The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

escorted onto a Missouri Pacific train in Fort Smith, Arkansas, by two FBI agents, Joe Lackey and Frank Smith, and Otto Reed, the forty-nine-year-old police chief of McAlester, Oklahoma, who was familiar with Nash from his earlier crimes and detested him.

The train arrived at Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, at 7:15 Saturday morning, just a quarter of an hour behind schedule. Waiting were two young FBI agents, Reed Vetterli, in charge of the bureau’s Kansas City office, and Ray Caffrey, plus two seasoned Kansas City detectives, Bill Grooms and Frank Hermanson.

The lawmen made an impressive-looking wedge formation as they led the handcuffed Nash through the station, which was teeming with travelers arriving and departing. FBI agents were not yet authorized to carry firearms, but this morning, Lackey was toting a short-barreled shotgun and a pistol. Smith carried two pistols and Caffrey one. Reed carried a short-barreled shotgun and a pistol. Both Kansas City detectives carried pistols, as usual. Vetterli was the only lawman who was unarmed.

The seven lawmen and their prisoner emerged from the station into the sunshine of the parking lot and walked to the two cars that were to transport Nash and his keepers to Leavenworth. Nash was put into the front seat of one car, positioned behind the steering wheel for a moment, so that the right passenger seat backrest could be folded forward to let Smith, Lackey, and Reed climb into the rear seat. The plan was to slide Nash over to the front passenger seat so the three lawmen in the rear could keep watch on him while Caffrey drove.

Meanwhile, several men were leaning casually against another vehicle parked nearby. Suddenly, the men were walking with deadly purpose toward the lawmen. Just as Caffrey was about to get into the car, the air exploded in “a rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire,” as the New York Times described it.60

“The sounds lasted only a few seconds,” the Times account continued. “Mown down like grain in a field, the handcuffed prisoner and guards were all prostrate. The gunners leaped into their car and sped away, while the bystanders stood rooted to their places, horror-stricken.”

Detectives Grooms and Hermanson lay dead on the pavement. Frank Nash was dead in the car, as was Otto Reed. Agent Ray Caffrey was mortally wounded and would die hours later. Lackey and Vetterli were wounded. Only Smith was unscathed.

The sickly sweet aromas of blood and gun smoke blended in the air. A crowd of sightseers, reporters, and news photographers swarmed over the scene, their feet slip-sliding through the gore. For dramatic effect in one photo, a lawman’s bloody straw hat, with a hole blown through the front, was placed on the right front fender of the car that held the corpse of Frank Nash. Some people grabbed souvenirs. By the time police arrived, the crime scene had been hopelessly compromised.

The carnage would be known forevermore as the Kansas City Massacre or the Union Station Massacre. Although this book is primarily about kidnappings, the Union Station event demands to be explored—because of how the FBI bungled the transfer of Frank Nash, then covered up its mistakes, and because of a weird link to a kidnapping only days before.

Newspaper reporters occasionally refer to their craft as writing “the rough draft of history.” Some drafts are rougher than others. Five men died at the train station. But what really happened?

The initial front-page account in the New York Times quoted Kansas City detective chief Thomas J. Higgins as stating confidently that the ambush was staged to free Frank Nash, who was killed accidentally by his would-be liberators.61 Higgins noted that Nash was a friend of the notorious Harvey Bailey, who was serving a term of twenty years to life for murder and bank robbery when he and ten other prisoners escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary on Memorial Day 1933 during a baseball game between two American Legion teams.

The Associated Press also quoted Higgins as saying that the station ambush was meant to free Nash. But the AP also observed cautiously that other officials “were divided as to whether the killings were the result of an effort to free Nash or to ‘rub him out.’”62

The FBI at once asserted that Pretty Boy Floyd, who after all had kidnapped a Missouri sheriff only the day before, must be behind the slaughter. Thus, one of the most significant passages in the Times initial account was a reference to Higgins, who was said to “cast doubt on reports that Charles ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, the Oklahoma desperado, was involved” in the train station bloodshed.63

An AP account published in the Times under the headline “No Clue to Killers in Kansas City” also noted Higgins’s doubts. It noted too that Sheriff Jack Killingsworth, who had been kidnapped by Floyd and Adam Richetti, was doubtful that Floyd was linked to the massacre.

Yet less than three weeks later, on July 7, 1933, a maddeningly brief AP report appeared deep inside the Times to the effect that Hoover had demanded the capture of Floyd (and several of the Kansas prison escapees) in connection with the train station slaughter.64 The brief news report did not describe Floyd’s exploits, but there was no need. By mid-1933, Floyd was wanted as a killer as well as a bank robber (his victims included several lawmen, along with rival criminals) and a prison escapee.

Reading the accounts these many years later, a journalist like myself wants to ask, “Did Higgins and Killingsworth say why they thought Floyd was not involved in the Kansas City violence? What reason did Hoover give for suddenly concluding that Floyd was involved? Why didn’t someone in the Times Washington bureau question Hoover?”

But back then, the FBI chieftain did not submit to sharp questions from journalists. So was Floyd involved in the train station carnage? Maybe it doesn’t matter now. Back then, it mattered a great deal, especially to Hoover.

In the summer of 1933, the Lindbergh kidnapping was still unsolved, and the FBI had largely been relegated