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

cab. His captors had generously given him $10 for the fare. The taxi took him the twenty miles to his home in Oklahoma City.

Urschel rang the front door of his house. A man he didn’t know opened the door, frowned at the dirty, unkempt visitor, then slammed the door.

“I got a big laugh out of being refused admission to my own house,” Urschel recalled later. He made his way to the rear door, where the household help recognized him. How good it was to be home!101

Investigators checked airplane schedules within six hundred miles of Oklahoma City. American Airways had a flight that left Fort Worth, Texas, each morning at 9:15 for the 340-mile trip northwest to Amarillo, Texas, and a flight that left Amarillo for Fort Worth at 3:30 p.m.

Urschel had recalled hearing a plane for several days in a row at 9:45 a.m. and another at 5:45 p.m. But he had heard no plane on July 30, a day when there was pouring rain.

The airline people told investigators the Amarillo-bound plane was normally over Paradise, a somnolent little town in Wise County, Texas, some seventy miles northwest of Dallas, about 9:45 a.m. The Fort Worth–bound plane was normally over Paradise around 5:45 p.m. But the flight to Amarillo left Fort Worth two hours late on July 30 because of a storm and took a more northerly route—to avoid heavy rain in the Paradise vicinity.

Meteorological records showed the July 30 downpour was the Paradise area’s first rain since May 20. The region had been so parched that the corn had begun to burn in June. What had Urschel heard the woman say at the gas station? “The crops around here are burned up.”

So the Paradise area seemed a logical place to look for the kidnappers’ lair. And since Urschel had seen cows, chickens, and pigs, it was a good bet he hadn’t been held captive in “downtown” Paradise, to the extent there was one.

On his farm several miles outside Paradise, Robert Green Shannon raised cattle until the grass withered during the Dust Bowl years. Then, like many other farmers, he struggled just to survive. As some other farmers did, he happily sheltered bank robbers and other criminals on the run. They typically gave him a few hundred dollars—big money, precious money—to let them hide out on his property for a few days.

Nothing had been easy for him. He was born in Arkansas in 1877, the sixth child of farming parents. Around the turn of the century, the family moved to Texas. Robert returned to Arkansas in 1904 to wed Mary Jackson, the daughter of a family friend, and the couple settled in Wise County, Texas. Mary died when she was only twenty-five, leaving Robert to raise their two young children. Soon, Robert went back to Arkansas and married his late wife’s sister, Maude, who was just nineteen. They had three more children, and then Maude died in 1923.

In 1928, Shannon took up with a woman named Ora Brooks, a divorcée who had a daughter, Kathryn Brooks, from her first marriage. Ora’s great-grandmother, a Cherokee Indian, had married a veteran of the War of 1812 who received land grants in Mississippi for his service. Thus, Ora and her three sisters were well educated by the standards of the time. After her marriage to Robert Shannon, Ora was said to have played the piano and taught Sunday school at churches in the Paradise area.

The family history is murky, but it is believed that Ora’s daughter, Kathryn, married one Lonnie Fry in Oklahoma in 1918, when she was just fourteen. The next year, they had a daughter, Pauline, and apparently divorced not long afterward. Kathryn was briefly married for a second time, then divorced and proceeded to marry a Texas farmer and bootlegger named Charles Thorne when she was twenty-nine.

Charles Thorne soon died under puzzling circumstances, puzzling because he supposedly took his own life, leaving behind a perfectly typed suicide note that was grammatically correct—even though he was reputed to be illiterate.

Emerging from grief, Kathryn had a gangster boyfriend before meeting and eloping with George Francis Barnes Jr. Barnes was born in Tennessee on July 17, 1897. He went to school for a while, then tried being a salesman. He found that work unrewarding. Bootlegging was more exciting…and lucrative. He dropped the surname Barnes and went by Kelly, his mother’s maiden name, or sometimes Kelley, perhaps to confuse lawmen when they were chasing him, which was often, as he liked to rob banks.

Years before, Kelly had married a teenage girl, had two children with her, then abandoned his family after realizing he wasn’t cut out for domestic life. By the time he was in his early thirties, he had been arrested for liquor violations in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Tulsa, where he was also charged with vagrancy. He did time in New Mexico State Prison and in federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, for selling bootleg liquor on an Indian reservation.

Upon getting out, he made up for his spartan existence behind bars. He loved fancy cars and other luxuries but didn’t like the humdrum of a nine-to-five job. Luckily for him, he had a like-minded wife and friends, including the gangster and prison escapee Harvey Bailey, who was known for meticulously planning his bank heists.

Kathryn was handy with firearms and, according to legend, wanted to enhance her husband’s masculine image. So she obtained a Thompson submachine gun from a pawnbroker and encouraged Kelly to practice with it on the ranch. Again, according to legend, Kelly supposedly got so handy with the weapon that he could write his name with bullet holes on the side of a barn. Thus he became known as “Machine Gun” Kelly, although it is unlikely that he was ever that accomplished with the Thompson.

Around this time, Kelly and Harvey Bailey were holding up banks with some frequency across the South and Midwest. Typically, they would head to Mexico after a heist, split up, and lie low for