Serial Killers
Valentine's Special: "A Couple of Gangsters" - Kathryn and "Machine Gun" Kelly
Mon, 03 Feb 2025
For Valentine’s Day we’re going back into the archives to bring you some of the most infamous couples in true crime history. Kathryn Kelly was running schemes long before she ever met her notorious husband. She hungered to live a life of luxury and decadence. And she’d never apologize for those desires… Or for the things she did to make her dreams come true. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who was Kathryn Kelly and what did she desire?
Due to the graphic nature of these crimes listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder, suicide, assault and kidnapping. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and welcome to Criminal Couples.
They say that there's a great woman behind every great man, and while that holds true in a lot of stories, it might be more accurate to say that those women were standing right beside their great and powerful men. That's certainly the case with Catherine Kelly, who chose a husband who could help her get everything she ever wanted.
Sure, they were in love, but it was the kind of romance where one person was always calling the shots. You've probably heard of George Machine Gun Kelly, but I'll bet you didn't know that his loving wife was the one who helped build the mythos around him.
In this episode from Female Criminals, we're diving deep into Catherine's life, her romantic false starts, and the love that landed her in prison. Our story begins in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi. Dusty and isolated, Saltillo was so far east of the river, it rode the border of Alabama.
Chapter 2: What was Kathryn's early life like?
The small town was barely more than a collection of farms, with a population of only a couple hundred people. It was there, in 1904, that newlyweds James and Ora Brooks welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Cleo Lyra May. There aren't many specifics about Cleo's childhood, but it's safe to say her life was far from easy.
You see, the Brooks were small-time farmers, and in the early 1900s, that meant endless hours of backbreaking work. While people in the big cities could afford the latest fashions and dine at fancy restaurants, the Brooks family was barely scraping by. Over time, Cleo became acutely aware of her socioeconomic status and decided she wanted more.
Desperate for a different future, she dreamed of being one of those city women, beautifully dressed and glittering with jewelry. But more than anything else, she wanted to be somebody other than Cleo. At some point, while still a schoolgirl, she decided to change her name.
Before we continue with the psychology for this episode, please keep in mind that I'm not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but we have done a lot of research for this show. According to psychologist Jean Twenge, a name is more than just a name. That's because it can become a symbol of the self.
As such, when people dislike their name, they tend to not be well adjusted psychologically and have lower self-esteem. This can lead to a host of negative outcomes, such as anxiety and depression. To combat these feelings, many change their names to one that matches their inner identity. To Cleo, her name probably sounded like the name of a girl destined to spend her whole life on a farm.
Perhaps it was hard for her to imagine a cosmopolitan existence with a name she thought better suited to a country bumpkin. So Cleo gave herself the most sophisticated one she could think of. Catherine. As Katharine Hepburn proved in the 1920s, it was a name that sung with star quality. It was elegant, grand, timeless.
After all, it was a name shared by two wives of Henry VIII and a handful of saints. But to truly make herself stand out, she opted for the ultra-modern variant, spelling her name with a Y instead of I-N-E. The staccato of the two syllables, Cath-rin, gave the classic moniker a modern edge, like a pop of bullets fired from a gun.
As if the universe were rewarding her boldness, when she was nine years old, Catherine's family moved farther into the Wild West to Coleman, Texas. Though it was still a small town, Coleman was much larger than Saltillo. For Catherine, it probably felt like the big city. But the excitement was short-lived. After the move, James and Ora divorced.
And while it wasn't unheard of, the sudden dissolution of a marriage was still somewhat scandalous in the early 1900s. Even still, Ora held her head high and pushed forward. She found a job as a hotel manager, which came with a room where she and Catherine lived. To Catherine, hotel living must have been a dream come true.
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Chapter 3: How did Kathryn Kelly transition into a life of crime?
The beauty dazzled her way into all the important dives and clubs in Texas. Soon, she knew everyone who was anyone in the business. Who bought, who sold, who was small-time, and who was big news. One of those people was Charlie Thorne, a mid-tier bootlegger who worked the same turf as Catherine. It could have been the start of a gang war, but Catherine was a lover, not a fighter.
So rather than make Charlie an enemy, she made him family. In 1926, 22-year-old Catherine followed her heart down the aisle for the third time. She'd steadily improved her prospects with each marriage, and Charlie was no exception. He was so well off, he bought Catherine a $30,000 house in Fort Worth. And thanks to his exceptional wealth, she could finally live out her fantasies.
Clothes, jewels, cars, whatever she wanted was hers. Of course, some sacrifices had to be made. For instance, Catherine left Pauline on the Paradise Farm with Ora and Boss. This was probably for the best, because her romance with Charlie was, let's say, passionate. Both of them were extremely jealous and hot-tempered.
In fact, Catherine threatened to kill her husband so many times, it became something of a running joke. Among the tumult, the pair kept up the bootlegging. Catherine managed the deliveries, while Charlie stayed behind, tending to other parts of the business. Or so he said.
After about two years of marriage, when Catherine was on one of her runs, she caught wind that Charlie was cheating on her back home. When she heard the news, she flew into a jealous rage, feeling the bitter sting of betrayal. A 2017 study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found a strong connection between feelings of jealousy and the part of the brain associated with social pain.
According to neuroscientists, this pain affects the brain in the same way as a physical hurt. Needless to say, Catherine was hurt by her husband's infidelity. For most of her life, she'd been an object of desire, and if being desired was the ultimate form of validation, then infidelity was the ultimate insult.
Her brain likely processed her husband's betrayal as both a literal and metaphorical slap in the face. and she was determined to make him feel the same. She took off like a bat out of hell, screaming that she was on her way home to kill that goddamned Charlie Thorne. And this time, she meant it. The fight that broke out when she got home was worse than all of their others.
Eventually, Catherine picked up the phone and called the police. But when they arrived, the cops found Charlie with a bullet in his head. After they searched the home, they found a note left in a typewriter. It read, "'I love my wife. I can't live without her, so I'm ending it all.'" The thing was, Charlie was illiterate.
Everyone knew that, but it seems no one was interested in working too hard on this case. After all, who was going to miss a criminal like Charlie Thorne? At first, the coroner determined Catherine had probably shot him in self-defense, but a judge ultimately ruled his death a suicide, and from a legal standpoint, that was that. But to everyone else, Charlie's death was suspicious at best.
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Chapter 4: What was the relationship between Kathryn and George Machine Gun Kelly?
Bailey took George under his wing, passing along all of his hard-earned criminal wisdom. The trick, he said, was to focus on mid-sized towns and little cities, places where there'd be enough money to make it worth stealing, but not so much that local police were likely to be on guard. Bailey taught George how to study the banks, how to track business activity like payroll deposits.
With a few days of careful observation, George could nearly pinpoint the day the take would be at its highest. And soon, George could too. He absorbed all the lessons Bailey had to offer. Well, all except the most important one. Don't ever work with women. especially when it came to their lips. In short, he believed women were gossips.
And okay, Catherine liked to chat and share secrets, but she was also a major asset. She was smart, she was cunning, and she was ruthless. Once George struck out on his own, he was more than happy to include her in his schemes. While George and another associate went inside a bank, she waited in the parking lot, manning the getaway car.
She was often disguised as a man and armed just in case of any emergencies. According to the FBI, she was an expert shot. We don't know how or when she learned, but between growing up in Texas and years of dating gangsters, she was bound to pick up a thing or two. For his part, George wasn't all that interested in firearms.
He carried them for the power they conveyed, but he used them only sparingly. Unlike his wife, and unlike many other bank robbers of the day, George had never killed anyone, and he never intended to. But guns were part of the gangster ethos. Even now, the image of the 1930s gangster in a suit and fedora wielding a Thompson machine gun, or Tommy Gun for short, is iconic.
That's thanks in no small part to Catherine. Though it's true gangsters already favored the machine gun for its sheer power, she was the one who put it in the hands of her husband, George Machine Gun Kelly. Purchased secondhand from a pawn shop in Fort Worth, Catherine gave George his first Tommy gun and urged him to practice it at her family's farm.
She then used her love of gossip to build up George's reputation as a fearsome gangster with deadly aim. Catherine boasted about her man every chance she got. She talked him up at all the speakeasies, telling tales of his expert marksmanship. According to Catherine, her husband could shoot walnuts off fence posts at 30 feet.
One of her favorite stories was that George was such a good shot, he could write his name with his gun, which he called the little stenog, short for stenographer. This detail quickly worked its way into the growing legend of machine gun Kelly. And that legend spread quickly. Soon there were rumors around the entire country about a bank robber who signed all his heists in bullets.
And these alarming tall tales piqued the interest of the relatively new Federal Bureau of Investigations. At the time, the FBI's reputation was badly sullied from years of corruption. When J. Edgar Hoover was made director in the early 1930s, he did his best to weed out the bad apples, but the stain was hard to remove. Despite the U.S.
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Chapter 5: What led to Kathryn's criminal partnership with George?
Now that they knew they were dealing with the real kidnappers, the authorities could finally make a move of their own. Of course, this first meant following the Kellys' instructions. A second letter came through demanding the largest ransom in U.S. history, a whopping $200,000, or the equivalent of $4 million today. Also included was a script for a fake classified ad.
If their terms were accepted, the ad was to be placed in the Daily Oklahoman. When veteran FBI investigator Gus Jones took one look at the letters, he knew they were dealing with professionals. So Bernice did as she was told, getting the money and placing the ad that same day. Meanwhile, Catherine sent another letter from an address in Joplin, Missouri, to throw investigators off their scent.
This time, the directives were for Kirkpatrick. He was to take the bag of cash on the 10 p.m. train to Kansas City and choose a seat in the observation car. Once the kidnappers were sure there was no funny business, Kirkpatrick would see two signal fires at various points along the track. After the second fire, he was to throw the loot from the train.
If anything went wrong, he'd receive further instructions at the Muehlbach Hotel in the city. Brushing aside his terror, Kirkpatrick agreed to the mission. As a precaution, he wrote a goodbye letter to his wife, asking Bernice to get it to her if he didn't come back. John Catlett decided to go with him for moral support.
On July 29th, the men boarded the train according to the plan, but then everything started going awry. The observation car was usually the very last on the train, but thanks to the World's Fair happening in Chicago, two extra passenger cars were tacked on to accommodate more travelers.
Not sure how this might affect the kidnappers' plan, Kirkpatrick and Catlett paid an attendant to allow them to stand on the tiny platform off the back of the train. They spent the entire night there and never saw a single fire. When they got to the designated hotel, a message was already waiting for them. A telegram reading, "'Unavoidable incident kept me from seeing you last night.
We'll communicate about six o'clock.'" As promised, Kirkpatrick and Catlett received a call to their room just before 6 p.m. A man identified himself as Moore and told Kirkpatrick to take a walk in the direction of the nearby LaSalle Hotel. He was to bring the package alone. Out on the street, George watched Kirkpatrick coming toward him.
The man was twitchy, practically jumping out of his skin at every bump and jostle. When they were finally shoulder to shoulder, George reached for the bag and murmured, "'I'll take that grip.'" In that moment, it seems Kirkpatrick felt a burst of confidence. He demanded some assurance he could pass along to Bernice. George told him that Charles would be home in around 12 hours.
Then he yanked the handle from Kirkpatrick's hand and disappeared into traffic. Meanwhile, Catherine was back in paradise, watching over Charles. George and Al had been gone two days, and she was starting to worry. To calm her nerves, she sat chain-smoking on the porch with her eyes trained on the driveway, until, finally, she saw the car in the distance and breathed a sigh of relief.
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