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Hoover declared Durkin’s apprehension the Bureau’s top priority, and in the ensuing three months, with agents across the country working nights and weekends, Durkin was tracked to New York, then to Los Angeles and San Diego. From California Durkin and his wife drove east across Arizona and New Mexico until a deputy sheriff in Pecos, Texas, spotted a pistol on his front seat. Durkin drove off, but not before the sheriff called the Bureau office in El Paso. A search was launched, and Durkin’s car was found abandoned nearby, at the height of a January blizzard. It was Jones who discovered Durkin had boarded a train to Chicago. Agents arrested him outside of St. Louis.

j

Nash had visited the Barkers in St. Paul a week before the kidnapping, a fact the Bureau would not learn for months.

k

A native of North Carolina, Dwight Brantley served in the FBI from 1924 to 1950. In 1957 he was named Kansas City’s police commissioner. He died in 1967 at the age of sixty-eight.

l

Under questioning William Shaw admitted participating in several Indianapolis robberies. He received a sentence of ten years in a state reformatory for the Bide-a-Wee robbery. Twenty-five years later, Shaw became the principal source for writers researching Dillinger’s early months as a bank robber. He gave extensive interviews to John Toland, Dillinger historian Joseph Pinkston, and a writer named Allanna Nash. In and out of various Midwestern prisons for all but seventeen months of his next forty-four years, Shaw burned to death in a Chicago hotel in 1977 after falling asleep holding a lit cigarette. His body lay unclaimed for a week.

m

Purvis’s son Alston, now a professor at Boston University, speculates that Hoover’s infatuation with his father was romantic in nature. If so, it was unrequited. Purvis was a dedicated lady’s man who would later marry.

n

Another sign of Purvis’s Southern heritage: he called black people “darkies.”

o

Born in 1883, Frank Blake attended Vanderbilt University, where upon graduation he briefly coached the football team. After five years as a rancher, he joined the Bureau in 1919, moving up through the ranks to become the Dallas SAC in 1930. Small and wiry, with a soft Texas drawl, Blake served in the FBI until a heart attack forced his retirement in 1942. He died at his home in suburban Dallas in 1948.

p

As Depression-era ransom notes go, this one was commendably free of melodramatic threats. It included only one: Remember this—if any trickery is attempted you will find the remains of Urschel and instead of joy there will be double grief—for some-one [sic] very near and dear to the Urschel family is under constant surveillance and will likewise suffer for your error.

q

Born in Illinois in 1905, Dwight L. McCormack served in the FBI from 1929 to 1944. In later years he served as a juvenile court judge in Dallas. He died there in 1959.

r

One year later the Majestic would figure prominently in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, when a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann said he couldn’t possibly have kidnapped the Lindbergh baby because he had been working at the Majestic.

s

Kelly D. Deaderick, a World War I veteran born in Jonesboro, Tennessee, served in the FBI from 1927 to 1951. In later years he was a prosecutor in Yakima, Washington. He died there in 1970 at the age of seventy-one.

t

Two other Lansing escapees, “Big” Bob Brady and Ed Davis, had arrived at the Shannon Ranch the previous night with Bailey but had left after dinner. Had FBI agents staged their raid the previous night, as planned, they might have faced a major shoot-out.

u

For years afterward, Hoover allowed writers chronicling the Urschel case to report that the FBI had apprehended Bates. In fact, as case files make clear, Bates was arrested following an exhaustive investigation by an unlikely source, the American Express Company. Company investigators had been after Bates since he passed traveler’s checks stolen in the Tupelo, Mississippi, robbery in 1932. In the end, his