CLAYTON -- Standing upright on Sherry Altman's table was a dulled, unfired bullet, supposedly taken from the jailhouse murder scene that sent Aunt Irene to prison. Beside it, a spread of yellowed newspapers and letters from Missouri State Penitentiary.
For decades, Altman's family spoke little of Irene McCann. They had put away the records and hushed the old stories of Altman's great-aunt, the hard-edged gangster in high heels.
"Most everybody in the family didn't want to talk to her, but I always asked," Altman said with a giggle.
In August, Altman's mother died, leaving sealed cardboard boxes stacked in the Clayton home they shared.
Altman and her daughter found a trove of family history - including relics of Aunt Irene from a time when the press and police turned Depression-era robbers and gangsters like John Dillinger into almost mythical antiheroes.
There's the photo of McCann, beaming, in the Missouri State Penitentiary courtyard circa 1931. And on a tattered magazine page, a writer traces a young woman's criminal rebellion and her battle with the law. "Irene has lived hard, and dangerously," columnist Fred Allhoff wrote in a series called "In the Crime light."
"The newspapers made 'em look glamorous," said Rick Mattix, a crime historian. "They vilified them, vilified them in a way that made them really a lot larger than life."
A criminal history
McCann's name isn't widely known, but "she had a hell of a story behind her," said Mattix, who puts out a quarterly journal about '30s crime and justice called On the Spot.
Family lore has McCann associating with the outlaw luminaries of the time, including Dillinger. And she was a friend of lesser lights like Edna Murray, a bank and highway robber known as the "Kissing Bandit."
"Every gangster had his moll," Mattix said. But, he added, "there were a few of the really tough [women], like Irene McCann and Edna Murray, Bonnie Parker."
At age 17, in the late 1920s, McCann ran away from her husband of three years and eventually hooked up with Albert McCann, a new beau and a partner in crime, whom she would eventually marry.
Around 1931, they traveled across Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri, sticking up filling stations and drugstores - "enough to keep us in the money," a 20-year-old Irene McCann told a United Press International reporter in an interview at a Missouri prison.
By staying on the road, the McCanns were likely able to dodge the paddywagon for a time. They struck small stores during a Great Depression- fueled crime wave, while other criminal gangs and thieves criss-crossed the country armed with powerful guns and cars that gave them the jump on police.
The McCanns were not so well-equipped, but they faced agencies that were "undermanned, underpaid, poorly trained" and paralyzed by jurisdictional lines, Mattix said.
Their crime spree didn't last long, though. In 1931, Albert and Irene visited a jail in Carthage, Mo., aiming to free an imprisoned friend, Raymond Jackson, according to the clipped and photocopied articles.
The break-out went wrong. The newlyweds fought jailer O.E. Bray, and one of them killed him with a pistol, newspapers reported.
As the couple fled, the high heel on one of McCann's shoes broke free. She and Albert were caught a month later when a police officer noticed her damaged shoe, according to a Moberly Monitor-Index clip Altman found.
Family lore and a magazine clipping say that both Irene and Albert McCann claimed during the trial to have shot the jailer. But according to newspapers of the day, Irene argued that she was innocent and never knew of Albert's "murderous intent," while Albert pleaded insanity.
Irene McCann was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Albert faced a death sentence.
Heartache, jailbreaks
A few months after the trial, Irene faked appendicitis and escaped from a hospital, leaving a note that she was "going out to get the evidence which will free" Albert. She was caught within 24 hours. The next day, Irene claimed responsibility for the murder before a United Press correspondent.
"I guess I wasn't big enough to tell the truth at the trial," she told reporter Meade Monroe, hoping to save 19-year-old Albert. If she didn't, Albert would hang before he'd say a word, McCann said.
McCann also told the reporter that Albert's sister held on to the bullet from his leg. The slug that Sherry Altman found was unfired, but an unsigned, handwritten note said it came from the murder scene.
Later, Albert's sentence was reduced from death to 50 years. And in December 1932, a year after her first escape, McCann filed through the bars of her cell and escaped prison alongside Edna Murray.
Murray, a wife of convicted police killer "Diamond Joe" Sullivan, enjoyed a few years of freedom, but McCann turned herself in 13 months later. Albert died in prison, Altman said, but it is unclear whether Irene died behind bars or while on sick parole later in the '30s.
Passing legacies
Newspaper archives make no obvious mention of their deaths, and the articles about the McCanns grew shorter and sparser in the decade when the newly-empowered Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested or killed Dillinger, Kate "Ma" Barker and Lester Joseph Gillis, also known as "Baby Face" Nelson.
In letters and musings, Irene McCann regretted the life that put her in print. To her sister, she wrote: "I have not lived my life the right way. I would give anything in the world to be out there with you."
A poem she wrote said a gangster's life could only end "with a number on your back - just another convict, marching down the track."
Leafing through the pages, Altman wondered about the woman who penned both escape notes and wistful remorse.
"I kind of would have liked to have met her and understood what was going on," Altman said.
The weathered papers make Aunt Irene tangible again, an unforgotten story from a history of crime.
