New York agents had been closing in on Vi Mathias since July 19, when the St. Paul office, which was intercepting her parents’ mail, called to say her daughter Betty had received a box of saltwater taffy sent from Atlantic City. A New York agent tracked down the store where the taffy was bought and retrieved a sales receipt. Handwriting on the receipt was confirmed as Mathias’s, but the trail ended there.

  Then on July 22, the day Charles Urschel was kidnapped, came word that Betty had received a second package, this one a pen-and-pencil set, mailed from a novelty store in Lake Placid, New York. New York agents were at the store within hours. They discovered that two well-dressed women had purchased the gift a week earlier. One of the women was described as thirty-eight years old, “very stout, very broad shoulders and heavy chest, very dark throughout, dark hair, dark complexion, looked Jewish and wore a yellow sweater ensemble and a very large green pin.” This was Buchalter’s wife, Betty. The second woman, a slim “straw blonde” wearing heavy makeup, was decked out in a blue silk ensemble and a white tam. A salesman identified her from a photo as Vi Mathias.

  Agents spread across the Lake Placid area, checking every hotel, resort, and Western Union office. They found nothing concrete, but on a tip that a woman who resembled Mathias had told a salesperson she was heading to Montreal, agents expanded their search into Canada. Finally, on the night of July 27, a hotel detective in Montreal told agents a woman who resembled Mathias had checked out of the Mt. Royal Hotel hours before. Identifying the photos of Mathias and Betty Buchalter, he said the two women had been driving with two men, one a Columbia Pictures executive, the other the owner of an Adirondack tourist camp. The next day, agents located the camp owner, who described how the two couples had toured Montreal nightclubs and upstate New York hotels for a week, drinking heavily and having a wild time. Mathias had fallen hard for the Columbia executive. Neither of the women seemed bothered by the absence of their respective life partners.

  The camp owner volunteered that the women were now at the New Sherwood Hotel in Burlington, Vermont. Two agents were dispatched from Manhattan, and at 11:00 the next morning, Sunday, July 30, they watched as Mathias, wearing a low-cut green dress, drove a black Lincoln away from the hotel. Beside her sat the buxom Betty Buchalter. The two agents followed the Lincoln across the New York line, where it turned south. All went smoothly until the two cars passed through the town of Troy, New York, where the FBI car got a flat tire. Mathias and Buchalter continued south, disappearing into a warm Sunday afternoon.

  Losing Vi Mathias was the kind of blunder the FBI made often in 1933 as Hoover’s men learned the ins and outs of professional law enforcement. Still, they recovered nicely. By then, thanks to an inspection of hotel registries, the New York office knew where Mrs. Buchalter lived, in Apartment 17J at the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West.r A team of agents was put on twenty-four-hour surveillance, and the next night, July 31, Mrs. Buchalter was spotted leaving the building alone. The agents followed her for a few blocks but let her go. They had already placed a tap on the Buchalters’ phone and secured an informant inside the building, apparently a bellman. If Mathias was still in New York, the agents bet she would return.14

  Three days later, the informant at the Majestic alerted the New York office that the Buchalters were preparing to leave for a vacation and had sent a grouping of trunks to Pennsylvania Station. A pair of agents reached the station just as a party of seven, including people identified as Mr. and Mrs. L. Buchalter and Miss V. Allen, boarded a train for Vermont. The agents scrambled onto the train, which reached Vermont that night. But inexplicably, by the time the two agents disembarked, they found the Buchalters’ party had already driven off.

  This time Hoover’s men caught a break. Agents from the New York office had been canvassing hotels in Atlantic City for weeks, chasing unconfirmed reports that Verne Miller was hiding in the area. The next evening, Friday, August 4, the assistant manager of the Ritz Carlton in Atlantic City telephoned to say the Buchalters and their son, accompanied by a Miss Vivian Allen, had just checked in to the hotel.

  By midnight five agents had gathered at the Ritz Carlton. The Buchalters and “Miss Allen” were staying in Rooms 1519 and 1520, overlooking the ocean. When questioned, the hotel’s assistant manager told agents the party had reserved beach chairs for the weekend. The next morning several agents donned bathing suits and took seats on the beach behind the Buchalter party, which consisted of Buchalter and his wife, a young boy, and three other men “of Jewish extraction.” There was a second woman with them, but she wasn’t a blonde; in their report the agents described her as having “henna colored hair which she wore in a Greta Garbo fashion.” It was Mathias, her hair newly dyed.

  Monday morning around eleven, after an uneventful weekend, the Buchalters checked out. Along with Mathias they stepped into a black Lincoln sedan outside the hotel. As the Lincoln pulled away, the New York agents were behind it, two agents driving in a Packard, another agent following in a chauffeur-driven limousine. They trailed the Buchalters north, toward Manhattan. When the FBI car overheated, only the chauffeured limo remained behind the Buchalters’ Lincoln as it headed into downtown Newark and stopped at the Robert Trent Hotel. A bellman unloaded several bags. The Buchalter family, Mathias, and an unidentified man stepped out of the car and walked inside.

  After a few minutes the Buchalters emerged from the hotel and stepped into the Lincoln. There was no sign of Mathias. The agent inside the limousine had to make a split-second decision: follow the Lincoln, or follow Mathias. Assuming Mathias had checked in to the hotel, he chose the Lincoln, trailing it just far enough to be certain it was heading for the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan. At that point, the agent told his chauffeur to return to the Robert Trent. Reaching the hotel, he hurried inside to make sure Mathias had checked in. To his horror, she hadn’t. According to the assistant manager, she had loitered inside the lobby for twenty minutes, then left.

  A half-dozen agents descended on the hotel and questioned bellmen, taxi drivers, and anyone else they could find. It was no use. Vi Mathias had vanished, and this time the FBI couldn’t find her.

  Behind closed doors at the Urschel mansion, Gus Jones slowly drew from Charles Urschel every memory he could retrieve of his captors. Jones’s manner was soothing. Though Urschel insisted he had nothing to offer—he had been blindfolded—Jones asked him to proceed on the premise that when one sense is removed, remaining senses grow more acute. As the hours wore on, Urschel realized that Jones was right.

  He remembered passing through an intense rainstorm about an hour after leaving Oklahoma City. He recalled stopping at a filling station where an attendant had made a remark about “broom corn,” a crop grown mostly in southern Oklahoma. He remembered the car crossing a long wooden bridge. Jones thought he knew the bridge. It crossed the Red River near Ardmore. It meant Urschel had been taken to Texas.

  He was taken to a farm, he was certain. Roosters crowed. He could hear pigs squealing. He had been given water to drink in a battered tin cup. Well water, he guessed. He could hear the well’s pulley squeak. The water tasted strongly of minerals. When his blindfold loosened after several days, he was able to snatch glimpses of the shack where he was held. Jones made a sketch. Urschel nodded. It was close.

  Jones pushed for more. An airplane passed overhead twice each day, Urschel remembered, in the mornings around nine and the afternoons at five or six. Jones’s interest grew. Airline schedules could be checked. Finally, Urschel remembered a terrific rainstorm the Saturday night before his release. He had asked his guard—a young man, he thought, not one of the kidnappers—whether it was a tornado. “No,” the man had replied. “But they have a lot of those down in Oklahoma.”

  Jones smiled. “That was a plant,” he said. “You weren’t north of Oklahoma, you were south of it.” He leaned forward. “Now I want you to think hard, Mr. Urschel. This may be the most important question of all the ones I’ve asked you here today, so take your time before you answer it. Did you hear the airplane the night of that windstorm?”

  Urschel closed his eyes, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m sure I didn’t.”

  Jones smiled. “For a man who was blindfolded and chained,” he said, “I’d say you saw one helluva lot.”15

  Jones’s debriefing of Charles Urschel became famous within the Bureau, and for years afterward, while rarely crediting Jones by name, Hoover cited his work as a shining example of the FBI’s “scientific” approach to crime solving. In fact, as canny as Jones’s deductions proved, they proved unnecessary. As Jones launched a furious effort to find a North Texas farm that matched Urschel’s description, the Fort Worth detective, Ed Weatherford, had persuaded agents in Dallas that the Kellys were the kidnappers.

  The morning after Urschel’s release, Weatherford coaxed a Dallas agent named Kelly Deaderick out to the town of Paradise, where they interviewed the woman who ran the town switchboard.s She reported that Kathryn Kelly, whom she knew well, had been at the Shannon Ranch with her mother all week. Everyone in town was suspicious of the Kellys and their flashy cars and the twenty-dollar bills they threw around like confetti, she said. The man at the telegraph office said much the same thing. He said Kathryn boasted that her husband was a bank robber.

  Agent Deaderick returned to Dallas convinced they were onto something. He called and briefed Gus Jones. But Jones continued to ignore the Kellys; he had secured a plane from Phillips Petroleum and was busy flying agents across North Texas, trying to find the farm Urschel described. Despite all Weatherford had learned, an FBI case summary prepared August 5 made no mention of the Kellys. The Dallas office’s frustration peaked two days later when its number two, Dwight McCormack, wrote a report summarizing the evidence. In place of a title for his memo, McCormack put an argument: “Investigation of activities of George Kelly and gang at Fort Worth and Paradise, Texas, indicates strong possibility they were involved in Urschel kidnapping.”

  Still, Jones didn’t listen. He continued peppering the Dallas office with requests for airline schedules and weather reports all across Oklahoma and North Texas. FBI legend, and Jones’s own version of events, holds that it was only after a rigorous analysis of this data that the Paradise area was identified as the kidnappers’ probable hideout. In fact, what was happening was something more subtle: each time Jones asked for data, the Dallas office checked conditions at Paradise and pointed out how they fit Urschel’s descriptions. The clincher came late on Wednesday, August 9, when Dallas forwarded data on rain patterns at Paradise. They fit Urschel’s memory exactly.

  At last, Jones saw the light and ordered the Dallas office to reconnoiter the Shannon Ranch. Early the next morning, Thursday, August 10, Ed Weatherford drove an FBI agent named Ed Dowd to the town of Decatur, five miles from Paradise, where they interviewed an officer at Boss Shannon’s bank. Dowd became convinced of the officer’s honesty and decided to take a risk. He explained that Shannon might be mixed up in the Urschel kidnapping. The bank man called in his credit investigator, and Dowd laid out a map Urschel had drawn of a small shack. The investigator said he knew just such a shack on Shannon’s property.

  A plan was devised. The bank officer drew up a meaningless document for Shannon to sign. The credit investigator said he would take Dowd to the ranch and ask Shannon to sign the document; Dowd could masquerade as a bank examiner. Dowd slid into the man’s Ford coupe and was taken along bumpy dirt roads to the Shannon Ranch, where they found Boss Shannon’s son Armon standing outside his shack. While the credit investigator talked with Armon, Dowd asked for a drink of water. Armon helped him draw it from the well. Dowd noticed that the well’s pulley squeaked. The water had a mineral taste. Armon’s wife emerged from the shack and offered everyone a plate of freshly cut watermelon. After a moment Dowd rose and wandered inside the house. It matched Urschel’s description exactly. Afterward, Dowd raced back to Dallas and reported his findings to Gus Jones in Oklahoma City.

  Jones decided to raid the Shannon farm the next day, Friday, August 11. When Urschel demanded to come, Jones reluctantly consented. Everyone rendezvoused Friday afternoon in Denton, north of Dallas. There were fourteen men in all: Jones and three Dallas agents, four detectives from Fort Worth led by Ed Weatherford, four Dallas cops, plus Urschel and an Oklahoma City detective. By the time they reached Decatur, the light was fading. Jones stopped the caravan and gathered the men around him.

  “Boys, we’ve got about twenty-six miles to go over slow roads,” Jones said. “We might reach the place before dark, but even if we did I doubt we’d be able to finish the job before it got black.” He dropped to one knee and drew a map of the Shannon Ranch in the dirt. “This is the way the place is laid out,” Jones said. “There is only one road into it, and that’s as plain as the devil. We can’t creep up on the place because it’s so flat you can see an ant a mile off. The only way to get in there is to just bang straight in, and for that we need daylight . . . I’ve done enough shooting in my time not to want to go barging into a strange place where the odds are all on the other side. My judgment is to back off, go down to Fort Worth and get a little sleep, then hit this place right at sunrise.”16

  In Oklahoma City that night the SAC, Ralph Colvin, was so confident of success he cabled Hoover, WE CAN’T GO WRONG. EXPECT IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS BY NOON SATURDAY.17 In Fort Worth, Jones and his men ate dinner and grabbed a few hours of sleep at the Black-stone Hotel. At 4:00 A.M. they reconvened in the hotel’s parking lot and drove to the town of Rhome, seventeen miles from Decatur, where they waited for ninety minutes to be joined by a local sheriff. When the sheriff hadn’t arrived by six, Jones decided to proceed without him.

  On radio station WBAP the new day began with a song by Cecil Gill, the Yodeling Country Boy. As the eastern horizon reddened, the three-car caravan sped north along dirt roads toward Paradise, clouds of dust billowing in its wake. The Shannon house was dark when the lead car skidded to a stop in front. Jones leaped out carrying a submachine gun, with Charles Urschel behind him; amazingly, the agents allowed Urschel to carry a sawed-off shotgun. They ran around the side of the house, where they encountered Boss Shannon pulling on his suspenders.

  “What do you think you’re doing here?” Shannon demanded.

  “That’s the old man who guarded me!” Urschel blurted out.

  As agents trained their guns on Shannon, Jones glimpsed something odd in the rear yard: a makeshift cot atop two sawhorses. Someone was sleeping on the cot. Jones ran toward the figure, machine gun ready. As he approached, he saw it was a man, sleeping in his underwear. A pair of pants and a white shirt lay at the foot of the cot, alongside a Winchester rifle and a Colt .45 pistol. The man wasn’t moving. Jones crept up and looked down on the face. He recognized the features—the wavy hair, the concrete jaw-line—and quietly cursed in surprise.

  Jones brought the tommy gun’s barrel down inches from the man’s face until the tip brushed against his nose. The sleeping man’s nose twitched. His eyelashes fluttered, and suddenly Jones was staring into the blinking brown eyes of the man who had mentored Verne Miller, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker brothers, the man who had emerged as the primary suspect in the massacre case. It was Harvey Bailey. For several seconds, as they peered at each other in the dim light of dawn, neither spoke. Bailey’s eyes took in the submachine gun, now pointed at his chest. His Colt lay on the ground, inches from his right hand. A Dallas agent, Charles Winstead, was standing to one side.

  “Go ahead!” Winstead snapped. “Reach for it!”

  Bailey didn’t move.

  “Get up, Harvey,” Jones finally said. “Who’s here with you?”

  Bailey said nothing.

  “Harvey,” Jones went on, “if a head bobs up anywhere around here, or a shot is fired, I promise I’ll cut you in two with this machine gun.”

  “I’m here alone,” Bailey said. “You have me.” Slowly he sat up and stretched. A weak smile crossed his face. “Hell,” he said. “A fella’s gotta sleep sometimes.”18

  Agents poured into the Shannon house and its outbuildings, handcuffing the Shannon family. Kathryn’s mother, Ora Shannon, was fierce in her denials of wrongdoing. “Don’t you tell ’em nothing!” she snapped at her husband. It was no use. Gus Jones took the Shannons’ son Armon for what he called “a fatherly talk,” and the young man soon broke down and told him everything. It was the Kellys, he said—the Kellys and Albert Bates. And they were all long gone.

  Harvey Bailey and the Shannons were taken to the Dallas jail, where Boss Shannon soon joined his son in a full confession. Hoping to catch the Kellys unaware, Jones managed to keep a lid on the story for almost seventy-two hours, but Monday night the news broke in the Dallas Times-Herald, and by the next morning it was all over the country. Most papers heralded Bailey as the mastermind behind the kidnapping, as well as the Kansas City Massacre. In fact, Bailey had nothing to do with the Urschel case. He had simply dropped by the Shannon Ranch, as he had done once or twice before at Kelly’s behest, because he needed a place to sleep.t It was a lucky arrest, but the FBI’s luck was overflowing that weekend. Saturday afternoon, just hours after the Shannon raid, police arrested Albert Bates in a downtown Denver parking lot.u Bates, however, gave no useful information on the Kellys, or on the whereabouts of his share of the ransom money.

  Thanks to Ed Weatherford, the hunt for the Kellys got off to a fast start. For two weeks an agent had been noting return addresses on the Shannons’ incoming mail—addresses that only now did the FBI begin running down. Two letters had come from Kathryn, one sent from St. Paul on August 4 and a second mailed from Madison, Wisconsin, three days later, bearing a return address of General Delivery, Indianapolis. An agent was assigned to watch the Indianapolis post office, while a bulletin describing the Kellys’ car was dispatched nationwide.