Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [44]
In time Kathryn’s boasting caught the ear of a canny Fort Worth detective named Ed Weatherford, who led Kathryn to believe he was corrupt. When Verne Miller was identified in the massacre case in July 1933, Weatherford recognized the name as one of the bank men Kathryn bragged of knowing. He contacted the FBI. The Dallas SAC, Frank Blake, passed the tip to Kansas City, the first time Kelly came to the Bureau’s attention.o “[Fort Worth] tells me that Kelly is most proficient with a machine gun,” Blake wrote, “it being said he can write his name with the bullets discharged from such a gun.”2
Overnight, Kelly became a suspect in the massacre case; in Kansas City, agents wrote Leavenworth asking for his record. Blake, meanwhile, drove to Fort Worth one afternoon and watched the East Mulkey Street house for several hours, jotting down the license number of a Cadillac in the driveway. On July 13, Agent Charles Winstead was sent to reconnoiter a scraggly ranch outside Paradise, Texas, north of Fort Worth, where Kathryn’s mother lived with a cantankerous old rancher named Robert “Boss” Shannon.Winstead found it, arranged with the postmaster for a cover on incoming mail, and returned to Dallas.3 With nothing linking Kelly to the massacre case, the FBI lost interest.
It was to the Shannon Ranch that the Kellys brought the blindfolded Charles Urschel nine days later. In return for a cut of the ransom money, Boss Shannon and his son Armon agreed to watch Urschel while Kelly handled ransom negotiations. Kathryn, meanwhile, took her daughter Pauline to Fort Worth. That Sunday morning, July 23, she invited Ed Weatherford to her house; if anyone was watching them, Kathryn suspected, he would warn her. Weatherford found Kathryn on her front steps in a chatty mood; she said she was just back from St. Louis.
It was a short talk. Walking down the driveway, Weatherford glanced at Kathryn’s car. He noticed an Oklahoma paper on the front seat, the headlines blaring the Urschel kidnapping, and red dirt caked on the wheels. Oklahoma was red-dirt country, Weatherford reflected as he drove off. Back at his home, Weatherford studied the Fort Worth Star Telegram’s stories on the Urschel kidnapping. The more he read, the more convinced he became that the Kellys were behind it. The next morning he again telephoned the FBI office in Dallas, which passed the tip to Gus Jones in Oklahoma City.4 Jones ignored it.
Dexter, Iowa Sunday, July 23
That Sunday, as Gus Jones assumed command at the Urschel home in Oklahoma City, a man named Henry Nye took a walk near his farm outside of Dexter, Iowa, a town twenty miles west of Des Moines. Walking down a country lane, he approached an open field where ten years earlier there had been an amusement park called Dexfield Park. These days the twenty-acre field, bordered by tall maples, heavy underbrush, and a coil of the Middle Raccoon River, functioned mostly as a lovers’ lane. Through the trees, Nye spotted a 1933 Ford. There were people beside it. At first he thought they were campers. Then he spotted a shirt thrown on the ground. It was caked in what appeared to be blood. Nye hurried to his house and telephoned the town night watchman.
Clyde had found the field three days earlier, on Thursday, the afternoon after fleeing the shoot-out at Platte City. Their campsite, a collection of blankets and seat cushions scattered on the grass, resembled a field hospital. Somehow Buck was still alive. His head bandaged, he lay on the ground semiconscious, nearing death. Blanche was blinded in one eye. Bonnie could barely walk. Clyde couldn’t risk a motel, much less a doctor. Their car had been so riddled with bullets that even the most myopic sheriff would notice. W.D. had slathered mud across the damage, then stolen a car in the town of Perry.
Clyde used the car that Friday to drive into Dexter. He bought five chicken dinners and a block of ice at Blohm’s Meat Market,