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

But two years later, when Richetti was on trial for the train station shooting, Lackey changed his recollection again: “I was on the backseat on the right or west side [emphasis added],” he testified.67

The question of where Joe Lackey was sitting is all-important. If indeed he was sitting in the left rear, “crouched down back of the driver’s seat,” as he stated originally, he was sitting directly behind Nash, from which position he inadvertently blew off the back of the prisoner’s head and, seconds later, accidentally killed Caffrey and Hermanson.

The contradictory accounts that Robert Unger unearthed are from the FBI’s own files and were apparently unnoticed for decades, although some in the FBI’s inner circle—Hoover and his sycophants—were aware of them. So, apparently, were some Kansas City FBI agents, who out of fear of the tyrannical director carried their dark secrets into retirement and to their graves.

One FBI man who was aware of what really happened at the train station confided later to Federal Judge William H. Becker of the Western District of Missouri. As Robert Unger recounts, the judge shared his recollection just before he retired in 1990. “Our agent sitting in the backseat pulled the trigger on Nash,” the judge recalled the FBI man as saying. “That started it. The machine-gunners didn’t shoot first. Our guy panicked.”68

If the press of that era had closely probed what happened at the train station, Hoover might have been cashiered and forgotten, especially considering the embarrassments that lay ahead. But the director was able to control the narrative and portray his agents as heroes at the Union Station shooting—when, in fact, they were victims of their own incompetence.

Ingeniously, if cynically, Hoover was able to turn a debacle into a triumph and use public sentiment for his own ends. “The audacity of daylight slaughter in a city center could not be excused as the work of oppressed country boys in depressed times,” as Unger put it. “Suddenly killers and thieves were judged as killers and thieves. And the public verdict was harsh.”

“Demands for reform were heard in cities and towns all over the country, but the focus quickly settled on Hoover and his small bank of federal agents… The carnage in Kansas City embedded a Hoover versus Gangland image in the public mind. And if the country wanted a gangbuster, J. Edgar Hoover desperately wanted the job.”69

And he wanted vengeance for the death of an FBI agent at Union Station. The people responsible, he declared, would be “exterminated, and exterminated by us.”70 Should the Kansas City police break the case before the FBI caught up with the killers, Hoover warned an aide, “it would spoil it for us.”71

On that Saturday morning of the Union Station Massacre, Blackie Audett was sitting in a car with Mary McElroy, the strikingly pretty twenty-five-year-old daughter of city manager Henry McElroy.

Mary lived with her widowed father and was very close to him. A somewhat impetuous woman, she was attracted to danger and excitement. She had heard there would be plenty of both at the train station that morning and had persuaded Audett to accompany her there to watch.

Mary was acquainted with John Lazia and other gangsters, whose company she enjoyed and whose exploits she liked to hear about, so it is not hard to believe that she would have heard something in advance. What is hard to believe is that she would want to flirt with danger, considering the ordeal she had gone through just three weeks earlier.

*Here, I am indebted to the crime writer Jay Robert Nash (no relation to Frank) for his essay “Who Was Behind the Kansas City Massacre?” (http://www.annalsofcrime.com/index.htm#03–05).

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MARY’S ORDEAL

Kansas City, Missouri

Saturday, May 27, 1933

Mary McElroy was enjoying a bubble bath in the upstairs bathroom of her father’s home, looking forward to going to the track later on. She liked betting on the horses, in moderation.

She heard a knock at the door, then heard the maid, Heda Christensen, answer. Mary couldn’t hear what was said, but she sensed from the tone of Heda’s voice that the maid was suspicious.

Mary found out later that there were two men. One of them explained that they were delivering cosmetics that Mary had ordered.

The men sure didn’t look like cosmetics salesmen. When Heda balked and started to close the door, one of the men aimed a pistol at her. “Either open that door for us, or I’ll shoot through it,” he said.72

Both men barged in. One brandished a sawed-off shotgun. They went upstairs.

Mary had heard the ruckus below and was alarmed. “Who’s there?” she said.

“We’re kidnappers,” a man answered. “We’re going to take you away, and if you behave yourself, you won’t get hurt. Hurry up and get dressed.”

The men let her go to her bedroom unmolested to put on clothes. Then they ushered her downstairs and out the door after promising the maid they would be in touch.

The kidnappers drove across the state line into Kansas, stopping at a house and escorting their captive to a dingy basement room furnished with a bed, chairs, and a radio. The room had an unpleasant smell, not surprising as it had been used to keep chickens.

The kidnappers gave their prisoner detective magazines to read. They handcuffed one of her hands to a wall by the bed.

That night, Henry McElroy got a special delivery letter. It was a note from his daughter, stating that her captors wanted $60,000—or $100,000 if the police or newspapers were told that she’d been taken, in which case, Mary warned, “I may not be returned.”73

And don’t mark the bills in the ransom package, she warned. The kidnappers had threatened to harm her father or her brother, Henry Jr., if the bills were doctored.

When a kidnapper got in touch by phone, McElroy said he could come up with only $30,000, much of it raised by his friends.

The kidnapper hung up and called back two hours later to say that $30,000 would be acceptable. He assured McElroy that his daughter had not been harmed.

The