Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren
Speaker 1: Vogelbaum here. Up until June seventeenth of nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: Pretty Boy Floyd led a relatively unremarkable life in and
Speaker 1: out of jail as a Midwestern hoodlum. He was robbing
Speaker 1: banks and payrolls, stealing cars, and murdering rival thugs, all
Speaker 1: while escaping police custody by jumping from trains and hiding
Speaker 1: out in the Trustee Cooks and Hills of Oklahoma. But
Speaker 1: on that particular June day in Kansas City, his humdrum
Speaker 1: career took a spectacular turn for the worse. At least
Speaker 1: that's what Jay Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigation decided. And
Speaker 1: in those bad old days, you really didn't want to
Speaker 1: antagonize the organization soon to become the FBI. It'd be
Speaker 1: renamed in nineteen thirty five. According to the FBI, events
Speaker 1: unfolded as follows. On October ninetheteenth of nineteen thirty a
Speaker 1: murderous crook named Frank Nash was in the United States
Speaker 1: Penitentiary at Levenworth, Kansas, serving his third long term sentence
Speaker 1: after being pardoned twice before when he escaped. Less than
Speaker 1: a year later, Nash managed to help seven other prisoners
Speaker 1: bust out of Levenworth as well. In the meantime, the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Investigation mounted a giant man hunt that spanned
Speaker 1: the continent. They finally tracked down Nash in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: It was then just a simple matter of getting there
Speaker 1: fellon back to Kansas via train, but some of Nash's
Speaker 1: buddies got wind of the transport and cooked up a
Speaker 1: scheme to free him when the train showed up. The
Speaker 1: story goes that Floyd and his sidekick, one Adam Ritchetti
Speaker 1: happened to drive into Kansas City the day before the
Speaker 1: train was due. They met up with Nash's pals and
Speaker 1: offered to help with their scheme to free him. When
Speaker 1: Nash arrived, seven agents and officers escorted him to a
Speaker 1: waiting vehicle. They were getting seated inside when from out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, gunmen opened fire on them. Only one of
Speaker 1: the officials escaped unscathed, but two were badly injured, and
Speaker 1: everyone else, including Nash, the very person the crooks were
Speaker 1: trying to free, was shot dead. The gunmen fled, and
Speaker 1: Floyd and Richetti were identified as they ran. Pretty Boy Floyd,
Speaker 1: who made a habit of boasting about his crimes, maintained
Speaker 1: to the very end of his life that he had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with what became known as the Kansas
Speaker 1: City massacre. But that didn't matter. JEdgar Hoover had already
Speaker 1: eliminated John Dillinger, whom he had previously dubbed Public Enemy
Speaker 1: Number one, and now he turned his sights on pretty
Speaker 1: Boy Floyd. Charles Arthur Floyd was born in Georgia on
Speaker 1: February third of nineteen oh four, and his family moved
Speaker 1: to Hanson, Oklahoma, in nineteen eleven, an area that had
Speaker 1: been just a few years earlier part of the Cherokee Nation.
Speaker 1: The family settled down on the edge of the Cooks
Speaker 1: and Hills, a territory of thick scrubby brush which had
Speaker 1: served to hide many famous outlas laws of the decades,
Speaker 1: as it would Floyd himself in later years. A But
Speaker 1: if proximity to this law breaking heritage inspired Floyd's subsequent career,
Speaker 1: he showed no signs of deviance in his early life.
Speaker 1: On the contrary, he was known as a kid who
Speaker 1: loved his mother, looked up to his father, protected his
Speaker 1: siblings and helped out around the farm, and although the
Speaker 1: Floyds worked hard, it was difficult to spraate more than
Speaker 1: a meager living from their acreage. At the age of fourteen,
Speaker 1: Floyd went off to work as a harvest hand on
Speaker 1: larger farms, and there he met other traveling workers who
Speaker 1: exposed him to a rougher, tougher mode of existence. When
Speaker 1: he returned home, his family felt he had changed. There
Speaker 1: seems to be no agreement as to how Floyd acquired
Speaker 1: his nicknames. Some say it was applied in his teenage
Speaker 1: years due to his carefully tended pompadour, Others that he
Speaker 1: earned it by working in the oil fields in a
Speaker 1: white dress shirt. Floyd himself allegedly hated the name and
Speaker 1: preferred to by Chalk, which was a reference to his
Speaker 1: passion for a local Oklahoma beer called Choctaw. On May
Speaker 1: sixteenth of nineteen twenty two, Floyd was arrested for the
Speaker 1: first time. The crime was the theft of three dollars
Speaker 1: and fifty cents in dimes, nichols, and pennies from a
Speaker 1: local post office. Although he was later acquitted due to
Speaker 1: a lack of witnesses. It was the beginning of a
Speaker 1: long hostile relationship with the law. In the months that
Speaker 1: followed the Kansas City massacre, the Bureau mounted a giant
Speaker 1: man hunt for its new public Enemy number one. Floyd
Speaker 1: was doing a decent job of laying low in evading
Speaker 1: police ambushes until he and Richetti wrecked a car in
Speaker 1: rural Ohio on October twentieth of nineteen thirty four. Their
Speaker 1: two lady companions drove the car to the nearest town
Speaker 1: for repairs while Floyd and Richetti reclined on the side
Speaker 1: of the road to wait. A passing motorists spotted Floyd
Speaker 1: and Richetti in suits, snapping next to their guns and
Speaker 1: reported their incongruous appearance to the local police chief, who
Speaker 1: went to have a look. But when the police chief
Speaker 1: showed up with his team and approached the two men,
Speaker 1: the gangsters opened fire. Floyd scrambled up the embankment and
Speaker 1: managed to flee in a hail of police bullets, but
Speaker 1: Richetti was out gunned before he could escape. Once Richetti
Speaker 1: was identified, the police realized that the escapee was none
Speaker 1: other than the Bureau's Public Enemy Number one. By that evening,
Speaker 1: famed FBI agent Melvin Purvis who had been instrumental in
Speaker 1: capturing Dillinger, arrived with his team. In the meantime, Floyd
Speaker 1: had flagged down a passing car, which then ran out
Speaker 1: of gas. Floyd, with that driver in tow, commandeered a
Speaker 1: second car and its driver, but when the three men
Speaker 1: encountered a roadblock, Floyd ordered the car turned around and
Speaker 1: they fled, Pursued by the police. At a critical juncture,
Speaker 1: Floyd jumped from the car and escaped into the woods,
Speaker 1: firing behind him as he ran. He wandered the woods
Speaker 1: for nearly forty eight hours until he stumbled across a
Speaker 1: farmhouse inhabited by a widow named Ellen Conkle. Claiming to
Speaker 1: be a lost Floyd managed to get an excellent hot
Speaker 1: meal from Conkle, but it was to be his last.
Speaker 1: A local farmer had spotted Floyd and phoned the cops.
Speaker 1: When they showed up, Floyd ran across a field of
Speaker 1: corn stubble, heading for the tree line, but nine officials
Speaker 1: opened fire. Floyd fell wounded. The officials caught up and
Speaker 1: Purvis questioned him about the Kansas City massacre, but Floyd
Speaker 1: refused to talk, and in just minutes he was dead.
Speaker 1: Floyd's funeral was massive. More than twenty thousand people showed
Speaker 1: up to pay their respects or gawk, as the case
Speaker 1: may be. In the years after his death, the legend
Speaker 1: of pretty Boy Floyd continued to grow. Like many outlaws,
Speaker 1: he developed a reputation as a robin hood of sorts
Speaker 1: who would destroy mortgage documents whenever he robbed a bank, and,
Speaker 1: as is the case with most other alleged robin hoods,
Speaker 1: this generosity has never been proven, but that hasn't diminished
Speaker 1: his fame nor his reputation. Today's episode is based on
Speaker 1: the article how pretty Boy Floyd became the FBI's Public
Speaker 1: Enemy Number One on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by a
Speaker 1: Scene Quran. Brain Stuff It's production of iHeartRadio in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuffworks dot Com, and it is produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.