The Union Station Massacre

On the morning of Saturday, June 17, 1933, a planned ambush in the parking lot east of Kansas City’s Union Station left five men dead — the federally convicted bank robber Frank Nash, whom federal and local lawmen were returning by train to Leavenworth Penitentiary, and four of his armed guards: one FBI Special Agent, one Kansas City Police Department detective, and two Oklahoma police officers. Two additional FBI agents were wounded. The shooting was almost universally attributed to Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Verne Miller, and Adam Richetti — though Floyd denied involvement until his own death the following year and the case remains historically debated. The massacre brought J. Edgar Hoover’s nascent FBI into full national prominence, accelerated congressional authorization of federal law-enforcement firearms and arrest powers in 1934, and stands as the bloodiest single incident of the Pendergast-era gangland environment in Kansas City.

Summary

In the early morning of Saturday, June 17, 1933, a transfer party of federal and local officers arrived at Union Station Kansas City by train. They were returning Frank “Jelly” Nash, a convicted bank robber and escapee from Leavenworth Penitentiary, who had been captured several days earlier at Hot Springs, Arkansas. The officers walked Nash from the train through the Union Station concourse to two waiting cars parked on the east side of the station.

As the officers loaded Nash into the front passenger seat of one of the cars, three men with submachine guns and shotguns opened fire from concealed positions across the parking lot. The fusillade — lasting perhaps thirty seconds — killed:

• Frank Nash (the prisoner being transferred)
• Raymond J. Caffrey — FBI Special Agent
• Frank Hermanson — KCPD detective
• William J. “Red” Grooms — KCPD detective
• Otto Reed — Oklahoma police chief
• (Some accounts include a second Oklahoma officer; sourcing varies)

Two additional FBI agents — Frank Smith and R.E. Vetterli — were wounded but survived. The shooters fled in a getaway car within minutes; no shooter was ever arrested at the scene.

The massacre was attributed by the FBI to a conspiracy involving:

• Verne Miller — KC underworld figure, former South Dakota sheriff turned gangster, close associate of Frank Nash
• Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd — Oklahoma outlaw bank robber; one of the most-wanted figures in the country
• Adam Richetti — Floyd associate

Pretty Boy Floyd denied involvement until his death in a 1934 FBI shootout in Ohio. Adam Richetti was convicted of the Massacre and executed in 1938 — a conviction that remains historically contested. Verne Miller was murdered, almost certainly by organized-crime associates, in November 1933 in Detroit. The full truth of the conspiracy was never definitively established and continues to be debated by historians.

Background

Frank Nash

Frank Nash (1887-1933) was a career bank robber and Oklahoma outlaw. He had been convicted on a federal assault charge in 1924, escaped from Leavenworth Penitentiary in October 1930, and remained at large for over two years, during which time he participated in multiple bank robberies across the Midwest. He had become a fixture of the Cookson Hills outlaw community in northeast Oklahoma and was widely known to be associated with Pretty Boy Floyd’s circle.

In June 1933 the FBI captured Nash at the White Front Pool Hall in Hot Springs, Arkansas — a town with a notorious reputation as a fugitive-friendly resort where corrupt local authorities tolerated outlaw presence. The arresting agents — Frank Smith and F. Joseph Lackey of the FBI, with Otto Reed of the McAlester, Oklahoma police — moved fast to get Nash out of Hot Springs before local complications developed. They drove him to Fort Smith, Arkansas, then took an overnight train north.

The Verne Miller connection

The key to understanding the Massacre’s organization was Verne Miller’s relationship to Nash. Miller and Nash had been friends and criminal collaborators for years. Nash’s wife Frances had contacted Miller as soon as she learned of Nash’s capture, asking him to help free her husband.

Miller was at this time operating in Kansas City — living at a residence on East 30th Street — under the protection (or at least tolerance) of the Pendergast machine’s broader organized-crime apparatus including John Lazia’s KC mob organization.

Miller’s plan, in the historical reconstruction supported by most evidence:

1. Recruit additional gunmen — almost certainly Floyd and Richetti
2. Position the gunmen at Union Station to ambush the transfer party
3. Free Nash during the chaos

The plan failed catastrophically when the opening shots killed Nash himself — either by deliberate FBI agent action (some sources suggest Caffrey may have shot Nash to prevent escape, though Caffrey was the first lawman killed and the timing is contested) or, much more likely, by the gunmen’s own fire hitting Nash through the windshield or door of the car. Once Nash was dead, the rescue attempt had failed, but the gunmen continued firing — killing four lawmen before fleeing.

The KC underworld environment

The Massacre took place in the context of the mid-1930s Kansas City underworld that had developed under the Pendergast machine’s protection. John Lazia ran KC organized crime as a Pendergast ally. The city was a known hideout for federal fugitives who could pay for protection. Bank robbers, kidnappers, and prison escapees routinely passed through KC for rest, medical care (KC doctors who treated gunshot wounds without reporting them were a known underworld asset), and reorganization.

The Massacre is almost certainly impossible without this protective environment. Miller could organize a daylight ambush at the city’s most-prominent transportation hub because he reasonably expected local authorities would not actively pursue him — and that expectation was largely correct. After the Massacre, KC police investigation was nominally cooperative but practically ineffective; the federal FBI investigation operated essentially without local support.

The shooting

The transfer plan

The FBI agents transferring Nash had made the transfer plan publicly known in advance — a decision that has been criticized as catastrophically negligent in retrospect. Train arrival times were known. The need for KC and Oklahoma local police support meant the operation could not be kept fully internal to the FBI.

Verne Miller knew the train arrival time and the transfer route through Union Station by the evening of June 16, 1933 — almost certainly through informants in KC law enforcement.

Morning of June 17

The train arrived at Union Station at approximately 7:15 a.m. The transfer party — seven officers and Nash — walked from the platform through the station concourse to the east parking lot. Two cars were waiting: one for Nash and his immediate guards, a second for the remaining officers.

As Nash was loaded into the front passenger seat of the first car, the shooters opened fire from across the parking lot. The first volley killed Nash, Caffrey, and at least one other lawman immediately. The remaining lawmen returned fire briefly; the wounded crawled for cover; the shooters maintained the fusillade for several seconds, then fled to a getaway car.

The entire incident lasted approximately thirty seconds. Spent shell casings recovered from the scene indicated submachine gun and shotgun fire.

Witnesses

Multiple Union Station passengers, redcaps, and parking-lot attendants witnessed the shooting. Witness descriptions of the gunmen were inconsistent — some said three shooters; some said four; descriptions of clothing and physical features varied. No witness positively identified any of the alleged shooters at the scene.

The inconsistencies became one of the central historical problems with the case.

Aftermath

The investigation

The FBI investigation, led by J. Edgar Hoover personally from Washington, treated the case as a national priority. Hoover assigned the St. Louis FBI office to lead with substantial central support. The investigation focused immediately on Verne Miller as the organizer.

Within days, Miller fled KC. His East 30th Street residence was searched; physical evidence connecting him to the conspiracy (including planning materials) was reportedly recovered, though specifics remain debated. Miller was located in New York and Detroit in subsequent weeks but evaded capture.

In November 1933, Miller was murdered by associates — found tortured and strangled outside Detroit. The case-closing assumption is that Miller’s organized-crime sponsors decided his continued freedom was a liability and eliminated him before federal capture could produce confessions.

Floyd and Richetti

Pretty Boy Floyd was located by the FBI in East Liverpool, Ohio in October 1934 and killed in a shootout. Floyd’s final statement, reportedly given as he died, denied involvement in the Union Station Massacre. Some historians take the denial seriously; others discount it. Floyd had every reason to deny involvement (the charge carried capital exposure) and limited reason to confess in his final moments.

Adam Richetti was captured in October 1934 (the same operation that killed Floyd). He was extradited to Missouri, tried in June 1935, and convicted of the Massacre. He was executed in Missouri’s gas chamber in October 1938.

Historical assessment of Richetti’s conviction has been substantially critical. The evidence presented at trial relied heavily on eyewitness identifications that were inconsistent and physical evidence that was indirect. Several modern historians have argued Richetti was likely convicted on weak evidence as a convenient surrogate for the deceased Miller and Floyd.

The actual composition of the shooting party remains historically debated. The minimum-consensus position is Miller plus at least one other gunman. The maximum-coverage position is Miller plus Floyd plus Richetti plus possibly a fourth shooter.

FBI national emergence

The Union Station Massacre was the single most-prominent of several 1933-1934 federal-vs-outlaw incidents that built J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI into a major national institution. Other contemporaneous events:

• The Kansas City Massacre (June 17, 1933) — this event
• The kidnapping of Charles F. Urschel (July 1933) — solved by FBI
• The Lindbergh Kidnapping trial and execution context
• The killing of John Dillinger (July 1934)
• The killing of Pretty Boy Floyd (October 1934)
• The killing of Bonnie and Clyde (May 1934)

Hoover used the Massacre and related cases to lobby for expanded federal law-enforcement authority. The federal Bureau of Investigation had been a small civil-investigative agency since 1908; the 1934 federal crime bills authorized FBI special agents to carry firearms, make arrests, and operate across state lines — powers the modern FBI takes for granted but which did not exist before. The transformation was substantially driven by the political response to the Union Station Massacre and contemporaneous events.

The FBI was officially renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935.

Local KC consequences

The Massacre embarrassed Kansas City nationally and added pressure to the broader federal scrutiny of the Pendergast machine. The Massacre is one of multiple events in the 1933-1939 period — alongside the March 1934 election violence (four dead in voter-related shootings on election day) — that built the case for federal intervention in KC’s machine-protected criminal environment.

John Lazia himself was murdered in July 1934, one year after the Massacre. The killers were never definitively identified but the killing was almost certainly internal to the KC organized-crime apparatus — a confirmation of how dangerous KC’s underworld had become to its own participants.

Eventually the federal pressure culminated in the 1939 federal tax-evasion conviction of Tom Pendergast and the dismantling of the machine.

Long-term significance

• FBI institutional history. The Union Station Massacre is canonically identified as one of the key events building the modern FBI. Hoover used the case (and contemporaneous cases) to expand federal law-enforcement authority and to build his personal political position.
• Pendergast Era evidence. The Massacre is the most-visible single piece of evidence for the violent character of the late Pendergast-era KC underworld. Multiple subsequent histories of the Pendergast machine — including Larsen + Hulston’s Pendergast! — feature the Massacre as a defining moment.
• Historical-mystery debate. The identity of the shooters remains historically contested. Recent scholarship (since approximately the 1990s) has been more skeptical of the Floyd-Richetti involvement than the official 1930s FBI narrative. The case is studied in true-crime literature, FBI history, and Pendergast historiography.
• Union Station civic memory. Union Station itself — KC’s most-prominent surviving Beaux-Arts public building — carries the Massacre as part of its historical interpretation. The east parking lot where the shooting occurred has been substantially altered by subsequent construction (Crown Center development), but the general location is identifiable.

Sites in KC associated with the massacre

• Union Station — primary site; building survives; the east-side parking lot has been substantially developed but the general location is identifiable
• Memorial plaque inside Union Station — commemorating the slain officers
• Verne Miller residence site — East 30th Street; building gone
• Memorial Hill / Union Cemetery — burial sites of several KC-resident officers killed in the Massacre

Cultural memory

The Union Station Massacre is a recurring subject in true-crime journalism and FBI history. Major treatments include:

• Robert Unger — The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI (1997; argues Richetti was wrongfully convicted)
• Bryan Burrough — Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (2004; covers Massacre in broader context)
• Various FBI institutional histories and Pendergast-era histories

The Massacre’s role in building the modern FBI keeps the case in active national memory. Anniversary coverage from the Kansas City Star, KCUR, and other regional outlets appears at intervals.

Sources