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By Root 2182 0

proved a quiescent witness. He freely admitted knowing Miller, telling agents of a 1932 Thanksgiving dinner with the Millers and Frank Nashes, playing golf with Miller in Hot Springs that winter, even about squiring Vi Mathias that summer. “No one will have anything to do with Miller now,” Buchalter said, according to an FBI summary of the meeting.6 “[But] if Miller shows up in New York, you will know about it.” When the agents pressed, asking if Miller might be “bumped off” within the next thirty days, Buchalter “gave a knowing smile and said he didn’t know about that but would have to make some inquiries around town.”

The next evening, Wednesday, November 29, the FBI got its answer. A man named Vernon W. Northrop was driving home from work when he spotted something in a vacant lot on the outskirts of Detroit. It was a man’s naked body, lying in a drainage ditch, trussed up with rope and in a fetal position. Police were called. When they examined the body, they found a man about five-feet-seven, 150 pounds, with his hair and mustache dyed red. He had been killed by eight or nine blows to his forehead, apparently with a clawhammer. Tied around his neck, so tight that it had crushed his Adam’s apple, was another clothesline, the last twenty feet of which trailed off into the lonely lot.

It was Miller. Though his murder was never solved, everyone realized that Lepke had won the race. Hoover was beside himself. “Be absolutely certain it is Verne Miller,” he scrawled on one memo. “Do not merely accept the word of the police.”7

But the police were right. Miller was dead, and with him went any hope of a quick solution to the massacre case. Once again agents returned to their files, poring over old leads and reinterviewing people. No one the FBI arrested had anything useful to say. There remained only two suspects at large, Pretty Boy Floyd and one of the men who had escaped prison alongside Harvey Bailey, the wild-eyed Oklahoma outlaw Wilbur Underhill. Hoover’s men were combing the eastern half of Oklahoma in search of both men, but so far had nothing.

In the wake of Miller’s death, the massacre investigation began to spiral off in bizarre new directions. The next morning Ted Conroy, the new Kansas City SAC, wrote a letter to Hoover. Based on interviews his agents had been doing at the Kansas State Penitentiary, Conroy wrote, he had “vitally important” information on the identity of Miller’s partners in the massacre. According to Conroy’s theory, they were none other than Fred and Dock Barker.8

It was progress, of a sort. The FBI was looking for the right suspects, but for the wrong crime.

In late November, the Barker Gang returned from their Nevada vacations invigorated and ready to work. Once settled into a new set of Chicago apartments, Fred and Karpis drove up to St. Paul, where one night in early December the Green Lantern’s Harry Sawyer had them out to his farm. There was much to catch up on. The Touhy trial had just concluded, and they all had a good laugh at the FBI’s expense. They spent the better part of an hour speculating about who had killed Verne Miller.

Finally Karpis asked Sawyer if he had any jobs in mind for them. He did. To Karpis’s surprise, it was another kidnapping, of another Twin Cities millionaire, Edward Bremer, the thirty-seven-year-old son of Adolph Bremer, one of President Roosevelt’s principal financial backers. The Bremers owned the Schmidt brewery. Karpis thought Sawyer had lost his mind. “Do you realize how much heat there would be?” he asked.

“What do you mean, heat?” Sawyer said. “You know I’m connected here. Hell, you guys won’t have any trouble getting that money. Just like that Hamm thing. You guys didn’t have any trouble doing that or getting the money.”

“This is going to be a hell of a lot different thing,” Karpis said. “You know as well as I do how much money that guy put up for Roosevelt’s goddamn campaign. I was told he put up three hundred fifty thousand dollars and could have been the ambassador to Germany.”

Sawyer laughed. “Well, I don’t know how much he put up, but he