Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  Urschel was taken to a 500-acre ranch in Paradise, Texas, owned by the gangster Boss Shannon, Kathryn Kelly’s stepfather. He was chained to a bed and next morning, over breakfast, the kidnappers read to him the newspaper articles about the kidnapping.

  Kathryn had, meanwhile, driven off to attempt to establish an alibi for herself, meeting a friend who was a detective. The astute policeman noticed red dirt on the wheels of her car and Oklahoma newspapers lying on the back seat. He put two and two together and on his return to his office phoned the FBI. When Mrs Urschel was shown a photograph of Kelly, she immediately identified him as one of the kidnappers.

  Charles Urschel, meanwhile, was using every opportunity to find evidence that might help the FBI if and when he was released. He would listen for planes flying overhead and five minutes later would ask the time. He estimated the times of these flights to be 9.45 a.m. and 5.45 p.m. He tried to memorise the mineral taste of the water and anything else that might pinpoint the location.

  Urschel was ordered to write several ransom notes, one to his wife and one to a friend, John G. Catlett. A third was sent to another family friend, E. E. Kirkpatrick, asking for $200,000 in used notes. He was to place an advert in the Daily Oklahoman reading, ‘FOR SALE — 160 acres land, good five-room house, deep well. Also cows, tools, tractors, corn and hay. $3,750.00 for quick sales TERMS’.Kirkpatrick was then instructed to take the train to Kansas City on the night of 29 July, travelling alone. He was to keep watch for two bonfires burning, one after the other on the right hand side of the train. When he saw the second, he should throw the bag containing the cash from the train’s observation platform. Once that was done, Urschel would be released.

  Kirkpatrick got the money – all of it in marked notes – and boarded the train, but he was accompanied by John Catlett. One story says that Kelly had car trouble and was unable to get to the spot where the bonfires were to be set. Another says that Catlett was spotted boarding the train and the operation was aborted. There was another plan, however, in the event of anything going wrong with the first one. Kirkpatrick had to check into the Muehlenbach Hotel in Kansas City, under the name E. E. Kincaid and await further information. At 5.45 p.m. that afternoon, he was telephoned and told to take a taxi to the La Salle Hotel and walk west, carrying the bag containing the money in his right hand.

  As he walked along Linwood Boulevard, a large man wearing a turned-down Panama hat, approached. It was none other than Machine Gun Kelly. ‘I’ll take that grip,’ he said tersely. Kirkpatrick asked him when Urschel would be freed and Kelly hissed back that he would be home in twelve hours.

  On 31 July, Charles Urschel did, indeed, arrive home after being dropped twenty miles outside Oklahoma City. The following morning, he was telling the FBI everything he knew about his kidnappers and the place where he was held. The search began and they quickly located the Shannon Ranch as the place where Urschel had been held. On 12 August it was raided and Harvey Bailey, Boss and Ora Shannon were arrested. On the same day, Alfred Bates was picked up in a Denver hotel. Five other men were arrested to whom Kelly and the gang had sold a portion of the marked cash.

  Hearing of her mother’s arrest, a distraught Kathryn wrote a threatening letter to the Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General, Joseph B. Keating, ‘The entire Urschel family and friends, and all of you will be exterminated soon. There is no way I can prevent it. I will gladly put George Kelly on the spot for you if you will save my mother, who is innocent of any wrongdoing. If you do not comply with this request, there is no way in which I can prevent the most awful tragedy. If you refuse my offer I shall commit some minor offense and be placed in jail so that you will know that I have no connection with the terrible slaughter that will take place in Oklahoma within the next few days.’

  Meanwhile, one day Kathryn picked up a family of hitchhikers, Luther Arnold and his wife and their daughter Geraldine. She immediately saw an opportunity to use the Arnolds to help her and George get away. They paid the Arnolds to let them borrow Geraldine who would provide perfect cover for their true identities while they travelled. No one would be looking for a couple with a child in tow. They set out for Chicago, stopping in Texas to bury $73,000 of the ransom money at the ranch of an associate called Cass Coleman. George, meanwhile, had written to Charles Urschel threatening death for his family if the Shannons were convicted.

  From Chicago, they made their way to Memphis where they hid in the home of Machine Gun’s long-time friend, John Tichenor. They then went down into Mexico, having sent Geraldine back to her parents, but returned to Memphis as everything began to unravel.

  The Arnolds were soon picked up and twelve-year-old Geraldine was, of course, a wealth of information, information that led the FBI straight to Memphis and the home of John Tichenor. On 26 September 1933, two police officers knocked on the door of Tichenor’s house. It was opened by George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly pointing a .45 automatic at them. One of the officers pushed his shotgun against Kelly’s stomach and the two eyed each other for a moment in a tense standoff. Kelly realised the game was up, however. He threw down his gun and put his hands in the air. He was at last in custody. On 1 October, he and Kathryn were flown to Oklahoma City to face trial in an extraordinary convoy of nine planes.

  Their letters did nothing to help Ora and Boss Shannon. The couple were each sentenced to life imprisonment. On the day that sentence was passed, as Kelly was being escorted out of court in handcuffs, he walked past Charles Urschel. He put his finger across his throat in a cutting motion, and snarled, ‘You’ll get yours yet, you_____’.

  Their own trial ended as expected. On the morning of 12 October, it took the jury less than an hour to find George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly and Kathryn Kelly guilty of kidnapping. They, too, were sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Kathryn and her mother were paroled in June 1958 and after Ora’s death in 1980, Kathryn became a recluse until her own death in 1985, at the age of eighty-one.

  As he was being led to the train to go to Leavenworth after his trial, Kelly had joked with reporters that he would not be there long, that he was going to break out. He never did, however. In 1934, he was transferred to the new escape-proof Alcatraz located on a rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, where he would remain until 1951 when he was sent back to Leavenworth. He died there of a heart attack in 1954, aged fifty-four.

  Kelly undoubtedly harboured regrets about some of the decisions he had made in his youth. In a letter to his kidnap victim, Charles Urschel, written towards the end of his life, he observed plaintively, ‘These five words seem written in fire on the walls of my cell: Nothing can be worth this!’

  John Straffen

  In 1951, when John Straffen entered Broadmoor Institution in Berkshire, George VI was on the throne, Clement Atlee was prime minister of Britain, and food was still being rationed in Britain following World War Two. Straffen, aged twenty-one at the time, had already spent half his life in institutions. He would spend the remainder of it locked up, apart from four fateful hours in 1952, when he escaped and murdered again. By the date of his death, on 19 November 2007, he had become British legal history’s longest-serving prisoner, having spent fifty-six years behind bars.

  John Thomas Straffen was born in Bordon in Hampshire in 1930, the son of a soldier who was posted to India when John was two years old. The family would remain there for six years, during which time, sometime before he was six years old, John was struck by an attack of encephalitis which caused severe damage to his cerebral cortex, leaving him with a low IQ and mental age for the rest of his life.

  Returning to Britain, the family settled in Bath in Somerset, but very soon afterwards, eight-year-old John was getting into trouble for truancy and theft. He was referred to a Child Guidance Clinic and appeared before a juvenile court in June 1939 for stealing a purse from a girl. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and his probation officer, noting that John did not seem to know the difference between right and wrong, referred him to a psychiatrist.
He was certified under the Mental Deficiency Act. In 1940, aged ten, he was reported to have an IQ of fifty-eight and a mental age of six.

  At Bedford Court residential school which he attended from the age of twelve, he was disruptive and found it difficult to make friends. An increasingly violent tendency emerged when he strangled two geese belonging to a member of staff. By sixteen, his IQ was sixty-four and his mental age had risen, but only to nine years and six months. He was discharged and returned to Bath where he worked as a machinist in a clothing factory. Meanwhile, however, he was breaking into houses and stealing small items which he hid, never trying to sell them or take them home with him.

  He was arrested in summer 1947 for strangling five chickens and was also a suspect in a burglary. When interviewed, he happily confessed to the burglary, also admitting to a number of crimes in which he was not even a suspect. His mental capability was taken into consideration and he was committed to Hortham Colony in Bristol, an institution that prepared offenders such as Straffen for release back into the community. In 1949, he was transferred to a lower security facility at Winchester, but after stealing a bag of walnuts in February 1950 he was sent back to Hortham. Later that year, he left the institution without permission and made his way home. When police arrived to take him back, he struggled with them and had to be subdued.

  By 1951, he was considered to have responded well enough to treatment to be allowed home leave and found employment during this at a market garden. Nonetheless, aged twenty-one his certification under the Mental Health Act was renewed for another five years. When his family appealed against this ruling, he was reassessed and his certificate was revised to only six months with a discharge at the end of that time.

  On 15 July 1951, Straffen killed for the first time.

  He was on his way to the cinema when he saw five-year-old Brenda Goddard picking flowers in the garden of her foster parents’ house in Bath. When he told her that he knew a better place to pick flowers, Brenda agreed to go with him. Shortly afterwards, he lifted her over a fence into a wooded area and strangled her, before banging her head against a rock. Without concealing the body, he continued on to the cinema.

  He had no real record of violence but police, considering him a suspect in Brenda’s murder, interviewed him on 3 August. When they checked with his employer to work out his movements on the day of the murder, Straffen was sacked from his job.

  Five days later, he met nine-year-old Cicely Batstone and invited her to go to see a film with him. When they left the cinema, he took her by bus to a meadow on the outskirts of Bath where he strangled her. This time, however, a number of people had seen him with Cicely. The bus conductor had once worked with him and knew him well, a courting couple who had been near the scene of the murder recognised him and a policeman’s wife also came forward, having seen them together. The next day, he was arrested.

  He immediately confessed to the murders of both Cicely Batstone and Brenda Goddard and was charged with murder. At the end of the month, he was committed to trial for Brenda’s murder.

  At Taunton Assizes in October 1951, Straffen was found unfit to plead, the judge, Justice Oliver, memorably commenting, ‘In this country we do not try people who are insane. You might as well try a baby in arms. If a man cannot understand what is going on, he cannot be tried.’ Straffen was sent to Broadmoor, originally an asylum for the criminally insane, but now a hospital whose inmates were described as patients.

  Astonishingly, despite a ten-foot-high wall, John Straffen succeeded in escaping from Broadmoor on 29 April 1952, when he climbed up onto the roof of a shed and scrambled over the wall. He had put his ordinary clothes on under his work clothes that morning. Walking into the nearby village of Crowthorne, he chatted with a woman in her garden, joking about the possibility of escapes from the nearby hospital. Ninety minutes later, he saw five-year-old Linda Bower riding on her bicycle. He strangled her.

  Moving on, he asked a woman in her garden for a cup of tea and she generously offered to drive him to the nearest bus stop. As they drove off, Straffen noticed some men in uniforms and learning that they were police officers, leapt from the car and fled. The woman told the policemen about her passenger’s strange behaviour and Straffen was pursued, recaptured and taken back to Broadmoor.

  When the little girl’s body was discovered at dawn the following day, police immediately went to Broadmoor to interview Straffen. Without telling him why they were there, they questioned him about what he had done while he had been free. He became defensive, blurting out, ‘I did not kill her… I know what you policemen are, I know I killed two little children but I did not kill the little girl…I did not kill the little girl on the bicycle.’ On 1 May he was charged with Linda Bower’s murder and, Broadmoor having failed to keep him locked up, was remanded to Brixton prison.

  At his trial on 21 July, he pleaded not guilty but, controversially, evidence was introduced about his previous murders. A medical expert testified that Straffen had admitted that he knew murder was wrong, saying that it was one of the Ten Commandments. This persuaded the jury that he was, indeed, sane and they found him guilty of murder in just under an hour. John Straffen was sentenced to death.

  On 29 August, however, after his appeal failed, the Home Secretary at the time, David Maxwell Fyfe recommended that he be reprieved. No reason was given at the time, but it later emerged that he believed Straffen to be insane.

  And so began John Straffen’s fifty-six-year-long tour of England’s prisons.

  It began with Wandsworth Prison where he remained for four years before being transferred to Horfield Prison in Bristol. Prisoners planning an escape included Straffen in their plans because they felt he would be a huge distraction for the police. The escape was foiled, but it caused outrage amongst local residents. A 12,000-signature petition demanded that Straffen be moved away from their area.

  Two years later, he was moved, to Cardiff Prison, returning to Horfield in 1960. When the new high security wing was opened at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, Straffen was its first occupant on 31 January 1966, arriving there just before six of the Great Train robbers.

  His neighbour in the top security E Wing at Durham Prison, to which he was transferred in May 1968, was the Moors murderer, Ian Brady. During this time, Straffen was described as ‘a shambling lunatic’ who was only in prison because no mental hospital could hold him. He would circle the exercise yard relentlessly, banging the fence every few minutes. As ever, he remained a solitary, friendless figure who talked to no one. In 1984, he was still there when Kenneth Barlow, who had killed using insulin, was released from prison after serving twenty-six years. Straffen now had the dubious honour of being Britain’s longest-serving prison inmate.

  It seemed obvious that Straffen would never be released and his name was high on a list of twenty such prisoners compiled by then Home Secretary, Michael Howard in 1994. His life of working as a cleaner in the prison craft shop and tea-making for warders looked set to continue indefinitely. He was, by this time, getting on well with prison staff and was known to them by his first name. Other inmates, however, still avoided him.

  The old claims that he had been unfit to stand trial resurfaced in 2001 on the fiftieth anniversary of his arrest. Doubt was also introduced into whether he killed Linda Bower, a crime Straffen had always insisted he did not commit. Some have even claimed that the little girl was killed after Straffen had been taken back into custody. Nonetheless, the Criminal Cases Review Board turned down his request for an enquiry in December 2002.

  In May 2002, the authority of the Home Secretary over the release of lifers was challenged in the European Court of Human Rights. The success of this case implied that Straffen might eventually be released but before that could happen, John Straffen died, aged seventy-seven, at Frankland Prison in November 2007.

  His old Durham Prison neighbour, Ian Brady, took on the mantle of Britain’s longest-serving prisoner, but at 44 years he still has a few more to do before he
overtakes John Straffen’s long stretch.

  Albert DeSalvo – The Boston Strangler

  ‘Me? I wouldn’t kill no broads. I love broads.’ Albert DeSalvo

  He was never charged with the murders that made him one of the most infamous individuals of the twentieth century and the Boston Strangler case, the reign of terror between June 1962 and January 1964 that left thirteen women dead in the Boston area, has never been closed. Many, however, believe he was not responsible for all of the murders. There are inconsistencies – in one case, he remembered killing his victim with his bare hands, but she was in fact strangled with scarves and a stocking. Recent DNA testing has also come up with surprising new evidence. Did his attorney, the famous F. Lee Bailey persuade him that, given his catalogue of sexual offences, if he pled guilty to the Boston Strangler killings, he would be sent to the more lenient regime of a psychiatric hospital rather than the harsh environment of the federal prison system? Was there more than one Boston Strangler, as some suggest, operating in the area at that time, each copying and building on the other’s acts? We may never know the answers to these questions, but one thing is for certain, whether he was or was not the Boston Strangler, or whether he was the only one, Albert DeSalvo’s criminal career was extraordinary and extensive.