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LaCapra’s story was perfect. It explained almost everything: how Miller and Floyd, strangers to one another, could have teamed up, and why Adam Richetti would have stayed at Verne Miller’s home, leaving behind his fingerprint on a beer bottle. As far as Hoover was concerned, there was just one problem. A secondhand story told by a frightened junkie would do little to sway a jury. What they needed was confirmation, and there was only one person in custody who could furnish that: Verne Miller’s girlfriend, Vi Mathias.

Mathias had been languishing in the federal women’s prison in Milan, Michigan, since the previous November. She was to be paroled on Tuesday, September 18, a fact the Chicago office noted several days before her release. For months Kathryn Kelly had been trying to pry information out of Mathias, but to no avail. Now, with her impending release, Sam Cowley proposed a bold, if extralegal plan. Mathias should be released onto the steps of the prison with no guard present, Cowley suggested, and at a time when no buses or taxis were available. No one would be allowed to meet her.

Because Mathias would be isolated and alone, Cowley wrote headquarters, “there will be no attorneys or any other person present at the time she is released, and . . . she [can be] taken by Agents of the Division and held incommunicado in some apartment where she can be thoroughly questioned concerning the massacre case.” In effect, she was to be kidnapped. Given enough time, Cowley was confident he could break Vi Mathias. “Mr. Cowley pointed out that the success obtained at the Chicago office in questioning the women has been the result of holding them indefinitely and breaking down their mental resistance and obtaining from them, piece by piece, the story of their activities,” an aide wrote Hoover.1

Cowley’s plan was approved. When Mathias was released that Tuesday evening, three Chicago agents took her into custody. They drove to Detroit, where they had rented an apartment for the interrogation. The agents started in on her immediately. But Vi Mathias, while alone and unsure of her legal status, was a tough woman. She admitted knowing the Barkers and a dozen other criminals, but as the week wore on she refused to answer questions about the Kansas City Massacre.

New Orleans, Louisiana Saturday, September 22

For fifteen months Dick Galatas, the Hot Springs bookie who had taken Frank Nash’s wife Frances to Joplin on the eve of the massacre, had proven as elusive as Pretty Boy Floyd. Theorizing that Galatas was the true mastermind behind the killings, Hoover’s men had tracked down tips on his whereabouts from St. Louis, where he had gambling friends, to Los Angeles, where he owned some land outside the city. They had questioned and shadowed his relatives, an aunt and uncle in upstate New York, a brother in Chicago, still other family members in California. At one point, in an effort to eavesdrop on his college-age stepson, they had inserted an undercover agent into a University of Alabama fraternity house. For their efforts they had absolutely nothing to show. Galatas and his wife, Elizabeth, had vanished.

That Saturday morning, David Magee, the New Orleans SAC, took a call from the New Orleans U.S. Attorney, Rene Viosca. Viosca asked him to come to his office in the Federal Building; he had a citizen with a tip that Galatas was hiding in the city. At Viosca’s office, Magee was introduced to a man whom FBI files identify only as Confidential Informant Number One. The man said he had seen a photograph of Galatas in the September 15 issue of Liberty Magazine, which advertised a $1,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Galatas, the man said, was a dead ringer for Edwin W. Lee, the southeastern distributor for a paint company, Liquid Celophane Corporation. Lee’s office was in the Stern Building downtown. He stayed there until 2:00 most Saturdays.ec

Agent Magee telephoned Washington and asked whether they should place Lee under surveillance. No, he was told. If Lee was really Galatas,