Case File | Machine Gun Kelly and the Woolverton Kidnapping

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal. At some point in your life, you probably heard a variation of the phrase, history is written by the victors.

So the idea that what we remember and how we remember it depends on, well, it depends on a lot of things, but one of them is the people who are in charge.

Therefore, the stories of the people who don't hold all the cards are less likely to survive and be retold.

Now, I'm not here to analyze the veracity of this statement, but it's a helpful idea to keep in mind when dealing with the telling of true crime, especially with older cases.

When details can get murky and accounts are often muddled, there are times we just have to admit that we don't know exactly what happened.

Even in the story we've just finished about Machine Gun Kelly, there are patches where the narrative is blank, or we've had to take our best guess. Take, for example, the kidnapping of Indiana businessman Howard Woolverton.

As a refresher, he's the guy I told you about all the way back in Episode 1. In January 1932, Howard and his wife were run off the road by some thugs in another car, who grabbed Howard and drove away.

In our telling of the story, those kidnappers were Machine Gun Kelly and his buddy Eddie Dahl. And on the whole, the ransom scheme didn't work out for them.

Howard made it home safely, but the promised money never got to the kidnappers, leading a frustrated Kelly to try again 18 months later. But that's just the most popular version of the story.

And like most retellings of history, it doesn't cover everything. Oh, but luckily for us, our friends over at Most Notorious have done a deep dive into this exact case.

3:02

Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/most-notorious-a-true-crime-history-podcast/id1055044256

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In this episode, host Erik Rivenes speaks with author Kevin Meredith about the messy kidnapping of Howard Woolverton. Why the world thinks Kelly and Dahl were the men behind it and what evidence there is for or against that version of events.

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6:10

A Buried Story

Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast.

I'm Erik Rivenes. Great to have you with me, as always. I am very excited to have Kevin Meredith with me today.

He has worked as a reporter, editor, photographer and columnist at newspapers in Hillsboro, North Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, covering all sorts of subjects, from local politics to education to business to crime.

He is the author, along with David Henry Jr., of a recently published book called Under Penalty of Death, the untold story of Machine Gun Kelly's first kidnapping. Thank you so much for joining me.

Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you.

Yeah. This story revolves around an obscure but fascinating kidnapping. How did this story fall into your lap, and what was it about this case that you connected with?

What was it that led you to believe that it would make a compelling book?

Well, the way it came to me, my mother-in-law, Jean Miller in Ogden, Utah, was a professor at Weber State, and apologies, but this is a very convoluted story. You can edit it as you see fit.

Had been a French professor at Weber State University, knew some folks in the library. They ran into David Hendry. He was an alum at Weber State, and he was asking people, hey, does anybody know a writer?

So they went to my mother-in-law, and she said, well, my son-in-law does writing, along with other things, and they connected with me and got me in touch with David Hendry. So it was really just about as much out of the blue as you can imagine.

And David is the grandson of Howard Woolverton, who was the kidnapped victim, and he found some old paperwork in his grandfather's archives. And this was decades ago, and he felt like this is significant.

One of the most important things he found was a five-and-a-half-page statement submitted to the FBI in 1934 about the kidnapping, which happened in January 1932.

So two years later, the FBI came to Howard Woolverton and said, we need a statement on everything you experienced as a kidnapped victim. And he gave him five-and-a-half pages. And that information was basically buried.

And Dave was the only person that had a copy of the statement in a readable form. And so Dave sent me the statement and I thought, well, this is interesting. This guy got kidnapped and Dave wanted to get a story written about it.

And I said, well, sure, I will be your writer. And I started going through the statement and read it all through and found it kind of odd. It seemed like things were being left out.

Things weren't quite adding up. So I used that to, as the basis for some research. And what I thought was going to happen was maybe a 30,000 word book, basically a family heirloom that I was going to give Dave.

Here's your book about your grandfather's kidnapping. And maybe we can make a few copies of it, or maybe I can get it published. And you'll get to enjoy it.

You can hand that down. So I started researching the old newspapers. And newspapers.com is an amazing resource.

This is not an advertisement. It's just a resource that I absolutely had to have to write this book. Fortunately, Howard Woolverton has an unusual name.

So I was able to search his name. And what newspapers.com has done is not just scanned every page, but scanned for OCR, Optical Character Reading. And Optical Character Recognition, I think, is what OCR stands for.

And so they were able to get every word of every newspaper page of thousands of, probably millions of pages of newspapers, through history, and lots of newspapers from January 1932. So I typed in Woolverton.

I thought I'd find five or six articles, you know, local man kidnapped, 24 hours local man brought home, everything's fine. What I found were about a thousand articles about the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton. It just went on and on.

It was a huge story. There were papers in California, in New York, in Florida, in Alaska, which wasn't even a state yet, that were, that talked about rich man kidnapped, industrialist kidnapped were some of the headlines, often on the front page.

It was a big story and it ended up being historic as well.

I find it so interesting. When this all went down in January of 1932, reporters were so suspicious about how Woolverton reacted to his kidnapping after his release, how he responded or didn't respond.

And then the story kind of disappears until you come along 90 or so years later and look at the case and your reaction as a journalist is the same as it was for those first newspaper reporters.

Yeah, the newspaper reporters of the time did a great job of capturing what was going on. Three states all mobilized their state police to look for Woolverton. He was grabbed from the street at 11 o'clock at night.

He was driving with his wife and a guy jumped on his running board, poked a gun through the window and said, I'm taking you with me. He got in the back seat and said, you're going to drive where I tell you to drive.

This was considered a shocking, horrific crime at the time that an innocent man with his wife could be grabbed off the street at 11 o'clock at night and forced to drive out of town and then held prisoner by unknown thugs in an unknown location.

As you read those articles from the day after it happened, you're reading about state police being mobilized, cruising the highways, looking for not just Woolverton, but his kidnappers. It was a huge deal.

And then Woolverton got back home that 24 hours later, that next night. And what happened was there was no federal law against kidnapping.

And so all Woolverton had to count on to protect him from these thugs who were still out there and told him, you will not say anything to the police or we'll come for you again. So they told him that and he gets home.

And all he's got to protect him is the Indiana police and the local cops, the South Bend police and a few other groups that were interested in it.

There was actually some interest among Chicago law enforcement because there was a thought that he had been, that it was Chicago gangs that had kidnapped him.

But Woolverton wanted to protect himself, but probably more importantly, his wife and his 12-year-old daughter. And so he wouldn't talk. He actually said at one time, he's quoted in the press, I'm not going to talk.

They told me not to talk and I'm not going to. So the reporters were very unhappy about this. They saw him run up his front porch and dash into his door about 11 o'clock that next night, 24 hours after he got kidnapped.

The way the stories presented, they rushed his porch and they were literally, these reporters were literally pushing against the front door to be led in to find out what had happened, who had kidnapped Woolverton, where they were now, what he knew

about them. And the interesting wrinkle here is that he was very good friends with Frank Mayer, M-A-Y-R, Frank Mayer, who was Secretary of State of Indiana and lived a block or two away from him when he wasn't in Indianapolis.

And Frank Mayer headed up the Indiana State Police. And so I'm pretty sure that Woolverton had a quick conversation with Frank Mayer and said, they're going to kill me if I talk. So we're not going to investigate.

I'm not going to help anybody with this investigation. I'm going to save my life and my wife and daughter's lives. They know where I live.

They know what car I drive. And I'm not going to be safe.

And so what that led to, I believe, and this is speculation now, was that when Woolverton wrote his, or provided, submitted his five and a half page FBI statement two and a half years later, he was very careful about some of the things he said.

I don't believe he was completely honest with the FBI. I think he kind of covered up who he called because he didn't want people to know that he was calling basically his lawyer and saying, how are we going to cover this up? They just let me loose.

They told me not to talk. I don't want to talk. I know it's a big story.

And a quick side note, after Woolverton was let go in downtown Chicago, he went to the nearest Main Street and found newspapers with his picture, with his wife and daughter's picture on them.

Man Kidnapped, the Chicago Tribune put this on the top of the front page that day. So he was seeing all this coverage, realizing this is a huge story, and he wanted it to go away as quickly as possible. And so that meant a cover-up on his part.

And as I'm reading these articles, the first day you have three states, state police on a war footing, basically, cruising, looking for this guy on every highway. The next day, this just blew my mind as I was going through these articles.

The next day, Indiana state police, Indiana officials say, yeah, well, Woolverton's not going to talk, so we're done. We're not going to investigate. We're finished with this.

And I'm just like, what happened? How could this, this is a huge story. And then it just went away.

And it's because he, Woolverton was very well connected.

Yeah, it's pretty wild. Let's go back to the evening of the kidnapping.

17:17

A Shocking Crime

Howard Woolverton and his wife, as you've said, and a family friend had gone to see a movie.

Sure. It was Tuesday, January 26th, 1932, about 11 o'clock. What they did was they took Bessie Studebaker to the movies in South Bend.

And Ms. Studebaker was a member by marriage of the Studebaker clan that made the cars. And so this was, you know, they moved in the highest circles of South Bend culture.

These were really rich people. The Studebakers left, I don't know, a half dozen mansions all over South Bend. So they went to the movies with Mrs.

Studebaker, came back to her mansion and had a nightcap and then got in the car and headed back to their home, which was only two or three blocks away.

And as they were driving away from her home on the street where her home was based, they got to the intersection and it's kind of confusing, but there was a pedestrian crossing the intersection and there was a car that was also at the intersection

and it was turning. And depending on which version of things you read, the car almost hit them and forced them off the road.

But in the meantime, the pedestrian is jumping on Howard Woolverton's running board and sticking his gun through the opened window, the slightly cracked window.

And I suspect that Howard Woolverton was smoking, and that's why his window was cracked, because it was January. It was a cold night.

It was not arctic, but it was probably in the high 30s or 40s that particular night based on the weather reports I've looked at. So he sticks his gun, his handgun through the window, says, let me in the back door, unlock your back door and let me in.

It was a four door. It was a pierce arrow four door. So they had four doors there.

He unlocks the door. This hoodlum jumps in the back seat, pointing the gun at Howard and his wife and says, all right, let's go. We're going west.

And so he had them drive through downtown South Bend. And another car, the car that had almost run them off the road was following. And the guy in the back seat says, don't look at me, eyes straight ahead.

And instructed them to turn here and there. They made their way west, got over the river, ended up driving through a little community called Ardmore that's still there.

And I don't believe it's been incorporated yet, but it was there then and it's still there today. Kept going until they're out maybe two or three miles.

It's not really clear how far away they drove, but just a few miles west of South Bend, pulled over on a dirt road and they verified, you're Howard Woolverton, yes, I am. We're kidnapping you. Okay.

They handed Mrs. Woolverton a note, a ransom note, said, we want $50,000 in cash, we want it wrapped up nicely in paper, we want you to drive tomorrow from Chicago Heights, along a highway in Chicago Heights.

And when a car behind you flashes their lights 10 times, you'll chuck the money out the window and everything will be good and you'll get your husband back. And if you go to the police, we're going to kill your husband. You'll never see him again.

And so they put Mrs. Woolverton in the Pierce five-seater, and she drives back to South Bend, haltingly because she didn't know how to drive a manual transmission. And she immediately goes to the cops.

And that's why it became such a big story because she went to the cops and told them the whole story. In the meantime, Howard is being driven further west, most likely into Illinois somewhere.

And he's kept in a farmhouse basement, according to his FBI statement. He's forced to wear goggles, and then they put a muffler, like a scarf over his face too, so he can't see where he's going. And they drive him to this farmhouse.

They make him go down the basement and let him take his goggles off there.

And he kind of looks around and they're on the floor above and open the hatch, like a hatch from the first floor to the basement and start addressing him through that and telling him, don't touch anything. Don't do anything we don't want you to do.

You just lie in the cut and or we'll kill you. So there's a lot of death threats there. And so he spent the rest of the night there.

By the time he got there, it was probably two or three in the morning and he never slept. He just sat there in his clothes. So that's the first chapter of the kidnapping.

I'll pause and let you ask any questions, but I can keep going too, if you want to hear more about the rest of the incident.

As I was reading the account, I was struck these kidnappers seemed a bit hapless. They were having issues with directions. They sent Mrs.

Woolverton off, but she couldn't start the car, so they had to go back and help her. Yes. So many things were going wrong.

Yeah, they weren't completely clear on the map of South Bend.

They had to ask Howard Woolverton, which streets do we turn on? We want to cross the river, which street has a bridge?

And then once they got west of South Bend, they were looking for some road to pull down, and they pulled down one that was the wrong one, and they got stuck in a ditch, and then they pulled out and found another one, and that's where they finally

stopped. And yeah, Mrs. Woolverton couldn't drive the manual transmission of the Pierce Arrow. And so, which by the way, a Pierce Arrow is a really nice car, and a very expensive car.

I think it would translate to about $50,000 or $60,000 in today's dollar, so it was higher engine. It was a Studebaker too, that's important to note. The Woolvertons bought cars from their friends, and the Pierce Arrow being a Studebaker vehicle.

And so she couldn't drive it, so she drove all the way back to South Bend in first gear.

They helped her get into first gear, and I'm not quite sure how they got her moving, but she was able to get into first gear, but she couldn't switch it any higher. And as soon as she got to the first stoplight in town, she choked the engine.

And there was a cop there at that intersection, just kind of keeping an eye on things. And so it's a side note that what happened was he walked up to her, you know, what's the problem, ma'am? And she just told him everything.

My husband's been kidnapped. I'm Mrs. Woolverton.

We need help. Here's the note they gave me. And they took her to police station.

And Chief Cuspert interviewed her that night and got all the facts in the newspapers. We're ready to roll the next morning.

Hey, all. It's Jeremy Schwartz from American Criminal. So have you heard that Slayer rules?

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Hi, I'm Jim Clemente, retired FBI profiler.

And I'm Cathy Canning-Mello, retired FBI profiler.

And we are the co-hosts of Real Crime Profile.

28:19

Apple Podcasts

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Cathy and I work together profiling cases for the FBI for more than a decade.

Yes, and if you're looking for insightful and informed deep analysis of open and closed crimes, you've come to the right place.

Yeah, we don't just do the skim over like they do on the news. So please listen to Real Crime Profile anywhere you listen to podcasts. And on Identify, the app.

So yeah, it's dark outside, dark in the car, and the man with the gun is telling them not to look at him.

But there is some question later about whether they were able to catch a glimpse of the man holding them hostage.

Yes, there's a lot of questions. Woolverton's statement, and I say this in the book, his statement in certain places does not make any sense at all.

He says he was wearing painted goggles and a scarf around his head too, and yet he describes all the places they drove. He's talking about signs he saw, rivers he saw.

He was able to see the driver, the man driving the kidnapper's car, able to see that he was moving guns from one pocket to another, that he was consulting a map. But then he said, I have no idea what he looked like.

And at first, as she was speaking to the police and the press the next day, Florence Woolverton was also saying, I have no idea what they looked like.

And then all of a sudden, they did start to know what they looked like and provided pretty good descriptions of them.

The most memorable part of Florence Woolverton's description of the kidnapper, or one of the kidnappers is she told the press, he looked like Rudy Valentino. He was a very attractive man.

And they were well spoken, polite, and attractive men for what that's worth. That's the way they were described.

And then Woolverton also in his 1934 statement to the FBI, also provided a pretty good description and said, I would probably recognize these people if I saw them again.

Yeah.

So, Woolverton is in this tight spot, as you've said. And he was a guy who really liked being in control of situations. And it's just a really interesting moment when he suddenly isn't in control anymore.

He's being forced to comply with these demands. He's got a pistol pointed at him. He's put in this dark, dirty, cold basement.

A far cry from his typical, luxurious surroundings. But even in this difficult situation, where they're using language like, we're going to drill him in the head, he still tries to stay in control, right?

31:06

Negotiating the Ransom

And in this pretty preposterous exchange between Woolverton and his captors, he tries to negotiate the price of his own release.

Yeah. And that's something else that seemed really odd to me. But once I did a little bit more research, I understood where he was coming from.

He worked out a deal. First they said they were going to kill him because his wife went to the press.

And they were reading, they were reading these newspapers about the kidnapping with, I think, utter fury that his wife not only had talked to the police, but had gone straight to them.

That within an hour of them kidnapping Woolverton, she was sitting in the police chief's office telling him everything she knew. And it was all in the paper the next day.

And they went and picked up probably the afternoon editions and said, OK, well, this is this whole plan just just went out the window. So they're telling Woolverton they're going to kill him. They they say, all right, get in the car.

We're we're going to kill you because your wife talked. And we're obviously not going to get the ransom money because the whole note was published by every newspaper in the vicinity.

The Chicago Tribune, the South Bend Tribune, they all had a complete accounting of the note with exactly the instructions for where you need to drive and what speed you need to drive and what you'll need to see to drop the money out the window, the

flashing of the lights ten times. Everybody knew that was the plan.

You could only imagine how many people would have been driving up and down that road, either looking for the kidnappers or flashing their lights ten times in the hopes that they might be the ones that score the 50,000 in cash.

The plan falls apart, they're not going to get their money. They could have hung on to Woolverton, but at this point, I think he was too hot. They did not want to get caught.

They didn't really want to kill him either. These were rational people who, if they kill him, now they're looking at pretty much a death sentence if they ever got caught. So they started negotiating.

And Woolverton, I think, was in his element at that point. My impression is that he, as a secretary and treasurer of Malleable Steel Range, which was the company his father started, he was used to job owning, arguing, debating, negotiating.

And that's what he did. And he said, well, 50,000 isn't going to happen. You can go ahead and kill me now.

He more or less put it that way. 50,000 is just never going to happen. The banks are shutting down.

We can't get that much cash. Things haven't been good for us either. Now, that last point, I'm not sure if that was true or not.

That may have just been what he was saying. It seems like he had always been very comfortable. But he was pleading prob poverty.

And so they said, okay, all right, $10,000. And this is the part that really just surprises me. Assuming it's true, assuming that Woolverton was being honest in his FBI statement, he said, no, $10,000 is still too much.

You might as well kill me now. And so he says, let's do $8,000. And just to put it in perspective, the rule of thumb for $1932 is about a factor of 20 for inflation.

So $1 in 1932 is equal to about $20 in 19, excuse me, is equal to about $20 in 2020 currency. So we're talking $160,000 in 2020 cash that Woolverton was committing to paying. So $8,000.

And then the question is, and I raised this in the book, why didn't Woolverton just say, sure, I'll give you the 50,000, just let me go and I'll get it together and I'll pay you as soon as I get home?

They would have let him out and he would have been alive.

But he had no, he needed to make a deal with these guys because if he double crossed them, so to speak, if he promised them money and then didn't deliver, they knew where he lived and they'd come and either kill him or kill his wife and daughter.

They knew where everybody went to work and what cars they drove and where they went to school. And so he felt that he had to make a promise that he could keep. And in fact, he did put $8,000 in cash and gave it to his nephew, John Woolverton Jr.

And John followed the instructions of a new ransom note that was sent to him in the mail, which Dave Henry also has the original of.

And John Henry tried to make a delivery, but in a great irony, apparently that money was never received by the kidnappers. So they called, they threatened, they for a year, they threatened the Woolvertons on the phone and in letters.

And fortunately, no harm was ever done, other than I'm sure great psychic harm.

Can you imagine getting a call from, and these calls are apparently placed by a woman, getting a call from a woman saying, we're going to kill your daughter unless you pay up. You still owe us $8,000. We haven't gotten any money yet.

So something went wrong with the money drop and the thugs were angry. But in the end, they never got it and no harm came to the Woolvertons.

And Betty Woolverton was the apple of their eye, right?

Absolutely. She was adopted soon after birth. The parents, who knows, are a little bit of mystery there.

They had tried to have a child. There was one child stillborn, died a few days after she was born, I think on Thanksgiving Day in 1919, I believe.

And so they adopted Betty just like a few weeks after that, or maybe even within a few days of losing their child, their biological child. And she's the only child they ever had. Absolutely precious.

And Florence Woolverton kept a book of baby things and had all kinds of cute stuff. This was obviously a very loved child and a very pampered child too. As I note in the book, on her first Christmas, she got two silver spoons, not just one.

And she was born into probably very difficult circumstances, but was within weeks, was in the Woolverton household being taken care of by everybody.

So one of the questionable decisions made by the kidnappers is why, and this is pre-freeway. It's a three-hour drive from South Bend to Chicago. Why do they take him all the way to Chicago and drop him off downtown?

Basically, why didn't they just take him, you know, a bit out of South Bend and leave him on some rural road? You know, it's an odd decision.

Yes. And all I can do is speculate because there's really nothing, there's no explanation for this.

But I would propose that they needed to take him far away from South Bend to a place where there are a lot of people and a lot of cars with the concern that if they dropped him somewhere closer to South Bend, he'd immediately wave down the next car

or run to the next gas station or restaurant and tell everybody what happened and, you know, hurry, hurry, they're getting away. They dropped me off five minutes ago. They can't be far out of town. Cops would give chase.

And like I said, there was a military level of state police activity on all these big state roads and state highways. So everything was swarming with cops.

So I think taking him far away from South Bend, dropping him off in a kind of desolate part of the city. As he says, there weren't many lights visible. It was an empty lot where they dropped him off.

And he had to walk several blocks to get to a main street and the street cars that were ubiquitous in Chicago at the time. And by then, they could be any number of places away.

And plus, I think they were, I don't know, I think they were based in Chicago. And so maybe it was convenient for them because there was only a few more miles drive to whatever their hideout was.

But I think they were pretty confident that they would not be picked up. Now, Woolverton himself was worried.

He said, hey guys, please drop me off here in the middle of nowhere because if any cops see me or anybody sees me and the cops give chase, they're gonna start shooting and you're gonna start shooting back and you're trying to let me go and I'm gonna

end up dead anyway. But that's what they did. They dropped him off in Chicago and he made his way home from there. Yeah.

So yeah, as you've said, Woolverton arrives in Chicago.

He takes his time going home, doesn't call his family, makes some stops to buy this or that. And he claimed that he was afraid of being tailed and took this meandering route home to shake anyone who might have been following him.

And he just kind of strolls through the door of his house, his house is full of books, jaws drop. It's unusual for a kidnapee to be released before a ransom is paid.

41:25

The Kidnapping Epidemic

And it's such an interesting era for kidnappings, as you write in your book, that the Marion Parker kidnapping had preceded this one.

In 1927, she was kidnapped. Significantly, she was 12 years old. And her story, the horrific details of her kidnapping, were covered in the South Bend Tribune, which the Woolvertons were faithful subscribers of.

And I'm sure they saw the story, and she didn't make it. She was murdered by her kidnapper, and then dismembered. And then he got, I think it was about $2,000 in silver certificates from her rich banker father.

And she was dumped off, I don't know, like 100 or 200 feet down the road, and her father ran to her and just found a dismembered body. It was called the most horrible crime of the 1920s. And they wrote songs about it.

It was just such an awful case. And I have to think that the Woolvertons had her story in mind as they dealt with their own kidnapping trauma with their own 12-year-old daughter.

Right, right, yeah. And the Lindbergh kidnapping happened not long after Woolverton's.

What happened, what I propose in the book is Woolverton's kidnapping seemed to be kind of a breaking point for a lot of people. This is a shocking crime. That's the way they described it.

Unparalleled in its ruthlessness and brashness. And so it seems that within a few weeks of his kidnapping, several reporters decided they were going to write a complete compendium of kidnapping.

Somebody at the Daily News in New York City did so, and somebody working for the Newspaper Enterprise Association did the same thing. Both stories got picked up on the wire.

And usually, the journalism gods are not very kind, and I can say that from experience. But in this case, the timing was amazing. Lindbergh was kidnapped five or six weeks after Woolverton was.

These two reporters had these big series ready to go. The Daily News ran a 16-chapter, they called it, a 16-part series ran day after day for more than two weeks in the Daily News.

And these series were ready to go within a day of Lindbergh's kidnapping. So they definitely were not prompted by Lindbergh's kidnapping. These series represented a ton of research, and this is pre-internet days, and there was travel involved.

The reporters would describe going to Missouri to get information from people. So these stories had been written before Lindbergh's kidnapping.

The day he was kidnapped, they just changed the lead from kidnapping is a big problem in America, to something more like Lindbergh's kidnapping illustrates how big a problem kidnapping is in America. And it was really a serious issue.

I did kind of an unscientific study of the appearance of the word kidnapping in papers and newspapers.com year by year and found that there was a peak. It really just skyrocketed.

Kidnapping, the word kidnapping and kidnap appears just over and over again in the early 1930s. Peaks may be around 35 or 36, and then just precipitously drops.

Right. We've covered a lot of kidnappings on the show, including the Barker-Carpus Gang's kidnapping of Edward Bremer and William Hamm Jr. I think maybe we talked about that more on Minnesota's Most Notorious.

45:32

The Kelly Connection

But the Charles Urschel kidnapping, which you write about in your book. And I want to ask you about that. Urschel was snatched by Machine Gun Kelly.

Kelly had a connection to the Woolverton kidnapping, which by the way has never been solved, right? The Woolverton case.

Yes. J. Edgar Hoover wrote several times in the American magazine and in a book called Persons in Hiding, that was published I think in 1937.

And he described in these magazine articles and in his book, which fed off the magazine articles a lot of the same language, that there was a wealthy industrialist in South Bend, Indiana, who was kidnapped by Machine Gun Kelly.

And there is no doubt he's talking about Howard Woolverton. And the press of the day knew that he was talking about Woolverton, but he didn't name Woolverton. And people said, well, Mr.

Hoover, this is still a big deal for us, this kidnapping from four or five years ago, because these magazine articles in the book came out in like the late 30s, I think 1937, 1938. And they said, what's up with this?

And he sent a telegram back, this is secret. I'm not telling you anything about the Woolverton kidnapping, which was really, I thought, a strange outcome.

He liked to claim credit for arresting and imprisoning, convicting and imprisoning Machine Gun Kelly, George Kelly, his wife Catherine, and Eddie Dahl. All three of them were in on the Woolverton kidnapping, according to Hoover.

But he didn't want to provide too much information. He didn't want to provide the name or the date or too much information about it, because you can only speculate.

Correct, yeah. And Catherine Kelly, her involvement in the gang, it does make some sense in the Woolverton case, because again, it was a woman who had been calling the family, threatening them.

Yes. You can assume that it was her, but I don't have any proof of that. There's, we can only speculate.

But it makes sense. She wanted her money.

You do write quite a bit about Kelly's connection to the Woolverton kidnapping. And by the way, I did an episode about Machine Gun Kelly many, many years ago. It was one of the first interviews on the show.

But the Woolverton case was not talked about. I'm pretty positive. For J.

Edgar Hoover, it was so convenient for him to place the blame on the Kelly's case for Woolverton's abduction. Because George Kelly was already in jail. Everything had been tied up for him in a nice, tidy little bow.

Yeah.

And he never charged them. They were never charged, never prosecuted for the Woolverton kidnapping. Nobody ever was.

But my impression is they were the ones. And I've done some more research on things since the book came out.

And this is, of course, the risk you always run when you publish a book about something that happened 100 years ago is you're going to eventually happen upon some new information. And in my case, it was kind of funny.

I Googled Woolverton kidnapping, which I did maybe once every week or two for the last four years just to see if something else popped up.

In this case, I was curious about if anybody's talking about the book because it was out or just about to come out and it had been promoted up until that point. And so I looked it up and I see this new link to this FBI, this collection of FBI files.

So I pop it open. It's a bunch of scans, a bunch of, I don't know, photographs or mimeographs or something of raw FBI data and notes from the Bremer kidnapping. And I found out that that's why they wanted the statement from Woolverton in 1934.

The federal anti-kidnapping law was passed in summer of 32. It's called the Lindbergh law. Although what happened to Woolverton can very much be given credit for the passage of that law too, because his kidnapping got people's attention.

So, this new law is in place that enables J. Edgar Hoover to pursue kidnappers wherever they happen, as long as they take their victim across the state line, which usually kidnappers did. And he, to his credit, whatever else you want to say about J.

Edgar Hoover, he shut down kidnapping. He was all over these cases. And the number of pages the FBI generated on the Bremmer kidnapping was, I'm estimating somewhere around 4,000 to 5,000 pages, documents, notes, memos.

And I've been going through it ever since.

And that's where there was multiple references to the Woolverton kidnapping, because there was a thought that where they kept Woolverton might be the same place where they kept, where they were keeping Bremmer.

Because they were trying to find this place, this farmhouse where Woolverton was kept. And thought they might find Bremmer there, because they kept Bremmer for, I guess, about a week or so.

You know, Woolverton was only in their possession for 24 hours, but Bremmer they kept for a good bit longer. And they did get the ransom on the Bremmer case. And they never did find the farmhouse.

Nobody's ever found the farmhouse where Woolverton was kept. There's a good chance it's been bulldozed since then. But they interviewed Katherine and Machine Gun Kelly about the Woolverton kidnapping.

And they were both very forthcoming about it. These were prison interviews. Both of them were in prison for life for the Urschel kidnapping.

But they were both very forthcoming, at least seem to be. But Machine Gun Kelly was saying things about, oh, yeah, we kept Woolverton in a farmhouse owned by a Swedish guy with six kids, six or seven kids. And he lived near Aurora, Illinois.

And he told us to get out once he figured out we were we were kidnappers. And nothing none of it checked out. There's no Swedish kidnapper.

I mean, there's no Swedish farmer anywhere in that in that area. The FBI searched up and down around Aurora, Illinois and in parts further never found anybody. Catherine was saying things about it, too.

She really didn't know what she was talking about. And so it was but they they didn't deny that they'd been involved in it, which I found interesting.

It seemed that they were telling the FBI all kinds of stuff about it as if they had definitely partaken of the crime, the kidnapping of Woolverton. And that's not in the book because I found this information after the book came out.

It's not really there's not a whole lot there that I wish was in the book because it seems like it was a lot of misdirection. The Kellys were not very helpful. There's nothing that would have changed the overall scope of the book.

It was just basically criminals lying, was what I ended up with in those notes. But it's fascinating to go through it too.

Yeah.

53:42

Unmasking the Suspects

A man named Vern Miller is part of this story. He was a South Dakota native who did spend a good deal of time in Minnesota and also Chicago and committed crimes all over the Midwest.

But there is some speculation that Vern Miller might have been the Rudolph Valentino lookalike Mrs. Woolverton had tried to identify. Can you talk more about Vern Miller and his possible involvement in all of this?

Yeah.

There's one sentence in Woolverton's FBI statement. He says that one of the kidnappers had a cough, a persistent hack, and Woolverton asked him about it. And he said, Yeah, I'm fought for the Army, the such and such US.

Army. He used some foul language in France for four months. And I got gassed.

And I've had a hack ever since. And just that one tantalizing sentence, Woolverton had no reason to make that up. I can't imagine that that wasn't exactly what happened.

And that sentence just absolutely blows the lid off who was involved here. Neither of the Kellys served in World War I.

Obviously, Katherine is a woman, and George, Machine Gun Kelly, was graduating from high school about 1918 or 1919, so he wouldn't have seen action, although he did fill out a draft card.

And Eddie Dahl was not a veteran either, was not a World War I veteran either. So who else could it have been? And that, I didn't think I'd ever find out anything about that.

It's so hard to dig up that kind of information. But I kind of stumbled on to it. Well, I was just reading a book, doing some research, and it just, it threw out a sentence.

Oh yeah, and Frank Nash, World War I veteran, used to hang out with Machine Gun Kelly in Chicago and do jobs with them. And Vern Miller also hung out with Machine Gun Kelly and did jobs with him.

Vern Miller was also a World War I veteran who also claimed to be injured. Although as I discussed in the book, there's some doubt as to whether he really was injured. But Frank Nash, the records very strongly indicate he was.

He came home on a casualty company, troop ship, which was for the injured. And so he probably got gassed pretty bad. And he spent about four months in France.

If you look at his draft registration card and then the date of the casualty company ship coming back to America, it works out to arguably four months, six months, four months. And so were one or both of them involved?

Because yeah, Vern Miller, he's a Rudy Valentino lookalike. Based on the pictures I found of him, he looks as much like Rudy Valentino as anybody could in those times. Frank Nash, not so much.

So it's one, both or neither were involved in the kidnapping, but either one of them are plausible. And they help explain why J.

Edgar Hoover didn't want to say too much about this kidnapping, other than that he had arrested and imprisoned for life the perpetrators.

Because Vern Miller and Frank Nash were both key players in the Kansas City Massacre, which was a huge black eye for the FBI, giant embarrassment. They were escorting Frank Nash back to prison. He had a habit of escaping from prison.

They're escorting him back. They're not making a secret of it. They're walking across the parking lot of the Kansas City train station and just a couple of cops around them.

Everybody knows, all the underworld knows that they're doing this, knows that they're going to have Frank Nash with them. They're getting him into the car.

And at that point, somebody shows up, very likely Vern Miller and some of his fellow criminals, and they all just start, the bullets start flying. I'll put it that way. And among the first to die was Frank Nash, probably killed by friendly fire.

They believe that he took a shotgun to the back of the head from one of the cops there.

As soon as the people started firing, the cops were not ready for this, did not have their guns ready, were taken completely by surprise, and they were getting hit by machine gun fire while a lot of them just had either shotguns or handguns.

And so it was a massacre, and it was several FBI agents, several local cops, including a police chief, and Frank Nash, all dead around this car, and just not something that Hoover would want to talk about. Or mention those that were involved.

Frank Nash's nickname was Jelly.

Jelly.

He didn't remotely look like Valentino.

No, no, he wore a wig when they arrested him in Arkansas after his last prison break. They arrested him in Arkansas, he was drinking a beer. A couple of cops surrounded him and said, all right, you're coming back to federal prison.

And he was wearing a wig at the time. He'd spent some good money on it. And that probably made him look a little bit more robust, shall we say.

But no, he was an extremely charming, very pleasant person to be around, is my impression. Everything I've read about him. People loved Frank Nash.

He was a good tipper, in fact. But he was a lifelong criminal, too. Was he there for the kidnapping?

Who knows?

I had a guest on a couple of years ago named Kenneth LaMaster, and he wrote a book about the Leavenworth Seven, the infamous Kansas prison break. And two of the people that helped facilitate the breakout were Frank Nash and George Kelly.

Yes. I touch on that. I don't think I said a whole lot about that.

That was the point where I realized that the criminal, the criminal connections just web out in ways that are beyond the scope of this book. But these people all knew each other. They all did jobs together.

They broke out of prison together, and they kidnapped together. Yeah.

It's hard to keep straight sometimes. These roving, midwest bank robbing gangs, they all have their core members, and then they would kind of borrow members from other gangs.

I consider it a singularity in American history. You have the car which enables these guys, and a lot of them drove souped up cars, not just ordinary cars. You have the automobile, which is a few decades old.

You have a good network of roads and highways, but you don't have a federal police. You don't have a national police force. So all you had to do was cross the state line, and chances are they're not going to come for you.

Because the cops in Illinois can't go to Indiana and start grabbing people. They don't have the resources, first of all. And if you're a cop in Indiana, you don't want a bunch of Illinois cops running around and arresting your citizens.

So there was no police force, but there was cars that everybody could drive and buy and good roads. And you just had these basically celebrity hoodlums going bank to bank, doing kidnapping, one kidnapping after another, and getting away with it.

And then finally, to his credit, again, J. Edgar Hoover put a stop to a lot of things. He got the laws he needed, and then he enforced them in a way that shut this down.

1:02:06

A Grandfatherʼs Secret

So, Howard Woolverton, does he ever in his later years confide to anyone about his thoughts on his abduction?

Does he ever make a guess on who he believed kidnapped him? Or was this something that he didn't want to talk about at all?

There's a moment in the book where he, soon after the kidnapping, they arrested a gang of kidnappers in the Chicago area, and they brought Woolverton and Florence Woolverton to Chicago to have a look over, and they went. Along with their lawyer, Mr.

Faribault, and they took a look and they really couldn't decide if they didn't feel like any of them were the people that had kidnapped them. So it's pretty inconclusive and none of them were ever charged with this kidnapping, of course.

So they did that, and then he provided this FBI statement that never saw the light of day until my book came out, and that's it, except for one more very brief mention that is in the book. He is visiting California.

He's visiting his daughter and his daughter's family, Betty. She's grown up. She's had four kids.

She lives in California now with her husband, and her children, and he's there visiting. He visited every year, and they're driving over the Bay Bridge where you can see Alcatraz. And at that point, Machine Gun Kelly was at Alcatraz.

He was eventually moved to Leavenworth, but he was at Alcatraz at the time. Woolverton leans back. This is in the mid-50s, I believe, the mid-50s.

He leans back from the front seat, looks at his grandson, David Hendry Jr., and just says something along the lines of, that's where they got my buddy. That's where my buddy lives. And he points to Alcatraz.

And Betty immediately shut him down. Daddy, don't say that. The kids are too young to hear about that.

And that's an anecdote that's in the book. And it really stuck with Dave. He never forgot that his grandfather had said that to him, and he was forever after interested in this kidnapping and eventually got all the old files about it.

And then the book resulted. But other than that, no, there was no, that I ever could find, no mention of it. His obituary talked a good bit about it.

He died, I want to say, in the late 60s. And he never said a word about it to anybody. The obituary was just completely things taken from the, from the newspapers.

Woolverton, who was kidnapped in 1932, has died, et cetera. And that's all we know.

Buddy, it's an interesting choice of words.

Yeah, I mean, who, who knows? This is, this is a, oh gosh, a 70-year-old memory from, from Dave Hendry. So probably the word he used, that's what Dave remembers.

It was a very distinct memory from him. And sure, at that point, 20 years had passed. Machine Gun Kelly was no longer scary for anybody.

In fact, soon after he went to prison, they started calling him Pop Gun Kelly because he was just all talk and really, he really wasn't very tough. He just, he knew how to shoot a machine gun. And that's about it.

Right.

He got a really cool name, right?

Yeah. Supposedly, his whole persona was created by Catherine, his wife. She wanted to be married to a supervillain.

And I think she really did have the criminal mindset. I believe she was antisocial. I think she murdered one of her husbands.

And if you read some of the things that she would say or do, it just, there's just a disconnect from reality there and in anger, just an underlying anger that you think she's not, there's something wrong here.

So she was the one that got him a machine gun and taught him to make sure he learned how to use it and supposedly would walk around and present the shells fired by him, the bullets fired by him from his machine gun.

And she'd hand them out and say, this is one of the bullets from Machine Gun Kelly, my husband, just a souvenir for you. And she really, that made his name catch on too.

Gosh, I get so excited talking about this era of American history. I love it so much. So for you, for people who want to learn more about you and your work, where should we send them?

Oh gosh, well, I don't have a web page.

I work full time. So this has been a side project that's been very consuming for the last four and a half years, but I haven't had time to put together any kind of blog or web page or whatever.

If somebody contacts you and they seem legit, feel free to give them my email address. I'd love to talk about this to folks that are curious or that are interested in more books on the topic.

And then I've got a LinkedIn page that mentions the book, so I'm not hard to find. It has a lot of other things I've done too, because mostly I've been selling for the last 25 years.

Sounds good. And we can direct interested listeners to your publisher's website.

Yes, and Indiana University Press has been amazing to work with. Just a quick little side note on that for what it's worth. I've been sending draft work in for close to 40 years.

And when I got the email from Indiana University Press, my first acceptance ever after hundreds of rejections, I thought it was a joke. But I replied, and they've been great to work with.

And when people contact them, they make sure I get the note that's happened several times. One of the cool ones was a family member, Hugh Woolverton, reached out. What happened was his son was like, hey, our grandfather was kidnapped, wasn't he?

I'm gonna look that up. And so his son searches Woolverton in Google, he Googles Woolverton, and my book pops up. This had been a just family lore, kind of secretive, infamous family lore for decades for these folks.

Nobody really knew much about it. It was just, I think our grandfather got kidnapped by Machine Gun Kelly. And so every once in a while, they Google it.

And finally, in 2022, somebody Googled it, and they came across the Indiana University Press pre-launch page. This is like the whole story. Here it is.

Here's a picture. Here's the cover. Here's, you know, in this case, here's your grandfather or your great grandfather's picture, and the whole story about his kidnapping it, you know, it really was a shock to them.

So they reached out to Indiana University Press and had some great chats with family members who finally got the true story. And it was interesting because I was telling them things they didn't know.

There has never been an accurate representation of the story until the book came out.

And really, I had to tell five different, six different versions of the kidnapping because I had to use Woolverton's version for one, the newspaper version for a second, Florence Woolverton's version for a third, J.

Edgar Hoover's version of the kidnapping. That was like the fourth. And then I had to build my own version of everything everybody else was saying for the fifth.

Plus, I had to interview the few people who still remembered. So it was quite an undertaking. And I had resources that nobody else had, including family members, to put this thing together.

Yeah, that's so satisfying, right?

To be able to fill in the historical blanks for family members, especially.

Yes, yeah, and to be able to tell them. And Dave, Dave Hendry did not know that this was major news. You had to delve through thousands of newspaper articles to figure out how big a deal this was.

And he hadn't had a chance to do that yet. He'd found a few newspaper articles, but he didn't know that this was as big a deal as it was.

Well, congratulations on your first book, and hopefully many more to come.

I hope so. Thank you so much.

Again, I have been speaking to Kevin Meredith. He is co-author along with David Hendry, Jr. of the book Under Penalty of Death, the untold story of Machine Gun Kelly's first kidnapping.

This has been another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cobwebbed corner of the world. I'm Erik Rivenes, and have a safe tomorrow.

If you want to hear more true life tales of crime, tragedies, and disasters throughout history, follow Most Notorious wherever you get your podcasts.

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This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan, managing producer Emily Burke. Executive producers are Joel Callan and Lindsey Graham.