The Lingering Ghost
of “Ma” Barker
There is a small,
rundown house just outside the town of Ocklawaha, Florida that stands as one of
the most infamous locations in gangland history. The cottage, on the shores of
Lake Weir, stands empty and silent these days, its windows dark and its paint peeling.
A few “private property” signs are posted around but it’s not a place where
most people would venture. The porch sags and the wooden steps lean
precariously to one side but none among the living bother to walk here anymore.
This is a place where dark memories linger and where death occurred on January
16, 1935.
It was here that the
last stand of the feared Barker gang took place and where “Ma” Barker and her
son, Fred, battled it out with G-Men before being shot to death. This horrific
battle occurred more than 70 years ago but there are those who claim that it
has not yet ended for at least one restless spirit that still resides here in
this house.
After Prohibition
came to an end and celebrity gangster Al Capone went to prison, the American
public needed a new fixation for their fascination with crime. President
Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, led by the newly empowered FBI, began a
national war on crime to confront the seeming peril of kidnappers and bandit
gangs that were terrorizing the Midwest, robbing banks and kidnapping wealthy
businessmen for ransom.
The outlaw gangs of
the Depression era were largely inventions of the FBI, with two very
conspicuous exceptions. The Dillinger Gang, consisting initially of convicts he
helped break out of Indiana’s state prison, worked closely as a group until
most of the gang was arrested after a hotel fire in Tucson led to them being
recognized. After Dillinger’s escape from the Crown Point, Indiana, jail, he
was forced to team up with Baby Face Nelson, who had his own band of robbers
and had to grudgingly accept being called the Dillinger Gang by the national
press. Dillinger’s own criminal career only lasted another four months before
he was set up and killed outside the Biograph Theater (or vanished into
history, whichever story the reader is inclined to believe).
The only other
traditional Depression-era outlaw gang was the one headed by Alvin “Creepy”
Karpis and the Barker brothers, mainly Arthur and Fred, and supposedly
captained by the notorious “Ma” Barker. Despite kidnappings, burglaries,
murders, and dozens of bank, train and payroll robberies starting in the 1920s,
the FBI was not even aware of the existence of the Barker gang until an
informant passed on information about them in 1934. Their career had spanned
the entire “public enemy” era and while the Barkers and Alvin Karpis were the
principal members, they often teamed with criminals from other gangs and also
worked with organized crime groups in several cities, notably Chicago.
But despite the
criminals who came and went, the main members of the Barker-Karpis gang were
always the Barkers, who hailed from the backwoods of the Ozark Mountains. The
only real mystery about these outlaws was what role “Ma” Barker actually played
in the gang. Legend, based largely on FBI publicity reports, has it that she
groomed her sons to be lawbreakers and managed their criminal careers, planning
the gang’s many crimes. There’s no doubt that she knew of her sons’ activities,
which made it necessary to constantly move to avoid the police, but what she
did beyond that is open to debate. Alvin Karpis characterized “Ma” as an
ignorant hillbilly who traveled with her sons because they were “family” and
who often came in handy as camouflage. A later member of the gang, Harvey
Bailey, said, “The old woman couldn’t plan breakfast. When we’d sit down to
plan a bank job, she go in the other room and listen to Amos ‘n’ Andy or
hillbilly music on the radio.” He laughed at the idea of “Ma” Barker as a
cunning, ruthless gang leader, plotting their crimes.
J. Edgar Hoover would
later call “Ma” Barker “a monument to the evils of parental indulgence” and
this may be a little closer to the truth. She seemed to be more along the lines
of the mothers of the James boys, the Youngers, the Daltons and the countless
other bandit teams of the rural regions than the bloody figure familiar to
movie-goers and devotees of crime literature. “Ma” Barker was simply devoted to
her sons, whom she chose to believe were driven to their crimes by hard times
and persecution by the authorities. She was likely just a non-judgmental
matriarch of a clan from the Ozarks whose careers just happened to be in crime.
Had she not died with
her son Fred after a gun battle with the FBI, “Ma” Barker might have only
received a short jail sentence for harboring her criminal children, as the
mothers of Bonnie and Clyde did. But once the Feds ended the siege of their
hideout and they discovered that they had killed an old woman who turned out to
be “Ma,” the myth-making and villainizing began.
“Ma” Barker was born
Arizona Donnie Clark near Ash Grove, in Boone Township, which is northwest of
Springfield, Missouri, on October 8, 1873. When she married George Elias Barker
in 1892, she listed her name on her marriage license as “Arrie Clark” but
somewhere along the line adopted the name of Kate. The Barkers lived at
different times in Aurora and on secluded Ozark farms. Between 1893 and 1903,
the Barkers had four sons, Herman, Lloyd, Arthur (who went by “Doc”) and Fred.
In 1910, they moved to Webb City, near Joplin, and there George found work in
the area’s lead and zinc mines and left the care of the children to Kate.
The Barker boys soon
gained a reputation for rowdiness and bad behavior and were often accused of
stealing and shoplifting. Legend has it that neighbors who complained to George
Barker about his sons were simply told, “Talk to Mother. She handles the boys.”
Those who dared confront “Ma” were screamed at, called liars and sent on their
way. It was said that she had a desperate belief that the community had singled
out her sons as scapegoats for every crime committed in town.
On March 5, 1915,
Herman Barker was arrested by the Joplin police for highway robbery. Popular
accounts say that “Ma” got him released and stated that she could no longer
live in such an intolerant town, and moved the whole clan to Tulsa, Oklahoma, –
but this is not entirely the truth. Herman actually remained in Missouri and
was convicted of burglary the following year but escaped from the Springfield
jail. He moved to Billings, Montana, and adopted the alias of Bert Lavender. He
was arrested again for burglary and convicted with a sentence of six to twelve
years in the state prison at Deer Lodge. He languished in prison until 1920,
when he moved to Minnesota with the new alias of Clarence Sharp. He was
apparently not a very good burglar because he was arrested and convicted again
on the same charge and sentenced to another stretch in the state prison at
Stillwater.
The rest of the
family did move to Tulsa, probably because Kate’s mother and stepfather were
living there. They lived in several different places in Tulsa, often with
“Ma’s” family. Before 1918, none of the boys, except Herman, seemed to have
serious criminal records. The remaining boys started hanging out with other
young troublemakers around the old Lincoln Forsythe School and the Central Park
district. They formed the “East Side Gang,” which in time numbered more than 20
young thieves and hoodlums. The gang included Volney “Curly” Davis and Harry
Campbell (later important members of the Barker gang) and William “Boxcar”
Green. Green would pay a leading role in a mass breakout from Leavenworth
Prison in 1931 and then commit suicide rather than be recaptured.
Lloyd Barker actually
steered clear of trouble by enlisting in the Army, where she served as a cook
until he was mustered out in 1919. But trouble was something that seemed to
come looking for his brother, Doc. He was arrested in July 1918 for stealing a
government- owned car in Tulsa. Doc escaped but was recaptured in Joplin in
1920 and returned to Tulsa, then escaped again. He was arrested again, using
the name Claud Dale, for an attempted bank burglary in Coweta, Oklahoma, and
jailed in Muskogee. Ray Terrill was arrested at the same time and both were
transferred to McAlester for safekeeping. Doc was later released by court order
but Terrill was sentenced to three years for second-degree burglary on March 1,
1923. He was subsequently arrested for other crimes but either escaped or
managed to beat the rap.
On August 26, 1921, a
night watchman named Thomas J. Sherrill was killed by burglars at the
construction site for Tulsa’s St. John’s Hospital. Doc was arrested for the
murder, tried and convicted and sentenced to life at McAlester. Nearly a year
later, fellow East Side Gang member Volney Davis was also sent up for a life
sentence for this same murder. Davis escaped from McAlester in January 1925 but
was recaptured just 13 days later in Kansas City.
Lloyd Barker left the
Army in 1919 but mostly bummed around until being arrested for vagrancy in
1921. On June 17, with William Green and another man, he robbed a mail truck at
Baxter Springs, Kansas, a crime for which he was arrested and convicted. He was
sent to Leavenworth for a 25-year sentence and this marked the end of Lloyd’s
criminal career. Paroled in 1938, he went straight and re-enlisted in the Army
during World War II. He spent the war as a cook at a P.O.W. camp at Fort
Custer, Michigan and when it ended, received an honorable discharge. He married
and then managed a bar and grill in Denver for many years. In March 1949, his
wife killed him with a shotgun at their home in Westminster, Colorado. She was
placed in an insane asylum shortly afterwards.
Herman Barker was
released from prison in 1925 and formed a small gang, burglarizing banks and
stores throughout Oklahoma and the southwest. This group, sometimes known as
the Terrill-Barker-Inman gang, included Herman Barker, Ray Terrill, Elmer Inman
and others. Their favorite technique, credited to Terrill, was to back a stolen
truck up to a bank, haul out the safe with a winch, and then drive away to open
it at their convenience. For a time, the gang used the Radium Springs Health
Resort near Salina, Oklahoma, as a hideout. Radium Springs was operated by
Herman Barker and his common-law wife, Carol, under the names of Mr. and Mrs.
J.H. Hamilton, but it was actually owned by Q.P. McGhee, a corrupt former judge
from Miami, Oklahoma, who worked with the gang and served as their attorney.
McGhee was always around to bail out captured gang members or to gain their
release with fraudulent warrants that claimed they were wanted elsewhere. The
health resort was heavily armed and fitted with a powerful electric light that
was used as a warning beacon in the event of a raid. Safes stolen by the gang were
looted and then dumped off a nearby bridge into the Grand River.
Fred Barker soon
joined up with his brother at Radium Springs. Fred had been arrested in Miami,
Oklahoma, in September 1922 and a month later, was jailed in Tulsa on a charge
of vagrancy for 30 days. In June 1923, he was convicted of armed robbery and
sentenced to five years at the state reformatory in Granite. Fred was paroled,
only to be arrested again for robbing a bank. He was later arrested as a
fugitive in Little Rock, Arkansas; for burglary in Ponca City; and was wounded
in a gun battle with police in Kansas City. He managed to get away from every
one of these scrapes with no jail time, likely thanks to his brother’s friend
McGhee, who was often accompanied on his trips by a crooked Miami County
deputy. But his luck would not hold out. While using the alias of Ted Murphy,
Fred was arrested again in Winfield, Kansas, in November 1926 for burglary and
grand larceny. This time, he was convicted and sentenced to a term of five to
ten years at the state prison at Lansing.
Earlier, in June
1926, Herman Barker and Elmer Inman were arrested for car theft in Kansas and
extradited to Oklahoma, where they were both wanted for robbery. McGhee saw to
it that they did not stay in custody for long. Herman, charging with robbing a
county attorney in Miami, was released on bond on June 22. Inman was charged
with bank and post office robbery in Ketchum, also made bond. Inman was
arrested again in Ardmore, Oklahoma, with Ray Terrill, for burglary. Together,
they overpowered a jailer on September 27 and escaped. Inman was recaptured on
December 27 while burglarizing a store in Oklahoma City. He was convicted and
sentenced to seven years in prison but escaped by jumping from a train en route
to McAlester on March 17.
During the early
morning hours of January 17, 1927, members of the gang attempted to burglarize
the First National Bank at Jasper, Missouri, near Joplin. They arrived in two
cars and a truck and entered the bank by cutting bars from one of the rear
windows. They managed to get the bank’s safe onto a cart and were wheeling it
out the back door when a baker, who was coming in to make bread for his
business down the street, spotted them and telephoned the night telephone
operator, who alerted the town marshall. Police officers from Joplin and
Carthage quickly deputized a group of citizens to help apprehend the gang and
rushed to the scene. The burglars were forced to abandon the safe and the truck
but still managed to escape in their two cars. One of the cars sped west into
Kansas. Herman Barker and Ray Terrill were in the other car and they returned
to their hideout, a small house at 602 East Main Street in Carterville,
Missouri. Unfortunately, the local police had been watching this house, thanks to
an anonymous tip that stated that it was “the headquarters of an organized band
of outlaws.” A gun battle followed and Barker was wounded and taken into
custody, along with Terrill.
Herman was extradited
to Fayetteville, Arkansas, on bank robbery charges. Terrill, a McAlester
escapee who still owed the state 20 years on his earlier bank robbery
conviction, was returned to Oklahoma but escaped again, this time jumping out
of a moving car as it neared the prison. On March 30, Herman also escaped by
sawing apart the bars of his cell. When he left, he took a suspected forger
named Claude Cooper with him.
The gang was soon
back to work again. On May 12, they stole a safe containing $207,000 in cash
and securities from the state bank at McCune, Kansas. On August 1, a man came
into the American National Bank in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and, using the name R.D.
Snodgrass, cashed three American Express Travelers checks. “Snodgrass” then
left the bank and climbed into a blue Chrysler with Idaho plates. A woman with
dark hair was also in the car. The teller quickly identified the checks as
having been stolen during a Buffalo, Kansas, bank robbery in December 1926. He
chased after “Snodgrass” who hurriedly drove away. “Snodgrass” was actually
Herman Barker and the woman who was with him was his wife, Carol. Deputy
Sheriff Arthur E. Osborn managed to catch up with the Barkers’ car at Pine
Bluffs, about 40 miles east of Cheyenne. As the deputy approached the car, his
own gun still holstered, Barker pulled out a .32-caliber automatic and shot the
officer two times before speeding away. Osborn was found a half hour later,
dead on the side of the highway. At first, his killer was mistakenly identified
as Elmer Inman.
On August 29, after
robbing an icehouse in Newton, Kansas, Herman Barker and two other men shot it
out with police officers in Wichita. During the battle, Herman killed another
cop, Patrolman Joseph E. Marshall. Herman was hit several times and was so
badly wounded that he shot himself rather than be taken alive. Ray Terrill and
Elmer Inman were captured at Hot Springs, Arkansas, on November 26 and were
sent to the Oklahoma state prison. Herman’s wife, Carol, subsequently pleaded
guilty as an accessory in Deputy Osborn’s murder and admitted that it was
Herman, not Elmer Inman, who had killed the officer. She was sentenced to serve
two to four years but since Wyoming did not have a place for female prisoners,
she was sent to the Colorado state prison in Canon City to serve her time. She
was paroled in October 1929 after serving two years. Soon afterward, she was
working as a prostitute out of the Carlton Hotel in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, and
briefly became the girlfriend of Alvin Karpis. Karpis would later marry her
niece, Dorothy Slayman. Karpis left Dorothy in late 1931 and following in her
aunt’s footsteps, she became a prostitute.
George and Kate
Barker buried Herman at the Williams Timberhill Cemetery near Welch, Oklahoma,
where they and Fred would eventually join him. The family plot was purchased
for them by McGhee, who would soon be convicted of aiding and abetting Herman
Barker and Elmer Inman. Soon after, George left his wife. Apparently, Kate and
a friend had been seeing other men in Tulsa. George moved back to Webb City,
Missouri, and spent the remainder of his life operating a filling station. Kate
took up with an alcoholic sign painter named Arthur Dunlop and they moved into
a house in Tulsa together. Dunlop spent more time drinking that painting and,
with Herman dead, Kate had little money to live on. After she was released from
prison, her daughter-in-law, Carol, supported Kate and bought her groceries.
Kate despised Carol, just as she would all the other women in her son’s lives.
She constantly did everything she could to discourage and sabotage all of the
Barker boys’ relationships with other women. According to Alvin Karpis, “Ma
didn’t like female competition. She wanted to be the only woman who counted
with her boys.”
Alvin Karpis, who was
born in Montreal, Canada, in 1908, met Fred Barker at the Kansas state prison
in 1930. While earlier incarcerated at the State Industrial Reformatory in
Hutchinson, Kansas, Karpis became a prison protégé of a safe-cracker and
cop-killer named Lawrence DeVol. The two escaped from Hutchinson in March 1929
and engaged in a burglary spree. Recaptured in Kansas City in March 1930,
Karpis was returned to the reformatory but then was transferred to the
penitentiary after three knives were found in his possession. He still managed
to earn time off his sentence by working in the prison-owned coal mine. In
reality, he hired lifers to work in his place, another trick that he learned
from DeVol. Karpis and Fred Barker became close friends and agreed to form a
criminal partnership when they were released.
Fred was paroled in
March 1931 and Karpis was released a few months later, in May. They contacted
Carol and Ma Barker in Tulsa and Ma sent a telegram to Fred, who was living in
Joplin with another ex-convict named Jimmie Creighton, who was wanted for
kidnapping, robbery and attempted murder. Creighton was also a suspect, with
Lawrence DeVol, in the April 1930 murders of two businessmen at the Hotel
Severs in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Karpis and Barker went to work burglarizing homes
and businesses in the area.
On the night of May
16, Jimmie Creighton shot and killed a local man named Coyne Hatten outside the
Morgan Drug Store in Webb City – apparently because Hatten failed to apologize
enough for bumping into him on the street. Karpis and Barker fled back to Tulsa
in Creighton’s car and Creighton was later convicted and sentenced to life in
prison for the murder.
On June 10, Tulsa
authorities arrested Fred Barker, Alvin Karpis, Sam Coker and Joe Howard.
Karpis was transferred to Henryetta, Oklahoma, to face charges of burglarizing
a jewelry store. He returned the stolen jewelry and entered a guilty plea for
burglary on September 11. He received a sentence of four years but it was
suspended since he had made restitution and had already served three months in
the country jail. Barker was transferred to Claremore, Oklahoma, on another
burglary charge but escaped on August 16 with several other prisoners. Coker
was returned to McAlester to complete a 30-year sentence for bank robbery. Howard
was released on bond and disappeared.
Karpis joined Fred
and Ma Barker, along with Arthur Dunlop, on a rented farm outside Thayer,
Missouri, close to the Arkansas state line. On June 20, Phoenix Donald, who was
better known as Bill “Lapland Willie” Weaver, was paroled after serving six
years of a life sentence for murder and bank robbery and came to live on his
sister’s farm only two miles away from Karpis and the Barkers. On October 7,
Karpis, Barker, Weaver and a man named Jimmie Wilson robbed the People’s Bank
at Mountain View, Missouri. They made off with $14,000 in cash and securities.
On the night of
December 18, a burglary occurred at McCallon’s Clothing Store in West Plains,
Missouri. Two strangers had been seen in town that day driving a 1931 DeSoto
and were suspicious enough to residents that a couple of them wrote down the
car’s license plate number. The following day, three men drove a 1931 DeSoto
into the Davidson Motor Garage in town to have two flat tires repaired. A
repairman noticed that the tires matched tread marks that had been left by the
burglar’s car and he told his boss. The garage owner called Sheriff Roy Kelly
and the owner of the clothing store, Clarence McCallon. When they arrived in a
police car, the occupants of the DeSoto opened fire on them. Alvin Karpis fired
the shots that killed the sheriff, putting four bullets into Kelly’s chest.
Barker, armed with a .38-caliber revolver, hit the sheriff in the right arm.
Barker and Karpis quickly fled the scene, leaving behind the third occupant of
the DeSoto, a college student named J. Richard Gross, whom they had picked up
while hitchhiking. He was arrested but later released when it was realized that
he had definitely gotten in a car with the wrong people.
Lawmen raided the
farm near Thayer, but found that it was abandoned. The house was located on a
hill, with a good view in every direction, and was surrounded by barbed wire.
The front gate had been fitted with an electric alarm bell that warned the
occupants of the house of intruders. Inside, the police found photographs of
the Barkers, Karpis and Dunlop, along with letters, including one to Kate from
Lloyd Barker in Leavenworth, thanking her for sending Christmas gifts. They
also found an interior drawing of the First National Bank of West Plains.
West Plains Police
Chief James A. Bridges and Howell County Sheriff Lula Kelly, who succeeded her
murdered husband, offered a $1,200 reward -- $500 each for the arrest and
conviction of Alvin Karpis and Fred Barker and $100 each for the arrest of
“A.W. Dunlop and Old Lady Arrie Barker, Mother of Fred Barker.” This was the
first official notice of Ma Barker, who would make no further news until she
was killed three years later by federal agents.
The Barkers, Karpis,
Weaver and Dunlop deserted the southern Missouri farms and fled to the home of
their friend, Herb Farmer, near Joplin. Farmer was an old pal of the Barkers
and owned a chicken farm in an isolated, rural area. He was a confidence man
with a long record of arrests who reputedly harbored a number of outlaws,
including, at one time, Pretty Boy Floyd. Farmer would later serve a term at
Alcatraz as one of the Kansas City Massacre conspirators. When the
Barker-Karpis gang arrived in Joplin, Farmer suggested that they go to St. Paul
and contact Harry Sawyer. Coincidentally, Karpis’ friend, Lawrence DeVol,
arrived in St. Paul around this same time. He was on the run after killing a
policeman in Kirksville, Missouri, as well as being wanted for murders in
Oklahoma, Nebraska and Iowa.
For many years, St.
Paul had been a safe town for criminals. Out-of-town fugitives could hide out
there without interference from the police, as long as they paid a protection
fee and committed no crimes within the city limits. In 1928, the fixer for this
system, a bootlegger named “Dapper” Dan Hogan, had been killed by a car bomb
and his successor, Harry Sawyer, imposed even fewer restrictions. He no longer
enforced the rule about committing crimes within the city limits, as long as he
received a cut of the action. The police department was as corrupt as ever and
visiting criminals were still safe from arrest. A city that had been safe from
crime since the early 1900s was now as dangerous as any other place in America.
After checking in
with Sawyer, the Barker-Karpis group rented an apartment at 1031 South Robert
Street in West St. Paul. Fred and Karpis again went to work committing small
burglaries, thefts and hijackings. In December 1931 and January 1932, they
staged carefully planned nighttime raids on the Minnesota towns of Pine River
and Cambridge. Several citizens were taken hostage and the gangsters
systematically looted a number of major businesses and private homes. In
addition, thanks to Harry Sawyer, they also made their most important future
business connections.
The formation of the
Barker-Karpis Gang, as it was when it began to make headlines, might be dated
to the night of December 31, 1931. Karpis and Fred Barker attended a New Year’s
Eve party at Harry Sawyer’s Green Lantern Saloon on Wabasha Street, where they
met some of the most infamous members of the Midwest’s underworld. They
included Minneapolis crime boss Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld, Capone mobster
Gus Winkeler and several leading bank robbers like Harvey Bailey, Tommy Holden,
Francis “Jimmy” Keating, “Big Homer” Wilson, and Frank “Jelly” Nash, a former
member of the old Al Spencer gang who may have known the Barkers during their
younger days in Tulsa.
Nash had escaped from
Leavenworth in October 1930, as had Holden and Keating. They each had been
sentenced to serve 25-years after a mail train robbery in the Chicago suburb of
Evergreen Park. They arrived in Leavenworth in May 1928, where they met Nash
and other Spencer gang veterans. They also met a minor Oklahoma bootlegger
named George Kelly, who was serving a short sentence for smuggling liquor onto
an Indian reservation. Kelly, whose real name was George Barnes, would later
make headlines as “Machine Gun” Kelly, but at the time he worked in the
photographic section of the prison’s record room. On February 28, 1930, Holden
and Keating walked out of Leavenworth, using trusty passes that had been made
by Kelly. They fled to Chicago, then to St. Paul, where they were joined later
that year by Kelly and Nash.
In St. Paul, Holden
and Keating teamed up with Harvey Bailey, who had been committing bank
robberies for nearly a decade. A former bootlegger, Bailey had only been
arrested once and had never served any prison time. Law enforcement agencies
considered him one of the country’s top bank robbers, however, after his
suspected involvement in the Denver Mint robbery of 1922. Bailey’s regular
associates included “Big Homer” Wilson, another longtime bank robber; Charles
Fitzgerald, a criminal in his 60s with ties to the Chicago mob; Verne Miller, a
decorated World War I veteran and former South Dakota sheriff turned
bootlegger, bank robber and killer, whose increasing mental instability may
have eventually led to his murder by other gangsters who were endangered by his
erratic behavior and Bernard Phillips, alias “Big Bill” Courtney, a former
Chicago policeman who saw more money in being a bandit.
The group formed a
gang with a sometimes-floating membership and went on to commit a number of
spectacular robberies, cleaning out banks all over Iowa, Nebraska, Texas,
Minnesota and Wisconsin. On October 20, 1931, they robbed the Kraft State Bank
at Menomonie, Wisconsin, and Cashier James Kraft, the son of the bank’s
president, was taken hostage and killed. Two gang members, Charlie Harmon and
Frank Weber, were found shot to death after the robbery, their bodies lying in
a pool of blood next to that of James Kraft. It is believed that they were shot
to death by other gang members for killing the hostage. Harmon’s widow, Paula,
who was known as “Fat-Witted,” later hooked up with Fred Barker.
The deaths of Harmon
and Weber left vacancies in the gang’s membership and Barker and Karpis soon
joined up. On March 29, 1932, they joined Tommy Holden, Bernard Phillips and
Lawrence DeVol in the well-executed holdup of the North American Branch of the
Northwestern National Bank in Minneapolis. No one was injured or killed and the
gang escaped with $266,500 in cash, coins and bonds. They escaped in a fast
Lincoln that belonged to an executive of the National Lead Battery Co. of St.
Paul. It had been stolen just for this job.
A short time later,
Nick Hannegraf, the son of the Barkers’ landlady, recognized Karpis and Fred
Barker from their photographs in True Detective magazine and dutifully called
the police. St. Paul Police Chief Tom Brown, who was on Harry Sawyer’s payroll,
advised Hannegraf to report this at the Central Police Station. The desk
sergeant there told Hannegraf that he would have to come back later and see
Inspector James Crumley, who also took cash from Sawyer. Seven hours after the
first call was made to Brown, St. Paul police officers raided the house on
South Robert Street but, of course, the Barkers, Karpis and Arthur Dunlop were
long gone. The telephone call likely cost Dunlop his life. His body was found the
next day on Lake Fremstadt, near Webster, Wisconsin. He had been shot three
times at close range. It was theorized that he was killed by Karpis and Barker
because they suspected him of being an informer.
After the police
raid, the gang temporarily shifted its base of operations to Kansas City. The
Barkers and Karpis stayed at the Longfellow Apartments for a time as “Mrs. A.F.
Hunter and sons” then rented an apartment at 414 West Forty-Sixth Terrace.
Bailey, Nash, Holden, Keating, Phillips and DeVol also rented apartments
nearby. On June 17, they robbed the Citizens National Bank in Fort Scott,
Kansas, of $47,000. That same day, a pal of Fred’s named Jess Doyle was
released from the Kansas state prison and joined the gang. Some of the proceeds
from the bank robbery were spent on a lavish party for Doyle’s prison release
at the Barker-Karpis apartment.
On July 7, Kansas
City police officers, accompanied by Special Agent Raymond Caffrey of the
future FBI (it was still known then as the Justice Department’s Bureau of
Investigation), arrested Harvey Bailey, Tommy Holden and Francis Keating on the
Old Mission Golf Course after allowing them to play a few holes. Their fourth,
gang member Bernard Phillips, escaped to warn the others. Phillips was later
suspected of betraying the three captured men, particularly after other gang
members learned that he used to be a policeman. Phillips disappeared a year
later on a trip to New York with Frank Nash and Verne Miller. He was never seen
again.
At the time of the
arrest, a Liberty bond from a recent bank robbery was found in Bailey’s pocket
and turned over to Fort Scott authorities as evidence for his subsequent trial.
Holden and Keating were returned to Leavenworth and the rest of the gang headed
back to Minnesota. The Barkers, Karpis and Frank Nash rented a cabin on White
Bear Lake. Barker and Karpis then contacted a shady Tulsa attorney named J.
Earl Smith, who was retained by the gang to defend Bailey. Smith took the money
but never showed up in court and Bailey ended up with a court-appointed lawyer
named James G. Sheppard. On August 16, Smith was found shot to death at the
Indian Hills Country Club near Tulsa, where he had gone after receiving a
mysterious telephone call from an unknown client. The next day, Bailey was
sentenced to 10 to 50 years in the Lansing, Kansas, state prison. Bailey later
escaped from prison on Memorial Day 1933, along with nine others using smuggled
guns. Frank Nash and the Barker-Karpis gang would be erroneously suspected of
arranging the jail break, but they had nothing to do with it. Bailey was
recaptured after a short bank robbery spree and accused of involvement in the
Kansas City Massacre and the kidnapping of an Oklahoma oilman. No solid
evidence ever connected him to either crime.
With most of the
members now in prison, Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis were left running the gang.
On July 25, 1932, Barker, Karpis, DeVol, Jess Doyle and Earl Christman robbed
the Cloud County Bank at Concordia, Kansas, and made off with about $250,000 in
cash and bonds. On August 18, they pulled a second job at the Second National
Bank of Beloit, Wisconsin, for $50,000.
Arthur “Doc” Barker
was paroled from his life sentence at McAlester in September 1932 on the
condition that he leave Oklahoma forever. He was more than happy to oblige and
after a brief stop to visit with his father, he joined the gang in St. Paul. He
came along for the next several robberies as the gang hit the State Bank &
Trust Co. in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, the Citizens National Bank at Wahpeton,
North Dakota, and then a bank in Amboy, Minnesota, where Lawrence DeVol was
recognized as one of the gunmen.
Doc Barker wanted to
arrange a parole for his pal, Volney Davis, who was still in McAlester for the
Sherrill murder. Karpis managed to contact a “big-time operator” in St. Paul
who said that he could arrange to get Davis an early release for $1,500. The
gang paid the money and unbelievably, Davis, a convicted murderer and former
escapee, was released from the Oklahoma state prison in November. He was not
paroled but was granted a two-year “leave of absence,” after which he was due
to return back to prison in 1934. He must have been laughing all the way to St.
Paul, where he joined up with the gang and a short time later, accompanied Ma
Barker on a trip to California to visit her sister. Soon after this, Davis’
girlfriend, Edna “The Kissing Bandit” Murray, escaped from the women’s state
prison in Jefferson City, Missouri. It was her third prison break. Edna had
been serving a 25-year sentence for highway robbery and when Davis learned of
her escape, he returned to the Midwest to join her and her teenaged son,
Preston Paden.
The Barker-Karpis
gang, which now also included Bill Weaver and Verne Miller, robbed the Third
Northwestern Bank in Minneapolis on December 16. During the robbery, two
policemen and an innocent bystander were killed. They escaped with $22,000 in
cash and $92,000 in bonds but the heat from this robbery was tremendous, thanks
to the murders. They decided to get out of the area for awhile and Miller
returned to Kansas City while the rest of the gang, except for DeVol, drove out
to Reno. DeVol stayed behind and went on a drinking binge. While intoxicated,
he crashed a party on Grand Avenue in St. Paul and was arrested --- still carrying
$17,000 in cash from the robbery. He was convicted of robbery and murder and
sentenced to a life term at Stillwater. Three years later, he was transferred
to the St. Peter Hospital for the Criminally Insane and escaped with 15 other
inmates in June 1936. After a series of crimes, he was killed a month later
during a gun battle with police in Enid, Oklahoma.
The gang wintered in
Reno and San Francisco and spent most of their time making good contacts in the
Reno gambling rackets and other places. It was during this time that Karpis met
Illinois prison escapee Lester Gillis, who would become better known under his
alias of George “Baby Face” Nelson. Karpis sometimes had dinner with Nelson,
his wife, Helen, and their children, Ronald and Darlene, at their apartment in
Reno. Both men had grown up in the same part of Chicago and became good
friends. Nelson introduced Karpis to the ex-convict owner of a private hospital
in Vallejo, California, Thomas “Tobe” Williams. His staff performed illegal
abortions and treated Nelson’s wife, Helen, as a regular patient. They also
took care of any sick and wounded fugitives under any alias they wanted to use.
Karpis had his tonsils removed there in February 1933, just before the gang
returned to the Midwest. Another useful contact was Frank Cochran, a Reno
airplane mechanic and garage owner who serviced cars for outlaws. He had fitted
Nelson’s car with a siren to help him escape from close calls.
In return for the
favors that he had done for the gang, Karpis connected Nelson with an
experienced gang of bank robbers who were headquartered near Long Beach,
Indiana. In the summer of 1933, he joined Eddie Bentz, a semi-retired collector
of old books and coins and several younger men, including Tommy Carroll and
Homer Van Meter, a prison friend of Dillinger’s, who, along with Dillinger, had
recently gotten out of the Michigan City, Indiana prison. It was during this
time that Nelson and Dillinger first became acquainted.
The Barker-Karpis
Gang returned to St. Paul in February but a month later, moved to Chicago when
some of Harry Sawyer’s police contacts informed him that the gang’s apartment
was about to be raided. Running low on money, they planned another bank
robbery. On April 4, Karpis, Fred and Doc Barker, Frank Nash, Volney Davis,
Earl Christman, Jess Doyle and Eddie Green robbed the First National Bank in
Fairbury, Nebraska, and managed to get away with $151,350 in cash and bonds.
They narrowly escaped after a violent gun battle that left a sheriff’s deputy
and two civilians wounded. Earl Christman was also wounded and was taken to
Verne Miller’s home in Kansas City. Miller contacted an underworld doctor but
Christman died before he could be treated. He was buried by the gang in an
unmarked grave outside the city.
Soon after the gang
returned to St. Paul, Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis were contacted by bootlegger
Jack Peifer and asked to come to a meeting at his Hollyhocks nightclub. Peifer
introduced them to two friends, Fred Goetz and Byron “Monty” Bolton, who worked
for the Capone Outfit in Chicago and who had allegedly been involved in the St.
Valentine’s Day Massacre. Goetz claimed to be one of the gunmen and Bolton was
a lookout for the hit. The two occasionally did freelance work and had a
proposition for the Barkers and Karpis. They were hiring help for a kidnapping
that Jack Peifer had arranged in St. Paul and wanted the gang in on the job.
Barker and Karpis agreed to go along and were joined by Doc and Charles
Fitzgerald when they kidnapped William A. Hamm, Jr. on June 15, 1933. Hamm was
blindfolded and driven to the Chicago suburb of Bensenville to wait for his
family to raise his ransom of $100,000. Hamm later reported that he and the
gang spent the next week cooking and playing cards and that he never feared for
his life in their presence. In fact, he added, they got along quite well.
On the same day as
the Hamm kidnapping, Frank Nash was captured by the FBI in Hot Springs,
Arkansas. Two days later, as he was being returned to Leavenworth, Nash and his
captors were ambushed at the Union Station in Kansas City. In a release attempt
gone wrong, Nash, a federal agent and three other officers were shot to death
in what became known as the Kansas City Massacre.
On August 30, 1933,
the Barker-Karpis Gang robbed the South St. Paul post office and made off with
the Stockyards National Bank payroll, which amounted to $33,000. During the
heist, one police officer was killed and another was wounded. A few weeks
later, on September 22, the gang pulled another job, this time using a car that
had been equipped with smoke-screen and oil-slick devices. They robbed
messengers for the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago, killing another policeman
and wrecking their tricked-out automobile in the process. They managed to
escape, only to discover that the bags they took contained useless checks. The
car was traced to the shop of Joe Bergl at 5346 West Cermak Road in Cicero,
right next door to the Cotton Club, which was owned by Ralph Capone. Bergl’s
partner in the business turned out to be Gus Winkeler, whose customers, the FBI
later learned, included members of the Capone mob and visiting outlaws like
“Machine Gun” Kelly. Some had steel plates installed in their cars to protect
them from gunfire, while the economy versions of the “bulletproof” car had
their trunks and backseats stuffed with thick Chicago telephone directories.
The heat garnered
from this attempted robbery sent the gang on another vacation to Reno. When
they returned to St. Paul, they were met by an annoyed Harry Sawyer, who felt
that he had been shortchanged on the Hamm kidnapping. He convinced the gang to
pull another kidnapping, which would be more profitable for him. Their victim
was Edward G. Bremer, president of the Commercial State Bank of St. Paul,
against whom Sawyer had a personal grudge. Bremer was taken on January 17, 1934
and was also transported to Bensenville, where he was held for nearly a month
until his family raised a ransom of $200,000. Things do not go as smoothly as
they had with the Hamm kidnapping. Gasoline cans used by the gang were found
along the route of the ransom drop and one of them bore the fingerprints of Doc
Barker. Flashlights used by the gang as signals at the payoff location were
traced to a store in St. Paul, where a clerk recognized Karpis as the man who
bought them. Doc Barker and Alvin Karpis were added to the FBI’s “Most Wanted”
list. The money from the kidnapping was so hot that the Barkers’ Reno gambling
connections wouldn’t launder it, as they had the money from the Hamm abduction.
Instead, the money starting turning up in Chicago and several people, including
corrupt politician John J. “Boss” McLaughlin, were arrested.
In March 1934, Barker
and Karpis paid a visit to Dr. Joseph Moran, Chicago’s leading underworld
surgeon. Moran had offices at the notorious Irving Hotel on Irving Park
Boulevard, near where the police had failed to trap Dillinger on his way to
another doctor’s office the previous November. Once a prominent physician,
Moran had served time for one or more botched abortions and, in prison, met
some powerful gangsters who set him up as the city’s number one doctor for
wounded gangsters, particularly for members of the Outfit. Moran tried to alter
the faces of Karpis and Barker through plastic surgery, but didn’t have much
success. However, he did manage to remove Karpis’ fingerprints during a painful
operation using a scalpel. Moran later came to a bitter end. When he was drunk,
which was often, he tended to brag about some of the clients that he worked on
and unwisely suggested to some members of the criminal community that his
talents were indispensable. As a result, he was taken on a traditional “one-way
ride” and his body was buried somewhere in the Chicagoland region.
It was in April of
that year that the FBI first really learned about the organized gang that was
operated by the Barkers and Alvin Karpis. A former member of the Barker-Karpis
gang, who had taken up with Dillinger, named Eddie Green was shot by FBI agents
in St. Paul. Before he died, he babbled in delirium for eight days in the
hospital, giving details of past crimes as federal agents took notes. His wife,
Bessie, who was captured at the same time, also gave up a lot of information to
save herself. The Greens gave the FBI the first detailed knowledge of the gang.
From Bessie Green, they learned that Karpis and the Barker brothers traveled
with a dowdy old woman who (according to FBI notes) “posed” as their mother.
This was when Ma Barker entered the picture for the Feds.
By the end of the
year, the Barker-Karpis gang was scattered all over the country, trying to stay
away from the FBI and still attempting to pass their share of the Bremer
ransom. Various gang members were captured and Bremer money turned up as far
away as Havana, where Karpis lived for a brief time with his pregnant girlfriend,
Dolores Delaney. Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde and Baby Face
Nelson – the most famous “public enemies” in America – were all gunned down and
killed in 1934, leaving only the Barker-Karpis Gang on the loose.
J. Edgar Hoover was
desperate to bring these bandits to justice and the FBI’s desperation had led
tragic mistakes in the past, especially at Little Bohemia when Melvin Purvis
was trying to track down the Dillinger gang. On January 8, 1935, they almost
made another terrible mistake in Chicago. On that morning, an army of agents
raided a courtyard apartment building at 3920 North Pine Grove, without
alerting the Chicago police. They caused such a commotion with gas and gunfire
that city cops rushed to the scene, unaware of what was going on. A general
bloodbath was narrowly averted by the arrival of the cops, who discovered that
the feds had lobbed tear-gas shells into the wrong apartment. When their
mistake was realized, the agents launched an assault on the right place and
Byron Bolton, Clara Fisher Gibson, and Ruth Heidt, widow of a recently murdered
gang member, surrendered as soon as they could. However, Clara’s husband,
Russell Gibson, chose to fight. He put on a bulletproof vest, armed himself
with an automatic rifle and a .32-caliber pistol and tried to escape out the
back of the building. Gibson barely made it onto a fire escape before an FBI
agent with a Winchester rifle put a bullet into his chest. He died a short time
later. Gibson, who had joined the gang as a money-passer after the Bremer
kidnapping, had been wanted since 1929 for a bank messenger robbery in Oklahoma
City.
Earlier on the same
day as the battle on Pine Grove Avenue, which angered the Chicago police along
with the newspapers, Doc Barker and his girlfriend, Mildred Kuhlman, were
arrested by FBI agents outside their apartment at 432 Surf Street. Inside,
agents found a map of Florida with the region around Ocala circled. Doc refused
to say what the mark on the map meant but Byron Bolton later told his
interrogators that Ma and Fred Barker, and possibly other gang members, were
living next to a lake in Florida.
Eight days later, on
January 16, 1935, a small army of federal agents surrounded a house that was
located on Lake Weir in Ocklawaha, Florida, and ordered the occupants of the
place to surrender. The only reply they received was a hail of machine gun
fire, so the agents opened up on the house. During what became a prolonged
battle, the feds poured more than 1,500 rounds into the two-story house. About
45 minutes after all return fire had ceased, Inspector J.E. Connelly sent
Willie Woodbury, the Barkers’ black handyman (whom the Barkers would presumably
spare) into the house to see if any of the occupants were still alive. After
cautiously going inside, Woodbury found Fred Barker dead in an upstairs bedroom
with 14 bullet holes in his body. Ma Barker was found nearby, also dead. She
had been shot three times.
The bodies of Fred Barker and his mother, Kate
According to J. Edgar
Hoover’s publicity machine, a Thompson machine gun was found on the floor
between Ma and Fred (although it would later be claimed that it was planted
there by FBI agents to justify the murder of Ma Barker). The newspapers, using
Hoover’s account, embellished the story and armed Ma with a “smoking machine
gun.” Hoover stated that Fred had given her the Thompson and kept another for
himself. Agents also found two shotguns, two .45 automatics, a .380 automatic,
a Winchester rifle, a large quantity of ammunition, several bulletproof vests
and $14,293 in cash in the house. The arsenal was carefully arranged on the
front steps so that newspaper photographers and reporters would be able to get
a good look.
The bodies of the
Barkers remained in the Ocala morgue until October, when George Barker was
finally able to get together enough money to have them shipped home. Later, he
successfully sued for the recovery of the cash seized after the battle, because
the government could not prove that any of it was ransom money.
Doc Barker and other
members of the gang were convicted for the Bremer kidnapping and sentenced to
life in prison, partly on the testimony of Byron Bolton, who took a deal for
the Bremer and Hamm abductions and received concurrent sentences of three to
five years. Doc was sent to Leavenworth and then Alcatraz. On Friday, January
13, 1939, he was shot to death by guards as he attempted to escape from the
island prison using a crude raft. He was buried at Olivet Memorial Park
Cemetery in Colma, California, identified by only his prison number. He remains
there today, even though a marker with his name on it can be found in the
Barker plot at Williams Timberhill Cemetery in Oklahoma.
After the killing of
Ma and Fred Barker, Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell fled to Atlantic City. They
were cornered by police at the Dan-Mor Hotel on January 20, 1935, but managed
to shoot their way out and escape. Their girlfriends, Dolores Delaney and
Wynona Burdette, were captured and sentenced to five years in prison for
harboring fugitives. Dolores gave birth to a son while in prison, named him
Raymond Alvin Karpis, and gave him to Karpis’ parents in Chicago to take care
of.
Karpis and Campbell
kidnapped a doctor in Pennsylvania and stole his car, releasing him unharmed in
Ohio and dumping the car in Michigan. They later organized a new gang and
committed several mail robberies in Ohio before the FBI finally caught up with
Karpis. He was staying in a rooming house in New Orleans when he was finally
arrested by J. Edgar Hoover himself. Stung by the criticism that he lacked
police experience and let his men take all of the risks, the FBI director
rushed to New Orleans by airplane and took personal credit for arresting Karpis
on May 1, 1936. Karpis later remarked that Hoover stayed safely out of range
until agents were holding him at gunpoint, then he took charge for the benefit
of the newspapers. Since no one remembered to bring handcuffs for Hoover’s “big
arrest,” Karpis’ hands were bound together with Agent Clarence Hurt’s necktie.
As he was led away, Karpis jokingly offered to give agents directions to the
federal building, claiming that he had planned to rob the post office there.
Hoover was not amused.
Alvin Karpis was
flown to St. Paul, where he entered a guilty plea for the Hamm kidnapping and
received a life sentence. He spent the next 33 years in federal prisons, mostly
Alcatraz, before he was paroled in 1969 and deported to Canada. He later moved
to Spain and died there in April 1979 from an overdose of sleeping pills that
was probably accidental.
Karpis was the last
outlaw of the period to be captured and his trial marked the end of what most
Americans thought of as the era of the “public enemy.” For at least one unquiet
spirit, though, the era of the depression bandits had never really come to an
end – it continues on today as the events from a fatal day in 1935 replay
themselves over and over again at a small house in Florida.
According to local
legend, the ghost of Ma Barker still maintains a presence at the bullet-riddled
house on Lake Weir in Ocklawaha. Not only have an old woman’s cries of
desperation been reported coming from inside the house, but some
curiosity-seekers claim they have actually seen Ma’s face as she peers out the
windows, perhaps frantically still watching for the scores of FBI agents who
ended her life and that of her beloved son on that January day. Those who
report that they have seen this shadowy figure behind the glass initially
believe that someone is inside the house, perhaps a fellow tourist or macabre
souvenir-seeker. Once they realize that no one ever comes out the door, they slowly
realize that the person they have seen is an otherworldly occupant of the
dwelling.
And she is one who
will likely remain here for many years to come.
