Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [103]
Suddenly Underhill emerged from the front door, clad only in his socks and underwear. A trio of agents fired, a rookie named Tyler M. Birch emptying his shotgun.bd Underhill twisted, hit, then leaped off the front porch. He slipped in the muddy front yard and fell. Bullets whizzed everywhere as he rose, then fell again, then rose and staggered into a neighboring yard. Inexplicably, the FBI men kept their guns trained on the house. Underhill disappeared into the fog.
When the firing stopped, there was movement inside the house. Colvin hollered for everyone inside to come out. One of Underhill’s partners crawled out the front door, blinded by gas and bleeding from wounds in his elbow and shoulder. A woman followed him out, screaming, bleeding from two bullet wounds in the stomach. A few minutes later Detective Hurt coaxed Underhill’s wife to come out as well.
Once the three were packed into an ambulance, lawmen fanned out across the town, shining flashlights down alleys and beneath houses in search of Underhill. He was wounded and couldn’t get far. Colvin telephoned the state prison at McAlester, a hundred miles east, and asked for bloodhounds. By sunrise there was still no sign of him.
Then, a little before seven, Shawnee police took a call from the owner of a secondhand furniture store, who said Underhill was in his store on Main Street. Eight Shawnee cops and sheriff’s deputies scrambled to the store. They found Underhill lying in bed in a back room. The sheets were reddened with blood. Underhill himself was a mess. As the officers stood over him, he offered no resistance. A bullet had hit him in the forehead, torn a groove across his hairline, and sheared off his left ear. His abdomen was pockmarked with bullets, including one that exploded through his back.
“I guess you’ve got me,” Underhill croaked.
Stanley Rogers, the Oklahoma City sheriff, stepped forward. “You’re in a pretty bad way, Underhill,” Rogers said.
“Yeah, I’m shot to hell,” Underhill said. “They hit me five times. I counted them as they hit me.”
Underhill was taken to a hospital, where he lapsed in and out of delirium all that day. Agents clustered at his bedside, attempting to question him about the massacre. It was Frank Smith, the old Cowboy who had survived the shooting, who got Underhill to talk. “[Underhill] thought he was dying and under such conditions positively asserted to Agent Frank Smith that neither he nor Harvey Bailey had anything to do with the Kansas City massacre,” an agent wrote Hoover. “This statement, made under such conditions, is believed to be true.”
The next day, Underhill was taken to the prison hospital in McAlester, where he died on January 7. For Hoover, there was no choice but to accept his deathbed denials. After six months the Bureau’s efforts to solve the Kansas City Massacre had come to a dead end.
The year was over, the new federal “War on Crime” almost six months old. In retrospect, as eventful as it was, 1933 served only as a prelude, a kind of extended training session, for the FBI and the nation. Despite the efforts of Attorney General Homer Cummings to make crime a national issue, to this point it remained a regional phenomenon; while newspapers in Chicago and Kansas City ran blazing front-page headlines over stories of Verne Miller’s Halloween escape, for instance, the news merited barely eight paragraphs on an inside page of the New York Times.
What was missing was a set of national criminals for Hoover’s national police to fight on a national stage. The year 1934 would produce five such groups. Each would emerge into public view as easily recognized, media-friendly icons: the family of kidnappers, the fugitive lovers, the charismatic escape artist, the psychotic killer, the