hoover was on the verge of losing his job as bureau director after Roosevelt came into office in 1933. The murder of a young federal agent and three other lawmen may indeed have spared him that indignity.
The outrageous act of shooting down law officers in broad daylight enraged Americans who had been sympathetic to crooks they previously believed only robbed from the rich to give to the poor. It did not take a genius to figure out that had the Kansas City of 1933 been free of political and underworld corruption, a spectacle like the one at the train station would probably not have been possible. The public outcry for reform and retribution, not to mention all the sensational headlines, played right into Hoover’s hand. As Fred J. Cook so aptly pointed out in his 1964 book, The FBI Nobody Knows, when Hoover learned of the killings at Kansas City, he was able to become “the knight on the white charger riding down the forces of evil.” Hoover called the massacre a “turning point in the nation’s fight against crime.”
U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings also jumped on the bandwagon and became Hoover’s ally. “So far as lies within my power, no criminal, either high or low estate, shall go unscathed,” pontificated Cummings. “Moreover, it is my hope that in the field of law enforcement and in the detection and prosecution of crime, I may be able to bring about a better coordination of federal and state activities. We’ve got to win this war.”
Over the next year, a host of legislative measures was passed by Congress to increase the bureau’s jurisdiction and broaden its authority. At last, agents would be permitted to carry firearms. They were granted the power of arrest anywhere in the country. They were also allowed to investigate certain cases of stolen property, bank robbery, racketeering, or flight to avoid prosecution. This momentous legislation, signed into law by Roosevelt in the late spring of 1934, sounded the death knell for Depression-era outlaws and gave rise to the modern Federal Bureau of Investigation, as the agency became known in 1935.
Besides the FBI becoming the most potent police force in the world, the often-ruthless Hoover would gain almost as much power as the eight U.S. Presidents elected during his forty-eight year reign. However, on July 29, 1933, when he was asked by Cummings to continue as director, the full impact of Hoover’s influence on the nation was still unknown.
During the balance of 1933 and well into the following year, several underworld figures who had past associations with Nash—Underhill, Bailey, Brady, Ed Davis, Jim Clark, Verne Miller, Maurice and Homer Denning, and William Weissman, a brother of slain Kansas City gangster Solly Weissman—remained on the active suspect list. And the names of Pretty Boy Floyd and Adam Richetti stayed right at the top.
A flurry of Floyd and Richetti sightings popped up throughout the Midwest, especially in Oklahoma shortly after the massacre. On June 22, in Bristow, the hometown of several of Ruby Floyd’s relatives, including the police chief, a cobbler admitted to authorities that Choc had visited his shop to get some shoes resoled. He claimed that Pretty Boy gave him a large bill and told him to keep the change. That evening, Floyd and Richetti supposedly kidnapped a Tulsa couple and held them captive until dawn, when the outlaws fled with their victim’s automobile. A few days later, a tourist-camp proprietor in Wichita reported that, following a domestic argument, his wife hired Pretty Boy to beat him up. The man checked into a hospital with a broken rib. Later that week, Floyd was suspected of a bank robbery at Seneca, Missouri, while at just about the same time, witnesses swore they saw Pretty Boy in downtown Tulsa delivering bootleg liquor to the host of a party.
As more Floyd accusations came to light, an assortment of mistaken-identity reports surfaced. A Kansas City cosmetics salesman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Pretty Boy became so nervous after the massacre at Union Station that he finally obtained credentials from the police department to prove he was a respectable citizen. Near Webb City, Missouri, a force of deputies, assisted by policemen from nearby Joplin, swooped down on an old ambulance parked on a country lane after an excited farmer reported seeing Pretty Boy napping in the vehicle. When the posse yelled for Floyd to come out with his hands up, they were surprised to find a groggy black man emerge, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Almost as comical was the incident in Tulsa involving William Martin, a Floyd look-alike from Honey Grove, Texas. Martin was en route to Chicago in a chauffeur-driven car when he was stopped no fewer than three times by officers toting sawed-off shotguns. Each time, they were convinced they had caught Pretty Boy.
Floyd found none of the stories very amusing, however. Caught in the midst of the propaganda war being waged in the newspapers by Cummings and Hoover, the bandit grew weary of seeing his name in print. As Jay Robert Nash observed in his narrative encyclopedia of American criminals, Bloodletters and Badmen, “where Dillinger was romanticized in the newspapers of the day, ‘Pretty Boy’ got the worst press of any outlaw in the 1930s, and for a crime—the Kansas City Massacre—many believe he never committed.”
Floyd’s problems were further exacerbated as many other massacre suspects were arrested for other crimes, or else were slain by fellow hoodlums or lawmen.
One of the first of the prime suspects to fall was the bank-robbing fugitive Harvey Bailey. A little more than a month after the massacre, he was implicated in the July 22 kidnapping of millionaire oil tycoon Charles F. Urschel during a bridge game at the victim’s Oklahoma City residence. It was a poorly planned scheme hatched by George Kelly and his wife, Kathryn, who pumped up her husband’s reputation by giving him the nickname “Machine Gun.” After nine days of captivity, Urschel was released unharmed when a two-hundred-thousand-dollar ransom was negotiated. A trail of clues helped the authorities track down the offenders. Bailey was apprehended August 12 on the Texas farm where Urschel had been held. The next month, Kelly was captured in Memphis. This was a well-publicized incident in which Kelly reportedly threw up his hands and screamed, “Don’t shoot, G-men, don’t shoot!” Years later, it was revealed that G-men, a term that became synonymous for the bureau’s hard-charging agents, was actually a public-relations gimmick invented by Hoover.
The Kellys, Bailey, and two other accomplices were given life sentences. Kelly and “Old Harve” Bailey were shipped to Alcatraz, the island in San Francisco Bay where, in 1933, Attorney General Cummings established the premier maximum-security prison designed to hold hordes of gangsters. Bailey was never charged in the Union Station murders.
The mutilated corpse of Verne Miller, the two-time South Dakota sheriff trained as a machine gunner during the Great War, was found November 29, 1933, in a roadside ditch on the outskirts of Detroit. Federal agents maintained that they had found Adam Richetti’s latent fingerprints on a beer bottle in the basement of Miller’s former Kansas City residence on Edgevale Road. They believed Miller, based on a recommendation from John Lazia, had hastily engaged Richetti and Floyd to help free Frank Nash.
Miller would not be of any help to the agents in solving the great mystery killings in Kansas City, however. He had been beaten and strangled. His head was crushed. His nude body was trussed up with clothesline in a jackknife fashion. Kansas City agents were not surprised by the rubout. They realized that Miller, in their own words, had “turned the heat on the whole underworld.” Revenge-minded gangsters were known to be stalking him. Hoover checked another name off his list.
Then, on December 30, the number of Union Station murder suspects shrunk even further when Oklahoma laws officers shot down Wilbur Underhill in downtown Shawnee. The “mad dog of the underworld” succumbed to his wounds a week later in the state prison hospital. At the moment of death, he supposedly uttered this cryptic sentence: “Tell the boys I’m coming home.” Officers were left to puzzle over Underhill’s final words, as well as his exact role in the Kansas City slayings.
In February of 1934, the month Choc Floyd celebrated his thirtieth birthday, a massive force of more than one thousand peace officers and mobilized National Guardsmen swept through the rain-soaked Cookson Hills of eastern Oklahoma. Crack Tulsa Tribune reporter Joe Howell termed the operation “the biggest single manhunt in the nation’s history.” For all their troubles, the huge army turned up only a handful of wrongdoers. Not one of those captured was of the caliber of Pretty Boy, Clyde Barrow, or other high-profile fugitives sought by the expeditionary force. Only later did the nation learn that Floyd had been nowhere near Sequoyah County or any of his other choice hiding places.
In fact, Choc and Richetti had bid farewell to friends and relatives in September of 1934. With Beulah and Rose Baird, they drove east, pausing briefly at a few familiar spots in Ohio. Newspaper editorials from that period suggested that Pretty Boy was the ghost of Jesse James, risen from the grave. Floyd was flattered. During a brief stop in Canfield, Ohio, he even sent a thank-you note to a staff artist at an Ohio newspaper that had published a series of sketch strips comparing Floyd’s career to that of James.
Thanks for the compliments and the pictures
of me in your paper.
I’ll be gone when you get this.
Jesse James was no punk himself.
I’m not as bad as they say I am.
They just wouldn’t leave me alone
after I got out.
Yours truly
Chas. A. Floyd
The two couples snaked their way northeast through Pennsylvania, finally stopping in Buffalo. Federal agents later discovered that on September 21, using phony names, they rented an apartment in a middle-class neighborhood. Charley and Juanita were known as Mr. and Mrs. George Sanders. Adam and Rose took the alias Mr. and Mrs. Ed Brennan. The apartment was their home for the next thirteen months.
Choc doled out money for living expenses from a stash accumulated from past bank robberies. Except for a few quick excursions, they did not leave the city. In fact, other than trips to the grocery or to a beauty salon, where the women overindulged themselves for a rare moment, the foursome hardly left the apartment.
Life in Buffalo was monotonous. There were no friends, no parties, no callers. Little mail came except for rare letters from family or responses to advertisements the women received under their aliases. Neighbors thought it odd that neither of the men went off to jobs. All they heard were muffled voices and Choc’s incessant pacing. There were few exchanges between the mysterious couples and outsiders. Juanita and Rose occasionally threw coins and candy from the window to children playing in the streets. Sometimes Choc slipped youngsters, who lived in the building, a slice of pie or cake. He scanned the Buffalo Courier-Express to stay abreast of the outside world.
In March 1934, Choc read that Ed Davis, a Memorial Day prison escapee suspected in the Kansas City killings, had been captured by officers in an apartment-house raid in Los Angeles. Davis, charged with other crimes, was soon dropped from the massacre suspect list, however. Just prior to the arrest of Davis, another escaped Lansing convict and alleged massacre culprit, Bobby Brady, was slain near Paola, Kansas: more checkmarks for J. Edgar Hoover’s list.
The papers were filled throughout the spring of 1934 with the obituaries of tough killers, bank robbers, and kidnappers. Some Floyd knew. Aussie Elliot, one of Choc’s early getaway drivers, was killed by Creek County officers in a raid near Sapulpa, Oklahoma. Ford Bradshaw, a Sequoyah County graduate of the bootleg school who became a bandit chieftain himself, was also shot and laid in a fresh grave.
Stories about Floyd competed with those about John Dillinger, Ma Barker and her sons, and Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Although Choc never met the psychotic pair, familiarly known as Bonnie and Clyde, he had been sent word that they admired his style. They indicated a desire to join Choc on some bank jobs. Floyd’s family later said Choc did not give the proposal a second thought. He admonished them to ignore Barrow and Parker if they ever came looking for him. “Those two give us all a bad name,” Choc reportedly told several of his kinfolk. Yet, despite Choc’s warning, both E. W. and Bradley fed the outlaw duo and gave them comfort on one their jaunts through Oklahoma. “We just couldn’t turn anyone away in those bad years, even the likes of them,” explained Bessie Floyd.
When news broke on May 23, 1934, that Bonnie and Clyde’s bloody career had finally been terminated, Charley Floyd most likely did not go into mourning. The couple’s nemesis, former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, led the possemen who shot the ruthless lovers in an ambush along a road near Arcadia, Louisiana.
Hidden in the cramped Buffalo apartment, Choc was undoubtedly surprised to see that Pretty Boy stories still made the papers. Some reporters had him dead from old gunshot wounds or dying from blood poisoning and disease. According to some reports, he was supposedly dickering with a Hollywood film company to sell his life story. Other published tales circulated that Pretty Boy was living in Mexico, Virginia, or the mountains of Arkansas and had dyed his hair red and grown a long beard. Almost at the same time, he was reported to have joined the Chinese army and robbed a bank in New York City. Pretty Boy was seen on both coasts on the same morning. He was figuratively behind every bush and billboard.
During the summer of 1934, the spate of news stories about other criminals still on the scout dominated the headlines. The month of July was especially action-packed. In Kansas City, where rival gangs continued to battle for position, two hoods wielding a shotgun and submachine gun murdered John Lazia, the North Side crime boss and ranking lieutenant of Tom Pendergast’s political machine. Lazia, whose underworld activities were chiefly characterized by his attempts to prevent major crimes and keep outside gunmen from Kansas City, was shot in the early hours of July 10 as he alighted from his sedan in front of a hotel. It was discovered only later that the fatal bullets came from a Thompson submachine gun used in the Union Station killings.
Twelve days later, on the evening of July 22, the nation’s most celebrated felon, John Dillinger, was killed. Dillinger was shot in front of Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where he and two lady friends, one of them the infamous Woman in Red, had just watched Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Cable. Dillinger’s killers were not rival outlaws but a team of Department of Justice agents led by Hoover’s cracker-jack crime fighter, Melvin H. Purvis, Jr., the agent in charge of the bureau’s Chicago office.
Choc was not surprised to hear of the bank robber’s death, but he indicated to his family that he was dismayed to learn that with Dillinger gone, Hoover had determined the nation’s new public enemy number one was indeed Charles Arthur Floyd.
Over the course of the next few months of 1934, Floyd grew even more cautious. He dashed off notes to Ruby and Dempsey, who continued their Crime Does Not Pay stage shows. In July, Dempsey had been baptized by a crusading Fort Worth preacher. The boy even had an official business guardian appointed to oversee the vaudeville engagements, which included a brief film showing his baptismal ceremony. At the close of each performance, Ruby never failed to mention that “we know positively that Charles had nothing to do with the Kansas City Massacre.” Apparently the public grew tired of listening to the canned lecture of the former wife and nine-year-old son of Pretty Boy, for Ruby and Dempsey gave their final show on September 11, 1934. Fittingly, it was staged in Kansas City—Tom’s Town.
About a month later, Choc Floyd decided it was time to go home. His decision was prompted in part by dwindling financial resources but also by a startling announcement made public on October 11. On that date, it was disclosed that government witness James LaCapra had provided information that John Lazia had arranged a meeting of Floyd, Richetti, and Verne Miller the night before the trio committed the massacre at Union Station. A Kansas City hoodlum with illusions of taking over the local rackets, LaCapra swore that when Lazia heard of the plot to free Nash, he told Miller not to use any “local muscle.” Instead, Lazia hooked up Miller with Floyd and Richetti. After the attack, LaCapra stated that the killers, including Floyd with a bullet wound to his shoulder, remained in Kansas City for twenty-four hours before local gangsters escorted them out of town.
Friends of the dead Lazia labeled LaCapra’s confession as the ramblings of a desperate man out to cut a deal. Hoover and his agents felt otherwise. The headline in the October 11 Buffalo Courier-Express read:
U.S. MEN SOLVE MASSACRE
OF 5 IN KANSAS CITY
PRETTY BOY FLOYD, TWO OTHERS
NAMED BY FEDERAL AGENTS IN
RAILWAY STATION TRAGEDY
The story read like a death notice to Charley Floyd. He knew that Hoover’s G-men would be relentless.
Less than a day after LaCapra’s damning statements appeared in newspapers, sightings of Floyd and Richetti were reported throughout Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. A National Guard airplane was used in the manhunt in Missouri. Near Cresco, Iowa, officers claimed they had engaged Floyd in a gun battle when they flushed Pretty Boy and his companions from a farm hideout near the Minnesota border. On October 13, a front-page story in the Buffalo Courier-Express told of heavily armed posses on the “trail of the West’s notorious killers.” Six weeks later, officers figured out that they were not chasing Floyd and Richetti but some other wanted men, including the killer of the two law officers near Columbia. Nerves grew taut in the Buffalo apartment. Charley felt compelled to make a move. Oklahoma’s familiar hills and prairies beckoned.
“The last letter my Uncle Bradley got from Uncle Charley came that October from Buffalo,” recalled Choc’s nephew Lawton Lessley. “The letter said, ‘We’re comin’ home.’”
Federal agents subsequently learned that on October 18, Floyd, down to the last of his cash reserve, gave Rose Baird six hundred dollars. He instructed her to buy a Ford tudor coach. Around 3:00 A.M. on October 19, with Choc behind the wheel of the two-door sedan, the couples bid farewell to Buffalo. Several days later, investigators were told that a fresh-baked apple pie was left on the kitchen table.
Choc and his friends drove through the early-morning darkness, only stopping for gasoline and meals. They kept the Ford on a southerly course. Charley wanted to return to a refuge he knew of on the banks of the Ohio River. For many years, bootleggers and bank robbers found comfort there, if only for a few hours. It was situated near East Liverpool, Ohio, on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, just above the northern tip of an intruding finger of West Virginia. Only a wide spot in the road, Hell’s Half-Acre is what the locals called it. Choc’s old partner, Willis “Billy the Killer” Miller, had frequented the area in the twenties. In the early 1930s, he took Floyd to one of the saloons run by a crusty lady who asked no questions about her patrons’ private lives.
Richetti was also not unaware of the pleasure at Hell’s Half-Acre. He and Charley figured on wetting their whistles at the joint operated by State Line Jenny, before moving on to visit with some of Adam’s relatives. One of Richetti’s sisters and her husband, Minnie and Henry Sustic, resided near the small Ohio burg of Dillonvale, downriver between Steubenville and Wheeling, West Virginia. After a brief stopover, the foursome planned to head out on the back roads and drive like fury all the way to Oklahoma.
On Saturday, October 20, folks in the small Ohio and West Virginia towns dotting the river awoke to learn that the previous day the bank had been robbed in Tiltonsville, Ohio, not far from Dillonvale. Two men with heavy beards had entered the bank brandishing shotguns and made off with five hundred dollars in cash. One of the bandits reportedly comforted a four-year-old girl who was terrified by the commotion. “There, there now, don’t cry, little girl,” the robber was overheard to say. “Why, we ain’t goin’ to hurt you. No, sir.” When the child’s worried mother extended three dollar bills clutched in her hand, the robber ignored the money and added, “Nor you, either, ma’am.”
To the north, in the Columbiana County towns of East Liverpool, Wellsville, Calcutta, and Lisbon, no one really thought too much about the bank heist. After all, Tiltonsville was more than forty miles downstream. Some of the sheriff’s deputies and local police departments took notice, however. There was always the chance that the bank robbers were still in the area and could strike again. Some citizens with lively imaginations even wondered out loud whether the outlaws might be Pretty Boy Floyd and his Italian pal who had family living close by.
Early that Saturday morning, clouds of thick fog wafted over the banks of the Ohio River and shrouded the steep Columbian County hills. The Ford sedan, carrying Choc, Adam, and the two Baird sisters, sped along at a rapid clip down Route 7, along the Wellsville-East Liverpool Road. They were just shy of the Wellsville city limits, near a closed brickyard in an area the natives called the Silver Switch, when a combination of poor visual conditions and the rain-slick road caused Choc to lose control of the automobile. In an instant, the car skidded into a telephone pole. No one was injured but the new Ford was damaged. Choc was able to get it back on the road but he did not feel the car was in any shape to continue without some repairs.
Not wanting to risk detection, and remembering the sticky situation that had arisen the year before at the garage in Bolivar, Choc told Beulah and Rose to take the vehicle to a mechanic in Wellsville. After getting the car fixed, they were to return for Floyd and Richetti. Before the women drove off, the men grabbed firearms and blankets from the backseat.
Charley and Adam walked a short distance into a hollow next to the road. They climbed a hillside covered with scrub brush and maples until they reached some large rocks. It appeared to be a good place to wait without attracting the attention of passersby on Route 7. Within minutes, they gathered enough dry tinder and twigs for a small fire to ward off the morning chill. From their resting place, Choc and Adam had a commanding view of the Ohio River, the railroad tracks, and the deserted brickyard.
Overnight, there had been a hard frost. Joseph Fryman, who lived in one of the small houses on top of the hill, and his son-in-law, David O’Hanlon, went out early that morning to salvage vegetables from their garden. Fryman was disabled and had a wife and eight children to feed. His garden was planted not far from the river, on a strip of ground between the railroad tracks and the road. As Fryman and O’Hanlon started for home, they looked up and saw Floyd and Richetti sitting on the side of Elizabeth Hill.
At first, Fryman thought the men were tramps. When he got closer, however, he saw they did not look like the kind who rode the rails. As Fryman and his son-in-law, carrying baskets of tomatoes and squash, walked by the strangers, the larger of the men by the rocks spoke. “Say, where are you fellas goin?” Fryman replied that they were on their way home. “We live up here,” he told them. Still wary of the men, Fryman went to one of his neighbors, a retiree named Lon Israel. “There are some guys camped out down below your house,” Fryman told him. Israel was immediately suspicious.
He and Fryman walked to the nearest telephone, located at a small store that sold essentials to area residents. Israel phoned Wellsville Chief of Police John H. Fultz to report a pair of “shady characters” lurking near his place. Fultz promised that he would be out to investigate. A ten-year police veteran, Fultz did not have an inkling that he was about to come face-to-face with public enemy number one.
Fultz later said that after receiving Israel’s telephone call, he theorized the strangers might have been the Tiltonsville bank bandits. To be on the safe side Fultz took along Homer Potts and William Erwin, some local men he deputized as special patrolmen. All three were in plainclothes but, for unknown reasons, only Fultz carried a weapon. They drove out Route 7 to the Silver Switch, near the Kountz Avenue hollow, and parked the car on Elizabeth Hill next to Israel’s home.
The police chief, with his helpers bringing up the rear, worked his way toward the rocks where the strangers were located. Choc was on lookout. He bristled when he saw Fultz and demanded to know where he was going. “I told him I was a working man on my way to the brickyard,” recounted Fultz.
Floyd, a .45 pistol in his hand, did not buy the story. He realized the brickyard was no longer in operation. “You ain’t no workin’ man,” Choc told Fultz. A heated discussion ensued as they walked farther down the hill.
“He [Floyd] stepped to one side of the path, stuck his gun in my ribs, and told me to go on down the hill, warning me not to run,” Fultz wrote the next day in a first-person newspaper story that was syndicated across the nation. “I kept trying to get further ahead of him and when I gained a little distance, tried to pull my gun.
“‘Keep your hands in the air,’” said Floyd. “He walked us down the hill about one hundred feet and there I saw a fellow sitting on some blankets.
“I said, ‘Hello, buddy, how are you?’”
Adam smiled at Fultz, but just then Floyd yelled out, “Stop him, shoot him! Don’t let him kid you, he’s an officer!” Richetti whipped out a .45 automatic and opened fire. Fultz pulled his .32 revolver and returned the shots. He fired away at Floyd, then he wheeled and started shooting at Richetti. The unarmed Erwin and Potts were helpless. “All they could do was stand off and watch,” explained Fultz.
Richetti’s gun misfired. He dumped it in a clump of briars and raced toward a nearby house. Although he was slightly wounded in an ankle from a grazing bullet, Fultz followed in hot pursuit. He found Richetti trying to get inside the house, but the door was locked. Seeing that he was trapped, Richetti had no other choice. He raised his arms and surrendered. Fultz handcuffed Adam and took him to the city jail at Wellsville.
Meanwhile, Floyd moved to the blanket and uncovered his Thompson submachine gun. He let loose a spray of bullets, then turned and ran up the hill. Potts and Erwin had already reached the hilltop. They borrowed shotguns from Israel and took up positions. When Floyd dashed by, the two men blasted away but missed. Floyd fired back at them on the run. One of his bullets struck Potts in the left shoulder. Another round tore through the front wall of Israel’s house and lodged in a sewing machine. Then the tommy gun jammed. Choc threw it on the ground.
Unaware that his partner had been captured, Choc kept running. He stopped at the house of thirty-year-old Theodore Peterson and his widowed mother. A friend of the family, George McMullin, was having a late breakfast with the Petersons before calling on his girlfriend in Wellsville. “This fella, who we later found out was Floyd, told us that his car had broken down by the brickyard and he needed to get to Youngstown,” Peterson recounted fifty-six years later. “He was willing to pay ten dollars for a lift. That was a lot of cash during the Depression.” Peterson was not able to break away from apple-picking chores, but McMullin decided his girlfriend could wait. He jumped at the chance to earn some easy money and told Floyd to hop in his 1925 Model T Ford.
Once on the road, Choc pulled out his two .45 automatics and showed them to the surprised McMullin. “I don’t mean you no harm, but I’ve got to get away,” McMullin recalled Choc saying. “Just stay on the back roads to Youngstown and don’t stop for anything.” The farmhand did what Floyd asked. McMullin did not stray from the dirt farm roads. The two men had not gone very far when the Ford sputtered and stopped; it was out of gas.
With the hapless McMullin in tow, Floyd walked to a brick bungalow where James Baum, a sixty-five-year-old florist, was busily loading flowers into his Nash automobile. “I was in the greenhouse,” Baum told reporters. “This man came in and said, ‘Get your car, Dad.’ We got in and then he said, ‘Now, Dad, I want you to do what I tell you and when I want you to.’”
Choc and his two hostages took off, with Baum at the wheel. “When we started away,” recalled Baum, “he said, ‘I want you to turn onto the first dirt road you find. There are too many cars around.’ He wasn’t very nervous. Occasionally, he would duck down, but most of the time he just sat up straight. I wasn’t scared.”
The Nash roared up Route 45 onto Route 30 in a northwesterly direction toward the village of Lisbon. Law officers back in Wellsville had already figured out that the stranger whom Fultz had arrested earlier that day was not just some camper packing a gun. Although Richetti said very little, Fultz had his suspicions concerning the true identity of the other gunman. He called law-enforcement offices throughout the area and told them to be on the alert for an armed man believed to be Floyd.
By the time Baum’s automobile approached the outskirts of Lisbon, officers there had moved a railroad boxcar across the highway. Choc spotted the movable roadblock in the distance. He quickly ordered Baum to turn his car around and backtrack. He then told Baum to cut off the main highway. The florist veered onto a side route with plenty of dips and curves, known to the locals as Roller Coaster Road.
Back at the roadblock, Deputy Sheriff George E. Hayes and Lisbon police officer George Patterson watched Baum’s car beat a hasty retreat. The lawmen were on the lookout for a Ford, but the sudden movement of the Nash demanded further investigation. Hayes and Patterson jumped in their car and followed. They caught up with the Nash in just a few minutes.
From the backseat, Floyd kept watch. He spotted the other car gaining on Baum’s automobile. Choc told the old man to pull over and let them pass. When Baum maneuvered his vehicle to the side of the road, the officers also pulled over and screeched to a halt. Witnesses offered conflicting versions of what happened next. According to Hayes, Floyd fired through the back window of Baum’s car at the pursuit vehicle. One of the bullets shattered the windshield, narrowly missing the deputy’s head. Hayes related that during the mayhem that followed, McMullin and Baum leapt from the front seat and ran to the front of the car, seeking protection. Floyd also fled the Nash. “In all the excitement,” as Hayes put it, the lawmen opened fire and accidentally shot Baum in a leg when he was mistaken for a fugitive.
When the smoke cleared, Choc Floyd was gone. Armed with his pair of .45 army Colt automatics, he rolled under a fence and vanished in a thick forest known as Spence’s Woods. The Phantom Terror was back in his natural habitat.
That Saturday afternoon, law officers in Wellsville pressed their interrogation of Richetti. He told them his name was Richard Zamboni. He said the ninety-eight dollars they had found in his pockets was part of his winnings from a recent card game at Medina, Ohio, south of Cleveland. When confronted with his own fingerprints, Adam finally admitted his true identity, but he insisted his elusive companion was a Toledo gambler named James Warren. Richetti divulged that he knew Floyd, but he maintained he had not seen him in over a year. Fultz was not swayed. Too many photographs of Floyd had crossed the chief’s desk over the years. He was completely convinced the other man running amok in the woods was indeed Pretty Boy. Despite the steady rain that fell throughout the night, huge posses spread across Columbiana County searching for the fugitive.
Not a trace of Pretty Boy was uncovered in the dense woods by Sunday morning, October 21. There were only a few rumors that did not pan out. That afternoon, however, two employees from the Tiltonsville bank tentatively identified from photos Floyd and Richetti as the bandits who had robbed them. Fultz became worried that Floyd might try to free his partner. He placed riflemen outside the city hall and in the corridors to the basement jail where Richetti was being held.
When the Bureau of Investigation learned that Richetti had been positively identified, they knew Floyd had to be close by. Late Sunday evening, Melvin Purvis, the top G-man for J. Edgar Hoover, flew into the small airstrip near Wellsville. If Purvis could take out John Dillinger, Hoover was confident he would do the same with Floyd. A dozen handpicked federal agents from the Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh bureaus arrived on the scene to assist Purvis. More were on their way from other locations. Jackson County Sheriff Tom Bash, who had mistakenly placed Floyd at the massacre, came from Kansas City to lend his support.
Purvis decided not to say in Wellsville. Instead, he drove a few miles north to East Liverpool, an historic river town settled by English potters in the 1840s, many years after George Washington camped on Babb’s Island in the Ohio River in 1770 during a survey mission. Through the years, East Liverpool had become known as the Pottery Center of America, but in 1934, the town of hills and idle kilns was no longer booming. The city was floundering on the edge of decline. Once in town, Purvis set up a command post at the Traveler’s Hotel. A reporter from the Pittsburgh Press who visited the agent’s headquarters described it as resembling “a miniature arsenal, for the room is lined with rifles, sawed-off shotguns and submachine guns.”
That night, Purvis and his men returned to Wellsville and interrogated Richetti. They conducted raids on the homes of Adam’s relatives, and made sure guards were posted on the bridge across the Ohio River. The ace federal agent, however, ran into problems with Chief Fultz, who had grown somewhat cocky after surviving his duel with Pretty Boy Floyd. Enjoying the limelight, Fultz decided to keep Richetti in Wellsville to face Ohio charges and not to release him to the bureau. Purvis fussed and fumed. Fultz told him to get a federal warrant.
Late Sunday, Purvis issued a statement to the East Liverpool Review. “We have had information for some months that Richetti was one of the participants in the Kansas City massacre,” Purvis told reporters. “Two weeks ago we received definite proof of that fact. We have, of course, been searching for him for many months. Tonight I made a formal demand upon the chief of police of Wellsville for custody of Richetti and he refused to turn over the prisoner. Meantime, we shall continue our concentrated effort to find ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd.”
About 2:00 A.M., a band of two hundred searchers was called in from the rugged countryside where Floyd had last been seen. Purvis feared the trigger-happy possemen would fire upon their own men in the darkness or expose themselves to potshots Floyd might take at them from ambush. He ordered the manhunt resumed after sunrise. Hot baths and a few hours of sleep were needed.
Lights burned in farmhouses throughout the night. Men leaned shotguns or rifles on the walls next to their beds. Some folks locked their front doors for the first time in memory. There had not been so much excitement in Columbiana County since the summer of 1863, seventy-one years earlier, when John Hunt Morgan, a daring cavalry officer, had surrendered his exhausted raiders there after making the Confederacy’s deepest thrust into Union territory.
Monday, October 22, dawned with no fresh news about Floyd. He had not been spotted since Saturday afternoon when he fled the skirmish on Roller Coaster Road. Unconfirmed sightings of the bandit flooded overworked police dispatchers and switchboards. All of them proved to be dead ends. Some of the deputies and policemen believed Fultz had managed to pump a bullet into Floyd’s stomach during the scrap on Elizabeth Hill. A few of them speculated that the outlaw was either dead or dying out in the hilly terrain north of Wellsville and East Liverpool.
This was not so. Choc was tired, dirty, and hungry, but he was very much alive. His wounds proved real only in the minds of pursuing officers. No bullets had found their mark. Choc spent two days and nights roaming the backwoods, living off the land, not realizing the irony of his situation. A son of the South, who flourished in the hills of Oklahoma with taproots reaching back to Georgia, Charley Floyd found himself tromping through fields worked by farmers whose fathers or grandfathers had donned Union blue to do battle on land that was home to generations of Floyds. Choc had no way of knowing that men from these parts had once trudged across his own family’s land and fought against Floyd kith and kin at Allatoona Pass in 1864.
Now, just as Morgan, the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy, had done with his guerrillalike raids in 1863, Charley Floyd, armed with a pair of Colt automatics, penetrated enemy territory. Choc’s true foes, however, were not the struggling farmers or the unemployed pottery workers in the towns along the broad river. Choc’s chief adversary here was Melvin H. Purvis, Jr., a product of Timmonsville, South Carolina. On October 22, 1934, Purvis, just two days shy of his thirty-first birthday, was primed and ready for combat.
Charley Floyd, however, was not looking for a fight. He was interested only in finding a way to get home. The terrain he covered was mostly steep hills blanketed with trees and vines. There were some springs, and Little Beaver Creek and Long’s Run wound through the landscape. At night, he may have slept on the bank of a stream, under a canopy of stars and sycamores. He no doubt found hickory nuts and was able to forage from frost-withered gardens. By that Monday, though, hunger drove Choc from the sanctuary of the brambles.
Several people from the area, especially those about ten miles north of East Liverpool, near the St. Clair Township towns of Calcutta and Clarkson, reported seeing a man that day that they believed was Charley Floyd. Some looked up from their work and saw a solitary figure walking over the fields. Others offered him water or directions.
Around high noon that Monday, Charley approached the farmhouse of Robert Robinson. The farmer’s daughter, Mabel Wilson, allowed the man to wash his face, and she made him a sandwich. She gave him some ginger cookies and apples. Choc had not been gone long when Constable Clyde Birch came to the farm and heard about the man. From the description, Birch knew it was Pretty Boy. At once, he drove to a telephone and relayed the information to a Department of Justice agent and the East Liverpool police.
Purvis swiftly responded. He chose three of his best agents, W. E. “Bud” Hopton, Sam McKee, and Dave Hall, to accompany him to the area where Floyd had last been seen. East Liverpool Police Chief Hugh J. McDermott was asked to provide backup assistance. McDermott, fifty-three years old at the time, had become a policeman just after the turn of the century, when he walked a beat on the rough riverfront with an Airedale terrier named Turk. He selected three of his officers to go along. They were Herman Roth, a feisty cop whose trademark was a gun belt with two pearl-handled pistols he carried butts aimed forward; Glenn “Curly” Montgomery, a barrel-chested man built like a fireplug; and Chester C. Smith, a crack shot and decorated veteran of the Great War who had encountered Choc Floyd and even talked to him years before at Hell’s Half-Acre. The four local policemen led the way in McDermott’s 1934 Chevy, followed by the four G-men, who had piled into Hopton’s 1933 government-issue Chevrolet.
At approximately three o’clock that afternoon, Choc appeared at Ellen Conkle’s fifty-acre farm on Sprucevale road between the towns of Clarkson and Calcutta. Mrs. Conkle, a widow, was cleaning out a smokehouse when she heard someone knocking on the back door. She always remembered the events of the next hour, especially the words exchanged between herself and the young man who paid an unexpected visit. The following day, their conversation appeared in newspapers throughout the land.
“Lady, I’m lost and I want something to eat,” Charley told her. “Can you help me out with some food? I’ll pay you.”
Like most country people, Ellen Conkle had always been taught to be kind to strangers, even tramps, because they might be angels in disguise. The polite young man before her was dirty and bedraggled. He wore no hat and his blue suit was covered with Spanish needles, the pesty thistles that thrived in the fields. The tip of a blue necktie extended from a suit-coat pocket crammed with apples. The man’s silver belt buckle was initialed with a large C. His black oxfords were scuffed. He needed a shave.
“I look like a wild man, don’t I?” Floyd laughed. “But I’ve been drinking. I was hunting squirrels with my brother last night and I got lost. The more directions I got, the more confused I became. I don’t where I am now.”
Mrs. Conkle, suspicious because she knew no one hunted squirrels at night or even went near the woods in business suits, nonetheless told Choc to wash up in the kitchen while she fixed him a dinner. “He had a sort of a wild look about him,” recalled Mrs. Conkle, “but I couldn’t refuse him food.” She asked Choc what he wanted to eat.
“Meat,” he replied. “All I’ve been eating is apples, and some ginger cookies. I’m hungry for meat.”
There was no bacon or ham, so the farm woman fetched some cold-packed spareribs from her smokehouse. As she fixed a meal of spareribs, potatoes, and rice pudding, Choc sat in a rocker on the back porch and studied the Sunday edition of the East Liverpool Review, which Mrs. Conkle had not read. It was the most recent paper on hand, since the Monday edition would not reach the Conkle farm until the following day. As he read the front page, dominated by news of the massive manhunt and the promise from Melvin Purvis to bring down Pretty Boy Floyd, Choc devoured slices of freshly baked bread. He ate everything on the pottery plate, except for the pudding, and finished his meal with coffee and a slice of pumpkin pie. It would be a superb last supper.
Afterward, Choc declared that the dinner was “fit for a king.” He pulled out a roll of money to pay for the food. Mrs. Conkle refused, but he insisted she at least take a dollar bill.
Floyd then asked the woman whether she could assist him in getting to a bus station so he could go to Youngstown. She said she could not help, but she had a suggestion. Her brother, Stewart Dyke, and his wife, Florence, were out in her fields husking corn. Perhaps when the Dykes finished their work, they would be willing to give the young man a lift in their Model A Ford. Choc climbed in the car parked out back and waited. It was almost 4:00 P.M. when the Dykes walked up to the Conkle house. They spied Choc sitting in their car. He was toying with the keys while he studied a road map. Choc asked whether, for a fee, they would drive him to Youngstown. Dyke refused. That was too far, he said, and they were tired. “I’ll not take you there tonight,” Dyke remembered telling Charley. “I’m going home. I’ll take you to Clarkson, though.”
Choc accepted the offer. He opened the car door and got in the backseat of the Ford. Florence Dyke sat up front with her husband. Choc borrowed the woman’s powder puff to pat his cheeks, apparently to cover the heavy beard. As they drove off, they waved goodbye to Ellen Conkle. The Model A had barely moved when two Chevrolet cars appeared on the Sprucevale Road. It was Melvin Purvis and his men, and they happened just to be driving by, alerted by the constable that Floyd was in the general vicinity.
“I saw the two automobile loads of officers before Floyd saw them and wondered who they were,” recounted Dyke. “When Floyd saw them, his face paled and he ordered me to drive to the back of the corncrib. After I backed up he said, ‘Get going!’ and called me a nasty name. He pulled out his gun and jumped out of the car and crawled under the corncrib. An instant later, he darted out and came toward the car. Then he started across a pasture.”
In the meantime, the eight armed agents and policemen scrambled from their cars in the front yard. They had seen the Ford and saw the man in the blue suit leap out. There was little doubt in their minds who he was. Their mission was clear.
“As we were passing the Conkle farm, I spied a hatless man dodging back behind the corner of a corncrib,” Chester Smith, an East Liverpool policeman, related to reporters that evening. “We stopped and I jumped out with my rifle and ran toward the shed. I saw the man running up a hill in the rear, and shouted to him to halt. He kept going, darting to the left and right, trying to make the crest of the hill. I’d had a good look at him, and was sure it was Floyd. I called again, but he wouldn’t stop. Then I knelt down and took aim at him.”
The other law officers spread out behind the farmhouse.
“Halt!” yelled Purvis. Choc kept going.
“Fire!” commanded Purvis. A blaze of gunfire commenced. Their target was five hundred feet away, running like a hunted wolf.
“My first shot hit him in the arm above the elbow and knocked the .45 out of his right hand,” Smith remembered decades later in the East Liverpool Review. “I didn’t want to kill him, just bring him down.” Choc staggered from the shock of the bullet and went to his knees, but he righted himself and kept moving toward the distant tree line. “My second shot hit him in the side above the shoulder blade and brought him down.”
Smith and the others ran to the fallen man. “Why didn’t you halt when I yelled?” Smith asked Choc. “If I’d gotten in them woods, you’d never got me,” Choc replied. The officers picked up the Colt pistol Floyd had dropped. Another .45 automatic was tucked in the top of his trousers. “You might as well take it,” Choc said with a slight smile. “I have no more use for it.” He managed to prop himself up on an elbow. Some of the officers lifted Floyd and carried him over to an apple tree and laid him in the shade. “Who the hell tipped you?” asked Choc. They did not answer him.
Purvis questioned the wounded man about the Kansas City Massacre. Choc glared and spat out, “I ain’t telling you sons of bitches anything.” Then Choc thought of his partner and asked, still using Richetti’s last alias, “Where’s Eddie?”
It was apparent that death was near. “You got me twice,” Choc said, his voice choking.
“You’re Pretty Boy Floyd,” stated Purvis, as if to convince himself that he had brought down yet another public enemy. The eyes of the two Southerners locked, one a lawman, the other a bandit, both the same age.
“I’m Charles Arthur Floyd,” Choc told him.
“You are Floyd, though, aren’t you?” asked Purvis.
“I am Floyd,” said Choc. That was the last he had to say.
Charley Floyd died at 4:25 P.M. His end came where his life had begun, on a hardscrabble farm. He took his final breath just as the last rays of the sun fell on the hills.
He would be thirty years old forever.