Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [76]
Rorer crept down a hallway toward the back of the house, where he could see a screened-in porch; the floor was strewn with empty bottles of Old Log Cabin bourbon. To his right he saw a second bedroom door. Stepping to it, he looked inside and saw a woman in green silk pajamas asleep on a bed. It was Kathryn. Detective Raney, meanwhile, stepped into the front bedroom where the two sleeping men lay. As he did, Kelly, having heard footfalls, stepped from the rear bedroom through a hallway toward the front bedroom. Detective Raney saw his shadow on the wall. He raised his shotgun. A moment later Kelly stepped into the room and came face-to-face with Raney’s two loaded barrels.
Kelly, wearing only underwear, his bright yellow hair rumpled by sleep, was holding his .45.
“Drop that gun,” Raney said.
“I been waiting all night for you,” Kelly said with a smile.
“Well,” said Raney, “here we are.”
Kelly slowly placed his pistol on a sewing machine, then raised his hands. It was over.aj Within minutes the other lawmen poured into the house, handcuffing Kelly, the garage attendant, and the second sleeping man, an unsuspecting friend. Before handcuffing Kathryn, Rorer gave her fifteen minutes to get dressed. She emerged wearing a smart black dress with monkey-fur epaulets and orange buttons and walked curtly to the waiting cars. She told one of the agents she was waiting for a young man to return from Texas with her furs and her Pekinese dogs and asked him to please make sure these things were taken care of.
Kelly went quietly. At police headquarters he was taken to a sergeant’s desk. “What’s your name?” the sergeant asked.
“George R. Kelly.”
“What’s your age and where do you live?”
“I am thirty-seven years of age and I live everywhere.”
By noon, as word spread of the arrests, more than three hundred people crowded in and around the jail to catch a glimpse of the Kellys. Policemen were forced into the street to direct traffic. Thrown into a cell, Kelly brightened as he renewed acquaintances with a dozen Memphis policemen he knew from high school or previous arrests. “Bill! Hey! Gari!” he shouted as officers filed by to see him. Before long Kelly was joshing with everyone. “Lend me that machine gun, will ya?” he asked one FBI agent. To Rorer he quipped: “You ought to start a hamburger stand outside the jail and make some money with this crowd.”
Held in another part of the jail, Kathryn wasted no time betraying Kelly. “I’m not guilty and I can prove it,” she told the reporters who clustered around her cell. “And afterward I’ll be rid of him and that bunch.” Kathryn portrayed herself as an innocent wife who lived in fear of her murderous husband. “I was going back to Oklahoma City tomorrow to give myself up,” she insisted. “Kelly told me he would kill me if I did, but I was going anyway.”
But if Kathryn thought she could talk her way free, she was sadly mistaken. She and Kelly were taken aboard an army airplane the following week to Oklahoma City, where in October they stood trial. Like Albert Bates, Harvey Bailey, and the Shannons, both received life sentences.ak Kathryn ended up at the federal women’s prison in Milan, Michigan, where for several years she acted as an FBI informant in an effort to reduce her sentence. Kelly, Bates, and Bailey were all shipped to Leavenworth, and then, when it opened the following year, to Alcatraz.
Machine Gun Kelly was the first nationally known fugitive the FBI had ever captured, and his arrest marked a turning point in the Bureau’s history. It furthered the notion that there existed a realm of larger-than-life supervillains loose in the land, popularized the idea that the nation was actually at war with these criminals,