“Mr. Nathan stated that Barker is a tough one and is not going to talk,” an aide memoed Hoover Tuesday night. “They are going to work in shifts during the night.”

  By the next morning, Dock had still said nothing. As the hours wore on, Hoover grew convinced that Chicago wasn’t working hard enough. One of his top men, Ed Tamm, told Connelley to use “vigorous physical efforts” to break Dock.5 Just what those efforts were, the FBI never disclosed. But in later years one agent, Ray Suran, reportedly bragged that he had broken two telephone books over Dock’s head. Whatever tactics agents employed, Barker still wouldn’t talk.

  Bryan Bolton was no Dock Barker. Connelley’s men initially had no idea how much Bolton knew, dismissing him in one memo as a “minor member of the gang.” Friday morning, after more than fifty hours in custody, Bolton suggested otherwise. If the Bureau would put him back “on the street,” as he put it, he would tell them everything: who committed the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, what became of the money and, best of all, where Freddie and Karpis were hiding.

  Pop Nathan briefed Ed Tamm, who wrote Hoover that he “advised [Nathan] that we must consider the possibility that in making the complete statement about the case [Bolton] may implicate himself. Consequently we should be careful in making inducements to him, that no promises be made to him to hold him free of any of his own activities. Mr. Nathan advised that we have nothing against [Bolton] now, and I stated that you had suggested, in questioning him, we not show how little we know about the facts in the case.”6 Connelley sat down with Bolton and made the proposal that policemen have made since the beginning of time. He could make no promises, Connelley said. But if Bolton produced information that helped the FBI, it would be taken into account at his sentencing.

  Bolton talked. To Connelley’s amazement, the man was a geyser of information. Bolton laid out every detail of the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, naming every participant and identifying the location of the long-sought safe house in Bensenville. Best of all, Bolton said Fred Barker and Karpis were staying at a lake house in central Florida. He had visited in December, but couldn’t remember how to get there. He said it was south of Ocala, a six-hour drive from Macon, Georgia. Nor could Bolton remember the name of the lake. But, he went on, it was locally famous as the home of a gigantic alligator named Big Joe. At one point, Freddie had towed a pig behind a motorboat in a vain attempt to catch him. That was all Bolton knew.

  Then they found the map. Why it took three days to discover Dock Barker’s map to his family’s Florida hideout is a mystery. It wouldn’t be the last time agents overlooked an important item during a search, a phenomenon that never failed to drive Hoover to apoplexy. When the map was handed to Connelley that Thursday, it had a ring drawn around the area of Lake Weir, twelve miles south of Ocala.

  There were probably dozens of houses around the lake, Connelley could see, as well as several smaller lakes nearby. They had to narrow down the search area, and fast. It was only a matter of time before reporters figured out they had Dock Barker, and when that hit the papers, the Barkers would be gone.

  Saturday, January 12, Connelley and three agents boarded a 1:00 P.M. charter flight that got them to Jacksonville by nightfall. Ten more agents, toting trunkloads of machine guns and rifles, took an overnight train and arrived Sunday morning. Everyone gathered at the Marion Hotel in Ocala. Connelley was in a touchy position. The area south of Ocala was sparsely populated, dotted with tiny towns where strangers would be noticed. He knew only that the Barkers were in the area. Already the arrival of fifteen men in dark suits was attracting notice.

  Connelley moved gingerly. He sent agents to check the maternity ward at Munroe Hospital in Ocala to see if Delores Delaney had been there; she hadn’t. Meantime they needed to find the lake with the alligator, Old Joe. Connelley dispatched two of the Cowboys, Jerry Campbell and Bob Jones, twenty miles east to check out Lake Bryant. Connelley took another agent to look at Lakes Weir and Bowers. Neither group came up with anything, and both felt they had been noticed. Connelley realized they needed help. Monday morning he contacted a deputy sheriff named Milton Dunning and described the story of Old Joe. Dunning said it sounded like Lake Warburg. But when he called a friend on the lake, he found Lake Warburg’s Old Joe had died in 1925.

  Connelley decided to forget about the alligator; every lake in Florida seemed to have an Old Joe. The more he mulled Dock Barker’s map, the more he became convinced the Barkers must be hiding on Lake Weir; it lay at the center of the ring Dock had drawn. BELIEVE WE HAVE SPOT LOCATED, IT BEING LAKE SIX MILES LONG FOUR MILES WIDE WITH MANY HOUSES AND COTTAGES IN VICINITY, he telegraphed Hoover Monday night. EXPECT COVER FURTHER TOMORROW IN EFFORT TO LOCATE ACTUAL HOUSE.

  In Washington, Hoover paced his office. Already rumors were flying in Chicago that Dock Barker had been arrested. They had days, maybe hours, before the story broke. Tuesday morning, as Connelley’s men set out to study Lake Weir, a reporter from the Chicago American called the Bankers Building and was again passed to Mickey Ladd. “What can you tell me about Dock Barker?” the reporter asked.

  Ladd denied Barker was in custody. But the reporter wouldn’t give up. “Where are you holding Dock?” he asked in a second call. After the second call, Ladd called Washington. If they kept Barker in Chicago, Ladd warned, the story would get out.7 Hoover ordered Barker moved to the Detroit office, which had a gun room with bars on the windows. Ladd promised to move him at nightfall.

  As Chicago jousted with the inquisitive reporter that morning, Agent Bob Jones climbed into a motorboat with the deputy sheriff, Milton Dunning, and cruised the shoreline of Lake Weir. While the two inspected lakeside cottages, Connelley took a gamble on the postmaster in the village of Oklawaha, on the north bank of the lake. The postmaster couldn’t identify photographs of Barker or Karpis. But when Connelley asked if any strangers had moved into the area, he mentioned a Mr. Blackburn, who was renting a nice lakefront house with a dock. He received several out-of-town newspapers. The postmaster suggested they approach Mr. Blackburn’s neighbor, a man named Frank Barber, who had once worked as a guard at Leavenworth. Connelley drove to Barber’s house and immediately received the confirmation they needed. Barber identified a photo of Fred Barker as his new neighbor Mr. Blackburn.

  Connelley studied the Blackburn house through the trees. It lay on the south side of Route 41, the area’s main road, and as he cruised past it at 11:00, he caught a glimpse of a small man and an aged woman in the yard. It was Fred Barker and his mother.

  Back in Ocala, Connelley called and briefed Washington. The situation looked ideal. The house sat a hundred yards back from the road, maybe ten from the lakeshore. There were no natural obstructions around it, only what appeared to be a guesthouse, a garage, and some chicken coops. They could use these buildings as cover. Connelley was determined to avoid another Little Bohemia. He sat down with his men later that day, drew detailed maps of the Blackburn house, and outlined every man’s position in the raiding party. Weapons were checked, then double-checked. They would move in before dawn.

  Oklawaha, Florida Tuesday, January 15

  The inky tropical night still enveloped the hamlet of Oklawaha as the FBI cars slid to a stop and extinguished their headlights out on Highway 41. Fifteen agents stepped from the cars into a primeval scene of lush woods dominated by ancient oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Deep in the shadows they could just make out a smattering of darkened houses and outbuildings. There was no movement, no light, no clue anyone knew they were coming.

  The Barker house, a two-story white clapboard with green trim, sat a hundred yards off the road, facing south toward the lake. There was a screened-in porch facing the water in front, a long dock out to a boathouse, and two grassy lanes on either side of the house. Connelley positioned cars at the end of each lane. At 5:30 they moved in and surrounded the house. Connelley took five men and crept down the west side of the property, jogging through a grove of spindly orange trees to the lakefront; they took shelter behind a small guesthouse, which sat thirty paces from the front porch. It was a strangely intimate setting for a potential shoot-out; Connelley’s position was so close to the porch he could underhand a softball and hit it.

  A group of the Cowboys—Charles Winstead, Jerry Campbell, and two other marksmen—took positions behind the stone wall at the roadside, covering the back of the house. Two more agents trotted down the east side of the yard, hunching behind Frank Barber’s home. The last two agents were placed on the highway to block traffic.

  The sun was to rise at seven, and Connelley planned to wait until daylight to make his move. In the meantime they waited. Crouching behind a tree beside Connelley stood Agent Johnny Madala, the onetime office boy, fighting his nerves. This wasn’t Dillinger or Floyd; they wouldn’t be catching the Barkers by surprise. Inside the shadowy house were gang members no doubt armed with Thompson submachine guns. They couldn’t get away, and they probably wouldn’t surrender. His mind drifted to Sam Cowley and Ed Hollis.

  Finally, when the first rays of dawn seeped over Lake Weir, Connelley emerged from behind the guesthouse and took two steps toward the front porch. “Fred Barker, come out!” he shouted. “We are Department of Justice agents, and we have the house surrounded.”

  Silence. Connelley repeated the command. If they came out with their hands raised, he announced, no one would get hurt.

  Connelley stood in the yard. No sound came from the house. Minutes crept by. Another agent shouted for the Barkers to come out and surrender. A few men thought they saw furtive movements behind the window screens, but they couldn’t be sure. The only sound was the lake water, lapping against the dock. In the orange grove, Agent Bob Jones took a block of concrete and laid his rifle across it.

  After a period of time he later estimated to be fifteen minutes, Connelley repeated his challenge: “Fred Barker, come out with your hands up! We have the house surrounded.” Once again, silence. Connelley glanced at Doc White, the smiling Cowboy who had shot Russell Gibson. White stood behind an oak tree to his left.

  Five more minutes passed, and still there was no sign of life. Back in the trees, a few men wondered if the Barkers had already fled town; their car, a black Buick, was parked in the wood-frame garage beside the house, but that meant nothing. Connelley motioned to a pair of rookie agents, Alexander Muzzey and Tom McDade, to fire tear-gas guns. Both men raised their guns and fired, but the gas projectiles missed the windows, thumping against the side of the house and falling to the ground, where gas escaped and began filling the yard.

  “Fred Barker! Kate Barker!” Connelley shouted once again. “Come out now with your hands in the air!”

  Hiding behind a mossy oak to Connelley’s side, Doc White thought he heard a woman’s voice from inside the house.

  “What are you gonna do?” the voice asked.

  There was no answer he could hear. But a moment later the woman’s voice rang clear across the yard: “All right, go ahead!”

  Lying on the ground beside the guesthouse, Connelley glanced at White. Both interpreted this to mean the Barkers were coming out to surrender. Connelley shouted, “Come ahead! Fred, you come out first!”

  Just then a machine gun fired from a second-story window. Bullets chopped the sandy grass all around where Connelley lay and whizzed through the limbs of the orange grove, tiny green leaves fluttering down everywhere. Connelley rolled behind the guesthouse as Doc White fired his .351 rifle. The morning exploded in gunfire. All around the yard agents opened up on the house. White crouched behind his oak tree as bullets struck all around him. He was pinned down.

  Seeing White’s predicament, Connelley rose and raced around the guesthouse, emerging on the far side, closer to the front porch. He raised his shotgun and fired, hoping to draw the fire from White. It worked. Machine-gun bullets chattered against the side of the guesthouse. Connelley dived for cover. So did White. Beside them three agents retreated into the trees.

  For five minutes the gunfight raged. Shots seemed to be coming from all over the house, from bedroom windows at the north and south, and from the front door. And then, as suddenly as it began, the firing stopped. Connelley peered at the upstairs windows. He guessed the gang was conserving ammunition. He needed gas canisters. He sent an agent back to the cars to get more and ordered a second tear-gas attack. Again the canisters thudded against the window screens and fell to the ground. Gas drifted aimlessly into the trees.

  By this time, there was a commotion behind Connelley, in the trees down at the lakefront. The woods were filling with teenage boys.

  Within minutes of the first shots, many of Oklawaha’s three hundred or so residents were peering out their windows and standing in their yards, asking what the sound was. By eight o’clock, crowds of people were milling out on the highway, barred from advancing by two agents. The more curious, many of them teenagers, crept into the woods, where they could make out the figures of FBI men firing at the house. A sixteen-year-old named Harry Scott watched in awe as shots ricocheted through branches above him. “The agents were firing all over the place because Fred was running all around from room to room,” Scott remembered sixty-seven years later. “They must have thought they had the whole gang inside.”

  Across the grassy lane to the east of the Barker house, Mrs. A. F. Westberry was asleep when the shooting began. Bullets seared through the walls of her thin frame house, striking the headboard of her bed. Panic-stricken, she crawled to a window and saw men in dark suits firing at her neighbor’s house. She had no idea who they were, but she was so close she could see flames spouting from gun barrels. Not wanting to see any more, Mrs. Westberry grabbed her daughter’s hand and jumped out a window. Once to the ground the two women began running.

  Fifty yards away, Agent Ralph Brown saw the women take off. He had no idea who they were. For all Brown knew it was Ma Barker making a getaway. He yelled “Stop! Halt! Federal officers!,” but the women kept running. He began firing over the women’s heads, stopping only when they reached another house.

  The outside world, including Hoover, learned of the unfolding gunfight from an Associated Press reporter in Ocala, who received a call from a local hotel wondering what all the shooting was about. On a hunch, the reporter phoned the FBI’s Jacksonville office at 10:45, where the SAC, Rudolph Alt, passed news of the gunfight to Washington.eq Hoover, worried that Connelley might run out of ammunition, told Alt to charter a plane and take extra bullets to Oklawaha.

  Back at the Barker house, intermittent gunfire continued for the next hour. It was an odd, stop-and-start affair. When shots seemed to come from one window, agents fired at it. They were never able to get a tear-gas canister inside. Around ten, firing from the house ebbed. By 10:30 it had gone silent. Connelley watched the windows. There was no way to know if the Barkers had run out of bullets or were waiting to ambush agents storming the house.

  At one point Connelley turned to see a pair of agents bringing up Willie Woodbury, the home’s twenty-five-year-old caretaker. Woodbury and his wife had been asleep in the guesthouse when the first shots rang out, and had crawled under their bed as bullets flew through their windows. Eyeing the house, Connelley asked Woodbury if he would be willing to check inside. Woodbury looked petrified. Connelley assured him the Barkers wouldn’t shoot him. If they were still alive, maybe he could talk them out. Reluctantly Woodbury agreed to try.

  Woodbury scampered to the front porch and tried the screen door. It was locked. He ran back to where Connelley stood by the guesthouse. “That door’s shut,” Woodburry said. The gas was getting to him; he was beginning to cry. Someone handed him a pocketknife.

  “Go back and cut the screen and kick it down,” Connelley said.

  Again Woodbury ran to the door. He cut the screen, shoved the door open, and, pressing a handkerchief over his mouth against the drifting tear gas, stepped across the porch to the front door. Inside, the house was still. Beer bottles were scattered around the dining room. “It’s okay, Ma, it’s me!” Woodbury announced. “They’re makin’ me do this!” There was no answer.

  He saw blood on the stairs. In tears Woodbury crept up the staircase to the second floor. The house was silent. Upstairs, there were four bedrooms. He stepped to the door of the southeast bedroom, Ma’s room, and looked inside. It was empty. The door to the southwest bedroom, where Fred usually slept, was ajar. Woodbury stepped to it.

  Outside, Connelley and his men waited. There was a minute of silence, maybe two, then Woodbury’s face appeared at a bedroom window. Tears were streaming down his face. It was a sight that would stay with several of the agents for years afterward.

  “They both up here!” Woodbury shouted.

  “What are they doing?” Connelley replied.

  “They all dead!”8

  Connelley led a group of agents into the house. They found Ma Barker dead on the bedroom floor, a single bullet hole in her forehead. Fred lay beside her. It was impossible to know how long they had been dead. There was no sign anyone else lived in the house. But a search uncovered an assortment of hotel bills, business cards, and receipts from the El Commodoro Hotel in Miami, the same hotel where Sam Cowley had found a man driving Karpis’s car in November. Several receipts were made out to a “Mr. D. Wagner,” an alias Karpis was known to use. The conclusion was inescapable: Karpis was in Miami. Connelley ordered Ralph Brown and three agents onto the first available flight south. They would hit the ground in Miami at 3:30.

  When Hoover stepped before a Washington press conference that afternoon, he was in a delicate position. There was little chance the Bureau would be criticized for killing Fred Barker; he was a stone-cold killer who had fired on agents with a machine gun. Ma was another matter. Hoover had to explain to the nation’s press just why his men had killed a grand-mother with no criminal record. Rather than wait for the question, he took the offensive, taking advantage of the fact that the Barker-Karpis Gang was the least known of the public enemies.