The Kansas City Massacre

The case

The prisoner was handcuffed in the front seat, and the man meant to guard him from behind had a shotgun he did not know how to use. A little after seven on the morning of 17 June 1933, seven lawmen walked Frank Nash out of Union Station in Kansas City to a waiting Chevrolet. Nash was a veteran train and bank robber who had walked away from Leavenworth penitentiary three years earlier. Two federal agents and Otto Reed, police chief of McAlester, Oklahoma, had arrested him the previous day in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and brought him north by overnight train. In Kansas City they were met by the head of the Bureau of Investigation's local office, Reed Vetterli, agent Raymond Caffrey, and two city detectives, Frank Hermanson and William Grooms.

Nash's friends had learned of his arrest and of the train. As the officers settled into the car, with Nash in front and agents Joe Lackey and Frank Smith and Chief Reed in the back, armed men came from between the parked cars. Someone shouted 'Up, up!' and someone else 'Let 'em have it!' Machine-gun fire swept the car. In about half a minute Hermanson and Grooms were dead on the pavement, Caffrey was dying of a head wound, and Reed and Nash were dead inside. Lackey was badly wounded and Vetterli hit in the arm. Smith, crouched in the middle of the back seat, was untouched. The attackers ran to another car and were gone.

The Bureau's investigation, driven hard by J. Edgar Hoover, concluded that the plan had been organised by Nash's associates in Kansas City and carried out by Vernon Miller, a former South Dakota sheriff turned gunman, with the help of Charles Arthur 'Pretty Boy' Floyd and his partner Adam Richetti. Floyd and Richetti, the Bureau said, had arrived in the city the night before after kidnapping a Missouri sheriff on the way. Fingerprints identified as Richetti's were found on beer bottles at Miller's house.

Miller never stood trial. In November 1933 his body was found in a ditch outside Detroit, apparently the victim of other criminals. Floyd and Richetti stayed at large until October 1934, when a car crash near Wellsville, Ohio, led to a gunfight with local police. Richetti was captured. Floyd escaped, and two days later, on 22 October 1934, federal agents and local officers shot him dead on a farm near East Liverpool. According to those present, he denied to the end that he had been at Union Station.

Richetti was tried in Kansas City in June 1935 for the murder of Detective Hermanson, about two years after the shooting. Witnesses who had earlier named other men or no one now identified him, and he was convicted and sentenced to death. After appeals he was executed in the gas chamber of the Missouri State Penitentiary on 7 October 1938. He too insisted he had not been there. Four men who had helped plan the escape, Richard Galatas, Herbert Farmer, Louis Stacci and Frank Mulloy, were convicted of conspiracy in January 1935 and given the maximum two years.

The case is still argued over, and for more than one reason. Floyd's biographers and several other writers say the massacre was unlike anything else in his career, and that the Bureau needed a famous name. Some researchers have gone further and argued, from the wounds and the weapons, that some of the lawmen and Nash himself were hit by Lackey's shotgun as he fumbled with it in the back seat, a possibility the Bureau never acknowledged. The Bureau's own files, and a number of underworld informants, continued to name Floyd. What is not disputed is the result: within a year Congress had given federal agents the power to carry guns and make arrests.