Ma Barker (1873-1935) was the matriarch of the infamous Barker-Karpis Gang.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today, we’re heading back to the 1920s in the Midwestern United States to talk about a woman who Edgar J. Hoover probably unfairly described as "the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.” She was the matriarch of a gang of outlaws who engaged in kidnapping, murder, and robbery. Let’s talk about Ma Barker.
Arizona Donnie Clark was born in Ash Grove, Missouri, an Ozark Mountain town, in 1872. Her family and early neighbors were poor and well versed in the outlaw mentality necessary to survive in what was then the Wild West.
From an early age, Arizona was familiar with crime. She fangirled over the outlaw Jesse James and was devastated when he was killed in 1882.
Arizona would become known by many names throughout her life. The second that she used frequently was Kate. Kate married a man named George Barker who held a variety of low skilled jobs. An FBI document described George as “shiftless.” The couple had four sons, giving rise to her most famous nickname, Ma Barker.
The Barkers paid little to no attention to their sons’ education, leaving them largely illiterate. What they did develop was a penchant for crime. Three of the sons -- Herman, Arthur, Fred -- became known as the “Bloody Barkers” and formed one of the most notorious gangs of the era, the Barker-Karpis Gang. The fourth brother, Lloyd, was a loner but didn’t stay out of trouble any better than the rest. He spent 25 years in Leavenworth prison and after release was killed by his wife.
The Barker sons began committing crimes at least as early as 1910. That year, Herman was arrested for highway robbery after running over a child with the getaway car. That was just the beginning. In subsequent years, the brothers were involved in crimes of increasing seriousness. Their activities spanned throughout the Midwest from Minnesota to Texas.
Ma’s contribution to the gang’s robberies and kidnappings was not well documented. Many believe she acted as a motherly support to her villainous sons while traveling around the country with them. There’s no proof that Ma killed anyone herself.
In 1927, Ma split up with her husband, George Barker, who wasn’t part of the criminal gang. Some accounts say she abandoned him and others say he left because living with his criminal family became intolerable. The FBI claimed that George left Ma because she had become “loose in her moral life.”
That same year Ma and George’s eldest son, Herman, died in Wichita, Kansas after a robbery and confrontation with police in which he shot and killed an officer. Herman killed himself to avoid prosecution after getting seriously wounded crashing his car.
The following year, all three other sons were imprisoned in different locations. While they were locked up from 1928-1931, Ma Barker lived in poverty. By 1930 she had shacked up with a jobless man named Arthur W. Dunlop. That ended up not being great news for Arthur.
Things improved for Ma when one of her sons, Fred, was released in 1931. He joined forces with a former prison-mate Alvin Karpis to form the Barker-Karpis gang. The duo committed a series of robberies. Then in December of that year, they killed Sheriff C. Roy Kelly in West Plains, Missouri, and were forced to flee the territory. Ma and Arthur Dunlop traveled with them.
But Arthur had a problem. The gang thought he was loose-lipped once he had a couple drinks and they blamed him for almost getting caught by the police. As a consequence, the gang murdered him with a single bullet wound to the head.
The gang continued their activities in Wisconsin. Fred Barker hid his mother in a variety of hotels and hideouts to keep her from learning much about the gang’s crimes and also to separate her from the crew’s girlfriends. The FBI later claimed that Ma would try to break up any relationships so women in the gang avoided her.
The gang kept on moving. In 1933, they carried out kidnappings of two wealthy businessmen in St. Paul, obtaining a total of $300,000 in ransom. But the FBI was closing in. The Bureau connected the gang to the first kidnapping with a new method of latent fingerprint identification. The gang left St. Paul and moved to Chicago where they rented apartments for Ma and tried to launder the ransom.
In 1935, the FBI got word of the gang’s location. When the arrived, however, they found just Fred and Ma in the house. Fred opened fire and he and Ma were both killed by federal agents after an intense, hours-long shootout. The ordeal took so long that locals supposedly came to watch and even had picnics during the shootout.
Ma Barker is often portrayed as the gang’s leader and mastermind in films such as Ma Barker’s Killer Brood, Bloody Mama, and Public Enemies.
In reality, that’s likely not true. One gang member, Alvin Karpis, suggested that J. Edgar Hoover and the fledgling FBI encouraged that story to justify the fact that they had killed an old woman. That’s when Hoover claimed Ma had been the most dangerous brain of the decade.
The facts as we know them are that Ma Barker’s children were criminals who committed a spree of robberies, kidnappings and other crimes. Ma knew of the gang’s activities and supported them before and after the crimes. Her role was in taking care of the gang, rather than participating in the actual events. In fact, Ma was often sent to the movies while the gang did their thing. Still her matronly aesthetic may have helped the gang maintain a sort of disguise as a family unit when interacting with people like landlords.
Alvin Karpis described Ma Barker as, “An old-fashioned homebody from the Ozarks… superstitious, gullible, simple, cantankerous and, well, generally law abiding".
Stay tuned tomorrow for the story of another fascinating villainess. We’ll be heading back to 16th century Hungary.
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Special thanks to my sister, Liz Kaplan, the genius researcher behind this collection of women.
Talk to you tomorrow!