The Year of Fear

by Joe Urschel

  That was seven years ago. That was when longed-for luxuries came—from the estate of Thorne. She bought a house in Fort Worth, paid $12,000 for it. She bought an eight-cylinder Cadillac and she bought jewelry worth $3,500. And she started living the way she wanted to.

  There had been slim days before, though. She worked as a manicurist in Oklahoma City, was tried for robbery and convicted. It was reversed. The story was dragged from her piecemeal and when she finally spoke the admission, she snarled at Keenan as only a mad woman, “Is that all?”

  “Answer the questions that are asked you and eliminate any comments,” Judge Vaught told her sternly. She looked at Vaught, the light of battle still in her eyes, then dropped her head.

  Keenan hammered on. He made her the “girl friend” of bootleggers and small-time hijackers, always leaving them for bigger criminals. Always moving toward the “big time.”

  She met Kelly seven years ago in San Antonio. Three years ago, after a six-month correspondence during which Kelly asked her to marry him, they were married in Minneapolis.

  “He deceived me,” she cried. “I didn’t know he made his money dishonestly.”

  Cleverly Keenan led her into a trap until, startled, she found herself admitting that she knew Kelly was in Leavenworth penitentiary during the six months that they wrote letters to each other.

  “So long as you got pretty clothes and a nice place to live in and good food, you weren’t particular how your man made his money, were you?” Keenan asked.

  “I thought he would sell whisky but I didn’t know he would kidnap anybody,” she answered.

  Then Roberts turned her testimony to the backwoods Coleman farm owned by Kathryn’s grandfather, near Stratford, Oklahoma.

  “Just what happened; you were there?” Roberts asked.

  “Yes. Well, about 4:30 o’clock on that morning [Sunday, July 23, a day following the Urschel kidnapping] someone flashed a flashlight in my face and told me to get up. I noticed a car in the backyard.

  “My grandma then was getting up and she asked me what was going on. I said I didn’t know but I’d find out. I met George on the porch … We had quite a little argument.”

  As she told of their “fuss,” she smiled coyly at the jurors and the crowd.

  “My grandmother said if they didn’t leave, she would scream. They left only a few moments later. I didn’t see anyone else there … I think someone else was there, though.”

  “Did you see the kidnapped man?” Roberts asked.

  “Oh, no sir.”

  “After they left with the kidnapped man what did you do?”

  “I went to Fort Worth.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “Well, I had wanted to go for some time, but my husband wouldn’t let me. He told me I could go,” Kathryn replied.

  “Where did you go first?”

  “I went to my mother’s, Mrs. R. G. Shannon.”

  “When did you get there?”

  “About 11:30 or 11 o’clock in the morning. I went down to get the kiddies and take them to Fort Worth with me. I took them and Oleta and her baby.” (It was then, the government charges, that she was “clearing the scene” for the arrival of Urschel later in the day.)

  She continued to Fort Worth, arriving early in the afternoon, and went to her house, where her father was staying, she said.

  “Now Thursday. What did you do Thursday?”

  “Well it was either Thursday or Friday. I think it was Thursday. I drove up to my mother’s [in the afternoon].”

  “What did you do? Whom did you see?”

  “Well, I went into the house and said hello to my mother like I always do. Mother looked very worried and so did my stepfather, Mr. Shannon. There was another man there, Mr. Bailey. I knew him as Mr. Brennan.

  “I talked with Mr. Bailey—about trivial things—and then I got my mother away from him and talked to her. She was almost crying and told me about what had been happening. I talked to my stepfather and he told me the same thing. I told them I’d stay over and find out what was going on.… at dark I went over to Armon’s place and then I found out.

  “I talked to Kelly there by the house. I had taken him some ice water and he told me what was going on. He came down to the barn and talked to me. He said they had a kidnapped man there,” Kathryn said. “I begged him to please release him. I said he would get my folks into trouble.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said for me to go back in the house. He threatened me. He said it was none of my business.”

  “Did he say 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. Then went back in the house.”

  Roberts questioned her about the days and dates of her flight, but she feigned confusion.

  “I had just so much on my mind, I don’t remember those exact things,” she admitted. “I left with George for Minneapolis, then.”

  They went first to St. Paul and Minneapolis, she testified, and from there to Des Moines, Chicago and to other cities before their return to the Coleman farm.

  “Did you see any money there?” Roberts asked.

  “No sir. I did see some money in Minneapolis, though. I had been out shopping. I had to shop because I didn’t have much when I went up there and when I came in George had some money, a lot of money out on the bed. He asked me if I’d ever seen $100,000 before. I don’t know what money it was,” Kathryn testified.

  “Did you see George and your uncle bury the money?” asked Roberts.

  “They were gone a long time but I didn’t know where they went.”

  “How long did you stay at your uncle’s?”

  “Overnight. Then I went to Dallas. I stayed there two days and talked to some attorneys.”

  Kathryn’s smile flashed continually as she talked, swinging in the chair to address first the judge and then the jury. The jurors watched her attentively.

  “I didn’t see George until two weeks later. I met him at my uncle’s after I had been to San Antonio.”

  In the interval, she said, she had picked up the Arnolds near Waco and had arranged for Luther to act as her contact man.

  Finding her husband at Coleman’s, she went with him back to San Antonio, where she had an apartment rented.

  “George said he was going to Chicago. He asked me to drive him to Coleman’s. I took Geraldine with me and told her mother we would be back later in the day.”

  “Did you come back?”

  “No. When we got near the Colemans’ we found there was some laws there so George made me and Geraldine go on to Chicago with him.”

  “Did the Arnolds consent for the little girl to go with you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Kathryn said emphatically. “We rented an apartment and stayed there five or six days.”

  “Were you in contact with anyone in Oklahoma City?”

  “Yes, I wrote twice to Geraldine’s mother.”

  Then she said they continued with Geraldine to Memphis, where they were arrested.

  “When you were in Chicago, I’ll ask you if you ever wrote any letter to anyone besides Geraldine’s mother.”

  “Yes … Mr. Keenan.”

  At this point Roberts stopped.

  “The defense at this time asks that Mr. Keenan produce the letter in order that the handwriting may be compared to the other letters,” he said.

  Hyde objected, and Judge Vaught sustained the objection, saying there were other samples of handwriting in evidence.

  Roberts handed Kathryn a letter and asked her if she’d written it.

  “Yes, I wrote this to Geraldine’s mother,” she said.

  Roberts handed her Government Exhibit No. 8, a letter written threatening the life of Urschel.

  “Did you write that?”

  “I did not!” she snapped.

  “Have you ever threatened anyone since t
his case or those cases have opened?”

  “I have not!”

  “Have the officials ever done anything to you to make you want to deprive them of their lives?”

  “No!”

  “Take the witness,” said Roberts.

  In a mocking, sarcastic voice, Keenan then dragged Kathryn through the history of her short life, starting with her shotgun wedding while still in high school, her two divorces and the mysterious death of her third husband, Charles Thorne, the criminal partner of George Kelly, her fourth husband.

  “Have you ever been arrested and convicted of any offense?” he asked.

  “Objection!” yelled Mathers.

  “Answer the question,” ordered Vaught.

  Kathryn hung her head meekly. “I have never been to the penitentiary.”

  “That is not what I asked you. You have not been to the penitentiary yet. Will you answer the question. Have you been arrested and convicted of robbery?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how much was your sentence?”

  “Five years. But I appealed and the case was reversed and thrown out.”

  Keenan squawked, and the judge cautioned her not to elaborate on her answers.

  “Where was that?”

  “Here in Oklahoma City,” answered Kathryn.

  “And how long ago was that?”

  “About seven or eight years,” she answered.

  “Under what name?”

  “Cleo, Mrs. Drewer, and Mrs. J. E. Barnett and Berniel.”

  The government then called a handwriting expert, who testified that, without doubt, it was Kathryn’s handwriting on the threatening letters that had been sent to Urschel.

  Then, perhaps the most exquisite evidence of her involvement was established—the fact that it was she who purchased Kelly’s infamous machine gun.

  Keenan showed records tracing it from Birmingham, Alabama, to New Orleans and from New Orleans to Fort Worth. He then produced the pawnbroker, J. Klar, who testified he sold it to Kathryn in late February 1933.

  Hyde knew that Hoover was convinced Kathryn was the brains behind the kidnapping and emphatically wanted her to go down with the full sentence of life in prison, and that Cummings felt likewise. Hyde knew how to please the boss, and in his final argument he twisted the knife just a little more:

  “How can you believe that this was the demure, loving and fearful wife she pretends to be after hearing that she roamed the country like a millionaire’s daughter or wife, buying machine guns? This sweet-smelling geranium. Do you think she schemed with George and others under threats? I tell you she was the arch-conspirator,” he said, addressing the jury.

  Young Pauline squirmed in her seat as her mother was demonized by the prosecution.

  Hyde would sarcastically refer to “sweet little Kathryn” and “little George” as he painted Kathryn as a woman who drove her husband to commit crimes so that he could supply her with the luxuries she demanded.

  He painted a picture, based on scant evidence, that when Kelly drove Urschel to Norman, Oklahoma, where he was released, Kathryn was right behind him in their treasured Cadillac to pick up her husband and flee the scene.

  He pointed out how they had changed license plates in Stratford, Oklahoma, at the Colemans’, as they fled to Texas.

  “Oh, they didn’t intend to stay at the Colemans’,” Hyde declared.

  As the fifteen-year-old Pauline looked on in dismay, her mother was depicted as an evil seductress and acquisitive manipulator who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted.

  “This woman’s whole life has been one of deceit. Do you think she would hesitate for a moment to try to deceive this jury? Her liberty is at stake,” Hyde said.

  Keenan asked the jury to consider the type of woman Kathryn had been.

  “She knew her husband was an outlaw, a human wolf who slept by day and prowled by night. This woman masqueraded under her own mother’s name. She deserted her daughter and all other members of her family. Did she do all this because she was afraid of her husband?” asked Keenan.

  “Kathryn did her part in the Urschel kidnapping when she cleared all the children away from the Shannon farm. The testimony shows that afterward she and Kelly were hundreds of miles apart … that he was down in Mississippi. Was she afraid of him then? No, instead she was going after him as fast as she could,” he said.

  After three days of withering testimony and evidence, there was little that James H. Mathers could do or say in his closing statement.

  He argued that Kathryn had nothing to do with the planning of the kidnapping, implying that Bates and Kelly originally wanted to stay at the farm of the mysterious “old thief” or the Coleman farm in Stratford.

  “Kathryn had nothing to do with the kidnapping up to that time,” he argued. “And force and coercion was used upon her when the kidnappers made the fatal mistake of crossing the state line.”

  If they hadn’t done that, he pointed out, the federal government wouldn’t even have jurisdiction in the case.

  “There is no legal and competent evidence to show this little lady is guilty and you should acquit her,” he concluded.

  As he closed the proceedings, Judge Vaught’s instructions to the jury contained incredible statements of partiality and assertions that she lied on the stand.

  He began by saying, “The court would feel cowardly and derelict in its duty if it did not point out its conviction that the defendant, Kathryn Kelly, was not wholly truthful.

  “This court will not hesitate to tell you that Kathryn Kelly’s testimony concerning the removal of the little girls from the Shannon farm near Paradise, Texas, the day Mr. Urschel was brought there, did not sound convincing.

  “Her conduct at the Coleman farm near Stratford, Oklahoma, not only is a strong circumstantial point but is convincing to this court that Kathryn knew about the kidnapping and knowingly participated,” the judge concluded.

  The defense attorneys howled in protest, saying that the judge’s statement “virtually amounted to an instructed verdict of guilty.”

  Their protests fell on deaf ears.

  The jury returned with a verdict an hour later. Legendary wire service reporter James Kilgallen described the scene:

  A hushed silence, broken only by the faint whir of motion picture cameras, fell over the crowded courtroom as the verdict was read.

  Kelly, the man who boasted he can write his name on a wall with machine gun bullets, and his 29-year-old wife, who had stuck with him throughout during their hectic married life and criminal career, stood up, side by side.

  She was pale, her lips tightly compressed and her long slim fingers closing and unclosing. She wore a black silk dress, with red buttons down the front of her waist, and a smart black hat of the latest mode.

  Kelly, a heavy-set ex-convict, wanted for murder and robbery in several cities, tried to appear nonchalant, but his face was serious as the judge leaned forward. Kelly’s dyed hair stood out like a beacon, its yellowish-red hue giving him a grotesque appearance.

  “Have you anything to say?” asked Judge Vaught in a quiet voice.

  “No, sir,” said Kathryn in a low, tremulous voice. Kelly said nothing.

  Judge Vaught gave them both the maximum sentence: life in prison. Kathryn trembled and began to weep softly.

  The Kellys were then removed from the court by a heavy guard of men armed with machine guns, rifles and shotguns.

  The judge turned his attention to the assembled scrum of newspapermen, photographers and newsreel cameramen. (The Kelly trial was the first federal trial to allow cameras in the courtroom. Weekly excerpts were shown in movie theaters around the country as the investigation and the trial progressed. But, in part because of the national hysteria created by the reports, cameras were subsequently banned from federal courts. They would return on an experimental basis in the late ’90s.) He asked for silence and, except for the whirring sounds of the motion picture cameras, he got it.

  “Of its own volit
ion and without apologies to anyone, this court has permitted various facilities in the courtroom for the purpose of giving publicity to this case,” said Judge Vaught.

  “Our attitude toward kidnapping is such that we should like the world to know what the United States Court of the Western District of Oklahoma does in such cases. Further, the Attorney General of the United States suggested that this be done for the reason that giving of wide publicity to it would have a tendency to deter crime,” he explained.

  When they asked Urschel for his reaction to the verdicts, the man who literally had led the investigators to his captors, and whose cooperation had resulted in the string of convictions, responded in his characteristic modest and taciturn manner: “The government deserves all the credit in the world in this case. I have no feeling of revenge or triumph, but only the highest regard for the officers who worked on the case and the juries which rendered the verdicts. Now, back to work.”

  (On the day the Kellys were convicted in Oklahoma, the state legislature in Texas passed a law making kidnapping punishable by death. The bill was sponsored by Grady Woodruff, who had been one of the attorneys for the Shannons in their trial with Bates and Bailey. Woodruff said his experience there convinced him that gangsters thought no more of kidnapping and holding someone for ransom than they would “going to the coast for a vacation.”)

  10

  THE G-MEN TAKE THE SPOTLIGHT

  In the remarkable ninety days since Berenice Urschel woke J. Edgar Hoover from his sleep with her urgent call about her husband’s kidnapping, Hoover had achieved what three months earlier would have been thought of as impossible: he captured and convicted the perpetrators of the most notorious kidnapping since the Lindbergh baby abduction. He incontrovertibly demonstrated the need for a national law enforcement agency whose authority was not limited by locale or boundary. The national melodrama that had played out over the nation’s radio networks and on the pages of its newspapers gave the Roosevelt administration not just proof positive of the need to expand the powers of the federal government, but the first real victory of his administration—a demonstrable triumph in his offensive against the forces that were dragging down the country.