Hoover knew that people feared for their safety (the kidnapping of a prominent citizen typically spurred hirings of bodyguards and purchases of firearms), and he knew which victims and families had friends in the White House or a governor’s mansion. Nor was he above sitting next to the FBI’s kidnapping telephone hotline in truly big cases.
“Too many habitual criminals are at liberty,” Hoover told a meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1933, warning that lawbreakers were “roaming our streets and highways intent upon violence, kidnapping, murder or any crime that will enable them to inflict their bloody will upon society.” He likened kidnappers to “sewer rats.”12
Initially, the maximum punishment for interstate kidnapping under the Lindbergh Law was life in prison. But members of Congress sensed that more and more Americans did indeed believe in smiting murderers and outlaws into the dust, as the House chaplain had urged after the Lindbergh baby was found dead. So the Lindbergh Law was amended in 1934 to allow the death penalty to be imposed if the jury so recommended.
The lawmakers presumably wanted the ultimate punishment to be imposed on interstate kidnappers who killed their victims or did them great harm. And that is how the law has almost always been applied. The Death Penalty Information Center lists five defendants who have been put to death by the federal government for kidnapping. Four of those defendants killed their victims.
And then there was a luckless, dim-witted career criminal who broke out of an Oklahoma jail with another prisoner in November 1934. The pair drove into Texas, where they pulled off a robbery, then kidnapped two local policemen. The escapees drove a short distance before freeing the cops, unharmed.
One of the escapees was soon killed in a shootout. Within weeks, the surviving fugitive was caught in Oklahoma City and no doubt expected to go back behind bars for a long spell, a prospect that probably did not scare him. But the cops had been kidnapped in Texas, then driven into Oklahoma. Because they had been taken across a state line, the hapless fugitive was prosecuted under the Lindbergh Law and hanged in 1936, becoming the only kidnapper executed under the Lindbergh Law who hadn’t killed a victim.****
The fugitive probably didn’t deserve his fate. But not many people were voicing compassion for habitual criminals in those desperate times.
Of course, you see similarities between then and now as you travel back to the 1930s via newspaper microfilm, following daily life. Presidents and governors and mayors wrestled with choices day after day, knowing they were living through history, making history, yet not knowing how it would turn out.
Then as now, there was no shortage of the sad and bizarre. A high school student hanged himself because he felt overwhelmed by pressure to succeed. A teenager killed his mother with an ax because he didn’t want to weed the garden.
This book is about kidnappings of long ago, but it can’t be only about them. After all, some big-time criminals in that era were bank robbers and kidnappers.
And two major crimes of the era intersected in a way that seems unbelievable—except that it really happened. The central figure was a young woman named Mary McElroy whose father was a high official in Kansas City, Missouri. She was kidnapped by gunmen who invaded her home on Saturday, May 27, 1933, while she was enjoying a bubble bath. Her father paid a $30,000 ransom, and she was freed after a brief but deeply traumatizing captivity.
A few weeks later, Mary heard a rumor from one of her father’s gangster friends that something big would happen at the Kansas City train station on the morning of Saturday, June 17, 1933. The prospect of excitement and danger had a moth-to-the-flame lure for her, so she persuaded a friendly gangster to accompany her to the station that morning.
As Mary and her companion sat in a car in the station parking lot, there was an explosion of gunfire about fifty yards from them. They were witnessing what would be called the Union Station Massacre: the death of an FBI agent, two Kansas City cops, an Oklahoma lawman, and the fugitive they were taking back to prison.
Immediately, J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed that the ambush had been carried out by the notorious bank robber Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and another thug, Adam Richetti. The pair had been trying to free the fugitive, who was their friend, according to Hoover.
Hoover was eager to link Floyd and Richetti, who were already wanted for robbery, to the Union Station Massacre. And he wanted the FBI to get them with as little help as possible from local police. That way, he could boast that his men had avenged the death of one of their own, the agent killed at the train station.
Yet Mary’s gangster companion said he recognized two of the ambushers as brothers who worked for a Kansas City gangster, John Lazia, and that Floyd and Richetti were not there.
Floyd was gunned down in an Ohio cornfield in 1934. As Hoover had wanted, his agents were in on the kill. Richetti was captured in Ohio, convicted of murder in Missouri, and sentenced to death. He maintained his innocence in the Union Station shooting right up to the day in 1938 when he breathed in the cyanide in Missouri’s new gas chamber.
The identity of the train station ambushers is a question that lingers to this day. Maybe the answer isn’t important in the eternal scheme of things all these years later. Back then, the issue was vitally important to the FBI chieftain. For nothing—nothing—was more important to Hoover than image.
The mostly admiring press of the era helped Hoover paint himself as a lawman who was at once
