by Joe Urschel
In Memphis, Geraldine told the prosecutors, the Kellys started plotting to get the ransom money from Cass Coleman’s farm.
“Langford Ramsey and I were to take a car and go to Texas and get the money and some furs that Kathryn had left … get Kathryn’s clothes and necklace. Then they wanted me to come back … They said I was a good shield.
“When I got to Oklahoma City, I did not want to go back [to Memphis] and Mother did not want me to go back either.”
Hyde asked if Geraldine had seen the Kellys writing any letters.
“Lots of them,” she answered. “George and Kathryn both wrote letters and George put his fingerprints on them. I seen him put his fingerprints on them. I bought the stamps for the letters at the post office substation.”
Geraldine told Hyde that when they weren’t writing letters they were drinking and talking about killing people.
“George said he was going to kill Judge Vaught, Keenan, Urschel and [you].”
“What did he say about Urschel?” Hyde asked.
“George said they should have taken Urschel to Arizona and buried him. Kathryn said, ‘That’s what we ought to have done.’”
During cross-examination, Kathryn’s attorney, James Mathers, who looked every bit the legal scholar with his shock of tussled white hair, round owlish wire rims, three-piece suit and fine cigar wedged in his fingers, asked Geraldine if Kathryn had treated her well. She smiled, and answered, “Yes.”
“She bought me this dress and a coat in Chicago,” she said, brightening.
“Are you sure it was not in Cicero?” asked Mathers.
“No, we went to Cicero but it was in one of Bergl’s saloons in Chicago where we saw him,” she said definitively.
“Kathryn thanked him for what he had done for us and said something about the car and the money,” she added, to Mathers’s chagrin.
Once he got on the stand, the nervous Armon broke down and confessed to everything. When the prosecutor asked why he agreed to guard Urschel, he replied, “Kelly said if I didn’t, he would shoot me with a machine gun.”
After Armon caved, Ora and Boss did so, as well. They told the jury that they feared for their lives if they didn’t cooperate with Kelly and Bates. Ora wept on the stand, saying she was “forced into this thing with machine guns, the same as Mr. Urschel … I was afraid of George Kelly.”
Boss expressed similar fears, saying that if he didn’t help out Bates and Kelly they would have come back and killed him and his family. Boss claimed that if he hadn’t cooperated, “I would not be alive, my boy would not be alive, and maybe Mr. Urschel would not be alive today.
“The reason I didn’t phone no officers or the sheriff was for the simple reason I had a boy over there at this place, and if I phoned the officers, or if they had come over there, there would have been a battle and perhaps my boy would have been killed or perhaps Mr. Urschel would have been killed.”
Later, in his comments at the trial’s conclusion, Judge Vaught would scoff at this reasoning. “The threat of future injury is not enough. The evidence shows that the Shannons knew there was a kidnapped man at their home. If they knew he was kidnapped and they guarded him, then they would be just as guilty as if they had kidnapped him, transported him, and collected the ransom. Fear of individual punishment is no excuse for a violation of the law.”
Vaught wanted to put teeth in the new Lindbergh Law, and if he could do it with the gang that had abducted and ransomed his good friend Urschel, so much the better. He’d earlier let his feelings be known, when he described the new law as “absolutely revolutionary.”
“Congress passed it for one reason only—to try to stop kidnapping,” he said. “A kidnapper is more than a murderer and is so recognized over the country. No more vicious character in this country exists than one who kidnaps a man and holds him for ransom.”
In his concluding argument, prosecutor Keenan took a similar tack. “If this government cannot protect its citizens, then we had better, frankly, turn it over to the Kellys and the Bateses, the Baileys and the others of the underworld and pay tribute to them through taxes.
“Kidnapping has become a modern art. The plotters lay their vicious plans, bold strong-armed men carry out the abduction, hirelings stand guard and later when the ransom has been paid, the money changers arrange for its dissemination through underworld channels. In this case, the government has shown you the whole picture of how this heinous scheme was conceived and carried out.”
In their closing arguments, Keenan and Hyde lowered the hammer, Keenan telling the jury they would decide whether “we are to have a government of law and order, or abdicate in favor of machine-gun gangsters.”
Neatly through his statements, he detailed the need for a strong national government and a federal police force to protect its citizens when the states, and their local forces, could not:
“Through four states of the Union these criminals plied their trade and defied the government. A single state could not control such swift operations. The federal government was forced to step in and take a hand. Now that government has been defied by these gangsters and we have caught them red-handed. We are convinced that they are all guilty of this conspiracy and demand that a verdict of guilty be returned.”
Hyde reminded the jury that the kidnappers had put Urschel through “the tortures of hell.”
“I beg of you, in the name of my government, to return a verdict of guilty against these defendants. This is one of the most important cases ever tried. Precedents are being set that will guide the courts and the bar in all future trials that grow out of this determined effort of your government to stamp out this most damnable of crimes—kidnapping!”
Even Bates was impressed with Hyde’s summation. When Hyde, dripping with sweat, walked by to return to his seat, Bates congratulated him. “That’s the best I’ve heard,” said the veteran bank robber mockingly.
Hyde grinned and shook Bates’s hand.
The trial ended and the jurors, who had been sequestered for the trial, broke for dinner and began their deliberations. Within an hour, and with just one round of voting, they had reached their verdict. But it would have to wait until the morning.
* * *
George and Kathryn Kelly were taken to the courthouse the next morning. Judge Vaught was expecting pleas of guilty from both, which would have buttoned things up nicely with the conclusion of the trial of the other defendants and the sentencing ready to be handed down.
However, the Kellys ruined everybody’s morning when they both pleaded not guilty. The headstrong Kathryn remained convinced she could use her charms and acting skills to persuade the jury that she had been dragged against her will into the kidnapping by her threatening husband. George had no such illusions, and he knew if he took the stand that Hyde and Keenan would grill him about Bates, Bailey and others, and there was no way he would testify against or about his compatriots. So he told Mathers he would sit it out and watch the proceedings from his box seat. He would not take the stand and be bullied and insulted by the federal stooges who were running this three-ring circus, he said.
Vaught was not happy. Now there would need to be another trial for the Kellys, the marquee players in this courtroom battle. He shunted them aside and made them wait as he read the verdicts and sentences for the other defendants.
With Bailey, Bates and the Shannons standing shoulder to shoulder in the courtroom (the statuesque Bailey towering above the rest in his handsome double-breasted suit, slicked-back, wavy hair and chiseled features), Vaught read the verdict.
“The jury has returned a verdict of guilty. The court is of the opinion that this verdict is fully sustained by the evidence.”
But before launching into the sentencing, he teased the audience with an assessment of the enormity of the case.
“Something more is at stake than the mere punishment for the crime that has been committed in this case. The question before the American people today is whether or not crime will be recognize
d as an occupation or a profession. Or whether the people will enforce the laws of the nation as they are written. So far as this court is concerned, it is its purpose to try to enforce the laws as they are written.”
He then sentenced Bates, Bailey and Boss and Ora Shannon to life in prison. Armon got a ten-year sentence.
The hammer had fallen, and Kathryn was crestfallen and shocked. Her mother had just been sentenced to life in prison for a crime she had no part in. Bailey also had taken the fall for something he didn’t do.
Hyde and Keenan gloated to the press that the government now had the upper hand in the fight against kidnapping and was ready to “shoot the works.”
So now they would have to have another trial with another jury for the two principals in the case, George and Kathryn Kelly. But this was going to be a pummeling. The same evidence that had just been presented to incarcerate the hangers-on in the case was simply going to be resurrected to convict the principals. It was the ultimate anticlimax, and the only one who thought the outcome might be different was the delusional Kathryn.
At this point, Kelly knew he was cooked and didn’t care. He could have a trial and a conviction, or he could plead guilty. If Kathryn thought she had a shot, there was no loss in playing along. He was going to prison either way, and he’d been there before. He knew the prison system and how it worked. He could live comfortably on the inside, and when the time was right, he could get out.
* * *
On October 9, the second trial began. Two days earlier, Judge Vaught had received another threat in a letter that read, “If you do not dismiss these people, you and your family will be killed and your house will be blown up.”
From his jail cell in Oklahoma City, Kelly tried to get a message out to the rest of his gang, pleading with them to kidnap Hyde’s four-year-old son. “Snatch the child of this prosecutor to calm him down,” wrote Kelly.
The message, of course, was intercepted, and Hyde’s wife and son were placed under protective custody for the duration of the trial.
George fully intended to take the rap for everything and let Kathryn try to plead and lie her way out of it by sticking to her story alleging that he had forced her to cooperate.
But Hoover was convinced that Kathryn was not only a willing participant, but the actual brains behind the operation. He wanted her brought down with equal force.
The press, however, was smitten with the comely gangster moll. Kathryn gave a jailhouse interview to Jack Stinnett of The Daily Oklahoman that the paper bannered across their front page with a tight glamor shot of the gangster couple dressed to the nines and looking more amused than concerned about their impending trial.
Kathryn made for great copy, and Stinnett didn’t let his exclusive go to waste.
Quick-witted as a lynx, sharp-tongued as a vixen when aroused, Kathryn Thorne Kelly, wife of the notorious gunman George “Machine Gun” Kelly [,] hides behind the most disarming smile imaginable and literally talks with her light blue eyes. Sitting on a bunk in the heavily guarded county jail, coarse blankets wrapped around her, Kathryn Sunday night good-naturedly discussed her plight, talked with some heat about the “injustice done her mother,” and dismissed questions she did not wish to answer with “That’ll all come out at the trial.”
“I’m not worried about myself, I never have been. It is only mother. She had nothing whatever to do with this. A wife certainly has a right to stay around her home and tend to her own business and that is all she did.
“It is Kelly’s fault that mother and dad got mixed up in this. They are the best people you ever saw. I don’t know how that little community down in Wise County is going to get along without them.”
He described her eyes, which:
… fairly snap. Little wrinkles run away from the corners of them and her mouth, which, under the pressure of anger presses into a cold hard line, curves upward at the corners. Anger flashed across her face when she mentioned that her daughter had been called to testify against her in the kidnapping case.
“They just think I’ll break down if they put her on the stand. I’d plead guilty in a minute if I could keep her out of the courtroom,” she said.
Kathryn complained to Stinnett about the lousy food she was getting and said she’d prefer that it be sent in from the outside. Twice during the interview she bummed a cigarette from Stinnett, which he said she “smoked slowly, deliberately, belying any hint of nervousness … in contrast to her action upon her arrival here from Memphis, when she lighted one cigarette off another.”
On the opening day of the trial, Kelly walked into the courtroom and glared at Urschel, who was sitting behind the prosecutors, legs crossed and relaxed.
Kelly ran his fingers across his throat and said, “This is for you. You’ll get yours!”
The guards snapped to attention and the crowd gasped, but Urschel didn’t flinch, returning Kelly’s glare without any display of emotion.
Jones and his team looked on in anger, wondering what else they could do to rein in the recalcitrant Kelly. The bloated alcoholic had been living on a diet of bread and water since his arrest and there wasn’t much else they could do to make his prison conditions less accommodating.
On her way into the courtroom, the heavily guarded Kathryn paused and walked toward her father, who’d come to the trial. She was intending to give him a kiss.
An agent roughly shoved her back and she stumbled. After regaining her balance, the indignant Kathryn slapped the agent. George, though shackled and cuffed, rushed forward to go to Kathryn’s aid. As he did, an agent clubbed him on the back of the head with the butt of his gun and proceeded to pistol-whip him vigorously.
Kathryn defiantly explained to the courtroom that she had “stopped to kiss my father and the agent hit me in the back. When George told him not to hit me again, he began beating George with his pistol. Sure I slapped him, and I’d like to do it again.”
For the rest of the morning, Kelly sat wordlessly in court dabbing the blood from his swollen face and head with a handkerchief as Kathryn and her attorneys tried to lay the blame for the kidnapping squarely on his shoulders.
The Urschels and the Jarretts positively identified Kelly as one of the men that had kidnapped them. Then the prosecutors went to work tying Kathryn to it.
First, they put the loquacious Geraldine Arnold on the stand, and she explained again how Kathryn and George were constantly writing letters and threatening to kill people.
“Whom did he say they were going to kill? What did Kathryn say about it?”
“Well, she said that—I don’t remember what she said about it.”
“Whom did he say he was going to kill?”
“Judge Vaught, Keenan, Urschel and Hyde.”
“Was Kathryn there when he said that?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then the prosecutors put Luther Arnold, who had agreed to testify in return for leniency, on the stand.
“Did you hear any conversations between George and his wife about the Urschel kidnapping matter?”
“No, I never heard any details of it at all, any more than I heard George remark that ‘If I had that to do over again, I would stick his head in a barrel of lime,’ or something like that. He said they should have took him out in Arizona and buried him—killed him and buried him,” Arnold replied.
“Who said that?”
“George.”
“What did Kathryn say when he said that?”
“She said, ‘That is what we ought to have done.’”
Then it was Flossie Mae Arnold’s turn. She claimed that Kathryn said she ought to “kill the son of a bitch, is what she said she ought to do to him.”
“When this statement was made, that she ought to kill him, did she mention anybody’s name?”
“Only one … Mr. Urschel,” said Flossie Mae.
“What did she say?”
“She said she would like to kill the son of a bitch herself, referring to Mr. Urschel.”
“Did
she use Mr. Urschel’s name?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who was present at the time?”
“Her husband, Mr. Kelly.”
Flossie Mae told Hyde that she began cooperating with the Bureau’s agents because she wanted to get her “baby” back from the Kellys.
On cross-examination, Mathers asked, “When you were in Oklahoma City and talked to Mr. Roberts [John V.], after he was employed as attorney for Mrs. Kelly by your husband, did you say that you would trust your baby anywhere with Mrs. Kelly?”
“No.”
“Did Roberts suggest you ought to get your baby back?”
“No.”
“Did you ever hear the Kellys talk about surrendering?”
“No.”
Then agent Rorer, the Bureau’s agent from Birmingham who led the raid that captured the Kellys in Memphis, took the stand.
He recounted a string of important details he had gleaned from George Kelly after his arrest.
“Kelly told me that while he was living in Fort Worth, he and Bates and two other men who were wanted for robbing a Colfax, Washington, bank, discussed kidnapping ‘Frank P. Johnson of the First National Bank and Trust in Oklahoma City.’”
Somehow, the authorities had gotten wind of it and a warrant for the two was received. Rorer said a Fort Worth officer “tipped off” Kelly about it, and they backed off. Kelly paid him $500 for the information.”
Rorer said Kelly told him of other men they considered snatching: John A. Brown, department store owner and M. K. Goetz, a St. Joseph, Missouri, brewer.
“He said the reason they did not pick any of these men was because they felt they would have trouble raising a considerable amount of money immediately,” Rorer testified.
“Kelly said he and Bates came to Oklahoma City July 1 and registered at the Huckins hotel. On July 6 they moved to the Biltmore and cruised the vicinity of the Urschel residence.
“He said on July 14 they went to the home of an ‘old thief’ about 150 miles from Oklahoma City and made arrangements for the kidnapped man to be taken there. At the time it was said Wilbur Underhill, Ed Davis, Jim Clark, Harvey Bailey and Bob Brady, all notorious desperadoes, were at the home of the thief. He refused to give the name of the man harboring them,” Rorer said.