June 17, 1933: The Union Station Massacre
Near Kansas City, Missouri
On the morning of June seventeenth, nineteen thirty-three, federal agents were escorting a prisoner named Frank Nash through Union Station in Kansas City. Nash was a bank robber and escape artist who had fled a federal penitentiary nearly three years earlier and had been captured the day before in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The agents were moving him to Leavenworth. A group of armed men was waiting for them in the station's parking lot.
What happened next took about thirty seconds. The attackers opened fire. Nash was killed. So were four law enforcement officers: Kansas City detective William Grooms, Kansas City detective Frank Hermanson, McAlester Oklahoma police chief Otto Reed, and FBI Special Agent Raymond Caffrey, who was the third agent killed in the line of duty in FBI history. Two other federal agents were wounded. The men who attacked them then drove away. Nobody stopped them.
The FBI, then called the Division of Investigation, threw the resources of its entire organization into the case. The killers were identified as Pretty Boy Floyd, Adam Richetti, and a hired gunman named Verne Miller. Floyd and Richetti were eventually cornered and killed or captured. Miller was found beaten to death in Detroit in November of nineteen thirty-three, killed by associates, the research suggests, who feared he had become a liability.
The massacre gave J. Edgar Hoover the congressional support he needed to arm FBI agents and to expand the Bureau's jurisdiction over interstate crime. Before Kansas City, FBI agents carried weapons as a bureaucratic matter but were not routinely armed on operations. After it, the agency became what it has been since. Union Station was renovated in the nineteen nineties. A marker at the station notes what happened there on a Thursday morning in June of nineteen thirty-three.
