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He saw blood on the stairs. In tears Woodbury crept up the staircase to the second floor. The house was silent. Upstairs, there were four bedrooms. He stepped to the door of the southeast bedroom, Ma’s room, and looked inside. It was empty. The door to the southwest bedroom, where Fred usually slept, was ajar. Woodbury stepped to it.

Outside, Connelley and his men waited. There was a minute of silence, maybe two, then Woodbury’s face appeared at a bedroom window. Tears were streaming down his face. It was a sight that would stay with several of the agents for years afterward.

“They both up here!” Woodbury shouted.

“What are they doing?” Connelley replied.

“They all dead!”8

Connelley led a group of agents into the house. They found Ma Barker dead on the bedroom floor, a single bullet hole in her forehead. Fred lay beside her. It was impossible to know how long they had been dead. There was no sign anyone else lived in the house. But a search uncovered an assortment of hotel bills, business cards, and receipts from the El Commodoro Hotel in Miami, the same hotel where Sam Cowley had found a man driving Karpis’s car in November. Several receipts were made out to a “Mr. D. Wagner,” an alias Karpis was known to use. The conclusion was inescapable: Karpis was in Miami. Connelley ordered Ralph Brown and three agents onto the first available flight south. They would hit the ground in Miami at 3:30.

When Hoover stepped before a Washington press conference that afternoon, he was in a delicate position. There was little chance the Bureau would be criticized for killing Fred Barker; he was a stone-cold killer who had fired on agents with a machine gun. Ma was another matter. Hoover had to explain to the nation’s press just why his men had killed a grand-mother with no criminal record. Rather than wait for the question, he took the offensive, taking advantage of the fact that the Barker-Karpis Gang was the least known of the public enemies.

As reporters scribbled into their notebooks, Hoover announced that Ma, who none of the newspapers or their readers had ever heard of, was the “brains” of the gang. He said she had been found dead with a machine gun in her hand, which was flat-out untrue. To advance the idea that the elderly woman had been an active participant in the morning’s gunfight, Hoover described a dramatic scene in which Earl Connelley approached the Oklawaha house and talked with Ma, who slammed shut the door and yelled to Fred, “Let ’em have it!” Needless to say, there is no evidence of any such incident in agents’ reports of the gunfight.

History is written by the victors, they say, and there was no one alive who would come forward to dispute Hoover’s fabricated story. Never mind that there was no indication whatsoever in Bureau files that Ma Barker had ever fired a gun, robbed a bank, or done anything more criminal than live off her sons’ ill-gotten gains. According to Hoover, Ma Barker was “a criminal mastermind.” Reporters ran with it.

As vivid a portrait as Hoover painted, their stories did not immediately produce anything like the public fascination with Dillinger. It took time for reporters to embroider the FBI myth. Not for six weeks would the notion of Ma Barker’s criminal genius be explored in any detail, in a multipart feature distributed by the King Features Syndicate. The FBI cooperated with the piece, which was headlined MA BARKER: DEADLY SPIDER WOMAN. “[T]he withered fingers of spidery, crafty Ma Barker,” it read, “like satanic tentacles, controlled the skeins on which dangled the fate of desperadoes whose activities hit the headlines on an average of once a week.”

“In many ways they were the smartest outlaws we’ve encountered,” Hoover was quoted saying. “And Ma was the mind behind the operations. She was so smart that we never got anything on her—although we knew plenty. We had to kill her to catch up with her.”9

Hoover never deviated from that line. It became one of his favorite stories; he made the tale of Ma’s “criminal genius” the centerpiece of his 1938 book, Persons in Hiding,