The Last of the Barkers

Lloyd ("Red") Barker was a little different from his desperate, murderous brothers Herman, "Doc" and Freddie, the baby of the family. He never killed anyone, but that wasn't because his mother Kate Barker didn't teach him well. It was just that the Federals got him first--in 1921, for a mail stickup in Baxter Springs, Kans. They put him away in Leavenworth for 25 years.

Lloyd was really Ma Barker's only failure. She could barely read or write, but she taught all her boys to rob and kill and keep their mouths shut. She loved them all with a twisted, violent affection, but she was quite capable of coldly permitting a crooked, drunken physician to slash her favorite Freddie's fingers in a vain effort to alter his fingerprints.

Riddled with Slugs. Ma had her lover riddled with slugs and dumped into Webster Lake, Minn., because she thought he had tipped off the cops to one of their hideouts. She had George ("Shotgun George") Zeigler murdered in Cicero, Ill., Al Capone's old stamping ground, because he was losing his mind and getting talkative. From the Barkers' overstuffed, garish headquarters in Tulsa, she engineered her boys' forays right down to the detail maps for the getaway, and she made the Barker-Karpis mob the terror of the Midwest.

Herman was the first of the Barkers to go. He got his in 1927, the day after a stickup in Newton, Kans. His body was found in the weeds on the outskirts of Wichita. Ma and Freddie were next, shot down after a blazing FBI siege at Oklawaha, Fla. in 1935, a year after they, Doc and Alvin ("Old Creepy") Karpis pulled off the $200,000 kidnaping of St. Paul Banker Edward Bremer.

When he heard about it on the radio in Leavenworth, Lloyd scrawled in self-pity: "I have no more mother and brothers for them to murder." He was wrong: brother Doc got a bullet in the head four years later trying to crash out of Alcatraz.

Forgotten Warning. By then Lloyd had served his time in Leavenworth and was trying to go straight. He finally wound up in Denver as the assistant manager of Charlie Klein's restaurant.

Then Lloyd did something Ma had always warned her boys against: he got mixed up with a woman. He married a skinny, hysterical divorcee named Jennie Wynne. One morning two weeks ago, Jennie took one of her spells and Lloyd begged off work to take care of her. She met him inside the door of their trim, white cottage and blasted his head half off with a 20-gauge shotgun. Last week Charlie Klein closed up the restaurant and some 50 people went out to Brighton for the funeral of the only one of Ma's boys who ever did an honest day's work.

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