The Kidnapping That Ended With One Oilman Outsmarting Machine Gun Kelly

And we returned to our American Stories. Up next, the story of how one of America’s most notorious criminals was caught because of one savvy oilman from Oklahoma. You to tell the story of how Machine Gun Kelly was captured is Joe Erschell, author of The Year of Fear, and later, as you’ll hear, Dr. T. Lindsey Baker, author of A Gangster Tour of Texas and numerous other books. Let’s get into the story. Here’s Joe Erschell to start us off.

The story takes place in 1933. The unemployment rate was up to forty percent. Thousands of banks were closed. Catastrophic dust storms were beginning to kick up across the Southwest and the Midwest. They’d blow so hard and so strong, with so much fine silt that the people who lived in that area would have to do things like drape their child’s beds and carriages with wet sheets just to prevent the silt from coming in and choking them to death. It would blow so far that it would turn snow red in England and kill livestock in the fields. While all this is going on, of course, FDR takes office and announces that that’s the only thing we have to fish.

No, no, no, no.

At the very same time, an incredible spate of kidnappings began occurring across the country. With the banks drying up, the bank rubbing business isn’t as good as it used to be. And an estimated two thousand kidnappings occurred between 1930 and 1933. Companies were issuing kidnapping insurance. People in Hollywood were driving around an armor-plated limousine with armed guards in the passenger seat. They would snatch a wealthy individual, ransom them, and then release them with the caveat that everything would be fine unless they go to the authorities. If they do go to the authorities, we’ll return and kill you. Not only you, but all the members of your family as well. So these are tough times in the U.S., with tougher times coming. In the midst of this, George Kelly and his glamorous wife decide that they are going to kidnap the richest oilman in the Southwest.

It’s hot summertime. Charles F.

Erschell and his wife were playing bridge with friends Walter are Jarant and his wife on the screen porch of the Erschell home in Oklahoma City.

And with an almost remarkable lack of planning.

Out of the darkness appeared two armed men. “Stick them up. We want Erschell.”

Kelly, armed with the machine gun, and his partner, Albert Bates, armed with the .45, burst into the Erschell home, run up to the bridge game, and suddenly discover that they don’t know which of the two guys is Erschell. So, making all kinds of threats, they demand that Erschell reveal himself, which he doesn’t do. He just sits there; so does Walter. So Kelly says, “We’ll take you both,” and they speed off into the night. A couple of miles out of town, they realized that they could probably identify which one was Erschell by emptying their wallets, so they stopped the car. They get the wallets, take all the money. They give him ten bucks to get a cab back to town, and they take off with Erschell.

Erschell was no ordinary businessman.

Farm kid grew up, enlisted in the Army during the First World War. When he got out, he was bound and determined that the last thing he was going to do anymore of was farming, so he struck out for Oklahoma and decided to try to make his fortune in the oil business. He cooks up with the aptly named Tom Slick.

The King of the Wildcatters.

Unfortunately, right at the peak of their oil business, Tom Slick, aged 47, kind of your classic Type A behavior guy, had a massive heart attack and died.

Erschell continued running his empire and, in time, married Slick’s widow, Bernice. Erschell’s own wife was Bernice’s sister, so he ended up being the husband of two sisters.

And of course, that generates a lot of headlines in the paper about how rich these folks are and in what their oil holdings entail. All of this was the interesting reading that got Kelly thinking about kidnapping Charles Erschell.

But who hood of Holms were no ordinary thugs either.

Kelly started out in Memphis, Tennessee. He was the child of upper-middle-class parents. He was a caddie at the local country club. Pretty smart kid. In fact, he’s not known to have killed anybody. He didn’t like machine guns. He was kind of afraid of them. He was one of these charming, hail-fellow-well-met Irishmen. But he did not enjoy a very good relationship with his father, whom he hated, and when he caught his father in a tryst with another woman, basically blackmailed him and said, “I won’t tell Mom about this.” This is when he’s in high school. If you give me the family car and increased my allowance by amount of money, which Kelly then used his new transportation and his money top across the board at Arkansas, which was a wet state; Tennessee was dry, and that’s when he started his liquor running business as a young entrepreneur in high school, and things basically went downhill from there. But that wasn’t good enough for Catherine. Catherine wanted to be married to the most famous criminal in all of America, so she started working on his reputation. She bought him a machine gun at a pawn shop in Fort Worth, then started spreading stories about him at speakeasies all over Fort Worth, and she’d leave spent shells behind and say that, you know, “We’ve been down to the farm, and George has been working on his skills, and he can shoot walnuts off a fence post or write his name on the side of a barn.” With this gun, and then that got into the press, and one thing led to another, and suddenly we had this psychopathic Machine Gun Kelly.

Their destination: a farm owned by the stepfather of George Kelly’s wife.

It’s a sad, broken-down farm with a few animals. They cover his ears with cotton and tape them shut.

There they held Erschell captive for nine days. The motive: lots of money—two hundred thousand dollars—and used twenty-dollar bills. Two hundred thousand dollars was a huge sum of money. You could buy a brand-new Ford V8 automobile for five hundred dollars.

But nevertheless, he’s the kind of guy who does not part with his money very willingly. He is bound and determined that if he ever gets out, he’s gonna come back and find these guys and get his money back.

Erschell’s friend made the money delivery in Kansas City on Sunday, July 30th, 1933, eight days after the abduction. The next evening, a disheveled man approached the back door of the Erschell mansion. It was the missing Charles F. Erschell, who had been carried to the outskirts of Norman, just south of Oklahoma City, and was left at the side of the road. Kelly, Bates, and their accomplices congratulated themselves on what they believed had been

a perfect crime.

What Kelly and the others did not realize was that Charles F. Erschell was not just a financial genius. He had what today might be called a photographic memory.

And you’ve been listening to Dr. T. Lindsey Baker and Joe Erschell tell the story of the kidnapping of one of the richest oilmen in the country, and by virtue of that, tell the story of Machine Gun Kelly. The story of Machine Gun Kelly and the Southwest Oilman continues here on

Our American Stories.

And we returned to our American Stories and the story of the capture of Machine Gun Kelly. When we last left off, wealthy oilman Charles F. Erschell had been released after his ransom was paid. But to the surprise of the FBI and later his captors, Erschell wasn’t just good at business. Let’s return to the story here to start us off.

He’s Dr. T.

Lindsey Baker. Erschell was not just a financial genius; he had what today might be called a photographic memory.

He knows how long the car ride took. He also realizes that they were going in a circuitous route designed to confuse him. But this is a guy who’s been working his whole career for the King of the Wildcatters. He and Erschell have been finding oil all over Oklahoma and Texas, and they know just about every inch of that territory backward and forward. And he realizes, of course, that he’s on a farm. He begins counting the number of different animals.

A bull, four milk cows, a flock of guineas.

What the postman’s name is. Who the local prostitute is.

Most importantly, he noted hearing the regular drone of an airplane.

Is that at 9:30 in the morning and at 5:30 at night, a plane is passing overhead. So he puts all that in the databank while he’s leaving his fingerprints all over anywhere he possibly can.

The very evening that the fatigued didn’t care, Warren Charles Erschell stumbled to his own back door. Special Agent Gus Jones plied him with questions. The federal lawman must have smiled to himself when he discovered the remarkable recall that the oilman offered. Just Erschell’s observation that he heard the kidnapper’s car riding across the bumpy Canadian River Bridge, plus his estimate of the eight-hour driving time during his release, pointed southward toward Texas.

Gus Jones just listens to this data dump, and having started out telling him that finding a needle in a haystack, after 90 minutes of talking to Charles, he said, “Well, we just got a really small haystack.”

Jones assigned investigators to find out what localities to the south experience the same sequence of rain and wind that Erschell remembered, and to check commercial airlines schedules. They quickly concluded that the airplane sound likely came from a daily American Airlines flight between Meacham Field in Fort Worth and Amarillo.

Erschell borrows a plane from one of his oil friends. They go up in the air, fly the route. They look down, using Erschell’s sketch of what he thinks to the farm looks like. They identify a farm that looks exactly like the drawing.

Jones dispatched Agent Edward Dowd. The investigator arrived there only three days after Erschell’s release, visiting in the guise of a mortgage salesman. Dowd confirmed with the oilman. He remembered the house had a broken windowpane patched with cardboard.

The floorboard ran the right directions. He saw the correct number

of cattle, mules, and even guineas. When the agent asked for a drink of water on the hot summer day, the pulley at the well made the right squeak, and the water had the same minrng eyes taste that Erschell described.

There was no question in the oilman’s mind.

Erschell insists that he be in the lead car the raiding party with a sawed-off shotgun on his lap, and in the middle of the night they burst in. They arrest the Shannons and a fellow named Harvey Bailey, who was staying at the farm kind of hiding out after his escape from state prison in Kansas. Harvey Bailey: an incredible character. Bailey was considered the most successful bank robber in American history. He was a guy who basically invented the modern form of bank robbing, which involves determining what the best escape routes are, riding the escape routes, figuring out when there’s the most money in the bank to be robbed, by studying the local economy and the county tax records, what the police activity is like, how far away the police station is, what kind of cars the police have, if they have any. Basically, if Harvey was planning your bank robbery, it was going to go well and nobody was going to know who did it. He robbed the Lincoln National Bank of so much money that the bank failed the next day. He did so well in the twenties that by the late twenties he retired from the bank robbing business and opened a series of gas stations and car washes in Chicago, but lost all his money in the Market Crash and had to go back to the business that he knew so well. So he had worked with George, and in fact, had lent George one thousand dollars when George was low on funds. So after he heard about the kidnapping, he went down to the farm in Wise County to collect the money that George owed him and to nurse a wound that he sustained when he was escaping from prison. He just happened to be sleeping in the backyard on a cot.

In the semi-darkness, just before dawn.

Gus Jones awakened Harvey Bailey with the muzzle

of a machine gun.

Meanwhile, George Kelly and Albert Bates absconded with the ransom money.

So even though George and Catherine had already fled the scene along with Albert Bates to launder their, the FBI agents still scored an important victory here by pulling in Harvey Bailey, and it arrived just in time for J. Edgar Hoover, who was not yet director of the FBI. In fact, he was barely holding on to his job when FDR took office. His first choice for Attorney General was a guy named Thomas Walsh, senator from Wyoming. Walsh had a long and bad history with J. Edgar Hoover during the Harding administration. J. Edgar Hoover’s job was to—well, you know—he tapped his phone, and he read his mail, and he tried to entrap him in a hotel room with a woman to get an incriminating evidence on him, none of which succeeded, but it did succeed in making a lifelong enemy of Mr. Walsh. Walsh vowed to get rid of that miserable son of him as soon as he got to town. Now, unfortunately, Walsh was 72 years old, and before he got to town, he went down to Miami and married a Cuban debutante. And on the train ride back to Washington, when the train stopped in North Carolina, Walsh’s wife woke up, but he did not. Subsequently, you know, FDR was prosecuting a war on this, war on that, a war on everything, and a war on crime.

So J. Edgar is…

under a lot of pressure at this time to bring in some big score, and it looks like the Machine Gun Kelly case could be the one. The FBI had just been given the sole responsibility for chasing kidnappers across state lines. They were really the only organization that could bring this to fruition. But there were two problems that they still had. One was the fact that they were not an armed police force. They were not trained in weapons. Most of them were lawyers and accountants who would help local municipalities prosecute criminal investigations. So Hoover looked around his agencies to try to find people who would be skilled enough to go up against machine gunners and shotgun wielders and whatnot. And he discovered that he’s got fewer than twelve, so he put those guys together. They found Kelly in Memphis, Tennessee, successfully arrested him.

George Kelly, R.G. Shannon, Albert Bates, and Harvey Bailey all went to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, while Catherine Kelly and her mother, Ora Shannon, went to a penal institution for women, all of them with life sentences. When the U.S. Department of Justice opened a new maximum security prison on Alcatraz Island in California, it transferred Kelly, Bates, and Bailey.

Shire.

The Erschells lived happily ever after. But Charles, by that point, had softened on the whole affair, and he went to FDR and Hoover and said, “Look, Harvey Bailey had nothing to do with this. You know, we ought to let him out.” He agreed to probation for Harvey and set him up in Jobson, Missouri, with a job as a cabinetmaker. He lived out the rest of his life without committing another crime.

Two decades later, George Kelly died in federal prison. His body went unclaimed, so a released R.G. “Boss” Shannon agreed to bury him in a plot that he owned in Wise County. There, beneath a homemade concrete marker, lie the remains of the man who coined the term still used for the FBI when he declared at his Memphis arrest, “How you G-men would get me?”

And a special thanks to Dr. T. Lindsey Baker and to Joe Erschell for sharing this story. A special thanks also to the Fort Worth Public Library and the Library of Congress for allowing us to access this audio: the story of the oilman who brought Machine Gun Kelly to justice. Here on Our American Stories.