Ma Barker and the Barker–Karpis Gang

The case

The FBI found Kate Barker and her son Fred through an alligator. In January 1935 agents arrested her other son, Arthur 'Doc' Barker, in Chicago, and among his things was a map and a letter mentioning an old alligator called Gator Joe that lived in a lake near the house where his mother was staying. Agents worked out that the lake was Lake Weir in central Florida, and that the family renting a two-storey house on its shore under the name Blackburn was the one they wanted.

On the morning of 16 January 1935 they surrounded the house at Ocklawaha and called on the occupants to come out. According to the Bureau, Fred answered with gunfire. What followed was one of the longest shootouts in the Bureau's history, lasting several hours while local people gathered to watch. When the firing from inside had long stopped, agents sent in a local handyman, Willie Woodbury, wearing a bulletproof vest. He found Fred and his mother dead in an upstairs bedroom. Fred had been hit many times. Kate Barker, sixty-one, appeared to have died from a single bullet.

J. Edgar Hoover immediately described her as 'the most vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade', and the image stuck: Ma Barker, the hillbilly matriarch who drilled her boys in murder. The record is much thinner. She was born Arizona Donnie Clark in the Missouri Ozarks in 1873, married a labourer named George Barker, and raised four sons in poverty in Tulsa. All four were in trouble with the law from their teens. Herman shot a deputy in Wyoming and killed himself in 1927 to avoid capture; Lloyd went to Leavenworth for mail robbery; Doc was imprisoned for killing a night watchman in Tulsa; Fred went to the Kansas state prison for burglary.

In prison Fred met Alvin Karpis, a cool and capable robber from Kansas. After their release in 1931 the two formed the core of what became the Barker–Karpis gang. In December 1931, after a robbery at West Plains, Missouri, they shot dead the local sheriff, C. Roy Kelly, and fled. Kate Barker, by then separated from her husband and living with a man named Arthur Dunlop, went with them. The gang moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where the corrupt police chief Tom Brown protected visiting criminals for a price. Dunlop, who talked too much when he drank and was blamed for a near miss with the police, was found shot dead in April 1932.

From St. Paul the gang robbed banks across the Midwest, killing several police officers, and then turned to kidnapping. In June 1933 they seized the brewer William Hamm Jr. and collected $100,000. In January 1934 they took the banker Edward Bremer, beat him, and held him in a house in Bensenville, Illinois, until his family paid $200,000. Both men were released alive. The Bremer case brought the full weight of the Bureau down on the gang. Fingerprints on the Hamm ransom notes, raised with a new silver nitrate technique, and the recorded serial numbers on the Bremer money led agents from one associate to the next.

Kate Barker's part in all this is the question. She lived with the gang, travelled with it, rented houses under false names and knew what her sons did for a living, which would have made her at least an accessory. But no witness ever placed her at a robbery or a planning session. Karpis said she was a simple, superstitious woman who was sent to the cinema when business was discussed, and the bank robber Harvey Bailey, who knew the family, wrote that she could not have planned breakfast. Most historians now think Hoover enlarged her role after the fact, to make the killing of a sixty-one-year-old woman look like the defeat of a criminal mastermind.