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Then Shotgun George Ziegler explained: he wanted to hit the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. It sat in the heart of the financial district, adjacent to the Bankers Building, nineteen floors below the Chicago offices of the FBI.

It was a muggy, damp Labor Day on the Potomac. In the Bureau offices at Vermont and Constitution, Hoover and his men remained focused on Machine Gun Kelly. They had traced the Kellys to Des Moines, but there the trail went cold. Agents were nosing around Kathryn’s old haunts in West Texas and had secured the cooperation of her father, who had allowed agents to search the East Mulkey Street house. But all efforts to determine Kelly’s actual identity had turned up nothing. To the agents who pursued him, Machine Gun Kelly was just a name.

While Hoover’s men scoured the country, the Kellys themselves were in disarray. This was like no other crime they had committed before. This time there were national headlines, and federal agents, from a bureau they had barely heard of, hounding them across state borders, night and day. After fleeing West Texas one step ahead of FBI agents, Kelly drove to Biloxi, Mississippi, checking into the Avilez Hotel on Thursday night, August 24. Three days later he moved to the Avon Hotel on West Beach Boulevard, registering as “J.L. Baker.”

Never the brightest soul, Kelly made the mistake of cashing a handful of American Express Travelers Cheques, and a clerk identified him. Agents from New Orleans scrambled to Biloxi, where word of their arrival leaked to a newspaper. Kelly was standing on a Biloxi street corner on Monday, August 28, when he heard a newsboy cry, “Machine Gun Kelly in town!” He panicked, ran to the bus station, and bought a ticket to Memphis. He had abandoned his luggage, including his clothes and a loaded .45 caliber pistol, at his hotel.

As inexperienced as its agents were, the FBI had learned to watch a fugitive’s old haunts: had Hoover known anything of Kelly’s past, agents might have been waiting for him in Memphis. But they weren’t. Later that day, at a pay phone outside the Memphis bus station, Kelly called his former brother-in-law, an up-and-coming attorney named Langford Ramsey. Ramsey, at the time the youngest lawyer to have passed the Tennessee bar, had no idea the George Barnes he had known eight years earlier was now Machine Gun Kelly, the nation’s most wanted man. Ramsey arranged for him to bunk at the home of a friend, a crippled attendant at a downtown parking garage.

Kathryn, meanwhile, after driving across Texas and Louisiana, arrived in Biloxi to find Kelly gone. Kathryn was beside herself. She was certain Kelly had run off with a woman he knew in Biloxi. Not knowing what else to do, she drove back to Texas, reaching a point south of Temple, where on Saturday night, September 2, she drove up to the house of her longtime maid, Junie.af Inside, Kathryn slathered her face in cold cream and began to curse her husband. “I don’t know where George is,” she said, “but I’m trying to get in touch with the s.o.b. to get him to surrender so they’ll release me and my mother from that indictment.”10

The next day Kathryn bought a red wig and checked into Waco’s Hilton Hotel, where she spent the day brooding about her mother’s coming trial. She needed to know whether Sam Sayers, the Fort Worth attorney she had hired to represent her mother, had made any progress on her proposal to turn in Kelly. The next morning, Kathryn telephoned Sayers in Fort Worth. “Hello, this is your girlfriend,” Kathryn said.

“Which girlfriend?” Sayers asked.

“Your best girl—the one with the Pekinese dogs. I must see you right away.” She told him where to meet her in Waco.

“I can’t talk to you now,” Sayers said. “You know better than to call me on this phone.” He hung up.ag At wit’s end, Kathryn jumped back in her pickup and drove north toward Fort Worth, unsure how to contact Sayers safely. Just past Hillsboro, at the town of Itasca, she spotted a family of three forlorn hitchhikers outside a filling station. She pulled up beside them. She had an idea.

“Y’all want