Charles Frederick Urschel (March 7, 1890 – September 26, 1970) was an American oil business tycoon and kidnap victim of George "Machine Gun" Kelly.
Urschel eventually helped solve the crime himself by carefully noting every piece of evidence of his whereabouts during his captivity despite being blindfolded, and leaving fingerprints on every surface he could reach.
The kidnappers released him on July 30 after Ernest Kirkpatrick, then the editor of the Brownwood Bulletin,[4] as well as a representative for the family, paid $200,000 in documented bills (equivalent to $4.52 million in 2022).
Because of the media's recent attention to the Lindbergh kidnapping and his agency's floundering reputation, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover took special interest in this case.
[4] There they arrested the owners, Robert and Ora Shannon, and Harvey Bailey, who was using the farm as a safe house after committing a bank robbery in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, with Kelly's machine gun.
Two of the felons, Edward Berman and Clifford Skelly, received sentences for "money changing" or exchanging the tainted bills for clean, spendable currency.
Despite his belief that Kathryn Kelly was the mastermind behind the criminal operation (as stated by Kent Frates, Urschel's nephew, in his 2014 book Oklahoma's Most Notorious Cases), Urschel anonymously funded the college education of her daughter Pauline, this only being discovered by author Stanley Hamilton much later, in the course of writing his 2003 book, Machine Gun Kelly's Last Stand (University of Kansas Press).