Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [256]
Neither Baby Face Nelson nor Sam Cowley ever learned how close they came to facing off that day. Cowley left Reno the next morning for Salt Lake City before moving on to Montana, where agents were questioning Chase’s friend, Arthur Pratt. No one knew it at the time, but the day Cowley would finally confront Nelson was coming, and sooner than anyone expected.
October 20
When night fell, Pretty Boy Floyd, Adam Richetti, and their long-suffering girlfriends, sisters named Juanita and Beulah Baird, left Buffalo. In darkness they drove through Pennsylvania and crossed into Ohio, then turned south. Richetti had relatives in Dillonvale, across from Wheeling, West Virginia, and they may have been heading there. Floyd drove past Youngstown and around three A.M. reached the Ohio River at East Liverpool, where he turned onto Highway 7, the two-lane blacktop that ran along the west side of the Ohio. Rain was falling as fog rolled off the river, and just before the city limits of Wellsville, four miles below East Liverpool, Floyd lost control of the car on the wet pavement and skidded into a telephone pole.
Steam rose from the hood as Floyd stepped out to inspect the damage. Irked, he looked up and down the road. An abandoned brickyard stretched into the gloom to their right. Moonlight sparkled on the river to their left; a mile across the water they could make out the lights of West Virginia. They managed to get the car back on the road, but Floyd saw they wouldn’t make it far without repairs. He told the Baird sisters to drive into Wellsville and find a mechanic. The girls coaxed the car south, disappearing toward the dwindling river town.
Frost lay silver on the grass as Floyd and Richetti took some blankets and their guns and hiked up a wooded hill to await the girls’ return. From their position above the brickyard Floyd could see up and down Highway 7 and across a set of railroad tracks to the river below. A few dozen yards behind them, at the top of the hill, sat a row of darkened houses, several no more than shacks. It was cold, and they gathered some leaves and twigs, started a fire, and sat back to wait.
Hours passed. At dawn lights began flickering in the homes above them. By eight there was still no sign of the women. Around ten a man named Joe Fryman emerged from his hilltop home to check his riverside vegetable garden. He was standing near the highway with his son-in-law when his eye caught a flash of white on the hill below. He said they should investigate. Halfway down the hill Fryman stumbled onto Floyd and Richetti, sitting on their blankets. At first he thought they were tramps; a glance at their clothing—Floyd was wearing a navy suit with no tie—suggested otherwise. “We’re out taking pictures,” Floyd said. “We had a couple of girls and got lost. We’re waiting for them.”
Suspicious, Fryman climbed the hill to his home, where he found a neighbor named Lon Israel. “It looks kind of fishy to me,” Israel agreed. Israel walked to a store and phoned the chief of Wellsville’s two-man police force, a pugnacious little fellow named John H. Fultz. That Thursday a bank had been robbed in Tiltonsville, an hour’s drive south, and it occurred to Fultz the two strangers might be connected. Before leaving he deputized two local men, William Erwin and Grover Potts, and asked them to come along. A few minutes later the three arrived on the hilltop. None wore a uniform. Only Fultz had a gun, a .38. “Do you know where these people are located?” Fultz asked.
“I don’t know exactly but I can tell you about the location, pretty near,” Israel said.
Israel led the group down a muddy path. About twenty-five feet down the hill, just as they rounded a clump of bushes, Floyd materialized before them. “What do you want?” Floyd demanded. Without waiting for an answer, he pulled out a