On a chilly January night in 1932, a wealthy industrialist named Howard Woolverton was snatched from his car by kidnappers. While he was released unharmed the next day, his apparent lack of concern for the capture of his abductors led many to believe he was attempting to halt the investigation. J. Edgar Hoover would later name George Kelly Barnes, aka “Machine Gun Kelly” and his wife Kathryn as participants in his abduction, but evidence suggests other notorious gangsters were also involved, and the case itself has never officially been solved.
My guest Kevin Meredith collaborated with Woolverton’s grandson David W. Hendry to write “Under Penalty of Death: The Untold Story of Machine Gun Kelly’s First Kidnapping.” In this interview he theorizes about why Hoover might have ignored other possible suspects, including Verne Miller and Frank “Jelly” Nash, and explains how this little-known kidnapping, along with the Lindbergh kidnapping that followed closely on its heels, helped usher in the 1932 Federal Kidnapping Act.
The author’s publisher page: https://iupress.org/9781684351992/under-penalty-of-death/
