Valentine's Special: "A Couple of Gangsters" - Kathryn and "Machine Gun" Kelly

Due to the graphic nature of these crimes, listener discretion is advised.

This episode includes discussions of murder, suicide, assault, and kidnapping.

Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.

I'm Vanessa Richardson, and welcome to Criminal Couples.

They say that there's a great woman behind every great man, and while that holds true in a lot of stories, it might be more accurate to say that those women were standing right beside their great and powerful men.

That's certainly the case with Catherine Kelly, who chose a husband who could help her get everything she ever wanted.

Sure, they were in love, but it was the kind of romance where one person was always calling the shots.

You've probably heard of George Machine Gun Kelly, but I'll bet you didn't know that his loving wife was the one who helped build the mythos around him.

In this episode from Female Criminals, we're diving deep into Catherine's life, her romantic false starts, and the love that landed her in prison.

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Our story begins in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi.

Dusty and isolated, Saltillo was so far east of the river, it rode the border of Alabama.

The small town was barely more than a collection of farms with a population of only a couple hundred people.

It was there in 1904 that newlyweds James and Aura Brooks welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Cleo Lira May.

There aren't many specifics about Cleo's childhood, but it's safe to say her life was far from easy.

You see, the Brooks were small-time farmers, and in the early 1900s, that meant endless hours of backbreaking work.

While people in the big cities could afford the latest fashions and dine at fancy restaurants, the Brooks family was barely scraping by.

Over time, Cleo became acutely aware of her socioeconomic status and decided she wanted more.

Desperate for a different future, she dreamed of being one of those city women, beautifully dressed and glittering with jewelry.

But more than anything else, she wanted to be somebody other than Cleo.

At some point, while still a schoolgirl, she decided to change her name.

Before we continue with the psychology for this episode, please keep in mind that I'm not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but we have done a lot of research for this show.

According to psychologist Gene Twangy, a name is more than just a name.

That's because it can become a symbol of the self.

As such, when people dislike their name, they tend to not be well adjusted psychologically and have lower self-esteem.

This can lead to a host of negative outcomes, such as anxiety and depression.

To combat these feelings, many change their names to one that matches their inner identity.

To Cleo, her name probably sounded like the name of a girl destined to spend her whole life on a farm.

Perhaps it was hard for her to imagine a cosmopolitan existence with a name she thought better suited to a country bumpkin.

So Cleo gave herself the most sophisticated one she could think of, Catherine.

As Catherine Hepburn proved in the 1920s, it was a name that sung with star quality.

It was elegant, grand, timeless.

After all, it was a name shared by two wives of Henry VIII and a handful of saints.

But to truly make herself stand out, she opted for the ultra-modern variant, spelling her name with a Y instead of I-N-E.

The staccato of the two syllables, Catherine, gave the classic moniker a modern edge, like a pop of bullets fired from a gun.

As if the universe were rewarding her boldness, when she was nine years old, Catherine's family moved farther into the Wild West to Coleman, Texas.

Though it was still a small town, Coleman was much larger than Saltillo.

For Catherine, it probably felt like the big city.

But the excitement was short-lived.

After the move, James and Aura divorced, and while it wasn't unheard of, the sudden dissolution of a marriage was still somewhat scandalous in the early 1900s.

Even still, Aura held her head high and pushed forward.

She found a job as a hotel manager, which came with a room where she and Catherine lived.

To Catherine, hotel living must have been a dream come true.

She likely crossed paths with affluent visitors on the regular, people like doctors, lawyers, and wealthy world travelers.

But the dull reality wasn't nearly as grand as her fantasies.

Many of the guests made her keenly aware of how little she really had.

While they all slept under the same roof, it was abundantly clear that she and her mother were simply the help.

As she watched her mother struggle to provide for her family, Catherine made up her mind there was no way she'd end up like Aura.

She was determined to be the one calling the shots, staying in lavish hotels, and being waited on.

But Catherine didn't fancy working hard to reach her goals.

Even though she believed she was destined for finer things, she knew school wasn't how she'd get there.

It was boring and stuffy, and no one expected a woman to be book smart anyway.

So just after the seventh grade, when she would have been around 13, Catherine dropped out of school.

Fortunately, the teenage stunner had other options.

Less than a year later, while visiting family in Oklahoma, Catherine met 16-year-old Lonnie Fry.

The son of a preacher, he had a good head on his shoulders and the physique of a laborer.

The two were instantly smitten, and flirtation quickly turned to talks of marriage.

While still very much children themselves, Catherine and Lonnie tied the knot.

Soon after that, they had a daughter named Pauline.

This should have been the start of a new, exciting life.

Catherine had the love of a good man, the blessing of a beautiful child, and the freedom to run her own household.

But she wanted more.

Lonnie worked long hours for little money, which meant that Catherine was hardly the kept woman she'd longed to be.

After two years of dismal reality, the bloom was off the rose, and the couple divorced.

Catherine took custody of Pauline and the teenager started her new life as a single mother.

Fortunately, she had her own mother to lean on.

When the divorce was finalized, she and Pauline returned to Coleman and moved back into the tiny hotel room with Aura.

But things were not as she'd left them.

By the time Catherine was back in Coleman, the roaring 20s was upon them, and the mood in America was changing drastically.

The end of World World War I filled people with a celebratory spirit, and an economic boom meant the party never stopped.

Flapper girls in particular were the life of the party.

They wore their hair like they wore their skirts, short, and they hung around bars and gambling halls.

They also drank, smoked, swore, and did other things as freely as men did.

In short, flappers challenged the norms of traditional femininity.

Enthralled by the exciting image of the free-spirited 1920s woman, the town of Coleman suddenly felt suffocatingly small.

Aching to make her mark, Catherine knew she had to leave.

So after just a couple of years, she set out on her next adventure in Oklahoma City with her daughter in tow.

It was here, in the hustle and bustle of the big city, Catherine likely cemented her hard partying ways.

It's possible she partook in copious amounts of drinking, dancing, and non-stop debauchery.

But partying wasn't the only thing on her mind.

She had to support her little family, so she opened a one-woman beauty salon in a room she rented.

However, it was far from the easy living she was looking for.

To find that, Catherine needed someone else to bring home the bacon.

So, shortly after moving to the city, she gave marriage another shot.

But the relationship lasted about as long as the first, and the result was the same.

Divorce.

At this point, the divorce rate had been steadily climbing in the U.S.

Even still, two divorces for one woman was something to be frowned on.

Catherine and her lifestyle lent credence to the growing fear that the moral fabric of America was unraveling.

Stoking this fear was the growing temperance movement, which sought to prohibit the production and consumption of alcohol.

According to agitators, alcohol was the root cause of all social ills, divorce included.

The movement's biggest victory was the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, transportation, and sale of all liquor throughout the United States.

Of course, making something illegal isn't a guaranteed way to stop it.

Instead, the making and selling of booze went underground, which made it more fun for those determined to break the rules.

These renegades gathered in illicit jazz clubs and secret speakeasies.

Catherine, of course, frequented all the hotspots, and it was there that she started rubbing elbows with criminals, ranging from the petty thief to the professional crook.

Around 1925, she met a gangster known as J.E.

Barnett.

He seemed to be making good, easy money, and that's exactly what Catherine longed for in a man.

By this stage, 21-year-old Catherine was struggling.

She was likely up at all hours of the night, drinking and partying, and if she wasn't hungover the next day, she was exhausted, and her salon business suffered for it.

Desperate to provide for her six-year-old daughter, she started dabbling in sex work, and it appears this opened her mind to other criminal activity.

Given her slow slide into criminal activity, Catherine was likely experiencing the phenomenon of ego depletion.

In psychological terms, the ego is the part of the personality that makes decisions.

According to psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Voss, a person with a healthy ego will keep social norms front of mind when deciding on a course of action.

However, when a person lacks essential resources like time, money, or rest, the ego gets weaker until it ultimately depletes.

By the mid-1920s, Catherine was exhausted, broke, and spending a lot of time with criminals.

In other words, she was psychologically primed to begin her criminal career.

Together, she and Barnett the gangster hatched a lucrative scheme.

Catherine would lure unsuspecting victims, usually wealthy businessmen, with her charms and good looks.

She'd invite them to join her somewhere private, like the nearby lake, for a late-night swim.

Once they arrived, Catherine would disappear and Barnett would rob the mark at gunpoint.

The scam ran flawlessly until Catherine got greedy and chose a target too close to home.

One of her neighbors was a woman named Bessie, and she made decent money as a stenographer.

She also wore a diamond ring that Catherine fancied for herself.

So, one night in June of 1925, Catherine invited Bessie to join her and Pauline for dinner and a drive.

At some point, when they were driving by the lake, Catherine pulled over, claiming to have tire trouble.

While Catherine checked the tire and Pauline dozed in the back seat, two men leapt from the bushes and robbed Bessie.

They took everything she had, including her diamond.

The plan had been a complete success, or at least that's what it seemed like at first.

But then Bessie realized that she recognized one of her assailants.

She'd seen Barnett hanging around Catherine's room quite a lot.

Then, when she reported the robbery to the police, she learned she wasn't the only one who'd told them a similar story.

It turned out a previous mark had filed a report almost identical to hers.

It didn't take long for investigators to put things together, and Catherine and Barnett were arrested for the robberies.

For the first time in her life, Catherine was about to face consequences for wanting more than she had.

She was about to learn a steep lesson, but not the one the authorities were trying to teach.

In June of 1925, 21-year-old Catherine Kelly was arrested for the first time.

She and her partner partner in crime, J.E.

Barnett, were charged with at least two counts of robbery.

The evidence against Catherine was particularly overwhelming.

Not only was she linked to both crimes, she'd been identified by her own neighbor, so her conviction was swift.

But for some reason, that decision was thrown out on appeal.

After this close call with justice, Catherine decided it was time to get out of the city.

So she and her six-year-old daughter, Pauline, packed up their bags and returned to Coleman, Texas.

But that wasn't their last stop.

By that stage, Catherine's mother Aura was engaged to a wealthy rancher named Robert Boss Shannon.

He owned a farm in Paradise, a town over 100 miles north of Fort Worth, and he was doing a lot more than raising cattle and growing crops.

In the era of prohibition, bootlegging was the criminal enterprise.

Miles away from nosy neighbors and the authorities, a farm was the ideal base of operations.

Boss made a killing manufacturing illicit liquor on his isolated property and was eager to have both Aura and Catherine to join the family venture.

After nearly going to prison for robbery, you might think Catherine would have hesitated joining another criminal operation.

But at this point, she developed a craving for fast money.

So rather than being scared straight, Catherine dove in deeper.

She moved to paradise and became a rum runner for boss.

And she was perfect for the job.

The beauty dazzled her way into all the important dives and clubs in Texas.

Soon, she knew everyone who was anyone in the business.

Who bought, who sold, who was small-time, and who was big news.

One of those people was Charlie Thorne, a mid-tier bootlegger who worked the same turf as Catherine.

It could have been the start of a gang war, but Catherine was a lover, not a fighter.

So rather than make Charlie an enemy, she made him family.

In 1926, 22-year-old Catherine followed her heart down the aisle for the third time.

She'd steadily improved her prospects with each marriage, and Charlie was no exception.

He was so well off, he bought Catherine a $30,000 house in Fort Worth, and thanks to his exceptional wealth, she could finally live out her fantasies.

Clothes, jewels, cars, whatever she wanted was hers.

Of course, some sacrifices had to be made.

For instance, Catherine left Pauline on the Paradise Farm with Aura and boss.

This was probably for the best because her romance with Charlie was, let's say, passionate.

Both of them were extremely jealous and hot-tempered.

In fact, Catherine threatened to kill her husband so many times, it became something of a running joke.

Among the tumult, the pair kept up the bootlegging.

Catherine managed the deliveries, while Charlie stayed behind, tending to other parts of the business, or so he said.

After about two years of marriage, when Catherine was on one of her runs, she caught caught wind that Charlie was cheating on her back home.

When she heard the news, she flew into a jealous rage, feeling the bitter sting of betrayal.

A 2017 study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found a strong connection between feelings of jealousy and the part of the brain associated with social pain.

According to neuroscientists, this pain affects the brain in the same way as a physical hurt.

Needless to say, Catherine was hurt by her husband's infidelity.

For most of her life, she'd been an object of desire, and if being desired was the ultimate form of validation, then infidelity was the ultimate insult.

Her brain likely processed her husband's betrayal as both a literal and metaphorical slap in the face.

and she was determined to make him feel the same.

She took off like a bat out of hell, screaming that she was on her way home to kill that goddamn Charlie Thorne.

And this time, she meant it.

The fight that broke out when she got home was worse than all of their others.

Eventually, Catherine picked up the phone and called the police.

But when they arrived, the cops found Charlie with a bullet in his head.

After they searched the home, they found a note left in a typewriter.

It read, I love my wife.

I can't live without her, so I'm ending it all.

The thing was, Charlie was illiterate.

Everyone knew that, but it seems no one was interested in working too hard on this case.

After all, who was going to miss a criminal like Charlie Thorne?

At first, the coroner determined Catherine had probably shot him in self-defense, but a judge ultimately ruled his death a suicide, and from a legal standpoint, that was that.

But to everyone else, Charlie's death was suspicious at best.

For starters, Catherine had so much to gain from his death.

In addition to the house, Charlie left her somewhere between $10 and $15,000, which would be around $200,000 today.

He also had a $1,000 life insurance policy that was meant to go to his parents, but as they'd already passed, Catherine pocketed that too.

Newly single and flush with cash, Catherine returned to her nightlife ways with a vengeance.

She became a regular at every jazz club and speakeasy in Fort Worth, and she spent her money with reckless abandon.

Fortunately for Catherine, she knew how to keep her pockets lined.

At some point, she returned to her old schemes, luring unsuspecting businessmen out to abandoned roads to be ambushed by thieves.

And that wasn't all she was up to.

As much as she loved shopping, she didn't always like to pay.

Even though she could afford whatever her heart desired, sometimes it was just more fun to go for a five-finger discount.

Catherine was flying high, feeling untouchable, but what goes up always comes back down.

At some point, while using the pseudonym Dolores Whitney, she was arrested for and convicted of shoplifting.

But as ever, Catherine's luck prevailed.

She was released on a technicality of some kind and was never required to give back what she stole.

It was yet another close call, but it didn't scare her straight.

Not even a visit to an actual prison could do that.

In fact, jail, it seemed, was a great place to meet men.

Around 1927, 23-year-old Catherine paid a visit to her uncles, who were doing time in Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.

There, she made the acquaintance of one of their fellow inmates, the very handsome 32-year-old George Kelly.

Though they met only briefly, Catherine made quite the impression.

George asked Catherine's uncles for her address, and the two started exchanging letters.

Initially, their flirtation was based on mutual attraction, but after a while, Catherine realized she and George had much more in common than their looks.

Unlike most of the other gangsters she knew, George seemed like he might be on her level.

The son of a middle-class Catholic family, he'd graduated high school and even attended a little college.

But just like Catherine, he didn't see the appeal of staying on the straight and narrow.

He dropped out before he graduated and had been wheeling and dealing in the criminal world ever since.

It was a match made in heaven.

But Catherine wasn't the type to wait around for a man.

So while penning love letters to George, Catherine started seeing a bootlegger known as Little Steve.

He was a big deal in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, which allowed Catherine to return to her old turf.

Before long, the couple were running a profitable business together.

That is until Catherine got a letter that changed everything.

In February of 1930, after three long years of nothing but writing, George announced that he was getting out.

While she'd found a good partner in Steve, the thought of seeing George made Catherine giddy as a schoolgirl.

Of course, she hid those feelings from Steve when she told him that she had a friend who was looking for a job.

Catherine stressed that before he'd landed in jail, George had been running a profitable multi-state bootlegging operation, so it only made sense for him to join their venture.

At some point, Steve agreed, and George made his way to Oklahoma.

When Catherine and George finally met in person, the embers that had burned for years grew into full-on flames.

Steve may have been suspicious of Catherine's intentions, but hiring George was ultimately good for his bottom line.

With his charming good looks and clean-cut style, George fit in with respectable society in a way most gangsters didn't.

Known as the society bootlegger, he sold liquor from a briefcase, taking the goods directly to wealthy clientele.

This influx of well-to-do customers improved Steve and Catherine's operation.

But even though George was great for business, Steve probably should have kept a closer eye on him and Catherine.

Because in September of 1930, while Steve was out of town, 35-year-old George took 26-year-old Catherine out to dinner.

Before their drinks even arrived, he spontaneously proposed.

She accepted without a second's hesitation.

They rushed back to little Steve's place and stuffed all of Catherine's things into Steve's Cadillac, which they took to Minnesota.

By this stage, there were more than a couple of warrants out for George's arrest, and probably Catherine's too, so they needed to keep government paperwork to a minimum.

Fortunately, George had connections up north who could arrange a hasty wedding.

Afterwards, the newlyweds returned to Texas and spent their honeymoon doing their two favorite things, partying and shopping.

Between the two of them, the Kellys could spend a fair amount of money.

Their wardrobes alone were worth thousands, and that was just one of their expenses.

So once the fun was had, they needed to get back to business.

Unfortunately, by the 1930s, the power of the temperance movement was waning.

The end of prohibition was in sight, and bootlegging wasn't as lucrative as it had been.

But George had a plan.

He'd made a few friends in prison who dabbled in a much more profitable business than liquor.

They robbed banks, and the Kellys wanted in on the action.

In 1930, 26-year-old Catherine Kelly finally married her perfect match, 35-year-old gangster George Kelly.

Together, they embodied the ideal image of the Prohibition-era underworld.

They were a gorgeous couple, living it up with the finest fashion, diamonds, and Cadillacs.

But with bootlegging on the way out, they needed a new way to stay flush.

So, after a quick trip to Minnesota for an even quicker marriage ceremony, George reached out to some folks he'd met during his time at Leavenworth Penitentiary.

His friends put him in contact with Harvey Bailey, the most successful bank robber of the period.

Bailey took George under his wing, passing along all of his hard-earned criminal wisdom.

The trick, he said, was to focus on mid-sized towns and little cities, places where there'd be enough money to make it worth stealing, but not so much that local police were likely to be on guard.

Bailey taught George how to study the banks, how to track business activity like payroll deposits.

With a few days of careful observation, George could nearly pinpoint the day the take would be at its highest.

And soon, George could too.

He absorbed all the lessons Bailey had to offer.

Well, all except the most important one.

Don't ever work with women.

Especially when it came to their lips.

In short, he believed women were gossips.

And okay, Catherine liked to chat and share secrets, but she was also a major asset.

She was smart, she was cunning, and she was ruthless.

Once George struck out on his own, he was more than happy to include her in his schemes.

While George and another associate went inside a bank, she waited in the parking lot, manning the getaway car.

She was often disguised as a man and armed just in case of any emergencies.

According to the FBI, she was an expert shot.

We don't know how or when she learned, but between growing up in Texas and years of dating gangsters, she was bound to pick up a thing or two.

For his part, George wasn't all that interested in firearms.

He carried them for the power they conveyed, but he used them only sparingly.

Unlike his wife, and unlike many other bank robbers of the day, George had never killed anyone, and he never intended to.

But guns were part of the gangster ethos.

Even now, the image of the 1930s gangster in a suit and fedora wielding a Thompson machine gun, or Tommy gun for short, is iconic.

That's thanks in no small part to Catherine.

Though it's true gangsters already favor the machine gun for its sheer power, she was the one who put it in the hands of her husband, George Machine Gun Kelly.

Purchased secondhand from a pawn shop in Fort Worth, Catherine gave George his first Tommy gun and urged him to practice it at her family's farm.

She then used her love of gossip to build up George's reputation as a fearsome gangster with deadly aim.

Catherine boasted about her man every chance she got.

She talked him up at all the speakeasies, telling tales of his expert marksmanship.

According to Catherine, her husband could shoot walnuts off fence posts at 30 feet.

One of her favorite stories was that George was such a good shot, he could write his name with his gun, which he called the Little Stenog, short for stenographer.

This detail quickly worked its way into the growing legend of machine gun Kelly.

And And that legend spread quickly.

Soon there were rumors around the entire country about a bank robber who signed all his heists in bullets.

And these alarming tall tales piqued the interest of the relatively new Federal Bureau of Investigations.

At the time, the FBI's reputation was badly sullied from years of corruption.

When J.

Edgar Hoover was made director in the early 1930s, he did his best to weed out the bad apples, but the stain was hard to remove.

Despite the U.S.

government's less than stellar reputation for law enforcement, some officials promised to clean house.

During his presidential campaign, Franklin D.

Roosevelt swore he'd declare war on the forces tearing the country apart.

Once he took office, he was ready to make good.

FDR wasn't just talking about the economic powers causing the Great Depression, he also meant to take on widespread corruption and the lawless gangland in the country's West, which meant Hoover needed to prepare his FBI agents for battle.

However, public opinion just wasn't on their side.

A series of poorly handled cases meant no one had confidence in the Bureau's abilities to solve cases.

The most highly publicized of these bungles was the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby.

In 1932, aviator Charles Lindbergh's 20-month-old son was taken from his home and held for ransom.

Though the president himself put the FBI on the case, New Jersey law enforcement refused their help.

It made Hoover and his men seem like laughable, ineffectual buffoons.

And it happened at exactly the wrong time because crime was on the rise in the U.S.

and no one knew what was coming next.

As the Depression wore on, robbing banks became less of a sure thing.

By the early 30s, even they were running low on cash.

At the same time, support for Prohibition was dropping dramatically, and a repeal seemed imminent.

That meant both of the Kelly's major income streams were on the verge of drying up.

But they noticed the kidnapping racket was booming.

It was the new, easy way to make money.

Snatch someone important, demand a ransom, and collect your cash.

The more Catherine thought about it, the better of an idea it seemed like.

Bank robbing was dangerous because there were so many variables.

With kidnapping, she'd have more control.

They could even name their price.

It sounded like the perfect move.

Though to be fair, it's possible Catherine was just eager to try something new.

A 2013 study titled, The Phenomenology of Specialization of Criminal Suspects, found that age can play a critical role in a criminal's pattern of specialization.

According to researchers, younger criminals tend to be generalists, while the older generation is made up of specialists.

Specialists explore only one specific group of types of crime.

Generalists, on the other hand, partake in more than one type of group.

At 28, Catherine was still pretty young in her criminal career.

As such, it makes sense that she was open to new schemes.

She had no problem escalating her crimes or jumping around while looking for a specialization.

George, however, was in his late 30s.

He'd been bankrobbing for long enough that jobs tended to run like clockwork.

Switching this late in the game might have felt like courting disaster.

Especially since he'd helped out on a kidnapping a couple of years earlier, the job had gone wrong, and his partner at the time killed one of the victims.

It had left a bad taste in George's mouth.

Despite that, in January of 1932, George attempted his second kidnapping, likely at Catherine's insistence.

He and an old bootlegging pal nabbed a banker on his way home from work.

They left a note for his wife demanding $50,000 for her husband's safe return.

Then, George held the man for two days, but the money never came.

Eventually, the victim convinced him there was no way his wife could come up with the cash.

So, feeling like he had no other option, George let the man go in exchange for a promise that he'd raise the money himself.

Obviously, that didn't happen.

George wrote the man plenty of threatening letters, but they were all ignored.

However, he didn't report George to the cops, so that was a plus.

But ultimately, the whole thing was a waste of time.

Catherine couldn't possibly have been pleased with the bungle, so she decided to take the reins and started studying the society pages of various newspapers.

They read like a who's who of targets that would actually pay.

The articles held everything she needed to know, from names and relations to a general idea of potential marks routines and schedules.

Armed with an actual plan this time, Catherine set her sights on the son of a Fort Worth oilman.

She got to work setting all her ducks in a row, which included reaching out to a crooked detective she'd been cultivating a professional relationship with.

At least, that's what she thought was happening.

In reality, Detective Ed Weatherford had been monitoring the Kellys for years.

He had hopes of turning Catherine into a valuable informant.

Thinking they were on the same side, Catherine told Weatherford about her plan to kidnap the oil man's son.

He gave his word that she could count on his help if things went sideways.

And then he called the FBI.

Thanks to the tip, the Dallas Bureau assigned a security detail to the intended target and his family, and the extra men were impossible to miss.

The heat was so intense that Catherine called the whole thing off.

As frustrating as these early attempts were, Catherine pushed on.

She'd become accustomed to her lavish lifestyle and had decided that this was the way to keep a hold of it.

Poring over the list of potential victims she'd collected from the society pages, Catherine started whittling down her list to a few well-chosen marks.

With the right moves, she was sure they could net however much they'd need to set themselves up for life.

The goal was a cool million dollars.

It was as audacious a plan as anyone had ever dreamed.

But if anyone could pull off such a feat, it was surely Catherine Kelly.

In the second half of Catherine and George Kelly's story, we'll see the infamous duo set out to commit the crime of the century.

But when the going gets tough, well, even the toughest lovebirds get going in different directions.

By 1933, 28-year-old Catherine Kelly had everything she'd ever dreamed of.

A closet full of clothes, jewels to rival any queen's, and the latest luxury car parked in her driveway.

But no matter how much she had, there was always a part of her that wanted more.

To call her materialistic would be putting it nicely.

No, Catherine was greedy.

Before we get into Catherine's psychology, please note I'm not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but we have done a lot of research for this show.

In a 2014 study, researchers Hudala Kreckles and Mario Pondelaire defined greed as an insatiable desire for more resources, monetary or other.

Kreckels and Pondelaire further noted that greed may have evolved as an adaptive trait in resource-poor environments.

By acquiring as many resources as possible, greedy people might feel more confident of their future resource access during times of uncertainty.

As we discussed last time, Catherine came from humble beginnings.

Growing up on a farm, she likely lived with the feeling of never having enough.

As such, it's possible she obsessively gathered more than she needed as a survival mechanism.

Perhaps she wanted to decrease her anxiety about a future that was becoming less certain by the day.

With Prohibition coming to an end, Catherine's lucrative bootlegging operations would soon dry up, and the longer the Great Depression lasted, the more fruitless robbing banks became.

Simply put, most Americans had no money left to deposit.

Fortunately for Catherine, a new criminal venture was emerging.

By 1933, kidnapping was a nationwide scourge so common, the New York Times dedicated a regular feature to updates on high-profile cases.

Insurance companies even started offering kidnap coverage.

While the country's richest had avoided the worst of recent suffering, they now had a target on their backs.

It got so bad that social elites began hiring private security for themselves and their families.

Even so, enterprising criminals like Catherine were undeterred.

If anything, she likely saw the heightened security as a challenge.

You see, when the snatch racket first began, it was as simple as grabbing a target off the street and waiting for the cash.

Chances were that the authorities wouldn't even find out what had happened until the victim was safe at home.

And by then, the abductors were already states away.

That said, kidnapping definitely took both brains and skill, two things Catherine prided herself on having plenty of.

And with her 38-year-old husband, George Machine Gun Kelly, beside her, she had the muscle too.

They'd been married just three years, but in that time, George had gone from an unknown bootlegger to a near-legendary bank robber.

Of course, this was entirely thanks to Catherine.

His nickname and accompanying mystique were her inventions.

She proudly claimed that George was a sharpshooter so skilled he could write his own name with the Tommy gun.

Naturally, everyone in the criminal underworld wanted to bring him along on their jobs.

But as much as a hard reputation helped the Kellys line their pockets, it had its drawbacks.

By 1933, the FBI had heard about Machine Gun Kelly, and he'd found a place on their watch lists.

But Catherine was oblivious to this development.

She was too wrapped up planning another daring spree.

After a few failed kidnapping attempts, Catherine had developed something of a system.

She studied the society papers for the names and whereabouts of America's richest tycoons and magnates, people with more money than they'd ever know what to do with.

It was within those pages that she learned of the marriage of 43-year-old Charles Urshel to Bernice Slick.

Charles was an oil man from Oklahoma who had amassed a fortune of his own, and his new bride was also flush with cash.

She was the widow of Tom Slick, another oil baron who'd left behind an astounding fortune.

The Associated Press estimated that between them, Charles and Bernice were worth about $75 and $100 million

back then.

Adjusted for inflation, that would be in excess of $1.5 billion today.

The number had Catherine practically salivating, and the Urshels sprang to the top of her list of marks.

But while she prepared for the big score, the rules of the game began shifting.

That June, Congress passed the Federal Kidnapping Act.

It gave 36-year-old FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover and his team of agents unprecedented unprecedented authority over kidnapping cases.

Not only that, they could chase offenders over state lines.

Unfortunately, local police departments weren't keen on handing over the reins to the new organization.

As a result, the first wave of FBI-led cases ended disastrously.

To cut out the uncooperative middlemen, Hoover created the first crime hotline for tips and information.

That meant anyone who needed help could dial in and instantly have the ear of the FBI.

Hoover was so serious about cracking down on the snatch racket that he even had a line installed at his private residence so that he'd never miss a report.

Needless to say, the odds of completing a successful kidnapping seemed to be diminishing by the day.

And yet, the Kellys weren't phased.

Before the summer was up, they were ready to make their move on the Urshels.

On the night of July 22nd, Catherine sent George to nab their prey.

Al Bates, an old bank robbing buddy of theirs, went along as backup.

Around 11.30 p.m., the men rolled up to the Urshel estate in a Chevy, likely expecting everyone to be in bed.

Instead, they found the Urshels were wide awake, drinking and playing a game of cards with another couple.

The foursome were out on their screened-in back porch, with the doors flung wide to dispel the late summer heat.

What's more, Charles had recently fired his bodyguard.

There was literally nothing standing in the bandit's way, so armed with his namesake, machine gun Kelly burst into the home with Al close behind.

Bernice screamed until George pointed the Tommy gun in her direction and ordered her to shut up.

Once she fell silent, he looked the two men over and asked which one of them was Charles Urshel.

When neither answered, George grew annoyed and threatened they'd have to take them both.

Still, neither man responded, so George and Al gathered up the men and pushed them towards the door.

But before they left, George gave the women a chilling warning.

If they called the cops, their men were as sure as dead.

Then, George and and Al hustled their captives outside and towards their getaway car.

While neither kidnapper had been masked, they made sure to blindfold Charles and his friend before shoving them into the cramped back seat.

Once the car was out of the driveway, Bernice sprang into action.

Despite the warning, she was smart enough to know the kidnappers wouldn't kill Charles, not before they got any money, at least.

Even still, she took the extra precaution and locked herself in a room with a telephone.

Then she called Oklahoma City PD, who promised to send officers.

But Bernice wasn't content to just sit and wait.

Her mind reeled with what had just happened.

She felt like she had to do something, anything.

That's when she remembered reading about Hoover's national hotline.

Around 2 a.m.

in Washington, D.C., the special line at J.

Edgar Hoover's home started ringing.

Within hours of the abduction, the FBI was hot on the Kelly's trail.

But by then, George had already put hundreds of miles between them and Oklahoma City.

Charles had also finally identified himself, likely hoping that his captors would release his friend.

Everything was going according to plan.

But as pleased as George was with their progress, his accomplice seemed jumpy.

Sure, things had gone fine, but not entirely to plan.

They had an extra hostage on their hands, and now the question was what to do with him.

Al wanted to make sure the other man couldn't talk.

He warned George that they shouldn't leave another witness behind, but George wouldn't hear of it.

Despite the name and reputation that Catherine had built for him, machine gun Kelly wasn't as vicious as people believed.

He certainly wouldn't just kill an innocent man.

That's why he chose the middle of nowhere to drop their excess hostage on the side of the road and speed off.

George, Al, and a blindfolded Charles spent the rest of the night and a good portion of the next day in the car.

To throw potential pursuers off their trail and make sure their captive was disoriented, they took the least direct route possible.

It was well over 12 hours after the kidnapping that they arrived at the Paradise Farmhouse in Texas, where Catherine was waiting for them.

When the men climbed out, she directed George and Al to an empty bedroom to deposit Charles for the night.

But while Charles was kept in quiet solitude, the rest of the farm was bustling with activity.

The property belonged to Catherine's stepfather and bootlegger, Robert Boss Shannon.

It's unclear if he and Catherine's mother, Aura Shannon, were in on the plan from the start, but when they heard of the score, they got on board and agreed to keep an eye on the prisoner.

This allowed George to focus on things on the farm and Catherine to take her 13-year-old daughter, Pauline, to her home in Fort Worth.

There, she contacted Detective Ed Weatherford, a crooked local cop she'd recently befriended.

Or, that's what she thought anyway.

In reality, Weatherford was working Catherine in the hopes that she'd turn state's witness against anyone and everyone in the criminal world.

So when she called him for a quick chat, he came right on by.

But Weatherford wasn't the only one with an ulterior motive.

Catherine knew the detective had connections and hoped he'd warn her if anyone was after them.

She also wanted to establish her presence in Fort Worth as a sort of alibi.

When Weatherford came over, she not so casually told him that she'd just got back from a trip to St.

Louis.

But because he hadn't heard about the Urshel kidnapping yet, there wasn't much else he could offer Catherine just then, so she made sure the conversation was a quick one.

The two said their goodbyes, and Weatherford headed back out.

But as he passed Catherine's parked car, he noticed something peculiar.

While Catherine had said she'd been in Missouri, she had a newspaper from Oklahoma laying on her front seat.

Weatherford's detective senses were tingling.

There was only one reason she'd lie about where she'd been.

Catherine Kelly was up to something.

In July of 1933, 38-year-old George Kelly and his accomplice, Al Bates, kidnapped 43-year-old Charles Urshall from his home in Oklahoma City.

It was just the start of a kidnapping spree that George's wife, 28-year-old Catherine, had planned as a grand finale of sorts to keep them set for life.

But thanks to the FBI's newly established hotline, the feds were on the case in record time.

And unlike previous investigations, the local police were more than happy to hand the reins to the feds.

That's because the special agent in charge of the Oklahoma City Bureau was an old colleague of the police chief.

The serendipitous connection meant countless agents and officers were working together on the case.

This made it nearly impossible for the Kellys to get their demands directly to the victim's wife, Bernice Urshall.

Anything sent to the house would be intercepted by the FBI, something the Kellys adamantly didn't want to happen.

So after nearly three days of brainstorming, Catherine finally came up with a feasible plan.

They'd have Charles reach out to a third party.

By now, the Kellys had moved the wealthy oil baron into a small shack that belonged to Boss Shannon's son, 22-year-old Armin.

They'd also made sure to keep Charles blindfolded, and his ears were stuffed with cotton for good measure.

But Charles' world wasn't entirely silent, just muffled.

Through the fluff, he could even hear the changing of the guard.

One day, George dismissed Armin so he could have a word with his captive.

He removed the cotton from Charles' ears and told him that he was very disappointed in Bernice.

He'd expressly forbidden her from going to the cops.

Not only had she ignored that, but she'd gotten the feds involved too.

Now, George explained, Charles needed to clean up her mess.

They wanted a name, someone they could write to with their demands and instructions, who would then take them to Bernice without alerting the fuzz.

Charles knew just the person.

He was given a pen and paper and sat facing the blank wooden wall before his blindfold was removed.

George warned that if he looked anywhere other than the page in front of him, it would be the last thing he ever saw.

When the letter was finished, the blindfold was put back in place and Charles was left once again in the dark.

The letter went to John G.

Catlett, a friend of the Urshels from Tulsa.

As soon as he read it, Catlett contacted Bernice and arranged to meet her at a hotel in Oklahoma City.

Bernice's brother-in-law, Arthur Seligson, and family friend E.E.

Kirkpatrick went with her, as both of their names were also mentioned in the letter.

Needless to say, seeing Charles' handwriting sent a wave of relief over Bernice.

While it had only been a few days since he'd been taken, she'd already received several fake letters from opportunists attempting to take credit for the abduction.

Now that they knew they were dealing with the real kidnappers, the authorities could finally make a move of their own.

Of course, this first meant following the Kelly's instructions.

A second letter came through demanding the largest ransom in U.S.

history, a whopping $200,000, or the equivalent of $4 million today.

Also included was a script for a fake classified ad.

If their terms were accepted, the ad was to be placed in the Daily Oklahoman.

When veteran FBI investigator Gus Jones took one look at the letters, he knew they were dealing with professionals.

So Bernice did as she was told, getting the money and placing the ad that same day.

Meanwhile, Catherine sent another letter from an address in Joplin, Missouri to throw investigators off their scent.

This time, the directives were for Kirkpatrick.

He was to take the bag of cash on the 10 p.m.

train to Kansas City and choose a seat in the observation car.

Once the kidnappers were sure there was no funny business, Kirkpatrick would see two signal fires at various points along the track.

After the second fire, he was to throw the loot from the train.

If anything went wrong, he'd receive further instructions at the Muehlbach Hotel in the city.

Brushing aside his terror, Kirkpatrick agreed to the mission.

As a precaution, he wrote a goodbye letter to his wife, asking Bernice to get it to her if he didn't come back.

John Catlett decided to go with him for moral support.

On July 29th, the men boarded the train according to the plan, but then everything started going awry.

The observation car was usually the very last on the train, but thanks to the World's Fair happening in Chicago, two extra passenger cars were tacked on to accommodate more travelers.

Not sure how this might affect the kidnapper's plan, Kirkpatrick and Catlett paid an attendant to allow them to stand on the tiny platform off the back of the train.

They spent the entire night there and never saw a single fire.

When they got to the designated hotel, a message was already waiting for them.

A telegram reading, Unavoidable incident kept me from seeing you last night.

We'll communicate about 6 o'clock.

As promised, Kirkpatrick and Catlett received a call to their room just before 6 p.m.

A man identified himself as Moore and told Kirkpatrick to take a walk in the direction of the nearby LaSalle Hotel.

He was to bring the package alone.

Out on the street, George watched Kirkpatrick coming toward him.

The man was twitchy, practically jumping out of his skin at every bump and jostle.

When they were finally shoulder to shoulder, George reached for the bag and murmured, I'll take that grip.

In that moment, it seems Kirkpatrick felt a burst of confidence.

He demanded some assurance he could pass along to Bernice.

George told him that Charles would be home in around 12 hours.

Then he yanked the handle from Kirkpatrick's hand and disappeared into traffic.

Meanwhile, Catherine was back in paradise watching over Charles.

George and Al had been gone two days, and she was starting to worry.

To calm her nerves, she sat chain smoking on the porch with her eyes trained on the driveway until, finally, she saw the car in the distance and breathed a sigh of relief.

When the car stopped in front of the farmhouse, George jumped out and sprinted towards Catherine, wrapping her in his enormous arms and spinning her around.

They'd pulled it off.

Al followed the happy couple to Catherine's room, where they dumped their prize out on the bed and stopped to admire the largest pile of cash any of them had ever seen.

But the moment was short-lived.

After dividing the ransom money, the only thing left to do was figure out who was taking care of Ursul.

To George's horror, both Catherine and Al agreed there was no way they could let him go alive.

The feds were waiting for him at his home, and he'd give them up in a heartbeat.

Even still, George did his best to reason with his partners.

Aside from the night they grabbed him, Charles had barely gotten a look at them.

They'd kept him blindfolded pretty much the entire time.

And if Bernice or the other guy they'd nabbed hadn't been able to ID them yet, Charles didn't stand a much better chance.

Fortunately for Charles, George was pretty convincing.

He reminded Catherine that the Urshel kidnapping was only supposed to be the beginning.

They still had plans to kidnap three more wealthy businessmen.

If they killed Charles after they got the ransom money, they could kiss the other jobs goodbye.

While George's rationale made complete sense, it seems Al couldn't care less.

He was ready to take his money and run.

So he did, hopping on the next train to Denver, Colorado.

For all he cared, the Kellys could do whatever they wanted with their captive.

Eventually, Catherine softened and agreed to let Charles go.

They put a pair of sunglasses on the oil man to hide his blindfold, then loaded him into the back seat of their car.

The Kellys took the longest, most roundabout route possible from Paradise toward Oklahoma.

When they were within 20 miles of the city, near a town called Norman, they let Charles out of the car and sped off.

With Charles out of the picture, the Kellys were flying high.

They drove north through the night until they reached St.

Paul, Minnesota.

There, George's contacts helped them launder launder their score.

Meanwhile, the couple did a little shopping.

George bought Catherine a new fur coat and an $1,100 diamond bracelet.

Then in Cleveland, Ohio, he bought himself a brand new Cadillac.

It was there that they got the first sign that things weren't quite right.

They heard that the feds had nabbed a few of the men who'd just helped them in St.

Paul.

Catherine knew they had to keep moving to keep the lawmen off their scent.

They drove the new caddy to Chicago, then continued on to Des Moines, Iowa, where they rented a hotel room and were just settling in when another bombshell landed.

The feds had arrested Catherine's mother, Aura, and her husband, Boss Sherman.

How had it all gone wrong so quickly?

To answer that, we need to backtrack a little.

While Catherine and George had bounced around the Midwest, Charles had made his way home.

But after nine grueling days as a hostage, he was so haggard his own staff didn't recognize him.

In fact, the guard at the door even tried to turn him away.

Luckily, someone recognized Charles and called for Bernice to come quickly.

Within minutes, lead FBI investigator Gus Jones was at the house, and by the next morning, Charles had given the feds more information than either he or the Kellys ever could have imagined possible.

You see, Catherine and George had made the mistake of kidnapping a man who had a memory like an elephant.

Since his early career as an accountant, Charles had been meticulous with details.

In fact, it was almost a photographic memory.

And it seems the trauma of being kidnapped only heightened these abilities.

According to Jim Hopper, a Harvard teaching associate in psychology, being in a high stress state puts the brain into super encoding mode, so much so that the central details of the event get burned into a person's memory and they may never forget them.

Even blindfolded, Charles had made note of seemingly every detail of his ordeal and he recounted all of it to Jones.

Jones deduced the oil man had been taken to a farm in northern Texas.

Charles also said that he'd heard planes passing overhead, so Jones looked into flight routes and schedules.

He studied weather reports for the area, looking for the closest match to Charles' description.

But they didn't land on Paradise thanks to Jones' analysis alone.

Detective Ed Weatherford from Fort Worth had convinced the Dallas Bureau that the Kellys were almost certainly involved in the plot.

So when Jones asked them for for help, locals pointed him toward Boss's farm.

With all the pieces falling into place, Jones organized a raid on the evening of August 11th.

Taking several agents and Charles with him, a caravan of cars pulled up to Paradise Farm.

When Boss demanded they state their business, Charles immediately recognized his voice as one of his guards.

Then, Jones sent agents to search the house.

Inside, they found Aura, who'd ordered everyone to keep their mouths shut.

But Boss's son, Armin, caved under questioning.

He told them everything.

With it all out in the open, Jones arrested Boss, Aura, and Armin.

Now they just needed to figure out where the Kellys had gone.

As luck would have it, the Dallas Bureau already had a few ideas where they could be.

Before the arrests, they'd been watching Boss and and Aura's mail for weeks and had already intercepted two letters from Catherine.

From the address, they knew the Kellys had been in St.

Paul.

The second letter's return address was General Delivery, Indianapolis.

Jones assigned agents to watch the post office there, but the real break came when they followed up on a bill from the Cadillac Agency in Cleveland.

There, agents found out they were just three days behind the Kellys.

The trail was hot, and the hunt was on.

By the summer of 1933, the feds were closing in on 28-year-old Catherine Kelly and her 38-year-old husband, George.

On August 11th, they arrested Catherine's mother, stepfather, and stepbrother for their involvement in the Charles Urshel kidnapping.

That very same day, another accomplice named Al Bates was apprehended in Denver, Colorado.

He'd been spotted by investigators from American Express who'd been looking for him for over a year.

The feds did their best to keep the arrests quiet, but three days later, they were in all the papers, including the one in Des Moines, Iowa, which was how Catherine learned about her mother's arrest.

The news infuriated her, and she knew exactly who was to blame.

She'd had the entire thing mapped out perfectly, but George had failed her.

She had told him they needed to kill Charles, but he didn't listen.

And now her mother was in some terrible jail cell, locked away for God knows how long.

They needed to help Aura.

They needed to go back to Texas.

So after a night of bickering, the couple climbed back into their car and headed south.

During the long drive, Catherine came up with a way George could make it all up to her.

In her mind, there was nothing but circumstantial evidence linking her to the crime.

If they got caught, she wanted George to take the fall.

It seems George truly loved his wife more than anything because he agreed to her demands.

He was willing to do anything to make her happy.

Psychologists call actions intended to help others pro-social behaviors.

This includes everything from doing simple favors for someone to taking the blame for another's crimes.

Such behavior is strongly influenced by many factors, so there are a few theories to explain it.

One is the close relationship theory, developed by psychologist Dr.

Josephine Korchmaros.

This framework suggests that relationship factors, like emotional closeness and obligation, dramatically increase one's inclination to help another person.

Generally, relationships don't get much closer than marriage, so it was probably a little bit of both that made George agree.

Whatever the case, it seems Catherine was placated, and the two eventually stopped at Catherine's uncle's house in Coleman, Texas.

There, they buried the ransom money behind a barn.

The next day, Catherine went to a nearby town and bought a beat-up old car.

She left it and George with her uncle while she took the caddy to Dallas to hire a lawyer for Aura.

When she returned a few days later, she was horrified to discover George was long gone.

The FBI had rolled into town, intent on questioning her family in the area.

When George heard the news, he split, leaving behind a one-word note that read, Mississippi.

Catherine cursed her husband, calling him a damned fool.

She knew he had a friend in the city of Biloxi, so she drove day and night across two states, but there was no sign of him.

By now, she blamed George entirely for their predicament, and it was starting to feel like every woman for herself.

So later that month, she wrote a letter to the FBI agent overseeing Aura's trial in Oklahoma City.

In it, she promised to give up Machine Gun Kelly in exchange for her mother's release.

If her pleas were ignored, she predicted, the entire Urshall family and friends would be exterminated soon.

The letter was postmarked Chicago, but by the time it arrived, Catherine was already on her way back to Texas.

She arrived in Waco in September, purchased a red wig, and checked into the Hilton Hotel.

By that stage, she'd been on the run for a month, and she was exhausted.

From her room, she tried to call the lawyer she'd hired for Aura, but before she could ask a single question, he told her not to call his office and hung up.

It's possible he knew he was under surveillance.

In a fit of frustration, Catherine got in her car and started driving to Fort Worth.

She needed to talk to the lawyer one way or another.

On the way, she passed a family of hitchhikers.

They were the Arnolds, Luther, Flossie Mae, and their 12-year-old daughter, Geraldine.

The bank had foreclosed on the farm where they lived, and they'd been roaming Texas looking for work.

Likely suspecting that the Arnolds were just as desperate as her, Catherine pulled over and picked them up.

After some time together, she told the family who she really was and confessed that she needed some help.

For a very handsome fee, Luther agreed to be her go-between to help her make contact with the lawyer.

With that issue seemingly solved, Catherine turned her attention back to finding her husband and decided to head back to Coleman.

To Flossie May's despair, Catherine took little Geraldine with her, likely to help her blend in.

At some point, Catherine and George finally reunited at her uncle's farm, but the weeks of separation didn't end in a tearful reunion.

The first thing Catherine said to her husband was, I don't know if I should kiss you or kill you.

But there was no time for either.

The feds were still canvassing the area, so the pair lit out, taking Geraldine with them.

They ended up in Chicago, where Catherine read everything she could about her mother's trial.

Meanwhile, George tried reaching out to his underworld contacts, but between the national media craze and the FBI closing in, the Kellys were persona non grata.

Anyone caught helping them was going to pay big time.

Realizing that, George was too paranoid to stay in the windy city, so they headed to Memphis, Tennessee.

He had a few hideouts there, as well as an acquaintance named Langford Ramsey.

They called him and arranged to meet up.

That night, George told Langford that he was the infamous machine gun Kelly.

At first, Lankford didn't believe him.

Even still, he took George seriously enough to agree to a massive favor.

The Kellys sent him and Geraldine back to Coleman to retrieve the ransom money they'd buried there.

But when Lankford pulled up to Catherine's uncle's farm, he was turned away.

The FBI had been sniffing around for weeks, and the uncle was sure he was being watched.

He told Lankford he'd better split while he could.

Langford needed to let the Kellys know what had happened, so he located the nearest place to send a telegram.

Meanwhile, Geraldine missed her parents and desperately wanted to go home.

Feeling for the girl, Langford made the fateful decision to drop her off at the train station in Fort Worth.

Last Geraldine knew, her mother was instructed to wait for them in Oklahoma City, so that's where she planned to go.

Before boarding the train, Geraldine fired off a quick telegram letting her mother know she was coming.

But Flossie Mae had already been picked up by the FBI and they intercepted the message.

So when Geraldine arrived at the station, officers were waiting for her.

Back with her mother, 12-year-old Geraldine told the cops exactly where to find George and Catherine.

So in the wee hours of September 26th, three FBI agents and a handful of local police raided the Kelly's Memphis hideout.

The notorious machine gun Kelly was arrested in his underwear, armed not with his iconic Tommy gun, but a simple 45.

Hearing voices, Catherine came out of the bedroom in green silk pajamas.

Taking in the scene, she put her arms around George saying, honey, I guess it's all up for us.

The G-Men won't ever give us a break.

Though she knew it was over, Catherine demanded she be allowed to get dressed.

After about 15 minutes, she emerged looking like a movie star in a slinky black dress, but she wanted it known that her best clothes were still in Texas.

Needless to say, the media adored Catherine.

She treated the perp walk to and from the courtroom like a red carpet, always made up and dressed to the nines.

When she took the stand that October, she stuck to her story.

The kidnapping was entirely George's idea.

She batted her lashes and claimed she had no idea about that crime, or any of his others for that matter.

She simply thought her husband had made all of his money betting on horse races.

But Catherine put too much faith in her charms.

Though she was right that the evidence against her was slim, she was still found guilty.

For his part, George Kelly tried to keep his word to his wife.

He wanted to testify that it was all his fault, but his lawyers wouldn't let him.

Not that it made much difference.

In the end, the couple received the same punishment, his and hers life sentences.

But their stories diverged after that.

In 1954, the notorious machine gun Kelly died behind bars at the age of 54.

Meanwhile, Catherine appealed her sentence for years with little success, but in 1958, she and her mother were both granted a retrial.

In the end, both women were released.

Thanks to a technicality regarding a handwriting expert, Aura and Catherine left prison together and lived the rest of their lives quietly in Oklahoma.

Perhaps that's why history has turned most of Catherine's legacy over to her husband, George, the machine gun-toting gangster.

Despite this, J.

Edgar Hoover remained convinced that Catherine was the true mastermind of the pair.

She lingered in his mind for years after the case.

In his memoir, published in 1936, Hoover called her man-crazy, clothes-crazy, and a cunning, shrewd, criminal actress.

Misogynistic overtones aside, his assessment wasn't that far from the truth.

Catherine Kelly was the beauty and brains behind it all.

And don't you forget it.

Thanks for joining me for this episode of Criminal Couples.

For more stories like this, listen to Female Criminals for free on Spotify.

This collection was developed by Chelsea Wood.

This episode of Criminal Couples was written by Joel Callan with writing assistance from Abigail Cannon, production assistance by Bruce Katovich and Ron Shapiro, fact-checking by Haley Milliken and hosted by Vanessa Richardson.

This episode of Criminal Couples comes from Female Criminals, hosted by Vanessa Richardson, with sound design by Dick Schroeder and production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Trent Williamson, Carly Madden, Bruce Katobich, and Joshua Kern.

This episode of Female Criminals was written by Megan Hannum with writing assistance by Jane O.

and Joel Callan, fact-checking by Haley Milliken and research by Mickey Taylor.

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