The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  Keenan asked if he had said the name of the man was Boss Shannon, but Rorer said he never mentioned the name.

  “Returning to Oklahoma City, Kelly said he and Bates cruised around the Urschel residence the nights of July 18, 19, 20 and 21,” Rorer stated.

  “The night of July 22 they saw him playing bridge but were prevented from entering the home earlier than 11:15 p.m. because there were so many cars passing and because a couple of cars had come to and left the house.

  “Kelly said the screen door was unlocked. After getting Urschel and Walter R. Jarrett—later letting Jarrett out—they went to the home of the old thief, but relatives were there and they couldn’t stay.

  “They then went to Coleman, where Mrs. Coleman cussed them out and they left for Paradise, Texas, for the Shannon farm.

  “The elder Shannon made them go to Armon’s house, where Kelly and Armon guarded Urschel while Bates went north to make arrangements about the ransom money.

  “After they collected the ransom money from Kirkpatrick in Kansas City, divided it equally and released Urschel near Norman, Bates and Kelly agreed to meet up later in Minneapolis–St. Paul,” stated Rorer.

  Kelly then went back to Paradise to get Kathryn.

  “He told Kathryn to leave with him immediately, but she argued she ought to have some new clothes and wanted to go into Fort Worth to buy them,” Rorer said.

  “Kelly said he went to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he saw Bates, then to St. Paul and on to Memphis.

  “He said he passed $2,000 of the money in the north and gave $7,000 ransom money to a man to pass for them in a liquor deal, with his payment to be 20 percent for passing the money.

  “Going to Cleveland, Kelly made a $1,000 deposit in good money on a Cadillac automobile for his wife. He said he read in the newspapers about some of the ransom money being traced to Minneapolis, and tried to call his friend there to determine what had happened, but was unable to get him,” he said.

  According to Rorer, the Kellys were in Des Moines, Iowa, when they read newspaper accounts of the raid in Paradise and the arrests of the Shannons and Bailey. Kathryn insisted they return to Oklahoma to help her mother.

  “Kelly returned to Oklahoma City and later went to south Texas where he bought an automobile in which he later went to New Orleans and then Biloxi, Mississippi,” Rorer testified.

  “He said he returned to the Cass Coleman farm at Coleman, Texas, to pick up his wife … and took her and the Arnold girl from San Antonio with him. He said Kathryn was wearing a red wig.

  “Kelly left an automobile in St. Louis, Missouri, and proceeded in another car to Chicago. He said he telephoned Gus Winkler [one of Capone’s lieutenants] and also saw Verne Miller, another desperado.

  “Winkler told Kelly not to come near him … wouldn’t be seen with him for $10,000. Kelly said they returned to St. Louis where he borrowed money to employ lawyers to defend the Shannons,” said Rorer.

  Then one of the Bureau’s agents who had questioned Kelly in Memphis after his arrest testified that Kelly had told him that he had contracted with his friend, Verne Miller, to kill Urschel if he was unable to do it himself.

  On the stand, Ralph Colvin, of the Bureau’s Oklahoma City office, testified that Kathryn told him that Urschel had filed suit to seize her jewelry, which had been found in a Fort Worth safe-deposit box.

  “She wanted me to ask Mr. Urschel to come and see her. She said she couldn’t afford to lose that jewelry because it was all she had left to provide for her daughter, Pauline, and she thought Mr. Urschel was a heartless man to try to do that,” Colvin testified. “And she went on to remark that if he won the suit, it would not do him much good because he wouldn’t have long to live anyway and that was about the extent of the conversation … She said this jewelry was not bought with the ransom money, that she had bought that long before.”

  “But did she say that Mr. Urschel did not have long to live?”

  “Yes,” Colvin said.

  “How did she say she knew that to be the fact?”

  “She said she knew some of George’s associates would get him.”

  Next, the prosecutors put on the stand a series of Kathryn’s relatives, who would prove not only how unpopular she was with her own family, but provide damning testimony, as well.

  Her eighteen-year-old cousin, Gay Coleman, grandson of Mary Coleman, whose house Kelly and Bates had stopped at en route with Urschel to Paradise, testified that Kelly had told him in July that there would soon be a kidnapping in Oklahoma City. To that, according to Coleman, Kathryn had quickly added, “We’re going to be in the big money before long.”

  Then Kathryn’s stepsister, Ruth Shannon, recounted how Kathryn had dragged her, Armon’s wife and Kathryn’s daughter, Pauline, who was being raised by the Shannons, off to her house in Fort Worth, where they were required to reside for a ten-day “vacation.” These, of course, were the very same ten days that Urschel was being held at their farm.

  Then Mary Coleman, Kathryn’s grandmother, entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. She corroborated her grandson’s testimony and added that Kelly and Bates had stopped at her farm the night of Urschel’s abduction and transferred him from one car to another.

  Even Kathryn recognized the damning nature of the testimony. As her grandmother condemned her from the witness stand, she sat next to George at the defense table and wiped tears from her eyes. During the morning’s recess she ordered her lawyer to tell the judge she’d be willing to change her plea to guilty in exchange for her mother’s freedom.

  But Judge Vaught scoffed at the offer and lambasted the attorney for even bringing it to him.

  Chastened but unbowed, Kathryn collected herself and prepared to take the stand and testify in her own defense. It was the moment the court, the cameras and the press were waiting for, and Kathryn did not disappoint.

  She approached the stand with the grace and poise of a Broadway star entering the stage. She sat down, crossed her legs, smiled at the jurors, recognized the judge with a demure glance and played to the exploding flashbulbs from the press pool and the newsreel cameras that were fixated on her every move.

  The reporters took special note of her attire. One wrote that she wore a “smart black dress and hat.” Another was more detailed: “She was smartly attired in a black skirt and a black satin waist, with a black bow at the neck. She wore a small black hat, black pumps and sheer stockings. A murmur of comment went up from the many women in the crowded courtroom.”

  Alternately wiping tears from her eyes with her dainty handkerchief and twisting it as she spoke, she told the jury about her domineering husband, who had forced her into the kidnapping, and how she knew nothing about it or any of the other crimes George had participated in.

  “He always told me not to mess in his business in any way, and I didn’t.”

  The prosecutors pressed her.

  “What did you ask Kelly about the kidnapping?”

  “He told me it was none of my business, that they had a man at Armon’s house. I told them if they did I’d tell the officers, even if he killed me. I begged him to release him. I said he would get my folks into trouble … He threatened me. He said it was none of my business,” she testified.

  “Did he say anything about what he intended to do with the kidnapped man?”

  “He said he was going to kill him.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I begged him not to. Asked him to please release him.”

  Keenan continued to tear into her story on cross-examination. As he did, her act began to come apart. Her demure countenance, according to E. E. Kirkpatrick, who was sitting next to Urschel during the trial, “changed to one of a cornered tigress … The sweet girlish smile changed to a fiendish snarl. If she had held any hope in her heart when she took the witness stand, it had completely vanished when she left it.”

  Kathryn claimed that her removal of the children from Paradise was only coincidental. She said her taking ice to Armo
n’s house, where Urschel was held, was not part of a plot to make the kidnappers comfortable, but a ruse on her part to talk to Kelly.

  Keenan had a field day with this.

  “You say your husband likes ice?… And when you wanted to talk to him about something you would go to him with a chunk of ice in your hand?”

  He asked Kathryn if she still loved her husband.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still trust him?”

  “No.”

  Kathryn’s attorney jumped from his seat with objections like a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box, only to be overruled constantly by a simmering Judge Vaught.

  Keenan asked how much money the Kellys had in a lockbox in the Fort Worth bank when she first went there from Stratford, Oklahoma. He tried to elicit from her the information that she knew the money was stolen from a bank, but she denied it.

  “How were you going to get any more money?” Keenan asked.

  “From my husband who was going to get in touch with me,” she replied.

  “Where did you get the diamond wristwatch for which you expect to file suit to recover?”

  “From my husband, I don’t know where he got it.”

  “You were on good terms with your mother and stepfather at this time?”

  “Yes,” Kathryn asserted.

  “Then why didn’t you tell them you thought George Kelly had a kidnapped man with him?”

  “He asked me not to tell anybody.”

  “You loved your husband at this time?”

  “Yes.”

  Mathers was apoplectic. He was continually jumping in and objecting in an effort to get Keenan to stop badgering the witness. But Vaught did not intervene.

  “Were you at the Shannon farm Tuesday night?”

  “No.”

  “Then if your mother said you were—in the previous trial—she was mistaken.”

  “I believe so,” Kathryn said.

  “When you left Stratford, where did you go?”

  “Straight to Paradise.”

  “Did you ask Mr. Shannon’s advice about the kidnapping?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “George said he would kill me if I mentioned it.”

  “How long were you at Paradise before you went on in to Fort Worth with the girls?”

  “About thirty minutes,” Kathryn replied.

  “Did you read about the Urschel kidnapping?”

  “Yes, and I was worried to death.”

  “After you got back to Fort Worth you were so worried about it you went to the cabaret?”

  “No! To the lake.”

  “At this time you say you were unaware Urschel was at Paradise.”

  “That’s right.”

  “When you went back to the farm did Mrs. Shannon say George Kelly and [Albert] Bates had a drunk man there?”

  “No.”

  “Did you read her testimony about this case?”

  “I don’t care what she said, I am telling the truth,” asserted Kathryn.

  “When did you first talk to your folks about the Urschel kidnapping?”

  “When I went back to the farm, Mr. Shannon said George Kelly had a drunk man there.”

  “Why did he skip telling you an important fact like Kelly’s having a machine gun on the man and that he was blindfolded?”

  Kathryn claimed he didn’t tell her about that.

  “If Mr. Shannon said at the previous trial that he didn’t know there was a kidnapped man at Armon’s house until you told him Wednesday, would you say he was telling an untruth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if your mother, whom you dearly love, said the same thing, she also was telling an untruth.”

  “Yes,” replied Kathryn.

  Keenan then began peppering Kathryn with questions he hoped would prove she’d been to Armon’s shack and had discussed the kidnapping with Kelly while he was there.

  “And didn’t you take newspapers to him so he could find out how the case was proceeding?”

  “No.”

  Roberts raised an objection to Keenan’s asking questions so rapidly that the witness did not have time to answer but, again, he was overruled by Judge Vaught.

  “What did you ask Kelly about the kidnapping?” Keenan asked.

  “He told me it was none of my business that they had a man at Armon’s house. I told him if they did, I’d tell the officers even if he killed me.” She said she was in tears during the conversation.

  “Was there any crying when you learned Urschel had paid $200,000 for his release, or when you sent $1,500 to your parents or when you paid some money on a new Cadillac automobile?”

  “No,” Kathryn responded.

  “Now, when you were at the Shannon farm during the absence of Bates and Kelly you had a fast car and could have left at any time, couldn’t you?” asked Keenan.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you talk to Harvey Bailey much?”

  “No.”

  “Did you talk to him about machine guns, or anything like that?”

  “Oh, no sir,” Kathryn stressed.

  “Didn’t you know your mother was harboring a desperate criminal and why didn’t you tell her?”

  “George had told me not to mix in his business.”

  Kathryn testified that she drove to Norman, Oklahoma, to pick up Kelly, who had been driven there. She described the trip they made north and said they stopped overnight in Omaha, Nebraska, and Mason City, Iowa.

  “Surely you knew you were wanted by the officers,” Keenan interrupted.

  “I didn’t know it then,” she replied.

  Kathryn said she and Kelly registered as Mr. and Mrs. R. G. Shannon in Cleveland, but insisted they were not fleeing.

  “But Mrs. Kelly, you could have surrendered at any time, couldn’t you?”

  “But I didn’t know I was wanted,” she kept insisting.

  “When you took Geraldine to Chicago, you knew that you were wanted by police, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I knew it then.”

  “Now, Geraldine is a sweet little girl, isn’t she?”

  “Awfully sweet,” Kathryn said, smiling.

  “Yet you were herding this girl around with a dangerous murdering scoundrel?”

  Roberts objected to Keenan’s language.

  Keenan said it was hard to use dignified language with a man like Kelly and withdrew the question.

  Keenan then turned his attention to the Michigan Tavern in Chicago.

  “Did you not know this was a gathering place for some of the worst criminals in the country? A place where they would gather to plan their illegal activities. Drink their illegal liquor. If you were so fond of Geraldine, why would you drag her to one of the most notorious saloons in the city?” he asked.

  “It was not a saloon. It was just a place where they served sandwiches and beer. George introduced me to the man as Mr. Edwards. I did not know anyone named Bergl,” said Kathryn.

  Pointing his finger at George Kelly, Keenan asked, “Would you turn your daughter, Pauline Frye, over to that man Kelly?”

  “I love George very much, he has been good to me,” Kathryn said. Keenan ignored this answer and asked his question again.

  “Would you turn your daughter over to that man?”

  “No, I—”

  Keenan jumped in and interrupted her.

  “You would take this little Geraldine Arnold, of tenderer years than your own daughter, along with this rascal?”

  “He made us go. We did not know we were going to Chicago,” Kathryn cried.

  Roberts then cross-examined Kathryn, and then called her elderly father, J. E. Brooks, to the stand. He had been living in Kathryn’s Fort Worth home at the time of the kidnapping.

  “Did you ever tell Mrs. Arnold this kidnapping was planned three months before it was done?”

  “I certainly did not,” he replied.

  “How much of that week Mr. Urschel was kidnapped was Kathryn at her home in Fort Worth?�
� Roberts asked.

  “Well, practically all week. She was home every night.” With that, Roberts rested.

  The coverage in the press was as prejudicial as the courtroom theatrics.

  In the midst of the trial, The Daily Oklahoman reported:

  Keenan, who acquitted himself so brilliantly in the other trial with his subtle and mockingly sympathetic cross-examination of the Shannons, methodically frayed Kathryn’s nerves and destroyed her poise as he carried her through her early life.

  He wanted to leave her stumbling and frightened, stripped of her smiling calm when he reached the vital testimony of the actual kidnapping. He succeeded.

  When she stumbled thankfully from the witness chair at a brief court recess, the last vestige of her flashing smile was gone and her eyes had a haunted look. But the respite was brief and when the recess ended the special prosecutor soon placed her again on a worried defensive.

  A lurid and sordid past life that wouldn’t stand close examination ruined the confidence she possessed when she seated herself in the witness chair and turned her appealing half-smile on the jury. Her past life came out, stark and unlovely under the skillful questioning of Keenan.

  It was the story of a girl, married first at 15 years old and a mother within a few months who was carried by a passionate yearning for luxury and a lawless nature to husband after husband … until she ended as the wife of a “big shot” George Kelly, who matched her criminal temperament and gratified her desire for clothes and jewelry with a free hand.

  Her confident voice replaced by a plaintive whisper, Kathryn told of her first marriage while a country schoolgirl to J. C. Frye, and the baby who would come within a few months. The baby, now Pauline Frye, sat in a front row seat watching her mother with [an] uncomprehending face.

  Frye was divorced. Then came Allie Brewer, of whom she remembered little. He too soon passed out of the picture, followed by Charles. F. Thorne, a Texas man with a small fortune.

  “He died a violent death, didn’t he?”demanded the merciless Keenan.

  “He committed suicide,” she answered in a defiant, almost inaudible voice.