Machine Gun Kelly

Machine Gun Kelly

George Kelly Barnes was born in the late 1890s in Memphis, Tennessee. His family was fairly wealthy, and he lived an ordinary life until his enrollment at Mississippi State University. At first, he was only in small trouble, earning poor grades and racking up demerits. However, after falling in love with a woman named Geneva, he decided to quit school altogether. They quickly found themselves in financial trouble, so Kelly schemed up a plan and began working as a gangster after separating from Geneva. At the time, he was only 19.

In 1927, he fell for a woman named Kathryn Thorne, whom he later married. Kathryn Kelly was a criminal in her own right. She bought him a machine gun, which spawned his nickname, “Machine Gun Kelly.”

His crimes were mainly centered on taking advantage of Prohibition’s laws and on robbing banks. However, his most famous crime was kidnapping.

Image result for machine gun kelly death criminal

With the help of a man named Albert Bates and the planning skills of his wife, Kelly intended to kidnap an oilman named Charles Urschel. They had planned to ransom Urschel for $200,000, but upon arrival at Urschel’s, had found two men instead of one, and had taken both, unsure of who was who. The other man was Walter Jarrett.

After receiving the ransom, the released Urschel. With Urschel’s help, the FBI found their way to the house where he was held. There, they discovered that Kelly and Bates were the kidnappers. With these clues and the serial numbers on the ransom money, they managed to find the kidnappers.

On October 12, 1933, they received their sentences: life in prison. Kelly died in 1954. Kathryn was released in 1958.

Comments

The Zodiac Killer

The Zodiac Killer He is our Jack the Ripper. Fifty years ago this week, a psychopath with a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol sneaked up on two high school students parked on a windswept lover’s lane in Benicia. Shot down as they scrambled in terror, the young couple died in a spray of gunfire. It was an unusually messy crime scene. The killing on Dec. 20, 1968, of David Faraday, 17, and his 16-year-old date, Betty Lou Jensen, marked the beginning of what became the twisted legend of the Zodiac Killer. By the time he was done, five more victims across the Bay Area would be shot or stabbed — three of them killed, two left barely alive but scarred for life. Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday, the Zodiac’s first victims. | Chronicle File Photos Although the carnage spanned less than a year, the moniker Zodiac Killer was cemented into history. He would never be caught. Considering the homicidal tumult of the 1960s and ’70s, the number of his victims was actual...

Ted Bundy

The Sadistic Sociopath Theodore Robert Bundy November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989, was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, before his execution in 1989, he confessed to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. The true number of victims is unknown and possibly higher. Bundy was regarded as handsome and charismatic, traits that he may have exploited to win the trust of victims and society. He would typically approach his victims in public places, feigning injury or disability, or impersonating an authority figure, before overpowering, raping and killing them in secluded locations. He sometimes revisited his secondary crime scenes, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and destruction by wild animals made any further interaction...

Enfield poltergeist

Enfield poltergeist The Enfield poltergeist was a claim of supernatural activity at 284 Green Street, a council house in Brimsdown, Enfield, England, between 1977 and 1979 involving two sisters, aged 11 and 13. Some members of the Society for Psychical Research such as inventor Maurice Grosse and writer Guy Lyon Playfair believed the haunting to be genuine, while others such as Anita Gregory and John Beloff were "unconvinced" and found evidence the girls had faked incidents for the benefit of journalists. Members of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, including stage magicians such as Milbourne Christopher and Joe Nickell, criticized paranormal investigators for being credulous whilst also identifying features of the case as being indicative of a hoax. The story attracted considerable press coverage in British newspapers such as the Daily Mail a...

Thriller

Search This Blog