
Uncle Jimmy - Killer from the Mountains
By Hal White
Edited and additional material by Guy Hadleigh
Grandma Barrett’s misty gray eyes blazed with anger. “Son," she said, "you take one more step and I’ll drop you with this here broomstick.”
George W. "Uncle Jimmy” Barrett took the step. Simultaneously his right fist shot out and smashed into his 73-year-old mother’s face.
"I told you what I’d do if you was to hit my boy again," he said.
“He was mean—mean and nasty just like you always been," screamed the old woman. "He was hitting the hound dog with a stone." The broomstick came down on Uncle Jimmy’s graying head. As he fell to the rough plank floor he reached for the .38 in his belt.
Ten-year-old Jackie screamed a warning. The boy's Aunt Rachel chose that moment to enter their three-room cabin at Big Hill, in the heart of the Kentucky hill country.
The gun in Barrett’s right hand barked three times. The first bullet struck his mother just over the heart. The second dropped his sister, Rachel. The third went wild.
Uncle Jimmy looked proudly at the son of his fifth marriage. “Ain’t no one ever going to hit your daddy again and get away with it,” he said. "And don’t ever let anyone get away with hitting you.” He turned and walked steadily from the cabin, climbed into his truck and drove the 18 miles into the Jackson County seat at McKee.
“I had to shoot Ma," he told his older brother. “She come at me with a broomstick. So I shot her and I saw her die. Thank God, she suffered no pain."
Barrett added that their sister, Rachel, “had got in the way" and suffered a minor injury. Then he took off again in his old Ford pickup.
But Grandma Barrett did not die—until two weeks later. Taken to the hospital at McKee, she finally succumbed to pneumonia after making what physicians termed a miraculous recovery from the bullet wound. Rachel, with a slug removed from her right breast, was released from the hospital on the day of Grandma Barrett’s death.
Rachel went straight from the hospital to the office of Commonwealth Attorney Frank H. Baker and swore to a warrant charging her fugitive brother with murder. The older brother next day filed a damage suit against George for their mother’s death.
During the month following the shooting on August 27th of 1930, George Barrett remained hidden out in the mountains. This was not difficult for him to accomplish. He had often been a fugitive in the past, from both local and government authorities.
Matricide was something different, though. Uncle Jimmy is reputed to have spread some $1700 in hard cash among his relatives and friends during the month he remained in hiding. Then, early in October, he returned to the family cabin at Big Hill. Word had reached him that Jackie was lonesome for his daddy.
At the time there were at least a dozen other of his children scattered throughout the country—many of them in orphanages, others with the women Barrett had legally married and deserted—who hadn't seen their daddy for years. But on the eve of his return to Jackie, child of a wife he had deserted in the early 1920s. Barrett married for the seventh time. He brought his bride, a teenage girl from the western part of the state, back with him. And he was promptly arrested for murder.
After a week in jail, Uncle Jimmy was freed on $1000 bond. A daughter was born to him soon afterward. In March of 1931, he appeared in Circuit Court and pleaded not guilty to his mother's murder, claiming self-defense.
A dozen witnesses for the Commonwealth, including the accused man’s relatives, took the stand against him. But their memories were bad—except for recalling the threatening glances directed against them by Barrett's friends as they had entered the courtroom.
Uncle Jimmy took the stand in his own defense. In a choked voice he told how he had come back to clear his name after learning of his little son’s loneliness.
At the conclusion of the testimony, the Commonwealth attorney asked that the indictment be dismissed because of insufficient evidence. The judge angrily denied the motion. There followed an eloquent plea by defense counsel for acquittal on the ground the accused had simply acted to protect his own life.
An equally impassioned address by Commonwealth Attorney Baker urged the same thing.
The jurors, bewilderment showing on their anxious faces as they glanced from the prisoner to his glaring friends in the back of the room, talked things over for two hours. They announced they were unable to reach a verdict. A second trial held the following year, proved a duplicate of the first. Early in 1932, Barrett walked out of the court a free man.
He was to remain a free man for some time. But from that day onward 42-year-old George Barrett was also to remain the object of unremitting attention on the part of the newly reorganized Federal Bureau of Investigation.
For years the eyes of various federal agencies had been on the mountaineer from Jackson County. And although he had never been known to kill before, shootings and violence had marked his career since soon after the turn of the century. In 1904, at the age of 14, he had quit manufacturing illegal corn whiskey long enough to be married to a neighboring mountain girl. He took her west on the first of a long series of honeymoons.
Three months later George returned to his native hill country and his family arranged for a divorce. The first of his score of children was born shortly afterward. From that time on Barrett was to be known as "Uncle Jimmy" to his friends and his various families.
In 1910 Barrett joined the army. While stationed in Salt Lake City, Utah, he was married for the second time. A divorce followed after the birth of a child a year later. He got his discharge from the army and returned to marry a girl in Beattyville, Kentucky.
By this time Uncle Jimmy began to tire of going to the expense and trouble of arranging for legal divorces. After the birth of his third child by this third wife, he simply up and left them. He was married for the fourth time in March of 1916 without bothering to go through the formality of a divorce.
A fifth wife followed two years later. At this time Barrett was under suspicion of having broadened his business activities to include fencing stolen articles. In August of 1926, he was back in his home territory, with a sixth bride. On the 11th day of that month one Jeff Cline, a resident of Jackson County, called upon him.
Cline, the brother-in-law by virtue of an earlier marriage, wanted to know what Uncle Jimmy was going to do about the support of an abandoned child. Barrett, quick-tempered but not so quick on the draw, reached for the six-shooter in his belt. Before he could pull the pistol Cline snatched a loaded shotgun from the wall behind him. A blast of bird-shot struck Uncle Jimmy full in the face.
It was the first time Barrett was to be on the receiving end of a charge of lead. He suffered the loss of his right eye in that exchange and afterward took to wearing rimless eyeglasses to conceal the disability. The eyeglasses did something for him. With his early graying hair and sallow complexion, he now looked more like a staid businessman or school teacher than the brawling mountaineer he was.
During the next few years, Barrett confined his activities largely to operating the home distillery. There were a few trips about the country with various women, but the boy, Jackie, was the only one of his children to whom he showed any affection.
To townsfolk, he was heard to boast of his exploits abroad, but he was never specific as to where he had been or exactly how he had earned the big roll of bills he liked to flash. On many occasions he exhibited wounds he said were received in gun fights.
“I’ve learned to give as well as take lead," Barrett was quoted as bragging to his fellow townsmen. "And if anyone doubts it, I'll take them up in the hills and show them the graves of half a dozen guys who thought they could get the best of old Uncle Jimmy. But they won't come back to talk."
Quite naturally there was talk about Barrett's latest boasts. And in due time that talk reached the ears of the federal authorities who had him under more or less casual surveillance for some years. It was not, however, until after the shooting of his mother and sister during the following year, that the newly appointed head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, issued orders that a special watch be kept on his activities.
Hoover admitted there was nothing for which he could bring Barrett in on a federal charge, although there was little doubt he had been mixed up with illicit whiskey rings since his childhood. “But this man’s career is a shocking example of the unwarranted leniency on the part of various enforcement agencies in the past," the FBI chief declared. “From now on he'll be watched. The next mistake he makes will land him behind bars if there's a federal offense involved.”
At the time he made that statement Hoover was busily organizing his 600-man department into the most thorough and efficient law enforcement agency the world has ever known. During the trial of Barrett for his mother's murder, an agent was assigned to watch the proceedings, although there was no question of the crime being a federal offense.
Shortly after the conclusion of the trial the freed killer was appointed personal bodyguard to Commonwealth Attorney Baker, the man whose duty it had been to prosecute him. After that, even the local authorities—excepting, of course, those aligned with the Baker faction—agreed that good old Uncle Jimmy was a man whose future would bear watching.
About this time Barrett went off on one of his frequent trips to parts unknown. It was also about this time that Sheriff John Schumacher of Butler County, up in Ohio where other members of the Barrett clan had migrated since a recent outbreak of feuding among their kinfolk, started looking for a couple of automobiles reported stolen from outlying farms.
When it became apparent that the missing automobiles had been taken out of the state. Sheriff Schumacher called upon the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Only recently Congress had passed legislation that made the taking of a stolen automobile across a state line a federal offense.
By the time two FBI men arrived in Butler County. Deputy Sheriff Charles B. Walker had come from adjacent Hamilton County with information that a man answering to Barrett’s description was wanted for the theft of an automobile from there a few days before.
It took the two government men, Agents Nelson B. Klein and Don C. McGovern, more than a month to trace the three missing cars. Two of these, it was learned, had been disposed of in Indiana. A third, still believed to be in possession of the thief, was traced to Southern California.

G Man – Nelson B. Klein
Shortly after that a scholarly appearing, gray-haired, bespectacled man in his early 40s held up a business in San Diego, California. His description fitted almost exactly that of the Kentucky mountaineer suspected of stealing those automobiles back in Ohio several weeks earlier.
Within a few days of the San Diego robbery, the last of the three stolen cars were found abandoned on a downtown street in that city. Local agents of the FBI went over the machine with a fine-toothed comb. They turned up several fingerprints that were very similar to those of the man upon whom they had been trying to keep their eyes during recent months. But the prints were badly smeared, so positive identification could not be made.
Witnesses to the robbery later looked at photographs of Barrett—rogues’ gallery shots that showed a quiet, well-dressed man who in appearance was the exact opposite of the hill-country feudist of song and story—and expressed their willingness to appear in court and swear he was the holdup man.
The hunt for George W. Barrett was intensified. Thousands of circulars went out to local peace officers throughout the country. During the next two years, these circulars brought results—but not exactly the kind of results the authorities back in Ohio and Kentucky had hoped for.
What the state and federal men did learn was that a smooth talking, quiet mannered man of Barrett’s description was beginning to turn up in widely separate places. Always he was accompanied by a good looking, well-dressed woman several years younger than himself. But it was not always the same woman, although he would invariably introduce her as his wife. He never lost an opportunity to exhibit one of the numerous marriage licenses he seemed to have always ready at hand.
Barrett during this period was known to be traveling under a variety of names. Frequently, he would be driving an automobile, although it was rarely the same automobile and never bore the same license plates. He was spotted on trains and airplanes. At least 50 of the more than 600 FBI men scattered across the country were sent off on what proved to be wild-goose chases after receiving reports of the presence in their districts of the bigamist mountaineer from Big Hill, Kentucky.
Not until late in 1934 did the FBI finally get onto what it considered a definite trail. By this time Barrett’s name had been added to the newly inaugurated list of the Bureau's Ten Most-Wanted Men. Every agent in the country was aware he would likely be armed and would resist arrest.
In September of that year, two strangers entered the little town of Manchester, about 30 miles from Barrett's old home at Big Hill, Kentucky. One of the pair was a dignified, bespectacled gentleman dressed in an expensive gray suit and immaculate linen. Villagers later were to describe him to Federal men as “looking like one of them college professors, and talking low and knowing like a preacher of some kind."
Along with this distinguished appearing visitor, there arrived a man whose general build and facial features closely resembled his own. They were joined by a third man that same day, a Saturday during the last week of the month. All retired to a suite in the local hotel arranged by a "Mr. Baker, of McKee."
Sunday morning dawned bright and clear. The trio came down to the lobby where the man who had paid for their suite told the hotel clerk that they planned to stay for several days as he had an important civil case coming up in the Clay County court. They went in for breakfast and afterward went out and started along the main street toward Courthouse Square.
Frank Baker, the former Commonwealth attorney for Jackson County, was in the lead. Behind him came Barrett, the man he had unsuccessfully prosecuted for murder. Next to Barrett was another hired bodyguard, a man whose identity never was to be established.
Hardly had the group started their stroll when there came the sharp report of a high-powered rifle. Baker staggered and fell to the street. The man next to Barrett drew his revolver and started firing. Another rifle shot, and he fell beside the former Commonwealth attorney. George Barrett turned and fled back into the hotel.
When the smoke cleared they found Baker and his bodyguard dead of bullet wounds through their hearts. Barrett was gone before the authorities could question him.
A purely local shooting affray is not a matter in which the FBI can take a hand unless one of its own agents is involved. But when the local authorities came up with the information that George Barrett had been positively identified as the gray-haired man who was forced to barricade himself in the hotel room during the heat of the battle, Director Hoover dispatched his agents to the Kentucky town to make inquiries.
More than once in the past federal men had been sent into the Kentucky hills in an attempt to learn the details of violent outbreaks resulting from long-standing feuds and family wars. It was always with the purpose of getting information that might aid them in rounding up some participant wanted on a federal charge. And almost invariably these agents had come away with little more information than they had before they arrived.
For even the local and state officials in the "feuding counties" of Kentucky know the futility of attempting to get to the bottom of the brawls and shootings and stabbings that mark the course of these strictly private wars. Such was the case in the battle of the Manchester hotel. Those on the losing side were either dead or gone into hiding. The winners had shot from ambush and not a single witness had seen them. Persons who did admit seeing Baker and his bodyguard fall as Barrett ran back into the hotel, were not inclined to talk about it. They knew from long experience the danger of volunteering information that might later involve them and their families in a controversy that could drag on for generations.
About all Agents Klein and McGovern were able to learn about George Barrett's part in the battle was that he had fled at the first shot. They were convinced he had gone to Manchester as a personal guardian for the man who had done so much to get him off the hook on the murder rap several years before. But that is all they were sure about. Baker's surviving relatives were not talking, and they never were able to learn the identity of the other murdered man.
For months after that little was heard of Uncle Jimmy. In January of 1935, a man answering to his description stopped at a Hazard, Kentucky, hotel in company with a pretty girl half his age. They registered as man and wife.
The people of Hazard, a conservative southern town of 9000 population, kept a close watch on strangers in their midst. There were some who thought it strange that such a pretty young girl would be married to a graying, grave-faced man so much older than herself.
The girl was questioned and admitted she was not legally married to the older man. Her companion was arrested, charged with adultery—fined $20 and freed. Two weeks later fingerprints forwarded to the FBI in Washington revealed the adulterer was Uncle Jimmy.
Again five months later, the federal men narrowly missed their quarry. A bespectacled transient was nabbed in a hotel at Hardinsburg, Kentucky after a valise was reported stolen from the room of another guest. He quickly admitted his guilt, paid a small fine and was released. Again delayed fingerprint reports proved him to be Uncle Jimmy Barrett.
In June, the following month, an interesting clue came out of Covington, Kentucky. A local key-maker reported one of his customers was buying duplicates of automobile keys by the score. Immediately, special agents suspected a link to someone in the stolen car racket, and an operative from Louisville was sent to investigate.
The key-maker looked over photographs of known and suspected Interstate car thieves. He finally picked a mug-shot showing a bespectacled, squint-eyed man with thinning gray hair as his late customer. A stakeout was put in the locksmith's establishment but Uncle Jimmy never returned for more keys.
Warrants were now out charging Barrett with the San Diego robbery, the car thefts In Ohio, and for his arrest as a ‘‘material witness" in the shootings at Manchester and the earlier shooting of his sister, Rachel. Half a dozen women had filed complaints with the local authorities in towns all the way from New York to California, accusing him of wooing them, wedding them and leaving them.
From orphan asylums and welfare agencies scattered throughout the country came word of the presence of more than a dozen children whose several mothers described their father as a smooth-talking mountain man who had loved them and left them at about the time other husbands would have been nervously pacing hallways outside of maternity wards.
The federal men wasted little time in checking the stories of these abandoned wives and sweethearts and their orphaned children. Experience had taught them that about the only place they could be sure of not finding their man would be in the vicinity of one of his helpless love-dupes once he had abandoned her for another.
Back in the town of Hamilton, Ohio, county seat of Butler County, Sheriff John Schumacher was keeping a constant watch on the activities of the other members of the Kentucky family who had come up there to make their home. He had, since the last shooting down in Kentucky, learned that Uncle Jimmy still kept in close contact with members of his family.
Sheriff Schumacher was also keeping in close touch with the FBI. He told them he was confident Barrett would return to Hamilton sooner or later to visit his folks there, especially as his young son was at the time staying with an uncle near town.
The sheriff was instructed to get in immediate touch with the Cincinnati office of the FBI if any new development occurred. During the next few months he and his deputies, along with city police, kept a close watch on the home of Barrett's relatives. Their vigilance paid off early in August of 1935 when a man of Uncle Jimmy's build and general physical characteristics was seen leaving the house where young Jackie was then living.
The man was followed to a downtown parking lot, but closer scrutiny revealed he had coal black hair and wore green, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, whereas the wanted man’s hair had turned nearly completely gray in recent years and he had always worn rimless spectacles. When it was noticed the man walked with a marked limp, it was decided he could not be the Kentucky gunman.
A day or two after the limping man left town, local police received word from the FBI that Barrett had last been seen wearing a disguise that matched exactly that of their suspect!
Meanwhile, City Detectives Ed Riley and Herschel Haines learned the limping man had appeared at a local automobile dealer and arranged for the sale of a car he said he was bringing over from Indiana in a few days. The suspect was traced to a Hamilton hotel, but there his trail ended. Again agents were staked out to wait for him to show up, and again Barrett seemed to sense the hot breath of the law on his neck.
A check was made of the parking lot and it was learned the limping man with green glasses had said he was going over to Indianapolis for a few days and would be back in town on the following Saturday when he would want the same parking space again. It was then late on Friday night, August 16th, 1935.
Sheriff Schumacher, working with the city men, lost no time in putting through a call to the Cincinnati office of the FBI. There, Agents Klein and McGovern prepared to leave immediately for Hamilton, 30 miles to the north, after first calling Harold Reinecke, the agent in charge of the Indiana office of the FBI.
Early Saturday Klein and McGovern, along with half a dozen Indiana FBI men led by Reinecke, went over the possible routes Barrett might be expected to take on his return trip from Indianapolis to Hamilton. They had a complete description of his new disguise and the automobile he last drove, but did not know his license number and could not even be sure he would be in the same machine when he returned—if he did return.
Finally, it was agreed that Barrett's most likely route would take him along what is now U.S. Route 50 to a point some 30 miles southeast of Indianapolis where it intersects State Route 44, then due east another 28 miles to the intersection of U.S. 27, and on south to Hamilton.
Somewhere along that route, the federal agents hoped to lay in wait and capture their quarry. The best spot, they decided, would be in a region where there would be comparatively little danger of other motorists or innocent bystanders being injured if the fight they anticipated was to take place.
After further discussion it was decided to split up the group, with some of the officers taking positions midway between the two cities. Klein and McGovern would lie in wait at the junction of Route 44 and 27 in the little village of West College Corners, Indiana, on the borderline between the two states.
At a few minutes before noon, the two Cincinnati agents spotted a car with Ohio plates coming toward them where they lay behind a hedge in a yard at the intersection of the two roads. They instantly recognized the license number as one on their list of recently stolen cars believed to have been taken out of the state. Then they saw that the car fitted the description of that in which Barrett had last been seen driving.
The machine slowed almost to a stop as it approached the sharp turn into Route 27. Following instructions from the local police, the neighbors were in the back part of their homes, away from danger. Half a block down the street the local postmaster peered carefully from behind the partly opened door of his general store. Deputy Sheriff Walker of Butler County was stationed in his automobile a hundred yards east on Route 27, prepared to intercept Barrett's car should he fail to halt at the G-men’s order.
Klein and McGovern stepped into the middle of the intersection as Barrett's car came almost to a stop. Klein held a .38 Colt Special and McGovern a sawed-off shotgun.
Before either could shout the order to halt, Barrett stepped on the gas and his car shot off down the street. Just before it reached the spot where Deputy Walker was already pulling out to intercept it, the driver pulled to the curb with a screech of brakes. He was out of the car a moment later and running toward an alley that ran back behind the yard.
Exactly what occurred during the next few moments is a matter upon which a Federal Court jury in Indianapolis was to ponder for many hours at a later date. But when the shooting was over Agent Klein lay dead in the alleyway with a .45 caliber slug through his heart. George Barrett, shot through both knees, lay a hundred feet away.
As McGovern and Walker ran up, they heard Barrett cry, "You can't blame me for shooting down a man like that. He'd of got me sure if I hadn't got him first."
Residents arrived in time to hear the wounded gunman mutter, "There’s a government man over there I shot him down. I was in a bit of trouble and they been hot after me for four years."
When, early in December of the same year, Barrett appeared in the Federal District Court in Indianapolis to answer for the murder of the FBI man, he denied making either of those statements. Before the first jury ever to hear a murder case in an Indiana Federal Court, Barrett swore he thought Klein and McGovern were mountain feudists who were after his life because he had been a witness to the shootings in Manchester twelve months earlier.
During a trial at which U. S. marshals daily went through the clothing of all witnesses and the defense attorney himself in a search for weapons, a dozen persons were called in an effort to prove George Barrett was a harmless hillbilly whose worst vice was playing knock rummy for a penny a point.

George “Uncle Jimmy” Barrett on trial in wheelchair
Barrett under direct examination told Defense Attorney Edward E. Rico that only a short time before the shooting he was warned by a John Law that those feudists were “gunning to get me.” That, he said, was why he had left Hamilton so suddenly just before Klein’s death, wearing a disguise and affecting a limp.
Questioned about, the earlier trial during which he was charged with the murder of his own mother, the defendant's normally soft voice rose to a scream as he cried, "I wish I could go to Heaven and explain why I had to kill her!”
He denied being responsible for half a dozen graves scattered throughout the hill country of his native state but admitted most of the long list of other charges leveled against him by U. S. District Attorney Val Nolan. In a measured, well-modulated voice he told of the "seven or eight wives" he had left in various parts of the country. He boasted of his "twenty or so young uns.”
The slain FBI agent’s widow and their three small children were in the courtroom when the jury returned its verdict finding Uncle Jimmy guilty of murder in the first degree. They heard Judge Robert C. Baltzell sentence him to be hanged on the morning of March 24th, 1936, exactly three months from the day the trial ended.

Judge Robert C. Baltzell
On that day a calm and restrained prisoner rose from the wheelchair to which he had been confined since his recovery from the bullet wound suffered during the shooting of Klein. He was helped by Marion County Sheriff Otto Ray as he limped toward the gallows where Chief Deputy U. S. Marshal Julius J. Weschter was to officiate at his hanging.

Sheriff Otto Ray
The Reverend John F. McShane, who had converted the killer to the Catholic faith as he waited in the Marion County jail to pay the penalty for his crime, was the last person to speak to him before he fell to his death just before dawn.

By daylight all evidence of the scaffold and tent that had covered it was entirely removed.
Editor’s notes:
More about Nelson B Klein:
Nelson B. Klein was born in New York City April 3 1898 and became Special Agent Klein after joining the bureau in 1926.
Prior to this he had served in the New York Guard during World War I and also worked as a private investigator and hotel detective.
He was transferred in 1932 to the FBI offices in Cincinnati located on 5th Street at Government Square.
At that stage, there were few federal laws. Agents only received very basic training and were not even allowed to make arrests or carry firearms until 1934.
Today the Indianapolis FBI office is located on Nelson B. Klein Parkway in memory of the first FBI agent to be killed in the line of duty.
More about George W. Barrett:
Born March 24, 1936, in Clay County, Eastern Kentucky, George W. Barrett was the antithesis of Special Agent Klein and was aged 55 when he became the first person to be executed for the capital offence of killing a federal agent.
A career criminal, car thief, moonshiner, killer, he was also known as "the Diamond King" from the days when he went around with diamonds in his pocket.
He also worked for a time as a conductor on streetcars in Cincinnati just prior to the murder, and became the focus of attention by the FBI because of his car stealing activities.
On his arrest after killing Klein he was quoted as saying "Us Kentuckians carry guns and we carry ‘em to shoot."
About 50 official witnesses attended his execution - but his brother John was not amongst them who Barrett sent an unanswered telegram to prior to his death.