The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  1. Communicate immediately the fact of the kidnapping to the nearest official of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation so that among other things its vast collection of fingerprints may be put into use at the first opportunity.

  2. Take prompt steps to keep out of the picture other than the properly constituted officers so that all available clues will be preserved.

  3. Make full disclosure of every fact to the federal officers so that they will not be needlessly handicapped.

  Life in Oklahoma and Texas among the scattered burgs where Urschel and his companies did business had always been rough-and-tumble, but since the market crashed and the Depression spread, people were growing increasingly desperate and violent. He was well aware that a group of gangsters had just shot up the parking lot of Kansas City’s Union Station, killing cops and a federal agent, and The Daily Oklahoman was making the claim that they’d fled to Oklahoma to hide out and that local killer/kidnapper Pretty Boy Floyd was among the suspects. He worried about the safety of his family.

  Today, though, there was news of another sort on the radio, and it was one in which Urschel had a great deal of interest.

  Fifty thousand New Yorkers had gathered at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to watch daredevil aviator Wiley Post land after flying around the world. If he landed successfully, he would become the first pilot to fly it solo. And, unless something went terribly wrong, he was also expected to do it in record time, breaking the previous record he had set flying with a navigator.

  The Wiley Post adventure was exactly the kind of feel-good story the weary nation craved, and the press was hyping it at every opportunity. Now, as the conclusion of the flight neared, the story was the province of the newly formed national radio networks, and they had listeners glued to their sets.

  Urschel knew all about Post and his exploits. Though he was born in Texas, Post spent most of his life in Oklahoma, and the state was proud to claim him.

  Post was a poor farm boy, part Cherokee, who had dropped out of school after the sixth grade. He hated farmwork and was hardly built for it at 5′4″ and weighing 130 pounds. He left his parents’ farm in Texas to find work in the oil fields of Oklahoma, but he was equally ill-suited to that work. He found it tedious and boring and impossibly hard. He tried to find success as a highway robber, but was arrested on one of his first attempts.

  Within months of his incarceration, a sympathetic prison doctor took pity on the despondent prisoner and arranged for his release on parole. Eventually, Post returned to work in the oil fields, but lost his left eye in an accident when a flying chip of steel hit him.

  The state compensation board ordered the company to pay him a settlement of $1,698.25. Post would use it to pay for flying lessons and buy a recently crash-landed plane for $240. He rebuilt it, learned to fly it and launched his aviation career without the benefit of a pilot’s license, which was denied him because of his disability.

  He later went to work for one of Urschel’s competitors, oilman F. C. Hall. Hall was looking for ways to gain a competitive edge in the business and needed a pilot to shuttle him to distant fields, where he might lay a claim before others could get there. Post, always the thrill seeker, was willing to brave any kind of weather and take off at a moment’s notice. Hall found him to be the perfect fit, and lent him his plane to fly at off-times in races around the country. From there, he built his legend.

  The Daily Oklahoman had been following his exploits since his takeoff on July 15 from New York bound for Berlin, where he landed 25 hours and 45 minutes later. He was greeted on the ground by Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s newly appointed Reichsminister Hermann Goring. Two hours later, he took off for Novosibirsk in Siberian Russia, but equipment trouble forced him down in East Prussia. The rest of the flight had been a doozy of a story full of unscheduled stops, equipment failures, crash landings, bad weather and assorted unexpected emergencies. But Post continually pressed on and, with good weather ahead of him, it looked as if he would break his own round-the-globe flying record—but this time flying alone.

  The Urschels had invited their good friends and neighbors, the Jarretts, over that evening for a game of bridge on the sunporch behind the house, where the air stirred and the temperature dipped below that inside the mansion, which had baked in the sun all day. Charles was an excellent player. He had a card-counters memory and, with his wife’s mental tenacity, they were daunting competitors. The Jarretts enjoyed the rivalry, but after a long, hot night of losing hands, they were itching to leave.

  “It’s almost 11:30. Time we were going home, Walter,” said Mr. Jarrett’s wife.

  “I suppose so,” he responded.

  But Berenice was liking her luck and asked for another game. Walter Jarrett shuffled the cards and dealt.

  As they sorted their cards, a car pulled up to the house and killed its lights. Inside the powerful new Chevrolet, George Kelly looked at Al Bates, his agitated partner, and told him to relax. Kelly felt good. Excited. He saw lights on the back porch. The doors were open and the screens were the only barrier.

  “OK, Al. Calm down. It is going to be a piece of cake.”

  Berenice’s luck held. Staring at her hand and hoping to run a grand slam, she stoically bid: “Two hearts.” Then she froze.

  “What is it?” asked Charles.

  “I heard something,” she said. “Someone moved outside.”

  Charles turned toward the screen door just as two men rushed inside, both armed. One carried a submachine gun, the other a revolver.

  Berenice screamed.

  Flipping the machine gun in her direction, Kelly told her to “shut up.”

  Then, calmly: “Everyone keep your seat, and no one will get hurt.”

  As he stared at the startled foursome, he realized he had no idea which man was to be his victim. Which man was the richest oilman in the whole damn country and which man was the unlucky chump he was playing cards with?

  “Which one of you is Charles Urschel?” he asked politely.

  Urschel stared back in stoic silence trying to catalog details of the machine-gun-wielding thug who had no idea who he was trying to kidnap. That the gunman couldn’t tell Urschel apart from his pudgy, balding neighbor, who just so happened to be a wealthy oilman as well, was almost laughable.

  The trim, muscular machine gunner was awfully well-dressed for a night of marauding. Snap-brimmed Panama hat, pressed short-sleeved shirt, pleated slacks, fancy leather belt, shined shoes. The hat threw heavy shadows over his face, and it was hard to make out any features. His complexion looked dark. Mexican, maybe. But his speech was smooth and unaccented. Probably some thug from up north.

  Urschel would kill them both in a heartbeat if he could get to his shotgun. He thought worriedly about his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter upstairs. Would she have it cocked and ready if the intruders had other intentions? He kicked himself mentally for firing his bodyguard, whom he’d caught sleeping on the job.

  In any negotiation, time and delay are the weapons of last resort for the side dealing from a weaker position. So Urschel sat, unmoving, as Kelly repeated his demand.

  “Once again I’ll ask you. Which one is Urschel? If you still refuse to answer, we’ll take you both.”

  Jarrett, playing the hero, began to rise. As he did, Urschel followed.

  “All right, if that’s the way you want it,” said Kelly turning to Bates. “Take ’em both.”

  As Kelly backed out of the room, machine gun still trained on the frightened women, he instructed them not to call the police or he wouldn’t hesitate to kill the two men.

  Berenice, who’d grown up with hard-bitten cowboys and ranchers and had raised her children in the gritty oil fields of West Texas and Oklahoma among the roustabouts and drunks, was no stranger to adversity. And she did not scare easily.

  As soon as Kelly was out the door, she ran upstairs, locked herself in a room and called Chief Watts of the Oklahoma City Police Department. Then she grabbed a copy of Time magazine a
nd flipped to a page that had caught her interest. She had been discussing it with Charles just that afternoon and had left it on her dressing table. The Time article was analyzing the recent spate of kidnappings of wealthy individuals. It included the telephone number the Justice Department had set up to expedite action on any kidnapping that should occur. The department was eager to put the new Lindbergh Law into practice and bring kidnappers to justice as quickly as possible.

  She dialed the number immediately.

  Nine miles outside of town, Kelly told Bates to stop the car. He turned to Urschel and Jarrett and demanded their wallets. Pulling sixty dollars in cash and a driver’s license from Jarrett’s wallet, he looked at Urschel and told him he could have saved his buddy all this grief if he’d just spoken up earlier.

  A few miles later, they stopped the car again. Kelly tossed ten bucks at Jarrett and kicked him out of the car.

  “Have a nice walk home, sucker.”

  The car sped off into the night.

  As it did, there was news of joy and celebration on the radio. Wiley Post, still serving his parole, had landed safely, becoming the first solo pilot to fly around the world, setting a new speed record in the process.

  5

  WELCOME TO PARADISE

  Urschel had not gotten where he was in life by being inattentive or careless. He was, in fact, quite the opposite—a meticulous accountant who was obsessed with details, whether they be numbers on a page, contours of the land, the direction of the wind or the chemical content of the soil. In the cutthroat oil business, he was a shrewd survivor and dogged as a bloodhound.

  So with his eyes blindfolded and lying in the back of the car, he began doing what he always did: he started collecting details. Before they’d jettisoned Jarrett, his kidnappers had been driving in an easterly direction. Before they taped his eyes shut, he could see the lights of a power plant near Harrah, Oklahoma, some twenty miles east of Oklahoma City. Now, though, they were driving in what clearly was a circuitous route designed to confuse him. They were heading south over backcountry roads that he knew well from his constant travels back and forth to the oil fields and country farms where he held leases. He knew if ever he were to catch these bastards—and he would catch them—he would need to lead a team back to the place of his hideout. To do that, he would need every clue he could collect.

  He was blind, but his other senses were working overtime, and everything was being logged in his memory bank.

  About an hour into the journey, Urschel recognized the distinctive smell of an oil field. It was either a small field or they were on the edge of a very large one because the odor was distinctive, but faint. Thirty minutes later, a similar scent returned. Again, either a small field or the edge of a very large one. In the middle of the night, the car stopped. Probably about 3:30 a.m., he calculated. He was pulled out of the car and into the brush, where he was forced to sit out of sight in the weeds. Chiggers attached themselves to his legs and arms and bugs feasted on his sweaty skin. The other abductor grabbed what he guessed was a gasoline can and headed off. He was back in about fifteen minutes, so they must have been just a short three- to five-minute walk to the gas station. They guided him back into the car and were off again.

  During the drive, one of his abductors kept referring to the other as “Floyd.”

  “Hey, Floyd, gimme a smoke.” Floyd this, Floyd that. Funny. They were obviously trying to make him believe he was being abducted by Oklahoma’s infamous Pretty Boy Floyd, as he was called by the newspapers. But the inferences were so painfully obvious that he concluded the one person who definitely was not in the driver’s seat was Pretty Boy Floyd.

  An hour later, they stopped to open a gate. Two or three minutes later they stopped and opened another, and then drove into a building that had the sound and smell of what must have been a garage or barn. They transferred the license plates to another car and put him into the backseat, which had been made up into a makeshift bunk where he could mercifully stretch out after being covered up. The car was obviously a lot bigger than the cramped Chevy sedan they’d been driving in. Probably a seven-passenger Caddy or Buick.

  After about three hours of driving, they stopped at a filling station and made small talk with the woman who was gassing up the tank.

  They asked about the heat, and what it was doing to the crops.

  “The crops around here are burned up,” she said. “Although we may make some broomcorn.”

  Broomcorn? That caught Urschel’s attention. Not much of that being grown around here. Most farmers were using what precious little water there was to grow food they could eat to survive. But broomcorn was hardy, and the way the damn dust was billowing through every nook and cranny, a good broom was getting to be as essential as a pickax and hoe.

  The abductors got back in the car and again drove off until the sun started rising. At no point, Urschel noted, had the car been driven on pavement. By midmorning, probably 9:00 or 10:00, it started to rain, much to the irritation of Urschel’s abductors, who managed to get the car stuck as the rain poured down, turning the parched earth into rivers of mud.

  The junior partner was then commanded to get out and push, a situation Urschel might have found almost comical were he not so hungry, tired and disoriented. Having extricated the car, the complaining mud- and rain-soaked assistant jumped back in and the journey resumed.

  Hours later, they pulled into a garage and turned off the engine.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Two-thirty,” was the reply. In Urschel’s world it was still pitch dark. He was desperately trying to keep track of time. He was left in the car in the stifling heat for hour after hour. At least, though, he was free to come out from under the covers, get out of the car and try to relax. He sat on a wooden box that sagged into what was unmistakably a couple of bags of golf clubs. What he would give to be strolling the fairways with his golf buddies, hacking balls into the rough and laughing about the sorry nature of their game. But that fantasy was a brief respite from his current state. The sun beat down on the garage and the temperature rose like a baking oven until it finally set in the late evening and the air cooled to a breathable level.

  At that point, they led him out of the garage and he felt the cooler air, though still in the upper eighties, on his face. They took him through a narrow gate, down a boardwalk and into a house. As he walked, he counted his steps. In a bedroom, he was told there were two beds. They sat him down on one. It felt more like an iron cot. They stuffed his ears with cotton and covered them with adhesive tape, as well. Unmistakably, this was a farmhouse. He could hear barnyard animals in the distance and began mentally cataloging their number and nature. There were horses, cows and several dogs with barks of different pitches. There were quail—lots of them—chickens, roosters. The usual assortment; nothing special or distinctive. They gave him a ham sandwich and a cup of black coffee in a china cup with no saucer. It was the first thing he’d eaten since they left Oklahoma City.

  The man who had been calling the shots on the kidnapping sat on the adjacent bed and delivered a colorful lecture.

  “If we thought you would ever see anything here, or ever tell anything when you go back, we would kill you now. That really is the safest way, but if we take your word and release you after the ransom money is paid, and you betray us by giving the federals any information, we will choose our own methods of punishing you,” he said.

  Urschel was listening intently through his muffled ears, aiming his blinded eyes at the sounds that were filtering through. It was an odd and measured voice. The man had the vocabulary of an educated man, tempered with a slight Southern accent. It was not like the forceful, ineloquent threat one would expect from the kind of lowlife who’d pluck a man from his backyard and haul him off into the night. The man then continued, his voice almost theatrical, and his language as grammatical as a Catholic prep-schooler.

  “I think the best method of punishment is the Chinese bandit system. They take a vi
ctim, strip him of his clothes and place him face downward on a board floor in some old shack where numerous wharf rats are extremely hungry. A hole is bored in the floor immediately under the victim’s belly, the hungry rats begin nibbling through the hole in the floor, and slowly but surely eat the lining of the belly and pull out the intestines. The process takes days and the victim has time to repent his error.”

  A very colorful rant. But a logical listener would conclude that no one fearing capture would go to those lengths, risking both the escape of his prey and relying on the unpredictable behavior of a bunch of small-brained rodents. Urschel fully understood his life was in danger, but he also realized the most likely way his days would end would be the result of a bullet in the head and a shallow grave in some nearby burned-out wheat field. In the end, what does it matter anyway? Dead is dead. He worried more about the fate of his wife and children, and there would be plenty of threats made to them, as well.

  Urschel remained on the cot for the rest of the night, but never slept. One of his captors was always in the second bed. Occasionally, he could hear the muffled voices of another man and a woman in some adjoining room. His world remained black and sounded sunken.

  The next day, the two men led him to a car, put him inside and drove slowly over a very rough road for about fifteen minutes to another house.

  “All right, let’s unload,” said one. They took him inside and made him lie on a bunch of blankets in the corner. He could hear the sounds of another man and woman in a different room.

  Later, they handcuffed him to a chair and he tried to sleep. In the morning he heard the sound of propellers overhead. A plane passing by, heading west. He remembered hearing one the previous afternoon, as well, heading in the opposite direction. This, too, went into his memory bank. The farm likely was in someone’s flight path. When the plane doubled back in the afternoon, the excited aviation buff knew he was on to something. If he could learn the approximate times of the flyovers, he would have an important clue to the location of the farm. But, not wanting to give away his intentions to his captors, he devised a bit of trickery to determine the times. He began counting off seconds and minutes in his head. When he thought sufficient time had passed, he innocently asked what time it was. To further cover his intentions, he would occasionally anticipate the arrival of the flyover and ask the time in advance and then begin counting off. It was a clever dodge that escaped the notice of his captors. Within a few days, he had the flights timed almost exactly. The morning plane crossed over the farm about 9:45. It returned in the afternoon at 5:45. On Sunday, it rained steadily. By late morning, Urschel realized the plane had not passed over. Nor did it come back in the afternoon. Of this he made a special note.