The police chief of Wellsville, Ohio, was just doing his job when he got a strange call. A motorist reported two men in suits lying by the roadside at dawn, a sight odd enough in the fog that it triggered suspicion. Chief John H. Fultz and two other officers went to investigate, and what they found would end the life of one of the most famous outlaws in America.
For years, Charles Arthur Floyd—known to the world as Pretty Boy Floyd—had been a haunting presence across the Midwest. He was born in Adairsville, Georgia, in 1904, and moved to Akins, Oklahoma, as a child. His life of crime started early. At eighteen, he stole $3.
50 from a post office, a paltry sum that earned him little more than a slap on the wrist. But it was only the beginning. Three years later, in September 1925, Floyd and two others robbed the payroll office of the Kroger grocery chain in St. Louis, making off with $12,000—a fortune today.
Flush with cash, Floyd and an accomplice drove a flashy new Studebaker through Sallisaw, Oklahoma. A suspicious police chief pulled them over and connected them to the heist. This time, Floyd got five years in prison, though he was paroled after three and a half years for good behavior. A free man again, Floyd jumped straight back into the criminal underworld.
Kansas City in the late 1920s was rich with Prohibition-era organized crime, and Floyd made valuable partnerships with its most powerful figures. Over the next several years, he participated in a string of bank robberies, an activity he clearly had a talent and appetite for. It was here that he acquired his famous nickname, though its origins are disputed. Some say it came from his smartly pressed white shirts and slacks while working in the Kansas oil fields.
Others claim a witness to the Kroger heist described the culprit as having a “pretty face”—a “pretty boy with apple cheeks. ”
Floyd hated the name. Being called “pretty” didn’t inspire fear. He wanted to be known as a tough outlaw and an accomplished bank robber.
He reportedly avoided using the nickname whenever possible, snapping back at accomplices and insisting he was called “Chalk,” allegedly because of his fondness for Choctaw beer. By 1929, his reputation was growing, and so was the attention from law enforcement. He was arrested for vagrancy and suspicion of highway robbery, but never held for long. In 1930, he was picked up in Akron, Ohio, under the alias Frank Mitchell and accused of murdering an officer.
He wiggled out of those charges, but not long after, a jury in Toledo, Ohio, convicted him for a bank heist in Sylvania. He received his harshest sentence yet: twelve to fifteen years in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Before he could even be transferred, he escaped and made his way back to Kansas City, where he had people he could trust. The Great Depression only deepened the gang activity in Kansas City.
Floyd was suspected in the brutal murder of rival criminals Wally and Bull Ash, whose bodies were found in a burned-out car in March 1931. His gang killed a patrolman that April, and Floyd was personally responsible for killing a federal agent. The press seized on him. His handsome face, his charm, and his talent for robbing banks made for irresistible headlines.
During the Depression, banks were deeply unpopular. Their predatory interest policies crushed ordinary people. When Floyd robbed those banks, he allegedly burned mortgage documents, freeing many from crushing debt. Unsurprisingly, he became beloved.
Locals in Oklahoma offered him protection. They dubbed him the Robin Hood of Cookson Hills. To them, he was a hero; the institutions, they believed, were the monsters. In reality, Floyd was more complex.
Not especially polished or intelligent, he was nevertheless shrewd, cool under pressure, and skilled with a firearm. Those who knew him insisted he was generous and honest. He left a large donation at an Oklahoma church he regularly attended and was known to tip musicians handsomely. In June 1933, a massive gunfight broke out in Kansas City between police and several gang members.
Four law enforcement officers lay dead. The event became known as the Kansas City Massacre. Because of his notoriety, Floyd became a prime suspect. It was likely a false accusation—historians remain divided, and most claims came from rival criminals.
The supposed gunman Floyd was described as having been shot in the shoulder, but when his body was later examined, it showed no such wound. Floyd himself admitted to many crimes, but he always vehemently denied any involvement in the Kansas City Massacre. None of that mattered to J. Edgar Hoover.
The powerful head of the Bureau of Investigation used the massacre to justify expanding his own power and pursuing Floyd relentlessly. He named Floyd Public Enemy Number One. A big team was assembled to hunt him down, with no expense spared. It was in October 1934, in the foggy early hours near Wellsville, Ohio, that everything came to a head.
Floyd and his partner, Adam Richetti, were heading back from Buffalo, New York, when their car smashed into a telephone pole. No one was hurt, including the two female companions with them. But the car was busted up. Because both men were wanted, they sent the ladies to get help while they waited by the roadside.
Chief Fultz and his officers arrived after the motorist’s report. Richetti spotted them and fled into the woods, leaving Floyd to deal with the police alone. A gunfight broke out. Floyd wounded some of his adversaries, but he was outnumbered.
He fled into the forest after Richetti. The officers pursued and eventually caught Richetti, but Floyd disappeared. For three days, he evaded capture despite a massive manhunt. But he had to eat.
He hitched a ride to East Liverpool, Ohio, and found a meal at a pool hall owned by a friend. When he left the building, his pursuers spotted him. He ran into a cornfield, guns went off, and Floyd was shot and went down. According to the official story, he told officers before he died that he was innocent of the Kansas City Massacre.
That story held for forty-five years. Then, in 1979, new details emerged. Captain Chester Smith claimed in an interview with Time magazine that he had shot and wounded Floyd, but not fatally. When Bureau of Investigation agents arrived on the scene, they tried to talk to the wounded man.
He cussed them out. According to Smith, the agents then opened fire point-blank on the helpless Floyd, finishing him off. To hide what had actually happened, the Bureau of Investigation reportedly undertook a massive cover-up. Whatever the true events, the public was left with the image of a daring outlaw ruthlessly gunned down by an overreaching government.
Floyd’s body was embalmed and put on display in East Liverpool, likely at the behest of Hoover, who wanted to make a public example of the outlaw. The body was then sent to Sallisaw, Oklahoma, where it was shown to the masses, presumably as a warning to anyone who might follow in his footsteps. The response was the opposite of what was intended. The people of Oklahoma turned out to honor their Robin Hood.
An estimated twenty thousand to forty thousand people came to his funeral to pay their respects. It remains the largest funeral in Oklahoma history to this day. Whatever the purpose of displaying his body, the effect on the people was clear. Pretty Boy Floyd was buried in his hometown of Akins, Oklahoma.
The man was gone, but the legend would live on. Nearly a hundred years later, his legacy remains complicated. He was undeniably a criminal.
But he is still viewed by many as a tragic figure, an anti-hero of the Great Depression, a working-class man who rose up against the predatory financial practices that crushed so many ordinary people.
