Friday, April 28, 2017

A MONSTER NAMED BELLE

4/28/1908 - Awakening to the smell of smoke in his second floor room, recently hired farmhand Joe Maxson finds the house of his employer, Belle Sorenson Gunness, on fire.  Screaming Belle's name and those of her children, Maxson gets no response, and barely having enough time to save himself, jumps out of a window in his underwear, and runs to the town of La Porte, Indiana for help.  By the time the old fashioned hook-and-ladder fire wagon gets to the farm the house is a total loss and the cleanup begins ... in which the bodies of Belle's three children are found, plus that of a female corpse with its head decapitated.  Opening clues to a mystery that still exists, the Indiana community will soon be horrified to discover that a female serial killer has been living in their midst for years!
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Belle With Three Of Her Children She Will Murder

Born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storseth to a Selbu, Norway stonemason and his wife in 1859, the youngest of eight children, her childhood is seemingly normal, with the first unsettling event in her life being an attack by a local rich man at a country dance while she is pregnant that causes Belle to miscarry her child (or so the story goes).  Friends and family will claim she is never the same after the incident, but it is only guessing as to what the real catalyst is for the madness that will manifest itself in her adult years on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  Nothing to tie her down with the child she was carrying gone and its father out of the picture, following the example of her older sister Nellie, in 1881 she immigrates to America, where she changes Bryhild to Belle and begins working as a servant (by this time she is a woman of six feet that weighs in the neighborhood of 200 pounds, and is extremely strong).  In 1884 she marries her first husband, Mads Sorenson, and two years later the pair opens a confectionery store in Chicago (not successful, the business mysteriously catches fire and the couple collect insurance money which they use to buy a lovely new home) ... and they have four children.  And then the deaths begin.  All four children die allegedly from acute colitis (with symptoms that also mirror poisoning), and grant their parents another insurance payday, then, on the only day that two life insurance policies overlap on Mr. Sorenson, he kicks the bucket too from heart disease (though one local doctor will think strychnine poisoning is much more plausible) ... affording the widow Belle yet even more insurance money (over $250,000 in today's currency).
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Black Widow

Hunting for a new husband, in 1901 Belle marries Norwegian-born Peter Gunness, and the pair move to La Porte, Indiana ... where with slight variations, her new family suffers the same fate as her Chicago one did ... Peter's infant daughter passes only a week after the marriage from uncertain causes while alone with Belle, and Peter, while cooking in the kitchen, somehow manages to knock over a sausage-grinding machine from a shelf that crushes in his skull ... a tragedy which gets the grieving widow still another insurance settlement (during this period she gives birth to a son named Phillip, and when her foster daughter, Jennie Olsen, vanishes, tells people the girl has gone away to a Lutheran College in Los Angeles ... though Jennie's body will be later found buried at the La Porte farm).  And with those leavings, she turns from family and starts vanishing men that respond to the personal ads she starts running in Chicago newspapers that reads:  Comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provide, with view of joining fortunes.  No reply by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit.  Triflers need not apply.
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Jennie Olsen

One after another, assisted by the handyman she has hired for a regular wage and her sexual favors, Ray Lamphere, suitors assets become Belle's and their bodies go into the Indiana ground, or are chopped up and fed to the hogs.  How many are killed is unknown, but most experts place the number of Belle's victims at being between 25 to 40 ... and the count could have gone even higher if not for the persistent inquires of Asle Helgelian, searching for his missing bachelor brother, Andrew, and Lamphere falling in love with Belle. Monies withdrawn from her accounts, Lamphere fired for his amorous intentions and the town notified as such when she advises the local sheriff she can't get the man to leave her farm, Belle is at first thought to be a victim of the fire when a dental crown matching her teeth is found next to the charred adult female corpse (tests later will show that the temperature of the fire should have destroyed the intact bridgework, and two witnesses will claim to have seen a friend of Lamphere plant the teeth evidence next to the corpse moment's before the bridgework is "discovered") found at the farm.  And the culprit is at first deemed to be Lamphere ... who does his cause no good when he asks arresting officers if Belle and the children survived the fire, before being told there was a fire (and there is an eyewitness that testifies to seeing Lamphere running down a road leading away from the Gunness home just before it catches fire ... a youth Lamphere threatens as he passes with death should he open his mouth about the handyman's presence).  And then the truth begins seeping out as Lamphere realizes from his cell he has been played too.
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The Missing Andrew Helgelian
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Lamphere
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After The Fire

Admitting to helping Belle dispose of the bodies of men she has poisoned with strychnine or killed with a meat cleaver after drugging their coffee or food (by the farm hands' count, Belle has murdered 42 men), soon on trial for arson and murder (he will be found guilty of arson, but acquitted of the murder charges ... sentenced to 20 years at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Lamphere dies there from tuberculosis in December of 1909), Lamphere states that the fire was a ruse for the pair to flee and make a fresh start in Chicago, but that when he went to their rendezvous spot, Gunness is a no show ... a tale which dovetails nicely into the fact that the decapitated body is that of a woman only 5'3" inches tall and weighing about 130 pounds (Lamphere will claim that the cooked cadaver belongs to a woman from Chicago Belle hired as a housekeeper before drugging the victim, bashing her head in, decapitating the corpse, and then throwing the clue filled head into the deep waters of a nearby swamp ... the head is never located), and the fact that once a 12-man team starts digging (a team which includes a local miner named Louis "Klondike" Schultz, who instead of using his sluice box to look for gold, sifts through acres of wetted earth seeking human bones), bodies, and pieces of bodies are found all over the farm.
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Searching
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The Hog Pen Area Where Eleven Bodies Will Be Found
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The Missing Helgelian
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Sluicing For Bones

Killer unmasked, wanted posters for Belle go up around the country, but it is too late, as of 4/28/1908, Gunness is never seen again ... although there will be sightings of her up to 1931 (in Mississippi), from Chicago to San Francisco, Los Angeles to New York ... becoming a bogey monster parents frighten their children with.  And there will be bodies identified as Belle that are dug up over the years and tested, but never conclusively matched with existing DNA evidence.  Murderer gone, whatever happened to Belle after the fire remains a mystery to this day. 
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Young Monster Image result for belle gunness grave
Rest In Peace

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

MA'S MAN GETS MURDERED

4/25/1932 - Unsurprisingly given the company he is keeping, Arthur Dunlop's body is discovered on the isolated shores of Frenstad Lake in Wisconsin, killed by his common-law wife's youngest of four sons, and the son's Canadian best friend ... the lady in Dunlop's life is Arizona Donnie Clark Barker, who will soon be known to police agencies around the country as Ma Barker, and the two killers are her 30-year-old son, Fred, and future Public Enemy #1, Alvin "Old Creepy" Karpis.
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Dunlop & Ma

Mother to a brood of thieves and murderers (all four of her sons will die from gun wounds, as will she), in 1928 after she kicks her husband George Barker out of the house over their continuing battles about the criminality of their four sons (the catalyst is George's refusal to support his son Lloyd after he robs a mail truck and is arrested), Ma shacks up with a jobless old man that makes her happy, Arthur Dunlop.  A seemingly happy pair about the live their golden years in Oklahoma, everything begins to come unraveled when Freddy Barker is paroled from prison in 1931 and moves in with the couple, and is soon joined by the friend Freddy has made in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing while serving time for burglary, Alvin Karpis.  Base camp established in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the boys are soon pulling off burglaries in the area ... until they draw too much heat to themselves, and with proceeds from the pair's first bank robbery, buy Ma a small, ten-acre farm and house (a four room cottage on a knoll where anyone approaching the farm can be seen way ahead of their arrival) in Missouri that the foursome next move into. It too is ruined as a base of operations (along with everyone's Christmas plans for 1931) when Freddy and Karpis are approached by West Plains, Missouri, Sheriff C. R. "Roy" Kelly (investigating the recent robbery of the town's McCallon's clothing store the men have pulled off, among the booty, showing the crooks still need some seasoning, are fifty neckties, stolen by men who usually don't wear ties) while parked in a stolen blue DeSoto at a gas station (they are having two flat tires fixed) and cold bloodily gun the lawman down (45-years-old, Kelly leaves behind a widow, who serves out the sheriff's term in office).
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Kelly

Fleeing just ahead of the arrival of a posse of lawmen, the group makes their way to the shelter of a criminal safe house outside of Joplin, Missouri run by a confidence crook named Herbert "Deafy" Farmer.  There, the crook suggests they will be even safer if they move north to St. Paul, Minnesota, where for a fee, the corrupt police force will leave the outlaws alone, and where Freddy and Karpis can make the contacts necessary to become big time bank robbers by hanging out at the town's notorious Green Lantern tavern run by Harry Sawyer (bank robbers Harvey Bailey and Frank "Jelly" Nash are regulars there, as is gangster wannabe, George "Machine Gun" Kelly).  So its off to St. Paul, where the group rents a place from Helen Hannegraf (who lives next store, where she makes bootleg whiskey out of sauerkraut in the basement, which her son Nick then sells at the family's speakeasy, the Drover's Tavern) at 1031 South Robert Street as the Anderson Family.  Settling in as seemingly normal while Freddy and Karpis pull off burglaries and make friends with the local crooks, the Anderson's drive Helen's granddaughter to the local Catholic school and pick her up when school is over, become friends with local children who walk Ma's dog for her for the fee of a nickel or a candy bar, and Dunlop drinks bootleg whiskey with Nick Hannegraf's brother, Pete (not amusing Freddy or Karpis in the least as the old man gets loquacious when hammered).
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Fred
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Karpis
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Harry Sawyer

As wished for, Freddy and Karpis are soon asked to join in a robbery planned by another Karpis convict pal, killer Larry DeVol (who will kill eleven people before being gunned down himself in Enid, Oklahoma in 1936), that also includes veteran bank robbers Thomas Holden and Bernard Phillips.  Almost perfect, the gang hits Minneapolis' Northwestern National Bank and Trust Company on 3/29/1932 and holding the 28 patrons and employees at gunpoint, the outlaws remove $75,000 in cash, $6,500 in coins, and $185,000 in bonds ... the big time indeed!  But thanks to one of the Hannegraf's, there latest hiding place in St. Paul is discovered by the police and the group is on the road once more.
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Holden & DeVol

Thumbing through a copy of the latest edition of True Detective magazine, Nick Hannegraf is shocked to see the two Anderson boy's faces in an article about the killing of Sheriff Kelly ... no best buddy to the neighbors with reward money in play, after warning his mother, he races to the nearest police station and makes his announcement about the crooks ... and waits and waits and waits as he is shuffled from department to department.  Shuffling that is a stall for the corrupt Chief of Police, Thomas "Big Tom" Brown, to call Harry Sawyer with a warning, who in turn warns the Barkers.  Out the door in seconds (in fact the door is left open in their hurry to leave) and down the road in two cars, when a police raiding team arrives about thirty minutes later, they find the radio on, the gas for the stove going, a half eaten meal on the kitchen table, Ma's brown fur coat, pairs of new shoes Freddy has just purchased, a closet full of clothes with all the labels torn off, a fishing box, a portable radio, a camera with pictures inside of Ma, a suitcase containing twelve .45 automatic shells, four .16-gauge shotgun shells, and two pistol cleaners, and under the rug, a $500 bond stolen in 1931 from the Farmers Savings Bank of Alden, Iowa (rushing to remain ahead of the law, the bandits do pause long enough to steal Mrs. Hannegraf's expensive silverware).
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The Crooked Police Chief Brown 
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Ma & Dunlop
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Ma With The Holiday Spirit

Unaware they have been ratted out by their next store neighbor, the deadly minds of Freddy and Karpis instantly gravitate to the person they believe is responsible for their almost getting caught in a town that was suppose to be safe, the 73-year-old whiskey brained motor mouth they are traveling with, Ma's Arthur Dunlop.  Headed for Kansas City by way of Webster, Wisconsin, denials ignored, the travelers make a stop at Frenstad Lake and leave Dunlop behind, naked, with a killing .45 slug in his head (meant for a watery grave and never being found, Freddy and Karpis are unable to drag Dunlop's body over 100 yards of bog to the waters of the lake), left behind also near the body is a woman's black glove, covered in blood.  Adios Arthur!
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Wanted Poster

The murder just another crime on the men's resumes, before Freddy is killed and Karpis is arrested and sent away to Alcatraz, there will be more killings of both policemen and civilians, numerous bank and payroll robberies, killings of gang members thought to be "suspect" in some manner, the execution of a doctor for a botched job of plastic surgery, two kidnappings, a train robbery, an escape made by plane for the first time, and four hour machine gun battle with the FBI ... sadly for cops of the Midwest, the robbers themselves, and anyone in between them, the Barker-Karpis Gang is just getting started!
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Freddy
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Karpis In The News

Monday, April 24, 2017

BACK IN BUSINESS FOR ALVIN

4/24/1935 - Tired of drinking to excess, partying with prostitutes, and sitting around in a variety of Toledo, Ohio whorehouses reading popular magazines of the day, Public Enemy #1, 27-year-old Alvin "Old Creepy" Karpis, the most hunted man in America, decides he needs the rush of adrenaline in his system once more that he can only get from pulling off a major criminal score, and so, risking even more law-and-order heat, with two other men, he robs a payroll shipment intended for the workers at the Youngstown Steel & Tube plant in Warren, Ohio, in between the money being transferred from a train to an armored car (actually just a modified truck with only a single guard/driver) for final transportation, and arrival at the manufacturing facility.
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Karpis - 1936

Marble champion to the country's #1 outlaw in the span of two brief decades, by 1935, Karpis is the last major Depression Era desperado still standing ... Machine Gun Kelly is arrested screaming "Don't shoot G-men" (or so the story goes), Bonnie & Clyde have been turned to Swiss Cheese on a lonely Louisiana road, Dillinger has been shot in the back outside Chicago's Biograph Theater, Pretty Boy Floyd has been gunned down trying to run into a copse of trees near East Liverpool, Ohio, and Baby Face Nelson has left in a hail of bullets gun battle that takes the lives of two FBI agents.  And the Barker-Karpis Gang has been decimated too ... escaping after being arrested, Volney Davis is in hiding (and in June, will soon become Melvin Purvis' last arrest for the FBI), Doc Barker is about to go on trial for his part in the 1934 kidnapping of St. Paul banker (an endeavor discovered because the outlaw has not heeded Karpis' advice to wear gloves will pouring gas into a car used in the kidnapping ... the discarded can is found and with the prints on it, the FBI is off and running in its pursuit of the Barker-Karpis Gang), Edward Bremer (on his way to a life sentence in Alcatraz that will result in the murderer's death trying to escape in 1939), master yeggs, Harvey Bailey, Thomas Keating, and Francis Holden are all in prison, Larry DeVol is in a Minnesota insane asylum (but not for long, escaping, he will be gunned down after killing a cop in Enid, Oklahoma in 1936), and Karpis' best friend, crazy Freddy Barker has been eliminated, along with his Ma, during a four hour machine gun battle with FBI agents along the shores of Lake Weir, outside of Ocklawaha, Florida.  Gone, but the missing are no lesson to Karpis at all ... other than to think smarter and be more careful than his former companions were.
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Freddy & Ma - January, 1935

Thievery seemingly in his blood, Karpis has been out of action since shooting his way out of police trouble in an Atlantic City hotel and kidnapping a doctor while making his escape, when buddy Fred Hunter (a blackjack dealer Karpis meets at the Harvard Club while hiding out in Toledo, Ohio the previous year, starting the journey that will lead to Alcatraz Island and a failed 1943 escape attempt) suggests robbing the payroll of the Youngstown Steel & Tube Co.  Investigating the idea, Karpis believes the robbery can be achieved, but will need two other bandits to pull it off, with Hunter not participating because of his association with the company through a friend, and the possibility of his identification as Warren is his hometown.  With Hunter out and other outlaws refusing to participate for fear of the heat hanging with Karpis will generate, choosing his next associates as best he can, Karpis goes with a known commodity from his Barker-Karpis days, outlaw Harry Campbell, the man Karpis has been with since fleeing Florida after Ma's and Freddy's deaths (including the Atlantic City shootout and doctor kidnapping), and a new partner, the only person he can find, a heroin addict in need of a score to buy his next fix that lives with a whorehouse madam in the city of Canton, a Fred Hunter friend named Joe Rich.
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Karpis - Boy, Punk, Pro
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Under Arrest - 1936 - Fred Hunter

Team put together and plan practiced, the men arrive at the Warren train station and wait for the money to arrive, staying in their escape car after Karpis thinks the trio looks too conspicuous standing on the empty station platform, noticing the station master's eyeballs on them several times (they are all wearing overcoats to hide the weapons they are carrying.  There, the veteran outlaw wonders not about how addict Rich will perform, but whether he has been right selecting Campbell, who argues that the job should be called off after spotting a black cat along the railroad tracks.  No bad mojo whatsoever, right on time in the afternoon, the train arrives and the payroll is moved by two couriers to the truck and driver who have also been waiting ... when the unescorted vehicle leaves for the plant, the trio of crooks drives along in front of it until the group arrives at a railroad crossing and stops.  Out in a flash and pointing .45 automatics at the driver, the man responds to the threat coming his way by throwing his pistol into the street, raising his hands, and letting himself be taken hostage.  Moving again quickly, Campbell and Rich get in the truck with their hostage, and following Karpis, make their way safely to an abandoned shed on the outskirts of town.  Despite Campbell's black cat worries, the robbery has come off without a hitch (indeed, it will be weeks before the FBI even knows Karpis was involved and local hoods are originally arrested for the crime).
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The Warren Train Station

Truck broken into (the driver is tied up and left where he can be found), Karpis finds exactly what he was expecting in a burlap sack in back ... bricks of cash that when counted after being dumped on the floor of the shed amount to $72,000 in cold, hard cash.  A big payday, Rich instantly shows why Karpis will not use him on his next job ... so excited at the payday that his coming his way, the addict takes out his syringe, drain's water from the truck's radiator, boils a dose of morphine, shoots up, and high as a kite, proposes that the trio should next attack the Federal Reserve in Cleveland (busted for his drug use, Rich will try to barter his way to freedom by offering to provide information on the robbery, but at first, the Feds don't believe the junkie).
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Harry Campbell
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On Alcatraz

Flush with ill-gotten gains, Karpis and Campbell return to their haunts in Toledo, Ohio, posing for a month as gamblers before Campbell falls in love.  Treating himself to a $10, 18-year-old hooker, Campbell has his heart stolen and proposes two nights later, and in less than a month's time, is married and living in a trailer behind his new mother-in-law's Ohio home (coming out of retirement to help Karpis rob a train in 1936 and escape in a plane, he begins his journey to a long stay on Alcatraz Island and at Leavenworth after being arrested in a 1936 raid on the property led by J. Edgar Hoover himself).  The love of his life, and mother of his only child (a boy being brought up by Karpis' parents that the desperado will never see), Dolores Delaney, already behind bars on harboring charges after the Atlantic City shootout (in which she is wounded by a Karpis bullet while the outlaw is firing at the police), Karpis is far from coming close to being domesticated, and is soon on the road once more, with Fred Hunter as his traveling companion.  Dust in the wind seemingly, in the men's last year of freedom before being arrested in New Orleans in 1936, on their odyssey nowhere, the pair will take a drive to and through the state of New York, wander through New England, going as far north as a tourist camp in Maine, return to Toledo, visit old friends in St. Louis and Tulsa, laze about Lake Hamilton outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas, drive down to Texas and then along the Gulf Coast all the way to Florida, return to Lake Hamilton (Hunter leaves for a brief time to go to New York to take in a heavyweight boxing bout between Joe Louis and Max Baer at Madison Square Gardens (that is also attended by J. Edgar Hoover), join the ranks of Jesse James and Butch Cassidy by robbing a train stopped at the Garrettsville, Ohio station (the take of only $34,000 disappoints Karpis, who had expected a payday in six figures ... and just missed it when an expected payroll unexpectedly changes its movement schedule), escape to the Lake Erie town of Port Clinton, fly to Memphis (with two landings to refuel), drive back to the Hot Springs, drive back into Texas for some fishing (barely missing being caught in a series of FBI raids that take place at their Arkansas hiding places), make a stop in Biloxi, rent apartment in New Orleans, return to Hot Springs to pick up Karpis' latest girlfriend, a 32-year-old madame named Grace Goldstein (her real name is Jewel Laverne Grayson and her parents believe see owns a hat shop), where now as a foursome (Hunter has Connie Morris along for the ride, a teenage runaway turned prostitute that works for Goldstein), the group drives to Florida for a vacation before returning to New Orleans where Hunter and Karpis have a destiny date with the FBI.
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Pymouth Karpis And Hunter Are Arrested In
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Plymouth Weapons
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Busted - Karpis In Cuffs

Busted in what is purported to be J. Edgar Hoover's first arrest (Karpis and Hunter tell far different stories about the FBI chief's lack of involvement until after ... and stupidity ... no one brings handcuffs along, so Karpis is bound with an FBI agent's tie ... and lost taking Karpis to custody, the arrested outlaw will have to give the driving agent directions to the holding cell at the post office ... asked how he knows the way, he will jokingly state that he knows because he and Hunter were thinking of robbing the place), the public enemy (killer outlaw Al Brady will be next atop the list ... until he is gunned down by the FBI on the streets of Bangor, Maine in September of 1937) will plead guilty to the Bremer kidnapping to escape the death penalty, be sentenced to life in prison, serve 26 years on Alcatraz Island (the most time by any prisoner), teach Charlie Manson to play guitar while the two are serving time at the Federal prison on Washington's McNeil Island, get paroled in 1969 and deported back to his birthplace of Canada (he will have a horrible time getting a passport because he is one of the few people to ever have his fingerprints successfully removed ... after the skin is taken off with scalpel and his fingertips are dipped in acid), writes two books about his criminal experiences, and moves to Torremolinos, Spain (the residents think he is just a doddering old fool, creating fantasies of bank robberies and gun fights, never dreaming he is the real McCoy!) ... where his life ends at the age of 72 in 1979, after an accidental overindulgence in sleeping pills, long journey finally over.
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Karpis - August, 1936
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Just Before Leaving Alcatraz
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McNeil Photo
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Gone!
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Finally Free
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Last Photograph
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Where The Public Enemy Now Resides