Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [305]
Those who avoided Alcatraz, and those who chased them, met a multitude of fates. The man who betrayed Bonnie and Clyde, Henry Methvin, was run over and killed by a train, apparently while sleeping, in 1948. Frank Hamer died in 1955. W. D. Jones lived long enough to watch the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde and wrote an article in Playboy about the gang. Jones was killed during a fight in Houston in 1974. Clyde Barrow’s last sibling, Marie Barrow Scoma, died in 1999.
The Urschel mansion still stands in Oklahoma City; a historical society plaque is the only reminder of that warm night in July 1933 when Kelly paid his only visit. Ed Weatherford, the Texas detective who brought Kelly to the FBI’s attention, never received credit outside Fort Worth for his work on the case; he died in 1949. Kathryn Kelly’s father, Boss Shannon, was paroled from prison in 1944; he died in 1956. Albert Bates died of a heart attack at Alcatraz in 1948. Kelly died, also of a heart attack, at Leavenworth six years later.
Kathryn Kelly outlived her husband. In 1958, after years of begging Hoover for her release, she persuaded an Oklahoma judge to grant her a new trial. The Bureau, caught off guard, scrambled to reassemble its twenty-five-year-old case. It was all but impossible. Frank Blake, the Dallas SAC, had retired in 1942 after a heart attack and died six years later. Ralph Colvin, the Oklahoma City SAC, died in Tulsa in 1947. The Urschels’ bridge partner, Walter Jarrett, died in Midland, Texas, in 1947. The Bureau spent months trying to locate the Luther Arnold family, the sharecroppers who figured prominently in the Kellys’ capture. At one point agents pursued rumors that twelve-year-old Geralene Arnold had changed her name and become a famous movie actress. The Arnolds were never found. When the FBI was unable to provide evidence to reconvict her, Kathryn was freed. She worked in an Oklahoma hospital for many years before her death in 1985.
The bit players of the Dillinger case died in obscurity. Harold Cassidy, the doctor who assisted in Dillinger’s surgery, committed suicide in Chicago in 1946. The FBI paid reward money to Ana Sage, the “Woman in Red,” but it couldn’t prevent her deportation; she died of liver failure in Romania in April 1947. Patricia Cherrington died two years later, apparently of natural causes, her body discovered in a Chicago flophouse. Louis Piquett became a bartender after his release from prison. He died of a heart attack in Chicago in 1951. Pete Pierpont and Charles Makley attempted to escape from Ohio’s death row in September 1934, using fake guns carved from soap. Makley was killed; Pierpont was later executed. The last surviving member of the Dillinger Gang, Russell Clark, was released from prison in August 1968, having served thirty-four years. He had inoperable cancer and died four months later.
Billie Frechette married a Wisconsin man named Arthur Tic, bore him children, and died in January 1969. Dillinger’s last girlfriend, Polly Hamilton, lived quietly in Chicago for years as a salesman’s wife. She died a month after Frechette. Nine months later, in October 1969, Martin Zarkovich died. Whatever secrets he harbored about the East Chicago Police Department’s ties to Dillinger went with him to the grave. John Chase was paroled from Leavenworth in 1966. He became a janitor in Palo Alto and died there in 1973. Baby Face Nelson’s widow, Helen Gillis, lived out her years working in a Chicago factory and raising the couple’s children. She died in 1987. The