BARKER GANG Ep. 3 | “I Shot The Sheriff”

With Herman Barker gone, and Lloyd Barker and Doc Barker in prison, Fred Barker restarts the Barker Gang with the help of his friend, Alvin Karpis. The Barker clan creates a safe house in southern Missouri, but they are forced to flee after Fred commits two notorious murders similar to those of his older brother, Herman. Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/infamousamerica Thanks to our sponsor, Mood! For 20% off of your first order, use the promo code INFAMOUS at Mood.com Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com or @blackbarrelmedia on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  Alvin Francis Karpavicius was an exceptionally difficult name for Americans to say. Alvin's parents were from Lithuania, and they tried changing their surname to Karpavitz, but that wasn't much better. Alvin was born in Canada, but his family moved to Topeka, Kansas, when he was an infant. When he started school, his teacher couldn't pronounce his name, so she called him Alvin Karpis, and the name stuck. Alvin was seven years younger than the youngest Barker brother, Fred, but he followed a similar path to all the Barker boys. Alvin's family scraped by on railroad wages from Alvin's father. The family of six, mother, father, Alvin, and his three sisters, teetered on the edge of financial ruin, and Alvin was desperate to help.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  He quickly realized that Topeka's underbelly, gamblers, bootleggers, pimps, and prostitutes, paid far better than legitimate businesses. So instead of delivering newspapers, he carried contraband from one person to another. Alvin's parents never knew the source of his money, or if they suspected, they knew better than to ask. While other boys his age earned pennies running errands, Alvin brought in $1 or $2 a day. A dollar or two in the 19-teens would be earning $30 to $60 in today's money. That was pretty good for a youngster. And like the Barker boys, Alvin graduated to real crime when he was 10 years old. One night, an 18-year-old named Arthur Witchy persuaded Alvin to help with the burglary

• 2:34Speaker 01

  of a grocery store. Despite the harsh punishments Alvin's father doled out for breaking curfew, the adrenaline rush of the heist proved addictive. In Alvin's mind, the crime was justified. He was stealing to build a better life for his struggling family. Stealing was fun and fast, and Alvin had a natural gift for it. But as soon as he became comfortable stealing from Topeka stores, his family moved to Chicago. In 1923, at 15 years old, Alvin entered the sprawling, mesmerizing, and violent world of one of America's bootlegging capitals during prohibition.

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  Chicago's Italian mob, known as the Outfit, led by Johnny Torrio and his right-hand man, Al Capone, was warring with the Irish mob called the Northside Gang, led by Dean O'Banion. The war would escalate dramatically over the next few years, though teenager Alvin Karpis wouldn't stay in Chicago long enough to see the worst of it. Alvin attempted to walk the straight and narrow, taking a job as a shipping clerk in a factory warehouse. It was honest work, but it was suffocatingly dull. After two years, Alvin's health began to fail. A doctor blamed the decline on strenuous labor and ordered Alvin to find a less physically demanding occupation. To Alvin, the prescription was clear: return to the work he enjoyed most.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  He needed to go back to stealing. And to do that properly, he needed to return to Topeka, the city he knew like the back of his hand. At 17, Alvin went back to the city he considered home. Alvin's teachers had dismissed him as an average student, but they underestimated him. Alvin possessed a sharp, calculating intellect that shone only when he applied himself to his true passion. Unlike most criminals, Alvin loved planning a burglary as much as committing the crime. Selecting the target, devising the entry, and mapping the escape route provided a thrill equal to the loot itself. He was good at it, but at some point, everyone's luck runs out.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  He had hardly been back in Topeka before he was caught riding a train without a ticket. He was sentenced to 30 days of hard labor and shackled to other inmates on a chain gang. The experience was understandably miserable. When his time was done, he reasoned that if he stayed off trains, he could get back to building his career as a thief. Later that year, police caught him in the middle of a burglary. Unlike the Barker boys, who often found ways to get out of trouble, usually thanks to Ma Barker, Alvin could not wiggle his way out of the charges. In 1926, with no mother to plead for his innocence in court, Alvin Karpis received a sentence of five to 10 years in prison at the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory.

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  Within two years, with some excitement in between, he would be transferred to the state prison in Lansing, Kansas, where he would meet Fred Barker and form the partnership which became the foundation of one of the most feared gangs of the 1930s.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the story of the Barker-Karpis Gang, the longest-running and deadliest group of Depression-era outlaws. This is episode three, "I Shot the Sheriff."

• 6:23Speaker 01

  When Alvin Karpis was one year into his prison sentence at the Kansas State Reformatory, Herman Barker took his own life to avoid capture. Herman had spent the first eight months of 1927 on the run after he escaped prison in Arkansas, where he had briefly started serving time for bank robbery. Herman and his wife Carol had fled to the West Coast to lay low, but on their way back east, Herman ended up killing a deputy sheriff near Cheyenne, Wyoming. 28 days later, on August 29, 1927, Herman and two associates robbed a factory that made ice in Newton, Kansas. Two hours later, in Wichita, Herman was cornered by police, and he made good on his promise to never be taken alive.

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  At that time, August of 1927, Alvin Karpis was in prison 35 miles up the road in Hutchinson, Kansas. Karpis didn't know the Barkers at that time, but it's possible he would have heard about Herman's death. The news filtered through prisons in Kansas and Oklahoma to the three remaining Barker boys. Lloyd was six years into a 25-year stretch in Leavenworth, Kansas. Fred Barker had just started five to 10 years at the Kansas State Prison in Lansing, near Kansas City. And Arthur "Doc" Barker was doing life at Big Mac, the Oklahoma State Prison in McAllister, Oklahoma. That left Ma Barker all alone in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and her task in September of 1927 was to

• 7:53Speaker 01

  bring Herman home. The authorities in Wichita, Kansas, refused to release Herman's body without a guaranteed burial plot, but cemeteries all over Oklahoma were likewise refusing to bury the career thief and two-time cop killer. Finally, a corrupt lawyer named Q. P. McGee, who had helped the Barker boys in the past, stepped in to perform one last service for the family. He convinced the Williams Timber Hill Cemetery to accept Herman's remains. The small rural cemetery sits five miles outside of the tiny town of Welch, Oklahoma, just south of the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Herman's funeral was a desolate affair.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  His three brothers were locked up, and his criminal associates were either on the run or also in jail. And that included his wife Carol. Herman had left Carol at a hiding spot in Arkansas before he committed the robbery in Newton, Kansas, which led to his death in Wichita. She was wanted for accessory to a host of crimes, the most serious of which was the murder of Deputy Sheriff Arthur Osborne in Wyoming. Carol couldn't participate in her husband's funeral, but she watched from some distance away as his coffin was lowered into the ground. Over the next few days, Carol visited Herman's grave at night to avoid being seen, but her time was running out.

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  In mid-September 1927, she surrendered to lawmen in Oklahoma without a fight. She told her story to the police with a sense of relief. She admitted to being with Herman when he killed Deputy Osborne, and she had knowledge of some of Herman's other crimes, but she had not participated in any of them. Later, when she faced a jury in Wyoming, guilt consumed her. She begged them for the death penalty. The jury refused to grant her wish. She hadn't pulled the trigger, and Wyoming had no other female prisoners at the time, so Carol received a light sentence. She was transferred down to Colorado to serve two to four years in state prison.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  By the end of 1927, everyone in the immediate orbit of Ma Barker was dead, or on the run, or in prison, with the exception of her husband, George Barker. He had left the family five years earlier, when he could no longer tolerate the criminal behavior of his wife and sons. But just before Herman had died, Ma brought a new man into her life: Arthur Dunlop. Ma Barker was in limbo between feeling alone but not lonely. Arthur had no problem with the criminal lifestyle, but other than that, he didn't bring much to the table. Arthur was a heavy drinker who scraped by with sporadic work as a billboard painter. He and Ma holed up in a dirt-floor shack, plunging Ma into the deepest poverty she had ever endured.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  And worst of all, though Ma didn't know it, she was blind to her own hypocrisy. She had been furious when Herman married Carol. She warned her sons repeatedly against having wives or serious girlfriends. She felt wives and girlfriends were distractions and liabilities. She knew her sons would never turn on her or each other to save themselves, but she didn't believe that deep sense of loyalty applied to significant others. And yet, here was Ma with a no-account boyfriend who added nothing to the Barker criminal enterprise. She would regret her hypocrisy in the future, but for the moment, she rode out the lean years with Arthur until her youngest son, Fred, got out of prison.

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• 12:52Speaker 01

  While Ma Barker buried her eldest son Herman, and while Herman's wife Carol went to prison, Alvin Karpis was slowly but surely planning his exit from prison. By 1928, he had been at the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory in Hutchinson, Kansas for two years. His sentence could last for another three years or as long as eight more years. Neither was acceptable. Luckily for 20-year-old Alvin Karpis, he found a mentor. Lawrence DeVal was a seasoned criminal who was six years older than Karpis. He had committed some small crimes with the Barker boys in Tulsa, Oklahoma during their earliest years. Doc Barker had helped form the Central Park Gang when they were all teenagers in the

• 13:37Speaker 01

  19-teens. By the 1920s, Larry DeVal had earned a reputation as a safe cracker, though he had eventually been caught like everyone else in the gang. And like Karpis, DeVal was eager for an early exit from prison. Karpis, DeVal, and two other friends worked in the prison workshop. In the spring of 1929, they smuggled saw blades out of the workshop. They sawed through the bars in the windows of their cells, crawled outside, and vanished into the night. Karpis and DeVal went on a crime spree through Kansas, stealing cars, swiping guns, and robbing clothing stores until they eventually split up. A short time later, DeVal was caught in Chicago.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  He was taken back to Kansas and sent to the Kansas State Prison at Lansing, where Fred Barker was doing his time. Larry DeVal made friends with some of the inmates at Lansing, though it didn't seem like he interacted with Fred Barker during his brief stint at the prison. DeVal soon learned that the prison had an agreement with a nearby coal mine. If prisoners volunteered to work at the mine, they received reduced sentences as compensation. DeVal immediately volunteered for the mining program, and he earned some time off of his sentence. In relatively short order, he was released, and he reunited with Alvin Karpis. When DeVal and Karpis got back together, DeVal talked about the guys on the coal mining crew.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Many of them were wearing worn-out rags as shirts, and they had no way to replace them. So DeVal and Karpis broke into a clothing store, looted the place, and shipped boxes of shirts to the volunteer coal miners at the Kansas State Prison at Lansing. The inmates were extremely grateful, and as a result, Karpis had lots of new friends when he arrived a few months later. In March of 1930, Alvin Karpis was caught while robbing a pool hall in Kansas City, Missouri. During what he later claimed was a rough interrogation, the police realized he was a fugitive from the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory. They returned Karpis to the reformatory, but he soon received a transfer to the state prison at Lansing.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  He knew about the coal mining program from Larry DeVal, and he quickly volunteered. When the other men on the crew learned that he was one of the guys responsible for sending them new shirts, his status elevated to that of a moderate hero. Karpis had a new group of friends, and through them, he met Fred Barker. Karpis and Barker were only at Lansing together for one year, but they became close friends. According to the legend, Fred Barker gave Alvin Karpis the nickname Old Creepy because of Karpis's apparently sinister smile. There are no easily available photos of Karpis smiling in his younger years, so it's hard to know what his smile looked like. But in the early 1970s, one year before Karpis died, he gave a television interview

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  to promote the release of his autobiography. During the interview, he smiled, and his facial features were very similar to those of legendary Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson. If you picture Jack Nicholson's smile when he played the Joker in the Batman movie from 1989, that's probably what Karpis's smile looked like. With a proper slant to his gaze, Karpis would indeed have looked sinister. And likely by the time Fred Barker was released from prison in March of 1931, Karpis's soon-to-be-famous nickname was shortened to simply creepy. Fred Barker served four years of his five-to-10 stretch.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  When he was released, he headed home to Tulsa to see Ma, but the reunion quickly soured. Fred instantly disliked Ma's boyfriend, Arthur Dunlop. Fred dismissed Arthur as a worthless drunk, and their constant bickering proved too volatile to sustain. In less than a month, Fred made a move which would have seemed crazy, maybe unthinkable, a few years earlier. He left Ma and went to Joplin, Missouri to crash with his father, George. But before leaving, he told Ma that his new best friend, Alvin Karpis, would show up soon. In May of 1931, two months after Fred was released, Alvin Karpis walked out of the state prison at Lansing.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Shortly thereafter, Ma Barker watched a tall, lanky man step out of a car in front of her rundown shack. The man was sharply dressed, and he carried a single bag which contained all of his worldly possessions. Ma was guarded as the stranger approached and asked for Freddie. But when the stranger introduced himself as Alvin Karpis, Ma relaxed. She invited him in, and he explained his life story. His childhood in Topeka, his crimes in Topeka and Chicago, his crime spree with friend of the family Larry DeVal, his time at the reformatory and his escape, and his time at the state prison with Fred. Ma Barker was genuinely thrilled for the first time in four years.

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  Even though Fred's homecoming had been rocky, she had one of her sons back, and now she felt like she had gained another. She believed Fred and Alvin would make a wonderful team. By the end of the afternoon, Ma considered Alvin to be family, a status she rarely granted, certainly not to the boys' wives or girlfriends. Alvin felt the kinship too. He looked past the squalor of her ramshackle home and saw a woman who was fiercely protective of her sons. He understood why Fred held her so close. Ma telegrammed Fred in Joplin and notified him of Alvin's arrival. Fred wired back instructions to send Alvin to Missouri.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  In late May of 1931, the Barker/Karpis gang was born. Fred Barker was 29 years old, Alvin Karpis was 24. Fred possessed a lethal combination of cleverness and charm. Alvin was the strategist who had both the intellect to plan the jobs and the guts to carry them out, up to a point. Alvin shied away from killing, though not out of morality. His only concern was that murder carried the heaviest legal penalty. Fred's older brother Doc was currently learning that lesson the hard way while serving life in prison for murder. But before the Barker/Karpis gang launched its four-year run as one of America's scariest criminal outfits, Fred had to take care of Ma.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Before Fred had gone to prison, he had hidden the cash he and Herman had stolen from jewelry stores. Now he retrieved it and used it to move Ma Barker out of her rundown shack in Tulsa to a nice farmhouse in Thayer, Missouri, on the border between Missouri and Arkansas. The house sat on 10 acres of land, and Ma arrived in style, wearing a fur coat and a new hat. Ma Barker was back, though to Fred's chagrin, she brought Arthur Dunlop with her. Fred just had to hope that the perks of having Ma happy in a new home outweighed Arthur's worthlessness. As they settled in, Ma was in high spirits. She loved the farm, she had money for groceries, and she loved to cook for the boys.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  She rarely left the kitchen, and she was often joined by Alvin Karpis, who had honed his cooking skills in prison. In addition to simply making Ma happy, the farm doubled as the gang's headquarters. While Ma and Alvin worked the stove, Fred secured the gang's new hideout. He surrounded the property with a barbed wire fence and rigged an alarm system. A cable stretched from the front gate all the way to the bell at the farmhouse door. If the gate opened, everyone inside would know it. After six months of work, the safe house was done. With Ma settled and the headquarters secure, Fred was ready to pick up where Herman left off. Simple burglaries were still options for easy money, but the Barker/Karpis gang was

• 21:40Speaker 01

  going to focus on banks.

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• 22:41Speaker 01

  Pocahontas, Arkansas, was a town of fewer than 2,000 people in 1931. It sat, and still does, about 15 miles south of the Missouri-Arkansas border. For those who might be familiar with the area, it's about 30 miles north of Jonesboro. On today's roads, it would take about an hour to drive from the Barker Farm in Thayer, Missouri to Pocahontas, Arkansas. In 1931, it would have taken longer, but the town was still pretty close to the Barker headquarters. The chief of police of Pocahontas was 32-year-old Manley Jackson. He was 32, but looked younger. His department probably had no more than three or four officers, including himself.

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  They took turns working the night shift, and on November 8, 1931, it was Chief Jackson's turn. The officer who worked the night shift was called the night marshal, so on November 8, Chief Jackson became Night Marshal Jackson. As Jackson patrolled his tiny town in the dark hours just before dawn, it's doubtful anything moved, which was why he was drawn to a car with three men inside, which seemed to be prowling the town. Chief Jackson would not have known that the three occupants were Fred Barker, Alvin Karpis, and their new recruit, William Weaver, or that they were scouting the local bank to rob. But Jackson was suspicious nonetheless, and he approached the vehicle on foot to write

• 24:08Speaker 01

  down the license plate number. As Jackson drew near, Fred Barker jumped out of the car with a pistol in his hand and ordered Jackson to get into the backseat. Jackson did as instructed. Fred climbed back into the driver's seat and sped out of town. Fred drove to a remote spot in the Arkansas countryside, ordered Jackson out, and told him to start walking. Jackson may have thought they were letting him go, but Fred shot Chief Manley Jackson four times in the back as the young officer walked away. Jackson had seen their faces, their car, and their license plate number. In Fred's mind, there was no way he could let Jackson live.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Unfazed by the murder, Fred was more concerned that Jackson had interrupted the robbery planning, and now they would have to find a new target. They abandoned Arkansas and headed back up to Missouri. Over the next six weeks, they made Howell County, Missouri their playground. Howell County was a rural area with a few small towns straight north of the Barker Farm in Thayer, Missouri. The crew robbed a bank in Mountain View and stole $7,000. They committed a string of burglaries in the area of the town of West Plains, 20 miles down the road from Mountain View. They were running Howell County Sheriff Roy Kelly ragged, and they weren't the only crew operating in the area.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  By December of 1931, the Great Depression had been growing worse for two years. The fallout from the stock market collapse of October 1929 was still spreading across the country, and as a result, lawlessness was rising everywhere, from big cities like Chicago to tiny towns like West Plains, Missouri. For Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis, southern Missouri was ripe for the picking. They could hit a store or a bank and quickly escape to the farm in Thayer. After the Mountain View bank job, they drew up plans to hit the First National Bank in West Plains. But while they hammered out the logistics, they decided to pull an easy job. Barker and Karpis snuck into C.C.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  McCowen's clothing store overnight between December 17 and December 18 and stole $2,000 worth of the finest suits in West Plains. But as they sped back toward their safe house, their getaway car blew two tires. They limped back to the farm, but it was clear they would need a professional to fix the tires. On December 19, one full day after the burglary, they returned to West Plains and took the car to the Davidson Motor Company for repair. This time, there were three men in the group: Fred, Alvin, and William Weaver, and they were all wearing nice suits. The mechanic who started to work on the car noticed that the quality of the expensive

• 26:56Speaker 01

  suits didn't seem to match the relatively poor quality of the car. And the mechanic, like almost everyone else in town, had read about the burglary at McCowen's clothing store in the newspaper. Two of the three men in suits, Fred and Alvin, appeared to pay more attention to the car repairs than normal customers did. While the mechanic worked on the tires, he studied the men's suits as closely as possible without arousing suspicion, until he decided he was right, and he made a phone call. Under the guise of finishing the order, the mechanic at Davidson Motor Company stepped away from the vehicle and separated himself from the men in suits. He used the phone to call Mr.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  McCowen, the owner of the clothing store. The mechanic told McCowen to hurry to the auto garage. The mechanic was pretty sure three guys who were there right now were wearing McCowen's stolen suits. McCowen hustled out of his shop and walked toward the garage. On the way, he spotted County Sheriff Roy Kelly. McCowen explained the situation to Kelly and asked the sheriff to come along. Kelly reached into his car, grabbed his revolver, and slipped it under his winter coat. At the garage, Fred Barker, Alvin Karpis, and William Weaver were in the car waiting for the mechanic to return from finishing the order. The mechanic came back and handed the car keys to Fred, as McCowen and Sheriff Kelly

• 28:24Speaker 01

  walked across the street toward the garage. When Fred and Alvin noticed the mechanic's nervous energy, they knew something was up. Their instincts for danger were sharp, even though their common sense was sometimes lacking. You didn't need to have Albert Einstein's IQ to know it was a bad idea to wear stolen suits when you returned to the town where you had just stolen them. Now the suits were going to lead to far worse trouble than simple burglary. Despite the public setting, Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis drew their guns. When they saw Sheriff Kelly walk into the garage, Fred opened fire from the driver's seat, while Alvin leapt out and fired at the sheriff from a different angle.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  As Sheriff Kelly collapsed to the ground, Fred stomped on the gas, swerved around the sheriff, and sped through the streets of West Plains in a frantic bid to escape. Karpis ran down an alley, made it out of town on foot, and eventually reunited with Barker. Medics arrived at Davidson Motor Company, but Sheriff Kelly was dead before he hit the ground. He had been shot twice in the chest and twice in the right arm. For the killers, it was bad enough that the crime happened in broad daylight, but they had spent plenty of time with the mechanic before the shooting. The mechanic didn't know their real names, but he provided crystal-clear descriptions of Barker and Karpis, and then identified them from mugshots without hesitation.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  By the next morning, wanted posters plastered the town, offering $1,200 rewards for Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis. Despite Alvin's later denials, claiming it was Fred and William Weaver who pulled the triggers, eyewitnesses like the mechanic were certain that Karpis was one of the shooters. After the killing, the gang retreated to the farm in Thayer, but now the farm was not safe. Thayer was only 20 miles down the road from West Plains. The farm had been a near-perfect sanctuary on 10 acres with a farmhouse Ma Barker loved, but the gang had to abandon it less than a year after moving in. Fred, Alvin, Ma, and Arthur Dunlop packed up and hurried west to their old stomping

• 30:36Speaker 01

  grounds of Joplin, Missouri. They hid with Herbert Farmer, a family friend from the old days who had been Fred's criminal mentor after Fred's brothers went to prison. Herbert used his farm as a fugitive hideout, and he was thrilled to see his old friends. But his smile faded when he learned why they were on the run. The 170 miles of distance between Thayer and Joplin wasn't enough. Herbert advised them to keep moving. Trusting Herbert's instincts, the group piled back into the car. Like Ma's idle Jesse James when a manhunt in Missouri threatened the James gang 55 years earlier, the Barker gang ran north to Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, where

• 31:19Speaker 01

  their bank robberies in 1932 would vault them into the national spotlight. Next time on Infamous America, the Barker gang learns that Minneapolis-St. Paul is run by corrupt politicians and is a safe haven for criminals. The gang goes on a spree of bank robberies, which rivals any of the other infamous gangsters of the era, though one member of the group will not live to see the action. The worst thing to be in a criminal outfit is a liability.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This series was researched and written by Mandy Wimmer. Additional research and writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.

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