Residents of a small North Texas town recall trouble in Paradise
PARADISE — I took a trip to Paradise last week and ended up meeting the devil.
I exaggerate, of course. Paradise is an unassuming, little town in Wise County, 35 miles northwest of Fort Worth. An early settler named the town, rhapsodizing that wildflowers sprinkled across the rolling prairie resembled paradise on earth. With a population these days of less than 600, it’s still an agricultural community, although during normal times
a number of residents commute to Denton or Fort Worth.
The devil I discovered in Paradise is the notorious gangster from the 1930s, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, an unlikely “resident” who had ties to the community but can’t be called a native son.
“He’s all we have, though,” Gay Read, curator of the Paradise Historical Society, told me, laughing. Read and her history-minded neighbors have been known to feel a twinge of envy for nearby Aurora, site of a well-known UFO incident in 1897.
The man whose memorable nickname ranks with Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson was born George Frances Barnes Jr., in Chicago in 1900. He grew up in Memphis, Tenn. Paradise historian Donna Weeden suggests that his life of crime began when his insuranceagent father handed him the keys to the family car. The elder Barnes had reason to be generous: The teenager had discovered that his father was cheating on his sickly mother with a onelegged woman. Young George was threatening to tell.
With access to a car, George found a job — not throwing newspapers or delivering groceries but running bootleg whiskey. Soon he was making so much money that it only made sense to quit school, particularly since he already was a married man. He and 15-year-old Geneva Ramsey, whose Memphis family ran a successful construction business, had eloped across the state line to Mississippi.
George seemed to respect his in-laws, but when his father-in-law was killed in an accidental dynamite explosion in 1922, he left his wife and their two young sons and resumed his life running whiskey. He soon found himself serving a three-year sentence in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary for selling bootleg whiskey on an Oklahoma Indian reservation. Leavenworth turned out to be his university, his professors being convicted bank robbers with time on their hands.
Released early, the model prisoner eagerly plunged into the banking business. Between September 1930 and May 1933, he and a gang of fellow Leavenworth alumni robbed at least 11 banks from Minnesota southward. The last bank they hit was in San Marcos on May 22, 1933.
A tall, attractive young woman also walked into his life during his banking period, whether for better or worse is debatable. A Mississippian, she was born Cleo Lera Mae Brooks but decided as a teenager that “Kathryn” was more glamorous. A man who dated Kathryn before she met George remembered her this way to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: “She took me to more speakeasies, more bootleg dives, more holes in the wall than I thought were in all of Texas. She knows more bums than the police department. She can drink liquor like water.” (The anecdote comes from Stanley Hamilton’s book, “Machine Gun Kelly’s Last Stand,” as quoted by Mike Finger in a 2017 issue of Memphis Magazine.)
Kathryn was married four times between the ages of 14 and 26, the third time to a fellow whose bullet-riddled body was found sprawled near a suicide note, despite the fact that he was illiterate. After her husband’s demise, Kathryn and her young daughter Pauline moved in with her mother Ora and new stepfather, Robert “Boss” Shannon, who lived on a farm near Paradise. She and George married in 1930.
Like poetry-writing Bonnie Parker burnishing the image of Clyde Barrow, Kathryn transformed George Frances Barnes Jr., into “Machine Gun Kelly.” She bought him his first Thompson submachine gun from a Fort Worth pawn shop and taught him to shoot well enough that, legend has it, he could spell out his name on the side of a barn with a blast from his tommy gun (in cursive, I presume).
Since Depression-desperate banks were running low on cash, Kathryn also encouraged her husband to break into a more lucrative line of work: kidnapping. On July 22, 1933, George and an accomplice kidnapped a wealthy Oklahoma City oilman named Charles Urschel, brother-in-law to legendary oilman Tom Slick. The kidnappers held the tycoon for eight days, blindfolded, on the Shannon family’s Paradise-area farm. They demanded $200,000, equivalent to several million today.
The Urschel family delivered the ransom money, and Kelly released the oilman, who, though blindfolded, was able to remember important details that led lawmen to the Shannon farm. A plane that Urschel recalled flying over the farm twice daily helped agents trace flight paths. His description of a rainstorm one evening also helped the G-men. Even though Urschel was chained to a bed most of the time, he said that his captors served him some of the best fried chicken he had ever tasted.
George and his accomplice, and Kathryn, were arrested in Memphis soon after Urschel was released. Although the oilman was unhurt, his kidnapping was the first after the high-profile Lindbergh kidnapping case, in which the 20-month-old son of the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife was found dead. Kidnapping was now a federal offense, with the FBI in charge. Tried in Oklahoma City, both Kellys were sentenced to life in prison, as was Kathryn’s mother and stepfather.
Boss Shannon was released after 11 years, his sentence commuted by President Franklin Roosevelt. Kathryn was released in 1958 and lived a quiet life in Oklahoma City under the name Cleo Kelly. She died in 1984. Her mother also was released.
Machine Gun Kelly, who, despite the fearsome nickname, never used his tommy gun on a human being, spent most of the rest of his life in Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, on an island in the San Francisco Bay, before being transferred back to Leavenworth. An oft-told FBI account that Kelly pleaded to arresting agents, “Don’t shoot, G-men!” has been largely debunked, according to Bryan Burrough’s 2004 book “Public Enemies.” Fellow inmates knew him as a mild-mannered gent who told stories, some of them perhaps true. They called him Pop Gun Kelly.
Read, who has lived her whole life in Paradise except for a year in Fort Worth, knew the Shannon family. “They were good churchgoing people,” she recalled. “Ora Shannon played the piano at church.”
Locals, concerned about offending family members still living in the area, rarely talked about the kidnapping. Planning their museum back in the 1990s, they were pleased to discover that the Shannons were happy to tell the story, in part because they didn’t know all the details themselves.
“They appear to be very proud of Boss,” Donna Weeden told me, “not about the part he played in the kidnapping, but the way he conducted himself during the trial and his humbleness in serving his time for a despicable crime.” Weeden, author of a play about the incident called “Eight Days in Paradise,” pointed out that Boss was nobody’s boss; his mother had bestowed the nickname when he was a toddler.
When George died in 1954, no one from his family claimed the body, so Boss Shannon had it shipped to Wise County. The notorious Machine Gun Kelly is buried near the Shannon family plot in the Cottondale Cemetery, not far from Boss himself, who lies between his first two wives, Icye and Maude. A small, flat stone, inscription barely legible, marks the Kelly site. A scattering of coins atop the stone gleams in the winter sun.