Vernon Miller was the only positively identified gunman in the Kansas City Massacre, a violent shootout that killed five men in 1933, yet his path to that moment began years earlier in small-town South Dakota. Born in Kimball, South Dakota, on August 25, 1896, Miller moved to Huron in 1914, where he worked as an auto mechanic before enlisting in the U. S. Army in 1916.
He served in the Mexican Expedition and later fought in France with the 18th Infantry Regiment during World War I. By the end of the war, he had been decorated for valor and reached the rank of color sergeant. After his discharge in 1918, Miller joined the Huron police force as a patrolman. He resigned in 1920 and ran for sheriff of Beadle County, winning the election.
But after two years, he fled in 1922 after withdrawing four thousand dollars from county revenue. Miller was quickly caught, convicted of embezzlement on April 4, 1923, and sent to the South Dakota State Penitentiary. While imprisoned, he became the warden’s personal chauffeur and was granted parole in November 1924. Prohibition had taken effect nationwide by the time Miller was released, and he entered the lucrative bootlegging business.
His record stayed relatively clean until October 1925, when he was fined two hundred dollars for bootlegging in Sioux Falls. But the late 1920s saw Miller grow increasingly unstable, fueled by heavy drug abuse and advanced syphilis. He had frequent, unpredictable bursts of violence. On February 3, 1928, he was charged with wounding two Minneapolis police officers, though the case was dropped for lack of evidence.
By then, Miller was well known as a freelance gunman hired by bootleggers and racketeers across the Midwest. On May 31, 1930, after his friend Eugene “Red” McLaughlin was murdered by members of Al Capone’s Chicago outfit, Miller tracked down three of the known suspects to a resort hotel in Fox Lake, Illinois. On June 1, he gunned them down. The event became known as the Fox Lake Massacre and was attributed to members of George Moran’s North Side gang, though Miller’s involvement was later understood.
On July 15, 1930, as Prohibition neared its end, Miller joined forces with Harvey Bailey, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and three others in a daylight raid that netted seventy thousand dollars from a bank in Wilmar, Minnesota. A month later, on August 13, an argument over a double cross from that robbery led Miller to kill Frank “Weenie” Coleman, Mike Rusick, and “Jew” Sammy Stein, dumping their bodies at White Bear Lake. His relationship with his accomplices appeared unaffected, as he joined Bailey, Holden, Keating, Kelly, and Lawrence Deval to rob a bank in Ottumwa, Iowa, for forty thousand dollars on September 9, 1930. On April 8, 1931, Miller stole another forty thousand dollars from a bank in Sherman, Texas, alongside Bailey, Kelly, Frank “Jelly” Nash, and several others.
After the Sherman robbery, Miller retired from armed robbery in favor of murder for hire, though he kept in contact with his former partners. On December 16, 1932, the Miller gang killed two Minneapolis police officers during a bank robbery. Miller’s most infamous act came when he was hired to free former partner Frank Nash from federal custody while Nash was being transported to Leavenworth federal penitentiary. On June 17, 1933, Miller and several unidentified gunmen ambushed federal agents as they arrived at Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri.
After a brief but violent gunfight, Miller and the other gunmen fled, leaving Nash and four law enforcement officers dead and two others injured. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover named Pretty Boy Floyd and Adam Richetti as suspects and active participants in the massacre, though evidence suggests otherwise. Miller was the only gunman positively identified.
After the Kansas City Massacre, Miller fled to the East Coast, staying with New Jersey mobster Abner “Longy” Zwillman in Orange, New Jersey, until Miller killed one of Zwillman’s gunmen in an argument. Miller arrived in Chicago on October 23, 1933, posing as a salesman for an optical supply house while living with girlfriend V. Mathis. Federal agents raided her apartment on November 1, and Miller shot his way out.
Though gunfire was exchanged, no one was seriously injured. Mathis and a friend, Bobby Moore, were quickly arrested. Miller was never seen alive again by the women or the FBI. Less than a month later, on November 29, 1933, Miller’s body was discovered in a roadside ditch outside Detroit, Michigan.
He had been beaten and strangled to death, appearing to be the victim of a gangland slaying. The cause of his death remains unclear. It is believed he may have been killed by Zwillman in retaliation for the murder of his gang member, as punishment over failures to free Nash, or in retribution for the earlier Fox Lake Massacre. Mathis was released three months before her year-long sentence was finished, and FBI agents immediately detained her for a 12-day interrogation about her knowledge of the Kansas City Massacre and her lover, Vernon Miller.
In October 1934, Miller’s alleged accomplices, Adam Richetti and Pretty Boy Floyd, were discovered in Ohio by state authorities. Richetti was captured, while Floyd was killed in the chase by state and federal agents. In December 1932, Miller had also served as the driver of the getaway car for the infamous Barker gang when they held up the Third Northwestern Bank of Minneapolis.