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Time Machine: ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd
Oklahoma bank robber and killer had friends and hideouts in Iowa
The headstone on a grave in Akins Cemetery in the Oklahoma hills reads Floyd Charley Arthur/ Feb. 3, 1904/ Oct. 22, 1934.
He was known as “Pretty Boy” Floyd and for a while was regarded as Public Enemy No. 1 by the U.S. Justice Department. He also earned the sobriquet “the phantom outlaw” for his ability to elude capture.
Not as well known is how often Floyd was in Iowa. A story in The Gazette the day after Floyd was shot and killed in Ohio noted Floyd had been in every major Iowa city and had spent months at a time in the state hiding from authorities.
Those Iowa friends probably were Floyd’s greatest protection from the law.
Everyone’s suspect
Floyd was accused of more crimes than he could have ever committed.
A somewhat sardonic item in the Feb. 19, 1934, Gazette said, “Floyd has been blamed by police for a large percentage of the crimes committed in the Middle West and Southwest the last year or two.
“His capture and confinement would leave police without a really prominent desperado on whom to hang unsolved crimes in the future. They might thereby be encouraged to get up and really try to find out who actually commits all the robberies and murders.”
The piece went on to say that Floyd’s “presence has been reported simultaneously in so many widely separated localities at one time or another that it seems hardly probable that there is only one of him.”
Life of crime
Charley Floyd was born in Georgia but his family moved to Akins, Okla., on the state’s eastern border with Arkansas. He started his life in crime at age 18 when he robbed the post office in Akins. He got $3.50 in pennies and was not charged. But a 1925 payroll robbery in St. Louis brought him five years in prison.
Paroled after four years, he returned home to find his father had been killed in a feud.
When Floyd was 25 and using the alias Frank Mitchell, he was sentenced to life in prison in December 1930, convicted of robbing a bank in Akron, Ohio. He was being transported to the Ohio penitentiary when he dove through a train window and escaped.
In April 1931, Floyd was being sought for the murder of a Bowling Green, Ohio, policeman Ralph Castner, killed during a shootout in which Floyd’s fellow outlaw William Miller was caught in the crossfire.
By 1932, Floyd was wanted for 10 bank robberies and was accused of killing a half-dozen men in Missouri and Ohio. Tired of being hunted, he offered to surrender if Oklahoma Gov. Robert Burns would refuse to extradite him to those states and allow him to return home.
The offer was declined.
When four officers and their prisoner were killed in the Kansas City Union Station massacre June 17, 1933, authorities claimed Floyd was one of the shooters. Floyd sent a postcard to officers in Kansas City, denying any involvement. A year and a half later, the crime made him the nation’s Public Enemy No. 1.
Iowa sightings
In August 1933, Floyd, perhaps, was seen in Neola in Pottawattamie County in southwest Iowa. Car salesman William Thompson saw four men buying sandwiches, one of whom looked like pictures of Floyd.
In November 1933, stolen items were discovered at a house owned by Al Bostetter in McIntire in Mitchell County in northeast Iowa. It was later learned Floyd had visited the house.
In January 1934, a Des Moines waitress reported a man at one of her tables was drunk and whispered to her that one of his companions was Pretty Boy Floyd. When police later showed her several photos, she picked out Floyd.
Iowa hideouts
On Oct. 11, 1934, a couple of law officers stopped at the Al Bostetter home in McIntire — the house where stolen items had been found the year before — and asked if anyone had seen Floyd. A man was standing in the yard, but the officers paid him no attention until he ran toward two other men in a cornfield. The three fugitives jumped into a car and drove off.
After pursuing them into a dead end, the agents were surprised when the outlaws reversed direction, driving toward them, firing as they sped past, and escaped.
Bostetter, his wife and daughter were arrested and questioned about Floyd using their home as a hideout. Bostetter claimed he had hired the men as farmworkers a few days before.
Howard County Deputy Sheriff Will Owens revealed that officers suspected Floyd had been using a hideout somewhere in northeast Iowa for more than a year, believing Floyd had relatives or friends in the area.
“We have found out that Floyd has been in this neighborhood for several months, hanging around one farm and another,” he said. Several farmers in the area knew Floyd as “Eddie” and welcomed him into their homes.
It was later learned that Floyd had hidden the previous winter in Ainsworth in Washington County, where the Bostetter family had another farm.
The end
After the shootout near Cresco, sightings of Floyd came in simultaneously from diverse places on Oct. 12, 1934. The outlaws’ car was found abandoned on a side road a mile west of Meservey in Cerro Gordo County.
Floyd was reported traveling north out of Keokuk on Sunday, Oct. 21, 1934. The sheriff said Floyd and three others left about 8 p.m. in a Ford V-9 with Missouri license plates.
Two days later, Floyd was at a farm near East Liverpool, Ohio, when federal agent Melvin Purvis caught up with him. Floyd was shot and killed amid the stubble of a cornfield.
P.S. on Cresco
Cresco appeared to have been a hideout for several notorious criminals.
An Oct. 13, 1934, Iowa News Service story said Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had taken refuge there in 1931.
And while federal and local officers had been scouring the Iowa countryside for Floyd, they discovered evidence “Baby Face” Nelson also had hidden “at this paradise for public enemies.”
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