In Search of Mattie Howard, Kansas City’s “Agate Eyes” Outlaw
Some 15 years before outlaw Bonnie Parker commanded the attention of Depression-era newspaper reporters of the American Southwest, who detailed her exploits with fellow criminal Clyde Barrow, Mattie Howard had a similar effect on writers employed by Kansas City’s several newspapers.
During and after World War I, they detailed the exploits of the woman whose eyes were described as “agate,” a reference to gemstones that suggested what one writer described as a “cool, steady, fascinating fixity of expression…”
Newspaper employees had another definition of “agate,” which in newsroom jargon referred to a typographical font normally used to display statistical data or legal notices. It was considered the smallest variety of type that could be used on newsprint and still be legible.
As this month’s E-Journal by Howard biographer Dan Kelly suggests, the type size used to announce Mattie Howard’s latest alleged offense routinely would be much bigger than that.
By Dan Kelly
Mattie Howard (Smith Archive/Alamy Stock Photo).
Mattie Howard was regularly the subject of front-page stories in Kansas City’s three major newspapers for more than three years beginning in June 1918. She was described as the “most dangerous criminal ever in Kansas City,” “the most picturesque woman crook known to police of the Middle West,” and “a cold-blooded murderess.”
Law enforcement officers considered her a criminal mastermind who not only associated with some of the Midwest’s most notorious outlaws but was the brains behind their operations.
So, why hadn’t I heard of Mattie Howard before I stumbled across her name in 2018? And why hasn’t anybody I’ve told about her in the past five years recognized her name?
Simply put, she’s a forgotten figure in Kansas City’s gangster past. Virtually nothing has been written about her locally in the past 70 years — no books, no newspaper articles, nothing.
How, then, was I fortunate enough to hook up with Mattie Howard?
Like so many other men seeking a woman — on the internet.
I had written a previous book, Soaring with Vultures, a melding of fiction and non-fiction about an intra-family killing in Lexington, Missouri. It became a bestseller in Lexington, which translated to a few dozen books sold.
The friendly folks in Lexington immediately offered ideas for my next book, including one about the first female sheriff in Lafayette County, who took over the post when the previous sheriff, her husband, was murdered by prisoners he was transporting from the jail in Richmond.
It was a good story, but my preliminary research uncovered very little on the woman (although quite a bit on her husband’s death).
At that point, it dawned on me that even if the female sheriff idea panned out, the book would again be largely a Lexington story and thus another multidozen seller. But if she had been from Jackson County, with more than 20 times the population of Lafayette County, that would be different.
So I switched tacks and searched for female sheriffs or any women in law enforcement in Jackson County or Kansas City. Then I figured I’d try the other side of the law.
Thus began an online search for female gangsters in Kansas City. After a bit of digging, I came across Mattie Howard’s name and a short description of her misdeeds. It didn’t take long to discover a few more items online — including references to her nickname, “The Girl with the Agate Eyes.” Then I found dozens of stories in The Star’s archives.”
I knew I had the subject of my second book.
Unlike that female sheriff in Lafayette County, Mattie Howard produced a treasure trove of research, although almost everything was from about 100 years ago.
Her name pops up in two fairly recent books, Laura James’ biography of Jesse James Jr., The Love Pirate and the Bandit’s Son (2009) and Jefferey S. King’s self-published title about the Lewis-Jones Gang, Kill-Crazy Gang (2013).
The only substantive work on her, however, is The Pathway of Mattie Howard, a 1937 book. “M. Harris” appears on the cover as the author, but in most quarters the book is considered an autobiography written in the third person.
“M. Harris” almost certainly refers to Mary Belle Harris, a leading promoter of prison reform who at the time was superintendent of the nation’s first federal correctional institution for women. She wrote I Knew Them in Prison (1936), but her role in the Howard book isn’t clear.
The Pathway of Mattie Howard provides insights into Howard’s life, especially about her days in the Missouri State Penitentiary, but it can’t be completely trusted.
It leaves out major facts that might reflect badly on her — such as marrying a man at age 17, then leaving him to join a gangster boyfriend in Kansas City. The book also includes details that minimal research shows to be inaccurate (it claimed she associated with Al Capone, John Dillinger, and “Pretty Boy” Floyd) and other details that are impossible to believe (she was arrested 18 times in one day, really?).
The book probably should be considered more of a long parable than a biography or autobiography.
Most of the useful information about Mattie Howard comes from newspapers of the period, in particular the Kansas City newspapers — The Star, The Post, and The Journal. The amount of coverage, and the depth of details, dwarfs anything a 21st century newspaper would publish.
Howard was introduced to the U.S. public on June 6, 1918, when she was identified as a suspect in a murder in Kansas City.
The Jackson County Courthouse at Fifth and Oak streets in Kansas City, where Mattie Howard was tried in 1919.
(Courtesy, Missouri Valley Room Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library).
The bloody body of Joe Morino, described as an “extremely wealthy” diamond broker and pawnshop operator, had been found in a downtown hotel two weeks earlier. The police found in Morino’s place of business a check for $100 from Mattie Howard, and they said a woman who matched her description had checked into the hotel with Morino.
That was enough for police to name Howard as a suspect. The problem was, they couldn’t find her. So they issued a wanted circular, which was mailed to police forces around the country. It offered a $1,000 reward for her arrest.
From that point, a saga that covered multiple states and included manhunts, shootouts, killings, love affairs, and two murder trials kept Mattie Howard’s name in the newspapers for more than three years.
The primary focus of my book is that period — from May 1918 to November 1921 — during which “The Girl with the Agate Eyes” became so familiar in Kansas City that headline writers frequently shortened it simply to “Agate Eyes.”
A Star legend
Marcel Wallenstein of The Star originated the nickname. Wallenstein went on to become the newspaper’s primary foreign correspondent, covering the Normandy invasion and Hitler’s death, among many other stories. He also published two plays and three novels, including Tuck’s Girl, which was loosely based on Mattie Howard.
The first use of “Agate Eyes” came in an article in The Star on June 6, 1919. The headline read “A Mystery of Agate Eyes,” and it described “a quiet appearing blond, whose most noticeable feature was her eyes, described as agate blue, with a cool, steady, fascinating fixity of expression that immediately focused the attention of anyone to whom she might be talking.”
William Moorhead of The Kansas City Star in 1945. (Courtesy, The Kansas City Star).
Stories in The Star didn’t carry bylines at the time, but we know Wallenstein wrote that June 6, 1919, story because of William Moorhead. In 1951 (after The Star began using bylines), Moorhead wrote a review of Wallenstein’s Tuck’s Girl in which he indicated that Wallenstein had produced the 1919 “Agate Eyes” article. Moorhead’s review read, in part:
In reading “Tuck’s Girl,” it seemed as if Marcel Wallenstein and I were reminiscing about stories we had gathered for The Star years ago. It was almost like being back in the dingy press room in the old police headquarters building across from the city market at Fourth and Main streets. For there it was that I, in an atmosphere of crime, casualty and cabbages, wrote many news accounts about “Diamond Joe” Morino and “The Girl with the Agate Eyes.”
We don’t know which stories Moorhead wrote, but he almost certainly accounted for the bulk of those about Mattie Howard.
Moorhead was a legend. A native Kansas Citian who was a high school buddy of baseball Hall of Famer Casey Stengel, he served as a police reporter for The Star for more than 50 years, joining the newspaper in 1909 as an office boy and becoming a police reporter in 1913. A few years later, he briefly took a cub reporter named Ernest Hemingway under his wing.
The Kansas City Police named Moorhead an honorary lieutenant colonel shortly before he retired in 1965, and he taught a class at the police academy.
Moorhead’s career, and his writings, make it obvious that the relationship between reporters and the police in the early 20th century was a far cry from what it became a 100 years later.
Not only did the men (almost never women) working the cops beat inhabit offices right in the police stations, but they also enjoyed virtually unfettered access to crime scenes, suspects, and witnesses. Moorhead, in fact, testified at more than one trial because he was either on the scene before the cops or uncovered things they hadn’t.
Truth vs. facts
Because The Star didn’t use bylines, my first draft of the book was filled with references to “a Kansas City Star reporter wrote” or “according to The Star.” Then, the idea of using the voice of Moorhead to tell the story came to me — in a dream.
I ran with it, revising the story to tell it through an anonymous first-person narrator but from the perspective of Moorhead. Who better to tell the story?
The narrative supposes that Moorhead wrote all The Star’s significant uncredited stories about Mattie Howard. Aside from that bit of literary license, everything else is nonfiction.
Of course, even nonfiction includes the challenge of separating truth from “facts.”
In addition to the many dubious claims in The Pathway of Mattie Howard, there were stories in Sunday supplements that appeared in newspapers around the country and took sensationalism to another level. The supplements appeared mostly in big-city newspapers, but not always.
One of the largest troves of Sunday supplements available today is from The Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner. Among its headlines of the era were “Why It’s Cheaper to Kill a Pretty Girl than to Disfigure Her,” “Who Mailed the Baby in the Parcel Post Package?” and “Why Left-Handedness Should Not Be Corrected.”
On February 5, 1922, The Standard-Examiner ran a spread with the headline “The ‘Girl With The Agate Eyes’ ” by Clifford Butcher. On the same day, The Arkansas Gazette carried the same story, but with the byline Clifford Fletcher and the headline “The Bloody Trail of ‘The Girl With the Agate Eyes.’ ”
The story is sprinkled with fact errors and fiction, but it includes enough truth that it can’t be dismissed as complete nonsense. The same can be said of two similar syndicated stories that appeared in The Buffalo (New York) Times, The Indianapolis Star, Atlanta Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, and other major metropolitan newspapers in 1921 and 1922.
More important is that although these stories might not have revealed the true story of Mattie Howard, they went a long way in creating the legend of Mattie Howard.
In fact, that legend has been perpetuated into the 21st century by books (The Love Pirate and the Bandit's Son and Kill-Crazy Gang) that use these stories as sources — fact errors, fiction, and all.
Kansas City police circulated this “Wanted” poster depicting Mattie Howard in 1921.
The Sunday supplement stories played up Howard’s many death-destined lovers, and men did, in fact, have a habit of suffering violent deaths after associating with her. Some said 12 men met their demise, some 10.
The Kansas City Post put the number at nine.
On November 20, 1921, The Post ran its own story on the legend of Mattie Howard. It appeared on the news pages, not as a Sunday supplement, and was written by a staff writer — Manton L. Marrs.
Given that Marrs had firsthand knowledge of Howard and her escapades — unlike the Sunday supplement writers who probably never met her — his account carries more gravitas than the others. Of course, that doesn’t mean he didn’t exaggerate.
Marrs called her “the most picturesque woman crook known to police of the Middle West,” a “genuine ‘queen of banditry,’ and the ‘gamest Moll’ who ever ‘bumped’ a safe or threw a ‘six-gun’ in a back stickup,” and “the siren of the underworld, for whose favor men dared death and murdered with a smile.”
Marrs identified the nine men he claimed Mattie sent to their graves, but she in truth had no direct involvement in any of their deaths. He also failed to provide specifics of any criminal act she might have committed (other than the Morino murder).
That was a recurring theme in the newspaper coverage of Howard — lots of allegations of crimes, mostly based on assertions by police, but little in the way of hard facts on her misdeeds.
Jesse E. James, sometimes known as Jesse James, Jr.,as a Kansas City lawyer, unsuccessfully represented Mattie Howard in a murder trial. (Courtesy, Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library).
One element of her criminal career is hard to dispute, however: her association with the Jones-Lewis gang. That is no small thing, because Dale Jones, Frank Lewis, and others terrorized the Midwest during 1917 and 1918, robbing banks and trains while leaving dead bodies — including several law-enforcement officers — in their wake.
The Jones-Lewis gang drew comparisons to the James-Younger gang, which had menaced the same area of the country a half-century earlier.
Howard had a link to that gang as well. Jesse E. James, who was usually referred to as Jesse James Jr., practiced law in Kansas City for about 15 years. The son of perhaps the nation’s most notorious outlaw represented many of the area’s gangsters, including Mattie Howard, before leaving the law to make two movies about his father in 1921.
Jesse James Jr. defended Howard in a murder trial described as “one of the most spectacular in Kansas City’s court history,” which included rumors that Howard, if found innocent, would leave to seek a career in Hollywood.
A new biography of Mattie Howard, by writer Dan Kelly, will be published this month.
The ultimate verdict of guilty was predictable, given James’s record. By the time of Howard’s trial, James had become the go-to mouthpiece for Kansas City’s underworld characters - but not a successful one. Including Mattie, James defended accused murderers at six trials during a five-month period. All six were found guilty.
Mattie Howard got 12 years; the others received life sentences.
She wound up serving six-and-a-half years at the Missouri State Penitentiary, but only after going on the lam for more than a year after her conviction. Upon her release in 1928, she returned to a life of crime, mostly in Chicago, before turning her life around.
Without spoiling what is a bit of a surprise ending to the book, suffice it to say that she found Jesus and stayed out of trouble for the rest of her life.
She died in 1984 in Los Angeles, two days before her 90th birthday.
Dan Kelly has been a journalist for his entire adult life, working at newspapers including the Columbia Daily Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Louisville Courier-Journal and, since 2009, The Kansas City Star. He was on the University of Missouri School of Journalism faculty for six years. The Girl with the Agate Eyes is his second book; he also wrote a historical novel, Soaring with Vultures.
The Girl with the Agate Eyes is scheduled to be released on April 28. The book is available for preorder at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
Author Dan Kelly
EDITOR’S NOTE: If Mattie Howard made a name for herself on one side of the law, Mary Brady Bugler did on the other.
Born in Ireland in 1828, she left for America 20 years later, leaving allegations of prostitution behind her. Making her way to Jackson County, Missouri, she married Henry Bugler in 1850.
In 1859 Henry became jailer at what is today known as the 1859 Jail Museum in Independence; he and Mary moved into the jail’s residence that year.
In 1866 Henry was elected marshal but died only six days later when he was shot and killed during a jailbreak.
This left Mary to operate the jail in Henry’s absence, which she did through the end of 1867. Today Mary is considered the first woman jailer in the United States.
The Jackson County Historical Society has scheduled a May 7 program about Mary Bugler. To learn more, go to Mary Bugler - Eventbrite.
Meanwhile, the 1859 Jail Museum has reopened for the 2023 visitor season. To learn more about the jail, go to 1859 Jail Museum — JCHS.