In 1935 FBI agents knocked on the front door 63 year old Ma Barker opened the door also called bloody mama by the agents. Just a few seconds later Fred Ma Barker's son that as 32 went onto the porch and opened fired with a machine gun.  For about 5 hours both sides exchanged gunfire nonstop. Eventually after 3,500 bullets the shooting from within the house stopped. The agents found Ma and Fred both dead. 

Ma was found dead in the second floor left front bedroom and was shot three times holding her still hot machine gun to her breast. Her pocketbook contained $10,200 in large bills. The bodies were taken to Pyles Funeral home in Ocala located at 13250 Highway 27A on the north end of Lake Weir. They were buried however in Oklahoma months later the photos of Ma Barkers Grave are below. 

Some say Ma Barker shot herself in the heart as the wound appeared to be self inflicted probably after seeing her son die. Even when Fred was found he still had his sub machine gun clinched in  his hands. Unfortunately the Barker family sons all died tragically. Doc was shot and killed trying to escape Alcatraz in 1939, Herman Barker shot himself in 1927 after killing a policeman during a robbery, Lloyd Barker was shot and killed by his wife and 1949.  Then of course Fred being shot some say as many as 14 times by the FBI. 

One of the gang members who spent life in jail Alvin Creepy Karpis said that "Ma was always somebody in our lives. Love didn't enter into it really. She was somebody we looked after and took with us when e moved city to city, hideout to hideout...Its no insult to Ma's memory that she just didn't have the brains or the know-how to direct us on a robbery. It wouldn't have occurred to her to get involved in our business and we always made a point of only discussing our scores when Ma wasn't around. We'd leave her at home when we were arranging a job or we'd send her to a move. Ma saw alot of movies. "

So it was pretty obvious that Ma was just following what her sons did best which was robbery and crime. She sat back while her sons did most of the dirty work and of course  when it came down to giving up near the end against the FBI she chose death in her last hideout trying to protect her son. 

The house up until recently was in original condition with its bullet holes and busted down front doors. But was recently restored and is now rented out to love birds and tourist. They use to do reenactments here. Unfortunately I was not able to take any photos of the cottage cause its occupied I feel bad cause if I would have went last year ago I could have gotten inside the house for some photos but we did get to walk around it and visit the bar near by called Gator Joes who often passes around stories about the shoot out.

I did not do this for the ghost photos we already know the house is haunted people see Ma Barker in the upstairs window sometimes. But this is nonetheless a well famed story passed around even their was a movie about it. So for the PGS team to visit the site walk around and tour the area it really is something I want to share with the fans. 

Below is a more in depth story and timeline of events. I will also share the morgue photos and pictures of the gang. We mainly investigated the very dismal Gator Joes at night which has a beach, deck, volleyball area etc you can feel something is not right when walking around the area. The grill and bar was named after a giant alligator seen in Lake Weir over the years.

© By

Lord Rick-AngelOfThyNight

The Cottage As It Looks Today!

JANUARY 1935--END OF THE BARKER GANG

     

     In January 1935, agents of the U.S. Justice Department's Division of Investigation--soon to be renamed the FBI--were closing in on the notorious Barker-Karpis Gang, nearly a year after their successful $200,000 kidnapping of St. Paul banker Edward Bremer. On the night of January 8, the G-men raided two apartments on Chicago's North Side. At 3920 North Pine Grove, they arrested Byron "Monty" Bolton and two women. Another gang member, Russell "Slim Gray" Gibson, elected to shoot it out instead. Donning a bulletproof vest and arming himself with a Browning Automatic Rifle, Gibson ducked out onto a fire escape and was brought down by a .351 rifle slug which penetrated the front of his vest. He died soon afterward in a Chicago hospital.That same night other agents, led by Melvin Purvis, arrested Arthur "Doc" Barker and his girlfriend Mildred Kuhlman outside their apartment at 432 Surf Street. "Where's your gun?" asked Special Agent Walter Walsh. "Home," replied Doc Barker. "Ain't that a helluva place for it?"

 In the Pine Grove apartment, agents recovered a small arsenal, including a .32 Colt automatic, a .38 revolver, two B.A.R.'s, a 20 gauge Ithaca Auto Burglar gun, and a .351 Winchester rifle fitted with a Thompson foregrip and Cutts Compensator, along with a large quantity of ammunition.  A search of the Surf Street apartment revealed a Thompson submachine gun. The serial number was filed off but the gun later proved to be one taken from wounded police officer John Yeaman during the August 1933 holdup of Stockyards National Bank messengers outside the South St. Paul Post Office. Officer Leo Pavlak was killed in the same robbery.
     Among "Doc" Barker's effects agents discovered a Florida map, with the Ocala region circled. Barker refused to say anything about this but Byron Bolton was more cooperative. He revealed that Fred Barker and Arrie "Ma" Barker were living beside a Florida lake and that Fred enjoyed hunting a large alligator known locally as "Old Joe"; according to Bolton, Fred circled the lake in a boat, towing a pig as bait and hoping to shoot "Old Joe" with his Tommygun.

Eight days later, an army of federal agents converged on a house on Lake Weir at Ocklawaha, Florida. The occupants were called on to surrender and answered with a burst of machine gun fire. Teargas was lobbed into the house, forcing the Barkers to move to an upstairs bedroom. How long the shooting from the house lasted is anyone's guess--only forty-one shell casings were later retrieved from the house--but agents poured fire into the house for over four hours. After forty-five minutes of noticeable silence, the G-men cajoled Ma Barker's Black handyman, Willie Woodbury, into entering the house. He found Ma and Fred Barker dead in the upstairs bedroom. Fred had been hit fourteen times and held a .45 automatic, its handle splintered by a bullet. His mother lay a few feet away. Between them was a Thompson submachine gun, equipped with a hundred-round drum. Newspapers later exaggerated this, claiming that Ma clutched a "smoking machine gun" in her hands but photos taken by Special Agent Thomas McDade prove otherwise.

Whether Ma Barker participated in the battle or not remains a matter of controversy to this day. Virtually unknown in life, she was instantly demonized in death by J. Edgar Hoover, who, sensitive to the possible criticism that might result from shooting an old woman, named her as the sinister "brains" of the Barker-Karpis Gang. Most crime historians nowadays lean more toward the view of surviving gang members: that Ma Barker was simply an ignorant old hillbilly woman, blindly loyal to her criminal sons, who in turn used her as a cover.

Ma's oldest son, Herman, had killed himself to avoid capture following a gun battle with Kansas police in 1927. Arthur "Doc" Barker received a life sentence for the Bremer kidnapping. He was killed four years later, on January 13, 1939, while attempting to escape from Alcatraz. Another son, Lloyd, had missed out on most of the fun, being sent to Leavenworth in 1922 for mail robbery. Lloyd was paroled in 1938 and seemingly went straight, only to be shot dead by his wife in a domestic dispute outside their suburban Denver home in March 1949.

By: Rickmaddog Mattix

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Historical Background:

Ma Barker's  four sons were outlaws with two of them, Fred and Doc (Arthur), becoming career criminals.  They worked with Alvin Karpis, forming the Barker-Karpis gang in the years 1931-1935. Fred & Doc were small men, while Karpis was 5’10” (but only weighing 128lbs).

Karpis and Fred Barker met in a Kansas prison.

1931  --  When they both were free they formed a bank robbing gang.

1932  -- Doc Barker joins the gang when he gets out of prison and the gang robs more than 11 banks in this one year.  They covered a wide area in the mid-West.

1933  -- kidnap William Hamm (of Hamm’s Beer).

1934 January -- kidnap banker Edward Bremer.

1934  -- move their criminal operations to the south. 

1935 January --  Melvin Purvis and his FBI agents arrest Doc Barker and his girl friend as they left Barker's apartment near Lake Michigan in Chicago.

1935  --  FBI informant Monty (Byron) Bolton, who was involved in the Hamm kidnapping, told the agency that Fred and Ma Barker were in Oklawaha, Florida in a cottage on Lake Weir. Special Agent E. J. Connelley and his men engaged in a shootout that lasted for hours and ended with the deaths of Fred and Ma Barker.

1936  --  Karpis captured by the FBI.

1939  --  Doc Barker killed when attempting to escape from Alcatraz.

Alvin Karpis of the Barker-Karpis gang wrote in his autobiography that Ma Barker was only involved when the gang traveled together, moving as a mother and her sons to look as innocent as possible.  J. Edgar Hoover only wrote that she was a very bad mother, influencing her children into a life of crime; but this is not a crime itself.  

 
(Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/outlaws/karpis/1.html)

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Mother of all Mothers

BERNARD EPPS

As an antidote to all the recent and past Mother's Day mush, consider Ma Barker, a struggling single mum to four troublesome boys during the Great Depression, a mother who, despite the lack of even a rudimentary education, despite having no marketable skills or training, launched her own small enterprise in middle-age and rose like a rocket to the top of her chosen profession as Queen of the Underworld. She was "a one-woman army against society" with her picture in every post office and newspaper in the country.

She was born to God-fearing hard-working Presbyterian parents in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and very early in life learned the value of hard work and the rewards of virtue. As a girl, she thrilled to see Jesse James ride past on horseback and wept bitterly when he was murdered.

She read the Bible, played the violin and married for love at the age of 20. George Barker gave her four healthy and active boys: Herman, Lloyd, Arthur and Freddie. Then he disappeared, leaving her to raise the boys on her own in a succession of tar-paper shacks.

Like all boys, they sometimes got into mischief but Ma often managed to get them off by storming into the police station screaming and cursing, or weeping and wringing her hands as she thought fit.

In 1915, she lived beside the Santa Fe Railroad in Tulsa, Oklahoma and opened her first "cooling off" service for any ex-convicts needing a place to hole up until the heat died down. She offered bed, board and advice. Al Spencer listened carefully, followed her advice and successfully stuck up a crack passenger train, the Katy Limited, for $20,000.

After that, Ma took to planning and organizing the jobs her boys went on for housekeeping expenses and a portion of the take. They did very well in the bank robbery line until Herman was gunned down by G-men after killing a cop in a hold-up.

J. Edgar Hoover declared that tragedy turned Ma Barker from an "animal mother of the she-wolf type into a veritable beast of prey."

Things seemed to go wrong for Ma Barker after that. She snuggled for a while with a billboard painter, Arthur V. Dunlop, but had to shoot him several times for ratting to the cops and dumped his body in a lake.

Lloyd, her second son, was sent up for 25 years only to be killed by his wife when he got out.

Arthur was gunned down by prison guards for trying to escape. But she got Freddie, her youngest, out on parole after pestering the parole board for years until they succumbed.

She also took under her wing an errant lad from Montreal named Alvin Karpis, called "Creepy Karpis" by his cellmates for his spectral appearance made worse by a botched plastic surgery job intended to disguise his looks. Creepy Karpis proved to be a good pupil and led what was left of the gang into the very difficult kidnapping dodge that not only netted them $300,000 but won for Alvin the distinction of being named Public Enemy No. 1 by J. Edgar Hoover - no mean accomplishment in a time featuring such world-class contenders as Al Capone, Baby-Face Nelson, John Dillinger, and Machine Gun Kelly. And he owed it all to a short, dumpy little woman in a shapeless dress and floppy hat - Ma Barker.

Creepy Karpis was sent to Alcatraz for life where his cell is still proudly pointed out to visitors to this day.

Ma and Freddie were finally cornered in a lakeside cottage in Florida by the FBI. She held them off with a machine gun for four hours, then fell under a blizzard of hot lead and tear-gas canisters, Freddie at her side with 14 bullets in his corpse. Ma was found with three bullets in her body and $10,000 in her pocket in crisp, large-denomination bills. Not bad for a dirt-poor girl from the Ozarks.

George Barker turned up to claim the cash.