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All evening, even as friends and reporters phoned in congratulations, Purvis remained uppermost in Hoover’s mind. Around nine Purvis and Sam Cowley, who had arrived from Chicago, telephoned Hoover to report that they expected to take custody of Richetti within an hour; when Purvis stepped away from the phone, Hoover told Cowley that he wanted Purvis out of Wellsville immediately. Purvis is “to leave tonight and the curtain pulled down on the publicity there,” Hoover wrote an aide. He repeated himself for effect. “I again stated [to Cowley] that I wanted Mr. Purvis and the men to get out of there tonight because if they stay over, there will be a lot of motion pictures and the like,” Hoover wrote.

But Purvis couldn’t help himself. After three months in Hoover’s doghouse he was once again a star, and when reporters asked what happened, he told them. The next morning’s newspapers uniformly portrayed Purvis—“the man who got Dillinger”—as the FBI hero who had now brought down his second major public enemy. PURVIS’ STORY OF U.S. TRAP, read the Chicago American headline. “Melvin Purvis, youthful attorney who turned sleuth, marked another notch on his gun [today],” wrote the Chicago Tribune. “[A] normally mild-mannered southerner, who ‘sees red’ when dealing with criminals, Purvis today became the most dangerous nemesis of the desperado [element].”

In Washington, Hoover fumed. He wanted accolades to flow to the Bureau, not Purvis; if any one man was responsible for bringing in Floyd and Dillinger, he felt, it was Sam Cowley, whom the newspapers continued to portray as Purvis’s second-in-command. Two nights later a headquarters supervisor named Bob Newby reached Purvis at his home in Chicago and told him to stay away from the office; in fact, Newby told Purvis to tell no one he even was in the city. Purvis, who had taken a victory lap through official Washington after Dillinger’s death, asked if he could come east; Newby said he saw no reason to. What remained of the relationship between Hoover and Purvis was damaged beyond repair.18

With Dillinger and Floyd dead, Sam Cowley focused on Baby Face Nelson. His files were thick with new intelligence: the work on Nelson outshone anything achieved during the Dillinger and Floyd manhunts. That the two earlier cases had been resolved at all was seen by cynics as dumb luck, the FBI capitalizing on an opportunistic snitch and a car wreck. Cowley was determined that Nelson’s capture would be different. The Nelson files were an indication of how sharply the FBI’s professionalism had risen in mere months; the Purvis-era embarrassments of Roger Touhy, Verne Miller, and Little Bohemia were fast receding into memory. War conditions honed many organizations into fighting shape, and the FBI was no exception.

Under Cowley’s direction, agents had rounded up almost every contact from Nelson’s early days, interviewed his partners in the 1930 crime spree, and staked out the homes of his and Helen’s siblings. Several family members were quietly cooperating with the FBI, including Nelson’s brother-in-law, Robert Fitzsimmons, whose wife had taken in the Nelsons’ son Ronald. On October 9, Fitzsimmons had called to tell Cowley his family was leaving to visit relatives in Bremerton, Washington. It took a week for the family to drive cross-country. Two of Cowley’s men followed the entire way.

Cowley’s best hope of finding Nelson was still John Chase’s girlfriend, Sally Backman, who remained in custody in San Francisco. Cowley was transfixed by a vague story she told of visiting a town in Wisconsin where Nelson said he planned to spend the winter. In San Francisco agents spent several days poring over maps with Backman, trying to identify the town, but it was no use. No matter how she tried, Backman couldn’t seem to remember its name.

The day after Floyd was killed, Tuesday, October 23, Cowley had Backman flown to Chicago in hopes that a tour of northern Illinois and Wisconsin might refresh her memory.