The Shannon Farmhouse
Shack Where Urschel Was Hidden
Tired of being shot at during bank robberies, the Kellys and Bates decide to try their hand at what they believe will be easy pickings, and on the evening of 7/22/1933, at around 11:30, with the gunpoint assistance of a machine gun, interrupt the last rubber of a bridge game taking place on the back porch of the home of 43-year-old oilman Charles Urschel (also present on the porch are Urschel's wife, Berenice, and their neighbors, Walter Jarret and his wife) and kidnap the millionaire (estimated to be worth $50 million before Wall Street's collapse). Blindfolded, and enraged at being taken hostage, Urschel will spend the rest of the evening and nine days that follow memorizing as many details of his experience as his memory can handle ... and it can handle a lot! Released when a ransom of $200,000 in cash (worth around $3.6 million by today's standards) is exchanged with his kidnappers on 7/29, Urschel is back in his home on Monday, 7/30, and in almost immediate communication with the FBI team working the case.
The Urschels
The Urschel Home
Brought into the case only minutes after the kidnapping takes place (as the kidnappers drive off, Berenice runs upstairs, locks herself in her bedroom and calls Oklahoma City Police Chief Watts with news of the crime, then uses a Time magazine article about the recently passed Federal Lindbergh Law to telephone the Justice Department at National 7117 about the evening's events and speaks directly to J. Edgar Hoover), Hoover takes 51-year-old Special Agent Gustave "Gus" Tiner Jones (a former Texas Ranger and the head of the Bureau's San Antonio office) off bringing the Kansas City Massacre killers to justice, and reassigns him to the kidnapping. By 11:00 in the evening, Jones is at the Urschel home, interviewing Charles. Due to Urschel fatigue, the first questioning lasts only thirty minutes, but the men are back at it in the morning and a host of critical information is related ... the kidnappers pass through a major rainstorm about an hour after leaving Oklahoma City, at a filling station an attendant comments on "broom corn," a crop grown in a southern portion of Oklahoma, the kidnap car passes over a long wooden bridge, he is held at a farm that has roosters crowing and pigs squealing, gives distances from the farm's main house and the shack (and draws an overhead layout of the farm), he drinks water from a tin cup that has been pulled out of nearby well and has a mineral taste, twice a day a plane passes overhead (Urschel guesses at around 9:00 in the morning and at about 6:00 in the evening), a huge rainstorm takes place during his captivity during which the plane breaks its pattern of appearances overhead, and blindfold loosened enough eventually for quick glances about where he is being held, Urschel is able to make a sketch of the shack (and a description of the furniture inside) he is held in, and he gives descriptions of the two men that hold him captive (not the original kidnappers) ... and he even leaves fingerprints about should the hiding spot ever be found by authorities. It is an incredible performance of recall! Off and running with the info they have (including the Bureau's Dallas office providing links to Fort Worth detective Ed Weatherford, who believes Kathryn Kelly is involved in the kidnapping) after an over six hour debrief of Urschel, the focus of law enforcement soon narrows to a farm in northwest Wise County, Texas belonging to the Shannon Family that fits the memories of the kidnap victim almost exactly.
Hoover
Jones
Verifying that they have actually located the location where Urschel had been held before being ransomed, Jones sends in agent Edward Dowd to explore the property as a bank examiner needing Robert Shannon's signature on some bogus documents. There, Dowd confirms an iron taste in the water (brought up from a well by a creaking pulley), the presence of various animals (in the quantities reported), sees the iron bed and high chair the victim was chained to, looks in the cracked mirror the victim used for shaving, and notes the east to west running of the shack's floorboards ... all matching information Urschel has provided. Once off the farm and far enough away from the Shannons so as not to arouse suspicion, Dowd heads for the nearest pay phone and calls Jones with his confirmations of the site, and Jones in turn calls Hoover, who tells him to raid the farm as soon as possible. Orders received, wanting to be prepared for anything, Jones puts together a raiding party consisting of Bureau agents James "Doc" White and Charles Winstead (both former Texas Rangers, Winstead will be credited with being the agent that drops John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater in 1934), Deputy Sheriff Bill Eads of Oklahoma City, Detective Ed Weatherford, and other trusted lawmen from the region ... fourteen men in all, including Urschel who insists on going along with a double-barreled shotgun (the sheriff of Wise County, J. T. Faith is also advised as to what is coming). The raid is scheduled to take place on Friday, August 11.
Where Urshel Was Held
Winstead
Meeting near the town of Denton (north of Dallas), the men pile into three cars with their weapons, and head for Paradise and the Shannon farm. Delays take place though, and realizing the group will not arrive before dark, Jones stops the car caravan twenty-six miles away from their destination, pulls everybody together, and over a map drawn in the dirt, goes over his new plan ... the posse will go back to Fort Worth and rest up, then hit the farm at sunrise. Told to expect "fireworks," in the early darkness of the next day the men set off and arrive a mile from the farm just before the sun comes up, where they go over the plan for the raid once more ... the lead car, containing Jones and Urschel, will be responsible for surrounding the farmhouse, the second car and its occupants will surround the barn, and the third car will help wherever it is required. Driving on to the farm as the Saturday sun lights up the property, Urschel instantly recognizes Shannon as the man comes out of the house pulling on his suspenders. Pointing his shotgun at Shannon's head, Urschel proclaims, "That's the old man that guarded me."
The Shannons
As agents cuff a protesting Shannon, machine gun in hand, Jones heads around the structure to the back porch where he finds a man in his underwear he immediately recognizes, sleeping on a cot, near a Winchester rifle and a pistol ... it is a recent escapee from the Kansas State Prison at Lansing (6/1/1933), the notorious bank robber, Harvey Bailey. Ecstatic, Jones brushes Bailey's nose with his machine gun and tells Bailey to get up, and what will happen if any armed resistance takes place. "I'm here alone," Bailey proclaims with a smile. "You have me. Hell, a fella's gotta sleep sometime." A surprise plum, Bailey is at the farm to return a machine gun belonging to Kelly that he'd used in a recent robbery, collect a money debt from Kelly while the kidnapper is flush with illicit earnings, and nursing a leg wound, to seek an underworld medical attention from a doctor (enjoying a home cooked meal at the farm the night before with their partner, Bailey, fellow Kansas escapees "Big Bob" Brady and Ed Davis have moved on just in time to miss the morning's festivities). Shannon, his wife, two children, and Bailey under guard, the rest of the raiding party heads down the road and arrests Armon Shannon and his 17-year-old wife, Oleta (along with taking the couple's baby into custody). Confronted by how much time Armon might be spending away from his wife and infant, the youngest Shannon soon gives up the names of the Urschel kidnappers (last laugh to Urschel, he mockingly thanks Ora Shannon for the fried chicken dinner she made him on his first night at the farm) ... the men who took him off the porch in Oklahoma City were Machine Gun Kelly and Albert Bates (in a grand stroke of luck, later that same Saturday, Bates is arrested getting off a train in Denver after being identified by a detective with the American Express Company).
Bailey
Bates
The quest to find Machine Gun Kelly and his wife now on, the huge national manhunt that develops eventually corners the couple in Memphis, Tennessee on September 26, 1933. Arrested in the bungalow of shady garage attendant they have hidden with before, Kelly becomes an FBI legend when confronted by armed lawman while just waking up from a night's slumber dressed only in his underwear, he is purported to give the FBI its new nickname, screaming repeatedly to the raiders, "Don't shoot G-men!" Crime solved and its culprits in custody (though Harvey Bailey briefly breaks out of the Dallas jail he is in), for the Urschel kidnapping Machine Gun Kelly will be sentenced to life in prison (which he does, dying in Leavenworth Penitentiary from heart disease at the age of 59 in 1954), Albert Bates will get life (and dies of heart disease on Alcatraz Island at the age of 54 in 1948), Harvey Bailey is sentenced to life (convicted by having Urschel ransom cash on his person though he wasn't involved in that crime, the bank robber is released from prison in 1964 after stints at Leavenworth and Alcatraz, and dies in Joplin, Missouri in 1979 at the ripe old age of 91), Kathryn Kelly is sentenced to life in prison (she serves 25 years before being released and dies in Oklahoma City at the age of 81 in 1985), Kelly's mother, Ora Shannon also gets life (she is also released after 25 years and lives with her daughter in Oklahoma City until she dies in 1980 at the age of 92), Boss Shannon gets a sentence of 25 years (he is released after 11 years and dies 12 years later, but not before making a nice last gesture for his son-in-law ... body not claimed by his family, the "Boss" of the family arranges the outlaw to be buried in the Shannon Family plot in 1954), and Armon Shannon is sentenced to ten years behind bars. The raid is the FBI's and Hoover's first victory in what will be called "The War on Crime."
Machine Gun & Kathryn
Caught
On Trial - Standing Left To Right - Bates, Bailey, And The Three Shannons, Armon,
Robert, And Ora
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