Authors: Joe Urschel
The reporters took special note of her attire. One wrote that she wore a “smart black dress and hat.” Another was more detailed: “She was smartly attired in a black skirt and a black satin waist, with a black bow at the neck. She wore a small black hat, black pumps and sheer stockings. A murmur of comment went up from the many women in the crowded courtroom.”
Alternately wiping tears from her eyes with her dainty handkerchief and twisting it as she spoke, she told the jury about her domineering husband, who had forced her into the kidnapping, and how she knew nothing about it or any of the other crimes George had participated in.
“He always told me not to mess in his business in any way, and I didn’t.”
The prosecutors pressed her.
“What did you ask Kelly about the kidnapping?”
“He told me it was none of my business, that they had a man at Armon’s house. I told them if they did I’d tell the officers, even if he killed me. I begged him to release him. I said he would get my folks into trouble … He threatened me. He said it was none of my business,” she testified.
“Did he say anything about what he intended to do with the kidnapped man?”
“He said he was going to kill him.”
“What did you do then?”
“I begged him not to. Asked him to please release him.”
Keenan continued to tear into her story on cross-examination. As he did, her act began to come apart. Her demure countenance, according to E. E. Kirkpatrick, who was sitting next to Urschel during the trial, “changed to one of a cornered tigress … The sweet girlish smile changed to a fiendish snarl. If she had held any hope in her heart when she took the witness stand, it had completely vanished when she left it.”
Kathryn claimed that her removal of the children from Paradise was only coincidental. She said her taking ice to Armon’s house, where Urschel was held, was not part of a plot to make the kidnappers comfortable, but a ruse on her part to talk to Kelly.
Keenan had a field day with this.
“You say your husband likes ice?… And when you wanted to talk to him about something you would go to him with a chunk of ice in your hand?”
He asked Kathryn if she still loved her husband.
“Yes.”
“Do you still trust him?”
“No.”
Kathryn’s attorney jumped from his seat with objections like a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box, only to be overruled constantly by a simmering Judge Vaught.
Keenan asked how much money the Kellys had in a lockbox in the Fort Worth bank when she first went there from Stratford, Oklahoma. He tried to elicit from her the information that she knew the money was stolen from a bank, but she denied it.
“How were you going to get any more money?” Keenan asked.
“From my husband who was going to get in touch with me,” she replied.
“Where did you get the diamond wristwatch for which you expect to file suit to recover?”
“From my husband, I don’t know where he got it.”
“You were on good terms with your mother and stepfather at this time?”
“Yes,” Kathryn asserted.
“Then why didn’t you tell them you thought George Kelly had a kidnapped man with him?”
“He asked me not to tell anybody.”
“You loved your husband at this time?”
“Yes.”
Mathers was apoplectic. He was continually jumping in and objecting in an effort to get Keenan to stop badgering the witness. But Vaught did not intervene.
“Were you at the Shannon farm Tuesday night?”
“No.”
“Then if your mother said you were—in the previous trial—she was mistaken.”
“I believe so,” Kathryn said.
“When you left Stratford, where did you go?”
“Straight to Paradise.”
“Did you ask Mr. Shannon’s advice about the kidnapping?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“George said he would kill me if I mentioned it.”
“How long were you at Paradise before you went on in to Fort Worth with the girls?”
“About thirty minutes,” Kathryn replied.
“Did you read about the Urschel kidnapping?”
“Yes, and I was worried to death.”
“After you got back to Fort Worth you were so worried about it you went to the cabaret?”
“No! To the lake.”
“At this time you say you were unaware Urschel was at Paradise.”
“That’s right.”
“When you went back to the farm did Mrs. Shannon say George Kelly and [Albert] Bates had a drunk man there?”
“No.”
“Did you read her testimony about this case?”
“I don’t care what she said, I am telling the truth,” asserted Kathryn.
“When did you first talk to your folks about the Urschel kidnapping?”
“When I went back to the farm, Mr. Shannon said George Kelly had a drunk man there.”
“Why did he skip telling you an important fact like Kelly’s having a machine gun on the man and that he was blindfolded?”
Kathryn claimed he didn’t tell her about that.
“If Mr. Shannon said at the previous trial that he didn’t know there was a kidnapped man at Armon’s house until you told him Wednesday, would you say he was telling an untruth?”
“Yes.”
“And if your mother, whom you dearly love, said the same thing, she also was telling an untruth.”
“Yes,” replied Kathryn.
Keenan then began peppering Kathryn with questions he hoped would prove she’d been to Armon’s shack and had discussed the kidnapping with Kelly while he was there.
“And didn’t you take newspapers to him so he could find out how the case was proceeding?”
“No.”
Roberts raised an objection to Keenan’s asking questions so rapidly that the witness did not have time to answer but, again, he was overruled by Judge Vaught.
“What did you ask Kelly about the kidnapping?” Keenan asked.
“He told me it was none of my business that they had a man at Armon’s house. I told him if they did, I’d tell the officers even if he killed me.” She said she was in tears during the conversation.
“Was there any crying when you learned Urschel had paid $200,000 for his release, or when you sent $1,500 to your parents or when you paid some money on a new Cadillac automobile?”
“No,” Kathryn responded.
“Now, when you were at the Shannon farm during the absence of Bates and Kelly you had a fast car and could have left at any time, couldn’t you?” asked Keenan.
“Yes.”
“Did you talk to Harvey Bailey much?”
“No.”
“Did you talk to him about machine guns, or anything like that?”
“Oh, no sir,” Kathryn stressed.
“Didn’t you know your mother was harboring a desperate criminal and why didn’t you tell her?”
“George had told me not to mix in his business.”
Kathryn testified that she drove to Norman, Oklahoma, to pick up Kelly, who had been driven there. She described the trip they made north and said they stopped overnight in Omaha, Nebraska, and Mason City, Iowa.
“Surely you knew you were wanted by the officers,” Keenan interrupted.
“I didn’t know it then,” she replied.
Kathryn said she and Kelly registered as Mr. and Mrs. R. G. Shannon in Cleveland, but insisted they were not fleeing.
“But Mrs. Kelly, you could have surrendered at any time, couldn’t you?”
“But I didn’t know I was wanted,” she kept insisting.
“When you took Geraldine to Chicago, you knew that you were wanted by police, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew it then.”
“Now, Geraldine is a sweet little girl, isn’t she?”
“Awfully sweet,” Kathryn said, smiling.
“Yet you were herding this girl around with a dangerous murdering scoundrel?”
Roberts objected to Keenan’s language.
Keenan said it was hard to use dignified language with a man like Kelly and withdrew the question.
Keenan then turned his attention to the Michigan Tavern in Chicago.
“Did you not know this was a gathering place for some of the worst criminals in the country? A place where they would gather to plan their illegal activities. Drink their illegal liquor. If you were so fond of Geraldine, why would you drag her to one of the most notorious saloons in the city?” he asked.
“It was not a saloon. It was just a place where they served sandwiches and beer. George introduced me to the man as Mr. Edwards. I did not know anyone named Bergl,” said Kathryn.
Pointing his finger at George Kelly, Keenan asked, “Would you turn your daughter, Pauline Frye, over to that man Kelly?”
“I love George very much, he has been good to me,” Kathryn said. Keenan ignored this answer and asked his question again.
“Would you turn your daughter over to that man?”
“No, I—”
Keenan jumped in and interrupted her.
“You would take this little Geraldine Arnold, of tenderer years than your own daughter, along with this rascal?”
“He made us go. We did not know we were going to Chicago,” Kathryn cried.
Roberts then cross-examined Kathryn, and then called her elderly father, J. E. Brooks, to the stand. He had been living in Kathryn’s Fort Worth home at the time of the kidnapping.
“Did you ever tell Mrs. Arnold this kidnapping was planned three months before it was done?”
“I certainly did not,” he replied.
“How much of that week Mr. Urschel was kidnapped was Kathryn at her home in Fort Worth?” Roberts asked.
“Well, practically all week. She was home every night.” With that, Roberts rested.
The coverage in the press was as prejudicial as the courtroom theatrics.
In the midst of the trial,
The
Daily Oklahoman
reported:
Keenan, who acquitted himself so brilliantly in the other trial with his subtle and mockingly sympathetic cross-examination of the Shannons, methodically frayed Kathryn’s nerves and destroyed her poise as he carried her through her early life.
He wanted to leave her stumbling and frightened, stripped of her smiling calm when he reached the vital testimony of the actual kidnapping. He succeeded.
When she stumbled thankfully from the witness chair at a brief court recess, the last vestige of her flashing smile was gone and her eyes had a haunted look. But the respite was brief and when the recess ended the special prosecutor soon placed her again on a worried defensive.
A lurid and sordid past life that wouldn’t stand close examination ruined the confidence she possessed when she seated herself in the witness chair and turned her appealing half-smile on the jury. Her past life came out, stark and unlovely under the skillful questioning of Keenan.
It was the story of a girl, married first at 15 years old and a mother within a few months who was carried by a passionate yearning for luxury and a lawless nature to husband after husband … until she ended as the wife of a “big shot” George Kelly, who matched her criminal temperament and gratified her desire for clothes and jewelry with a free hand.
Her confident voice replaced by a plaintive whisper, Kathryn told of her first marriage while a country schoolgirl to J. C. Frye, and the baby who would come within a few months. The baby, now Pauline Frye, sat in a front row seat watching her mother with
[an]
uncomprehending face.
Frye was divorced. Then came Allie Brewer, of whom she remembered little. He too soon passed out of the picture, followed by Charles. F. Thorne, a Texas man with a small fortune.
“He died a violent death, didn’t he?”demanded the merciless Keenan.
“He committed suicide,” she answered in a defiant, almost inaudible voice.
That was seven years ago. That was when longed-for luxuries came—from the estate of Thorne. She bought a house in Fort Worth, paid $12,000 for it. She bought an eight-cylinder Cadillac and she bought jewelry worth $3,500. And she started living the way she wanted to.
There had been slim days before, though. She worked as a manicurist in Oklahoma City, was tried for robbery and convicted. It was reversed. The story was dragged from her piecemeal and when she finally spoke the admission, she snarled at Keenan as only a mad woman, “Is that all?”
“Answer the questions that are asked you and eliminate any comments,” Judge Vaught told her sternly. She looked at Vaught, the light of battle still in her eyes, then dropped her head.
Keenan hammered on. He made her the “girl friend” of bootleggers and small-time hijackers, always leaving them for bigger criminals. Always moving toward the “big time.”
She met Kelly seven years ago in San Antonio. Three years ago, after a six-month correspondence during which Kelly asked her to marry him, they were married in Minneapolis.
“He deceived me,” she cried. “I didn’t know he made his money dishonestly.”
Cleverly Keenan led her into a trap until, startled, she found herself admitting that she knew Kelly was in Leavenworth penitentiary during the six months that they wrote letters to each other.
“So long as you got pretty clothes and a nice place to live in and good food, you weren’t particular how your man made his money, were you?” Keenan asked.
“I thought he would sell whisky but I didn’t know he would kidnap anybody,” she answered.
Then Roberts turned her testimony to the backwoods Coleman farm owned by Kathryn’s grandfather, near Stratford, Oklahoma.
“Just what happened; you were there?” Roberts asked.
“Yes. Well, about 4:30 o’clock on that morning [Sunday, July 23, a day following the Urschel kidnapping] someone flashed a flashlight in my face and told me to get up. I noticed a car in the backyard.
“My grandma then was getting up and she asked me what was going on. I said I didn’t know but I’d find out. I met George on the porch … We had quite a little argument.”