• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“What the hell good is money if I gotta be by myself?” Ma asked. It took another hour of arguing before Ma gave in, beaten. “All right,” she said sadly. “If you boys will come and visit me when you’re in Chicago. But that don’t mean it’ll be like this forever. This summer we’ll get a cottage on a lake. How’ll that be?”

Karpis promised a summer cottage, even as he realized it would never happen. He would have said anything to get Ma Barker to shut up. The next day they all drove to Toledo. Ma stayed behind. It was the last anyone would hear of most of the Barker Gang for a long time.

By the time Karpis and the Barkers fled Chicago, the FBI’s pursuit was losing steam. Unlike the Dillinger Gang, which shed talkative confederates like dandruff, the Barkers seemed like clannish urban hillbillies, opaque and unknowable. A month after identifying them as Edward Bremer’s kidnappers, the FBI hadn’t found a single reliable source of information on the gang. Agents had prison snitches and old wanted posters from Oklahoma and Missouri, but little more.

It took weeks to compile lists of the Barker Gang’s relatives and prison contacts. Brothers and sisters of several gang members and their girlfriends were put under surveillance, as were Karpis’s parents in Chicago. Letters poured in to FBI offices from people who said they thought they knew or had seen members of the gang. Only one, a Texas prison inmate named Henry Hull, offered solid information. A prison pal of Dock Barker’s, Hull had once visited Barker in Nevada. FBI agents descended on Reno and identified every apartment, grocery, dry cleaner, and gambling house the gang had visited during its two stays there. They collected phone records and assorted arcana—from a tailor they learned Fred Barker had a 13½-inch neck—but none of it led anywhere. The most recent sighting of the gang was six months old.

For his part, Hoover was obsessed with identifying the house where Bremer had been kept. Thousands of hours were spent searching for a town in Wisconsin or Illinois that matched the descriptions Bremer had given. More than a hundred were surveyed. Police and mailmen were interviewed in each one, but none seemed to match Bremer’s memory. One of Purvis’s men, Ralph Brown, actually checked the correct town, Bensonville, but failed to recognize it.bw

If anything, progress in the Dillinger case was even slower. By the end of March, Purvis and his men had spent four weeks on the case, yet had failed to unearth a single lead on the gang’s whereabouts, nor any hint they were behind the robberies at Sioux Falls and Mason City. As the Crown Point publicity died down, in fact, the Bureau’s investigation lost what little momentum it had. In hindsight Purvis’s choices seem inexplicable. He didn’t bother placing the Dillinger farm in Mooresville under surveillance; had he done so, agents might have been waiting for Billie when she visited on March 19.

The one solid lead the Bureau managed to generate was appropriated from Matt Leach’s men, who had discovered Russell Clark’s girlfriend, Opal Long, living with her mother in Detroit. The Detroit office forced the Indiana police to withdraw and took over their surveillance in hopes Long might contact Dillinger. Even this minor lead Purvis managed to squander. On Thursday, March 29, agents in Detroit followed Long to the downtown train station, where she boarded a train to Chicago. When she arrived in Chicago, Purvis had his men tail her to the Commonwealth Hotel, where Hoover approved a tap on her phone. Long, however, realized she was being followed.

That night she climbed into a taxi, peering through its rear window at a pair of agents following her. The cab took what Purvis described as “a zigzag course” through downtown streets, easily eluding the FBI men. Weeks later agents learned that Long had gone straight from Chicago to St. Paul, where she joined Dillinger.

By the end of March, Hoover was growing impatient. Irked by newspaper