Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [55]
Determined to find a lawyer to represent her mother, Kathryn and Kelly drove south to West Texas, where Kathryn had relatives in the town of Coleman. On August 16, they arrived at a tumbledown ranch owned by Kathryn’s forty-three-year-old uncle, Cass Coleman. Kathryn got out of the car, lugging two leather cases containing the ransom. With her uncle’s help, they transferred the remaining money to a water jug and a bucket, then buried it beside a willow tree behind Coleman’s barn.
The next morning Kelly slept late while Kathryn drove to the town of Brownwood to buy a car. She returned that afternoon with a beat-up Chevy sedan. The next morning she left it with Kelly, and then left Kelly with her uncle, saying she was driving to Dallas to hire an attorney for her mother and would return in a few days. Cass Coleman, less than thrilled to find himself alone with a wanted man, deposited Kelly at another ranch, outside the neighboring town of Santa Ana, where a sixty-year-old farmer named Will Casey agreed to let Kelly stay in a vacant house on his property. Coleman brought Kelly bedsheets and cooking utensils, then sat back to await Kathryn’s return.
It was then that the FBI arrived in town. Dallas agents had discovered that Kathryn had family in Coleman and fanned out across the area, seeking to question them. It took only a day for word of their arrival to reach Kelly. Just before noon on August 23, he drove up to Coleman’s farmhouse. He ran inside and told Coleman, “I need a piece of paper.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Coleman asked. Kelly explained. When Coleman handed him a piece of paper, Kelly wrote something down, slipped it into an envelope, and sealed it.
“Give that to Kathryn,” he said, “and tell her ‘Mississippi.’ ”
Kelly hopped back in the car and drove off, heading east. When Kathryn arrived back at the farm several nights later, she read Kelly’s note and cursed. “He’s a damned fool,” she told her uncle before driving off in search of her wayward husband.
Throughout those blazing-hot late-summer days, as the nation’s attention remained riveted by the hunt for Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger kept busy on his own little-noticed crime spree, ricocheting between dozens of towns in Indiana, Ohio, and northern Kentucky, casing banks between side trips to visit the World’s Fair and a girlfriend or two. He kept on the move, though at some point he appears to have rented two apartments, in East Chicago and Gary, to use as hideouts.
Dillinger remained unknown to the public, but his robberies had attracted the notice of a detective named Matt Leach, who worked for the fledgling Indiana State Police. Leach, whose obsessive pursuit of Dillinger would become an Indiana legend, was a Serbian immigrant who arrived in western Pennsylvania in 1907 at the age of thirteen.v Three years later the family moved to Indiana when Leach’s father took a job in a Gary steel mill, and Leach worked in the mills before joining the U.S. Army in 1915. After serving with John J. Pershing’s expedition against Pancho Villa and on the Western Front during World War I, he returned to Gary and became a policeman, moving up through the ranks to head the department’s vice division. As a local cop Leach was active in the American Legion, and when its national chairman, Paul McNutt, was elected governor of Indiana in 1932, Leach was named first captain of the state police force McNutt formed. Only the superintendent of police, Al Feeney, ranked above him.
Much like the FBI, the Indiana State Police was ill equipped to fight crime. In 1933 its forty-one members (including clerks) were, like Leach and Feeney, political appointees, charged with cruising state highways on motorcycles