Infamous America - PRETTY BOY FLOYD Ep. 6 | “Public Enemy No. 1”

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Charles Floyd and his partner, Adam Richetti, successfully hide from law enforcement for months, but then a car accident on a country road becomes the beginning of the end. Local cops and FBI agents led by Melvin Purvis, the man stopped John Dillinger, close in on the two fugitives. After Dillinger’s demise, Pretty Boy Floyd rose to Public Enemy No. 1, and now Melvin Purvis and his team have a final confrontation with America’s most likeable bank robber. Try Headspace and receive one month free! Join here Headspace.com/infamous Check out the Jordan Harbinger show today! jordanharbinger.com/start For tickets to the "Nuances of True Crime Storytelling: Deep Cover and Lost Hills" event, go to momenthouse.com/dclh To advertise on this podcast, please email [e-mail] Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World, Once Upon A Crime, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Floyd sat on Ellen Conkel's front porch, tired and dirty, but with a full stomach. The sun was starting to set. The older woman had been kind enough to make a meal for a wayfaring stranger who walked down the road. He'd slept in the woods, and she forgave his tattered appearance. She tried to refuse money for the meal, but he insisted, and she ignored the 45-caliber gun in his belt. Charles now waited for Ellen's brother Stuart. Stewart had agreed to give Charles a ride off of the farm, but Stewart would only go as far as the town of Clarkson,

which was just three miles down the road. It wasn't much, but beggars couldn't be choosers. So Charles parked himself on the porch and waited for Stewart to finish his work. While Charles waited, he leaped through the local paper. It was a day old, but if it had been that morning's paper, Charles would have seen that his partner Adam Rischetti had been arrested. Charles would have discovered that he was no longer an unidentified fugitive.

The law knew that the man who ran into the woods yesterday was Charles Floyd, aka Pretty Boy Floyd. And Charles would have known that the law was dropping a net over the region. He would have known that federal agents, among them Melvin Purvis, the man who got Dillinger, had joined the hunt. But Charles knew none of that as Stewart returned to the farmhouse. Charles and Stewart climbed into the car along with Stewart's wife. As Stewart turned over the old engine, Charles spotted two sedans closing in on the farm, moving fast, churning up gravel. Charles turned to Stewart and said, back, back, pull back behind that corn crib.

Stewart struggled to get the car in reverse. The sedans were less than 100 yards away. Charles pulled his gun, jumped out of the car, and dove under the corn crib. If Charles was lucky, the cars would pass by. But when Charles saw them turn sharply onto the property, he knew it was time to run. The tree line was close. If he could make it to the woods, he'd be okay. He'd once been called the Phantom of the Ozarks, the bank robber who couldn't be caught.

But this would be the last run for Pretty Boy Floyd. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the story of 1930s bank robber, Pretty Boy Floyd. This is episode six, public enemy number one. Charles Floyd, Adam Roshetti, Bula Baird, and Rose Baird, laid low in Buffalo, New York for the second half of 1933 and the first half of 1934. And while Charles spent the extended period with his longtime mistress,

his ex-wife and son were living a very different life. Ruby and Jackie had been approached by an opportunistic theater producer. He convinced them to star in a stage show that told their story of being the family of the wanted outlaw. The play recounted Floyd's journey from country boy to Heartland Felon. It told of his narrow escapes and his generosity to the poor folks of Oklahoma. But the production also drove home the point that it could never, end well for Pretty Boy Floyd. The production was titled, Crime Does Not Pay. The show gained national attention, and newspapers speculated that the uncatchable outlaw might be brazen enough to appear at the show.

But Floyd stayed out of sight. He was largely inactive by most accounts for over a year, but Pretty Boy Floyd was still reported in towns and cities from Philadelphia to Fort Worth. There were rumors that he had joined up with John Dillinger. When Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker took their murderous roadshow to eastern Oklahoma, there was a rumor that they made an alliance with Pretty Boy Floyd. None of it was true, of course, and while Floyd remained quietly in upstate New York, the age of the Depression-era outlaw seemed to reach its twilight. One by one, gangsters and hoodlums started to fall.

In May of 1934, Bonnie. and Clyde were killed in Louisiana by a posse led by famous Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. After that, J. Edgar Hoover increased the pressure on his star agent, Melvin Purvis, who ran the Bureau's Chicago office to bring in John Dillinger. The bank robber had narrowly survived an epic shootout with Purvis and his agents at the Little Bohemia Inn in Wisconsin a month before Bonnie and Clyde died. And then in Chicago on July 22nd, Dillinger went to see the film Manhattan melodrama starring Clark Gable, William Powell, and Mernaloy. As the Most Wanted Man in America exited the theater, federal agents tried to capture him.

When Dillinger realized he was made, he bolted for an alley, where he was shot and killed. The papers ran banner headlines about the shooting. The Bureau and J. Edgar Hoover took curtain calls in the press, and the agent in charge, Melvin Purvis, became a national. hero. With John Dillinger's name crossed off the list, Hoover elevated Pretty Boy Floyd to the prestigious position of public enemy number one. And Hoover assigned his newly famous agent, Melvin Purvis, to do it again, bring down public enemy number one by any means necessary. And as Pervis hunted for the bank robber who had disappeared for more than a year, the Bureau made an announcement

that sealed Floyd's fate. On October 10, 1934, the Bureau said it solved the case of the Kansas City Massacre. It named local Kansas City criminal Vern Miller as the mastermind. One of the witnesses had tentatively identified Miller as one of the gunmen, and a few months later, Miller ended up dead in a ditch in Michigan. The Bureau said the other two shooters were Charles Pretty Boy Floyd and his partner, Adam Roshetti. While the Bureau and the media had pushed Floyd as a prime suspect from the start, the case was strengthened by Kansas City gangster Johnny La Cappra.

LeCapra reported to Johnny Lotzia, the crime boss of Kansas City. When Lottcia was brutally killed, LeCapra decided to tell his story to the Bureau. According to LeCapra, Vern Miller had been in contact with Frank Nash's wife at the time of Nash's capture, and Miller assured her he would free Nash. Nash had helped Miller escape from prison, and now Miller wanted to repay the favor. When it became known in Kansas City, that Nash would be coming through Union Station,

Miller approached Lotzia about using some of his men for the job. Lottzia didn't want the heat on his local boys, so he told Miller to use men from outside the city. LeCAPRA claimed he introduced Miller to Floyd and Roshetti. and that was how Miller, Floyd, and Roshetti became the men who killed four lawmen and Frank Nash at Union Station. Though it didn't explain why they killed the man,

they were supposedly trying to rescue. Either way, after the assassination, or the botched rescue attempt, LeCapra claimed that the three shooters hold up at Miller's Kansas City home because Floyd had been shot in the shoulder. Crime boss Johnny Lotzia provided them with a car, money, and the names of contacts in other cities. Floyd and Roshetti fled within a day or two at the most.

And that was the story of the Kansas City massacre. The story worked for the Bureau. The timeline of Floyd and Rishetti's arrival in Kansas City and departure from it fit the narrative. And bloody rags were found at Vern Miller's home after the shootout. And the Bureau claimed to have matched fingerprints at Miller's home to Adam Roshetti. And of course, crime boss Johnny Lotzia and suspected mastermind Vern Miller weren't alive to contradict the story. The publication of the Bureau's findings reinvigorated searches for Floyd in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. Many still believed that he returned to his home state after the massacre and had remained there while somehow eluding the manhunt. And with that in mind, it remains confusing as to why, within a week of being formally blamed for the massacre, Charles Floyd left Buffalo and headed toward home.

Records show that on October 18th, eight days after the announcement, the Baird sisters purchased a Ford V8. The outlaws and their girlfriends left the apartment in Buffalo, without returning the key, and followed the banks of Lake Erie down to Cleveland, Ohio. No one knows their intended destination, but heavy speculation rests on the small city of East Liverpool, Ohio. East Liverpool is almost directly across the state line from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and on the outskirts of town was an area known as Hell's Half Acre. It was a refuge for criminals of all kinds. The speculation rests on East Liverpool because the foursome was right outside it, near the community of Wellsville, when Floyd crashed the car.

car. On a foggy country road, Floyd lost control of the car and swerved into a telephone pole. The car could still drive, but not for long. They made a plan to send the Baird sisters into Wellsville with a damaged car to find a garage. Floyd and Roshetti would camp out until Bula and Rose returned. Floyd and Roshetti grabbed their handguns and their Tommy gun and found a secluded spot on a hill where they could track any approaching vehicles. They built a fire and prepared to wait out a long, cold night. In the early morning of Saturday, October 20th, a farmer discovered the makeshift campsite. He was properly suspicious of two men who appeared to be living in the woods like tramps while being dressed for a dinner date. The farmer went to his neighbor, Lawn Israel,

and told him that two men were in the woods on his land. Israel was equally suspicious, and the two farmers contacted the local police chief. Two men living in the woods wouldn't normally have gotten the chief out of his desk chair. This was the Great Depression, after all, and thousands were homeless and drifting through the landscape. But two days earlier, a bank had been robbed 40 miles away. The robbers were still on the loose, so the chief needed to investigate the strangers in the woods. The chief, John Fultz, deputized two local men as backup, and the three of them, in plain clothes, drove out to Lawn Israel's farm. When they arrived, Israel pointed out the path that led to

the campsite. As Fultz and his new deputies walked along the path, Floyd spotted them. He aimed a 45 at the three men, told them to raise their hands and explain themselves. Chief Fultz, who again was just in regular clothes, tried to play it off. He said he was just passing through on his way to work, and presumably the two guys with him were his co-workers. Floyd didn't buy it. He allowed the men to keep walking, but he watched them closely. Farther along the path, Fultz noticed another man, Adam Rischetti. Fultz said later, when he tried to talk to Rishetti, Floyd shouted at Rishetti to open fire. Floyd had correctly guessed that Fultz was a cop.

Roshetti grabbed his gun and fired at Fultz. Foltz pulled his 32 caliber pistol and fired at Floyd and then Rishetti. The two special deputies were unarmed, so all they could do was get the hell out of the way and watch the action. After a few shots, Rishetti's gun jammed. He threw it down and sprinted for a nearby farmhouse. Fultz chased him and caught him as he tried to break into the house. Roshetti had no choice but to surrender. He presented his hands for the handcuffs.

Back in the woods, Floyd grabbed his Tommy gun from under a blanket. He fired a string of bullets at the two deputies, but they were already running back up the path. They made it back to Lawn Israel, and the farmer handed them shotguns. They took up positions near the woods and quickly saw Floyd running down the path toward them. Floyd fired at the deputies with the Tommy gun, and the deputies returned fire with their shotguns. Floyd wounded one of the deputies, but then his gun jammed and he tossed it aside. Floyd ran through the gauntlet and escaped the vicinity. He was still free, but he didn't know the fate of his partner, and he did know that the law was closer than ever.

Chief Fultz took Adam Roshetti to jail and started an investigation. Rishetti lied about his name. but the fiction didn't last long. He tried to say that he hadn't seen Floyd in a year and that they had nothing to do with the Kansas City massacre. Fultz didn't believe either statement. Fultz called the Bureau of Investigation and set the wheels in motion

for what would be the last manhunt for Pretty Boy Floyd. Within hours, droves of men were scouring the woods around the campsite. And when Agent Melvin Purvis arrived, the argument about jurisdiction was at a frenzy. There were lots of questions and no answers. Who would lead the search for Floyd? Who would take possession of the weapons that were found?

Where would Adam Roshetti be charged? And by whom? The questions about Roshetti and the guns lingered for days, but the manhunt was the urgent matter. Agents and local lawmen blocked the roads out of Wellsville. They continued to search the woods. Purvis sent agents to Adam Roshetti's relatives in Ohio in case Floyd tried to hide in their homes.

The search went on for 36 hours and yielded nothing. Floyd, who had once been nicknamed the Phantom of the Ozarks, was living up to his billing. But with a town bottled up, it was only a matter of time. The big break happened at one of the roadblocks. A sedan carrying three men approached the roadblock, then quickly turned around and sped off. Deputies chased the car onto a country road,

and then someone in the car opened fire. The lawmen were suddenly in a speeding shootout with Pretty Boy Floyd. Floyd had kidnapped a gas station attendant and then paid a teenager to drive the outlaw and his hostage out of town. Now, the teenager and the attendant were trapped in a car during a high-speed shootout. The teenager must have been terrified, but apparently he did a decent job. There were no injuries, and Floyd was able to abandon the car and escape on foot. He raced into the woods once again and eluded capture for a little while longer.

But now the Bureau was sure that Pretty Boy Floyd was still in the area and they tightened their grip. Agents, officers, and volunteers crisscrossed the woods. Those woods eventually led to East Liverpool, Ohio, so Melvin Purvis took a group of agents into the city to search the houses that backed up to the woods. Near midday on October 22nd, Charles Floyd emerged from the woods near a farm and paid the owner for a sandwich. But the farmer refused to give the stranger in the dirty suit a ride to Youngstown. Floyd continued moving, and a few hours later, he made it to Spruce Vale Road. He saw Ellen Conkel cleaning her smokehouse.

He approached and turned on the charm. He said he and his brother were hunting in the woods, and he'd gotten lost. Ellen was understandably suspicious. Floyd was wearing a suit with cufflings and a pocket watch and wingtip shoes. If he was out hunting, he was the first man in history to go hunting in the same clothes he would wear to Sunday church service. When she asked him what they had been hunting at night, Floyd blushed and told another lie. He said the truth was he'd had too much to drink, and he'd woken up with no idea where he was. Ellen Conkel wasn't a drinker, but she also wasn't one to judge.

She invited the well-mannered young man inside and fed him spare ribs, bread, potatoes, rice, and pumpkin pie for dessert. Floyd was able to negotiate a ride with Ellen's brother, Stuart. Stewart would only agree to go to Clarkson three miles down the road, but it was better than nothing. Then Floyd sat on the porch and waited for Stewart to finish his farm work before, they drove to Clarkson. As Floyd waited on the porch, the farmer up the road was giving serious thought to the wild-looking man who'd come out of the woods. The farmer decided he needed to tell the police. He passed a description of the man to the local law, and the description quickly found Agent Melvin Purvis. Pervis wasted no time. The sun was setting, and if the

coalition couldn't find Floyd by the time it was dark, he might escape again. Pervis and and others loaded into cars and headed towards Spruce Vale Road. At about the same time the agents left for Sprucevale, Ellen Conkel's brother, Stewart, finished his work and returned to the house. He and his wife and Charles Floyd climbed into Stewart's car for the short trip to Clarkson. As the engine cranked to life, Floyd spotted two cars rushing down the road toward the farm. He shouted for Stewart to back the car up and hide it behind a corn crib. Stewart was probably flustered, and he struggled to put the car in reverse.

Floyd pulled a gun out of his waistband, leapt out of the car, and crawled under the corn crib. He waited and watched and hoped the cars would pass the farm. Instead, they turned toward it. Floyd rolled out from under the corn crib and dashed through a field. If he could make it to the woods in the distance, he had a chance to escape. Behind him, the agents were equally determined to stop. him. The cars screamed onto the farm. The agents and local lawmen, eight of them in total, scrambled out and raised their weapons. Pretty Boy Floyd, public enemy number one, was about

50 yards in front of them and running for the woods. Melvin Purvis shouted for Floyd to halt. Others echoed the call, but Floyd kept running. Pervis yelled the one-word command, fire, and the lawman opened up with pistols and rifles. Up ahead, head, Floyd kept running, but the lawmen were good shots. Floyd was hit twice in rapid succession. He crashed to the ground and couldn't run any farther. The posse of lawmen rushed up to him and dragged him into the shade of an apple tree. Floyd still had his 45, but he handed it to them and said he didn't need it anymore. Purvis asked him about the Kansas City massacre, and Floyd defiantly said he wouldn't tell them anything. Floyd asked him,

about his partner, Adam Roshetti, but the lawmen weren't in the mood to give information. They wanted Floyd to talk. At the very least, Pervis wanted Floyd to confirm his identity. Purvis told Floyd, rather than asking him, your pretty boy Floyd. Floyd, who had always hated that nickname, said, I'm Charles Arthur Floyd. Floyd confirmed it one more time, and then died at 4.25 p.m. on Monday, October 22nd, 1934. Charles Floyd, the second public enemy number one, died exactly three months to the day after the first public enemy number one, John Dillinger. Floyd was 30 years old, the same as Agent Melvin Purvis.

In the space of three months, Pervis took down two of the most wanted men in America. Ironically, though not surprisingly, the lives and legends of the two outlaws far out distance and outlasted that of the agent who stopped them. And now, after the death of Charles Floyd, a new but often repeated circus began. The body of Charles Floyd was shipped back to Oklahoma in a cheap pine box. The autopsy revealed the cause of death as internal hemorrhaging caused by a bullet that tore through Floyd's river before wedging itself beneath his heart. But maybe the most interesting thing that the autopsy revealed was a thing that was missing.

There was no evidence of a gunshot wound to Floyd's left shoulder, a wound that he allegedly suffered while participating in the Kansas City massacre. Before Floyd's family could stop the media from pouncing, newspapers ran photos of Floyd's dead body laid out on a slab. reporters descended on Ellen Conkel's farm. She was photographed holding the plates on which Floyd ate his last meal, and you can easily see those photos online today. Sveneer hunters tried to buy the plates,

but she refused to sell them at any price. They became prized possessions and family heirlooms. Jay Edgar Hoover celebrated. He announced that he had been contacted by Pretty Boy Floyd, who promised to turn himself in and stop the carnage if Hoover would agree to spare him from the electric chair. Hoover boasted that he had refused because Pretty Boy Floyd was just a yellow rat who needed extermination.

When one of these yellow curs kills one of our men, we get him and we will never stop until we do. Hoover was a master of propaganda, and there's almost no chance that Floyd secretly contacted Hoover and offered to give himself up. When Floyd's body returned to Oklahoma, somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 people passed through the Sturgis funeral home to pay their respects. True to his wishes, Charles Floyd was buried next to his father,

and it was thought to be the biggest funeral in Oklahoma history. The Baird sisters, Bula and Rose, attended the funeral. Shortly thereafter, they were questioned by the Bureau about some of the blank spots in the timeline of Pretty Boy Floyd, but they were never charged with any crimes. They moved to Texas, and reports say they continued to live an outlaw lifestyle. Floyd's ex-wife Ruby remarried not long after the death of her first love. Their son, Charles Dempsey Floyd, steered clear of the criminal underworld. He served in the Navy after he graduated high school.

He lived on the West Coast later in life, where he was a car dealer and later owned a restaurant. He outlived his father by 44 years and passed away in 1999 at the age of 74. Floyd's last partner, Adam Roshetti, denied involvement in the Kansas City massacre until the day he died in the electric chair. In 1979, 45 years after Charles Floyd died, Time magazine published an article in which Chester Smith, an East Liverpool police captain who was part of the posse that killed Floyd, claimed that the Bureau essentially executed Floyd and then covered it up. Smith claimed that he alone had fired the shot or shots that dropped Floyd. And then after Melvin Purvis interrogated Floyd,

Purvis ordered agent Herman Hollis to shoot and kill Floyd. It was a sensational story that was widely debunked. First-hand accounts claimed that Herman Hollis was miles away and not part of the posse. But the story added to the mythology, And so did the films and books and trading cards and comic books and podcasts and of course the songs. Charles Floyd was immortalized in a folk song like his idol, Jesse James. Oklahoma legend Woody Guthrie wrote a song that portrayed Floyd as a Robin Hood figure, just like the song about Jesse James.

But in Floyd's case, some of his charitable qualities were actually true. On Sprucevale Road near Clarkson, Ohio, a sign marks the field where Pretty Boy Floyd was killed. It says he was allegedly responsible for a dozen murders, mostly police officers. The Bureau of Investigation officially charged Charles Floyd with the deaths of 11 people, Jim Mills, the man who killed his father, patrolman Ralph Castner in Bowling Green, Ohio, Prohibition agent Curtis Banks in Kansas City, Missouri, four lawmen and Frank Nash in the Kansas City Massacre, and retired Sheriff Irv Kelly in Bixby, Oklahoma.

The murder of Sheriff Kelly is the only one Floyd ever confessed to publicly. Charles Floyd was the quintessential American outlaw, loved by many, worshipped by some, and hated by others. But that line is a bit of a setup. Listeners around the world will certainly recognize similarities with iconic outlaws in their own countries. Ned Kelly in Australia is a perfect example. And in this country, in 1934, after the death of Pretty Boy Floyd, a new outlaw ascended to the exalted title of Public Enemy Number One.

He was Lester Gillis, also known as Babyface Nelson. But that's a story for another day. Next time on Infamous America, we're going to stick to. with the bank robbing theme, but we're going to spin the clock forward 60 years to the 1990s. It's a story of one of the wildest and most violent bank robberies in American history. It was a game changer for modern law enforcement, and I promise you you won't want to miss it. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive

exclusive bonus episodes. sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was researched and written by Jamie Leiko. Original music by Rob Belier. I'm your co-writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter.

and you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, Once Upon a Crime, and many more. Thanks for listening.