FILE NO. 0179
Content warning: This case file describes gun violence, the killing of police officers and federal agents in an ambush, the shooting death of Charles Arthur Floyd by officers, a disputed allegation that he was shot while wounded, and an execution in a gas chamber. It contains no photographs of the dead.
Pretty Boy Floyd: the Kansas City Massacre allegation and the disputed death in Ohio
From two robbery pleas to a cornfield in Columbiana County, what the court records and the FBI’s own files say about Charles Arthur Floyd, and why his role at Union Station and the manner of his death are still disputed.
Legal status: Charles Arthur Floyd was convicted twice in life, both times on guilty pleas to robbery charges: in St. Louis in 1925 and in Toledo in 1930. He was never tried for any killing. He was never tried for the Kansas City Massacre of June 17, 1933, because he was killed in Ohio on October 22, 1934. According to the Missouri Supreme Court, he was not charged in federal court until a second indictment was filed on November 5, 1934, after his death; a National Archives case file recites an indictment dated October 22, 1934, the day he was killed. His alleged role was never adjudicated, and the FBI’s attribution is disputed. The only person convicted of a murder at Union Station was Adam Richetti, found guilty of murdering Officer Frank Hermanson and executed in 1938. Four men were convicted in federal court of conspiring to free the prisoner.
On the morning of June 17, 1933, gunmen opened fire on a group of lawmen in the parking lot of Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri. In about thirty seconds, two Kansas City police officers, a federal agent, an Oklahoma police chief and the prisoner they were escorting were dead. The FBI decided within months that one of the gunmen was Charles Arthur Floyd, a bank robber from the Cookson Hills of eastern Oklahoma whom newspapers called “Pretty Boy” and whom his neighbors called Choc. Sixteen months later, Floyd was shot dead by federal agents and local police on a farm in Columbiana County, Ohio.
Both days are still argued over. Floyd was never tried for the massacre, so the only trial, his partner’s, put Floyd’s identity at its center without Floyd in the courtroom. His death is just as contested. The FBI says agents fired as he ran with a pistol in his hand. Forty-five years later, an East Liverpool officer told Time magazine that he had wounded Floyd himself and that a federal agent then shot the helpless man on Melvin Purvis’s order. The FBI calls that unfounded. This case file sets out what the records and the competing witnesses say.
Cookson Hills: a Georgia birth and an Oklahoma boyhood
Floyd was born on February 3, 1904, near Adairsville in Bartow County, Georgia, the son of Walter Lee Floyd and Mamie Helena Echols Floyd, according to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture entry written by his biographer Michael Wallis. In 1911 the family moved west to Sequoyah County in eastern Oklahoma, near the Arkansas line, and worked a series of small tenant farms near Sallisaw and Akins, raising cotton and corn.
The Wallis entry says the boy grew up on stories of outlaws, Jesse James above all, and learned to make corn liquor. By his early teens he was called “Choc,” after Choctaw beer, a local home brew. The FBI’s own 2009 history of his death says he preferred that name to the one the newspapers made famous. At sixteen, after minor scrapes with the law, he left to follow the wheat harvest through Oklahoma and Kansas, then drifted into bootlegging. Wallis writes that in Wichita he found a mentor in a fence named John Callahan.
In 1924 Floyd married Ruby Hardgrave, a tenant farmer’s daughter. Their son, born that year, was named Jack Dempsey Floyd after the heavyweight champion. The legend that grew up later, preserved on a local history page of the Carnegie Public Library of East Liverpool, Ohio, cast him as a poor farm boy pushed toward crime by drought and foreclosure. The records are less sentimental.
St. Louis, 1925: the first conviction
In 1925 Floyd and a friend rode a freight train east out of the Cookson Hills. On September 11, 1925, according to Wallis, he took part in a payroll robbery in St. Louis that netted $11,929. The FBI’s case history of the Kansas City Massacre gives the official record: he was arrested by the St. Louis police on September 16, 1925, for highway robbery, pleaded guilty on December 8, 1925, and was sentenced to the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City. He was released on March 7, 1929.
While he was inside, on January 4, 1929, Ruby Floyd filed for divorce on grounds of neglect. Wallis writes that Floyd did not contest it and that she took custody of their son, though Floyd kept seeing them for years afterward and lived with them at times in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and in Tulsa.
Prison did not end anything. Two days after his release, on March 9, 1929, the Kansas City police arrested him for investigation, and on May 6, 1929, they picked him up again for vagrancy and suspicion of highway robbery. Both times, the FBI notes, he was released. Kansas City was where he met Beulah Baird, who would be with him at the end. Wallis credits her with the nickname “Pretty Boy,” which, according to the FBI’s 2009 account, Floyd hated.
Toledo, 1930: the bank, the plea and the train window
By 1930 Floyd was working in Ohio. The Toledo Police Museum’s case page, built from the department’s files, says Floyd, using the alias Frank Mitchell, and a partner named Robert Amos, alias Nathan King, robbed the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank in Sylvania, Ohio. Witnesses took down the license number of the getaway car. Amos was arrested in Akron in March 1930 with another fugitive, Bert Walker, who shot and killed Akron Patrolman Harland Manes during the arrest. Walker was electrocuted for that murder on November 10, 1930.
On May 19, 1930, Toledo detectives Frank DeLora and John Hovey brought Amos and Floyd from Akron to Toledo for questioning about the Sylvania robbery, and the museum says lineups identified both men. The FBI dates Floyd’s Toledo arrest on the bank robbery charge to May 20, 1930. On November 24, 1930, he was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in the Ohio State Penitentiary. The museum page says he and Amos pleaded guilty to assault with intent to rob the bank.
He never arrived. According to the Toledo museum, while the two men were being moved by train a few days later, Floyd insisted on using the lavatory, unlocked his handcuffs inside and jumped through the window while Amos blocked the door. Amos was caught with one leg out of the window. Floyd got away. The FBI’s case history states simply that he “escaped enroute to the penitentiary” and remained a fugitive from then on.
Bowling Green, 1931: Patrolman Ralph Castner
Five months after the escape, Floyd was in northwest Ohio again. The Toledo Police Museum’s account of April 16, 1931, says Floyd and William “Billy the Killer” Miller, a member of his gang, turned up in Bowling Green with two women. Merchants reported them to Police Chief Carl Gallagher, who watched the group for a couple of weeks. That Thursday, after the four left a clothing store on Main Street, Gallagher and Patrolman Ralph Castner followed them to a spot where they thought the public would be out of danger and ordered them to halt.
The museum says Miller and Floyd drew pistols and began shooting. Miller was killed. One of the women and Patrolman Castner were wounded. The Associated Press reported the next day that the wounded woman gave her name as Buelah Baird, 20, of Kansas City. Castner’s father, who worked in a lumber yard across the street, heard the shots, ran over and carried his son to the curb to wait for the ambulance. Castner died of his wounds on April 23, 1931. Floyd escaped.
No trial ever decided whose bullets struck Castner; the museum says only that both men fired. That pattern, of shootings attributed to Floyd but never tested in court, runs through his career. Wallis writes that authorities implicated him in several killings and that he did not commit many of the crimes attributed to him.
Bixby, 1932: the killing of Erv Kelley
Back in Oklahoma, Floyd worked with a partner named George Birdwell. By early 1932 the Oklahoma Bankers Association had posted a $1,000 reward for him, and three other organizations offered $1,000 each, according to a 2007 Tulsa World account of the case transcribed on the OKGenWeb obituary archive. The bankers deputized a retired lawman as their special agent and gave him a new Thompson submachine gun.
He was Ervin A. “Erv” Kelley, a former McIntosh County sheriff and Checotah police chief. The Tulsa World account says Kelley recruited six lawmen and two deputized farmers and staked out a farmhouse three miles west of Bixby, where Floyd was expected for a weekend visit with Ruby and their son. Before 3 a.m., a car came up to the gate with its lights off. When the headlights snapped on, they caught Kelley in the open. He shouted “Stick’em up!”
The account says Floyd fired a .45 automatic seven times and hit Kelley four times, twice in the chest. Kelley’s submachine gun fired fourteen times, most of the rounds kicking up dirt at his feet. He died there. Floyd was hit four times below the waist, wounds that were painful but not life threatening, and he and Birdwell drove away. An estimated 3,000 people attended Kelley’s funeral in Checotah.
The date is unsettled. Wallis and the Tulsa World account say April 9, 1932; Wikipedia and a 2009 Oklahoman article say April 7. Like Castner’s death, Kelley’s was never tried.
Sallisaw and the making of a “Robin Hood”
The Wallis entry describes one of Floyd’s best-known robberies as the 1932 holdup of the Sallisaw State Bank in his home town, which he and Birdwell carried out in daylight while friends and family watched. In Wallis’s count, Floyd and his partners committed more than thirty bank robberies across the Midwest, mainly in Ohio and Oklahoma, between his release from prison in 1929 and his death.
The legend that made him a folk hero came out of those years. The Carnegie Library’s East Liverpool page puts it plainly: people believed that while he robbed banks he destroyed or stole the mortgages on local farms, so that the banks could not foreclose. The FBI’s own history concedes part of this. Its 2009 account says Floyd “reportedly destroyed mortgage notes from a bank or two that he robbed in hopes of saving a few farmers from foreclosure.” It also says his reputation as a humanitarian “is undeserved,” and that he “robbed and stole to support a lifestyle of flash and ease.”
The Oklahoma Historical Society entry calls him Oklahoma’s most notorious and glorified folk bandit, a Robin Hood figure to the dispossessed of the Depression who was also a wanton bank robber. He was later immortalized in a ballad by Woody Guthrie and referenced in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. Both halves are on the record.
Frank Nash and the road to Union Station
The man at the center of the Kansas City Massacre was not Floyd. He was Frank Nash, a career criminal whose record, as the FBI summarizes it, went back to a 1913 life sentence for murder in Oklahoma, later pardoned. In 1924 he began a 25-year federal sentence at Leavenworth for assaulting a mail custodian. He escaped on October 19, 1930.
On June 16, 1933, two FBI agents, Frank Smith and F. Joseph Lackey, together with McAlester, Oklahoma, Police Chief Otto Reed, arrested Nash in a store in Hot Springs, Arkansas. They drove him to Fort Smith and at 8:30 that night boarded a Missouri Pacific train for Kansas City, due at 7:15 the next morning. Reed E. Vetterli, the special agent in charge of the Kansas City office, arranged to meet them at the station.
According to the FBI’s case history, friends of Nash learned about the arrest and the travel plans. The Bureau says the rescue scheme was conceived and engineered by Richard Tallman Galatas, Herbert Farmer, “Doc” Louis Stacci and Frank B. Mulloy, and that Vernon C. Miller, a former South Dakota sheriff turned gunman, was chosen to carry it out. In the Bureau’s version, Miller made phone calls from Mulloy’s tavern looking for help, and Floyd and Richetti, who had just arrived in Kansas City, agreed to join him.
Bolivar, June 16, 1933: the sheriff in the garage
Whatever happened at Union Station, the events of the day before put Floyd and Richetti on the road to Kansas City. The FBI says the two men were stopped early on June 16 in Bolivar, Missouri, when their car broke down. While they waited in a garage for repairs, Sheriff Jack Killingsworth of Polk County walked in. Richetti recognized him, grabbed a machine gun and held the sheriff and the garage workers against the wall, and Floyd drew two .45 automatics.
The two men moved their weapons to another car and forced the sheriff in with them. The FBI says they drove to Deepwater, Missouri, switched to a commandeered car, released the sheriff and reached Kansas City about 10:00 p.m. on June 16. The Missouri Supreme Court’s 1938 opinion in Richetti’s appeal describes the same episode as a kidnapping that took Sheriff Killingsworth “of Polk County and Walter L. Griffith of Clinton” through Missouri and into Kansas.
At Richetti’s trial, the opinion shows, Killingsworth was among the witnesses who identified the machine gun the State put in evidence, and the court treated the kidnapping as evidence that Richetti and Floyd were together and armed on their way to Kansas City on the night before the massacre. That evidence placed them near the scene. It did not by itself put them in the parking lot.
Union Station, June 17, 1933
The train arrived on time. The FBI’s case history, built on the survivors’ accounts, says Lackey went out to the platform and met Vetterli, Agent Raymond J. Caffrey and two Kansas City police officers, W. J. Grooms and Frank Hermanson. Seeing nothing suspicious, the seven officers walked Nash, handcuffed, through the station lobby to Caffrey’s Chevrolet, parked directly in front of the east entrance. Lackey and Reed were carrying shotguns. The others had pistols.
Nash was put in the front passenger seat. Lackey sat behind the driver, Smith in the middle of the back seat and Reed on the right. Caffrey walked around to the driver’s door, while Vetterli, Grooms and Hermanson stood near the right front of the car. Then, the FBI says, Lackey saw two armed men run from behind a nearby car. One of the gunmen shouted, “Up, up!” Vetterli heard a voice command, “Let ’em have it!”
The firing came from a man crouched behind the radiator of a car about fifteen feet away and from others nearby. Grooms and Hermanson fell dead. Vetterli was hit in the left arm and saw Caffrey go down with a fatal head wound. Inside the car, Nash and Chief Reed were killed. Lackey was struck by three bullets and seriously wounded, and Smith was not hit. Both survived by falling forward in the back seat. According to the Bureau, one of the gunmen ran up, looked inside and shouted, “They’re all dead. Let’s get out of here.”
The FBI says a Kansas City policeman came out of the station and fired at one of the killers, “later identified as Floyd, who slumped briefly but continued to run.” The gunmen escaped west in a dark Chevrolet. The survivors told investigators that the attack lasted perhaps thirty seconds and that they were not sure whether there had been three gunmen or four.
The Missouri Supreme Court described the same scene in a single sentence that has never been improved on: “The murderers, whoever they were, fled and escaped.”
The case the FBI built against Floyd
The FBI’s published history says its investigation “developed evidence that the scheme was carried out by Vernon C. Miller, Adam C. Richetti, and Charles Arthur ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd.” Its strongest physical evidence was against Richetti, not Floyd: latent fingerprints that FBI agents lifted from beer bottles in Miller’s Kansas City home and identified as Richetti’s.
The case against Floyd rested on several pieces, most of them later aired at Richetti’s trial. According to the Missouri Supreme Court opinion, Vetterli and a woman named Lottie West, identified Floyd. Mrs. West, described in the opinion as a social worker for the Travel Aid Society at Union Station, testified about a man she saw in the station that morning, and the court records that “from a photograph she identified him as Pretty Boy Floyd.”
The most important item was a pistol. A .45 caliber automatic, Exhibit 8 at the trial, was identified by Samuel K. McKee, a federal agent, as one he took from Floyd’s belt on the Ohio farm where Floyd died. The opinion says the gun went to the Bureau, where Seth Wiard, a ballistics expert, restored it and test-fired it, and that the test cartridges were compared with an empty shell found at Union Station after the shooting. The court summed up: “This evidence tends to show Floyd took part in the massacre.”
Other claims came later and from the underworld. The Wikipedia biography of Floyd says the bank robber Alvin Karpis claimed Floyd confessed his involvement to him, and that an underworld account named Floyd and Richetti as the gunmen. Wikipedia’s article on the massacre notes that Bryan Burrough, author of the 2007 history Public Enemies, concluded Floyd “almost certainly was” guilty, relying on underworld informants arrested by the FBI. The same article notes that other informants and witnesses contradicted them.
The dispute: why many historians doubt Floyd was there
The same court opinion that described the case against Floyd also recorded the evidence that undercut it, because Richetti’s lawyers put it before the jury. Their defense was an alibi. The opinion says a police detective showed Mrs. West photographs soon after the massacre, and that she did not identify Floyd and instead “picked out a picture of Bernard Phillips.” Two cab drivers and a cab starter testified that she was not outside at all at the time.
Lackey, the agent wounded in the back seat, told a detective at the hospital, according to evidence the court summarized, that “it was all a flash to me, I couldn’t tell who it was.” Early suspicion, the opinion says, fell on other men, and “no circular was issued for Pretty Boy Floyd for some time.” The defense also showed that “agent Vetterli partially identified Bob Brady” as one of the killers, and that early radio broadcasts described “two white men in blue or dark shirts” with machine guns.
The most telling point is the charging record. The court wrote that a federal indictment in 1933 charged a group of defendants with conspiracy, but that Richetti and Floyd “were not charged until a second indictment was filed on November 5, 1934.” By then Floyd had been dead for two weeks. Other dates appear in the record. The FBI says Galatas, Farmer, Stacci and Mulloy were indicted on October 24, 1934, two days after Floyd died. A National Archives case file listed on the Mob Files site as United States v. Adam Richetti and Charles Floyd recites an indictment filed on October 22, 1934, the day Floyd was killed. Whichever date is right, Floyd never answered any charge for the massacre, and none led to a trial.
There is also evidence outside the court record. According to Wikipedia’s account, the Kansas City police received a postcard dated June 30, 1933, from Springfield, Missouri, signed by Charles Floyd and stating that he did not take part in the massacre, and the department believed it genuine. The gunman the FBI identified as Floyd was reported to have been wounded in the shoulder, but Floyd’s body showed no sign of such a wound. Floyd’s family has said that he admitted many crimes but denied this one, and Richetti also denied it. A 2002 book on the massacre, based on ballistic tests, attributed at least some of the deaths to friendly fire from a lawman unfamiliar with his weapon.
Three books dispute the FBI account outright: Michael Wallis’s biography Pretty Boy (1992), Robert Unger’s The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI (1997), and Joe Urschel’s The Year of Fear (2015). In his Oklahoma Historical Society entry, Wallis goes furthest, writing that new evidence makes it clear neither Floyd nor Richetti was involved. A 1954 memoir by an underworld figure named two other men as the gunmen; those names are left out of this case file because the claim was never tested. Wikipedia’s article on the massacre concludes that the matter “is likely to remain highly controversial, as evidence against the two men is far from conclusive.”
The honest summary is that the FBI alleged Floyd was a Union Station gunman, that a Missouri court found the evidence admissible against his partner, and that the allegation against Floyd himself was never tried and remains in dispute.
State v. Richetti: the only murder trial
Richetti was the one alleged gunman who lived long enough to be tried. Vernon Miller was found dead in a ditch outside Detroit, beaten and strangled, on November 29, 1933, according to the FBI; Wikipedia gives November 27. Floyd was killed in Ohio. Richetti, captured in Ohio just before Floyd’s death, was handed over to Missouri. The Missouri Supreme Court says he was taken to Jackson County and arrested on November 4, 1934. On March 1, 1935, a Jackson County grand jury indicted him on four counts of first degree murder.
The State tried him on one count, the murder of Officer Frank Hermanson. The trial began on June 10, 1935, and on June 17, 1935, two years to the day after the massacre, the jury found him guilty and recommended death. He was sentenced to hang. Most of the trial, as the appeal opinion shows, was about whether Richetti and Floyd had been at Union Station at all. The State’s evidence included the Bolivar kidnapping, Mrs. West’s identification of Richetti, his fingerprints on Miller’s beer bottle and Agent McKee’s testimony about the pistol from Floyd’s belt. The opinion notes that Floyd had been known nationally as “Public Enemy No. 1,” with Richetti cast as his “chief lieutenant.”
The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed. Its opinion, State v. Richetti, 342 Mo. 1015, 119 S.W.2d 330, is dated August 17, 1938, and concludes: “The conviction and infliction of capital punishment are affirmed.” Because a 1937 Missouri law had replaced hanging with lethal gas, the court sent the case back so the sentence could be carried out under the new law. The FBI’s history gives the affirmance date as May 3, 1938, which does not match the date on the opinion. The court’s date is used here.
The FBI says Richetti’s lawyers then claimed he was insane, that a hearing found him sane, and that on August 31, 1938, he was sentenced again, this time to die in the gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. He was executed on October 7, 1938. He denied taking part in the massacre.
The conspirators’ trial
The only people convicted of planning the rescue were the men who never fired a shot. The FBI says Richard Galatas, Herbert Farmer, “Doc” Louis Stacci and Frank Mulloy were indicted by a federal grand jury in Kansas City and found guilty on January 4, 1935, of conspiracy to cause the escape of a federal prisoner. The next day each was sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary and a $10,000 fine, the maximum the law then allowed.
The Eighth Circuit decided the appeals on November 18, 1935, in Galatas v. United States, 80 F.2d 15, which the Mob Files summary describes as an affirmance. The federal charge was conspiracy to free a prisoner; the murders were left to the state.
Buffalo: a year behind drawn curtains
After Kansas City, Floyd and Richetti dropped out of sight. The FBI says they made their way to Toledo, where in early September 1933 they met two sisters, Beulah Baird, also known as Juanita, and Rose Baird. The four went to Buffalo, New York. On September 21, 1933, Floyd and Beulah, posing as Mr. and Mrs. George Sanders, and Richetti and Rose, posing as Mr. and Mrs. Ed Brennan, rented an apartment there.
Neighbors found the couples mysterious because they seldom left the apartment, and then usually only for quick trips to the grocery. Floyd was said to pace from the front of the apartment to the back almost constantly. The couples did not visit neighbors, but they were friendly to neighborhood children, sometimes letting them in, and the women occasionally threw money from the windows to children playing in the street or gave them candy.
After John Dillinger’s death, according to Wikipedia, J. Edgar Hoover named Floyd “Public Enemy No. 1.” In October 1934, the FBI says, the two couples agreed to go back to Oklahoma. Rose Baird was given money to buy a Ford sedan for the trip.
Wellsville, October 1934
The trip west ended in a ditch in eastern Ohio. The FBI’s case history says the four left early on October 20, with Floyd driving, and that a few hours later, near Wellsville, he skidded the car into a telephone pole. The Bureau’s 2009 history instead places the crash on the “wet, foggy evening of October 20.” Floyd and Richetti took their guns and waited on the edge of town while the Baird sisters took the damaged car to a Wellsville garage.
Reports of two suspicious men in suits brought out Wellsville Police Chief J. H. Fultz. Wikipedia’s account, which dates the encounter to October 19, says two passing motorists spotted the men lying by the road and that Fultz went out with two officers, Grover Potts and William Erwin. There was a gun battle. The FBI says Richetti emptied his gun at Fultz and was captured by him, and that Floyd escaped. Wikipedia says Fultz was wounded in the foot and Potts in the right shoulder. The Missouri Supreme Court’s account says that Floyd fired a machine gun at the officer “until the handle broke” before he threw it down and ran.
The date is in conflict. Wikipedia says October 19. The FBI dates the crash to October 20, morning in one account and evening in another. The Missouri Supreme Court says Floyd was killed “the day after appellant’s” arrest, which implies October 21, while the FBI’s death mask page puts the fatal confrontation two days after the gunfight.
The Baird sisters, who were at the garage when they overheard talk of Richetti’s arrest, left at once for Kansas City, the FBI says, and later went to the Floyd family home in Sallisaw for the funeral.
The Conkle farm, October 22, 1934: the official account
For two days, federal agents and local police searched the farms and back roads of Columbiana County. The FBI says they questioned doctors and hospital workers in case Floyd had been wounded at Wellsville. On the afternoon of October 22, eight of the searchers were patrolling the roads south of Clarkson in two cars: four Bureau agents led by Melvin Purvis, special agent in charge of the Chicago office, and four East Liverpool police officers under Chief Hugh McDermott.
The Bureau’s 2009 history puts the time at 4:10 p.m. and the place at the Conkle farm, two miles south of Clarkson. The Carnegie Library’s local history fills in what happened just before. Floyd had knocked at the farmhouse door posing as a lost hunter and asked for a ride to the bus line. Ellen Conkle fed him a meal, for which he paid $1, and offered her brother, Stewart Dyke, to drive him. They were getting into the car when two police cars came up the narrow dirt road.
The FBI’s case history says the officers saw a car move out from behind a corn crib and then back behind it, and stopped to question its occupants. A man they recognized at once as Floyd jumped out with a .45 caliber automatic pistol in his right hand. In the 2009 version, Floyd zigzagged across the farm toward a stand of trees while all eight officers followed, calling on him to stop. “As Floyd looked over his shoulder to see the pursuit, gunfire rang out. Floyd fell.”
When the officers reached him, the FBI says, Floyd said, “I’m done for; you’ve hit me twice.” They took the pistol from his hand and a second gun from his belt. Two agents left with a local man to summon an ambulance. Floyd was questioned as he lay dying, and the Bureau says he admitted his identity “but little else.” He died about fifteen minutes after he was shot. On him the officers found a watch and a fob with groups of ten notches cut into each, which the FBI says were “reportedly carved by Floyd as an indication of the number of people he had killed.”
Wikipedia’s account adds a contemporary news report with a different sequence: Floyd crawling out from the corn crib toward the Dyke car, then turning for a wooded ridge; Purvis shouting “Halt!” and then “Fire!”; Floyd asking, “Who the hell tipped you?” and saying, “I am Floyd…where is Eddie?”, a reference to Richetti. In an October 29 memo cited by Wikipedia, Hoover told his aide Edward Tamm to send Floyd’s belongings to his mother after photographing the notched watch.
Chester Smith’s account and the FBI rebuttal
In September 1979, Time magazine published an interview with Chester Smith, a retired East Liverpool police captain who had been one of the four local officers on the farm. Time’s letters page later summarized his reason for speaking: of the several men involved, only he was still alive. Smith had served as a sniper in the First World War, according to Wikipedia, and the Carnegie Library page says he turned down the weapon he was issued that day and carried his own Winchester rifle.
Smith’s story, as quoted from Time in Wikipedia’s account, was that he fired first and wounded Floyd on purpose: “I knew Purvis couldn’t hit him, so I dropped him with two shots from my .32 Winchester rifle.” Floyd fell and could not get up, and Smith disarmed him. Then, as Time’s letters page quoted the article, “Purvis ran up and ordered: ‘Back away from that man, I want to talk to him.'” Floyd glared and cursed. Smith said Purvis turned to Agent Herman Hollis and said, “Fire into him,” and that Hollis did, killing Floyd with a burst from a submachine gun. Asked whether there had been a cover-up, Smith answered, as Wikipedia quotes him: “Sure was, because they didn’t want it to get out that he’d been killed that way.”
The Carnegie Library page, drawing on old local papers and funeral home records, tells a version of Smith’s account without the execution: Smith shot Floyd in the arm, Floyd kept running and was hit again in the back of the right shoulder, and the local officers carried him to the shade of an apple tree. It quotes Smith: “He was alive when we carried him to the apple tree. But he died then within minutes.” The same page notes reports that Purvis ordered Floyd shot under the tree because he would not answer questions about Kansas City, and labels that speculation.
The rebuttal came quickly. Winfred E. “Bud” Hopton, one of the four agents, wrote to Time, and his letter appeared in the November 19, 1979, issue. According to an FBI history site that reproduces it, Hopton wrote: “The truth is Floyd was shot by two of the 4 FBI Agents present when Floyd aimed his gun at them.” He added: “Agent Hollis, whom I know personally, was NOT even present when Floyd was apprehended.” The same site says a fifteen page report by Agent Samuel K. McKee, dated October 26, 1934, places Hollis at the Travelers Hotel in East Liverpool at the time of the shooting and lists Purvis, David E. Hall, Hopton and McKee as the agents in the field.
The FBI’s published position, in a 2009 article titled “The Chester Smith Controversy,” is that both of Smith’s claims are “unfounded.” It says the bullets that killed Floyd did not match the rifle Smith said he used; that the day after the shooting Smith told a different story and did not claim to have brought Floyd down; that the coroner’s report shows no close-range chest wound from a Thompson gun; that Hollis “was not even present at the scene, as FBI records show and Smith himself said in 1934”; and that sworn statements by the other three local officers are in the Bureau’s file starting on page 33.
The coroner’s findings, as Wikipedia summarizes them, were three wounds: one in the right forearm and two in the lower torso. The FBI history site says the coroner attributed death to two .45 caliber bullets, not to rifle rounds. Those findings fit neither Smith’s account of a rifle wound to the shoulder nor a point-blank burst to the chest cleanly. Hollis cannot be asked. He was killed on November 27, 1934, five weeks later, in a gunfight with Lester Gillis, known as Baby Face Nelson, according to his FBI Wall of Honor entry.
The records establish that Floyd was shot while running from officers on the Conkle farm and died there within about fifteen minutes. The FBI, Hopton and the McKee report say agents fired the fatal shots and Hollis was elsewhere; Smith’s 1979 account says otherwise. The Bureau’s rebuttal rests largely on its own files. No finding on the shooting beyond the coroner’s report was located.
East Liverpool to Akins: the funeral
Floyd’s body was taken to a funeral home in East Liverpool. The Carnegie Library page says his mother did not want it shown, but by the time Chief McDermott received her wire, crowds had gathered, and more than 10,000 people filed past between 8:30 and 11:15 p.m., about fifty a minute, tearing off the porch railing. The body was sent home to Oklahoma. He was buried on October 28, 1934, at Akins Cemetery, and Wallis writes that a crowd of more than twenty thousand made it the largest funeral in Oklahoma history. The headstone was stolen by souvenir hunters in 1985, the Carnegie page says, and a historical marker on Sprucevale Road at the site of the Conkle farm, erected in 1993, was stolen in 1995 and recovered.
Legacy: the Bureau and the ballad
The FBI’s own history calls the massacre “one of the deadliest attacks on the law the nation had ever seen” and says that within a year Congress gave the Bureau “statutory authority to carry guns and make arrests.” In July 1935 it was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Floyd’s death was, in the Bureau’s words, “another key victory in the war against gangsters.” To the people of the Cookson Hills he remained the man in Woody Guthrie’s song. The records support neither portrait completely.
Myth versus record
- Myth: Floyd was proven to be a Union Station gunman. Record: He was never tried for the massacre. Only Richetti was convicted of a murder there, and the evidence placing Floyd at the scene is disputed.
- Myth: Floyd was a Robin Hood who saved farms. Record: The FBI concedes he “reportedly destroyed mortgage notes from a bank or two,” but he was a career bank robber implicated in several killings.
- Myth: An FBI agent executed Floyd on Purvis’s order. Record: That is Chester Smith’s 1979 claim. The FBI, agent Hopton’s letter and the McKee report as described dispute it and place Hollis elsewhere.
- Myth: The notches on his watch counted his victims. Record: The FBI says only that they were “reportedly” carved for that purpose.
People
- Charles Arthur Floyd (1904 to 1934): bank robber; killed October 22, 1934.
- Adam Richetti: Floyd’s partner; convicted of murdering Frank Hermanson; executed October 7, 1938.
- Vernon C. Miller: named by the FBI as leader of the attack; found dead near Detroit in November 1933.
- Frank Nash: federal prisoner killed at Union Station.
- Victims at Union Station: Agent Raymond J. Caffrey, Officers W. J. Grooms and Frank Hermanson, Chief Otto Reed. Agent F. Joseph Lackey and Reed E. Vetterli were wounded.
- Ralph Castner and Erv Kelley: lawmen whose deaths in 1931 and 1932 are attributed to Floyd; never tried.
- Melvin Purvis, Samuel K. McKee, Winfred E. Hopton, David E. Hall: agents on the Conkle farm.
- Chester Smith: East Liverpool officer whose 1979 account is disputed.
- Galatas, Farmer, Stacci, Mulloy: convicted of conspiring to free Nash.
Timeline
- February 3, 1904: Floyd born near Adairsville, Georgia.
- December 8, 1925: Pleads guilty to robbery in St. Louis.
- November 24, 1930: Sentenced in Toledo; escapes from the train.
- April 1931: Bowling Green shootout; Castner dies April 23.
- April 7 or 9, 1932: Erv Kelley killed near Bixby.
- June 16, 1933: Nash arrested; Bolivar kidnapping.
- June 17, 1933: Kansas City Massacre.
- September 21, 1933: Buffalo apartment rented.
- October 19 to 21, 1934 (sources differ): Wellsville gunfight; Richetti captured.
- October 22, 1934: Floyd killed on the Conkle farm.
- October 28, 1934: Buried at Akins.
- January 4, 1935: Four convicted of conspiracy.
- June 17, 1935: Richetti convicted.
- August 17, 1938: Missouri Supreme Court affirms.
- October 7, 1938: Richetti executed.
Frequently asked questions
Was Pretty Boy Floyd convicted of the Kansas City Massacre?
No. He was never tried for it. He was killed before any trial, and his role was never adjudicated.
Who killed Pretty Boy Floyd?
The FBI says its agents fired the fatal shots. Chester Smith claimed in 1979 that he wounded Floyd and that Agent Hollis killed him on Purvis’s order. The FBI calls that unfounded.
Why was he called Pretty Boy?
Wallis credits Beulah Baird with the nickname. The FBI says Floyd hated it and preferred “Choc.”
Citations & Sources
Sources
- FBI: Kansas City Massacre and “Pretty Boy” Floyd
- FBI: Year of the Gangster, Part 4
- FBI: The Chester Smith Controversy
- FBI: Pretty Boy Floyd’s Death Mask (text only)
- FBI Wall of Honor: Raymond J. Caffrey
- FBI Wall of Honor: Herman E. Hollis
- FBI Vault: Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd
- FBI Vault: Kansas City Massacre
- Missouri Supreme Court: State v. Richetti, 119 S.W.2d 330, 342 Mo. 1015 (Mo. 1938)
- Pendergast Years: Missouri vs. Adam Richetti: Opinion
- Eighth Circuit: Galatas v. United States
- Toledo Police Museum: Pretty Boy Floyd
- La Grande Evening Observer (Associated Press), April 17, 1931, page 1, via Historic Oregon Newspapers: Killer Shot to Death by Ohio Police
- OKGenWeb (Tulsa World, April 1, 2007): Floyd, Pretty Boy
- Carnegie Public Library of East Liverpool: Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd
- Historical G-Men: Floyd: The Inaccuracies: SA “Bud” Hopton
- Time: Letters, Nov. 19, 1979 (quoted via wordola.com index)
- Oklahoma Historical Society, The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture: “Floyd, Charles Arthur,” by Michael Wallis (not linked, per the society’s terms)
- Wikipedia: Pretty Boy Floyd
- Wikipedia: Kansas City massacre
Image credits
- Photo: FBI, via fbi.gov. Public domain.
- Photo: Library of Congress, via fbi.gov. Public domain.
- Photo: FBI Wall of Honor, via fbi.gov. Public domain.
- Image: FBI, via fbi.gov. Public domain.
- Photo: FBI, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
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