by David Stout
In no time, police officers arrived, along with his sons, to take Luer home.
On the night of Monday, July 17, Fitzgerald turned up at one of his hangouts in Madison, Illinois, a little town near both Alton and East St. Louis, Illinois. Federal agents and a posse of local police arrested him without difficulty. Fitzgerald seemed almost relieved. “I’m right for this job,” he told detectives. “You’ve got me hooked.”92
The entire “job” had been a fiasco. The ransom notes that Luer had been forced to sign had never been delivered. Federal agents said no ransom was paid. It appeared that the kidnappers had simply grown weary of the frustrations and decided to free their hostage.
Fitzgerald quickly implicated three other men and two women in the enterprise. They were arrested in and around East St. Louis. Among the suspects were a husband and wife who lived on the farm in Madison County, Illinois, where Luer had been held.
If Fitzgerald was counting on his quick confession to gain him some leniency, he must have been disappointed. There were immediate cries of outrage over the treatment of a well-liked banker in his senior years and suffering from a heart condition. There was smoldering anger not just over what had happened but what could have happened.
“I can’t conceive why they put that old man in the hole instead of in the shed above,” one lawman commented. “Unless for this reason: Had he died, all they would have had to do would have been to fill in the hole. Then nobody on earth would ever have found his grave.”93
Eight and a half decades later, it is impossible to measure the mood of the American people, but it is reasonable to assume that they were becoming increasingly disgusted, even horrified, at the plague of kidnappings.
In 1933, the killer of the Lindbergh baby was still at large. In Philadelphia in July, a real estate broker was fatally shot by would-be kidnappers as he tried to flee. And in the Midwest especially, the ordeal of August Luer, a man of integrity who was nothing like a stereotypical banker with cold eyes and a sharp pencil, stoked deep anger.
By the time detectives and prosecutors sorted out who should be charged with what in the Luer case, there were six defendants—five men and a woman. When they went to trial in late September in Edwardsville, Illinois, the Madison County seat, prosecutors said all should go to the electric chair. Assistant State’s Attorney John F. McGinnis called the kidnapping “an atrocious crime” inflicted upon a “kindly old man” and urged jurors to “protect your home and fireside and children” by imposing the death penalty.94 Were the prosecutor’s remarks a bit extreme, considering that the victim had been freed by the kidnappers, albeit after an ordeal in a confined space? Again, the prosecutor was inviting the jury to imagine what could have happened. The judge must have been thinking along those lines too. In early October, after the six defendants were convicted, he imposed life terms on three of them, Percy Fitzgerald, Randall Norvell, and Lillian Chessen. Mike Musiala drew twenty years, and Christ Gitcho and Charles Chessen (Lillian’s husband) got five years each.
Any Washington politician with decent political antennae could sense the deepening public anger at kidnappers or at least those kidnappers who preyed upon good citizens instead of fellow criminals. Joseph B. Keenan, the special assistant attorney general who was the spearhead of the federal government’s drive to stamp out kidnapping, made it a point to sit in on the trial of Luer’s abductors.
Keenan stayed in Edwardsville only a few days. Then he was off to Oklahoma City to check on the status of yet another sensational kidnapping.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE OIL TYCOON
Oklahoma City
Saturday, July 22, 1933
Charles Urschel and his wife, Berenice, and friends Walter Jarrett and his wife, Kelly, were playing bridge on the sunporch at the rear of the Urschels’ Heritage Hills mansion. The home was routinely described as “palatial,” and in fact Charles Frederick Urschel was a fabulously rich oil tycoon, a billionaire if his fortune were converted to twenty-first century dollars. Jarrett, his friend and sometime business partner, had also been very successful in the oil fields.
Urschel, forty-four, was a powerfully built six-footer. He was occasionally called pompous, though not to his face. More charitably, he was described as forceful and dignified. He liked his privacy, didn’t like to talk to strangers about his personal life, didn’t like to read about himself in the newspapers. Who could blame him for that, really?
Besides, Urschel and his wife had good reason to be on their guard. The papers were full of lurid tales of kidnappings. Recently, the Urschels had read an article in Time magazine about the spread of the crime. It seemed that any family of means could be a target. Why, it was only last weekend that a banker in Alton, Illinois, was freed after being held for a week. He’d been taken right out of his home, and his wife had been roughed up! And as the foursome shuffled and dealt cards, the fate of John J. O’Connell Jr., the political prince of Albany, New York, was still unknown.
The Urschels’ young daughter, Betty, had had a chilling experience just a few days earlier. While driving down from Tulsa, she’d spotted a blue car in her rearview mirror early on. She hadn’t been alarmed at first, but the car, carrying two men, had stayed behind her all the way to Oklahoma City, more than a hundred miles to the southwest.
With loving firmness, Betty’s parents told her to stay in the house. Maybe we’ll hire a bodyguard if you absolutely have to go out, but otherwise, we want you to stay put, they said.
Dedicated bridge players, the Urschels and Jarretts stayed focused this Saturday night on spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds. The weather had been in the nineties for a few days, hardly unusual for Oklahoma in July, but the night air on the screened-in porch was comfortable enough.
No doubt, the card players welcomed a respite from recent troubling economic events. Just three weeks earlier, on July 1, Albert R. Erskine, president of the Studebaker Corporation, was having breakfast with his family in their home in South Bend, Indiana, headquarters of the automaker. Studebaker was in deep financial trouble and had been placed in receivership, leaving Erskine president in name only. Rather abruptly, Erskine left the table, went to his study, and wrote a note: “I can’t go on any longer.” Then he picked up a revolver and fired a bullet into his chest, dying at age sixty-two.
And only four days before the bridge game, the stock market had reached its highest level of the year—only to plummet for three straight days, with Friday’s trading the heaviest since October 30, 1929, when the economy had begun its spiral into the Great Depression.
It is likely that Charles Urschel and Walter Jarrett felt some sympathy for the thousands of speculators whose accounts had been emptied in Friday’s trading. As oil men, Urschel and Jarrett knew what it meant to take big risks in business.
And there was disturbing news from abroad. Philip Zuckerman, a businessman who lived in New York City and traveled often to Leipzig, Germany, where he owned a business that imported furs from America, had been badly beaten a few days before by Nazi storm troopers. His wife had also been injured.
The Zuckermans and two relatives had been watching a parade of storm troopers when several marchers broke ranks and attacked, punching and trampling them. “One of my relatives wears a long beard, making it easy to pick him out as a Jew,” Zuckerman said from his hospital bed in Berlin where he had gone for treatment.95
George S. Messersmith, the American consul general in Berlin, filed a protest with German government authorities, who promised “the most stringent action” against anyone found to have taken part in the assault. The Nazis, under Chancellor Adolf Hitler, had been in power less than six months, so perhaps it was too early to draw conclusions about them.
In the midst of the bridge game, Berenice Urschel thought she heard a car stop near the driveway. Moments later, as if in a dream, the door to the sunporch opened, and two men carrying machine guns entered. One was heavyset, the other more slender. The intruders were careful to stand in the edge of
the light so their faces could not be seen clearly.
“Don’t move or make a sound or we’ll blow your heads off,” the heavy intruder said. “Which one is Urschel?”96
Neither Urschel nor Jarrett replied. In their private lives, as in business and bridge, they had learned to hold their cards close to the vest.
“Well, come along,” the heavy intruder said. “We’ll take both of you.”
The women watched in shock as their husbands were steered off the sunporch at gunpoint. The wives waited until they heard a car start and move away. Then they rushed to an upstairs bedroom, locked themselves in, and called the police.
Berenice recalled the Time article about kidnapping and that it had mentioned a new national hotline to call. She found the article and dialed the number: National 7117.
An operator answered, inviting her to go ahead. Understandably breathless, Mrs. Urschel said she needed to report a kidnapping. At that point, according to at least one account, a man’s voice broke in. “This is J. Edgar Hoover, Mrs. Urschel. Give me every detail you can.”97
The car had gone only a short distance when the driver said to his partner, “Floyd, give me a cigarette.”
Jarrett had picked up the driver’s extra emphasis on the name “Floyd.”
A little farther on, the car stopped, and Jarrett was put out.
“If you want to help Urschel, don’t tell anyone which way we’re headed,” one kidnapper said. “On your honor, if you have any honor.”
Soon, Jarrett was able to hitch a ride back to Oklahoma City where he found Urschel’s wife and daughter nervous but composed. There was nothing to do but wait for the kidnappers to name their price—and no one doubted that it would be steep.
“The ransom demand is expected to be one of the greatest ever made,” a Texas newspaper, the Austin American, predicted two days after the kidnapping. “Few, if any, wealthier men have been held for ransom anywhere.”98 Not only were the Urschels wealthy, but their friends included some of the richest men in the oil industry, men who could be counted on to contribute toward Urschel’s freedom.
The kidnappers probably didn’t fully understand the kind of men Charles Urschel and Walter Jarrett were. Both had shrugged off losses and triumphed. They were tough, remarkably cool thinkers under pressure.
Jarrett remembered what the kidnappers had said to each other: “Floyd, give me a cigarette,” was one phrase. A few more times, the name “Floyd” was uttered, a bit louder than necessary.
Sure, Jarrett thought, smiling to himself. They’re trying to put the blame for this latest kidnapping on Pretty Boy Floyd. His name had begun to surface in the Union Station Massacre, which had taken place only weeks before.
Jarrett had seen pictures of Floyd, and he was soon telling the police and reporters that neither of his captors looked a bit like him.
For the rest of his life, Charles Urschel would remember the cold, empty feeling in his stomach as he lay on the floor of the sedan, his eyes taped shut. After a long while, the car stopped. From the smells, he thought he was in a garage. Then he heard faint metallic sounds. They’re changing license plates, he thought.
He was put into another vehicle and told to lie down. After a few hours, the car stopped at a gas station. He was warned to keep quiet. He did and overheard a snatch of conversation.
“How are the farm conditions around here?” a kidnapper asked.
“The crops around here are burned up,” a woman said as she pumped the gas.
Remember this, Urschel told himself. The information may be useful.
More hours went by. Finally, he was taken from the car and led through a gate into a house. He was placed on a cot. He heard one of his jailers lie down on a cot next to him. The prisoner heard the voices of a man and a woman. Then his ears were filled with cotton and taped over.
He was led to a second house and into a room where he was told to lie on some blankets in the corner. More voices, different from before. A handcuff was placed on one of his wrists, and the other hand was fastened to a chair. He slept fitfully.
In the morning, his jailers told Urschel to select a friend in Tulsa, write a letter to him, and say the ransom demand was $200,000—and there must be no funny business. Urschel chose J. G. Catlett, a wealthy oil man.
Urschel’s handcuffs were fastened to a chain so he could move around a little. He was able to peek outside and saw chickens, hogs, and several cows. He was given a pair of pajamas to wear so his clothes could air out. He was fed canned tomatoes and beans. He was also given cigars—El Cheapo compared to what he was used to.
Days crawled by. He came to know the sound of the pulley used to haul buckets of water from the well. He mentally implanted the image of the old tin cup he was given to drink water from. He took care to leave his fingerprints on the cup and on surfaces in his little dwelling place.
He noted that each morning, a plane would go over around 9:45. Another would fly by around 5:45 in the evening. It rained very hard on the morning of Sunday, July 30, and no plane went over.
Urschel had vowed to remember each detail of his time as a kidnapping victim, from the moment he was abducted until—when? He wondered how his wife was bearing up, what his friends were doing to obtain his freedom. He wondered what was going on in the real world.
Two days after Urschel was taken, the FBI announced a time-out of sorts. It would suspend its investigation for twenty-four hours to give the kidnappers a chance to contact the Urschel family without interference. “Our only concern at this time is the safe return of Mr. Urschel,” said R. H. Colvin, the agent in charge at Oklahoma City.99 Local police, who had been guarding the Urschels, also agreed to step aside, for the moment, to put the kidnappers at ease.
By then, the crime was being investigated more intensely than any except the Lindbergh kidnapping. Hoover was so hungry to solve a high-profile case and polish his FBI’s image that he pulled one of his top agents off the probe into the massacre at the Kansas City train station and assigned him to the Urschel case.
Hoover knew that Charles Urschel and President Franklin D. Roosevelt were friends.
On July 26, Urschel’s friend J. G. Catlett got a Western Union package containing a letter from Urschel asking him to be an intermediary. There was also a letter from Urschel to his wife and a letter addressed to another friend of Urschel’s, E. E. Kirkpatrick of Oklahoma City.
Kirkpatrick was instructed to obtain $200,000 in used twenty-dollar bills and to run an ad in the Daily Oklahoman reading: “FOR SALE—160 acres land, good five-room house, deep well. Also cows, tools, tractor, corn, and hay. $3750 for quick sale…TERMS…Box#______”100
The kidnappers said they would be in touch after the ad had run—and they were true to their word. On July 28, the newspaper got a reply addressed to Kirkpatrick in Box H-807. It had been sent from Joplin, Missouri.
Kirkpatrick was told to pack the money in a light-colored leather bag. The next night, he was to board Train No. 28, “the Sooner,” leaving Oklahoma City at 10:10 p.m. for Kansas City, Missouri. He was to sit in the observation platform and keep his eyes on the scenery in the direction the train was going. After a while, he would see a fire. That would be his cue to get ready to throw the bag off the train—which he was to do right after observing a second fire.
No tricks, the letter warned. No dummy package, no recording the serial numbers of the bills (the FBI did record the serial numbers despite the warning), no police involvement, or not only Urschel would be killed but “someone very near and dear to the Urschel family.”
The letter said that, if the ransom drop-off went awry, Kirkpatrick was to proceed to Kansas City and register at the Muehlebach Hotel under the name E. E. Kincaid of Little Rock, Arkansas, and await further instructions.
Catlett and Kirkpatrick rode the train together, sitting in different sections of the observation car with identical leather bags—except that Catlett’s contained the money, while Kirkpatrick’s was filled with old magazines. Agents had de
cided on the dual-bag arrangement thinking it might somehow reduce the risk of a hijacking.
All night long, Catlett peered out the window into the darkness. Now and then, he saw lights from buildings and cars. But no fires.
In Kansas City, Kirkpatrick registered at the hotel under the name Kincaid and waited in his room. Soon, he got a telegram from Tulsa: “Owing to unavoidable incident unable to keep appointment. Will phone you about six. Signed, C. H. Moore.”
Moore called around 5:30 p.m. Sunday, July 30, and told Kirkpatrick to take a taxi from the Muehlebach Hotel to the LaSalle Hotel, then walk west. After walking no more than half a block, Kirkpatrick was approached by a man who said, “Mr. Kinkaid, I will take that bag.”
Bag in hand, Moore told Kirkpatrick to go back to the Muehlebach, that Charles Urschel would soon be released.
Kirkpatrick and Catlett checked out of the Muehlebach. Kirkpatrick returned to Oklahoma City, Catlett to Tulsa.
“Well, Mr. Urschel, we are going to give you a shave and clean you up for a trip to town,” one of the kidnappers said. It was Monday, July 31, and Urschel was very tired.
He was allowed to shave, then his eyes were taped shut once more, and then it was into a car, sprawled on the floor of a back seat again. But this time, Urschel dared to hope.
Another long, long ride. Then the car stopped. He was pulled out, and his eyes were untaped.
“You’re just north of Norman,” he was told. “Here’s some money.”
He could see the lights of the city. The car sped off into the night, and Urschel walked. After a while, he came to a hamburger stand, where he phoned for a cab. His captors had generously given him $10 for the fare. The taxi took him the twenty miles to his home in Oklahoma City.