George and Kathryn Kelly escaped to Memphis, Tennessee, according to Memphis Magazine. The couple changed their looks to avoid detection and even borrowed a friend’s child, a girl named Geraldine Arnold, to seem more like a regular family. Although George’s former brother-in-law, Langford Ramsey, found the couple a place to lie low, they were also low on funds. Their best chance of survival was to get some of the ransom money that was hidden in different spots in Texas. George sent Ramsey, accompanied by Arnold, to try to retrieve the funds, but the authorities had already found some of the gangster’s caches of cash. Eventually, Ramsey let the girl go home to Oklahoma, and she tipped off the authorities about the Memphis hideout.

Early in the morning of September 26, 1933, FBI agents and local police officers raided the Memphis home where the Kellys were hiding. George, caught without his trusty weapon of choice, reportedly cried out, “Don’t shoot, G-Men,” and surrendered to the authorities (via the FBI). However, other sources claim that the outlaw denied saying this. In any case, news of the notorious gangster’s capture made the headlines.

On October 12, 1933, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his wife were convicted for the kidnapping, and both received life sentences. George was sent to Leavenworth, a federal penitentiary in Kansas, for his crimes, and later became an inmate at California’s infamous Alcatraz prison. He was eventually transferred back to Leavenworth, where he died in 1954.