Public Enemies (76 page)

Richetti raced through the trees across the hillside, leapt a fence, and made for the back of a house. Fultz reached its yard just as Richetti reached the backdoor. Fultz fired once, the bullet striking the house about two feet from Richetti’s shoulder.

“I give up!” Richetti shouted.

While Chief Fultz handcuffed Richetti, Floyd stepped out of the trees and pulled a Thompson gun from beneath their blankets. Meanwhile, Lon Israel and the two deputies hustled up the hill, where Israel grabbed shotguns from his house. The three men had just stepped back into Israel’s yard when, to their left, they saw Floyd emerge from the woods. Floyd turned and fired a burst from his machine gun; then it jammed. One bullet struck Deputy Potts in the shoulder; he fell, wounded. Deputy Erwin got off one blast of his shotgun before diving for cover. Floyd dived into a ditch, then rose and ran across the hilltop into the trees on the far side, throwing his gun in the weeds.

The woods Floyd entered lay on the northern reaches of Appalachia. West of the river, the land bunched together in steep, rocky hills; the hollows between were creased with shallow brown creeks and pockmarked with tar-paper shacks and trash-strewn hillsides. On the far side of the hill, a thirty-one-year-old auto mechanic named Theodore Peterson and his brother William were standing outside their garage talking to a teenager, George McMillen, who had stopped to buy a vacuum tank for his Model T Ford. McMillen looked up and saw a mud-streaked man in a dusty blue suit scrambling down the hill into the Petersons’ yard.

Floyd walked up and asked if he could pay any of them five dollars to drive him to Youngstown.

“Why?” one of the men asked.

Floyd explained he had been out hunting when his car broke down. “What part broke?” one of the Petersons asked. “Maybe we can fix it for you.”

“The front axle,” Floyd said. He put his foot on the axle of McMillen’s Ford to show where the break had occurred. “I’ve got to get to Youngstown,” Floyd went on. “I’ve got business to attend to up there. I’ll give you ten dollars.” He pulled a wad of ones out of his pocket to show he had the money.

Ted Peterson turned to Floyd and said, “We’ll take you.” He and Floyd got into Peterson’s car. Peterson was backing out of the yard when his mother stuck her head out of the house.

“Where are you goin’?” she yelled.

“I’m takin’ this man to Youngstown,” Peterson shouted back.

“You can’t take this man to Youngstown and get across the river at one o’clock,” she shouted. It was 12:40; Peterson was due at another man’s house in twenty minutes.

“Sorry, buddy,” Peterson said.

“That’s all right,” Floyd said.

He turned to the teenager, George McMillen, and offered him the ten dollars. “Will you take me?” Floyd asked.

“I will,” McMillen said, taking Floyd’s money.

Once in McMillen’s Ford, Floyd said to stick to the back roads.

“I suppose you know who I am,” Floyd said at one point.

“Don’t believe I do,” McMillen said.

“My name’s Floyd. Pretty Boy Floyd.”

McMillen stared.

“The radios are flashing it all over the country, the papers are full of it,” Floyd said.

“I don’t know [anything about] it,” McMillen said. “I’m just back from Cannon’s Mill and haven’t been readin’ the papers except the funnies or to look through the paper for a job.”

Five minutes later McMillen’s car stalled. Above the road was a set of greenhouses owned by a florist named James H. Baum. Baum sold his flowers at his shop in Wellsville; his biggest customer was the local funeral home. He and a friend were stacking lumber when Floyd and McMillen walked up his driveway. “How about some gas?” Floyd asked, motioning down to the stalled Model T. “I’ll pay you for it.”

“I haven’t any gas,” Baum said.

Floyd eyed Baum’s Nash sedan. “How about draining some out of your car?”

Baum shook his head. “Can’t get it out,” he said.

Floyd asked if Baum would take them to a gas station, and Baum agreed. McMillen went, too. Climbing into Baum’s Nash, Floyd pulled his gun. “Now, Dad,” he told Baum, “I want you to do just what I say.”

He told Baum to drive north toward Youngstown, keeping to the back roads. They bumped along muddy dirt tracks for nearly two hours, eventually reaching the highway ten miles north. Just as they gained speed, they spied a roadblock. Two deputies had placed a railroad car across the road. A long line of automobiles was waiting to pass.

At the roadblock, Deputies George Hayes and Charley Patterson watched the Nash stop and turn around. It looked suspicious. “Let’s go,” Hayes told Patterson. The two men hopped into their car and tried to give chase, but were slowed by the snarl of stopped cars.

Ahead, in the Nash, Floyd peered through the back window. “Here comes someone,” he said to Baum. “Step on it.” The mouth of a hilly dirt road—so swaybacked locals called it “Roller Coast Road”—opened to the left, and Floyd told Baum to turn onto it. The Nash roared into the little road and sped east into the woods north of East Liverpool. The deputies followed. A half mile down Roller Coast Road, they began honking their horn. At that point, James Baum decided he had had enough and stopped the car. The deputies’ car stopped about fifty yards behind it. From the backseat, Floyd rose and fired. His shot blew out the back window of the Nash, then struck the deputies’ windshield. The deputies ducked as Floyd scrambled out of the car and ran into the woods.

By nightfall Columbiana County was in an uproar. Farmers in black armbands, signifying their status in the gathering posse, spilled into Wellsville, milling around the riverside jail complex. Inside, Chief Fultz tried to question Adam Richetti. Locked in a cell, Richetti gave his name as Richard Zamboni. He said his partner was a Toledo gambler; inexplicably George McMillen had told no one that the “gambler” had identified himself as Pretty Boy Floyd.

Sunday morning the manhunt for the missing “gambler” continued. An overnight rain had erased any footprints Floyd left. He had disappeared into the wildest area of Columbiana County, a dim maze of steep wooded hillsides that lined Little Beaver Creek. Around one o’clock Sunday afternoon, Ray B. Long, the sheriff in Steubenville, Ohio, arrived in Wellsville to join the posse. Shown into the jail, he recognized Richetti from a Wanted poster. “That’s Adam Richetti,” he told Fultz. “He’s wanted in the Kansas City Massacre.” He called Richetti by his name, and Richetti admitted who he was.

Sheriff Long said they had to call the FBI. Fultz objected; he was enjoying his moment in the sun and apparently didn’t want to share it. Long called anyway. The switchboard at the FBI’s Cincinnati office forwarded the message to the senior agent in the area, who just happened to be Melvin Purvis.

 

 

 

Purvis was in Cincinnati with a team of agents hunting the kidnapper of a Kentucky woman. It wasn’t glamorous, but it beat writing memos, which was all Hoover wanted him to do. Their relationship had gone from cool to glacial. In one bizarre letter in mid-September, Hoover had hectored Purvis for refusing to speak clearly over the telephone. “I have had the phone checked here, and found that our phone is technically satisfactory,” Hoover wrote. “It might also be desirable for you to speak in a little louder tone of voice.”
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That Sunday morning Purvis was in his hotel room when he received the call about Floyd. He telephoned Hoover in Washington, and the director grudgingly approved Purvis’s plan to charter a plane to Wellsville and supervise the manhunt. By 2:00 Purvis and his men were aboard a plane floating over the brilliant autumn foliage of southern Ohio. Looking down on the trees, Purvis let his mind drift back to the flight that had taken him to Little Bohemia. No one used words like redemption around Purvis, but its scent hung unmistakably in the air.

At the Wellsville jail, Purvis immediately butted heads with Chief Fultz. It was dusk and the posses had dispersed, heading home for warm dinners; there had been no sighting of Floyd for more than twenty-four hours. Purvis said he wanted the entire area cordoned off. Fultz said it couldn’t be done. To make matters worse, Fultz refused to release Richetti to the FBI. He said he had an “open and shut case” against Richetti for assault. Purvis telephoned Hoover and reported the situation was “impossible to control.”
¹⁵

Leaving the jail, Purvis drove to East Liverpool and set up his command post at the Travelers Hotel. By 3:00 Monday morning, almost twenty agents from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Cincinnati had assembled in his room. Purvis split them into five squads of three and four men apiece. He decided to send two squads to raid the homes of Richetti’s relatives at Dillonvale, an hour’s drive south. The other three squads were to patrol Highway 7 and its spidery network of adjoining roads north of East Liverpool. Floyd was believed to be wounded, and other agents were put to work checking hospitals, doctor’s offices, and taxi companies. More than two hundred police and sheriff’s deputies, arriving from across the state, manned roadblocks at bridges up and down the Ohio River Valley.

Early Monday afternoon, after two days with no news of Floyd, a reliable report came in. Three of Purvis’s men were checking farms north of East Liverpool when they were waved down by a constable, who reported Floyd had just been seen at a farm north of Little Beaver Creek. A farmer’s wife had fed him a sandwich and allowed him to wash up. The news was relayed to Purvis. Hoover telephoned just as he was leaving his room. The director told Purvis to depart at once.
¹⁶
If Floyd was to be captured, Hoover wanted to make sure it was by the FBI.

Purvis rendezvoused with his men on a dirt road seven miles north of East Liverpool. He was willing to bet Floyd was heading north, making for Youngstown. They split into two groups and began checking farmhouses and outbuildings. In one barn, Purvis was rooting around in the loft when he heard a noise below. Purvis drew his gun. He heard footsteps coming up the ladder and aimed his .45, ready to fire—and felt silly when one of his own men popped up. They were all nervous.

Around three o’clock, as they cruised dirt roads watching the adjoining fields, Purvis and his men met a car driven by the East Liverpool police chief and three of his men. They decided to join forces.

As they did, Floyd emerged from the woods north of Little Beaver Creek. His white shirt was streaked with sweat, his suit sprinkled with thistles and pine needles. He had covered eight miles, due east, since fleeing the sheriff’s deputies forty-eight hours earlier. Behind him the creek gurgled past a fallen-down gristmill and a set of long-abandoned canal locks, remnants of another century. The metaphor was lost on Floyd, who only wanted a warm meal and a ride out of Ohio. Ahead lay an isolated farmhouse. Beyond it, green fields.

Ellen Conkle, a widow who worked her fifty-acre farm with the help of in-laws, was cleaning her smokehouse when the stranger knocked on her backdoor. “Lady, I’m lost and I want something to eat,” Floyd said. “Can you help me out with some food? I’ll pay you.”

Mrs. Conkle knew nothing of Pretty Boy Floyd or the manhunt. “I look like a wild man, don’t I?” Floyd said. “I was hunting squirrels with my brother last night and I got lost. The more directions I got, the more confused I became. I don’t know where I am now.”

Mrs. Conkle knew no one hunted squirrels at night, certainly not in a business suit and black oxfords, and said so. A sheepish look crossed Floyd’s face. “To be honest, I’ve been drinking,” he said. “I guess I got lost.” Mrs. Conkle, who for years afterward would be portrayed as a simple woman kindly helping a stranger, was not naive; in fact, she was frightened. As she told an investigating panel several days later, she was afraid what would happen if she denied the stranger food, so she agreed to make him something, hoping it would hurry him on his way. She asked what he would like. “Meat,” said Floyd. “All I’ve been eating is apples, and some ginger cookies. I’m hungry for meat.”

Floyd sat in a rocker on the back porch, reading the Sunday edition of the East Liverpool
Review,
while Mrs. Conkle walked to her smokehouse to fetch some spareribs, then disappeared into her kitchen. A few minutes later she returned with a plateful of ribs, fresh bread, and pudding. Floyd devoured it all, except for the pudding, then accepted the widow’s offer of coffee and a slice of pumpkin pie. Afterward he pronounced the meal “fit for a king.”

Floyd asked for a ride to Youngstown. Mrs. Conkle said she couldn’t take him, but her brother-in-law Stewart Dyke and his wife were out in her field picking corn. When they returned, maybe they would take him. Floyd climbed into Dyke’s Model A and waited. The keys were in the ignition, but he did not steal the car.

Around four o’clock Dyke and his wife walked up to the house. Floyd asked for a ride to Youngstown. He could pay. Dyke said he was too tired. “I’ll take you to Clarkson, though,” he said, where there was a bus to Youngstown. “Come on get in.” Dyke said.

Floyd climbed back into the car, borrowed Mrs. Dyke’s powder puff and began to apply it to his face, apparently in a feeble attempt to disguise himself. Dyke slid behind the wheel. As the car backed out of the yard, everyone waved good-bye to Mrs. Conkle.

Then Stewart Dyke saw the two cars coming up the road.

The two cars eased around a wide curve and rolled up the rise toward the last farm on the Sprucevale Road, the Conkle place. One of the East Liverpool policemen, Glenn G. “Curly” Montgomery, saw Floyd first. “Stop!” Montgomery hollered. “That’s him!”

Floyd spotted the lawmen a moment before they saw him. He ducked down and drew his pistol. “Drive behind that building!” he ordered Dyke. “They’re looking for me.” Dyke did as he was told, pulling his car behind a corn crib—a fifteen-foot-wide raised wooden shed used to store corn. Dyke reached over and unlocked the car door.