The Manhunt for Pretty Boy Floyd

Another chapter in my Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma book https://amzn.to/4gAkNFu chronicles the large manhunt for Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd in Cookson Hills in early 1934. Floyd, who'd made a name for himself as one of the most wanted men in America, was originally from the rugged hills, and he was thought to hide out there from time to time. 

In February 1934, state and local law officials in Oklahoma received intelligence that Floyd might soon return to his old stomping grounds. Then, on Friday, February 16, they learned that Kelly had recently been spotted in Oklahoma, and the next day they launched what was described at the time as "the nation's largest manhunt. Covering about 400 square miles in the Cookson Hills, the dragnet involved over 1,000 men, including US agents, state officers, county sheriffs, and police from the main towns in the area. Headquarters to coordinate the operation were established in four towns: Muskogee, Stilwell, Tahlequah, and Sallisaw. Police officers in western Arkansas were also cooperating in the massive raid. The huge posse had orders to patrol highways, search residences, and scour the woods and ravines of the “most notorious rendezvous of criminals in the Southwest.” Their biggest target was the elusive Pretty Boy Floyd.

Later, the National Guard was called out to join the search, and even prison guards from the state penitentiary at McAlester reinforced the large search party.

A newspaper reporter described the disposition of forces on Saturday night: "Rifles, riot guns, pistols and machine guns bristled on every corner of the key towns and on every highway held in the hands of officers who were ready to shoot any known bandit or murderer who attempted to break through the cordon."

Roadblocks were set up, and every vehicle entering or leaving the Cookson Hills “war zone” was stopped. The occupants were questioned and the vehicles searched. “Suspicious persons” were arrested and taken to one of the headquarter towns for fingerprinting. They were jailed pending the results of the prints.

The reporter called the sweep through the hills by the army of law enforcement officers “the most sensational organized war on crime ever staged in Oklahoma and perhaps the largest manhunt ever staged in the nation.”

After a weekend of most futile searching by the massive posse, the reporter announced that the manhunt had mostly been a failure. Not only had Kelly escaped, if he was ever in the region at that time to begin with, but very few other "big fish" were apprehended, only a few "minnows.". There were too many hiding places, and there were too many people living in the hills who sympathized with and harbored the outlaws. “The Cookson Hills are still impenetrable,” said the reporter. “It will take more than 500 officers or 1,000 officers and militiamen or however many of us there were patroling the highways from Muskogee to Stilwell, from Sallisaw to Tahlequah, to trap the gang of criminals lurking in those jumbled timbered hills.”

The huge sweep through the Cookson Hills had been planned under the assumption that the outlaws would do one of two things: either they would try to escape via the highways and run into a police blockade or they would hole up in their homes. They did neither. Instead, they took to the woods and hid out.

Although the dragnet failed to capture Kelly, his date with destiny loomed in the near future. On October 22, 1934, Pretty Boy was gunned down by FBI agents and local lawmen in a field near East Liverpool, Ohio. His body was brought back to Oklahoma for burial in the Akins Cemetery, where a crowd estimated at over 20,000 people attended, making it the largest funeral in state history.

For a much more thorough account of the manhunt for Pretty Boy Floyd, check out my new book.

The Severs Hotel Murders

Another chapter in my Murder and Mayhem in NE OK book https://amzn.to/3BIKAw0 concerns the Severs Hotel Murders in Muskogee. What follows is a greatly condensed version of that chapter.

About 8:30 on the evening of Saturday, April 26, 1930, the telephone operator at the elegant Severs Hotel in Muskogee received a call from a guest in Room 817 saying that his friends had been robbed and killed. The assistant hotel manager called police, and he and the hotel engineer hurried to the eighth floor to investigate. 

They opened the door to Room 187 and found an elderly man in the room with shaving cream on his face, a second man lying nearby on the floor with his hands bound, and two other men lying lifeless on the floor across the room near the door of adjoining Room 819.

The man with his hands bound and the elderly man identified themselves as John L. Wike and P. G. Seeley respectively, and the two dead men were brothers David and George Smith. The four men had traveled together on business from Connecticut. Wike said that two men had forced their way into the adjoining room, attacked and killed the Smith brothers after a furious struggle, and left him tied up. Seeley said he was in the bathroom at the time and didn't hear the sounds of a struggle but did hear four gunshots. 

Police tentatively accepted their story but grew skeptical as they began investigating the crime. The first question that arose was the mystery of why, if robbery were the motive, the bandits took only a small portion of the money and valuables the four men had in their possession. Why did Seeley not hear the commotion, and why did he not untie Wike? Why was the room relatively undisturbed if there was a violent struggle as Wike said. 

Seeley calmly explained that he was hard of hearing, and Wike said the reason he was still bound when help arrived was that he wanted authorities to see the scene exactly as it was after the crime was committed.

Calls to Connecticut confirmed that the four men from that state were prominent and trustworthy citizens. Arguing in their favor, also, was the fact that neither the murder weapon nor the room key had been found. If Wike and Seeley murdered the Smith brothers, how did they dispose of those items? 

Wike and Seeley were arrested and held for intense questioning for a couple of days before most of the lawmen involved in the case came to believe that they were not implicated in the murders, and they were released with an understanding that they stay in Muskogee and cooperate with officers in the investigation.

Later, officers found a diamond in Seeley's luggage that Wike had previously reported as having been taken by the killers. Seeley swore he knew nothing about the ring or how it got in his luggage, but he and Wike were re-arrested. Authorities still felt the two were probably not guilty, but the prosecutor thought indicting them would be the best path to move the investigation forward. 

At a preliminary hearing for the two men in the district courtroom at Muskogee before an overflow crowd, the prosecutor focused much attention on the fact that the missing ring was found in Seeley’s luggage, but he had little solid evidence to present. The defense, on the other hand, suggested that some “suspicious characters” who had been seen loitering around the hotel shortly before the murders might well have committed the crime. The sheriff said he was sure the defendants were not guilty, and Wike and Seeley, testifying in their own defense, calmly told their stories very much as they had told them from the outset. By the end of the hearing, even the prosecutor was won over. In his closing argument, he admitted there was not enough probable cause to hold the two men. When the judge announced that the charges against the Connecticut men were dismissed, the courtroom erupted into applause.

The Severs Hotel murders remained a mystery until early June when R. L. Benton, an alleged member of a holdup gang that was known to be in the Muskogee vicinity on the night of the murders, was arrested in Miami, Oklahoma, in connection with a series of robberies in southwest Missouri and northwest Oklahoma. Wike journeyed back to Oklahoma from Connecticut and identified Benton as one of the men who attacked and killed the Smith brothers. Held on charges of robbery and suspicion of murder at the Muskogee County Jail, Benton escaped in August.

In mid-November, a gunman shot and killed a police officer in Kirksville, Missouri, and the killer was later identified as veteran criminal Lawrence Devol (alias R. L. Benton), the same man wanted in connection with the Smith murders. A large manhunt for Devol, a known associate of notorious criminals like Harvey Bailey and Alvin Karpis, was launched throughout the Midwest, but nothing was heard from Devol until about a year later when he joined the infamous Barker gang. In late 1932, Devol killed two policemen outside a Minnesota bank during the gang’s robbery of the place. Devol was captured, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane in June 1936. Later the same month, he and a companion, Albert “Scarface” Soroko, tried to hold up a café in Oklahoma City, and Soroko was killed in a police shootout. The following month, Devol killed a policeman and seriously wounded a second one in Enid, Oklahoma, when two officers tried to question him. Devol was then killed in a second gun battle with police just moments later.

Gangster Jimmy Creighton was eventually identified as the other prime suspect besides Devol in the Severs Hotel murders, but he was already serving a life sentence in the Missouri penitentiary. Since no one was ever tried or convicted for the murders of David and George Smith, the crime officially remains an unsolved mystery.

The Osage Murders

Another chapter in my recent book Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/3OWWt4l concerns the Osage murders, made infamous by the book Killers of the Flower Moon and the 2023 movie of the same name. 

On May 27, 1921, the body of Anna Brown was found beside a road between Fairfax and Grayhorse in Osage County, Oklahoma. Brown had been shot through the head. Initial reports mentioned that, as a member of the Osage tribe, she was receiving about $1,000 per month in “oil royalties;” but the only theory of the crime local authorities could offer was that she had been the victim of highway robbery.

As it turned out, Anna Brown was not the victim of highway robbery but of one of the most diabolical get-rich schemes in American history. Because of a series of land deals made with the federal government going back to the late 1800s, the Osage held the rights to one of the largest deposits of oil in the United States. To divide up the profits from the commonly owned mineral rights, a system was adopted by which each Osage member would receive an equal share of the revenue. This came to be called a headright. Private companies could lease the land and then pay a percentage of their profits into a trust fund managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA would then distribute payments to the holders of the headrights.

During the Oklahoma oil boom of the early 1900s, the Osage people became some of the wealthiest in the world, as members of the tribe, like Anna Brown, received payments that today would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

The sudden wealth of the Osage people drew lots of swindlers looking to cheat tribal members out of their money; so, the U. S Government established a system that was supposedly designed to help the Osage protect their wealth. White guardians were assigned to manage the money of any members of the tribe who were judged incompetent. In practice, the guardianship program was a racist system under which simply being Native American was sufficient reason to be deemed “incompetent."

The guardians often paid themselves from money they were supposed to be safeguarding for the Osage, but this was not the worst of the abuses. The law allowed that headrights could not be sold but they could be inherited. This provision spawned the "Reign of Terror" during which many white people married into the Osage tribe and then killed or hired someone else to kill their spouses and/or their spouse’s relatives in order to gain their headrights.

Anna Brown was not the first victim of the scheme, but most of the murders occurred in the early 1920s, and her case was the first to receive much publicity. In total, at least 24 members of the Osage tribe were killed or died under mysterious circumstances during the "Reign of Terror," and some estimates place the number much higher. Most of the murders occurred in the Fairfax-Grayhorse area, and many of the victims were members of the same family, relatives of Anna.

Several people were arrested for questioning or as suspects in Anna's death, including Ernest Burkhart, who was married to Anna’s sister Mollie, but the coroner ultimately ruled that Anna had been killed by parties unknown. 

During the two years following Anna's death, her mother died under suspicious circumstances, her ex-husband was found dead with a gunshot to the back of the head, and a second sister (Rita) and her husband were killed when their house exploded.

The coincidence of so many members of the Osage tribe, especially members of the same family, dying so close together in time and place was too obvious to ignore, and the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) finally initiated an investigation. The investigative team kept encountering the names of William K. Hale and Ernest Burkhart, the same Ernest Burkhart who was married to Anna's sister Mollie and who had been arrested for questioning in Anna's death. Hale, a wealthy, prominent citizen, was Burkhart's uncle, and he was eventually identified as the mastermind behind the murders of Anna and her family. The scheme was for Burkhart to inherit all the family's wealth and then turn a large portion of it over to his uncle. 

Hale and Burkhart were arrested for conspiring to kill the family members of Burkhart's wife, Mollie. Mollie herself was found to be dying of gradual poisoning, but the scheme was uncovered in time to save her life. Hale and Burkhart were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, but both were paroled after twenty years or so. 

My recent book contains a considerably more detailed account of the Osage murders than I've given here, or if you really want to delve into the subject, here's a link to Killers of the Flower Moon https://amzn.to/3DeN1qJ.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Another chapter in my Murder and Mayhem in NE Oklahoma book (https://amzn.to/3Zlvl3U) is about the Tulsa Race Massacre. On Monday, May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old African American, was accused of accosting Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl, in an elevator in downtown Tulsa. The next day, Rowland was arrested and placed in jail.

Rowland denied that he had molested the girl, but his protestations of innocence made no difference to many Tulsans when they heard of his arrest. Tension between Blacks and whites during the Ku Klux Klan era of the 1920s was high, especially in Tulsa, where many Black citizens lived in and around the thriving Greenwood business district, which was known as black Wall Street because of its economic success. Meanwhile, many poor whites just across the railroad tracks to the south were struggling financially and surely resented their prosperous neighbors.

Throughout Tuesday afternoon and early evening, rumors of a lynching were whispered from one white Tulsan to another, and by about 7:30 that evening, hundreds of angry whites had gathered outside the Tulsa County Courthouse. The mob demanded that law officers turn over Rowland, but Sheriff W.M. McCullough refused.

When a group of Black men showed up to help defend Rowland if necessary, McCullough assured them they weren't needed and they left, but their appearance alarmed and angered the white mob. By 9:30 p.m., the mob had grown to about 2,000. McCullough tried to talk to the mob into dispersing, but the crowd hooted him down.

About 10:00 p.m., a second group of armed Black men, after hearing of the growing mob, went to the courthouse to offer their help in maintaining order, but again they were turned away. As the black men were leaving, a white man accosted one of them and tried to disarm him. The black man, a World War I vet, refused to hand over his weapon. During the ensuing struggle, a shot was fired, and the riot was on.

The white mob opened fire on the African Americans, and the Black men returned fire. Greatly outnumbered, the Black men retreated toward the Greenwood district, skirmishing with a pursuing horde of whites along the way. Fighting broke out elsewhere as well.

Hundreds of whites, including some members of the mob, were deputized and told to "Get a gun, get a nigger.” In their fury, the white mob largely forgot about Dick Rowland.

Angry whites prowled the streets of downtown Tulsa looking for Blacks to exact vengeance on. They broke into stores and pawn shops to steal guns and ammunition. Some of the rioters included Tulsa policemen.

The armed Blacks were driven across the Frisco tracks that separated Greenwood from downtown Tulsa shortly after midnight. Outnumbered, the Black men made a determined stand, as the two sides exchanged gunfire for over an hour.

After the Black defenders were finally forced to retreat, a few carloads of whites conducted drive-by shootings through the Black neighborhoods while others in the white mob began setting fires to African American homes and businesses.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the National Guard was called out, supposedly to restore order, but they spent most of their time rounding up Blacks to hand over to police as prisoners.

With the coming of daylight, white rioters poured across the tracks into the Greenwood business district looting and burning homes and other buildings. Anyone who resisted was shot. Some policemen and even a few National Guardsmen joined the rioters.

By the time order was finally restored around noon on Wednesday, at least 60 and some say as many as 300 African Americans were dead. About 6,000 Black Tulsans had been rounded up and placed in temporary internment camps. About 10,000, almost the entire Black population of Tulsa, were left homeless. Over 1,000 businesses and homes were burned and many others looted but not burned.

Sheriff McCullough secretly whisked Dick Rowland out of town sometime during the riot. Sarah Page later declined to prosecute, and Rowland was exonerated. But, even today, Tulsa is still reckoning with a legacy of racial hatred that has stained the city for over a hundred years because of the senseless violence sparked by a casual encounter between the two young people.

Often called the Tulsa Race Riot or the Tulsa Race War in the past, this tragedy has come to be known more aptly in recent years as the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Cherokee Bill and the Bill Cook Gang

Another chapter in my Murder and Mayhem in NE OK book https://amzn.to/3B4XjJa is about Crawford Goldsby, one of the most infamous outlaws in the history of Indian Territory. He had his first run-in with the law in the fall of 1893 when he was just seventeen. He went to a dance at Fort Smith, where he got into a fight with an older man over a girl. A few days later, Goldsby went looking for the man and shot him three times, seriously wounding him.

Adopting the name Cherokee Bill, Goldsby soon joined the Bill Cook outlaw gang. In July 1894, the Cook gang held up a Frisco passenger train at Red Fork, Indian Territory. Later the same month, the gang rode into Chandler and robbed the Lincoln County Bank in broad daylight. A barber across the street from the bank was shot and killed by one of the gang members.

On September 17, four members of the Cook gang robbed the J. A. Parkinson store in Okmulgee at gunpoint. On October 9, three members of the Cook gang held up the Valley Depot at Claremore.
Two hours after the Claremore stickup, the same gang reportedly robbed the depot at Chouteau over twenty miles away.

In the fall of 1894, a newspaper article described Cherokee Bill as the “first lieutenant” of the Cook gang and also its "best shot and the most dangerous member.”

On November 9, 1894, Cherokee Bill and another man rode into the small village of Lenapah about ten miles north of Nowata and held up the Shufeldt store. During the robbery, Bill shot and killed a young man standing at a window in nearby restaurant.

On Saturday evening, December 22, Cherokee Bill and several partners held up the train depot in Nowata. A week later, Cherokee Bill killed his brother-in-law over the man's alleged mistreatment of Bill's sister. Two days after that, Bill paid a return visit to the Nowata train depot and single-handedly robbed it again.

Lawmen captured Bill Cook in New Mexico on January 12, 1895, and just a couple of weeks later, Cherokee Bill was captured near Nowata. Both outlaws were brought to the federal jail at Fort Smith, Arkansas. Cook was found guilty on several robbery charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Cherokee Bill was convicted of murdering the young man at Lenapah and sentenced by Isaac Parker, the so-called hanging judge, to die on the gallows. While awaiting the outcome of an appeal, Cherokee Bill killed a guard during an escape attempt. He was tried for that murder, too, and again sentenced to death. The fateful day finally came on March 17, 1896. According to one report, Bill seemed as indifferent to his impending death as he had been to life, and he remarked just before the lever was pulled dropping him into eternity that it was "a fine day to die."

Check out my new book for a much more detailed account of Cherokee Bill's exploits.